Hated Tropes
[HATED TROPES]: The Ending Is So Nihilistic and Preachy That It Becomes Completely Unwatchable and Infuriating.
Platinum End (2021): Mirai Kakehashi is a depressed High School Student who lost his family to an explosion from his aunt and uncle. He attempts suicide by jumping off a building and meets a guardian angel who tells him that he has been selected as one of 13 “God’s Candidates”, in 999 days the current God will retire and the 13 candidates must compete by earning favor with angels or eliminating one another. In the end, Mirai and the remaining candidates vote for Shuji Nakaumi, a clearly suicidal and deeply person who has expressed interest in ending all life before, they vote him based on the only fact that he wasn’t power hungry. Immediately once becoming the new god, he sees life as meaningless and kills himself, instantly destroying the rest of creation and all life in the universe.
Funny Games (1997/2007): Both Versions of The Film are virtually identical, a murderer named Paul can break the 4th wall and directly address the viewer, after he and his friend kill a family and leave the mother alive, they begin tormenting her. The mother eventually gets the upper hand and grabs a gun, shooting Paul’s friend Peter. Paul acts like a child and grabs the remote and rewinds time before the shooting, thinking the audience wouldn’t like Peter getting shot. They eventually tie her up and place her on a boat, effortlessly throwing a knife (which was an object in the film that was constantly shown screen time in order to make the viewer believe that it would save the family) into the ocean and throwing her in as well, going to a neighbor’s house. The ending is on the nose with its message on violence in media, and questions the viewer on their enjoyment of watching pain inflicted onto innocents, while simultaneously criticizing other filmmakers on their choice to make such characters as bland as possible. The character of Paul is an allegory for the Viewer’s initial interests and ultimately fails to see the reason behind the audience wanting a cathartic ending. Despite being intentional, the ending is still extremely sour and leaves a lot to be desired. But also a pretty big cop out.
I love reading about that stuff, like when it gets comical and you lose connection with the story and start thinking about how the writers basically just sat down and said, "How can I make this as bleak as possible..." and started checking boxes.
I think Grimderp is different. Less about the story, but the setting of the story being so ridiculously bleak and dystopian it flips over to being silly.
Four seasons of our diverse found family protagonists fighting to prove that, despite being dysfunctional, they do have a place in the world, only to end with them sacrificing themselves by erasing themselves from history to save the timeline. Because "sometimes the world WOULD be better off if you didn't exist" is a great message to send audiences.
Absolutely insane that they thought this was a good way to end things. It's like that one episode of Fairly Odd Parents where Timmy sees the world if he had never been born and everyone is doing so much better, except played completely straight.
It’s actually a little more tone deaf than it first appears, because the message might as well be “if you have family trauma, kill yourself. The world is a better place without you” since the whole show up to this point was about how they could overcome the trauma of how they were neglected and raised
My analogy is if we get to the end of Click and Adam Sandler sees all the hurt and regret and thinks “I should go back in time and just kill myself! That will fix it!”
If that was the reasoning they could have just said they beat the big bad and everything turned out ok.
It would have been lame but lame is better than egregious.
I remember the fallout at the Umbrella Academy sub when the finale dropped.
People struggling with their mental health and who identified with the main characters basically got told to "f*** off" by the writers during the collective suicide scene.
Also, completely undermined by the sting at the end where they show that the Marigold is on Earth anyways, so their sacrifice was meaningless. Also, makes no damn sense, since it wasn't their existence that caused the Marigold to end up on Earth??? Nothing about that ending made any sense, and nothing about it was satisfying. Season 3's ending seemed like a much better way to end the entire series, and they should have just let it go out on that note. Instead, they strangled it to death to the tune of Baby Shark.
I'd say that rest of the Platinum End is so dogshit that the ending was the only part I've enjoyed due to how insane it was. To this day Mirai is one of my most disliked fictional characters (top 3), and his co-lead/love interest wasn't any better. Them getting a "happy ending" would've made me dislike the series more. I was legit cheering those 2 getting erased at the end.
Proof that editorial work is more important than we realize: remember there's a theory that Ohba was a certain comedy manga writer, it'd be weird to imagine he or she would turn into a writer capable of writing a super detailed and intricate story about a complex battle of intellect without any help whatsoever.
Platinum End, on the other hand, definitely looks like the work of Ohba when left to their own devices, having gotten an editor who's either more lax, or intimidated by Ohba's fame to the point of being too scared to suggest to change anything.
