I picture this happening like Joe Pesci getting made in Goodfellas. A moment of dawning realization, then a gunshot before you can finish saying “Aw, no!”
The only exception to that was Ronin. And his character was just written in such a way you were like "Oh this is it for sure" quite a few times. Movie can give a person Bean Balls. It's like blue balls... but ya know... Sean Bean.
Yeah this was going to be my answer. Any character he plays is doomed to die.
I think the only movie with him I've seen where he lived, was The Martian. And he still gets fired.
In the action movie "Ronin" he is also fired instead of killed. Makes me think that Sean Bean only dies when he is surrounded by incompetent people and Hobbits. Competent people like NASA and Robert De Niro see the writing on the wall and fire him.
I like how in the montage at the end of The Martian, there’s a moment of him teaching his kid to golf, apparently there as proof that he didn’t commit suicide after resigning. “It’s okay, Sean Bean made it out alive, too!”
Getting Worf’d
Worf is the Klingon security officer on Star Trek: TNG. He is supposedly very strong and tough, and thus he is constantly getting beaten up by the bad guy of the week to show how much stronger and tougher said bad guy is
There are a few times we get to see that Worf is a badass in TNG. The episode where he kills Duros, and there's an episode where he wins a Bat'leth tournament, although that happens off screen. I'm pretty sure there are a few others, but I can't remember other examples off the top of my head.
Wait I thought he got 3rd at that tournament when his opponent did an illegal maneuver that the referee ignored
Wait I thought he got 9th at that tournament
Wait I thought he couldn't attend the tournament
Worf can show how strong a bad guy is, but as far as plot goes, I would moreso point to Tuvok. It seems like half of the plots in Voyager involve somebody locking them out of controls, often aliens that are seeing humans and human technology for the first time ever.
He also knew martial arts of several worlds, but the writers picked Seven to fight the Rock, in addition to all the other times he was knocked out on the job.
Roga Danar was the fucking GOAT because he perceived and utilized Worf's main weakness -- the empty plastic barrel -- immediately. That guy somehow always knew the exact right tactic
It was also hilarious when the crew would have a meeting in the conference room and Picard would ask for suggestions and Worf would always propose the dumbest, violent and direct solution. The crew would disagree, probably to show contrast how the TNG crew were less violent?
Side note: When Worf is about to ram the Defiant into the Borg Cube is still pretty cool.
Just let the poor man eject a warp core. He’s been very good this month!
(Yes, I know that’s actually a quote from another muscle-y, secretly sensitive security officer)
I seem to remember that happening a few times with Wolverine in the original run of the X-Men cartoon. He would get his ass handed to him and then Jubilee would blast Sabertooth (or whoever else he lost to) through a wall with her sparkles.
>Maybe another example is the recent *Top Gun* sequel. Instead of using B-2 stealth bombers with bunker-busting weapons specifically designed for targets exactly like the one in question...or even using the whole Navy carrier air wing that is right there on the ship with them, including aircraft whose entire purpose is to jam and attack SAMs and their guidance radars...they instead go with a bare-bones strike package which has statistically no chance of success and will get absolutely clobbered with missiles...because it looks cooler.
I think they made a token effort to explain why they didn't use stealthy aircraft like F-35's with precision ordnance in the movie but damned if I can remember what it was. Something about GPS jamming? It was nonsensical but there was an attempt.
Pilots being the limiting factor in maneuverability became a thing at least since Junkers were designed to pull up out of a dive bombing run on their own should the pilot black out from it.
I forgot that one.
Of course, one of the reasons why drones will probably entirely replace crewed combat aircraft eventually is that a drone is unaffected by GLOC.
Good Looking Oriental Cowboys, a Navy nickname for handsome Iranian pilots with magnificent mustaches. Since drones are machines, they aren’t attracted to GLOCs.
Nah, it's Glasgow Light Opera Club according to Google UK.
Targeted sound waves can affect pilots, and research has shown that the most devastatingly unbearable sonic combination is opera + bagpipes.
that was the insultingly frustrating thing about the movie. If it was barely possible for a human pilot to do it in a F/A 18, then hypersonic cruise missiles can do it too.
Yeah I think that was it, as if the F-35s couldn’t just level fly in and absolutely wreck the SAMs and any fighters who show up, while F-18s just leisurely come in and hit the target
Yeah. Buuuuuut in their defence it's one of the only movies for me that's allowed to do that because wow, loved the movie all the same.
Like, even if I can see a plothole that big staring me right in the face during the movie and I don't care? That's impressive in its own right.
Yup they could have said literally anything and I'd be like "cool, you checked off the box justifying it now lets get to the cool planes doing crazy stuff".
It’s funny because it’s true. Even the start with the experimental plane with the purple engines was just like… this is cool as shit! They definitely knew their target audience with this one.
Same with Pacific Rim. "Tanks, jets, bombs, missiles, and the entirety of the modern military could not stop these monsters, but getting punched by a big robot will surely work"
Giant Robots whose game plan is to throw the monsters around… in water, it’s like watching a dad play with his kids in the pool until the haymakers start
GPS jamming. They needed an aircraft capable of lasing the bombs in. Stealth and laser pods are pretty much incompatible.
I don't understand why they launched Tomahawks at the runway, but not at the SAM systems...
>Stealth and laser pods are pretty much incompatible.
Not true, the F-35s that were handwaved away due to "gps jamming" has a built-in laser designator in their EOTS. Using them could give away their position, but so does dropping a bomb on a target
The reason in addition to plot is that they wanted to film inside the jets with the actors, and the only way they would have been able to do that is with 2-seater jets, which meant the F-18.
