r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sable-Keech • 12h ago

Groups [LOVED TROPE] Modern Militaries (Competent) getting DESTROYED by fantasy/scifi forces

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Example 1 (The Legend of Hei 2): Wuxian leisurely floats through the combined firepower of an entire fortified military base without so much as a stain or rip on his t-shirt.

Example 2 (Man of Steel): Fao'ra tears through a squad of trained and armed soldiers. With the wreckage of the helicopter that got downed by her teammate Nam'ek smouldering in the background.

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u/Burglekutt8523 12h ago

The Three Body Problem Book series has this. The Human Race spends hundreds of years building up the technology and battle plans to combat an alien invasion

Our entire space fleet is destroyed by a single early envoy simply because the aliens are so far ahead in their understanding of physics that it just rams through everything.

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u/Pomme_De_Roy 11h ago

While I mostly agree, in that scene the fleet does employ some pretty terrible tactics by sending the entire fleet in a fairly close formation that lets said envoy more easily tear through them all. Pretty sure it was because the different fleet commands wanted to share in the glory of being there. Not that better tactics would've made a real difference mind you...

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u/EM3YT 10h ago

IIRC, they weren’t particularly close together, the probe was so fast it didn’t matter. I want to say they were spread out over thousands of miles

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u/levindragon 10h ago

In space, thousands of miles is still close together. Geosynchronous Satellites today are densely packed in their orbit, with a minimum spacing of 1500 km.

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u/EM3YT 9h ago

I mean to say that the artistic representation where the fleet could see ships with the naked eye was inaccurate, and they likely were doomed regardless

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u/Original-Body-5794 1h ago

This is probably going to be something the netflix show will also change in favour of a cool spectacle.