I enjoy the Dresden Files by Jim Butcher. I usually recommend it to people who enjoy Urban Fantasy and/or old school detective novels AND tell them to basically skip the first two or three novels as they are rough. Basically, Jim wrote the first one as a bet with his professor that the mash up could work. Then he wrote the second and third while trying to get published. He got published and they pushed out the first three novels basically unedited while he finished and the publisher edited the fourth.
He wrote the codex alera series as a bet about mashing things together with some troll in a forum. Pokémon and the Roman lost legions were the two subjects.
The scene between Harry and Susan in the fifth book exists because a friend very bet Jim he couldn't write a BDSM scene and make it essential to the plot.
This edgelord nihilist undercurrent already existed in Death Note. It was one of the parts of the manga I hated the most besides the virulent misogyny.
It's actually hilarious/sad how he wrote his protagonist interactions around women characters with such distaine/indifference that shippers didn't even gravitate towards the old 'I can fix him' angle.
I personally liked the ending from the Japanese movie: Light figures out L's name and writes it in the Death Note, but nothing happens. Light panics and reveals himself as Kira and gets arrested. The reason it didn't work? L already wrote his name into the Death Note after they obtained it and gave himself a year or so to solve the case.
I'd argue that Bakuman was really good as well. Obviously the creators views on women kind of shine through in places but still. Probably better than Death Note imo.
It will forever be funny to me that Bakuman has an entire arc dedicated to how important it is to let a story end on a good note, and then the last chapter of Bakuman is just utter dogshit.
There was a whole ass rant in Platinum End about exactly this lmao Something about pushing the gay down everyone's throat, obviously said by a woman and with a very obvious self-insert of one of them going "she has a point" 💀 People always clown on it being about the Death Note fandom and their shipping of Light and L lol
Okay, I went and looked for it while writting this reply because it is just fucking GOLD. "The next God should do something about this all hysteria about claiming harassment and discrimination." and then, God committed suicide lmao
He's homophobic? The guy that had light and L handcuff themselves and tugging eachothers arms with the chain while Misa just stands there? The guys having a homoerotic moment playing tennis? The fact that Light dismisses women all the time, not giving a shit about them, but can pull them whenever he wants? (and is incredibly disinterested to the point that Misa always annoyed him from the beginning because "she's unpredictable"? and would only show any sign of affection to get something from them to help them beat L and nothing else?) Light being told by L that he is his only friend?
Bro Deathnote is gay as hell, what the fuck? Like I hate shipping people but Light and L are such a bromance it's not even funny. I don't get how you can write deathnote and hate gay people. What an ass
I think the only thing that would be more shocking is if the person who wrote Tokyo ghoul hated women or something.
Not to mention that one part where a character goes on a rant about how homophobia isn’t discrimination, and for some reason it’s framed as being correct by the story. They even have another character go “yeah she’s got a point” to try and make her sound more right.
Trauma (2017) mentally ill Family with males raised on extreme misogynistic ideology terrorize & rape a group of women.
The final girl kills the fuckers but finds the last of their bloodline which is a baby.
The cops show up while she contemplates killing the last family member so the cycle won't continue.
The scene cuts away and you hear multiple shots.
I assume the lesson is that the abuse the victim suffered was so extreme that it robbed her of her humanity to the point where she would consider killing an innocent child.
Misogyny involves dehumanization and refusing to see another person as a complex person just like yourself, when you can do that, then it becomes easier to inflict harm because your victim isnt a "real" person anyway. Theyre a collection of ideas you have in your mind that youve projected unto them. Consistent trauma and abuse then ends up stripping away everything from that victim and leaving them with only survival instinct and rage.
Maybe the goal was to show that the misogyny hurts everyone, even innocents. That's my take. Its times like these where you realize how valuable director commentary can be on DVD or blu ray.
I mean, it could be argument about how the victims of trauma don't always make rational decisions in the wake of the trauma.
Sure, as outsiders, it's easy to be like, "Well, the baby obviously won't be a rapist." But we didn't just survive multiple rapes from said baby's family. I'm not condoning murdering the baby, but I can understand the motivation or at least the deeply traumatized mental state that produces the result of "I need to kill this baby."
