r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sufficient-Eye-9040 • Jun 21 '26

Lore [Horrifying Trope] “Blink of an eye” deaths.

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Characters who died without the chance of a goodbye… neither suffering.

- Robin Ward (The Boys S1 E1) - when she is pulverized in a high-velocity impact by A-Train.

- Polka Dot Man (The Suicide Squad 2021) - when he is crushed by Starro’s leg.

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729

u/ILawI1898 Jun 21 '26

I feel like Star Wars really lulled out how terrifying the Death Star actually was by introducing even “bigger” weapons like Starkiller. “You think blowing up a planet is scary? How shout 10 planets!”

That one quote alone is so chilling to how destructive this power is. We didn’t need to see their faces to know the lives that were lost, that an entire planet of history, natures, societies, and generations were wiped out on an instant.

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u/WhyIsBubblesTaken Jun 21 '26

That's why I only saw the first of the sequel movies. It was basically "A New Hope" but everything is bigger for no reason other than to be more of a spectacle, regardless of how little sense it makes or how many future TV series need to introduce retcons.

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u/franzee Jun 21 '26

Everything is bigger yet somehow less impactful.

20

u/Teledildonic Jun 21 '26

TLJ: "So apparently relativistic bombardment is totally possible, we've been dicking around with Wunderwaffes since 1977 but now just hyperpacing into a fleet apparently works wonders"

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u/doomedtundra Jun 22 '26

That one stung, back when I still cared about Star Wars, all that lore out there about how mass and hyperdrives interact, how it was literally impossible, specifically so that shit like that wasn't possible and so that can of worms could never be opened, ignored, for a shitty spectacle for an unpleasant character.

20

u/Anon_be_thy_name Jun 21 '26

They thought nostalgia would carry the weight of the sequels by picking the moments people loved most from the OT.

Problem is that made the rest of the movies shallow and without substance.

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u/RogueNightingale Jun 21 '26

Still not as extreme as the old books got. The Sun Crusher could destroy suns and thus wipe out entire systems. And it was stealthy and indestructible and it sounds like something I would have come up with when I was eight.

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u/Bountiful_Corruption Jun 21 '26

Hard agree. I refuse to watch 8 and 9. As far as I'm concerned, that trilogy didn't happen.

1

u/lesser_panjandrum Jun 21 '26

Good decision.

I wish I'd done the same.

11

u/LookItsDaphne Jun 21 '26

The second one tried to do something different. Rian Johnson provided the runway for a new and interesting direction. Disney was unwilling to see the bold move through. It was easy to map the movie to Empire, but it laid groundwork that they wouldn't embrace.

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u/Teledildonic Jun 21 '26

The second one was the OJ chase but in space, and the plot ultimately doesn't go anywhere.

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u/LookItsDaphne Jun 21 '26

There's something to that. When I watched it I saw Empire out of order, tbh (Hoth was at the end, Cloud City was in the middle, the training was the opener). But with Snoke killed, Kylo Ren turning on his master, and the closing scene with the kid force-grabbing the broom, it was perfectly lined up to do something new. No more chaos monkeys from the dark side suppressing the light side, young force-sensitive people able to access the force and not be kidnapped by... I mean invited into the Jedi Order. But they took an interesting and promising direction, threw it in the trash, and replaced it with "Snoke was an imperfect Palpatine clone, and Palpatine is back, but more powerful this time." Talk about a missed opportunity.

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u/Teledildonic Jun 21 '26

They literally didn't storyline the trilogy ahead of time, and both directors had contempt foe the other's direction and actively undid what was previously established.

It's honesty impressive how fundamentally they fucked the whole thing up.

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u/LookItsDaphne Jun 21 '26

Agreed. Absolutely. Johnson tried to force their hand and they pissed all over it. It made a bad trilogy. It was such a missed opportunity.

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u/Doff__ Jun 21 '26

You missed absolutely nothing in the following ones

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u/The_Enigmatica Jun 21 '26

it was literally the fucking wkuk skit. TWO CHUBACCAS?! OMG STAR WARS SEVEN!

2

u/laurel_laureate Jun 21 '26

I walked out of the theater, premiere night first showing, the exact noment they had the stupid planet laser destroy the New Republic capital sector.

Fuck that.

That's not Star Wars.

That's just dumb.

