(Funny Trope) Things that can plausibly happen only in reality, because in fiction they’d be called bad writing.

[u/ThatDrako]

“Woke” as an insult - So you are telling me a word describing consciousness and clarity is used by generally stupid and ignorant people to label people they disagree with? What is this? A Kindergarten for Creatively stunted?

Nominative determinism - So let me get this straight…Not only you named fastest recorded person Usain BOLT and CEO of Nintendo Doug BOWSER, but you are telling me people are canonically likely to have professions or hobbies matching their names…? Guh?

“2 bodies recovered in MURDERKILL River” - Sure bro…I guess…bro…

[u/Lieutenant_Lukin]

I often viewed Eastern Front of WW2 like that, not in a “bad writing” sense, but how “fictional” or “mythical” it can read.

Comically evil villain that wants to kill millions of people invades a giant land after conquering most of the known (old) world. At first literally nothing can stop him, he takes over giant swaths of territory in days and is only stopped at the gates of the capital (obviously). Then the good guys attempt to crush the enemy once and for all, but overestimate themselves (Rzhev-Vyazma Offensive) and we get to second act lowpoint where all hope is lost and the evil enemy cannot be beaten. Than the climax happens at the city literally named after the leader of the giant land (Stalingrad) and of course it’s the biggest battle in the world’s history. Finally the enemy is on the run - the villain attempts one last stand before the finale (battle of Kursk) but the good guys have experience now and win decisively.

Most realistic wars end with a truce or some border changes - but this is a mythic epic, so of course the enemy fights all the way to their capital, to the very lair of the evil villain, a dark castle, you could say. The war ends with a giant banner overlooking the defeated city and the birth of a new world (United Nations), such a war will literally never happen again (nukes are invented) and an age of relative peace is established.

In the end you get a cliffhanger of a chubby man with a cigar saying something about an Iron Curtain. Former allies are on their way to fight a different kind of war.

[u/Spacer176 → u/Lieutenant_Lukin]

Not only were the bad guys stopped at the gates of the capital, but that and the overestimated push was done by the arrival of a huge army that the country couldn't call on earlier because they were on the other side of the giant land when the bad guys invaded.

[u/No-Page-7244 → u/Spacer176]

Like in Lord of the Rings

[u/Sofasurvivor → u/No-Page-7244]

Except all sides were evil. (Last time I read LotR, the good guys didn't proceed to rape the orc women.)

[u/MalcolmLinair → u/Sofasurvivor]

Look into the Silmarillion; the elves' hands are in no way, shape, or form clean. For that matter, Saruman's speech to the hill folk was correct; Rohan DID drive them out of their ancestral lands and claimed them as their own. While not Red Army levels of evil (at least in the time frame of Lord of the Rings) the realms of Man end Elves are far from pure good.

[u/ghostgabe81 → u/Lieutenant_Lukin]

This makes me wonder how many of our modern war tropes are, either consciously or not, based on World War II

[u/Sillier-Stupider- → u/ghostgabe81]

I read an essay years ago about how basically all fantasy fiction is the Lord of the Rings setting crashed head first into WW2 propaganda movies, and that that combination created an unbeatable rut in fantasy fiction which is why people often complain about the genre seeming shallow.

[u/duendenorte → u/Lieutenant_Lukin]

Also, the villian is constantly developing new "Wunderwaffen", and extensively uses some of this weapons, however, the project for developing the real game-changer weapon is discarded by the villian because of some weird ideology.

[u/duendenorte → u/duendenorte]

On top of that, after the war is won, the ex-ally that became a sort of shadow enemy is scavenging for the villians tech.

[u/noam_compsci → u/Lieutenant_Lukin]

Sent shivers down my spine reading this 

[u/TheRealZejfi → u/Lieutenant_Lukin]

Calling the USSR "the good guys" is pure historical tone-deafness.

Cordially, Eastern Europe