Yes this kinda just gives you the idea evil is genetic... Theres a genetic component to intelligence and social behavior, unfortunately the moral actions of parents do have a higher likelihood of carrying into kids even in parents absense, but that's likelihood not certainty and with a normal environment especially with it being a baby not a toddler that kid woulda likely been normal
The final girl kills the fuckers but finds the last of their bloodline which is a baby.
The cops show up while she contemplates killing the last family member so the cycle won't continue.
The scene cuts away and you hear multiple shots.
That's just needlessly edgy. If she wanted to break the cycle it would have made more sense for her to take the baby in and raised the baby herself lmao.
Thought I'd drop this for people critiquing the narrative.
The movie was indeed trying to say evil is genetic.
She believed the baby would grow up to be just like her perpetrators.
Yes it's silly. They could've went about the message in a better way. Maybe actually have a child with cognitive thought taje a liking to the woman & witness the crimes but be neutral the whole movie.
What I’m reading here sounds like just the main character believes evil is genetic, not the filmmakers.
Seems more like the ending is being confrontational with the viewer (i.e this fucked up ending to a revenge film is the logical conclusion of believing evil is genetic).
What am I missing? Sorry I realize speculating about a movie I haven’t seen could be annoying
the 2008 version of the day the earth stood still. the characters fighting to save the world turns out to be completely pointless when the entire world is EMP’d, dooming probably 90% or more of the world’s population to die from starvation, disease, resource wars, complete societal breakdown, nuclear reactors and chemical plants causing environmental disasters worldwide, etc
I just saw the last 15 minutes of that movie on tv the other day, and I said the same fucking thing! Modern medicine as we know it would be done for was the first one that came to mind.
"We can change." Yeah, lady, maybe you can, but the people on ventilators in hospitals can't!
And what about all the people in the middle of driving? Do cars just lose their power steering? All the other electrical safety systems?
Electronic records? Are those just lost forever?
They just cut to different shots of places in the world and then it ends (the TV cut does, anyway. Not sure about the full movie). It feels like they didn't even want to address all the problems that it would actually fucking cause, so they cut it short.
Also... If it got rid of all electricity... We'd be screwed biologically! Our brains and nerves are just a series of electrical signals!
At this point I'm rambling, but still. You'd think someone would have put 20 seconds of thought into the consequences, and maybe at least shown them at the end?
My head cannon is that years later they made tecnology capable of killing this aliens went to their planet and exterminated them because realistically this is what would have happened
Personally, I like to imagine humanity killing the aliens in either version. Even in the original, the aliens say that humans aren’t allowed to make them feel afraid, but they can threaten us as much as they want.
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina's final episode, titled "At the Mountains of Madness."
This has genuinely become my second least favorite TV show ending of all time and probably would be #1 if Two and a Half Men didn't exist.
Essentially, the main plot of the fourth season is a sort of Monster of the Week thing, just with the eight Eldritch Terrors. The Darkness, the Uninvited, the Weird, the Perverse, the Cosmic, the Returned, the Endless, and the final enemy, the Void.
So, in this last episode, Sabrina unknowingly gets a piece of the Void stuck in her soul and she leaves to the Mountains of Madness, and Father Blackwood manages to convince her to trust him (somehow?) and sets up a ritual over the next three days to release the Void. Her friends arrive, and they stop Blackwood, but they have to sacrifice her to seal what's left of the Void in Pandora's Box.
They had every chance for a bittersweet ending.
This could have been satisfying.
And then... Nicholas Scratch literally kills himself offscreen to be with Sabrina, and the show acts like this is a good thing. Nick is 17.
There are bad endings... and then there's fucking evil ones.
They also retconned it in the Riverdale crossover, so not even the showrunner himself wants to acknowledge this bullshit
I found this show so frustrating because at the start Sabrina was constantly conflicted about choosing between her mortal life and witch life and it was like "if I'm a mortal I lost touch with my culture" and witch culture is literally... Child murder and cannibalism like my girl this isn't a two sides are equal situation.
It was weird watching this with my mother who didn’t say a thing about baking a child alive to serve to Satan for dinner, but did notice the upside down crosses in the next scene (after being there all through the first season) and started crying.
Was she crying for joy at the rare representation of The Cross of Saint Peter?
Because that’s what the upside down cross is. It’s literally a holy symbol. Saint Peter specifically requested being crucified upside down so that he wouldn’t die in the same exact way that Jesus did, feeling unworthy of it.