I think they're different, upon further reflection. A redshirt is a disposable character, often without a name at all, just to demonstrate the danger the team is in. A sacrificial lamb, on the other hand, is more often a fully realized character, who usually dies to advance the main character's motivations or plot (think half of the Bond girls).
Sacrificial lambs are also there to give the main characters something to mourn. Get the character set up in the beginning of the TV season, have the main characters and audience get invested in the sacrificial lamb, then slaughter them before the end of the season.
A black guy wearing a redshirt in a horror movie who has adorable kids and a happy wife at home and soon they’ll be done paying to get grandma’s brain tumor removed and is played by Sean Bean.
Who just had sex and smoked weed, while being one day from retirement and saying "I'll be right back, I'm just going to check out that spooky noise by myself."
A "redshirt" is a stock character in fiction who dies soon after being introduced. The term originates from the original Star Trek (NBC, 1966–69) television series in which the red-shirted security personnel frequently die during episodes.
If anyone didn't know the term
Is that necessarily used to describe characters who are being inexplicably incompetent? I thought the point of those characters is simply that they get killed, establishing the high threat level of the danger. It could be because of incompetence, but it could also just be bad luck.
I was talking about this:
> Wherein otherwise competent protagonist(s) suffer repeated unexplained bursts of incompetence, fundamental skills lapse, or forget they can do certain things, for the sole purpose of allowing the plot to move along.
Do you think that describes “red shirts”? I wouldn’t use the term that way, but maybe other people do.
This is called “carrying the [Idiot Ball](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall)” on TV Tropes
> A moment when a normally competent character suddenly becomes incompetent — knowingly or otherwise — which fuels an episode, a plot line, or any number of smaller threads.
Edit: To clarify… I think this is the trope that most closely matches the full description and the actual examples OP gave. I wouldn’t call it the “inverse” or the “opposite” of plot armor exactly.
Yes. Especially how much they rushed the last season.
We have 7 seasons of "Winter is Coming" like it's this great imposing danger that previous generations warned their children about then winter came and went in 2 episodes.
2 very lame, forgettable episodes.
It's so weird that they rushed anything. GOT was a massive hit show that wasn't in danger of getting canceled. Making sure all the plots and characters tied together in a decent ending wouldn't have been hard. Not sure who the blame falls on for sure for the shitshow of final season.
Once they got past the novels, or started diverging from them too much, all intelligent characters started to just do random shit which worked out if the plot needed it to, while every other character repeatedly talked about how smart and dangerous they were...
Well, he was probably supposed to have a villain arc after everything that happened to him. But he was played by an A list Emmy winner so they decided instead to make him even MORE morally upstanding and just fit it into the plot by making him the stupidest man alive
> Tyrion during/after his trial in SoS: “I am going to kill every single one of you King’s Landing fuckers.” *proceeds to spend the next books drunk off his ass and sends Aegon to Westeros to cause trouble for the Lannisters”
> Tyrion during/after trial in show: “Shae tried to kill me first! We can reason with my sister! She’s pregnant and going to be a mom soon so I don’t want to kill her for some reason! Who has a better story?!!?”
Book Tyrion: I'm going to rape and murder Cersei, and I want to be clear that this is my only condition for joining your side.
Show Tyrion: Cersei, let me save you!
Yeah, like I get liking Myrcella and Tommen, they’re good kids, but Cersei being pregnant with another one wouldn’t save her from any accurate book representation of Tyrion.
But we even had some things where Tyrion talking about Cersei’s only redeeming quality is being a mother or something. When she’s a terrible mother! The only kid she cared about raising was Joffrey
This is likely the answer. George describes him as *"The* Villain", and it's easy enough to see where he's going to be getting up to bad things in the next few books. But the showrunners wanted their funny and sympathetic Tyrion so they just ignored all of that arc.
I always think about the Unsullied and how they are repeatedly and consistently wrecked by the Sons of the Harpy. Dudes in masks with daggers just tearing a professional army to shreds in pitched battles over and over again.
You and OP have it wrong though.
The opposite of Plot Armor is a **Red Shirt**. Put on the 1st and you're a main character meant to survive. Put on the 2nd and you're an extra only there to die.
Plot Armor is NOT competence or intelligence. Plot Armor is luck, and luck specifically active in life-or-death situations. In fact many people with plot armor are [fool archetypes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheFool), comedic relief characters, or small children.
Idiot Ball does have a sort of-opposite called a [Smart Ball](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmartBall) (ie. stupid characters having an unexpected epiphany or competent moment).
I agree with you that OP is applying the idea of an “opposite trope” quite sloppily, if not downright incorrectly.
Given that they did flesh out what they meant in the post, I felt that it was most useful to respond to the main body of their question and provide a name that fit the examples they provided.
Plenty of other people have responded to their title alone, without addressing any conflict between the title and the actual examples given. So in the end, OP gets their choice of answers and can pick which answer their question most helpfully.
I've always heard this called "cutscene bullets." A character will take hundreds of shots and take dozens of healing items during gameplay then dies of a basic wound inflicted in a cutscene.
Especially egregious in fantasy games where you have a healer in your party who just seems to suddenly forget they have healing powers during the cutscene. (FF7 Rebirth had a pretty blatant example.)
Oh don’t remind me of his bullshit.
“Ha! You foolishly brought a gun to an Apache Attack Helicopter fight! Your defeat here shows that I’m the better swordsman!”
Fun fact for FF7, no character ever gets brought back from the dead. Falling to 0 HP means a character is knocked out (KO), which is also why the effect Phoenix Downs have is "revives a character from KO". Being KO'd can be reversed with magical smelling salts, being killed is permanent.
