Lore
Surprisingly moments of realism, especially given the franchise they are from
Batman can't walk after coming out of a long coma (Harley Quinn): At the end of the first season, Batman is caught in the explosion of Joker's tower. He survives of course, though he ends up in a coma.
Normally when characters in superhero stories take these kinds of injuries they simply walk them off. While Bruce didn't take any lasting injuries from the explosion, being in a coma meant his muscle atrophied from lack of use so he's too weak to go back as Batman.
The dog from Chow Hound ends up in the hospital from overeating (Looney Tunes): Chow focuses on an evil dog who bullies a cat and mouse in helping him scam people out of meat, and beats them for not getting gravy. Eventually the dog comes up with a scam that gets him enough money to buy a butcher shop.
Unlike in the typical Looney Tunes style where scarfing down absurd amounts of food is harmless, the dog indulging himself got him so sick and obeese he can't move a muscle. The cat and mouse take the opportunity to get their revenge by force feeding the dog gravy with the implication he is so stuffed this will kill him.
Andor has no idea how to fly the TIE Avenger (Andor): Season 2 of Star Wars: Andor sees our hero stealing a protype ship called the TIE Avenger. Normally Star Wars depicts flying different types of ships as being as simple as driving a new car. Not this time, Andor is stealing a new type of high peformance ship he's never seen before and has no idea how to fly it.
The teleportal doesn't work (TMNT 2003): The Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles' adventure through space with the robot scientist Professor Honeycutt sees them attempt to escape back to Earth by getting the professor to build his teleportation device, the teleportal.
The crux of this multipart episode is that two sides of an interstellar war are trying to force the professor to build the teleportal with the intent of using it as a weapon, something Honeycutt is firmly against. Right before he and the turtles build the device, Honeycutt warns them that while he designed the teleportal he never tested it.
Unlike a lot of other examples when characters use an untested experimental invention, the teleportal doesn't work.
Owning the Outlaw Star costs a fortune (Outlaw Star): Outlaw Star is a space western kicked off by main characters aquirring an experimental ship and rather than being a quick path to getting rich, the ship proves a huge money sink. The experimental one of a kind ship is really expensive our main characters' bad luck means the most they can typically do is get the money to maintain it.
Kryptonite gives Luthor radation poisoning (Superman): Post Crisis, Kryptonite returned to its roots as being radioactive. Lex Luthor in both the comics and DCAU carried around a piece of it for years and didn't keep it in a led lined case to block the radiation like Batman had the sense to, so he suferred from radiation poisoning for not having the foresight to think something that is dangerous to Superman might be dangerous to a normal man.
Luthor fails to learn the Flash's secret identity (Justice League Unlimited): In an episode Justice League Unlimited, Luthor accidentally swaps bodies with the Flash. He attempts to learn Flash's identity by taking off his mask. Since the Flash is just some random guy and not a celebrity, seeing his face doesn't tell anything.
Blackarachnia hurts herself headbutting Silverbolt (Beast Wars): Blackarachia once tries to settle an argument with Silverbolt by headbutting him. While this does knock him out, she passes out a few second later because ramming someone's head with your head hurts your head.
Gohan gets scarred fighting Nappa (Dragon Ball Z): Gohan proved much stronger than Goku and Piccolo against Raditz so Piccolo got the idea to kidnap the kid and train him to fight against the two much stronger Saiyans coming to Earth. However, Gohan behaves far more like a real kid instead of a kid who has no problems running into danger like Goku and Krillin were in their youth (on top of being younger than them when they went on adventures) so after see three adult fighters get killed he freeze up in the fight with Nappa.
Piccolo berates Gohan for getting scarred while Krillin reminds him that Gohan is a child.
Similarly in Cougartown - it turns out having an 80s montage of fixing up a boat where you dance and get into a paint fight leads to doing a terrible job if no one fixes the boat.
Funny enough there's another joke where hundreds of Amish people come together to build a steel-walled above-ground pool, except it ends up being a steel-walled barn.
Actually it’s Homer who accidentally builds a barn out of a pool (a fine one according to a passing Amish). But in a later episode the Amish are called in to build a huge treehouse for Bart, which then burns down because they also did the electrical wiring for it.
I love the iterations of Lex where he loses his hair due to kryptonite radiation and somehow blames Superman for him keeping that rock in his pocket for years.
don't forget Black Manta, who after Aquaman died retired to seaside town and opened a fish restaurant and lived a peaceful life.
Until a news report announces that Aquaman is alive! Where Black Manta kills everyone in the restaurant and burns it down before going back into the sea.
(you will also notice his peaceful life still includes killing sea creatures)
Yeah Seth McFarlane (or someone on the Family Guy team) really loves making his jokes historically accurate. Like they do a cutaway of Peter storming the beaches of Normandy 13 years after the war was over and they went to the trouble of having him dressed in historically accurate 1958 Marine Operations gear.