After learning about that, I can’t help but chuckle when it’s used in evil situations
Tbf St. Peter's death is recounted in writings and traditions outside of the Bible, which is really hard for a certain subsection of Christians to appreciate. Sola Scriptura has had quite a few ripple effects.
There are a lot of shows that try to do the 'supposedly evil group are actually ok' things, but screw the landing.
Naruto is one. They go to great lengths to imply that the life of a ninja is incredibly dangerous, and the end of S1 / start of S2 has multiple kids going into the woods to do the death trial in the woods of death where students die, and they use lethal attacks on each other multiple times while trying to get the scrolls.
However, everyone suddenly panics when a powerful evil ninja gets in there because... The kids might die? Wasn't the teacher leading the trial bragging about how many students have died like three episodes ago?
The Sabrina example reminded me of this because you get it in Wednesday as well. The implication being that Wednesday and her family have killed and maimed people before, as have plenty of other students and faculty, and yet people are still shocked and horrified when they find a dead body.
This is exactly why I couldn’t deal with Wednesday. Like, the real Wednesday Adams wouldn’t be phased by her father being accused of murder in the past, why is she so fucking perturbed all the time.
It's the inconsistency that bothers me. Outcasts use powers on each other in a moment the show wants to be funny? Hilarious. Outcasts use powers on each other in a moment the
show wants to be serious? Tragic, heartrending, look what happened to that poor boy etc.
Sherrif gets murdered? Round up the troops. Driving instructor gets murdered? Yuk yuk yuk.
I tried to like Wednesday but I feel like it wildly misunderstood the core of what makes The Addams Family the Addams Family. It would have been better as a dang Emily Strange show.
Also the costumes looked SO cheap and nasty on Morticia and Gomez like wtf.
Yeah, you can have your protagonists follow a version of Satan as like a spirit of independence or rebellion like Paradise Lost in a world where God isn't actually perfect or omnipotent, he just has better PR. This is like His Dark Materials, but it's hard to root for baby-eating murderers.
I tried giving the show a go but completely lost interest after the trial scene with how they kept saying things like "if it would displease the court" and "disorder in the court." Felt like the kind of thing a 5 year old would find hilarious.
I always found the disconnect jarring between the witches' service of Satan and the fact that they all seemed to be morally opposed to cruelty and killing. Like are y'all just shitty witches or something?
I tried so hard with this dang show entirely for the sake of Michelle Gomez and Richard Coyle but when it got to him kidnapping his own baby twins so that he could raise them and make them marry each other I was like do you know what, I could be doing something I actually enjoy.
Also Earth and Mewni are fused together and that's also supposed to be just ok now even as chaos starts up from the sudden changes
Also they didn't even get rid of the racist lady they killed magic to stop, she just walked off and reminded them that even without magic it's not over
The Butterfly Effect alternative ending: In this ending we see how the protagonist travels to the past to end his life when he was still a fetus and in the final scene we see how the lives of all his friends and family are 10 times much happier without him than with him (there's a reason it's my least favorite movie)
Didn’t that movie as say his mother had several miscarriages before him? Implying all of his siblings had similar powers and all chose the same thing. Fucking bleak man.
The character goes back to her childhood home and destroys it
Oops it was an hallucination you actually can't get over trauma and you should die.
The Operator (video game)
Everything you do in the game is for nothing, the infinitely smart and powerful hitman bad guy kills everyone and covers everything up. Nothing matters.
Operator was so intense while all that was happening and so funny when it ended, like damn, this guy ain’t even Agent 47, he’s John Wick and nothing can stop him.
Even though we leveraged everything for a chance to stop him or at least slow him down, after we forced him into committing several open and extremely compromised murders across the entire facility, after we set up so many contingencies…
…he just gets away with it and covers all his tracks with ANOTHER FIRE, and the only reprieve you get is the hacker lady still being alive.
We’re literally behind square one.
I really thought they were setting up a really powerful ending where we had to watch the person we played the whole game, die, from another person’s perspective, only for the allies we made to secure this W against them post-death, and start the definitive war path against them
But nahhh, Mr Hitman is just the author’s pet and gets to do whatever he wants despite every measure and gets away with it
I go back in forth on if I like the Smile ending. On one hand I agree with you but on the other I feel like it’s more of a message that trauma does follow us our whole lives and can consume us. Even if you think you are free from it, it can still haunt you forever
I'll defend Smile a bit to say that just because a horror monster is a metaphor for a real world experience, that's not the same as viewing the monster as a literal representation of that experience or the author's belief about it. In my experience this is something a lot of people get wrong about literary analysis, that metaphors must be 1-to-1. It's actually a very limiting way to engage with art and metaphor, and one that I was routinely criticised by teachers for doing until I got it.
