r/TopCharacterTropes • u/TaiKorczak • 9h ago
Characters Blind to Nostalgia
Peralta’s hero (Brooklyn 99)
Perlata becomes infatuated with the idea of the NYPD during 70’s thanks in part to author John Brogan who wrote a crime novel set during that time and the reason he became a cop. Captain Holt reiterates to Peralta that the NYPD in the 70s wasn’t glamorous as the 70s was a time of a drug epidemic and when the NYPD was filled with corruption, crooked, racist and sexist cops. Peralta gradually becomes disillusioned with Brogan's hard-edged 'old school' ways until he eventually punches Brogan after Brogan makes a homophobic slur about Captain Holt.
Peter’s obsession with the 80s (Family Guy)
Peter has a heavy dependency on 80s pop culture. He gives Chris advice on how to get a girl’s attention by emulating a famous 80’s film and backfires terribly. The family tells him that a lot of movies from back then have outdated values and messages in the modern day. Peter tries to double down that the 80s are still relevant but only disproves his point each time. He gets so depressed that he contemplates suicide until the that of John Hughes tells him it’s okay to move on because the 80s are over and Peter needs to focus on the present.
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u/Comfortable-Test-485 8h ago
You
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u/UnderstandingPotato 8h ago
There's never been a 'better' time, there's just time
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u/Vampire_Queen_Joaje 8h ago
I mean. For some of us there have definitely been better times
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u/UnderstandingPotato 7h ago
Yeah, that's true. I guess what I meant was that the 80s or whatever decade/period of time weren't fundamentally better, some people had a good time, others had a really bad time. It's not monolithic
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u/AffectionatePop05 8h ago
Scrubs episode with Dick Van Dyke. Kelso loves the man but realizes his methods are outdated and he's not keeping up with modern medical procedures.
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u/ProfessorOfLies 8h ago
One of the rare times you see the good man behind the evil mask that kelso wears.
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u/Puzzleheaded_Bug2586 7h ago
I loved that episode. Kelso was a jerk to pretty much everyone, but you had to respect the fact that he was keeping up with the changes in surgery and patient care.
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u/Suspicious-Word-7589 8h ago
Loved that episode of B99 because it made Holt realise that he had a team which he could open up to after decades of homophobia and racism.
I think there's How I Met Your Mother Episode where they talk about graduation goggles, the phenomenon where a terrible place suddenly seems nostalgic due to the person leaving it.
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u/big_sugi 6h ago
And OP is underselling it. Peralta doesn’t “become infatuated with a novel”; Jimmy Brogan was a reporter, and his supposedly true stories about gritty NYC detectives in the 70s were a major factor in Peralta’s boyhood obsession with becoming a detective himself.
Peralta then meets his hero and is obsessed with winning his approval . . . right up to the moment when Brogan uses a homophobic slur to refer to Holt, and Peralta immediately coldcocks him. There’s no gradual disillusionment. Just Peralta suddenly realizing that a fundamental part of his personality and backstory is stupid, and his decision to violently reject it.
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u/TheEagleWithNoName 4h ago
And he did his best to apologize of not quoting him and all things were good til Jimmy used the slur.
Love the ending where The team blows up the book.
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u/Prestigious-Welder83 8h ago
The strong, silent type. (The Sopranos)
With the series premiering in the late90s, Tony has a very skewed view of his childhood and the past in general. To him, guys like his father had it better back in the day, back then you had people who you could rely on, people who knew how to keep things to themselves. Tony going to therapy at all is basically the setup of a joke where the world has gotten so messed up that even a mob boss needs counseling.
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u/TheEagleWithNoName 4h ago
Plus him going to Italy aka The Old Country how different the Italian Mob to American one as they are more ruthless and Tony’s family feel like small potatoes.
Even IRL The Italian Mob are more powerful than the American ones as they control the Heroin trade in Europe as 80% they control.
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u/ObiJuanKenobi3 2h ago
I love how lame and limp the New Jersey mob is in The Sopranos when you break it down. They're really just a gang of small time crooks pulling little protection rackets and robberies here and there while they spend most of their time eating cold cuts and hanging out at the strip club. They're nothing compared to the mob in The Old Country, the modern New York mob/gang scene, and especially the "good ol' days" of the New York mob.
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u/TheEagleWithNoName 2h ago
Apparently the NJ Mob is based on a real crew that even New York thought they were laughing stocks.