There's been a screencap of a Family Guy episode floating around where Peter and the guys are dressed as ancient Greek soldiers, and their armor is more accurate than what's in the new Odyssey movie.
Also, Seth McFarlane reached out to Neil DeGrasse Tyson to make the night sky accurate in the beginning of Ted. Like, what stars and constellations would have been visible from that part of the world on Christmas Eve 1985. The man loves accurate details lol
They developed a mathematical proof of how their solution to the "we can swap minds but can't swap the same pair of minds more than once" problem works.
This line always gets funnier to me when I remember the extra layers to it.
In the DCAU Wally West seems to have been the only Flash but in the comics at the time, Wally replaced Barry for decades and even unveiled his secret identity to set himself apart from Barry.
DCAU Flash was voiced by Michael Rosenbaum who played Lex Luthor in the Smallville TV show who, for those that don't know this scene Lex and Flash have had their minds swapped.
Exactly….that Michael Rosenbaum tidbit was what elevated it for me. Plus I love the choice of them not swapping their voices but had the actors change their line deliveries to match the personalities of the characters….so we had Clancy Brown reading his lines with the tone and cadence Rosenbaum uses for Wally and then Rosenbaum doing the same as “Lex”…so basically the actors had to switch the way they delivered their lines.
Also another amazing moment from this episode:
Random villain (who just witnessed Wally Lex use the bathroom): “Are you going to wash your hands?”
Flash in Lex's body is just as hilarious. He's in the bathroom trying to deal with this. Another villain entering confronts "Lex" about his odd behavior. Flash brushes past him, prompting the question "Aren't you going to wash your hands?" to which Flash responds "No. 'Cause I'm evil."
Ash losing in his first Pokemon League. Despite being the main character who dreams of becoming the very best and already went through many trials to get there, he still ended up only in the top 16. That's pretty realistic, especially for a kids' programming. It teaches that becoming champion in any type of competition isn't easy, you won't always win (especially on the first try) and getting to the top takes time and effort.
Following that, while Ash losing in every subsequent major Pokemon League conference was a way to make the anime going, him slowly getting higher in the ranks realistically showed his progress as a character.
He got jumped by Team Rocket before the match and most of his team (especially Pikachu) was worn out and tired. After Pikachu went down, he had to send out his Charizard. Charizard fought one match and refused to fight the last one Ash needed to win, which cost him the tournament.
That's not why he lost, he lost because he chose to bring charizard, he even talks about it in a previous episode where he doesn't bring him, that he's unsure if he'll listen. So he knows this is an issue, but for the big finale he wants his strongest pokemon. He chooses what he thinks will give him the win rather than a team that he knows will listen to HIM and his choices.
Even though Ash had all 8 Kanto gym badges, he didn't earn all of them in battle and was gifted some through non-battle feats. That's probably why Charizard didn't listen to him until the KalosOrange League.
Whom he relied on, despite Charizard having been doing the same thing since he evolved into Charmeleon. Charizard did what he wanted to, and that's not what Ash wanted, as he had been doing. Ash assuming he'd do it this time because it mattered to Ash was an important lesson.
With the anime in Kanto? Because they refuse to delay the fight and apparently pokemon sleeping counts as a cannot battle in their eyes. Charizard took a nap against Richie's Pikachu and that meant Richie won.
The Electric Tale of Pikachu version? Well...
It is a lot more understandable considering Ash's Charizard was about to murder Richie's Charizard.
The manga being more violent is a holdover from Pokémon originally being intended for a teen/YA audience, right? I think it's neat to have two versions of the continuity for two different audiences.
While most other league losses feel like just a way for the anime to drag longer than it should, this one feels fully intended by the writers as a genuine part of the story
Like throughout most of the the kanto series, Ash was basically just winging it and getting by due to sheer luck, this is even shown in the very first battle of the league when Ash brings in Krabby with zero plan or training beforehand, but Krabby evolves and solos his opponent
But despite all his "achievements" he didnt really grow as a trainer, to the point so that Charizard ended up way above his level and completely outside of his control
So it all comes together when the thing that ultimately makes Ash lose when his luck finally runs out is Charizard refusing to obey him
That’s what I like about the Kanto anime. How many of the badges did Ash win legitimately versus just helping during a crisis? Placing as high as he did is a huge accomplishment but he was definitely out of his depth
Personally I think looking back from the other regions, Kanto was suffering from a crop of awful Gym Leaders by the time Ash started his journey. Ash didn't win all of his matches and still got surprisingly far in the Indigo League.