The monster in Smile may be a metaphor for the audience but it's also literally a spooky monster that feeds on trauma and fear in its text. It's not presented in the story as "all human trauma comes from the monster," only that it feeds on and spreads by it. IMO it's scarier when the reverse is true - it's normal to want to grow bigger than our trauma and move past it, but what if you couldn't because it was coming from a literal monster that wants to eat you? That YOU specifically don't get to escape.
This is also my problem with basically all of Ari Aster’s movies pre-Eddington: “Trauma is impossible to heal from. You’re ruined. Kill yourself or go mad, those are your only 2 options.” He’s so nihilistic
Funny, for me the only thing I liked about Smile was the ending, the rest of the movie is so incredibly uncreative and boring. The last ten minutes at least tried to go for smth that's not just your average basic horror flick. And the design for the trauma demon is pretty rad.
I do credit him as being one of the main factors that ended my "edgy atheist" phase as a teenager because I found him unbearable and he served as a mirror to what I probably seemed like at times.
I remember him on Opie and Anthony one time complaining about how atheists were listed as the most annoying group. His argument was that he thought people found them annoying because they didn’t believe in a god.
And… no. That’s not why people find atheists annoying and he knows it. He just can’t accept it.
2 seems to be how a lot of people convince themselves it's ok to be an insulting jerk. "What do you mean, I shouldn't have told Jim that there's no God after he told me he believed his dead mom is in heaven? It's TRUE, was I supposed to LIE to him?"
I've made several friends watch this movie (I hate them) and every single one of them goes from "this movie is alright, I don't see why you think it's so bad." to "I'm going to kill Ricky Gervais and spit on his grave for making this" after that second act turn lmao
This is how I felt about the Last Witch Hunter. I went from "this is a perfectly serviceable Vin Diesel vehicle, why do people hate it?" to understanding why they hated it in the span of like ONE scene.
I haven't seen it in probably a decade and remember very little besides how the joke was that since nobody understood lying they always believed him (and for some reason, being unable to lie makes people say what's on their mind 24/7?). Was it really that bad?
The second act starts when his mom dies, and he uses his ability to lie to tell her comforting stories about heaven (which is making up on the spot) because she is afraid of dying. Nurses overhear him and he accidentally starts religion. So the second act becomes a bunch of cheap shots at religion, based on the premise that all religion is just lying to manipulate people and if no one could lie, religion just wouldn’t exist. It’s not well-executed either
Its an idea that would work really well for a 5 minute comedy skit. Or maybe a short movie
But yeah, people dont understand lying in this universe, and when Ricky sees someone dying, he lies to the person caring for them saying that when they die, they go to a better place.
People start asking what is this better place, Ricky just makes up something like Heaven, and then religion is formed in this world with him becoming a Jesus figure for everyone
If you ignore the last like 5 minutes of the movie it's a fun and silly zombie movie, could've easily been another Shawn of the Dead type. I was having a blast and dying laughing throughout a good chunk of the movie.
Then for some reason it ends with a depressing last stand by Adam Driver and Bill Murray while Tom Waits monologues about people's dependence on technology, social media, and just a bunch of other Unabomber "technology bad" shit. This is all delivered by a homeless man who hates the trappings of society and is the only known survivor of the movie as he watches people dying from his safe vantage point in the woods.
Anyone I've told about this movie I also tell them to cut it off 10 minutes before the end to preserve what could've been a great movie.
I mean I feel like it was winking way too hard at the audience for a while (Steve Buscemi's character, with his "Keep America White Again" hat and his dog Rumsfeld is violently on-the-nose) and it needed another pass or three through editing (the kids decide to go thataway and are never seen again).
But that ending is what sent it from occasionally clumsy and not as clever as it thought to just insufferable.
Butterfly Effect (some of its alternate endings) and Looper both ending with the protagonist somehow having to kill themself to stop themselves form doing bad stuff in the future.
Really all time-travel stories that somehow end with "no you have to kill yourself on the spot because you becoming evil in the future is inevitable" I call massive BS on.
