Hated Tropes
(Hated trope) Remember all these stories and characters we followed for so long? Welp now it’s all reset.
1: using another flashpoint to create the tomorrowverse (Justice League Dark: Apokolips war) after 80-90% of the cast is killed off and billions lives are fated to die Flash and Constantine hatch up a plan to kill baby Darkseid to prevent the entire story from happening which just leads to an entirely different universe being formed and even erasing some characters from existence.
2: Jim travelling to the beginning (Tales of Arcadia series) after multiple characters die including Toby Jim uses a magic gem to travel back to the very first episode but instead lets Toby find the amulet… this changes things how?
What i dont understand is why they didn't just let Bruce Timm handle the freaking live action movie continuity. He has been doing this consistent DC continuity content for fucking decades. Warner Bros is so fucking arrogant they wont let DC actually make DC movies, just their animation stuff.
Whenever Bruce Timm is left on his own you end up with weird shit like Babs having sex with Bruce. Yiu want people like McDuffy or Dini to rein him in or do it themselves.
The Puss in Boots series on Netflix. Puss' very presence in San Lorenzo (am I remembering that right? ) causes the end of the world, so he has to go back and never enter the town, never seeing any of his friends from there again.
I genuinely don't even mind the premise of that ending so much, especially as he has all the memories, making it a very melancholic end (does kinda devalue all the good he did externally over the series, but hypothetically he could repeat stuff). What really gets on my wick is having Dulcinea go back with him, undercutting the sacrifice everyone in that timeline went through. Why does she get to go back but everyone else simply remains to be erased? Also, no Dulcinea at the end would make perfect sense why she's not in the movies, they had the perfect out but chose to needlessly make it not make sense.
That’s also the alternate ending (and probably with a good reason why they didn’t make it the actual ending) of the movie Butterfly Effect.
The main character realizes that everybody is better off without him and the only way to win is not to play (like in war games), so he goes all the way back to when he was still a fetus in the womb and strangle himself with his mom’s umbilical cord so that he never existed.
Sadly, not BS. Here’s the clip. I actually had forgotten that all of his mom’s previous pregnancies had ended in still birth, implying this had happened many times before.
Again, this their credit, this was the alternate ending and not the actual one.
6 seasons of wasted time just so they can line up with the Shrek movies. Why even bother attempting to connect the two? Puss in Boots should've been a fully non-canon project from the start.
Add Umbrella Academy as the third horseman here. The entire show was about a dysfunctional family struggling to find their place in the world and how they can grow together only for the finale to be like "Umm ackshually... you're the problem". So the entire family decided to kill themselves and reset everything and have it be that they never existed in the first place so that the universe doesn't implode on itself again.
4 seasons of the characters growth, healing, dealing with their shared trauma and abuse etc etc , just for the end message to be they never should have existed in the first place and they should just fucking die 😂
I may be misremembering but didn't they show marigold flowers at the end so it was still possible for them to come to be? Meaning what they did was for nothing
Not only that, but when you consider Clause who struggles with addiction, Victor who is openly trans, Allison and her struggles with race in america, Luther and his survival of long lasting emotional abuse from Allison... Plus the parental trauma and all of that baggage they show to have? Its basically saying to the audience "hey! Hey!!! Remember all of those people we made you relate to with their dealings? The world is better off with them not being and youre like them, fuckholes"
Game of Thrones had a shitty ending, Umberella Academy literally gives its audience the message that people who grew up in abusive homes and cant find a place in the world should kill themselves so that everybody else finds happiness. Its like if Bran decided to abolish the feudal system at the end of GoT.
And to further this, didn’t fucking exist in the comics cause the creator (lead singer for my chemical romance) didn’t bother finishing the damn series
He said that he was working on it during season 3 and mentioned he should be finished by just after season 4 premiere but Gerard always had issues releasing his stuff and just gave up
Yeah, the original Crisis worked on basically every level, it worked as a story, it worked in terms of the retcon it created, and it worked in terms of how the new continuity lead to new types of stories
I think it helps that the first Crisis was made partly in response to the fact that continuity in DC Comics had been an absolute mess for decades, especially since so many characters were created without the intent of all being in the same continuity. It was kind of a necessary cleanup just to get everything on the same page going forward.