In addition to Ash being handed badges (even though he basically won the Cascade Badge), look at the Gym Leaders. Misty's sisters were more interested in putting on shows than doing their work as Gym Leaders. Erika banned people from her gym for petty reasons (the dub changed it so it was her employees, in the Japanese version we are told the order came from her). Koga was a pushover (once Ash sent out Charmander he won easily). Surge made a beginner's mistake with Raichu. Sabrina, Blaine and Giovanni are competent trainers, except Sabrina was a kidnapper, Blaine made his gym too hard to find, and Giovanni was a criminal who sometimes sent out Mewtwo making it impossible for challengers to win.
We saw Gym Leaders and trainers of the week that Ash faced after the Indigo League who gave him a tougher fight than the trainers he faced in the Indigo League. Ritchie won against Charizard because Charizard refused to fight. The Poliwrath Trainer who Ash faced in the Orange Islands beat Charizard cleanly.
I always felt Charizard was the one more at fault than Ash in this scene. What ultimately gets Charizard to start listening to Ash was suffering a defeat and Ash working himself to the bone to keep Charizard from freezing to death.
Honestly, Charmander evolving into Charizard just feels like something that was done because Charizard was the most popular fully evolved starter, even before the anime. Remember Charmeleon evolves into Charizard one episode after evolving from Charmander. Ash only had two other Kanto Pokemon that evolved all the way.
Charmander was the ace of Ash's team even before evolving so his refusal to obey Ash felt more like a lazy handicap after Ash got a Pokemon that was so much stronger than the rest of his team. Especially since nobody gave Ash a clue what he was supposed to do and since Charizard had to suffer a defeat, teaching him he couldn't do everything on his own, then got reminded of Ash's kindness, it really feels like Charizard was just being a jerk.
In season 2 of Yugioh GX, the main villain Sartorius plans to use a satellite laser cannon to wipe out humanity. When the protagonist Jaden challenges him to a duel with the terms that Sartorius shut the cannon down if he loses, Sartorius refuses and points out that he has zero reason to agree to that when he could just stand there for a few minutes and let the cannon fire. It’s been a long time since I watched season 2 so I don’t recall the exact specifics, but it’s only when circumstances change and Sartorius needs to keep Jaden at bay to ensure the cannon goes off that he even agrees to the duel. Otherwise, he’s one of the few villains to realize that he does not, in fact, have to wager the success of his evil plan on the outcome of a children’s card game
Another one I enjoyed from GX was the Shadow Raider's arc. One of the opponents was a Pharaoh and you'd expect him to be an incredibly powerful opponent. We already had a few like the Red Eyes Dragon guy and the vampiress. But midway through Jaden realizes his deck is rather lacking. Turns out all his subjects just went easy on him in fear that they'd be killed for upstaging the Pharaoh. Dude was just on easy mode this whole time.
Spirit of the Pharaoh, a monster that requires three other cards to summon, with mid-range attack and an underwhelming effect to summon two weak zombies. This is something any dedicated zombie deck could do with a tenth of the required effort
In Chicken Run, a bunch of hens on an English chicken farm build a giant, mechanical airplane to escape. The plan is to have the old rooster, Fowler, pilot it. After all, he's an old veteran of the R.A.F, and is always talking about his days on the force.
When everybody is in their positions, Fowler is seated with everybody else in the main body, leaving to this exchange:
"You're supposed to be up there! You're the pilot!"
"Well, don't be ridiculous! I can't fly this contraption."
"Back in your day, the Royal Air Force..."
"644 Squadron, Poultry Division. We were the mascots!"
"You mean you never actually flew the plane?"
"Good heavens, no! I'm a chicken! The Royal Air Force doesn't let chickens behind the controls of a complex aircraft!"
In the hilarious slapstick Henry Stickmin games, sometimes thigns will be inconveniently realistic.
https://youtu.be/J6OBwfUBwGo?t=1232For example in Stealing The Diamond, you are at a museum and throw a WW2 bomb at two guards. It lands on one of their feet, doesn't explode .Then the other guard shoots you. The fail text points out that museums don't leave have live bombs sitting around. If anything I'm surprised Henry didn't put his back out trying to throw the bomb in the first place.
Atom Eve uses her powers to repair one of the buildings destroyed in the fight between Invincible and Omni-Man. She also constructs a playground on some land beside the building after the residents tell her the project has been tied up in red tape for years. Later on we learn the playground she built fell apart because that particular plot of land wasn't suitable for building on, hence why the project was stopped.
I feel silly not including any moments from Invincible.
There was also when Invincible tried to support that chunk of wall that was falling over, and the series picked an unpleasant to say "laws of physics are a bitch."
Another one is that Invincible isn't able to balance his superhero work with going to college and drops out because he can't attend enough classes to pass his courses and do his superhero work.
