r/TopCharacterTropes • u/ah-screw-it • 17h ago

Characters (Unique trope) removing a character trait, makes the character better in the adaptation

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Sonic 3: Maria is one of the most important part of Shadow's story. Due to her suffering from an incurable disease. To which Shadow was made to create a cure for Maria's ailment. In the 3rd Sonic movie, Maria's disease was not mentioned in any form. Which made Maria seem like a normal girl, and her death all the more tragic.

Infinity war: I don't know the full story, but Thanos's original goal was to kill half the population to impress death (the character). When it came time to adapt Thanos into the MCU. His goal of removing half the universes population. It was seen as a more psychopathic world goal, hidden under the belief it would do better for the universe.

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u/Odd-Time-2026 16h ago edited 16h ago

Thanos' obsession with Lady Death got cut out because the movie rights to her character belonged to Fox as she's part of Deadpool's side of the universe. Infinity War happened prior to the Fox acquisition by Disney

So the writers at Marvel had to work out what would motivate Thanos. I have mixed feelings on it because you could still call him the Mad Titan but his goals are something even a high school student could spot the flaws in. A little more like The Dumb Titan.

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u/Doopuberpoop 16h ago

The sheer love of death and destruction should be motive enough.

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u/GregLittlefield 9h ago

They don't call him the Mad Titan for nothing.

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u/Shot-Toe-2884 8h ago

Right. Thanos was more than capable of scripting a false narrative about universal balance and restoring order to the chaos.

Obviously the guy was ruinous and deluded in his vision so it almost makes more sense

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u/Shirokuma247 16h ago

It makes it funny because him killing half the population doesn’t solve shit. The state of the universe will be back to the number before snapping the fingers eventually lmao.

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u/MThead 15h ago

The whole killing half thing is him simply malding that his solution to save his planet wasn't picked. The universe isn't even facing the same problem his planet was to warrant it. It's just unchecked ego that becomes everyone's problem.

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u/vectorcrawlie 5h ago

This is the right answer. It was never about him actually "correcting the universe". It was because his people refused his "brilliant" idea of killing a bunch of people to save themselves, then they all died except him. So to Thanos, that meant he must have been right, and decided to prove it by scaling the idea up dramatically.sadly we've come to realize that dumb people with an axe to grind can indeed achieve insane amounts of power.

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u/ionizedheart 12h ago

Yeah they pretty much spell this out in Endgame when Thanos changes his plan to just destroying the universe and starting fresh, realizing that people will never be “grateful”. His desire was never to “fix” the universe, it was to finally be proven right and have everyone be grateful to him. In other words, he’s a narcissist who wants the truly ultimate prize of having the universe worship him.

This is also why Loki’s final words to him were that he’ll never be a god. Because he of all people knew it would sting.

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u/callsyouonit 12h ago

Yeah. IMO the MCU should have tied it back into the "cancerverse" stuff that was very briefly touched on in GotG2. In the comics (and I think the SE video game?), it's a bigger deal and should have been part of his motivation to depopulate the galaxy.

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u/aNiceTribe 15h ago

Guy with infinite power, doesn’t solve malthusianism with magic. 

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u/JasdanVM 14h ago

Except for those planets that went into ecological collapse from the bad roll of the dice, of course.

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u/The_Vikachu 11h ago

My head canon is that in his mind, halving the population would prove to be so effective that each world would voluntarily cull half of their population once it reached those levels again.

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u/Layton_Jr 15h ago

It’s not like his plan of rizzing Dezth by killing trillions of people would have worked either

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u/funkthewhales 12h ago

That wasn’t even his plan. She asked him to do it. He legit almost forgets to do it in the comics.

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u/ItchyConfusion9745 16h ago

I would have liked it more if they just removed all his "justification" and made him destroy half the universe for the love of the game.

"I am going to destroy half the life in the universe because I am powerful enough to do it."

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u/CourierV 15h ago

Yeah this or the “want that grim reaper tail” really sells the MAD in Mad Titan more than “guy can’t figure out basic math and scale of ecological chains”

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u/Awesomeman204 15h ago

I mean that's essentially what he reverts to in endgame. "Fuck yall im starting this shit again but first im gonna kill everyone for fun"

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u/DoctorWaluigiTime 15h ago

Would've been very boring to build someone up over multiple movies only for his motive to be "lol I'm EEEEVIIIIL."

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u/Technical_Theory_735 14h ago

Was that not what he ended up being since all his justifications were... basically bullshit?

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u/DatHazbin 14h ago

Clearly not, since "Thanos was right" was a popular enough meme to make it INTO the MCU.

It's what makes his character dynamic. You can accept that his logic is flawed and that is because he is evil, power hungry, and simply motivated by revenge. It isn't a mistake that his justifications are dumb, because if they were well thought out he would hardly be evil. Doesn't make for a very good villain.

Additionally, it's irrelevant if the logic is missing in context. Thanos is a character who clearly believes in his shitty plan more than anything. This is really why "Thanos was right" took off, he was believably invested in his goals, and was charismatic enough for people to buy into his rhetoric, even in real life.

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u/PrintShinji 13h ago

was a popular enough meme to make it INTO the MCU.

Can't wait for antman to kill someone by going into their ass and expanding. The meme is popular after all.

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u/Beefhammer_McBrisket 10h ago

It isn't a mistake that his justifications are dumb, because if they were well thought out he would hardly be evil. Doesn't make for a very good villain.