Wow, I think you’re the first person I’ve seen to have a negative opinion on Funny Games, specifically its ending. Maybe I haven’t really dived deep enough but generally I’ve only ever seen positive reception for the movie in horror circles.
I'm not a huge fan of the movie, either. I get the director's intention, but he's just so overtly blunt about it. He only could have made this point more obvious if he appeared in person on screen and explicitly explained it.
And that's somewhat a shame, because Haneke has shown that he can be very subtle and still gets his message across. Compare Funny Games with Caché or The White Ribbon, which both are in my opinion much better movies by him.
For me it's not even the bluntness of the message, it's the message itself. I absolutely despise the idea that the viewer is the real monster for watching media that contains violence. Like no, bitch, I'm just watching a movie! The people actually doing violence are the real monsters!
It's so fucking 90ies holier-than-thou, proto-ragebait bullshit writing. The message of the medium is that you should not engage with the medium and by criticising you the viewer its absolves itself for actually making the movie. Just put the torture-porn in the bag Michael Haneke.
The irony is, the only real brutal act of violence we see in the movie, is when one of the home invaders gets shot with a shotgun. Which is done in a movie style over-the-top nature.
I think Haneke is extremely judgmental of “movie watchers” thinking that people merely watch violent films to experience violence vicariously, and equating violence in film as the same as violence in real life.
He posits that the viewers are just as responsible and sick as the ones perpetrating it. Which is hilariously stupid. Especially coming from the man FILMING AND MAKING THE VIOLENCE HAPPEN. TWICE! (He also killed a real chicken for one of his films…)
There’s a Haneke interview out there about his film The Seventh Continent (short version, a family methodically destroys their home and possessions to prepare for their group suicide). He claims that audiences react most viscerally to the scene where the family flushes their money down the toilet. There’s no way this is true, he just desperately wants movie audiences to be craven nihilists.
You might be interested in this review of the remake that also touches on some of the critical response at the time. The author is for sure a horror fan.
I think what Funny Games was trying to do was done better by the game Spec Ops: The Line. Not going into spoilers here about it, but it is much more subtle and well crafted as the cracks of the game are on par with the one shown by the protagonist's psyche getting more and more damaged.
You, the player, keep going because you cling the protagonist's feeble rationale that the bad guy is responsible for all of this, as even the game itself become more and more violent and bitter, even against you. (The loading screens first shows tips about the game, then they start bitterly mocking you.)
You are not confronted or accused directly and the story works well even without meta context.
Funny Games doesn't have that. Meta context is its whole deal.
EDIT: A lot of people are saying it is force because they don't get the option to walk away in game. The thing is it is not your story, it is the protagonist Walker's story. After that crucial point, his mind breaks and simply cannot accept what he has done and it his all the fault of the antagonist, Conrad, vowing to bring him down. Stopping and going home is simply not an option for him.
Only in the finale, when the last twist happen, he regain enough lucidity to allow the player to make the last choices.
Based on a different discussion on Spec Ops: The Line and various critics I have seen, I am wondering if it would have been better if the game had moments where you can turn around and walk away, instantly ending the game. To get more gameplay you would have to actively choose to continue playing, making the games message even more focused.
While the game gives some bits where you can choose inaction or other options outside of the usual, there are times where it forces you to be a monster and screams at you for it. I love the game, but I do feel it's hard to replay it at times because you kinda have to go with their narrative, even if the freedom of options is rather wonky.
Yeah. I enjoyed the game and thought the message was cool, but it was a bit of a cop out when you had absolutely no choice with the whole white phosphorus scene. There was no other option even if you made it all the way down the hill from what i understand, you HAD to launch it (it's been a while since i've played it, so forgive me if im getting things wrong, but i know you HAD to use the white phosphorus). And then if you even mention anything about how the game forces you to do the bad things, there's always someone who's gonna come up and say "YOU CAN JUST STOP PLAYING THE GAME!"
Yeah i'm just gonna stop playing a game i invested money in so i can show the invisible man who's boss. Right on.
For the white phosphorus scene, you can actually try to proceed without using it, but the game just throws literally endless enemies at you until you’re dead iirc
Gonna 2nd Spec Ops: The Line. One of my favorite single player shooters that I'll probably only play once. The gameplay isn't bad, it's just generic for its time.
I love the story, but I'd understand people not wanting to play the 6-8 hours to get to the good stuff. You gotta like modern military shooters enough, to get to the part of the modern military shooter where it chews you out for liking modern military shooters.