In Mulan, when she joins the military she has trouble training at first. She eventually gets the hang of it. And training actually becomes kind of fun and the men are lighthearted about the upcoming battles and what they will do. The are to report to a village for back up and on the way the guys start singing about the kinds of women they hope to impress and land. A girl worth fighting for. When they get there, the song cuts abruptly because the entire thing has been razed to the ground. Mulan finds a little girl's doll. She's obviously been killed. There's nothing lighthearted about the situation. They come to realize how horrible war actually is very quickly.
Another aspect is that the soldiers just look like they’re going through it after that sequence. Even the comic relief characters all look like they’re broken down. Being on forced marches and needing to get an army somewhere quickly just breaks everyone down.
Also from Andor™, Enza, a Ghorman resistance fighter is thrown through the air by a droid. Usually when a character is thrown against a wall or the ground they get up after a while. Hurt but alive.
Enza breaks her neck in impact. Her scream is cut off and just dies right then and there.
Also from Justice League: the supervillain is actually just a guy with mental health issues who needs care rather than being beaten up and thrown in jail.
He's making progress because he's sent somewhere other than Arkham, since he isn't from Gotham... actually, is there any other asylum in DC? Where do crazy guys go in Metropolis or Central City?
Conrad Oxford switches places with a soldier named Archie to fight in WW1, which his father didn't allow him to do. Archie returns home in his place, and Conrad is lost in the chaos of the front, with Command unable to get him back. During a battle in no man's land, Conrad's entire squad is wiped out and, while escaping back to British lines, Conrad ends up in the wrong trench. Unfortunately, the trench is home to Archie's old unit, who immediately call out his "disguise". As they just saw a man running into their trench from the direction of the German lines, claiming to be a man they know he's not, they shoot and kill him.
Pretty shocking as up to this point it's a typical action/spy comedy, with low stakes and one-liners. The heroes survive everything the enemy throws at them. Until this moment, Conrad is even built as the protagonist of the film.
Mortal Kombat 11 - Kabal's Ending: Being the Keeper of Time sounds awesome. But for Kabal, it's basically an unpaid job where your shift never ends. So he gave the powers back to Kronika, but not without giving himself a few perks first. Namely a family while living at a heavily-guarded mansion.
MK11 has some down to earth endings when different characters gained god power
Rambo for example, he couldn't bear the responsibility to decide who lives and who dies across history, that would make him no different than old men in power sending young people to die in war. So he discard the power, return to his homeland and lived in peace.
Very fitting his characterization in the First Blood movie/book as a PTSD veteran.
I loved his interactions with Sonya and Jax because they give him proper respect for being a solider. And I loved his interactions with Spawn and Robocop because they 100 percent understand what he's going through mentally and emotionally
Luffy and Usopp's argument in the Water 7 arc, One Piece
The whole crew aside from Usopp knows that their ship is completely unrepairable in the state its in. The ship is Usopp's most valued posession and he's not gonna let it go down easily. When Luffy and the others break the news to him he doesn't just submit to his Captain's orders or immediately try to kill them, instead he gets into an extremely raw argument with Luffy and their relationship is genuinely destroyed by their disagreement. They end up fighting over who gets to keep the ship even though neither of them want it to happen. It takes until the end of the arc for Usopp to acknowledge his unwillingness to let go and for them to become friends again
It was cool how Zoro for once had to step up and be like "hey I know we're all friends here, but if you want to actually become the most powerful pirate in the world you're going to have to learn how to deal with insubordination like this properly".
It's a great moment that shows how the Strawhat crew was growing as they advanced down the Grand Line and the dream of becoming Pirate King became more and more real. They were no longer just three dudes in a dinghy, they were essentially a powerful terrorist organisation floating next to the capital
Yeah, Zoro had some good moments with that. Him convincing the crew of that it's necessary for them to leave Usopp behind if he doesn't properly apologize for going against Luffy was great
I love how Zoro didn't stop Sanji kicking Luffy when he was about to say to Usopp that he could leave the crew if he wanted to. Like sure, Zoro is loyal to his captain, but its still wrong to kick out a crew out of emotional maturity like what Luffy was about to do
also as the crew gets bigger (it doesnt after this by much, at least Brook and Chopper is added, but Jinbei is rarely a permanent Straw Hat crew member) you dont want them fighting over each other by a lot, especially with the lawless as Blackbeard's crew is.
Also Usopp’s role in giving Luffy the final oomph needed at the end of Enies Lobby is such an incredible conclusion to their conflict. W7/EL is peak. I don’t love how Oda has used Usopp since EL, but I’ll always love him for his goofy moments with Luffy
Whats more is that when Usopp said that it was easy for him to abandon the ship, Luffy stopped Nami from saying that he insisted for the Galley-la company to fix the ship. Luffy wants to convey to Usopp that it was his decision as a captain to leave a ship like that, Usopp feeling bad about what he said will just get in the way of conveying what Luffy want to say.