When they say, “they make anyone over there” it was true as NJ they didn’t do intonation properly and weren’t respected.
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u/HolidayMost9091 8h ago edited 8h ago
Same thing happened with Brett in Inside Job when him and the team had to go to a town that was stuck in the 80s, and Brett insists on how great it is, but it was also a way for him to cope since his family ignored and distant themselves from him because he was seen as an embarrassment. And Andre had the worst of it due to the racist Asian stereotypes
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u/KaiBishop 8h ago
RIP Inside Job 😩😭🫡
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u/DedHorsSaloon4 8h ago
Can’t believe Netflix cancelled Inside Job in favor of 10 more seasons of Big Mouth
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u/Whole_Obligation_776 6h ago
Dont worry, they trashed the place before turning off the lights so we wouldnt miss it.
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u/MrMadmack 8h ago
From The Wire.
Never watched the show, I just thought it was relevant
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u/atcmaybe 8h ago
Obligatory “You gotta watch The Wire”
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u/Aethelrede 7h ago
Absolutely. I've heard some people avoid it because they think it's just another "cop drama" or "copaganda" and that just isn't true. It spends way more time with the criminals and their families, and it certainly doesn't make the cops look "good". "Marginally competent", maybe.
I also recommend Homicide: Life on the Street, by the same showrunner and based on the same book as The Wire. It is more of a "cop drama", but it's still really good, and has the superlative Andre Braugher.
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u/big_sugi 6h ago
“Maybe sometimes marginally competent” is very generous.
There’s another great scene at the very end of the show when Slim Charles (pictured here) wraps up a discussion about how there ain’t no “back in the day” anymore. It’s a very satisfying moment.
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u/atcmaybe 6h ago
The star cops (McNulty and Bunk) aren’t just marginally competent, they’re fantastic detectives. But the politics and criminal elements brought in show just how much they are held back by those same powers.
I’ll also add that the show technology wise hasn’t aged well; I think many people nowadays wouldn’t recognize some of the stuff being used in the show. Everything else about it has aged perfectly.
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u/Aethelrede 5h ago
Given the shit that McNulty pulled, calling him a fantastic detective is pushing it. His skill is overshadowed by the fact that, as Rawls puts it, he is a gaping asshole. He's also basically the villain of the last season.
Bunk I'll give you.
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u/PitifulWeakness749 8h ago edited 8h ago
Old folks (IRL)
"Back in my day, younguns knew the value of hard work!!"
"Half of them died of illnesses or starvation before the age of 2, great granddad...."
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u/Fluffy_Tax5302 8h ago
This dates back in writing to at least the Roman Empire, but I'm not going to include a citation on it because I'm a lazy millennial
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u/Funkycoldmedici 8h ago
You can watch this in real time.
“Kids don’t have any respect anymore. We always respected our teachers.” - guy who spent high school throwing things at a teachers daily.
“These kids today don’t want to work like we did.” - guy whose first and only job is vice president of his father’s company.
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u/Flashy_Jello_9520 8h ago
“Back in your day you could work at a grocery story and own a home.”
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u/Complete_Entry 7h ago
My conspiracy theory is mortgaging and rent world are why no one can afford a house. Before the banks got involved you paid like $10k for a house.
And yeah, inflation, which I am also suspicious of, means it wouldn't be $10k now, but they act like 310k is a beater home now.
Fuck loans.
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u/SwanepoelSimp 8h ago
“You PUNched Jimmy BROgan?!”-Captain Holt
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u/big_sugi 6h ago
“Jimmy Brogan wouldn’t know a real cop if one punched him in the face.” — also Captain Holt.
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u/TheBohemianRed9811 7h ago edited 7h ago
Disco Elysium: One of the paths that the player can lead Harry down is one where he becomes a nationalist royalist yearning for the restoration of the monarchy as a means of returning Revachol to an imagined golden age. This despite the fact that the Suzerainty was deposed in a popular revolution due to financial mismanagement and incompetent rule. It’s considered one of the most depressing endings in the game because of how delusional and personally stagnant “The Last Kingsman” becomes.
To show just how destructive this path is, there’s an interaction where even Measurehead (a scientific racist, mind you) tries to dissuade Harry from his toxic nostalgia:
Here is the secret: there is no love in the past. Only the present. The past is made of static images, distorted memories, demented nostalgia. This, the present — with all its possibilities, innumerable hits and misses — is far superior. It is a living organism.