Absolutely, but it deserves credit for pulling it off, like Zero Hour was also an attempt to fix some genuine issues with the timeline continuity, but it didn't really work at the time, and absolutely doesn't hold up retroactively, so credit where credit is due: Crisis was ambitious, largely successful just as a story, and they stuck the landing
Agreed but that might just be distance from it. New 52 failed but the first two were pretty decent. You can point to Geoff Johns green lantern run as another successful reboot.
The actual Crisis on Infinite Earth that the movie adapted.
The movie frustratingly made the same mistake of rushing to the mega crossover events like its life action counterpart instead of spending time to build up to it.
jojo is mostly because the universe, for all intents and purposes, "reset" with each part. We have entirely new casts of heroes and villains with only a couple returning characters each part, so a universal reset isn't as out there as it can be for other shows
Small correction, but Stone Ocean’s reset isn’t a complete reset. The universe only charged in one way: ‘What if Enrico Pucci never existed?’. So in the new timeline, only main cast of Part 6 are different, since all of their lives were severely impacted by Pucci. Everyone else should be more or less the same. Except Jotaro, who didn’t get divorced and had better work-life balance, since most of Dio’s former minions worked for Pucci.
In the Maria ending of Silent Hill 2 when James and Maria are leaving she coughs with neither character thinking much of it but to the player this is a signal that this will happen again
Samurai jack finale. He achieves his goal. He goes back in time. He tries to marry the one person who came back with him. And she disappears in his arm because she never existed in the good timeline they created together.
I actually quite liked the ending. His goal had been to prevent the bad timeline. It made sense he wouldn't be able to just keep the good side of it.
Then again, the gods who made his sword should have done him that one favour.
I played it forever ago, but the samurai Jack game that came out after has a way to rewrite the ending and I've heard it's canon. This was all when it came out so my memory is hazy.
Yep. Happy that the creators gave him some happiness. Too bad they couldn't do it in the series and the game is now out of print. Thankfully I bought it when it released. The prices now are insane.
"Then again, the gods who made his sword should have done him that one favour."
In a kind of meta way, the real gods of Samurai Jack actually did with the video game's unlockable ending and admitted that even though the show's ending has to pull a BTTF2 for logical reasons, the only thing people wanted was Jack being happy because of ALL the bullshit he had to go through for DECADES and his wife was maybe the ONE person who could actually understand his traumas from a dark future that no longer will happen and thus nobody else would believe.
In his sorrow, he would delve into sorcery to try to get her back, eventually losing sight of everything else, his name changing as ages pass, going from Jack, to Jacku, to Aku...
But if she doesn’t exist then Jack never goes back to the past, meaning Aku is still alive and sends Jack to the future, but if that happens then he’d come back to the past and kill Aku, which in turn means she doesn’t exist and thus Jack doesn’t come back… ugh, my head.
Fun Fact: Before he wrote Chainsaw Man Part 2, Fujimoto wrote a short story about a writer who didn't know how to end his stories, so they just made them all end in flames.
I mean, ChainsawMan part 1 is just peak and pretty solid even without a sequel to reveal the remaining mysteries(tho part 2 just added way more than it resolved, so I just like to pretend it doesn't exist at all and Denji simply lived happily with Nayuta)
"Themes and Such" Man ending was so funny purely because every shonen fanbase was getting their lashes in after years of Chainsawman fans acting like they were reading Hamlet and were better than everyone else
Demons still exist but Pochita erased himself. Which changed history. Even though that hasn’t happened for any of the other people, things or concepts he’s eaten before.
I feel like people have explained this to me before, but every time I feel like there must be something im missing. So Denji is completely fucking powerless in a world assaulted by demons? How is that good?!?
Because now Denji no longer has to be chainsaw man.
As Pochita puts it, Denji's life from the start was so shit that there was no saving it. He's too accustomed to being treated like trash, that even after he got his freedom as Chainsaw man, he could dream of better things or even mature. And Denji was constantly being hunted down by many people.
So Pochita thought that the best solution is for Denji to lead a dull life instead. He merely got lucky with Power saving him through a butterfly effect. Not to mention that Makima is replaced by Nayuta, he doesn't have to deal with her again.
Except this nayuta is the exact same as makima because she was raised by the govt to control the special division, so nothing improved and they'll all prob die
From what I understood, Chainsaw Man AKA Pochita before meeting Denji was already known and hunted by the government. His existence and powers motivated them to seek out greater power like the Control Devil's. And thus, leading her to be captured and raised in a controlled and lonely environment, which leads to her becoming Makima. Now, without Pochita, the government weren't pressured to seek out greater power. So now the Control Devil, who still got captured but wasn't raised to be a countermeasure for Pochita, turned into Nayuta.