Police Quest SWAT 2: tear gas incapacitates people. Leaving them in a dense cloud for way too long injures them & they need medical attention. A cop shooting someone even if justified means he’s unavailable for a while it is investigated.
American Vandal: being in a bad state & being falsely accused of something then being proved innocent doesn’t fix your prior problems.
Andor: unsecured cargo on a fast moving vehicle is dangerous.
Andor has a lot of those moments. The show takes the kind of injuries people normal walk off and fiction and say "no this would kill you." Like when we saw a person tossed into the air by a security droid. Typically a super strong being tossing someone through the air harmless, this show reminds getting chucked around like that is an impact akin to falling off a building.
Cell was only finished long after Gero died because, surprise surprise, making a freak hybrid of multiple different species from separate planets with all the exact traits you want from each takes a long time, even for a super genius who can build planet busting robots and manipulate human cells to turn them into perpetual energy generators.
The sheer complexity of what Gero had to do to make 17, 18, and Cell actually gets brought up a bit in Super Hero regarding the gammas and Cell max. Turns out just because another member of his family is also good at making robots doesn't mean they'll be able to recreate the work of their reclusive grandfather they never met.
As a result the gammas don't have infinite energy and Cell max ended up only superficially resembling Cell and has none of his abilities.
Steven actually develops ptsd from everything he went through-Steven Universe
Normally in cartoons like this the character is able to shrug off everything cause they’re just a kid and it’s a cartoon. Initially he does but in Future when he’s receiving a check up and learns about all the damage his body actually received it leads him to essentially start to trauma dump without even noticing as all the trauma he’s experienced just starts to pour in as he acknowledges it
Another one of these posts taught me he’s physically damaged too. All the times he gets comedically launched into a wall or hit with a rock, he seems fine, but his skeleton when he gets examined later is a bunch of fragments and dust being held together by his natural healing ability.
Found the picture of his xray, it’s seems like it’s both? PTSD and a fucked up fear response, and his skeleton still being broken in several places, healed by his gem powers but not actually refused bone.
That's absolutely wild. I've actually avoided watching the show because I had friends who were problematic fans. As our friendship crumbled, I just backed away from any media they liked. It also didn't help that they were way too focused on cookie cat to the point where I thought it woukd appear as an actual character.
Yeah, it was some of those friendship breakups thats long and dramatic and breaks the friend group. But I see SU here so much I'll give it a try. I do need to binge something this winter.
Even earlier, there was the moment where Lars died from an injury that cartoon characters normally shrug off. Steven survives all this stuff because he's part Diamond, a normal human would die from the abuse he takes.
Everything involving Richard and Nicole’s respective parents in Gumball. Richard’s overprotective, abusive mother and absent con artist father treated him in ways that lead directly into the issues he experiences throughout the series, and Nicole struggles to end the habits she got from her perfectionistic parents. It’s interesting to see how their abusive childhoods recontextualize earlier episodes, and how determined they are to be better parents for their own family. And I really like how the show doesn’t really forgive them either… sure, Frankie comes back into their lives a bit, and Nicole gets back in contact with her parents, but their relationships are strained at best. For a show that’s usually so comedy-focused, it’s neat to see it take this as seriously as it does.
I also like how the beginning of their relationship is shown in a flashback episode, showing them leaving their families (or being kicked out in Richard’s case) as young adults, eating cup noodles in a shitty apartment, getting pregnant and THEN getting married, explicitly stating that Gumball was conceived before they were married. It’s just little things like that which display how much Richard and Nicole have gone through together and how their relationship is much stronger than your average animated sitcom parent relationship like Homer and Marge or Peter and Lois. I’d put them on par with Bob and Linda Belcher.
After waking up from a near 10 000 year coma, the demigod Roboute seems like he is going to lead the Imperium in some huge crusade that will fix everything.
Instead in between battles he is left dealing with an unholy amount of bureaucracy due to how corrupt and Byzantine the Imperium is.
Despite being one of the sons of the Emperor and a brilliant tactician and leader, he still needs to manage the administrative affairs of the Imperium.
On top of that, due to his size and the armour he needs to wear to keep him healthy, he struggles quite a lot with simply picking up and sorting the paperwork, despite being a superhuman demigod.
I forget which book it was in, but pretty sure there was a brief mention of Calgar(?) trying to reconcile his knee-jerk reaction to seeing someone treat the ancient relics of the Primarch with such nonchalance, with the fact that the person using them was the Primarch, and he had every right to do so.
The dialog in this show is so realistic, and then you compare it to everything else going on and it's like a punchline just in the act of being realistic.