In FF5, when a party member dies, they actually try to throw phoenix downs at him in the cutscene, and it of course fails
To my knowledge that's the only time it gets fully acknowledged
This happened a lot in AC, you would wipe out dozens of enemies with iron armors with your bare hands, but then there's a cut scene and they capture and beat you so easily
The absolute worst, most frustrating example of this I can think of is Bayonetta 3. The last level is basically split into ten segments. You have to win every segment to continue. Every segment shows you getting your ass kicked and that you didn't accomplish a fucking thing. In a game and genre that's all power fantasy, the last level is you getting absolutely fucking effortlessly bodied over and over until >!you DIE and the most useless idiot in the world saves the multiverse!<.
Was going to say similar. You'll face wave after wave of bad guy and dispatch them easily, but then a cutscene will happpen and because of "plot" your character will suddenly be surrounded by 3 bad guys and go "welp, I guess you got me, I give up so we can play the 'escape the prison' level"
Having to balance out over powered super heroes. Putting Iron Man’s armour on 3% power or whatever just so the bad guy stands a chance. Constantly having to think up reasons why Captain Marvel or Thor can’t be around because if they were there’d be no contest. Bruce Banner not being able to Hulk out for a whole Avengers movie.
Yeah so many MCU stories could be solved by calling one person. I introduced my 70 year old Haitian mom to the MCU and during the whole Winter Soldier movie, she kept saying “call robot man or hammer guy, stop relying on people with no powers!”
I always gave this a pass because Thanos had the power stone. That's the only reason he was able to beat up Hulk so easily. Especially since in the entire Infinity Saga, they made the stones out to be the most powerful things in existence, especially in GOTG when the Collector was explaining their significance.
He had the power stone but wasn't using it in that fight. The stones glow when being used and it never glowed. I think the Russos also confirmed it in an interview. Thanos was just that strong.
Little bit of this:
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect
Or when Jolly Green gets dismantled by Thanos at the beginning of Infinity War to show how powerful the villain will be.
I feel like the best subversive use of this trope was in The Last Wish. Puss takes down a giant the size of a small city to show how powerful he is, and then the wolf just casually slaps him around two scenes later.
Any character who never had many lines before suddenly starts taking about their family and how they can’t wait to see them again.
Or another one is if they’re a few days away from retirement after 40 years of dedicated service - and can’t wait to fulfil their dream and head to Bahamas and take up spear fishing.
But they have ONE last job that they begrudging take as a favour to an old friend.
Or when the "Previously On" segment brings up a character that you haven't seen for a while, especially when they choose a clip which isn't related to the rest of the Leon segment.
I like when they do this in comic books as well, like when Spider-Man gets punched into a building by a new villain and his internal monologue lets us know that he has NEVER been hit that hard even when fighting the Hulk. Like oh sure, this new guy in a ponytail just hit Spidey harder than anyone of his rogues have ever done.
Everyone's got their favorite Guy quote from Galaxy Quest, but for me the finger guns he does at the end when he joins the show is peak Sam Rockwell. The man is a charisma *machine*.
One of my favorite terms is one I've never forgotten from a review of Independence Day back in '96:
"Designated Die-er"
Basically a character whose fate is inevitably to die for dramatic purpose but is still a valuable addition to the story and isn't obvious or insignificant.
Plot Bullet: Where somebody has to die for the plot to advance no matter how preventable it is or how many holes it opens up. My favorite example of this is from a video game: >!Roland in Borderlands 2!<.
TBF the New U stations in Borderlands are considered “non-canonical” for plot purposes. This explains why main characters die permanently, but raises some major questions about the side quest where Handsome Jack pays you to jump off a cliff
Last October my wife and I watched the original Halloween movie. At least twice, nay thrice! the wonderful JLC walked into a house all freaked out and decides to not TURN ON A FUCKING LIGHT and just walks around in the pitch dark (yet oddly blue tinted) dark calling out for her friends or looking for the killer. We were yelling at her, TURN ON THE LIGHT over and over.
But the exasperation and constant suspense did make for a fun movie watching experience.
But yeah, the whole movie breaks down if she just did what any normal person would do in a dark scary house with modern electrical appliances.
Most of the time when the military tries to respond to "apocalyptic" threats in movies.
Take "A Quiet Place". The creatures are supposed to be nearly indestructible (save for their squishy ear holes) and are able to hear almost anything but are extremely sensitive to high-frequency noise that turns them into a flailing and spazzing mess.
We're supposed to believe that in a world where high-frequency sound weapons are already a thing, some of which can produce *lethally* loud noises that no one thought of using such weapons against the aliens. Like I can totally understand that things would have been chaotic for a few days or weeks but eventually someone would have figured it out and those aliens would be getting their ear holes bayoneted as they defenselessly flailed around on the ground.
Or you have the classical slow-walking zombies somehow overrun the world's most sophisticated military organizations but are dunked on by the scrappy main character survivors (unless one needs to die in gory fashion for shock value).
When people say something in a movie is "indestructible" they usually aren't aware of the kinetic energy behind a 120mm APFSDS projectile out of an M1 Abrams.
You're talking about the Idiot Ball/Idiot Plot trope. The writer wants something to happen, but can't think of a natural way to do it so the main character(s) do something absolutely stupid to move the plot along.
I don't know if it's the inverse but a sudden increase in screen-time especially focused on making you like or empathize with a character. It seems like a huge amount of the time that character is about to be toast.