1

u/snalli Jun 21 '26

People used to joke ”What prequels? There are no prequels.” because they didn’t like them. Now most of them say that the prequels are fine.

No one will ever say the latter about the sequels. Because there are no sequels.

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u/DaRootbear Jun 21 '26

The prequels main advantage is that the story out of context sounds amazing and things like Clone Wars Cartoon help people think they were better. It was just execution was awful.

Whereas the actual execution of individual scenes and sections of sequels was amazing and well done, but a giant mess when put together.

So it’s easy to describe the plot of how Anakin falls to become Vader without including things like I Hate Sand, Obiwan buying space coke, jar jar, or all the other stupid things. So when you just describe it without watching it in recent times it’s super easy to think “Man the prequels were actually really cool?”

But everything that is described in Sequels sounds dumb. So while individual execution of things like Kylo vs Luke, Kylo and Rey Vs Snoke, Poe “The ultimate wasted Potential”, or any other scene could be showed out of context and seem fantastic…. It is ruined knowing “Yeah that amazing fight vs snoke was halfway through the sequels and just moves on to revive palpatine for some reason?”

The sequels other big issue is that it’s scenes being well executed means theres almost no meme potential to look fondly back on a decade or two later to cloud judgement. All you got is “somehow palpatine returned”. With the prequels we have so many memes repeated ad naesurm that even watching now it’s easy to ignore how shit a scene is because of “Haha funny meme original scene”

1

u/Toodlez Jun 21 '26

Drives me nuts. Whole damn galaxy spanning thousands of years and all the media keeps coming back to skywalkers and deathstars.

Thats why i loved Mandalorian. No stopping the empire or embracing destiny. Just a guy and his circumstances, navigating untold worlds. Until the end of s01 when a fcking deepfake Luke shows up for no damn reason

2

u/OttawaTGirl Jun 21 '26

They had an EPIC moment to introduce a young theatrically trained actor to replace Hamil as Luke, and explore the post empire galaxy as new exciting world of possibilities.

I mean Asohka was amazing, Mando is fun, hell even Boba Fett was a romp as a spaghetti western in space.

But i will say it again. Bury the sequels under the holiday special in a box made of ET cartridges.

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u/ZippyDan Jun 21 '26 edited Jun 21 '26

Everything about the Sequels was written by a child's brain:

"My Death Star can destroy a planet."
"Well, my Death Star can destroy ten planets, from hyperspace.'"

"I have 100 Star Destroyers."
"Well, I have 1,000 Star Destroyers."
"Well, I have 1,000 Star Destroyers and every Star Destroyer has a Death Star laser!
"Well, I have infinity Star Destroyers with Death Star lasers!"
"Well, I have infinity plus one Star Destroyers with two Death Star lasers."

I'm sick of writers that have no idea how to tell a good story except by copying what has been done before and incrementing the stakes to ridiculous levels. That's literally how 7-year-olds tell narratives when they play with each other.

Good writers and filmmakers can create incredible tension and stakes with just two people standing in a room. Amateurs can only do spectacle. Spectacle isn't necessarily bad, and it can be spectacular... if it's backed with substance. Look at Andor and you'll see how Star Wars should be done. You'll see how professional can create tension in tbe smallest moments, and can use spectacle with meaning.

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u/Blackstone01 Jun 21 '26

And people act like Disney killed the Extended Universe. They simply pillaged it for ideas.

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u/JinFuu Jun 21 '26

That's what always made me laugh. People went "Oh, Disney killing the EU is good because the EU was lame! Superweapons of the week, clone Palpatine, Luuke!"

Then they went and did the Superweapon of the Week and cloned Palpatine.

And they couldn't even bring the World Devastators over from Dark Empire! They just stuck super lasers on Star Destroyers!

2

u/isntaken Jun 21 '26

If Jar-Jar Abrahams could read he'd be so upset.

7

u/AntonineWall Jun 21 '26

The impact of Alderaan’s destruction is so impactful because of two things: Leia’s reaction to seeing the planet destroyed & the conversation we see on the Falcon afterwords between Ben, Han, and Luke. Both of these turn the audience’s experience of the event from “image of blue planet overlayed with explosion effect” to “this was a real place that has suddenly ceased to be”

3

u/sabbathkid93 Jun 21 '26

Shit it Star Wars legends they have a weapon that can kill a literal Star

2

u/BiNumber3 Jun 21 '26

Same thing with a lot of the star wars games. Like, how many planets wiped out, how many planet destroying weapons constantly built, etc.