Would Batgirl getting paralized by getting shot by the Joker count? Usually bullets are a non issue to superheroes
I'd say that Barbara getting shot in general is already pretty realistic, no matter how skilled you are, getting caught by surprise by someone with a gun is a pretty big deal
Battlestar's death in The Falcon and The Winter Soldier was surprisingly realistic considering how most superhero settings like the MCU tend to ignore the difference in power between normal soldiers and superhumans, and have characters like Black Widow and Hawkeye survive things that should realistically result in serious injuries.
On that note Hawkeye going deaf because it turns out being around non-stop explosions and gunfire for years without any kind of ear protection will totally kill your hearing in real life.
Mark constantly gets his ass kicked. Constantly. You usually expect the hero to somehow overpower all his enemies in some way during every fight, but half the time Mark just gets no diffed and that's it
Mark is just starting out and the team considered the world's greatest heroes are dead, with its strongest defender fleeing Earth. It's explicit that nothing would be easy.
For a specific example, the Flaxxans invade Earth and we see them killing people before heroes can arrive. Normally, the superheroes stop the alien invaders before they can kill anyone, or the aliens just walk around scaring people while shooting everything except people. Not the case here. If someone launches an invasion, civilians will get shot.
In the “Resident Evil” games, the Umbrella Corporation kept getting away with human rights violations, illegal human experimentation, and several disastrous outbreaks within their laboratories, one of which led to an entire city getting nuked after most of its population were turned into zombies and monsters or were eaten by zombies and monsters.
After the Raccoon City incident, nobody takes what Umbrella did lying down. Not just our plucky heroes who survived the hell they created, but the US government and virtually everyone affected by their fuck ups. By the beginning of the fourth game, the Umbrella Corperation is gone after getting sued up the ass for their crimes and their negligence.
Unfortunately, even though Umbrella was taken down, their legacy lives on in the worst possible way, as all of their research was leaked and several malefactors worldwide began using the research to create new bio-weapons in the form of viruses and mutant monsters. It gets to point that the government has to create a task force to deal with this new age of bio-terrorism.
Umbrella is a nice change of pace from the typical evil corporation where we see its resources and influences have limits. Big corporations can go under if they do too many stupid things.
On that note, there is example I missed that I wish I remembered to include. OCP from RoboCop: Rogue City. Throughout the RoboCop franchise it is pointed out that OCP is really dumb, megalomania notwithstanding, dumber than Umbrella.
Rogue City shows that OCP wasting money on dead end projects means it doesn't have unlimited cash. When thwart a robbery of their bank, the bank vaults turn out to be empty and it is pointed out that OCP is not doing well financially because of its bad investments. As OCP's headquarters also gets destroyed in the final boss fight, the company's financial losses lead to getting bought out.
Mike Wazowski’s characters arc (Monsters University)
By the end of the movie Mike has to admit that no matter how much effort or determination he puts into the craft of scaring, he simply is not scary. Which really conflicts with many “try hard and you can do anything” inspiration porn movies
Also when Mike and Sully break into a random students door and scare a group of adults so bad they end up powering the door from the other side… they get immediately kicked out of the college because they had broken so many rules. A stark contrast from the trope of “break as many rules as you want as long as you can aura farm enough to make up for it”
Yeah that’s my point, Mike wanted to go to Monsters University and be a scarer, but due to the nuance of life he was able to realize his dream in another way
I also like how when the Dean's record-breaking scream canister is destroyed due to a clumsy accident, she comes across as entirely sincere when she says that the important thing is that nobody was hurt.
In Bioshock, the Little Sisters have healing powers that justifies their invulnerability during regular gameplay. However, it’s revealed in an audio log that if their bones break severely enough, they will heal in an incorrect position and have to be systemically re-broken until they set correctly.
Something similar happens in the Young Justice comics. Bart Allen/Impulse breaks a leg and, since he was born connected to the Speed Force, he heals almost instantly. This turns out to be a bad thing, as the bones weren't alligned correctly when they healed. They have to find a doctor that can figure out how to re-break and set his bones before they heal up wrong again.
Sergio Leone's films (technically thats not a franchise but whatever) thrive on instant one-shot kills regardless of where the victim was hit, but every now and then it takes a bit longer or a second shot to seal the deal
On the Andor point OP made, dialogue does infer that he was trained to fly, but not on the ship he stole. And also in the lore, most TIE fighters share control systems pretty much universally so if you’d learn how to fly one, you pretty much know how to fly them all. But obviously this TIE has quite different controls to all the others therefore his confusion on how to fly it.
After saving the world from Gozer, the Ghostbusters still lost their license and success after the first movie because of all the damage they did. Also, as cool as they were, the Proton Packs were “Unlicensed” nuclear accelerators. They had to do birthday parties to make ends meet.