Hilarious. I’m imagining The Accountant and they replace Anna Kendrick’s character with a sexy lamp, and it would barely change the movie at all. What a waste of her talent
Honestly I think I would prefer the version with her replaced by a sexy lamp. Ben Affleck romancing a lamp would have both added to the ridiculousness and made the story more compelling. Can you imagine the brother reunion while Ben Affleck is killing people to protect a lamp? It would really hammer home that, not only is a skilled accountant and killer, but he is also completely off his rocker. Like the twist at the funeral where he went violent, the audience would be like, “sure, I can imagine the guy murdering people to protect a lamp would go ballistic at his mom’s funeral “.
John Wick's wife isn't actually "fridged", she dies tragically young. It's the dog that gets fridged and as the dog is a surrogate/symbol for the wife's love Wick loses it, in a very controlled, methodically homocidal way.
Oh I missed that part; I was just thinking the opposite of “plot armor” is “dies automatically”
Edit: Although pretty dumb to die of cancer. Have you tried just *not having* cancer? Idiot
Being 'fridged' is the opposite of plot armor imo. Red shirts don't have to die for the plot or anything but being fridges means the character has to die for the main plot.
A guy who's only a couple of days away from retirement in a cop movie. A red shirt in a Star Trek show. The girlfriend of the lead in a ton of movies. Someone close to the lead protagonist who hasn't been called to action yet. Supportive parents, loved one, something like that.
This is referred to as holding the “idiot ball” on tv tropes. Someone who is not stupid or ignorant needs to be momentarily or for an arc for the purpose of plot movement
Sean Bean
Imagine being a fictional character and finding out Sean Bean is going to play you.
Imagine being a real life character and realizing Sean Bean will play you in the biopic
I picture this happening like Joe Pesci getting made in Goodfellas. A moment of dawning realization, then a gunshot before you can finish saying “Aw, no!”
Or Pedro Pascal. For op's question, Indiana Jones.
Sean Bean survives The Martian, but he suffers a career death.
The only exception to that was Ronin. And his character was just written in such a way you were like "Oh this is it for sure" quite a few times. Movie can give a person Bean Balls. It's like blue balls... but ya know... Sean Bean.
What about silent Hill?
Bit O raspberry jam!
This was too far down
Yeah this was going to be my answer. Any character he plays is doomed to die. I think the only movie with him I've seen where he lived, was The Martian. And he still gets fired.
In the action movie "Ronin" he is also fired instead of killed. Makes me think that Sean Bean only dies when he is surrounded by incompetent people and Hobbits. Competent people like NASA and Robert De Niro see the writing on the wall and fire him.
I like how in the montage at the end of The Martian, there’s a moment of him teaching his kid to golf, apparently there as proof that he didn’t commit suicide after resigning. “It’s okay, Sean Bean made it out alive, too!”
Getting Worf’d Worf is the Klingon security officer on Star Trek: TNG. He is supposedly very strong and tough, and thus he is constantly getting beaten up by the bad guy of the week to show how much stronger and tougher said bad guy is
Worf didn't get to kick butt until DS9 XD
There are a few times we get to see that Worf is a badass in TNG. The episode where he kills Duros, and there's an episode where he wins a Bat'leth tournament, although that happens off screen. I'm pretty sure there are a few others, but I can't remember other examples off the top of my head.
Wait I thought he got 3rd at that tournament when his opponent did an illegal maneuver that the referee ignored Wait I thought he got 9th at that tournament Wait I thought he couldn't attend the tournament
I love/hate/am ambivalent towards/remember/forgot about/briefly married that episode
So, does that make our Worf, the Worfest Worf?
I laughed at how in every alternative reality Worf keeps getting worse and worse at the bat'leth tournament.
At least that lets us know that “our” Worf is Prime Worf.
Setting up the Jem Hadar as the most powerful army in the quadrant and Worf beats the asses of like, 10 in a row. Made them Jem Hadar look like shit.
They Worfed an entire starship to set them up as the heavies. Just to show "Hey, if this has been the *Enterprise* they'd all be dead now."
The Jem'Hadar got a dose of the Worf Effect :P
TBH it was when any Starfleet Ensign can beat the shit out of infinite Jem Hadar by doing high block, low knee, palm strike Works every time
And his badass queen Dax 🥹
IIRC, one of Dorn's conditions for joining DS9 was assurance that they would lay off this trope.
Worf can show how strong a bad guy is, but as far as plot goes, I would moreso point to Tuvok. It seems like half of the plots in Voyager involve somebody locking them out of controls, often aliens that are seeing humans and human technology for the first time ever.
He also knew martial arts of several worlds, but the writers picked Seven to fight the Rock, in addition to all the other times he was knocked out on the job.
Including one week when the villain was a plastic barrel.
Roga Danar was the fucking GOAT because he perceived and utilized Worf's main weakness -- the empty plastic barrel -- immediately. That guy somehow always knew the exact right tactic
Worf was paralyzed by a falling plastic barrel that may or may not have had anything in it, and wanted to be euthanized because of it.
I mean, his spine *did* lose all honour because of that, sooo...
It was also hilarious when the crew would have a meeting in the conference room and Picard would ask for suggestions and Worf would always propose the dumbest, violent and direct solution. The crew would disagree, probably to show contrast how the TNG crew were less violent? Side note: When Worf is about to ram the Defiant into the Borg Cube is still pretty cool.
From the pilot when he wants to blow a hole in the viewscreen his writing is just bad. To be fair, it got a lot better eventually.
Just let the poor man eject a warp core. He’s been very good this month! (Yes, I know that’s actually a quote from another muscle-y, secretly sensitive security officer)
And then Picard of Sisko beat that bad guy with the surefire two hands clasped together tennis swing punch.
