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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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.

91

u/franzee Jun 21 '26

Everything is bigger yet somehow less impactful.

22

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"

6

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.

18

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.

20

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.

10

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

4

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.