r/TopCharacterTropes • u/MeepMan324 • 6d ago

Hated Tropes (Hated Trope) Endings so awful they completely destroy the legacy of the media.

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  1. Two and a Half Men's final episode teased Charlie Sheen's character coming back and going to harm the other characters whilst also having insults to his character and Charlie Sheen himself. It's clear the director had a grudge and the ending where his character comes up to knock then get crushed by a piano before it cuts to the director before he says "winning" before getting crushed by another piano
  2. This was an upbeat animated show about a magical teen princess. The writers desperately wanted a romantic endgame for her and her best friend, but the way they got there was essentially multiversal omnicide. To stop a villain, the main character unilaterally decides magic is the root of all evil and destroys it entirely. By doing this, she casually commits mass genocide against every purely magical being in the multiverse. It also triggers a massive apocalyptic event that violently crashes different dimensions together into a chaotic hellscape. But the show frames this horrific, mass-extinction catastrophe as a sweet, triumphant ending just because two teenagers get to hold hands in the rubble (Star Vs The Forces Of Evil)
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742

u/Inevitable-Fish2739 6d ago

The Star Wars sequels were contentious but no one liked TROS. It's most enduring legacy is the infamous "somehow, Palpatine returned". Oscar Issac's delivery of that line is hilarious. 

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u/Funkycoldmedici 6d ago

“Somehow” would be acceptable as a start to the characters figuring out how it happened, but no one ever bothers.

You can even have an unexplained impetus that works, like Cloverfield or the Mist. We never really know what exactly made these things happen, but it’s ok. Palpatine is obviously back because they killed the intended Bad Guy in the previous movie and had no plan of any kind. “Somehow Snoke returned” would have work just as well/poorly.

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u/Aridross 6d ago

The intended villain was Kylo Ren. Obviously. Kylo kills Snoke, doubles down on being a villain because he thinks he can do it better than anyone who’s come before, then proves that he’s actually just a petty tyrant with issues he’s taking out on the rest of the galaxy. It works, it’s satisfying as a downward character arc for Kylo because it’s the logical conclusion of his established issues, and Adam Driver would’ve fucking nailed it.

The third movie would unironically have been amazing if they just let Adam Driver ham it up for his share of a 200-minute runtime as a fully unhinged and raving Kylo, driving the First Order into the ground (and the rest of the galaxy with it) to satisfy his personal grudges and prove his (alleged) superiority.

And then the producers got scared of the backlash from jackass fans, so they got rid of Rian Johnson and whatever his plan was, they pulled back JJ Abrams (who didn’t have a plan, because his whole storytelling style revolves around not having a plan), and they filled the script with lame nostalgia-bait because the Star Wars audience had clearly demonstrated that was what they wanted.

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u/grendus 6d ago

Yeah. As someone who has the unfortunate position of defending TLJ, Kylo going full villain was one of the better parts of the movie. He was reckless and easily fooled, but incredibly powerful and would have done a good job being distinct from Vader.

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u/Kerblaaahhh 6d ago edited 6d ago

The best part of TLJ was Rey's parents being nobodies who abandoned her, but JJ had to ruin that too while also making it canon that Palpatine fucks.

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u/StevieMJH 6d ago

C'mon, we all knew. 😏

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u/fanofairconditioning 20h ago

I always wonder why she didn’t just say “hey. I’m the heir and now the leader, and you all will do what I say. Quit attacking those guys”, but I also watched the movie half asleep

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u/Banana_0verdrive 6d ago

The situation with his mask resume the whole sequelogie for me: He destroyed it in TLJ because he wanted to be more than just a Vader cosplayer, and then repair it in TROS for no reason whatsover except Abrams was pissy.

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u/AwsmDevil 6d ago

Oh hey, someone else who gets it. Most Star wars fans are braindead and can't read a plot to save their life. Kylo was setup to fall from the first movie. Him taking over the first order and becoming the mainline villain was the natural conclusion. 