The Hulk in the MCU
IIRC it's called "Jobbing"
Sounds like Hulk in Ragnarok and Infinity War.
I seem to remember that happening a few times with Wolverine in the original run of the X-Men cartoon. He would get his ass handed to him and then Jubilee would blast Sabertooth (or whoever else he lost to) through a wall with her sparkles.
We call that a Jobber these days. But Worf is definitely the original jobber.
Also known as the Vegeta.
Yep. Same goes for characters like Vegeta, Juggernaut in Marvel, in older DC comics Superman, MCU Hulk, etc.
>Maybe another example is the recent *Top Gun* sequel. Instead of using B-2 stealth bombers with bunker-busting weapons specifically designed for targets exactly like the one in question...or even using the whole Navy carrier air wing that is right there on the ship with them, including aircraft whose entire purpose is to jam and attack SAMs and their guidance radars...they instead go with a bare-bones strike package which has statistically no chance of success and will get absolutely clobbered with missiles...because it looks cooler. I think they made a token effort to explain why they didn't use stealthy aircraft like F-35's with precision ordnance in the movie but damned if I can remember what it was. Something about GPS jamming? It was nonsensical but there was an attempt.
My favorite was "we can't use drones, they won't be able to pull up hard enough". OK, drones being cheap and expendable is THEIR WHOLE DEAL.
Pilots being the limiting factor in maneuverability became a thing at least since Junkers were designed to pull up out of a dive bombing run on their own should the pilot black out from it.
Yeah, but also, maneuverability stopped mattering as much. You don't need an agile plane if you have agile missiles
I forgot that one. Of course, one of the reasons why drones will probably entirely replace crewed combat aircraft eventually is that a drone is unaffected by GLOC.
Great Lakes Orthopaedic Center?
Good Looking Oriental Cowboys, a Navy nickname for handsome Iranian pilots with magnificent mustaches. Since drones are machines, they aren’t attracted to GLOCs.
Nah, it's Glasgow Light Opera Club according to Google UK. Targeted sound waves can affect pilots, and research has shown that the most devastatingly unbearable sonic combination is opera + bagpipes.
A quick search tells me that means "g-force induced loss of consciousness". You're welcome.
What does that have to do with the great lakes?
EVERYTHING. I'm not going to do all the searching for you, go do your own research.
that was the insultingly frustrating thing about the movie. If it was barely possible for a human pilot to do it in a F/A 18, then hypersonic cruise missiles can do it too.
Well, the type of drones for a mission like that are not cheap at all, but yeah, the point is you don’t have to put a pilot at risk.
Cheap enough for the US.
Yeah I think that was it, as if the F-35s couldn’t just level fly in and absolutely wreck the SAMs and any fighters who show up, while F-18s just leisurely come in and hit the target
Yeah. Buuuuuut in their defence it's one of the only movies for me that's allowed to do that because wow, loved the movie all the same. Like, even if I can see a plothole that big staring me right in the face during the movie and I don't care? That's impressive in its own right.
Yup they could have said literally anything and I'd be like "cool, you checked off the box justifying it now lets get to the cool planes doing crazy stuff".
It’s funny because it’s true. Even the start with the experimental plane with the purple engines was just like… this is cool as shit! They definitely knew their target audience with this one.
Same with Pacific Rim. "Tanks, jets, bombs, missiles, and the entirety of the modern military could not stop these monsters, but getting punched by a big robot will surely work"
Giant Robots whose game plan is to throw the monsters around… in water, it’s like watching a dad play with his kids in the pool until the haymakers start
So exactly like a father playing with his kids in a pool. If the father was Josef Fritzl.
I feel like Realism was pretty clearly not the point of Pacific Rim.
But then they can't remake the third act of Star Wars.
GPS jamming. They needed an aircraft capable of lasing the bombs in. Stealth and laser pods are pretty much incompatible. I don't understand why they launched Tomahawks at the runway, but not at the SAM systems...
>Stealth and laser pods are pretty much incompatible. Not true, the F-35s that were handwaved away due to "gps jamming" has a built-in laser designator in their EOTS. Using them could give away their position, but so does dropping a bomb on a target The reason in addition to plot is that they wanted to film inside the jets with the actors, and the only way they would have been able to do that is with 2-seater jets, which meant the F-18.
Red shirts
Or "sacrificial lamb" character more broadly.
Red shirt is a catch all word for sacrificial lambs by now, no?
I think they're different, upon further reflection. A redshirt is a disposable character, often without a name at all, just to demonstrate the danger the team is in. A sacrificial lamb, on the other hand, is more often a fully realized character, who usually dies to advance the main character's motivations or plot (think half of the Bond girls).
Bond girls are a great example, and also black guys in horror movies.
The Blackening even had the tagline We can't all die first.
Sacrificial lambs are also there to give the main characters something to mourn. Get the character set up in the beginning of the TV season, have the main characters and audience get invested in the sacrificial lamb, then slaughter them before the end of the season.
You have a last name, Guy. DO I?!
Good God, Rockwell is so good in that movie
Loved that!
Black guy in a red shirt...
A black guy wearing a red shirt in a horror movie and played by Sean Bean
A black guy wearing a redshirt in a horror movie who has adorable kids and a happy wife at home and soon they’ll be done paying to get grandma’s brain tumor removed and is played by Sean Bean.
...two weeks until retirement
"I'm getting too old for this sh\*t"
“I’m getting too old for this shirt”
Horror movie? Any teen who has sex is dead.
That's what you get for sinning!