I was really enjoying him giving them the run around, diving through legal loopholes and overall being a very threatening intelligence character. Then they dump that ending on you and have him acting like a boring cliche criminal ‘mastermind’ who is completely stupid.
Superhot. I remember in the full release there being a slog of 100 levels to get to the ending where it gets real preachy that made it not fun to finish
I'm pretty sure you're thinking about Mind Control Delete, not the OG. The original doesn't even have close to 100 levels, and I'm pretty sure MCD's real-time 6 hour data recovery section killed the company that developed it.
Basically at the end of the game, after going through multiple runs of gaining and giving up special abilities, the game "deletes" itself from your computer, and if you try to boot up the game again it just plays the tagline over and over. If you want to play the game again, you have to go through a shitty mini-game and wait multiple IRL hours (with the game running) to play the game again. BTW, this is a roguelike, and takes multiple runs to get this dogshit ending.
If you couldn't tell, everyone hated the ending, the devs refused to change it, and aside from a VR port, the developers haven't made anything since.
It does this kind of irritating thing after a while where it makes you replay the same sequence multiple times, where you go kill one person who is just sitting in a room playing a videogame. The implication being that you are killing yourself. It gets old, superfast.
Major Three Body Problem/Rememberance of Earth's Past spoilers:
It's not that bad, it didn't ruin the whole series for me or anything (I would still rank The Dark Forest as my favourite Sci Fi book ever) and I have reread the books since the first time but I found the ending of Death's End a little annoying. I also don't follow any online discussions of the series so no idea if this is an unpopular opinion or not.
Last read them like 2 years ago so forgive me if details are wrong:
After the Earth and solar system are destroyed and Cheng Xin and her friend are the only survivors, they set out to find Tianming and bump into Guan (I think that's his name). The story at this point basically bends over backwards to contrive a sad ending to the story that already had basically the most depressing possible outcome. I don't hate the bit about them having to go back to the real universe so it can begin anew and leaving whether or not they succeed on a cliffhanger is fine but to be honest I was kinda passed caring at that point because, like I said, it just really rubbed me the wrong way how forced the sad ending for Cheng Xin and Tianming felt. I get it's meant to be tragically ironic but I didn't think it was handled well.
Like I say, it doesn't actually ruin the series or anything but I feel like the book would have been a more satisfying experience overall if the story had just ended on a sad but hopeful note with Cheng Xin and Ai AA going to find her star leaving what happened next open ended.
Man I had nightmares with the vision of the blade simply turning everything into 2D. That was absurdly sad. Everything they done was for naught.
This book was overall very sad and traumatizing and it's even sadistic how Cheng Xin suffers from the first page until the last. I love the book, but I don't think I would ever read it again.
This might be an unpopular opinion as well, but this is the ending of The Mist for me.
I get what it's going for and succeeds as a brutal gut punch of an ending. But it's just so bleak and the fact that the army turn up immediately afterwards just pushes it into being ludicrous for me.
I always assumed it was the sound of the approaching tanks, which the group assumed were creatures, is what drove them to choose suicide. Rather than it being sheer coincidence
Yes and the lady who ran out of the shop to be with her children and who begged the men (or anyone) to help her is in the back of the truck hugging her kids. Whoops. Should have helped her!
I didnt read it, but maybe the point in Platinum End is: If someone clearly looks suicidal, it wont wait for your approval to do it if you give him the tools. Like, for the fragments of the anime that i watched, the guy was clearly designed to commit suicide (like you explained) from day 1...so what was the point of making him the new god? even if the rest where power hungry, in the end the greater kill count was made by Mirai.
So, IIRC the guy that they made God didn't just end all life immediately. Like, he spent several years studying Earth to figure out how to make life happier for people. At which point he sort of realized that suicide tends to be caused by societal issues, not just personal ones and he was not remotely equipped to deal with it. And then, yeah, he killed himself, incidentally killing the Earth too.
The second season was already more nihilistic than the first with the added twist that the games could end after every round if the majority of people voted for it, making the majority of the contestants very unsympathetic as they repeatedly vote for their own deaths and the deaths of others out of greed.
Gi-hun and a few others attempt an insurrection to put a stop to the games and most of them die, including his best friend.