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u/BiKingSquid 6d ago

Unless Ren did, which was still up in the air in the first movie (with Finn as the true protagonist). After the second movie there was no longer any hope of anything that interesting happening.

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u/No_Syrup_9167 6d ago

I disagree, and still think the better ending would have been for Rey and Kylo to actually switch "sides" or at least realize that they each had some light and dark in them.

for me, The entire Star Wars saga has the underlying "war" between light and dark sides of the force, while trying to bring home the idea that its NOT light v. dark, its about balance.

the movies should have shown how Rey and Kylo were inevitably linked. Rey's anger over being abandoned and then Luke trying to kill her and such, should have slowly consumed her in anger showing that despite being on the "light side" she had darkness to her.

and likewise, Kylo's connection with her, the guilt of killing his father, and the things he'd done, should have slowly softened him.

until they realize together, that he has light in him, she has dark in her,

settling into the creation, together, of the gray jedi's, who now understand that complete rejection of the opposing side will forever be wrong, and balance is the key.

Gray jedi's are already moderately cannon, and it would have tied a perfect bow on the series as a whole IMO.

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u/kaian-a-coel 6d ago

The light side is balance, the dark side is imbalance. A healthy body is not 50% cancer cells.

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u/No_Syrup_9167 6d ago

Disagree with your assertion.

If you were correct, then the whole

Anakin actually did bring "balance" to the force by becoming Darth Vader, because there wasn't enough dark side in the universe.

wouldn't work anymore. but its clearly a theme in the series. Dark side of the force is required by the force, since it always wants things balanced.

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u/AreYouOKAni 5d ago

Anakin didnt bring balance to the force by becoming Vader. He brought it by killing Palpatine at the end of Episode VI.

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u/-retaliation- 5d ago

Not sure why you blocked me and forced me to use another account to reply to this but,

deal, I can cop to that being the case, sure.

still means dark side is a required part then though. Under that assumption "balance" still requires a hand on the scale of "dark" to keep the force balanced.

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u/kaian-a-coel 6d ago

It's only a theme in the bullshit part of the expanded universe.

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u/No_Syrup_9167 6d ago

cool, and I'm saying taking pieces of "the bullshit part of the expanded universe" is better than what we got.

but hey, if you liked what we got, you do you bud.

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u/brutinator 6d ago

You can even have an unexplained impetus that works, like Cloverfield or the Mist.

The problem is, so much of Star War's lore/"vibe" post original trilogy is that EVERYTHING is explained. Every background character, every event, seems to be inexplicably tied to everything else. This makes have an unexplained mystery feel "off". Star Wars creators/extreme fans seem to have an inability to let any stone being unturned. Like how Han Solo is supposed to be kind of an irreverent character that you're not supposed to know if he's being honest or not, esp. when he brags about himself. He'll claim something that is nonsensical and absurd, and then fans bent over backwards to make everything he said actually true, and thus kind of killing part of the allure of the character.

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u/FamousWerewolf 6d ago

The line literally sets up a line from another character explaining how he returned.

I mean it's still not very good dialogue and moved past very quickly but I feel like people have memory holed the whole rest of that scene just so they can meme on it. The movie gives ample explanation of how Palpatine returned across multiple different scenes.

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u/Navy_Pheonix 6d ago

Right... sure. But the problem is that the event that Oscar's character is referring to was a fortnite event that is only referred to in the secondary tense, once in the opening crawl, and again by OI in the beginning of the movie.

You'd think a galaxy-wide announcement from Palpatine that he's back would be an important enough event to just, I don't know, include in the movie, instead of a character just saying it happened?

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u/Navy_Pheonix 6d ago

Imagine if they did a Fourth Hobbit movie, and in the first 5 minutes, Frodo, surrounded by his friends in the Baggins dining room says plainly: "Somehow, Smaug returned." The movie doesn't show this through any other visual spectacle than Frodo saying it, you had to be playing Roblox on July 18th to see Smaug's dead corpse rise up from the (middle)Earth to fight once again.