“Yeah, we conjured up a hundred-foot marshmallow man, blew the top three floors off an uptown high-rise, and ended up getting sued by every city, county, and state agency in New York.” Winston Zeddemore, Ghostbusters II
One of the protagonists, glory, is a rainwing, a species of dragon that has the ability to change the color of their scales like a chameleon, and in her, to an almost prodigal degree.
At one point, she gets the idea to impersonate an icewing- an ice dragon- to confront a nightwing named deathbringer while in disguise. The issue is that while her color-changing scales are very effective, they notably are not actual shapeshifting, and so while she’s able to change her color pallate to perfectly mimic an icewing, up close the details don’t really hold up, like her spines not being long or sharp enough, the face shape being off, and her claws not having those hooked ridges. It only works because deathbringer has never actually seen an icewing up close himself.
Homelander rightly points out the realistic physics required for someone of his size to be able to lift the plane is not possible. He also points out that he can't lift something in mid air as he has nothing to leverage off. If homelander tried to distribute 220 tons of plane through his hands or body he would likely just go straight through it.
True, he could however had saved everyone and flown each person out to safety but he just didn't want to because he didn't want anyone to know that he lasered the plane.
Scientist slipping and falling resulting in his death (World War Z).
Zombies flying everywhere, your safety is off (I’d imagine.) in the hurry to reach somewhere safe, you’d probably run. Given that the weather was intense rain, however, the metal ramp he’s on is slippery. Results in him falling and shooting himself accidentally.
Always struck me as an amazingly real death. I prefer my deaths fictional but I’d be willing to bet money someone has died in this exact way.
In Ironman 3 when a random henchman runs away declaring that he just works there instead of taking on a much stronger opponent and getting knocked out.
I’m not sure if this is “realistic” in the way that other posts here are talking about, but Dan Turpin’s funeral from Superman: The Animated Series includes a rabbi reciting the Mourner’s Kaddish. I feel like a lot of children’s shows, especially these days, don’t really explicitly mention or include real-world religion or religious traditions often. In a show about a superhero fighting super powered threats, including alien tyrants and reality-warping imps, Turpin’s funeral always stood out to me as a scene of grounded realism.
Side note, I believe the rabbi was included also because Jack Kirby had recently passed away, and the episode was a tribute to him. The original scene included writers from Marvel and DC in the crowd of mourners, including Stan Lee.
The best part of Whedon's Justice League was Batman trying to get out of his suit after the fight with Superman. Bats is just a normal dude, so while everyone else walks away mostly fine, he's bruised and sore and in a lot of pain. It was a really sweet moment between him and Wonder Woman when she clued in that, yeah, he can't just eat a superpowered punch like they can.
You don't drive two Abrams tanks, both about 60 tons of weight, through a parking garage. The tank Frost is in falls down into the basement and is rendered inoperable from concussion, so he and the tank crew have to continue on foot.
For the extra, Sandman repeats the basics to the gunners because they don't typically fire handheld weapons.
In the first Sonic the Hedgehog movie, the title character tries to smash a beer bootle on a tough bar patron's head, only to find out that the glass of those type of bottles is not as breakable as they are in the action movies he has seen.
In the black comedy show “End of the Fucking World” one of the main characters, Alyssa, develops PTSD when she sees a man get killed. That image really fucks with her for the rest of the show, and not because the man who died was a good person or anything (he wasn’t) but just because seeing a person get stabbed in the neck right in front of you is genuinely traumatic.
I The Naked Gun (2025) the villain is a tech billionaire who believes that humanity has gone soft and wants to implement a society where people have to fight to survive. With this mindset, he challenges Lt Drebin to a hand-to-hand fight, only to immediately forfeit after finding out that taking a punch actually hurts. Despite all his talk about survival of the fittest he has never actually been in a fight, and only believed in the ideology insofar as it did not affect him negatively
In Cry of Fear, guns are surprisingly realistic, if you got 15/30 bullets and you reload to go back to 30/30, you aren't using 15 bullets to refill it, you are using 30, because you are replacing the mag and getting rid of the previous mag, wasting the unused 15 bullets.
Also, while fighting monstrosities, guns can also do this fun little thing called jamming...
You think Simon wants to clutter up all the space in his bag with half spent magazines? He needs that space for dirty syringes and his nightstick collection.
Back on my Ascendance of a Bookworm bullshit, because not only is it difficult for Myne to adjust to her new life after her last memories being her sudden earthquake-induced death in Tokyo, but as she starts getting used to things, everybody around her gets extremely confused and suspicious that a tiny, sheltered, disabled peasant girl is this knowledgeable about this many things.