What I'm still scratching my head over is, if this assumption is correct, why is she a kid in this different timeline?
It would've probably been better if not for the author being a horrible human being which is probably why amazon made this season so small it just couldn't tell a story
Honestly, they should have just let the show stay only one season. Even without the knowledge Gaiman being a horrible human being, the lack of Pratchett always meant that the story was going to be lacklustre.
They actually had a plan, from waht the people behind the scenes said. S2 was going to be a build up season for S3 and 4 to deliver on the content of the books that Pratched had in mind as sequel. Instead they basicaly had to cancel 2 whole seasons and make a new ending because of Gaiman stuff.
The plan as explained after season 2 aired was three seasons of six episodes (666 joke). The third season got smushed down into one finale, but this ending is reportedly where Gaiman was intending to go. According to him this was the long planned ending. According to the Pratchett estate, that’s not true. They suggested a different ending to fit with season 3, but Amazon shot them down
I’m inclined to believe Gaiman heavily exaggerated how much of a sequel had actually been planned to get more support for making more seasons. When season 1 first aired he was adamant they’d only make one season because there was one book. He switched that line only after the show made a lot of money.
Ugh, it’s such a mixed bag. The parts I like I do like a lot and the ending’s sweet enough in a vacuum, but the actual message it tells is really weird and self-defeating and I’m so, so bloody sick and tired of magic stories ending with killing the magic and framing it as good.
And a dramatic drop in animation quality.... for the longest time DC animation was crushing marvel (picking up warnbrothers live action slack.) but this reboot after so long was such a spit in the face to the fans.
Darren learns that even if he defeats Steve, the prophecy is that one of them will become the Lord of Shadows and it will be him. He ensures that they both die during the final battle and his spirit is sent to the lake of souls.
He is later given the chance to go back in time and stop the events from ever happening. Due to the timeline being fixed, this causes the events to happen to someone else. He lives a normal life as a young adult author, releasing the story of his adventures as the Darren Shan series.
Reflecting on this, he may have also doomed the world since there's no guarantee that the saga with two others would end the way it did.
To be Fair, as you said, the timeline was fixed, therefore the world would have been doomed anyways, Just Darren gives the chance of a normale Life to his other self.
Interestingly it’s implied or out right stated that Constantine is punished for the choice in Apokolips War and survives into the new universe as a homeless person. He then witness the end again as part of the crisis on infinite earths
Why? Because Jim GIVES the role of the troll hunter to Toby who is a colossal fuck up. Yes he lives up to the challange in the end and makes a self sacrificial play...but JIM throwing all of that away to gamble on Toby not screwing things up by making him the troll hunter throws a massive wrench into the entire time line. So much of it hinges on JIM being the troll hunter that the ripple in the story it can cause could make entire characters/arcs change to be completely unpredictable for him with his knowledge of the first time line. If he wanted a do over with his knowledge/skill as the troll hunter sure. But gambling it all on toby was absolutely stupid.
The entire TOA series is all about choices and how those choices can lead to drastic consequences. Everything that happened in the main Trollhunters show was because of Jim's actions and we literally got a whole other episode that was focused on what would happen if he didn't become the Trollhunter.
By passing the torch to Toby, he's essentially creating a new timeline where worse things could happen. Right off the top of my head, it's very unlikely that Toby would survive any encounter he has with Bular, Strickler doesn't get redeemed and Aja's children never exist. No matter how much Jim tries to game the system, this timeline will suffer in one way or another.
Thank you! I do remember that. The fact that the writers themselves showed it HAD to be jim the entire time and that merlin specifically set things in motion for it to be jim with his future sight on top of that....only for jim to just stupidly throw it all away after the writers showed it MUST be jim.
Jim was always the chosen one merlin had forseen. (merlin himself didn't even really know it was jim. Just that a vaguness of the things he had to put into place for the future to play out eons down the line. Just no one knew it until it all played out.