It's not just the fact that the line itself is dogshit, it's the entire surrounding context that encapsulates it completely.

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u/FamousWerewolf 6d ago

Well, no, it's more like if Frodo said "Somehow Smaug returned" and then another character replied "Dragons can be brought back to life with magic gold" and then later the film showed us Smaug's huge horde of magic gold and several plot points hinged on him having been collecting magic gold for years.

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u/Martin_Aricov_D 6d ago

"somehow Smaug returned"

"How?"

"Necromancy, Dark Magic, Gold, powers only dragons wield"

More appropriate

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u/FamousWerewolf 6d ago

Hah yes, perfect!

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u/LiftingRecipient420 6d ago

That still sounds dumb as fuck

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u/FamousWerewolf 6d ago

Well, yes. I'm not saying Rise of Skywalker is good. It's awful, and bringing back Palpatine was very stupid. I'm just saying they did explain it.

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u/FamousWerewolf 6d ago

The whole Fortnite thing is very dumb, but it's not required information to understand how Palpatine came back or what they're talking about in that scene. I mean what would have made more sense is if there was just no announcement of his return at all, but we could pick apart the weird creative choices in that movie all day.

All I'm pointing out is that "Somehow, Palpatine returned" is immediately followed by another character offering an explanation of how Palpatine returned - and subsequent scenes confirm that explanation and offer further context.

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u/awaythrowthatname 6d ago

Except cloning was never "a secret only the Sith knew" and most people at that point didn't even know what a Sith was, let alone some grunt in the "Resistance."

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u/FamousWerewolf 6d ago

I'm not saying the explanation is well-written, I'm just saying it exists.

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u/TheActualGrayOwl 6d ago

Literally the next line, my guy. The movie opens on the cloning tanks.

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u/wvj 6d ago

The funny thing is that this is also obviously a through-line all the way back to stuff George had thought about in the very beginning, but kind of wussed out on.

The 'Clone Wars' line in ANH clearly positions clones as the badguys (wars are usually named after who you're fighting). It was just him being gun-shy about the war in the prequel trilogy and wanting to keep the movies PG (Revenge of the Sith is the first PG-13 SW film) that turned it into a dopey thing where they fight droids so they're not killing humans in a war.

But if you go digging through any of the interim stuff, his small amount of interaction with EU authors, the 'clones are the big villains of the SW universe' things becomes glaring. Joruus C'baoth was originally going to be an Obi-Wan clone, and 'Palpatine Returned' comes directly from Dark Empire.

It isn't a bad idea, it's just a bad movie that doesn't fully execute it (or maybe rushes to execute it with the prior 2 not having built it up enough).

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u/ThePopDaddy 6d ago

Yeah, but that would require them to pay attention and not just read reviews on the Internet.

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u/throwaway60221407e23 6d ago

"Somehow" is explained in the prequels with the tale of Darth Plagueis the Wise.

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u/Gamerguy230 6d ago

Apparently you needed to play Fortnite at the time for the Star Wars event to get all info not given to you in the actual movie of how he is back and so on.

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u/SugarVibes 6d ago

They did a decent job explaining the whole palpatine clone thing in the bad batch and somewhat in the acolyte but retroactively explaining such a huge thing is pretty lame regardless.

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u/Fitzftw7 6d ago

I hate 7 just on virtue of rendering the efforts of the OT meaningless.

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u/kaian-a-coel 6d ago

What do you mean? Legally distinct darth vader watching the legally distinct death star blow up legally distinct coruscant on the orders of legally distinct palpatine, and then the legally distinct rebellion defeats the legally distinct empire by doing a legally distinct trench run was peak storytelling. /s

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u/guitarburst05 6d ago

"Can I copy your homework?"

"Yeah just change it a little so no one will notice."

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u/this_is_a_hellscape2 6d ago

My favorite part was when they slapped Finn's face all over the promo material for the first movie, showed man wielding a whole ass lightsaber...just to reduce him to having a little more than a force allergy.