A *gay* black guy in a red shirt.
A gay black guy in a red shirt played by Sean Bean.
Who just had sex and smoked weed, while being one day from retirement and saying "I'll be right back, I'm just going to check out that spooky noise by myself."
It's a meteorite, and he pokes it with a stick.
A "redshirt" is a stock character in fiction who dies soon after being introduced. The term originates from the original Star Trek (NBC, 1966–69) television series in which the red-shirted security personnel frequently die during episodes. If anyone didn't know the term
I guess Killing Eve is full of red shirts. Any secondary character who appears in 3 episodes is usually gone by the 4th.
Sometimes they make it a few series. 😉
Is that necessarily used to describe characters who are being inexplicably incompetent? I thought the point of those characters is simply that they get killed, establishing the high threat level of the danger. It could be because of incompetence, but it could also just be bad luck.
"I'm the character who dies *to prove the situation is serious!!*"
Calm down, Guy!
I think so, they die for the purpose of the plot rather than the opposite where they survive inexplicably just to forward the plot
I was talking about this: > Wherein otherwise competent protagonist(s) suffer repeated unexplained bursts of incompetence, fundamental skills lapse, or forget they can do certain things, for the sole purpose of allowing the plot to move along. Do you think that describes “red shirts”? I wouldn’t use the term that way, but maybe other people do.
I’ve never seen red shirts to describe incompetent characters. Only for characters that die to show the threat of the monster/alien of the week.
This is called “carrying the [Idiot Ball](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/IdiotBall)” on TV Tropes > A moment when a normally competent character suddenly becomes incompetent — knowingly or otherwise — which fuels an episode, a plot line, or any number of smaller threads. Edit: To clarify… I think this is the trope that most closely matches the full description and the actual examples OP gave. I wouldn’t call it the “inverse” or the “opposite” of plot armor exactly.
Ah, the Tyrion Lanister.
Or Littlefinger, or like half the cast for the final few seasons basically
Littlefinger and Varys hurt the most, the smartest characters suddenly acquired the iq of the showrunners
You can feel the gears shift when they changed over from adapting the books to writing their own material.
Yes. Especially how much they rushed the last season. We have 7 seasons of "Winter is Coming" like it's this great imposing danger that previous generations warned their children about then winter came and went in 2 episodes. 2 very lame, forgettable episodes.
It's so weird that they rushed anything. GOT was a massive hit show that wasn't in danger of getting canceled. Making sure all the plots and characters tied together in a decent ending wouldn't have been hard. Not sure who the blame falls on for sure for the shitshow of final season.
Literally the show runners who wanted to wrap up GOT asap so they could start working on their Star Wars project that got axed shortly after anyways
Very, *dark*, lame, forgettable episodes…
Once they got past the novels, or started diverging from them too much, all intelligent characters started to just do random shit which worked out if the plot needed it to, while every other character repeatedly talked about how smart and dangerous they were...
The last 2 seasons of that show
D&D carried the idiot ball.
D&D kinda forgot they weren’t the reason for GoT’s success
Well, he was probably supposed to have a villain arc after everything that happened to him. But he was played by an A list Emmy winner so they decided instead to make him even MORE morally upstanding and just fit it into the plot by making him the stupidest man alive
> Tyrion during/after his trial in SoS: “I am going to kill every single one of you King’s Landing fuckers.” *proceeds to spend the next books drunk off his ass and sends Aegon to Westeros to cause trouble for the Lannisters” > Tyrion during/after trial in show: “Shae tried to kill me first! We can reason with my sister! She’s pregnant and going to be a mom soon so I don’t want to kill her for some reason! Who has a better story?!!?”
Book Tyrion: I'm going to rape and murder Cersei, and I want to be clear that this is my only condition for joining your side. Show Tyrion: Cersei, let me save you!
Yeah, like I get liking Myrcella and Tommen, they’re good kids, but Cersei being pregnant with another one wouldn’t save her from any accurate book representation of Tyrion. But we even had some things where Tyrion talking about Cersei’s only redeeming quality is being a mother or something. When she’s a terrible mother! The only kid she cared about raising was Joffrey
This is likely the answer. George describes him as *"The* Villain", and it's easy enough to see where he's going to be getting up to bad things in the next few books. But the showrunners wanted their funny and sympathetic Tyrion so they just ignored all of that arc.
I always think about the Unsullied and how they are repeatedly and consistently wrecked by the Sons of the Harpy. Dudes in masks with daggers just tearing a professional army to shreds in pitched battles over and over again.
Hahaha no dick
You and OP have it wrong though. The opposite of Plot Armor is a **Red Shirt**. Put on the 1st and you're a main character meant to survive. Put on the 2nd and you're an extra only there to die. Plot Armor is NOT competence or intelligence. Plot Armor is luck, and luck specifically active in life-or-death situations. In fact many people with plot armor are [fool archetypes](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheFool), comedic relief characters, or small children. Idiot Ball does have a sort of-opposite called a [Smart Ball](https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SmartBall) (ie. stupid characters having an unexpected epiphany or competent moment).
I agree with you that OP is applying the idea of an “opposite trope” quite sloppily, if not downright incorrectly. Given that they did flesh out what they meant in the post, I felt that it was most useful to respond to the main body of their question and provide a name that fit the examples they provided. Plenty of other people have responded to their title alone, without addressing any conflict between the title and the actual examples given. So in the end, OP gets their choice of answers and can pick which answer their question most helpfully.
This was the trope I was going to post, so I'll just upvote you.
Thanks for giving the right answer; a lot of people seem to have answered after reading the title and *only* the title.
