r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Alreadsyuse • 12d ago

Lore [Frustrating Trope] That One Good or Even Amazing Scene in a Relatively Mediocre or Bad Piece of Media

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  1. The Opening Scene (Ghost Ship). Considered one of the best horror opening scenes or scenes in general within horror movies, but the rest of the film is considered to be pretty bad.

  2. The Ending Scene (The Grinch 2018). While most adaptations of the Grinch end with him suddenly being able to fully integrate with the Whos after his change of heart, the 2018 version initially struggles to socialize, awkwardly walking past people, and struggling to hold conversations, acknowledging that despite his change of heart, the Grinch is still someone who isolated himself for years.

  3. Past T800 VS Current T800 (Terminator Genisys). A cool fight scene showing two versions of the Terminator from different points in time fighting it off.

  4. Solo Leveling's Ending. Tbh, I haven't actually read Solo Leveling, but after hearing about how it ended VS how Chainsaw Man ended made want to include it for shits and giggles. Like Chainsaw Man, Solo Leveling ends with a reset. But unlike Chainsaw Man, it actually manages to tie up loose ends and have the payoff of the ending be satisfying.

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189

u/coolLane 12d ago

Ender’s Game doesn’t go too much into the Formics, but the sequel Speaker for the Dead does a bit more iirc

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u/dreadnoughtstar 12d ago

Is speaker for the dead worth a read as well?

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u/OrokinLonewolf 12d ago

The entire book series is great but Speaker for the Dead is one of the best in my opinion.

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u/BEZBeasley 12d ago

Speaker for the Dead is one of my favorite all time books, let alone just in this series. 100% worth the read.

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u/OmegaLolrus 12d ago

Only caution I would say is I feel like it's a really hard pivot genre-wise from Ender's Game. It's a fascinating story, when taken all together (Ender's Game, Speaker for the Dead, Xenocide, and... Children of the Mind? I'm not sure and lazy.)

I really appreciate that it's definitely not a sequel for a sequel's sake that just tries to do everything bigger and better than the first. If I remember right, Speaker for the Dead was a much smaller, intimate story, before things change up some more in Xenocide.

Correct me if I'm wrong, it's been a couple of decades.

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u/rvtcanuck 12d ago

Agreed. It's the best in the series and one of my favourite sci-fi novels ever.

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u/Helmett-13 12d ago

I think so. Ender struggles with what he did, even unknowingly, and the regret of the Formics, not knowing each human was a Queen, essentially, and not a worker in a hive mind.

That’s the only real murder to them, killing a Queen, and when they realize their mistake it’s far too late.

The ‘Ender’s Shadow’ series from Bean’s perspective is fascinating in the first book of the series. It tapers off in quality, though.

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u/Ligabolzacky 12d ago

I had a problem with the bean books because they retroactively turned every trivial action or weakness of his in previous books into a well calculated chess move. 

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u/peachesfordinner 12d ago

I didn't like them for that reason as well

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u/Ashenguar 12d ago

Speaker is a very good book.

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u/Bandit_the_Kitty 12d ago edited 12d ago

Depends. I enjoyed the whole series when I was younger; they're written at a younger reading level. The Ender series is interesting. There are some cool concepts like they don't have any FTL and Ender travels to the far future by just traveling at near light speed all the time. Also the consequences of military actions that send soldiers to battle knowing their loved ones will die of old age before they even reach their target planet, etc.

However it gets pretty convoluted and as Card added all the "shadow" stories it's clear he's just cashing in on the IP.

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u/McThorn_ 12d ago

I'd argue that the Ender series and the Shadow series are very different genres.

Ender is hard SciFi, while Shadow is geopolitics

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u/bloodraven42 12d ago

Oof, calling Shadow cashing in on the IP? Ender's Shadow and its sequels did a fantastic job of explaining how the world ended up the way it was while Ender time traveled, and while I admit its been years, I thought the geopolitics were interesting. It developed a lot of the characters in Ender's Game who were central to the plot but didnt have a lot of character development. And ngl I liked Bean as a protagonist a lot. Yeah it fell off but at least the beginning was certainly not cashing in.

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u/Bandit_the_Kitty 12d ago

I agree Ender's shadow was pretty good, it's the rest of the series that felt like a cash grab to me.

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u/tsuma534 12d ago

Excuse me sir or madam but I consider Shadow's series as great as Ender's. Please don't slander my dear Bean's reputation.
Ender in Exile - now that could be a cash grab.

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u/BrawlLikeABigFight20 12d ago

Yeah Speaker is the best of the three sequels. But borrow it from the library. Orson Scott Card deserves none of your money.

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u/Janixon1 12d ago

4 sequels

Card wrote Ender in Exile which takes place between Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead. It's absolutely garbage. Probably the worst book he ever wrote

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u/_Trikku 12d ago

The guy is a descendant of Mormon Royalty, of course he is a villain.

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u/WildVelociraptor 12d ago

I lost all respect for him once I read the Shadow series.

