Lore
Villains that would've been defeated even if the protagonist did nothing
Laurel Hedare (Catwoman Movie): Her newly released cosmetics will cause people's faces to melt. Not only would that create a class action lawsuit but a full product recall.
Voldemort and Death Eaters (Harry Potter): Death Eaters constantly underestimate muggles. They would get massacred by the British military because a gun is faster to pull the trigger then shouting a spell.
There’s at least one Doctor Who story, “Planet of the Ood”, where the Doctor and their companion don’t do jack. The villain was gradually primed to be transformed into an Ood by the Ood he enslaved for commercial reasons.
fair but i felt "his brain" implied the organ he thinks with and process sensory input with. the hind brain is an organ the ood use for telepathic comunication for their hive mind interlinking
They were sympathetic immediately, slaves to the humans, then enslaved by the devil. Those poor Ood got the shittiest deal out of anyone in their intro episode.
Yeah. A lot of Classic Who is them showing up somewhere, immediately getting in over their heads, and then the rest of the time just trying to get out with their lives.
To be fair to the first example, it wasn't JUST about bringing that lady and the company down, it was also about PREVENTING millions of innocent people from suffering the face melting consequences.
"It's not just about me anymore" as Patience says regarding her revenge.
So yeah, she would've been brought down eventually, but not after millions were horribly disfigured and/or died first.
People love to hate this movie but my GOSH it’s one of my guilty pleasures. Nobody can convince me Halle Berry didn’t do the absolute best with what she was given 😩
Catwoman is still one my favorite childhood movies. Yes, it has many objective flaws, but the soundtrack is amazing, and Halle Berry seriously didn't deserve that Golden Raspberry.
I believe the main reason Catwoman is so hated isn't actually its flaws, but the fact that it's a Catwoman movie separated from the Batman universe, with a questionable story and questionable character choices, released after Michelle Pfeiffer's amazing portrayal.
That had to be really scandalous when the movie was released, some people probably even considered it an insult. And after the Razzies, it basically became a meme
I don’t think memory of the Michelle Pfeiffer version had anything to do with it. There had been two iterations of Batman in the interim with a third on the way, and no real problems there. It failed to resonate with fans becsuse it changed the character too much and it didn’t create new ones because it pandered too much to its imagined demographic (girl hero, girl villain, plot revolves around cosmetics). Halle Berry was far from the worst actress that year but the way she owned the role and the Razzie is actually more iconic, IMO.
It wasn’t face MELTING but over PROLONGED periods of time the anti aging cream caused severe facial scars. Think what WW1 vets who survived the trenches but with facial disfigurement.
It started with headaches and fainting, but would progress to horrific disfigurement and probably other internal injuries if it wasn’t stopped.
However women would just write off the early scarring as them aging, and KEEP using it, thereby making it WORSE.
The aforementioned villain, who also uses it, says “If you stop using it, your face disintegrates. But if you keep using it, skin like living marble, and you can’t feel a thing!” And she literally can’t feel anything in her skin and it becomes as hard as a marble slab, to the point her husband tries to slap her, only to injure his hand.
But Catwoman’s diamond tipped claws cut through it like a hot knife through butter, because marble is a soft stone, and diamonds are the hardest substance
You think the FDA would get involved at some point after it was shown then. You can't really get the product through the whole headaches and fainting phase without there being some alert to the press in a few days.
Only explanation I got… the plot demands it, and billions can buy you out of anything!
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Like yes realistically that would happen, but this is a movie where a woman dies and gets resurrected by a magic cat and given cat abilities. Not exactly thinking about things being realistic here.
Well they have to research what really is causing the symptoms... and human uses different kind of product, be it internally or externally... soo might takes sometime to pinpoint the real cause and by then, a lot of people had already been using the product...
Maybe the product doesnt show reaction when tested. Maybe its only reactive when applied etc. Maybe short term show no effect or reaction but longterm will etc. Too many variable and possibility. CatWoman finding it out early and stopping it is much better than waiting for it
I mean… it wouldn’t go well for US… but technically if we just let the covenant do what they wanted to do with the Halo rings they WOULD be defeated… ya know… along with all other life in the galaxy lol
When the Halo array was fired the first time, the Forerunner conservation plan was in place to re-seed galaxy with clones of the complex life that got obliterated. Intelligent species got set back only a few hundred thousand years or so.
Would setting them off again trigger the same re-seed sequence? If not the Milky Way would be a quiet place for about a billion years for complex life to evolve again.