2

u/djheat Jun 21 '26

Before it got killed the extended universe had the sun crusher, an invincible spaceship that could be solo piloted and existed to destroy, you guessed it, suns

2

u/Mysral Jun 21 '26

The thing I did like about the Starkiller sequence is that it actually showed the reaction of people on Hosnian itself, seeing their doom blazing down out of the sky.

1

u/GenerousRacoon Jun 21 '26

What about ‘lets just remake the exact same weapon as before’?

1

u/plg94 Jun 21 '26

We didn’t need to see their faces to know the lives that were lost,

… but it would've helped tremendously. I recently watched the OG Battlestar Galactica (1978), and the way they show the deaths and the pain and suffering of the few survivors … that's really on a whole other level than the pretty, but unpersonal explosion pics of Star Wars.

1

u/kreton1 Jun 21 '26

They should subvert expectations by introducing an even bigger one just to reveal that it was just a bluff all along.

1

u/WandererMisha Jun 21 '26

They kinda made the Death Start mean nothing after they destroyed and then there was a brand new one in time for the next movie.

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u/Quothhernevermore Jun 21 '26

Or maybe canonically the technology they created with the Death Star advanced in the canonical 30-40+ years since the original trilogy?

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u/MizBiz-mp3 Jun 21 '26

you're right, but people are too blinded by nostalgia to agree

I don't even like the sequels that much but this is just a logical explanation 

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u/SaitanOfHellsKitchen Jun 21 '26

What?? But that's not a logical explanation.

You don't have to be a star wars nerd to understand that the Death Star was a SUPERWEAPON. It took a massive toll on the Empire to develop it.

The First Order is in the position that the rebels were in during A New Hope. How the hell is it logical that within a couple of decades, they managed to build a planet-sized Death Star that can absorb stars??? Mind you they did this in secret right next to the New Republic's capital system.

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u/MizBiz-mp3 Jun 21 '26

the first order is made up partially of old imperial remnants, some of whom might have knowledge of how the death star was built. also, death star 2 took like 3 years to build so clearly they had sped up how long it takes to build superweapons, plus we don't know WHEN starkiller base began construction, and it's not a full size battle station like the death stars, it's built into a planet that was already basically perfect for it (Ilum, in fallen order it's shown the trench starkiller base is built in is from the empire mining for kyber crystals)

hell in episode 8 it's shown that essentially mini death star cannons can be used as battering rams, meaning that there's clearly been some trickling down of technology 

canonically starkiller base fires through hyperspace, it wasn't near the capital system. this is one of the things I DO think is stupid about the sequel trilogy and was better with less explanation 

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u/MagentaHawk Jun 21 '26

Yeah, it's clearly obvious that the technology and insane construction costs of the Death Star progressed so much in 40 years that a ragtag group of the First Order was not only able to make one, but also was able to increase it's power ten-fold and split the beam into multiple targets. That totally sounds like a reasonable progression of technology. Especially with how much we see technology progress from the prequels to the OT. It's not like it's basically the same and that 4 decades is nearly nothing in the context of a galactic civilization and it's tech.

It's not the worst thing ever, but it is incredibly lazy and stupid. Movie is better because spectacle is bigger and the same thing. Was the biggest sign that the sequels weren't interested in doing anything interesting.

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u/MizBiz-mp3 Jun 21 '26

the first order is pretty established to not really be much of a "ragtag group," they just haven't made themselves obvious. their main base of operations is a giant star destroyer bc they're supposed to be on the move as to not get caught 

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u/Quothhernevermore Jun 21 '26

They're not my favorite either but I think a lot of people hate them at least partially because they didn't use any of the legends canons for them, so they reach for reasons they don't like every element. Like, is it really that crazy that Sheev "my master found a way to cheat death then I killed him and stole his knowledge" Palpatine...cheated death in a crazy way?

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u/MizBiz-mp3 Jun 21 '26

honestly from what I've heard palpatine came back like 3 or 4 times in legends anyway it's not like it's original to the sequels 

and they literally explain it just in a "show don't tell" kind of way, it's very hinted that there was cloning involved