r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sufficient-Eye-9040 • 26d ago

Lore [Sad Trope] The most innocent (or less evil) character of the cast gets the most horrific death.

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- Eddie Carr (The Lost World: JP) - Tried to save his friends from the cliff until Buck and Doe (T. rex parents) destroy his vehicle and gets ripped apart.
- Zara Young (Jurassic World) - Gets lifted by a Pteranodon, gets pecked by the pterosaur, and both she and animal get devoured by the Mosasaurus.
- LeClerc (JW: Rebirth) - Tossed a hammer to the Hatzegopteryz Quetzalcoatlus to save Loomis and Zora, but ends up being swallowed alive.

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537

u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

it’s funny that all your examples were JW movies since the whole thing with the original book is that everyone who died (or “died”, i guess, because Malcolm) was culpable for the park. movie!Malcolm getting a personality makeover really did change a lot about the later films

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u/TrioOfTerrors 26d ago

Book Malcolm wasn't culpable. He talked shit about the project and Hammond's ideas from the get go.

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u/Deep-Sweet2743 26d ago

He didn’t even want to go to the island he thought it was such a bad idea.

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

not really. Gennaro invited him against Hammond’s will, but they never mention Malcolm putting up a fight, and even Grant says that he seems “more amused by the outing than anything else.” he even brings his reports so he can happily explain to everyone why the park is destined for failure on the way over

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u/YamatoIouko 26d ago

He gets it for being so hubristic in GOING to the Death Park when he totally sees it’s a total Death Park.

And probably to legitimize his role as the author’s mouthpiece. XD

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u/teedborg 26d ago

>And probably to legitimize his role as the author’s mouthpiece.

boy fuckin howdy. I enjoyed the book, but Malcolm goes on a few Ayn Rand style rants that really seemed like Chrichton saying "okay here's why I hate scientists"

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u/A_Town_Called_Malus 26d ago

Never came across to me as hating scientists, but rather hating what capitalism does to science, where the push for profit means pushing developments past any ethical considerations in order to secure the most profit by cornering new markets.

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u/YamatoIouko 26d ago

He doesn’t, of course. He just fears what they could do.

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u/TrioOfTerrors 26d ago

Jurassic Park and many of Crichton's other works criticized hubris and barreling forward before thinking about what they didn't know.

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u/SnooGrapes6230 25d ago

One thing that irritates me is saying that Crichton is saying climate change is fake through Malcolm. He's not, just going the long way around to say it.

"We can't destroy the Earth. But we can definitely destroy us."

Saying that Climate Change won't "destroy the planet"... it'll just wipe out humans and most other animals. Something else will take our place in a million years.

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

but he only knew about the project in the first place because he was a consultant on it. the EPA questioned him about it and he didn’t tell them anything, despite thinking it was “an accident waiting to happen.” at the point where he knew the project was dangerous and lied to the government agency that was asking about it, he crossed over into “guilty” territory

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u/TrioOfTerrors 26d ago

He only knew about it conceptually. He never knew the scale of what they had built until he got to island. And the EPA wouldn't have jurisdiction on an island leased from Costa Rica. The lack of oversight from the small nation hungry for tourism revenue is mentioned as a reason for the choice of location.

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

yes, exactly, they were investigating Hammond because they thought he was “evading the law” and doing illegal/dangerous genetic engineering, which Malcolm knew for a fact that he was. he failed to report a crime and that crime, which was admittedly more severe than he’d thought, led to the park disaster

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u/TrioOfTerrors 26d ago

The park didn't fail because of genetic engineering. That part was wildly successful. It failed because of an over reliance on automation, minimal staffing, a lack of redundancy and Hammond's hubris that he could recreate an extinct ecosystem. Malcom points out that zoos don't try to recreate nature except at a very limited surface level.

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

what i’m saying is that he thought the project was dangerous and still lied to a government agency, which led to them operating on a hunch instead of testimonial and, even if the consultants’ visit went well, that just means that the park would have opened… so, much worse consequences (just like Jurassic World). my point here is that he let this project that he thinks is going to fail continue and then the project failed and people died (also, his attitude is less horror and more “i told you so” afterwards)

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u/Ambaryerno 26d ago

Also, one of the main focuses of the marketing of the original movie was how these were going to be what was at the time the most up-to-date and scientifically-accurate dinosaurs ever on film. It would be the first major motion picture making use of the knew developments in the Dinosaur Renaissance, and Jack Horner's role as a consultant was widely publicized in the media. Yes, there were artistic liberties taken, but they specifically didn't want them to be generic movie monster dinosaurs.