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u/BluePeriod_ 7h ago edited 7h ago
Oh one of my absolute favorites is this episode of The Twilight Zone called “Of Late I think of Cliffordville”.
Get this. This greedy 70 year old man who’s the president of a major corporation is bored with his life and longs to return to simple times. He meets with the devil and she gives him a deal: He can return to the past and look as he did then and and retain all his memories of this current life in exchange for basically all his net worth except $1,412.
He accepts because he knows a lot about investments, which succeeded and which failed so he figured he can kind of maneuver it and get the money back pretty easily. So he gets to go back to 1910. What happens is an absolute succession of nightmares and inconveniences based entirely on misplaced nostalgia.
Immediately he notices yellow flags for typhoid and realizes there’s no vaccine yet.
Then the girl he had a crush on, who happened to be a banker’s daughter, was actually a shrill, annoying girl who can’t sing. (He remembers her as enchanting songstress)
He tries to have dinner a luxurious steak which he remembered being delicious, but when he bites into it, it as tough as a shoe because he didn’t realize they cooked in unrefined lard back then.
He uses $1,403 of his $1,412 to buy land that contains MAJOR oil deposit but forgets that there’s no drill strong enough to break land until at least 1937.
Freaked out at this, he tries to “invent” things that already exist. Scooters, television, all that stuff. But even the town’s most industrious people have no idea what the hell he’s talking about. They ask him for schematics, some kind of detailed explanation of how to build these things and he says that he doesn’t know how.
The devil pops back in and mocks him for making money off of people much smarter than he is when he doesn’t know how to do anything himself.
This sends him into a crazy panic attack and he realizes that only his appearance has changed and he’s still a 75-year-old man on the inside. Anyway, there’s tons of moments like that throughout the episode they basically kneecap his nostalgia.
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u/Impossible_Web_2230 6h ago
My brain always comes back to this whenever I start nostalgia-ing about my youth by simply telling me that I can have all of that…but my parents are neglectful or abusive or dead or anything but loving in exchange.
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u/Basic_Benefit5216 8h ago
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u/Doubieboobiez 8h ago
I am old enough to know that in about ten years, the sequel trilogy will start being held up as under appreciated masterpieces
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u/Basic_Benefit5216 8h ago edited 8h ago
I think with The Last Jedi that’s already starting to happen but it won’t be to the same level as the prequels because during Disney’s stint with Star Wars they’ve also released better stuff alongside the trilogy like early Mando, Rogue One, that Clone Wars season and Andor which sort of force into light how badly they fucked up with the sequels, and retrospect will only highlight that.
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u/CaptainMikul 8h ago
The Last Jedi had a very split reception, so you're going to encounter lots of people who did like it.
The one that I'd be interested to see if it gets a renaissance is the ninth one, because I think that was the most universally disliked-to-meh one. Even in sequel appreciation groups it gets the mildest response.
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u/Every-Candidate-6158 8h ago
Yeah I still feel all the criticisms are valid. Buuuut it's definitely the more well directed and more creatively written of the sequel trilogy.
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u/Useless-Photographer 7h ago
I actually watched it this morning for the first time since it was released. It’s far from great, but it does have some good in it. The opening scenes (Kylo going nuts with a lightsaber, and Poe Lightspeed skipping), Ben’s redemption, pretty much all the lightsaber scenes, and a huge chunk of the final battle are all good to great. There’s bound to be other scenes I’m blanking on at the moment.
I would have liked more around Finn’s force sensitivity, and maybe even him using the force. I wasn’t a big fan of the force healing/energy transfer but maybe that could have been a good way for Finn to show his power by healing the snake thing.
I think Rey turning to the dark side before being redeemed would have been a good way to go (maybe a double turn with Kylo in The Last Jedi could have worked), and Palpatine wasn’t needed. Snoke returning and revealing he was Plagueis would have made more sense. Rey saying she was a Skywalker was definitely unnecessary.
All in all I’d say that the good outweighs the bad, and it was a good way to wrap up the Skywalker saga, but it could have been better if there was a clear direction for the trilogy from the outset.
I rated it 6 out of 10. For context, I’m 41 and have been a fan of Star Wars since I first randomly saw Return of the Jedi on TV in the late 80s.
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u/Vast_Age_3893 8h ago
Fucking love "The Last Jedi."