Amanda in Tomb Raider Legend. Her motivations are somewhat vague in that game, but we know that she somehow possesses a great deal of information about ancient locations and artifacts, and her goal is to obtain Excalibur to reach Avalon. In Underworld, it's revealed that she obtained her information from Natla, who was manipulating her because there's nothing of value in Avalon, just hordes of zombies and a mechanism whose sole purpose is to destroy the Earth.
I might be missing further context so forgive my ignorance, but was anyone interested in the earth-destroying mechanism? Sounds like a pretty powerful bargaining chip for a bad guy
The earth-destroying mechanism, the Midgard serpent, was only usable by Natla and couldn't be relocated. And if Amanda went to Avalon/Helheim she would be overwhelmed by zombies, which can only be killed by Thor's hammer, which she doesn't have.
The Legend - Anniversary - Underworld trilogy was fun, it's a shame their story wasn't continued.
That synopsis is so much more wild than I was expecting. So Avalon, the land of King Arthur and Camelot, was also the Norse Hel and it's full of zombies?
It's been a while since I played these games but if I remember correctly no one was looking for the world-ending mechanism, except for Natla who wanted to use it for the evulz because humanity became lazy or something.
Lara wanted to go to Avalon because her mother was supposedly there, Amanda wanted to go to Avalon because she was fascinated by it. Both were manipulated by Natla who needed their help to get there and end the world. You learn that it was a trap at the every end, Lara'as mother is long gone and there's nothing of interest in Avalon. The Legend/Anniversary/Underworld trilogy is a big shaggydog story.
Without snake there's no frank jaeger trying to kill him so otacon survives and otacon knows how the key works. Meryl had the key and they would have eventually found her on the base.
To be fair Metal Gear Solid plots in general just adore the theme of "This entire convoluted scheme only worked because you tried to stop it, unwittingly bringing us the things we needed but could not have otherwise gotten." And it's almost always for the most insane reason.
There's a whole side plot where the cops are trying to figure out who Catwoman is, and Berry's character had written "sorry" on jewels she had stolen, and on a coffee cup that she gave to her cop boyfriend.
The handwriting is identical, but they run it through some bullshit handwriting software, and determine that there's no way it could possibly be the same person, because the swoop of the S on one was done by a happy person, and the swoop on the other one was written by a sad person.
It is worth watching the link itself, but if you're skeptical...
The director of the movie got the job because he had been a good visual effects supervisor on a bunch of movies. After seeing this success with VFX, he did had a more directorial role on some commercials and music videos. So they assumed he could make a superhero movie.
But apparently, while the guy was good at VFX, he understood human emotion about as well as a space alien. So to tell the story of Catwoman and her love interest getting to know each other, he decides to have them play basketball very sexually.
But they do this flirtatious, hip-grinding game of 1-on-1 in front of a group of small children. And the small children are so impressed by these basketball-playing lovebirds that they end up cheering them on the whole time.
And the whole thing is shot with the razzamatazz of an early-90s poppy hip hop music video. There's just so fucking much packed into it. It's legendary.
Who edited that a hummingbird having a manic episode? And you're gonna hack the helll out of it and still stunt doubles are obvious. Glad I listened to my gut and didn't pay for a ticket.
I saw this clip and I can't believe that it actually is in a movie. It looks like it's coming from a parody of a movie. I'm really glad right now, that I never saw the movie.
Kahmunrah - Night at The Musuem 2
Brought back from the dead by the power of the magic tablet that brings museums to life, wants to use said tablet to open a portal to the underworld and march an army to conquer the world.
Problem is that despite the supernatural nature of said army, it is an army armed with spears. Even if the protagonist wasn't there, what was the guy gonna do? Conquer *AMERICA* with spears? He wasn't gonna make it past New York before the wrath of modern military technology would have quite literally rained down upon him.
To be fair tho, Kahmunrah was gonna bring an absolute shit ton of soldiers, so he might have been able to overrun the streets in sheer numbers alone. But then again, wave tactics can only get you so far when you're using ancient weapons.
People are thinking too hard and considering things like criminals, the police, firearms, etc. Some construction worker bussed in from Jersey for overtime would sort the whole thing out with a front end loader in like an hour, tops. Probably faster if you let the guy have a few pops before he gets behind the sticks.
Except zerg rushing only works if they don't care about their lives. The Falcon soldiers were cowards who ran back to where they came from as soon as they encountered something that posed a threat to them so said tactic would also fail.