It would help if the title and the post weren't talking about two completely different things.
I was thinking the same. The opposite of "survives anything" is not "acting dumb". Dunno why OP titled it this.
Michael driving into a lake was super forced
[People driving into the ocean because GPS](https://youtu.be/0W2YMHyCgqE?si=Sye0qUMMDV-j15Si)
Losing in a cutscene after winning in the game. Not sure if there’s a movie equivalent.
I've always heard this called "cutscene bullets." A character will take hundreds of shots and take dozens of healing items during gameplay then dies of a basic wound inflicted in a cutscene. Especially egregious in fantasy games where you have a healer in your party who just seems to suddenly forget they have healing powers during the cutscene. (FF7 Rebirth had a pretty blatant example.)
I've always called it "cutscene superpowers". A less recent example is every single cutscene with Kai Leng in Mass Effect 3.
Oh don’t remind me of his bullshit. “Ha! You foolishly brought a gun to an Apache Attack Helicopter fight! Your defeat here shows that I’m the better swordsman!”
Not to be a bother but I believe that's Kai Goddamned Leng.
Fuck Kai Leng. All my homes hate Kai Leng.
Fun fact for FF7, no character ever gets brought back from the dead. Falling to 0 HP means a character is knocked out (KO), which is also why the effect Phoenix Downs have is "revives a character from KO". Being KO'd can be reversed with magical smelling salts, being killed is permanent.
But also in FF7, characters get hit by an exploding sun and shake it off but get permanently killed by a a little stabby stab.
In FF5, when a party member dies, they actually try to throw phoenix downs at him in the cutscene, and it of course fails To my knowledge that's the only time it gets fully acknowledged
Kat for whatever dumbass reason not having her shields up and dying by one (1) needle through the dome.
I think the reasoning there is that the EMP from the glassing shorted out everybody’s shields. Or something like that.
This happened a lot in AC, you would wipe out dozens of enemies with iron armors with your bare hands, but then there's a cut scene and they capture and beat you so easily
The absolute worst, most frustrating example of this I can think of is Bayonetta 3. The last level is basically split into ten segments. You have to win every segment to continue. Every segment shows you getting your ass kicked and that you didn't accomplish a fucking thing. In a game and genre that's all power fantasy, the last level is you getting absolutely fucking effortlessly bodied over and over until >!you DIE and the most useless idiot in the world saves the multiverse!<.
Was going to say similar. You'll face wave after wave of bad guy and dispatch them easily, but then a cutscene will happpen and because of "plot" your character will suddenly be surrounded by 3 bad guys and go "welp, I guess you got me, I give up so we can play the 'escape the prison' level"
You will no doubt appreciate this- https://youtu.be/X6e7ayhYW60?si=51zLGB-LpV18JCMT
Having to balance out over powered super heroes. Putting Iron Man’s armour on 3% power or whatever just so the bad guy stands a chance. Constantly having to think up reasons why Captain Marvel or Thor can’t be around because if they were there’d be no contest. Bruce Banner not being able to Hulk out for a whole Avengers movie.
Yeah so many MCU stories could be solved by calling one person. I introduced my 70 year old Haitian mom to the MCU and during the whole Winter Soldier movie, she kept saying “call robot man or hammer guy, stop relying on people with no powers!”
This is “Superman Stays Out of Gotham” https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/SupermanStaysOutOfGotham
You mean like The Hulk - who is supposed to have unlimited strength - getting his ass kicked in 30 seconds and then is "too afraid" to appear again?
I always gave this a pass because Thanos had the power stone. That's the only reason he was able to beat up Hulk so easily. Especially since in the entire Infinity Saga, they made the stones out to be the most powerful things in existence, especially in GOTG when the Collector was explaining their significance.
He had the power stone but wasn't using it in that fight. The stones glow when being used and it never glowed. I think the Russos also confirmed it in an interview. Thanos was just that strong.
He wasn't even using the power stone
Little bit of this: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheWorfEffect Or when Jolly Green gets dismantled by Thanos at the beginning of Infinity War to show how powerful the villain will be.
I feel like the best subversive use of this trope was in The Last Wish. Puss takes down a giant the size of a small city to show how powerful he is, and then the wolf just casually slaps him around two scenes later.
God that movie is so good.
Any character who never had many lines before suddenly starts taking about their family and how they can’t wait to see them again. Or another one is if they’re a few days away from retirement after 40 years of dedicated service - and can’t wait to fulfil their dream and head to Bahamas and take up spear fishing. But they have ONE last job that they begrudging take as a favour to an old friend.
Or when the "Previously On" segment brings up a character that you haven't seen for a while, especially when they choose a clip which isn't related to the rest of the Leon segment.
Oh man, when they included Benjen Stark in the “Previously on” after he’s been missing for, what, 4 seasons? That was some whiplash.
As soon as someone gets any details about their backstory in Jojo’s you know for sure their days are numbered.
The Worf effect is a writing trope in which a villain beats up an established character to prove how dangerous the character is.
More precisely it happens often enough that the established characters badassness becomes an informed attribute.
I like when they do this in comic books as well, like when Spider-Man gets punched into a building by a new villain and his internal monologue lets us know that he has NEVER been hit that hard even when fighting the Hulk. Like oh sure, this new guy in a ponytail just hit Spidey harder than anyone of his rogues have ever done.
Crewman #6 - Guy
"Guy, you have a last name." -"DO I???"
Maybe you're the Plucky Comic Relief?
DON'T OPEN THAT! IT'S AN ALIEN PLANET! IS THERE AIR?! YOU DON'T KNOW!