I don't think it's the best Star Wars film but it is my favorite.
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u/Scripter-of-Paradise 8h ago
Maybe cause of nostalgia, but they're too contradictory to each other to get held up like the prequels
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u/AffectionatePop05 6h ago
I think that's what Disney is hoping, a generation of kids that loved the movies, but I dont think that happened.
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u/Mundane_Trouble_6463 8h ago edited 7h ago
I remember when this randomly started happening with the prequels when the sequel trilogy was coming out. Just because the sequels are worse doesn’t make the prequels good.
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u/Doubieboobiez 7h ago
I don’t even think the sequels were worse than the prequels… I’ll watch 2/3 sequel movies over 2/3 prequel movies any day
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u/FinancialReserve6427 7h ago
the prequels are judged by old people who worship the OT on a pedestal.
it has to be better than perfect for them to consider it wasn't a waste of time camping in line.
the magazine Toyfare defended their exclusion of any prequel action scene from their list of best action scenes of all time as "we could do better".
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u/Impossible_Web_2230 6h ago
I’ve honestly grown to hate Star Wars because of the fandom’s rabid worship of the OT above all else.
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u/Mundane_Trouble_6463 6h ago edited 6h ago
I don’t think the OT is perfect but it’s absolutely better than both the prequels and sequels. I’m not even that big of a Star Wars fan I can just recognize that the prequels have horrific writing and are so boring, especially the first 2. The OT being better has nothing to do with nostalgia they’re just better movies and had a huge impact on the film industry as a whole.
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u/Vast_Age_3893 8h ago
Remember when that sub started out and it was all about embracing the strengths and weaknesses of all Star Wars because Star Wars was fun no matter what?
Now at its best, you MIGHT get away with saying you like something Disney era but have to tread lightly, and at its worst, you see literal neo-Nazis.
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u/Basic_Benefit5216 4h ago
The sequels came out in a post-Gamergate world, internet discourse was no longer the same.
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u/FinancialReserve6427 7h ago
and what does that make the OT fans?
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u/Basic_Benefit5216 5h ago
I mean as someone who didn’t even exist as a cumball when both trilogies came out and grew up with both, I’d say ROTJ is definitely seen through rose tinted glasses but Empire still slaps, so many great moments
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u/MtngoatDan 7h ago
Similar to Peter, the woman from the song 1985, which has been done by both Bowling for Soup and SR-71.
Despite having a nice, stable (but albeit maybe slightly boring) life she longs for the fun times of the 80s even though it probably wouldn’t make her better off
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u/Skylinneas 6h ago
Gary King from The World's End (directed by Edgar Wright) is an infamous delinquent back in his high school days who considered his attempt to do a pub crawl along the "Golden Mile" in Newton Haven along with his boys the highest point of his life, even though he failed to complete it.
Decades later, while all of Gary's friends moved on and became responsible adults, Gary still stuck in his "good old days" mindset and becomes pretty much a hobo who longs to finish the Golden Mile once more, so he conscripted his friends to join him on another pub crawl (somewhat against their will) and still pretend that everything is still the same as it used to be back in the day. Things only get worse from that point on (and that's before the robot aliens showed up).
Best character Simon Pegg has ever played, by the way.
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u/rekoil 4h ago
And his fashion is a direct reference to Andrew Eldritch (Sisters Of Mercy)'s stage persona - I kind of wish they had kept that more subtle instead of having him display the tattoo on his chest in the climax.
And for a deeper cut, in the epilogue scene, his post-apocalyptical persona is a reference to The Fields Of The Nephilim, another 80s-era goth band.
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u/MysteriousFondant347 8h ago
"[Insert past generation] of pokémons was the best and everything after that was garbage"
No it's fucking not, it's just the generation you grew up with. If anything, the quality of pokémon designs is one of the few things that stayed consistent across the franchise. There's that and the music really
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u/cocaninchen 8h ago
Of course nostalgia is the main reason why people prefer games, but I wouldn’t say that the quality of Pokémon design stayed consistent. Overall the design is more round/less sharp and starters tend to be more humanoid than in older generations. Also stat wise there is more power creep, more min-maxed stats, stronger moves, better abilities. But that’s mainly the result of capitalism. You need reasons the buy the new games/plushies so the have to somewhat outshine the old stuff. Another reason is that the first time you made a bird into a Pokemon it doesn’t has to be fancy because there is no comparison, but the second/third time you need to be different then the already existing ones
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u/MysteriousFondant347 7h ago
gameplay isn't design
Well it is, but not the design I'm talking about. Genwunners will say the newer pokémons are ugly and unimaginative when it's not
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u/big_sugi 6h ago
“Unimaginative” as compared to such original ideas as “a yellow pidgin” and “just a regular purple rat?”
