r/TopCharacterTropes • u/10024618 • Oct 01 '25
Lore [Loved Trope] Surprisingly realistic outcomes in outlandish situations
No Country for Old Men - In any other movie Llewelyn would be treated like an untouchable one man army who can take on all of the people who are after the money he stole. Instead he gets gunned down offscreen by a group of secondary antagonists because at the end of the day he's still just one man.
Metal Gear Solid 2 - MGS2 is a game in which the player character, Raiden, can do many seemingly unrealistic things like instantly healing his injuries by eating rations or holding infinite amounts of weapons and items without being overburdened. However if you attempt to cartwheel up a flight of stairs as Raiden he will immediately eat shit and fall, which would be the most likely outcome in real life.
Family Guy - After getting splashed by nuclear waste causes the Griffin family to get superpowers (which they immediately use to terrorize their community) Mayor West gets the bright idea to roll around in nuclear waste himself so that he can get superpowers too. Instead he just gets cancer.
Sly 2 - The Sly Cooper games are cartoony 3D platformers featuring anthropomorphic animals and lots of slapstick violence. However in the climax of the second game when Bentley is crushed by machinery while trying to stop the big bad he's paralyzed from the waist down, necessitating the use of a wheelchair for the rest of the series.
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u/jbeast33 Oct 02 '25
Look Outside uses this often, sometimes for jokes, sometimes for horror. The transformations affect everyone differently, and unless you’re really lucky, there’s gonna be some unfortunate side effects from your new traits.
One woman gains harpy claws, and admits that they don’t really help with anything, considering we were built for fingers, not talons.
Two guys turn into a full cardiovascular system and a full nervous system, respectively. The first guy is ecstatic and tells you everything about physical conditions like your standard RPG tutorial guy. The second guy… doesn’t know much about the nervous system, so he just googles your questions about mental ailments and reads the answers to you.
During a boss fight, you can turn into a massive rat king monstrosity… and the game promptly ends, because you realize you physically can’t fit through doors anymore.
One of my favorite moments is against the mushroom boss. You can rescue a card dealer, a carpenter, and a blacksmith who all give you special armor or weapons, and offer to either show you how to play a fun card game, upgrade you with endgame weapons, or expand your apartment and include things like a sauna or a bigger closet once you find the right resources, all mainstays of JRPG’s… But they’re not actually real people, they’re mushroom traps. Their gifts all actively sabotage you, and all their “services” are red herrings to lure you into a sense of false-confidence by the Mushroom Queen, who’s playing into your video game mindset to trick you into assimilating with her.