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u/goodnamestaken10 6d ago

I'm no Star Wars Mega-Fan. I went in to watch it blind, and it was offensive how it was the same story, remade with new names.

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u/Can_I_Say_Shit 6d ago

This comment legally distinctly offends me and I legally distinctly disagree!

Inserting legally distinct /s

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u/bscott9999 6d ago

I know, right? It's like history is cyclical or something.

I actually agree, maybe a threat that is a little bit different or new, please? Not just Darth Vader 2, now with more angst.

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u/ExternalPromotion542 6d ago

The entire trillogy had no plan. Star wars has been so masisvely humbled ever since episode 6 its just pure comedy. For the love of god the prequels were shit hut they had a fucking PLOT. Lukas himself had siblings kiss because he couldnt make a decision and rehashed episode 4 in episode 6.

Then somehow, only a god would know, disney manages to make a trilogy even more poorly written and dysfunctional. Like holy hell, freshmen film students with a C average could have written a better trilogy. Honestly, the internet is its own nightmare of slop but its so glaringly obvious 90% of the people inholywood have no talent and the gate keeping is arbitrary.

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u/Murgatroyd314 6d ago

Episode 7: Luke's old lightsaber is found in a basement somewhere, with no explanation of how it got there.

Episode 8: The lightsaber gets destroyed.

Episode 9: Before the movie even starts, the lightsaber has been put back together exactly the way it was.

This comment is not about a lightsaber.

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u/Interesting_Total_98 6d ago

That's like saying allied soldiers in WW1 did nothing simply because Germany invaded again later. It's like history. It rhymes.

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u/DonChrisote 6d ago

Luke and the Rebellion won 30 years of peace (a long time in the grand scheme of things). The things that Luke learned and passed down to Rey helped the Resistance beat the First/ Final Order in the end of the day. The Empire was much more of an all-encompassing existential threat that took decades of bloody rebellion to uproot. Nothing that the sequels did changed that. You certainly don't have to like them, I myself think ROS is among the worst Star Wars films, but I'm not exactly sure what you would have wanted, other than for them not to make new Star Wars movies.

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u/ProfessionalOil2014 6d ago

The thrawn trilogy is right there dude 

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u/Weekly_Interview_936 6d ago

Thrawn Trilogy, Rogue Squadron, and many more. They had the entire post-Jedi transition from the Empire to the New Republic literally prewritten for them and they threw it out. Then they replace it with a "oh btw the New Republic is already a failed willingly blind bureaucratic mess and the nu-Empire is at full strength and ready to attack"? The reality is that even the best movie of the DisneyWars trilogy is an objectively worse story than what it replaced.

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u/DarkGodRyan 6d ago

Personally I would have wanted them to do anything other than the exact same thing again

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u/Fitzftw7 6d ago

There’s no need for a sequel series after a perfectly satisfying ending, at least not one that’s the same galactic level threat as The Empire, and certainly not something that effectively The Empire remnants returning to power, that’s what really makes Luke’s efforts feel so fruitless. That and his attempt at reviving the Jedi order failing completely. And the to my knowledge far more optimistic EU being overridden by this trilogy.

There’s an enormous universe to explore that takes place before the OT. We could’ve gotten another trilogy out of that instead.

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u/Weekly_Interview_936 6d ago

They also could've just ... addressed the whole "killing the Emperor doesn't actually topple the Empire" issue that DisneyWars just handwaved away. The old EU spent a lot of books covering the actual resolution of the Galactic Civil War and the complexities of building the New Republic. All Disney had to do was adapt that existing material - which allows for just dumping the dreck that was in there - and they'd have had an infinitely better story for post-Jedi content.

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u/Fitzftw7 6d ago

That could’ve been cool. Now that I think about it, the idea of The Battle of Endor completely toppling the Empire seemed kinda silly.