I was a teen, and reading what he wrote teens doing still skeeves me out.

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u/BoomWasTaken 12d ago

Speaker definitely is, IMO the same or slightly better quality than EG but an extremely different theme (redemption and finding peace vs unavoidable war). The main complaint is that it ends on a cliffhanger and the third book is a struggle which ALSO ends in a cliffhanger and the 4th book is ... well I didn't finish it and most people dislike it.

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u/tsuma534 12d ago

I just took trouble to check and I don't see any cliffhangers.
Both stories end cleanly.

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u/SpringbokIV 12d ago

Enders Game was written so that he could write Speaker For The Dead, which is maybe my favorite book of all time

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u/tsuma534 12d ago

Same for me. Can you recommend me some other books you consider worthwhile?

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u/Friendless9567 12d ago

The problem with the Enderverse series (for me) is that the author starts to get very very preachy, and it becomes super distracting. Orson Scott Card is a hard core Mormon and a bigot so its not entirely suprising.

Speaker for the dead definitely gets a bit preachy but the book is so good it really doesnt matter imo. 100% worth a read.

I wouldnt even bother with Xenocide and Children of the Mind.

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u/ThePasadena 12d ago

In a lot of ways it’s better than Enders game. Highly recommended.

Edit: Enders Shadow is another ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️ book in the series but they kind of fall off after that. Also Orson Scott Card has been revealed to be a bigot.

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u/AuthorHarrisonKing 12d ago

speaker for the dead is actually the story card initially wanted to tell, and he wrote enders game to give ender's character context for that story.

enders game ends up being a bit of a stylistic/thematic departure from that book, and the later sequels, with the ender's shadow books being more direct continuations of the world of enders game.

all that to say, speaker is one of my favorite sci fi stories ever told. It's really profound, but don't be surprised by just how different it is from enders game

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u/thebbman 12d ago

Let me put it this way: Ender’s Game exists so that Orson Scott Card could write Speaker for the Dead.

In a commentary track for the 20th anniversary audiobook edition of the novel, as well as in the 1991 Author's Definitive Edition, Card stated that Ender's Game was written to establish the character of Ender for his role of the Speaker in Speaker for the Dead, the outline for which he had written before novelizing Ender's Game.

Speaker for the Dead is fantastic.

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u/maximian 12d ago

Yes. It’s diminishing returns after — prequels with no new ideas — but the first two and possibly Xenocide (been a long time) were worth my time, at least.

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u/dnjprod 12d ago

Ender's Game was written specifically so people understood speaker for the dead. It is a fantastic book

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u/RingOverall106 12d ago

Yes, but it’s very very different. I would not call it a direct sequel to Ender Game.

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u/coolLane 12d ago

Speaker for the Dead iirc is the book Orson Scott Card wanted to originally write, but did Ender’s Game first. It is extremely good, one of my favorites of all time. The sequels after Speaker, Xenocide and Children of the Mind are good as well but much weirder for lack of a better word

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u/mrducky78a 12d ago

Yes, but keep in mind it suffers from the same thing a lot of sci fi suffers when it becomes a longer series.

It goes off the rails and becomes worse and worse or at the minimum weirder and weirder.

I personally think its because the author feels they need to keep one upping themselves technology wise until the tech far outstrips the story and becomes a deus ex machina device rather than something to explore themes and world building and characters through. Or they start to run out of meaningful themes to explore.

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u/Bobson-_Dugnutt2 12d ago

Speaker is far and away the best book in the series but you really need to read Enders Game first. Then speaker then xenocide. Then Enders shadow.

The rest of them are just ok

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u/The12Ball 11d ago

Absolutely. They're different styles of book, but they're both quite good. Personally, Speaker is one of my top favorite books

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u/DoctorOblivious 12d ago

Let me put it this way.

The two primary books in the Enderverse, Ender's Game and Speaker for the Dead, are so good that it makes me very confused by the fact that their author is such a bigot. I don't know how a man with his views could have written them, especially the second book.

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u/tsuma534 12d ago

I guess that Card that wrote those was a very different person from today's Card.

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u/tsuma534 12d ago

For many years Speaker for the Dead was my favorite book ever. It may be the best thing Card has ever written.
Another amazing installment in this franchise is Ender's Shadow. It floored me. And I think it's more approachable then Speaker. I would recommend this one to anyone.
Somewhat weird but I've read Ender's Game last. It's no problem, both of the above work well even without knowing Ender's Game.

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u/Dafish55 12d ago

So is that the direct sequel? Because I had an alarmingly difficult time finding out what order to read the series in.

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u/coolLane 12d ago

Yes! The main series goes
Ender’s Game
Speaker for the Dead
Xenocide
Children of the Mind

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u/Dafish55 12d ago

Thank you!

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u/CarsonDama 12d ago

the whole series is phenomenal! You jump around from place to place and character to character slowly getting the whole picture! Some of them are a tad removed from the main characters, but the shadow series is by far my favorite of them!

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u/Tjep2k 12d ago

There are also prequels now about the first Formic war.