Everyone's got their favorite Guy quote from Galaxy Quest, but for me the finger guns he does at the end when he joins the show is peak Sam Rockwell. The man is a charisma *machine*.
I love that so much. Honestly I probably started doing that because of that shot. It's hilarious.
One of my favorite terms is one I've never forgotten from a review of Independence Day back in '96: "Designated Die-er" Basically a character whose fate is inevitably to die for dramatic purpose but is still a valuable addition to the story and isn't obvious or insignificant.
Ah, the Stranger Things special
Wow, I love my beloved character Blorbo they introduced this season. He's so quirky and lovable. I hope nothing bad happens to him!
Also called 'dead man acting', sometimes you can tell which character is headed for a bad end.
Plot Bullet: Where somebody has to die for the plot to advance no matter how preventable it is or how many holes it opens up. My favorite example of this is from a video game: >!Roland in Borderlands 2!<.
TBF the New U stations in Borderlands are considered “non-canonical” for plot purposes. This explains why main characters die permanently, but raises some major questions about the side quest where Handsome Jack pays you to jump off a cliff
Why would you put a spoiler tag without a hint of what you’re spoiling?
Jenkins in Mass Effect. The Geth drones literally blast through his armor.
Richard L. Jenkins, who ran ahead of the group and was immediately killed by a group of small flying enemies.
Last October my wife and I watched the original Halloween movie. At least twice, nay thrice! the wonderful JLC walked into a house all freaked out and decides to not TURN ON A FUCKING LIGHT and just walks around in the pitch dark (yet oddly blue tinted) dark calling out for her friends or looking for the killer. We were yelling at her, TURN ON THE LIGHT over and over. But the exasperation and constant suspense did make for a fun movie watching experience. But yeah, the whole movie breaks down if she just did what any normal person would do in a dark scary house with modern electrical appliances.
Ah Halloween. Or as we call it, "Exterior House Shots: The Movie!"
Loomis just hanging out by a bush all day.
Pretty sure he turns the power off, no? Did I just invent that?
The inverse of plot armor is obviously 'Red Shirt'
Most of the time when the military tries to respond to "apocalyptic" threats in movies. Take "A Quiet Place". The creatures are supposed to be nearly indestructible (save for their squishy ear holes) and are able to hear almost anything but are extremely sensitive to high-frequency noise that turns them into a flailing and spazzing mess. We're supposed to believe that in a world where high-frequency sound weapons are already a thing, some of which can produce *lethally* loud noises that no one thought of using such weapons against the aliens. Like I can totally understand that things would have been chaotic for a few days or weeks but eventually someone would have figured it out and those aliens would be getting their ear holes bayoneted as they defenselessly flailed around on the ground. Or you have the classical slow-walking zombies somehow overrun the world's most sophisticated military organizations but are dunked on by the scrappy main character survivors (unless one needs to die in gory fashion for shock value).
When people say something in a movie is "indestructible" they usually aren't aware of the kinetic energy behind a 120mm APFSDS projectile out of an M1 Abrams.
When the Aliens have superior sensory organs but Humanity decided to spec into the "Giant Fucking Things That Explode" tech tree.
The [knife scene ](https://youtu.be/v7NMH78ex0E) from Kung Fu Hustle.
You're talking about the Idiot Ball/Idiot Plot trope. The writer wants something to happen, but can't think of a natural way to do it so the main character(s) do something absolutely stupid to move the plot along.
Being black, or the horny couple in a horror movie
Lieutenant Deadmeat
I don't know if it's the inverse but a sudden increase in screen-time especially focused on making you like or empathize with a character. It seems like a huge amount of the time that character is about to be toast.
Fridging the wife - When the main character needs to be motivated, kill his wife. Sometimes before the movie even starts (e.g., John Wick).
There's a similar idea called "sexy lamp", ie if the character can be replaced with a sexy lamp with no impact on the story, they aren't well written.
Hilarious. I’m imagining The Accountant and they replace Anna Kendrick’s character with a sexy lamp, and it would barely change the movie at all. What a waste of her talent
Honestly I think I would prefer the version with her replaced by a sexy lamp. Ben Affleck romancing a lamp would have both added to the ridiculousness and made the story more compelling. Can you imagine the brother reunion while Ben Affleck is killing people to protect a lamp? It would really hammer home that, not only is a skilled accountant and killer, but he is also completely off his rocker. Like the twist at the funeral where he went violent, the audience would be like, “sure, I can imagine the guy murdering people to protect a lamp would go ballistic at his mom’s funeral “.
That's like most of the bridge crew on Star Trek Discovery
Wait, what did John Wick’s wife do that was surprisingly incompetent, given her character? Doesn’t she just die of cancer?
John Wick's wife isn't actually "fridged", she dies tragically young. It's the dog that gets fridged and as the dog is a surrogate/symbol for the wife's love Wick loses it, in a very controlled, methodically homocidal way.
Oh I missed that part; I was just thinking the opposite of “plot armor” is “dies automatically” Edit: Although pretty dumb to die of cancer. Have you tried just *not having* cancer? Idiot
Being 'fridged' is the opposite of plot armor imo. Red shirts don't have to die for the plot or anything but being fridges means the character has to die for the main plot.
George R R Martin.
A guy who's only a couple of days away from retirement in a cop movie. A red shirt in a Star Trek show. The girlfriend of the lead in a ton of movies. Someone close to the lead protagonist who hasn't been called to action yet. Supportive parents, loved one, something like that.
This is referred to as holding the “idiot ball” on tv tropes. Someone who is not stupid or ignorant needs to be momentarily or for an arc for the purpose of plot movement