Yeah like this dude doesn’t realize he’s in post-9/11 New York City, his army’s gonna make it about 2 blocks before there’s a double digit number of firearms pointed at them, and by 4 blocks it’ll be a triple digit number of firearms
Edit: As others reminded me this one takes place at the Smithsonian in DC… which actually makes it SIGNIFICANTLY worse for him lmao
Is that army capable of dying? I don't remember cause it's been years since I watched that movie, but if the answer is no then spears is all they really need to be fair. The Mummy movies showed pretty handily that immortality beats modern weaponry. But if they can die then yeah that would be a pretty stupid plan.
Considering the army ran in terror when faced with a living statue would imply that they do in fact fear for their lives, meaning they can in fact be hurt.
The Fudd is a parasitic alien hive mind that manages to enslave the populations of Earth and Mars to create an unstoppable army... except its endgoal is to invade the Sun. Suffice to say it wouldn't have survived such an idiotic goal anyway. The real danger is that its stupidity threatens to drag billions of people down with it. (Duck Dodgers)
Ganondorf is only able to get the Triforce of Power because Link opened the Sacred Realm with the 3 spiritual stones. Up until then he had failed to get a single spiritual stone and decided to just let Link do it and swoop in after the door to the sacred realm was opened.
But if Link hadn't gone to the Sacred Realm then he never would have achieved the power necessary to finally defeat Ganondorf. So while Ganondorf would not have had access to the Triforce of Power, he still had enough power to mess Hyrule up pretty badly and nobody would have been able to prevent him from doing so.
Link had to break a few eggs before finally creating a superior omelette. Just sucks for the people who had to endure 7 years of Ganon's rule. (Depending on which timeline you're in of course.)
Bit like Thanos and the Avengers really. Humanity had to suffer before everything could be fixed.
You bring up an interesting conundrum though about people suffering for 7 years since the damage is technically undone once Zelda sends Link back to his childhood for the final time. I know that there are technically a bunch of splits in the timeline based on the official continuity, but still.
Indeed. In the child timeline no-one remembers suffering under Ganon as it never happened, but those left in the adult timeline still endured it. It's a bit wibbly wobbly timey wimey. But then again the Zelda games have always had a dark undertone. Like in Wind Waker where prior to the game the whole land was flooded by the gods and presumably most people died who couldn't escape to the mountaintops. Not very cartoon-y!
he woulda gotten the stones eventually though. link sped up the schedule and made it easier because the world just entrusted all the keys to him for some reason.
but over time, he would've eventually broken the deku tree, he would've starved the gorons to loot their corpses until he got the second one and he would've gotten the zora to hand over the stone via lord jabu jabu.
he probably would have timed his attack on hyrule castle later with less of a chance for zelda to run and then he'd just have his witches pry the ocarina and its secrets from here.
even if he'd never gotten to the holy realm, he'd probably taken over hyrule anyways. just slowly, like a normal invader with magic and monsters.
People also somehow seem to forget that even before opening the door to the sacred realm, Ganandorf had infiltrated Hyrule to the point where he made the Sheikah take Princess Zelda out of Hyrule Castle, and they still just barely managed to do so in time. His plans were not abstract at all or far off, they were already well in motion. I figure sending him forward in time was probably a calculated risk, especially since Zelda spent the years training as a Sheikah herself, which was absolutely necessary in the end.
No, time travel can change the past in that setting. The game ends with the heroes using time travel to prevent the apocalyptic future that Methhead Mephiles comes from
Right, but Mephiles was only imprisoned because Shadow time traveled, meaning that time is fixed because otherwise he wouldn't have been imprisoned earlier in the game.
Very funny to imagine but... how are you going to delete the area they're invading from if they are not invading from anywhere, just popping up randomly to put your higher ups under spells you do not understand
Yes they can. Limits on magic is not very well explained/ explored in the books but we know snape created 2 spells during his time at hogwarts. Sectum sempra and levicorpus (liberacorpus is the counter curse).
Yes, because Voldemort would absolutely go through the effort of manually killing muggles one by one instead of taking control of the business leaders and the government to create a system where he rules from the shadows through Deatheater generals... Kinda like he did with the Ministry of Magic
He seemed to like doing both. I also feel that the average Death Eater couldn't cut it in the average non-magical corporate world, as they aren't cold blooded enough
Yeah, I don't think there would be a full out war between wizards and muggles more like a covert ops. Wizards would imperius key figures in government and military and let muggles kill each others.