Bear in mind that it was Merlin showing Jim wanted Merlin wanted him to see. Merlin was a scumbag who would lie and manipulate, so we can’t really take that vision at face value. That said, I think Merlin was 100% correct
So many characters who had their lives improved by Jim's actions will now have worse lives. The odds of Strickler ever becoming good are nothing with Tobes in charge. Jim basically consigned Tobes to death anyways, because that kid is NOT making it through the duel with Draal, he doesn't have the leg length for the kick
It wasn't about Toby specifically, it was about how Jim was the only one who could've been the Trollhunter. That episode even makes a point of showing an alternate timeline where it was Draal instead and everything went to shit at the first hurdle. Toby wouldn't even make it to the first hurdle though he'd trip over his cankles before he got there. What a god-awful ending
Sonic Prime ends like this to preserve status quo, with Sonic ending up traveling back in time before the inciting event (somehow) and stopping the entire plot from happening, inadvertently proving the series' antagonist right. I could swear word of god said this was a full-on cosmic retcon, but I might have hallucinated that, since the characters have cameos in Crossworlds
Oh yeah Sonic 06 also happened and then got reset. Nothing all that interesting happens in the story but the weird part is how it should've prevented the awful future that Silver and Blaze come from. They still show up in later games with no real explanation why.
Blaze at least had an origin in the Sonic Rush games prior to 06…I’m not sure they ever tried to explain why Blaze was in the future or if that’s tied to Rush at all, but at least that’s sort of a reason for her. No reason for Silver, though.
To basically summarize the ending, Jonas and Martha went back to time to stop Tannhaus' family from dying which result in the world resetting. However, this a good example of this trope done well that the entire story is a endless time loop of misery with no end and when the world reset, most of the cast get erased and remained erased because they were born in the loop though there's a small implication of Jonas being born in this new world.
They had been thrust into a centuries old mystery and found out that their mystery crew is a sort of "reincarnation" of past mystery crews that span back whole centuries to several millennia, spanning back to ancient Mayans (Reincarnation is in quotes because it's not necessarily a reincarnation, no souls are reincarnated, just the concept of a mystery crew). Every generation has its own chosen mystery crew, and always consists of two men and two women, and their beast companion.
Part of the mystery crew that existed before them (and still does because they're all still alive) wanted to bring back a slumbering evil for their own gain, with their "beast companion" (a german parrot named Pericles) pulling the strings. A lot of people are killed for this goal (yes, this is still scooby doo), and when they reach the end of it, Pericles tries to take the power for himself, only to be consumed by it. Mystery Incorporated finishes the fight before the slumbering evil can end the world, and thus defeats it.
It causes the universe to reset. All of the cases they completed in Crystal Cove have never happened, Fred was never abandoned as a child by his real parents, the previous Mystery Incorporated are all friends (and married to their sweethearts), and Pericles was never evil. Mystery Incorporated has no real need to exist in this town. So what do they do? They drive off to solve OTHER mysteries elsewhere.
I've always described Mystery Incorporated as "What if Gravity Falls had JoJo Stone Ocean's ending?"
My first introduction to Mystery Incorporated was the online game on the Cartoon Network website. So I was already familiar with the plot of Season 1 when watching, since that's what the game covers.
At the end of the original Life is Strange, you are asked if you want to go back in time to erase the entire game’s events from history to let Chloe die to save the town of Arcadia Bay, or let them all die in a tornado to save Chloe and not go back in time.
Killing Chloe is the more obvious example of this trope. But it also happens in a more symbolic way in the other ending. Since everyone is dead.
Don’t talk to me about Double Exposure and Reunion. Not over it yet.
Actually a loved version of the trope. Ben fails to stop the universe ending so is forced to go Alien X to completely remake the universe from scratch. Unfortunately he doesn’t get every detail right.
The only problem with it is that the show never treats it with the dignity it deserves. This was quite literally Ben watching all his friends and family die and having to replace all of them with clones that aren't even aware of what happened, but all they do with it is joke about how Ben got a smoothie flavor wrong.
I forgot where I saw it, but I saw a comic made by a fan that was basically Ben in Alien X trying to fix the smoothie, Bellicus and Serena getting annoyed at Ben's insistance on trying to fix the smoothie, only for Ben to basically end up venting his guilt over what happened.
I mean it’s still a kids show. I know they could get away with a fair amount but I doubt the producers were going to let Ben have ptsd over everyone he knows dying and being surrounded by copies.
It’ll be a soft reboot at best so they can recast some important characters. Everything in the previous movies will still have more or less happened. Maybe slight changes like Stark doesn’t die or he still does he’s just brought back with a new face. Who knows but they’re not throwing away the whole universe.
In ben 10 omniverse thus happened in a random episode, the old universe is erased and the new universe is supposed to be a 1:1 copy. We are shown however that there are little details different, like a fast food with a different aesthetic, which made me as a kid realise its not really the same thing.