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u/DonChrisote 6d ago

I think we just disagree about what good storytelling, and also the history that inspires it, looks like. The Allies defeated the Nazis, and then what happened? Was that the last the world saw of the Nazis? Do people, after defeating their inner demons, never have to face them again? People were so mad that Luke wasn't a perfect all-powerful God angel wizard, but would that have made a better story? People get old and disillusioned sometimes, especially after seeing their life's work crumble and fade. I think it was exciting to see Luke overcome that, re-become the legend that he was, to give the Resistance a chance. The Last Jedi is sick and I'm not going to apologize for saying it lol

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u/Fitzftw7 6d ago

Is that really the best example? Yeah, Nazis still exist, but they are nowhere near the threat they were 85 years ago. Small groups of skinheads don’t exactly compare to a nation that came scarily close to conquering the world.

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u/awaythrowthatname 6d ago

30 years after fulfilling a prophecy that is supposed to bring balance and peace is nothing when the previous era of peace lasted 1000 years

Luke didn't pass down anything, he didn't want to train her and complained about everything the whole time, and acted like a bum failure instead of the shining beacon of hope that he always was meant to be, the man who never gave up, the man who say the irredeemable, imposing lying evil Darth Vader and said "no, I can still feel good in him, I can save him."

The Empire lasted longer, but the Sequels tried to up the ante and made the First Order a significantly, comically more existential threat by giving them a SUPER DEATH STAR WITH HYPERSPEED SHOTGUN PLANET KILLING LASERS and then also giving them 1000 more mobile Star Destroyers with Death Star lasers after that.

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u/illy-chan 6d ago

You raise good points but how they executed it felt extremely unnatural and pandering? Like they needed the original trilogy stars back but also needed them to still be underdogs. And they all failed in extremely fundamental ways from family to professional. But also we still need them and it felt pretty opaquely for the brand than because the next generation wasn't ready (as an aside, I'm still salty how they squandered Finn - he was easily my favorite character in the first new movie and they just ditched him in the next two).

I'm no expert but it still felt obvious that they started the new trilogy without a plan with what they wanted to do. And, in fairness, the original trilogy didn't have a set story at the start either but at least that was more driven by artists than shareholders worried about quarter numbers.

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u/do_not_engage 6d ago

You must hate Empire Strikes Back and Return of the Jedi for the same reason?

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u/Fitzftw7 6d ago

No, because they built up to an ultimately satisfying conclusion. It was pretty obvious in the first movie that the war wasn’t over and Vader was still a threat.

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u/Dark_Fox13 6d ago

I saw the movie for my birthday at a local theater (which gets movies a few months after they come out)

And then the COVID lockdown started basically immediately after-

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u/Hunter5865 6d ago

They fly now

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u/Zeitgeist1115 6d ago

As someone who enjoyed 7 and 8 and wanted desperately to prove the critics (mainly the bigoted Ctitical Drinker crowd) wrong, I had such high hopes for TRoS to stick the landing for the trilogy.

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u/ChiefsHat 6d ago

Yup. Instead they made it a fix-fic that will always hang over the franchise because those jackasses complained so vigorously about Last Jedi.

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u/DasharrEandall 6d ago

And sidelined Rose really hard, giving all the people who bullied Kelly Marie Tran online what they wanted.

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u/ChiefsHat 6d ago

She deserved so much better.

The unmade Duel of the Fates gave both her and Finn a way bigger, more satisfying role in the film, and should have been what we got. It wasn’t.

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u/ThePopDaddy 6d ago

Critical Drinker is still milking that cow.

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u/Nekomiminya 6d ago

My unironically fav part is that you can have straight reading of Rey falling to the dark side.

She completed the Sith rite. She struck her grandpa down in anger.

The Final Order fleet is down. But entire Resistance is in one place for First Order to take it down once for all.

So Rey abandons the Resistance to usurp Skywalker legacy (which was started by Palpatines master Plageuis) and bury Anakins lightsaber in fucking sand, on planet where he learnt of his mother's death

5

u/RetroDadOnReddit 6d ago

I came to post Rise of Skywalker. I haven't been able to enjoy Star Wars since that film and its ending as well.