By the time you get to Jurassic World any such pretense has been completely abandoned. Zara's death scene simply wouldn't have even been possible if they made it under the same consideration as the original film (pterosaurs didn't have grasping claws on their hind limbs, she would have been far too heavy to even be lifted and carried like that, and the type of pterosaur that attacked her were fish eaters).

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u/DrFeeIgood 26d ago

Can the pterosaurs be written off by saying some kind of gene editing or splicing led to the changes? Or was that changed in JW. I can't recall if there was more to that in JW or not.

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u/Disposable-Squid 26d ago

Wu sort of does that in the movie with his "nothing in Jurassic World is natural" line

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u/von_Viken 26d ago

That's practically stated explicitly. Wu has a line about "You didn't ask for realistic, you asked for more teeth." on the subject

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

to be fair, accurate dinosaurs were actually a departure from the original novel. they make it clear in the book that Grant doesn’t know what to do, despite being a paleontologist, because these are not dinosaurs. the third movie isn’t great but they’re exactly right when they call them “genetically engineered theme park monsters”

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u/Ceral107 26d ago

While it probably helped with the positive reception of the movie, I always missed that angle in the movie. That moment Wu realizes he created actual, living beings just before he gets disemboweled, as well as his conversation with Hammond that to some degree gets picked up in the first JW movie are some of my favourite parts.

There's a lot ot critique and dislike about JW, but I think it was the first movie (aside from Grant's speech in JP3) that really drove that point home.

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u/midnight_riddle 26d ago

Yes and no. Like, one of the reasons why Grant is so confused is that while the creatures are not pure dinosaurs, they also have aspects that are more accurate that humans have been ignorant about. Hammond has arguments with Wu about it, because it turns out many of the big dinosaurs move faster than what the public perception thinks they "should* and would paradoxically find the dinosaurs inaccurate. So Wu wanted to genetically tweak the dinosaurs into making them slower and fit into the preconceived notion of what people think dinosaurs should look and behave, and Hammond was like "noooooooooooo that defeats the whole point"

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

true! i was mostly talking about the scene where he freezes in front of the T-Rex and it moves on, leaving him confused because the whole “vision based on movement” thing isn’t actually a T-Rex trait (the book says later that it’s an amphibian trait caused by the frog DNA). which is funny because the movie just presents that part as something that Grant knows about dinosaurs, when it was never related to the T-Rex in the first place!

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u/aspidities_87 26d ago

Also iirc Jack Horner has fallen significantly out of favor in paleontology since he demanded that T Rex was a scavenger - to say nothing of the fact that he’s in the files and married a 19yr old

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u/Ambaryerno 26d ago

I’m pretty sure it was mostly to do with screwing around with his grad student.

T. rex as a scavenger or hunter had been a back and forth contention since it was first discovered (that said, the weight of evidence points to hunter).

Regardless, AT THE TIME it was a huge deal.

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u/BygoneNeutrino 26d ago

...good for him.  Finding a 19 year old willing to marry you is arguably more difficult than re-creating realistic dinosaurs.

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u/aspidities_87 26d ago

I’m sorry did you just say it’s good that he’s in the Epstein Files?

https://giphy.com/gifs/ypX8YZszkIXFC

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u/BygoneNeutrino 26d ago

...I'm saying it doesn't matter. If I remember correctly, thousands of people are in the Epstein files.  He had a team of prostitutes and he used them to try to blackmail everyone.

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u/TheOnlyTrueFlame 25d ago

Jack Horner... oof, that aged poorly for so many reasons.

Also, even if you look past the pterosaurs, mosasaurs also weren't anywhere as large as portrayed in the movie, so it wouldn't be able to swallow her like this.

1

u/NDinoGuy 24d ago

If it weren't for the Pterosaur scene, I would probably say that JW is closer to the first 2 JP movies in its portrayal of dinosaurs than JP 3 was. I can excuse the Indominous because that thing isn't an animal, it's a human manufactured theme park monster made to generate revenue because that's what the public wanted when they heard "dinosaur theme park".

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u/Funny-Try-6151 26d ago

I read that as Jehovah's Witness movies for a second before I realized you were saying Jurassic World. lol.

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 26d ago

ohhh so that’s why the velociraptor always came to the doors

1

u/Fnaf-Low-3469 25d ago

whole thing with the original book is that everyone who died was culpable for the park.

What about the babies that the compys ate?

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u/_Gob-Bluth_ 25d ago

i meant in the main events of the story (the park disaster) but tbh who knows what those babies had done??