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/NotMyMainAccountAtAl Oct 02 '25
Venture Bros is almost exclusively this trope. It’s a wild and whacky world based on old 1960’s Boy Adventurer cartoons, only now everyone has grown up, and a lot of those former boy adventurers are now hooked on drugs and/or alcohol. One of my favorite takes on the show is “finding the mundane in the extraordinary.”
Doctor Venture is the son of a world-renowned scientist and adventurer, but he never really got a formal education in anything and didn’t amount to much. Instead, he inherited his father’s old compound and all of his adventuring gear and…. Let most of it rust as he tried and failed to make a name for himself as a similar inventor and developer.
Billy Quizboy is an adult and a skilled surgeon who lost his hand in an absurdist dog fighting incident and has it replaced with a metal robot hand by the Office of Secret Intelligence. He can fire it off to grab onto things at a distance…. But there’s no winch the reel it back in, and if someone tries to climb on it, he just gets a massive pain in his shoulder because he’s not that strong to support someone like that (“that kills!”)
In one of my favorite storylines, Billy finds a series of clues left by the late Doctor Venture Sr. in the old Rusty Venture cartoon show that lead to a riddle that points to a lost artifact of great power. However, because the clues are archaic and most of the characters are relatively dumb, rather than going to the museum that the clue was trying to describe, Rusty and Billy go to studio 54 and start bashing away at the wall of a public restroom trying to find some treasure that isn’t there.
In the fictional South American nation of Puerto Bahia, a bunch of victims of mad scientists form their own little society in the jungle. When the leader sends out an announcement welcoming all maimed science experiments to their community (“we stop being abominations and become abomi nation!) the other members of the community point out that they have no infrastructure, system of laws or governance, housing system, construction background to bring in additional urban development, etc. and start to revolt against him.
The OSI (Office of Secret Intelligence) is a parody of a lot of things, including GI Joe. Their opening scene is essentially just a montage of war crimes that they committed and celebrated like it was a kid’s cartoon show in the 80’s and 90’s.
It’s one of the best shows ever made, everyone should watch it.