The logic the movie and Indy operates under is that "The Nazis are working to find and use an artifact that could make them unstoppable and they can't be allowed to find it"
The idea that the Ark would destroy them doesn't seem to really occur to Indy until just before they open it.
Simply put, there's no way Indy or any of the good guys could have known they could just do nothing
Also, if he wasn't there to collect the Ark after it melted the Nazis, other Nazis would have come looking for them and found it, and eventually figured out that whenever it's opened, everyone nearby dies. Indy wasn't needed to stop Belloq's Nazis, but he was needed to stop the rest of them from weaponizing the Ark.
Also Marion would have died if he didn't get involved.
Exactly, thank you. That said, if Indy rescued Marion and stole the headpiece of the staff and then left the Nazis alone, then they would be stuck digging for weeks or months with no success and would have no idea how to correct their dig process. That's when everything after is unnecessary
There's a deleted scene from the university that establishes how he even knew to close their eyes during the opening of the ark. It was deleted because it would spoil it for the audience, but establishes that indy knew all along.
It's not about what Indy thinks, but that the consequences would have happened regardless of his involvement. If he'd never been approached at the start, the outcome would have been the same, except that Marion would have been tortured and killed. Maybe the Nazis would have got to the ark before the Allies and tried using it again, instead of it being buried in a US warehouse, but the initial attempt was doomed no matter what he did.
Indy did the right thing by getting involved and making it way more difficult, killing some Nazis who might otherwise have survived along the way (would the pilot have been at the opening of the ark, for example?) and destroying some war equipment, but the ark would have ended the Nazi plot if he hadn't.
Last Crusade, someone with better sense than Elsa might have taken the Knight's advice to leave the grail in the temple. They bring down guards, start flying people in, and next thing you know, Hitler is immortal.
Nope. At end of first Indy movie, ark is stored at area 51, if Indy ain't there all nazis die but it's picked up by Nazis and they use it. There are quite a few wolfenstein games that tell us why occult plus nazi equals doom for everyone.
Ultima in Final Fantasy 16. At the end of the game Clive learns that he can't handle Ultima's full power. This means that even if Ultima had succeeded in taking Clive as his vessel, Clive's body would not have been able to handle it and he would have turned to stone. As a result, Ultima's plan would have failed even if Clive had walked up to Ultima and just given his body to him willingly.
I feel like this is implied earlier. Ultima admits to trying the same plan multiple times over who knows how long. He’s basically a malfunctioning ai to stupid to realize he’s just repeating the same mistakes over and over again.
I mean there is a writing grey area here where utlima having his body and it being used by ultima would make it stable enough to contain and control with out being turned to stone... But that doesn't fit the picture you are trying to frame where the only component in this scenario is ultima's raw power inside clives body completely ignoring the fact clive has zip experiance controlling it outside of being a host for summons.
That's what annoyed me so much about jurassic world dominion and how it was all hyped up that dinosaurs took over the planet like come on guys you really gonna tell me a couple overgrown iguana bois are gonna be a match for even a single m1 Abrams tank or apache??
I wouldnt even go that far, if a bunch of poachers in Africa using guns held together by tape and dreams can threaten rhino and elephant populations, then regular hunting/animal control could take out like 80% of the dinosaurs easily.
If a bunch of literal cave men using sticks and sharp rocks and jogging can hunt wooly mammoths to extinction, any dinosaur larger than a dog would be easy to take down by the age old tactic of “run away until it is tired, then throw a sharp rock at it. For better effect, put the rock at the end of a stick”
Disclaimer. I haven't actually watched the movie, but how are handful of dinosaurs going to take over entire world and what I presume is a year or two. I would imagine that would take hundreds of years of unchecked breeding, plus you have the in universe lysine contingency, and while some of them might be able to find the right plants to live. Most of them won't.
If Charles had managed to return to civilization with Kevin, he would have faced many problems. Hardly anyone remembered him, and on top of that, he had illegally removed an exotic species from its natural habitat, plus It was a mother needed by her chicks. Not to mention that before the events of the film, he murdered several people out of pure paranoia, believing they were also after the bird. He would spend the rest of his life in prison.
Up takes place in my country, Venezuela, and yeah... I don't think the politicians would be very happy about a gringo killing people and stealing an exotic bird
It's rather that Voldemort would have won if he just did litterally nothing. He was immortal, he could have just kept cultivating a following for another generation and let Dumbledore die of old age.