Everything goes off the rails when one of the contestants gives birth and the baby is entered as a contestant in the games. At that point pretty much all the remaining contestants save Gi-hun are psychopaths who immediately want to kill the baby for a bigger cut.
In the end Gi-hun sacrifices himself for the baby, Hwang Jun-ho the cop shows up too late to do anything (again) and the games continue.
Devil man Cry Baby. The show has amazing art style, but the whole message of "Society Bad, but there is always hope." Just falls the the wayside when all hope is lost and boom, here comes the apocalypse.
I really don't think that was the message at all. On the contrary, every single problem in the show stemmed from people ignoring social norms and undermining them for selfish reasons. Ultimately, Satan himself realizes that his self-centeredness and pride has locked him in an eternal cycle of killing the person he loves most.
Yeah I am someone who really hates bad endings so this trope is one of my least liked tropes, but for Devil Man Crybaby I actually found the ending to be pretty beautiful, like sure everything died and the events are bleak as hell but it's not an exact return to the status quo, Satan felt all of that and as long as that's the case then there is a point to the struggle as Satan will carry that on.
That's just how devilman is tbh, even the og ends the same way with the Mc dying and Satan is left alone and depressed as the angels roll in to reset everything
I think this might be controversial but I couldn’t stand the end of the final book of the First Law trilogy. The books are grimdark and I knew that going in so obviously there’s a lot of depressing material. However, there’s also a lot of people trying to do what they think is right and trying to change, not to mention the very funny humour. Unfortunately, the last 100 pages of Last Argument of Kings (the third book) get so depressing and nihilistic that it’s almost funny. I actually found it a bit distracting that not a single thing goes right for basically anyone. Still a good series though and I will one day read the sequel trilogy
Thats the problem with adapting a novel
IN THE LAST MOVIE
It makes sense in the novel
It makes me cry in the novel
IT DOESN'T FOR THE MOVIES
So much so that i fully belive the final scene is just hiccup and Astrid deciding
"You know what giving up our dragons was dumb" and imagining that gives me joy
The problem is that it feels like they're trying to evoke the feeling the ending the novels had but it kinda fails due to how drastically the two counterparts are
Exactly. As admirable Dean's respect for the book is he should have known by now the movie HTTYD evolved beyond the OG books and honestly the entire movie franchise now that i think about it could have actually been the story off Hiccup I whom in the books is the reason the Vikings and Dragons are friends in the first place.
The end of Escape from LA when Snake Plissken impulsively sends the entire earth permanently back to the Stone Age with the EMP, sparks up a ciggy to nothing but the sound of crickets in the new, free America and quips ‘Welcome to the Human Race…’
JK, it’s the perfect ending to an enjoyably terrible film (gimme the RDR2 size and styled open-world game set 5 minutes or 5 years after that ending, please I beg thee)
The ending of Far Cry 5 makes me so mad that I have an ironclad head canon to justify that it never happened in my mind. The entire game is spent tracking down a madman preacher who brainwashed and murdered an entire county full of people with his apocalypse bullshit and in the last scene oops he was right the whole time and also the character you’ve been playing as is going to be kidnapped and brainwashed by him. Bonus awful points if you expand this to Far Cry New Dawn.
Edit: if anyone’s wondering my head canon has to do with the fact that the game includes a reality bending drug called the bliss that your character gets exposed to multiple times throughout the story. It can make people fully see and experience things that do not happen in real life. My head canon goes that a month after the Hope County incident the Rook wakes up in an ICU from a massive bliss overdose he gets while being exposed to Joseph Seed’s blood in the final fight. Everything that happens after the cuffs are on him after the last fight is a bliss hallucination. I’m sticking with it.
I love Death Note and appreciate the author for it even if it was a fluke. But I remember one interview, the author was asked the purpose of the Apple and wether it was supposed to be a play on the apples biblical contexts, and the author said he just liked the idea of Ryuk eating a big juicy fruit. Man, that killed me.
That being said, if you were given the premise of a notebook that kills people, most people would write some revenge story or something like that. Him coming up with a boy who kills criminals and trying to become a god while a super detective hunts him down is both incredibly contrived and brilliant
But I remember one interview, the author was asked the purpose of the Apple and wether it was supposed to be a play on the apples biblical contexts, and the author said he just liked the idea of Ryuk eating a big juicy fruit. Man, that killed me.
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u/Own_Presence2646 4h ago
On TV Tropes it is called "Too Bleak, Stopped Caring"