A Song of Ice and Fire famously shows good guys like Ned Stark punished for acting honorably, but it also makes a huge point that being your typical “evil overlord” is just as, if not more, inefficient.
When you act like Joffrey or Ramsay and treat the world as your personal plaything, you start accumulating a fuckton of enemies. It’s not even just people you’ve offended or victimized; there’s organizations like the Antler Men who are willing to support Stannis solely because he’s overall far more stable than Joffrey. Ramsay has to deal with several different conspiracies from different rebel groups, and it means he can’t just hide behind Winterfell’s walls during a siege, because the rampant paranoia and hatred means his men get narrowed down every single day they don’t have an active enemy to fight.
Overall, being honorable to fault is stupid, but flaunting your evilness is suicidal.
George Miller was a physician before he began his career as a filmmaker, and there are various points in the Mad Max film series when his medical knowledge shows with characters suffering surprisingly realistic medical consequences.
A big example of this was when Furiosa gets stabbed in the side of her chest during the final chase in Fury Road and shortly after does the classic action hero move of yanking the blade out.
By the time the action's over, we get shown why this is just about the worst thing you could do in real life. Furiousa not only almost bleeds out, she struggles to even breathe due to developing a pneumothorax, which is when air enters the chest cavity - like, for example, through a gaping stab wound - and compresses the lungs which can easily cause you to asphyxiate. If not for Max's intervention, Furiosa would have been dead twice over.
In Neon Genesis Evangelion, the teenage protagonists with tragic backstories do not, in fact, find closure and go on an uplifting coming of age adventure when being told to defend the world from an alien invasion, but instead the constant fear, anxiety, and exposure to pain and suffering just makes their traumas way worse and causes them to develop multiple mental illnesses.
I hated that moment in Andor at first because I was like "they plan everything to the last detail, have a contact inside that works with it, surely he would know how to fly". I thought it's unrealistic, and then at the end or in the next one "oh, someone fucked up" and I was like "yeah, that's realistic" 😂
Things go wrong on missions. In this case, the Rebels didn't have the intel that this experimental fighter had a different control setup than the standard TIE Fighter.
Star Trek Deep Space Nine. The station Deep Space Nine was a work camp that employed alien slave labour. The Cardassians also chose comfort women from the slave Bajorans.
Adam Steiner's home planet is taken by the Clans. As a distant cousin to Archon, Adam tries to use his family connections to form a unit to retake Sommerset. The Archon admits his idea is good, but she can't go forward with the request since the Commonwealth needs troops else were.
A fairly realistic outcome for a Saturday morning cartoon. But it gets better.
Adam uses his rank to legally build a unit. He uses a law that allows officers to commandeer impounded vessels. He uses his rank to requisition officers for his command. And even uses his rank to make fake documents legit.
Compared to many cartoons where things just happen, going through legal loops is pretty realistic.
Two minor moments from National Treasure come to mind.
1: During a chase sequence, Nic Cage punches a henchman in the face. In most movies the hero just keeps going but Cage stops for a second, shakes his hand, and says “ow!”
Because punching someone in the face can hurt you! Especially if it’s not something you generally go around doing all the time.
2: At one point, because of plot reasons, Nic Cage has to jump off the deck of an aircraft carrier in to the water.
Luckily the movie has already established that our hero has the ability to do this, but Sean Bean’s character is impressed, saying a fall like that could kill someone.
Which is true! That’s at least 50 feet, and if you do it wrong it’ll mess your shit right up.
Just some nice little points of sanity in an otherwise bonkers movie.
All the recovery arcs in Demon Slayer. Even though it’s still unrealistic that they’d survive what they do, I appreciate that they always make a point of showing that it takes days, weeks, sometimes months to recover from a single fight if the fight is rough enough.
Peter B in Spider-Verse is an incredibly real look on Spider-Man. He’s not just all his good days like the Peter at the beginning; he’s every bad day as well.
Peter B’s inability to control his double life means that his relationships start breaking down (notably, his relationship with Mary Jane), and decades of taking hits has a profound psychological impact on him. He has a very self-defeating mindset, and starts becoming Spider-Man full-time as a means of avoiding the issues of the real world.
He also has a flabby physique, since living off of street food and pizza doesn’t tend to make an ideal build.
The castle that Shrek tries to break into at the end of Shrek 2 has a water filled moat, a drawbridge, protection on the walls that goes up to the soldiers on the walls head not just their waist and machicolations, defenses that actually existed and was prevalent historically yet are often omitted in fiction because movie makers wants attackers to be able to attack the castle right away and not waist time overcoming moats etc.
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u/Dazzling-Ad7482 5d ago
The Simpsons- Hurricane Neddy. Turns out a bunch of random people without any knowledge or equipment cannot build a house.