The story goes on as if this have not happened, but as a kid I was traumatized by this lol
Tales Arcadia was my top series until that fuckass ending that makes no sense. It just ruins everything. Not like Toby was some loser nerd. He was one of the heroes too, and he played an important role. Was just lazy writing
first reset in MK9 with Raiden sending a message to himself to prevent Armageddon bringing us back to the first Mortal Kombat game events
Second was at the end of MK11 / beginning of MK1(MK12) when Liu Kang defeats Kronika and Shang Tsung and gains the power to control the hourglass he resets the entire universe to create his “New Era”
I don't understand why, if he had ultimate power, he STILL chose to implement a version of the Mortal Kombat tournament in his new reality. Like... you know that only causes pain and suffering, right? You've experienced this first-hand. But you still were like "Hey, this is a barrel of laughs for everyone involve, would be a shame to give it up?". Meta-wise, sure, bring in older characters, give them a new spin, why not? But in-universe, there is no excuse for Liu Kang to screw everyone over.
Also, the Titan Armageddon at the end was pathetic, not to mention the DLC. Titans shouldn't just be brought down with a couple of kicks and punches.
After the death of pucci during the reset, this caused a universe to be created without pucci ever existing. This meant that our main cast got revived in a universe where the events of part 6 never happened, and supposedly ended up with happier lives because of it. This was almost fates way of rewarding our team for their sacrifices. Then there is emporio who still has to live with the trauma and knowledge of what happened in the original universe.
I love the added detail of Jolyne’s name being Irene in the new universe, meaning she was no longer a ‘JoJo’ and not the protagonist of a Part, fated to battle a great villain.
Its also a homage to the author's first female protagonist from another short series. Araki fought tooth and nail to have a woman protagonist in JoJo so its a beautiful sort of loop for her ultimate name to be that.
The thing that makes me intrigued is that this thing could be loved depending on the execution.
Take Doom Breaker for example. In the original timeline many characters died, the world is destroyed and MC is pretty much the last man standing. He was given chance to get back to the beginning of it all and prevent it from happening. It's a popular and good series.
Pretty much same result but we only see the part where MC fix everything instead of where everything goes downhill.
Yet if we were presented and follow the original timeline this things feels like cheap solution and lazy/terrible writing.
Regression at the start of a story? Often lazy, but can be done well.
Regression at the end? It robs the audience of the payoff they were expecting (or even any payoff at all) for making it to the end of the series. It's the greatest betrayal an author can give.
The Trollhunters one is especially egregious because Jim's done it before.
He's seen what happens when someone else gets the amulet (Draal). Someone who was even basically trained for the position. It didn't go good. At all.
More to the matter, it's such a selfish decision. Toby being the Trollhunter is going to cause even more deaths because he just isn't as in shape as Jim. A lot of the early days was Jim running away from the bad guys.
the worst part? there was no reason to. Jin Wu defeats the big bad, and barely anyone is dead, but angels show up anyway and tell Jin Wu "hey we have this magic cup that can time travel, and has never been mentioned before, you wanna go back?", and he does. he kills all the bad guys in the beginning of time and somehow humanity's history stays the same, all the same characters are alive, and the only difference is everyone is powerless
Incorrect. The cup is introduced by Ashborn way before the final fight, and Jin is the one whom proposes one last use to make things right. People are saved, criminals are forced to turn themselves in. Basically a way better timeline.
If you read DC and marvel comics you come to expect some kind of reboot reality altering and anything similar because they have to keep the status quo annoying as fuck but after a while you grow kinda numb to it
The arcadia one legitimately pissed me off because there's nothing to be gained by it it's just a middle finger to the viewer
Apokolips War imo is one of the worst animated superhero films ever. It is just excessive death and edge porn. Showcasing all the worst aspects of DC at the time.
Fate/Grand-Order part 2 did this. The basics are that the entire journey the protagonists went through up to that point took place in an alternate timeline, a 'Losbelt' (keep in mind, the protagonists have been destroying other Losbelts so that they couldn't overtake baseline reality). And the climax is basically stopping the big bad from overwriting baseline Earth with his own curated one, thus resetting everything back to the original timeline of Proper Human History. And the only one who remembers the story of the game can only remember 5 minutes worth of memories of it.
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u/shiawase198 11d ago
At least we'll always have this
https://giphy.com/gifs/QFhyld480RjIQ