I do quite enjoy the inside-the-theater reactions to the final line of the film, though (spoilers, obviously):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYkAgLQ_0eU

5

u/happygocrazee 6d ago

I know no one who likes TRoS. No one. I hear a lot of mixed feelings about TFA but people generally at least found it fun and enjoyable. TLJ is obviously divisive as hell, but I'm an apologist and have met many people who think it's the best Star Wars movie, many who think it's the worst. Every single one of the prequels have people who can't see the light, and droves who adore them both sincerely and ironically. Some people find ANH slow and boring. ESB to some, is overrated. RotJ got silly and may have trivialized the story to some. But they're all still beloved.

But NO ONE likes TRoS. I have never heard a single positive word about it. It has no redeeming qualities. It's actually kind of amazing how bad it is. It doesn't even swing hard and miss like the prequels did in a way that could ever come to be loved; the prequels have many, many flaws but no one can claim George wasn't putting his all into it with passion and sincerity. TRoS is worse than bad: it's boring. It's astonishing really.

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u/TheComplimentarian 6d ago

I wasn’t a huge fan of TLJ, but the one thing Rian Johnson did was carve out some narrative space. He opened a shitload of doors, you could literally go anywhere and it would make some kind of sense.

And what did they do? Jesus Christ.

5

u/Nico_the_Suave 6d ago

I'm gonna be honest, one of my takes on the 2nd movie was that Rian CLOSED tons of narrative doors and left Abrams with nowhere to go. Funny how the movie can leave two completely different impressions.

1

u/the_cave_allegory 6d ago

I don't really see how TLJ did the series any favors either. Just make a set up for Kylo vs Rey. And so what, that's what we had at the beginning and she already won. The sequels are just a total abomination. I wish they'd reboot them, but what would it matter? All the OGs are either dead or not going to be a part of it anyway. Maybe Mark Hamill. But it would just be very pathetic at this point if they even tried to include them again anyway.

3

u/degen_inc 6d ago

I get revved up about it sometimes. I do think the sequels had some interesting ideas, but the Force Awakens destroys all the progress made and the happy ending of the original trilogy to service a movie that beat for beat copies a new hope. Then proceeds to spend the next two movies preforming character assassinations on every legacy character they can.
Frankly the Rise of Skywalker was the only movie that tried to be unique and it had good ideas just bad execution. Cloning is cool, bring Snoke back over and over it’d be terrifying and a unique idea for the series rested in the pre-existing lore.
The result makes it hard to watch this super cool era in between the original trilogy and the sequels, because we know it will all burn away with no investment or fan fair.
Andor was amazing though.

5

u/LiftingRecipient420 6d ago

Don't forget the part where palpatine's return was canonically revealed in Fortnite.

Yes, fucking Fortnite LMAO

0

u/InsanityRequiem 6d ago

Palpatine returning existed since Legacy Star Wars was the expanded universe. JJ Abrams, the hack that he is, pulled his work from the EU and thought Palpatine returning deserved to return.

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u/LiftingRecipient420 5d ago

Disney de-canonized the EU

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u/Shamscam 6d ago

I still think TLJ is waaaay worse than TROS.

10

u/Galle_ 6d ago

Nah, TLJ is the best sequel.

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u/Nico_the_Suave 6d ago

I'm completely on your side man. TLJ is just a straight up bad movie, and it killed my expectations for the series. By the time TROS came around, I already had low expectations, so I wasn't very surprised when it wasn't that good.

0

u/EtchAGetch 6d ago

As someone who is only casually a SW fan, I found TLJ the best of the three... only because I am not huge SW fan and just enjoyed it for the movie.

I 100% understand why true SW fans would really hate that movie though. But for me, thr visuals, action and story were way more engaging than the other two sequels. TRoS was atrocious in all aspects of movie making, I just laughed and felt really bad for SW fans after that one.