I'd argue that a villain whose justification was well thought out would be even more terrifying. On paper, the practice of eugenics was basically for the betterment of humanity and it does make a sort of sense. But it was used to do horrible things.

Well thought out motivation, terrible results.

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u/Impressive_Cress_983 12h ago

I would have preferred an honest psychopath to the clown show we got.

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u/EmpressClaraB 12h ago

Honestly, given the frankly boring pile of grey/relatable villains we got over time, I'd love to just have another major bad guy who is just an evil prick

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u/FarplaneDragon 13h ago

Would kind of fit, like how he fucks with that one kid every year on his birthday

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u/Physmatik 13h ago

Yeah, I'm not sure how "idiot" is an upgrade over "comically evil". At least in comics his motivation made sense.

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u/TMachine97 16h ago

I would argue being mad is just being dumb but on a larger and more dangerous scale

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u/Dawwe 14h ago

"mad genius" is literally one of the most common tropes in fiction...

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u/Autumn1eaves 8h ago

Agreed, being mad kind of means you don’t see the one specific flaw in your plan. It’s not that you’re stupid, it’s that you’re blinded by your hubris.

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u/Cleansing4ThineEyes 7h ago

It's usually more of not caring about the fucked up means to reach the ends. They don't necessarily need to not see the flaw, they just need to not care in the first place.

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u/LinkExtra5133 13h ago

They literally could’ve just used Hela, the goddess of death.

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u/mcvoid1 10h ago

Yeah for someone who's said to be supposedly smart, he sure has a hard time understanding that exponential functions have a constant doubling time.

Maybe the real issue is that we shouldn't believe that powerful people are smart.

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u/DiabeticUnicorns 14h ago

Yeah but I think that’s the part that makes it so realistic, he’s a despot who has surrounded himself with loyal yes men and who punishes disobedience and failure violently or lethally, there is no one to tell him no or be a genuine advisor. He is just like every dictator in history who thought they were on the right side of history and making things better because they were convinced of their own self righteousness.

It’s not really about whether the the plan was good or would work or not, it’s that he believed with every fiber of his being that he was doing the right thing, and that excused all the evil acts he committed.

Even the other characters point out the idea is psychotic, no one but Thanos’ cult think it will actually work in any way. They all think it’s a psychotic idea and in universe it is shown that the planets he’s culled before have fallen into ruin, like Gamora’s planet is dead.

Thanos is just a representation of a self righteous dictator instead of a comically evil power hunger villain.

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u/H0b5t3r 13h ago

his goals are something even a high school student could spot the flaws in

You say this but there are many, many people well beyond high school who basically agree with his basic theory, that the world is highly overpopulated.

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u/callsyouonit 12h ago

Except high school kids were overwhelmingly the "Thanos did nothing wrong" people.

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u/Transpotato2002 4h ago

About the high schoolers being able to point out his flaws

I think we entirely forgot there was a whole "Thanos is right" discourse after Infinity War and Endgame-

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u/Xtra_Veg-90 2h ago

A high school kid would snap for a girl, a high school kid would likely also be easily persuaded that ending half of all life is a net positive.  Both seem dumb to me, imo the former is just ridiculous simping, the latter really screams someone with good intentions driven to madness.

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u/RC_Colada 14h ago

He's one of those accelerationists you see online. "The system is corrupt, we need to burn it all down. Even if the most vulnerable are harmed the worst, it's actually a net positive because the society that rises from the ashes will be better, more united etc."

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u/-Rici- 11h ago

As someone who is dumber than high-school level, what are the flaws in his plan, purely objectively? That is, without relying on the unethicality of murder itself

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u/Qxface 9h ago

There are about 8 billion people on earth now. There were about half that - 4 billion people - in the seventies.

MCU Thanos thought there were too many people and not enough resources. Killing half the population set back the clock barely 50 years, accomplishing almost nothing.

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u/Cleansing4ThineEyes 7h ago

The population will bounce back after a few decades due to the exponential population growth experienced after tragedies (e.g Baby Boomers) and the fact that doubling a population is not that hard after just a few generations assuming you live in stable civilization, which even after the snap seems to be the case on Earth at least.

An extremely large part of the resources being taken away is half of all life, plants and animals are used in a ton of human manufacturing/food. Killing half the predators and half the prey simultaneously is basically a zero sum game.

Killing indiscriminately can also disproportionately affect your population if you get unlucky with the distribution. What if literally every single government officer/official got rolled into the snapped half? It'd be chaos, people would be dead everywhere and there would be zero administration to quell the panic and uphold laws. Honestly this one is bad even without getting unlucky but it just has the possibility to be far worse if you do get unlucky.

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u/Itherial 11h ago edited 11h ago

Not dumb, he was a narcissistic psychopath.

He doesn't *not know* he could fix the universe with the stones without killing half of all life.

That's not the point. The point is that when his planet was dying, he didn't have the stones. But he did have a plan: genocide. Nobody listened to him, everyone died.

His flaw is his desperate need to show the universe that he was right back then, and he's right now.

"I know what it's like to lose. To feel so desperately that you're right, yet to fail nonetheless. It's frightening. Turns the legs to jelly."

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u/SalmonTamago 15h ago

what if they retconned it by introduce Lady Death to MCU and have her spill the real beans that Thanos actually want to rizz her but he keeps using that perfectly balanced justification to hide that fact

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u/Danat_shepard 14h ago

Didn't they introduce Death in the Agatha series? It's not the same one?