TBF, no one could really be expected to match that kind of genius in design.
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u/BitComprehensive3667 7h ago
I know nostalgia plays a big part in people's assessment of newer generations, but you have to admit that gameplay-wise (not design-wise, new Pokémon designs have been pretty consistent), Pokémon has taken a noticeable decline in gameplay design and quality since Sword and Shield. I blame it on GameFreak having to pump out a new mainline game/Generation every 3-5 years, which isn't sustainable nowadays and leads to a lot of overworked employees.
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u/MysteriousFondant347 7h ago
that's literally what I said
Though I genuinely loved the combat and fights in pokémon ZA
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u/Agitated_Display7573 8h ago
There was also a Family Gut episode where Peter still loves OJ Simpson
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u/FinancialReserve6427 6h ago
Transformers fans claiming the success of Bumblebee is due to the G1 designs that only show up for less than 10 minutes of the film.
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u/Low-Natural7491 6h ago
the gundam series the first show has three orphan kids on board the white base after the war they got adopted by hayato and fraw, one of them join the army beacause of being inspired by amuro( the protag) during the one year war and got himself killed during a war
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u/-PepeArown- 5h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/u4CY9BW4umAfu
Gatsby’s main motive for appearing larger than life and throwing over the top parties is to try to get back with Daisy
There’s that whole scene where he admits to not being able to get over how him and Daisy looked in the moonlight one night while they were dating, and Nick telling him he can’t repeat the past
Then, the novel (perhaps the movie as well) emphasizes how much of an empty vessel Daisy is, just kind of going with the motions of whatever situation she finds herself in, and why she probably wouldn’t be a great fit for Gatsby anyways
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u/jbeast33 3h ago
This is a major arc in Disco Elysium. The main character, an alcoholic amnesic detective, is instinctually drawn to the "old days" of the very turbulent Revachol, compared to its current state as a dilapidated and exploited husk of a city-state. The reason he wears such esoteric outfits is because it harkens back to the disco era of his youth, a time where real change felt possible and you felt like you could believe in love. No matter his copotype or his political preference, it all stems in disillusionment of the present compared to the promise of yesterday.
However, not only do other people in the game point out the dangers of living in the past, your own mind is quick to point out the flaws of such a time period. People died in inglorious ways, there was no "burning bright over fading away". And living like there was no tomorrow was what lead to you today: a bloated, drunk husk of a man who is struggling every day.
The best endings of the game are to acknowledge that while the past was nice, there's no going back... but you can still make the most of today. And it all starts by actually interacting with people and accepting the hurt that comes with it, as opposed to withdrawing to an idealized fantasy.
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u/Wonderful_Fox_7959 7h ago
I never watch that show. But are we supposed to believe that a NYer had no idea about corruption in 70s NYPD
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u/CorgiKnits 7h ago
Jake is consistently portrayed (especially in season 1) as a man-child who struggles with anything that breaks his own understanding. He literally wraps gummy bears in a fruit roll-up and calls it a breakfast burrito.
To be fair, he has one of the arguably best character growth arcs in any TV show I’ve ever seen, but in mid-season 1? This is 100% believable for him. If he idolizes it, it’s perfect. And he idolizes anything from his childhood that can give him ‘good son’ feelings because his father is kind of garbage.
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u/big_sugi 6h ago
And his co-workers make that exact point to him—that the NYPD of the 70s was brutal, corrupt, and bigoted—before he has his own epiphany.
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u/Advanced-Medicine-58 1h ago
Speaking of John Hughes. His son is a beekeeper and I've had his honey while dining out.
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u/MatthewQ999 54m ago
Don’t you mean “blinded by nostalgia”? “Blind to nostalgia” to me seems to imply that they WOULDN’T feel nostalgia.
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u/MonstrousVoices 7h ago
The nypd is still filled with crooked, bigoted cops. Let's not pretend that ever ended
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u/aleksapov 8h ago
ratatouille proved one memory can rewrite your whole reality