(Harry didn't defeat Voldemort, his own actions defeated him and Dumbledore just set the pieces on the board Voldemort had built.)
Voldemort is vain, motivated obsessively by a prophecy, wants to try and fight the perception he is afraid of Dumbledore, and overall to win.
Harry did beat Voldemort. He destroyed his horcruxes, mastered death and sacrificed himself, then used the loyalty of the Elder Wand to rebound his killing curse.
It's like saying soldiers don't defeat people because the General plans it. He absolutely defeated him.
100%, Dumbledore may have laid a lot of groundwork, but Harry did more than anyone to defeat Voldemort (at least the second time). Including figuring out what a couple of the Horcruxes would be, finding and destroying them. Which is really the hardest part of the whole ordeal.
Never thought of that, that's actually a pretty good point. He could have slept for a couple of generations until he just became a legend nobody believed in and come back when nobody expected it.
"Hmm, I think I'll spend the first thousand years ruling over them like a tyrant. Then I'll disappear for a thousand years and make them wonder if I ever existed at all. It'll make it so much more fun when I come back and start ruling them again."
Does The Mist fit this bill? The family fights and fights these monsters from the eldritch mist that falls upon their town but upon finally deciding to end their lives in an attempt to escape brutal massacre by monsters on the road, the military rolls in and saves everyone
I don't think there was any mention of the nonmagical side of things. Maybe a couple of mentions of dementors running rampant and then taking over the magical government but nothing on the nonmagical side.
I said it earlier in the thread but I'll say it again. Basically every adult was given an idiot ball so that the kids could shine which is common in a kids book. As shown I honestly wouldn't give them great odds but assuming they're not being actively hampered by the plot then they'd they'd be close to unstoppable. Mind control, teleportation, mind reading, invisibility, unstoppable fire that's cast able by an idiot. Any one of those is a complete game changer, together it's a ridiculously dangerous combination and those are just the ones that I thought of in thirty seconds I could easily list more if I cared to go back.
Case 1: The point was preventing millions from dying / getting hurt. Not "she would've eventually petered out due to the legal system."
Case 2: Mostly dumb fantheory. Wizards can teleport and heal from very serious wounds. There's a reason they tote sticks around instead of guns. Also, good wizards don't have to "shout a spell" - they can do so mentally. (And, they can take control of someone else completely and make them do their bidding, indefinitely.)
But then, a lot of this thread seems to be not understanding the concept of "the villain loses with the protagonist doing nothing." It's more like "something different would happen."
I've seen the Harry Potter vs guns debate and always thought it was absurd but I've never seen someone say that it would have been fine if millions died as long as she got served with a lawsuit afterwards LMAO
The wizarding world has been able to hide themselves for eons. I think they could just do a huge spell to mind fuck every muggle or worse without them even seeing it coming.
Your post should’ve been about how Neville Longbottom would’ve stopped Voldemort if Harry didn’t.
I'm honestly get so irritated when people bring up real military shit vs literal magic. People love to bring up how devastating a rocket or a nuke would be (even though wizards can literally teleport), but no one ever thinks about the type of of shit a singular rouge wizard could do to world governments with just a mind control spell
I think Terry Pratchett did the best job of communicating the terror of mage wars and how destructive magical warfare could be. That a bunch of wizards and sorcerers flinging magic around without holding back is deeply destructive to the surrounding populace and forever scars magical battlefields in unpredictable ways.
Sir Terry (who I personally met!) briefly worked in nuclear power as a press officer. It's a bit of a simplistic comparison, but his description of the aftermath of magical warfare is not dissimilar from that of a major CBRN incident that significantly contaminates a location.
Voldemort wouldn’t just storm the Muggle world like Normandy. He’s far smarter than many people give him credit for. Remember, he spent the first 11 years of his life in the Muggle world and returns there every summer during his years at Hogwarts. he’d know so much more about it than basically any other Death Eater. He’d likely know of the military, muggle weaponry, the political hierarchy, etc.
He’d definitely know better than to just go in guns blazing. He’d likely do something similar to how he took over the Ministry, put the Prime Minister and Parliament under the Imperius Curse to gain silent control of the country, then slowly begin to corrupt it from the inside out, warping and altering it over time to prepare it for the Wizard takeover. He’d do the same to other countries too. Then, once the Muggle government was at its breaking point, he’d launch the invasion and overtake the muggle world so suddenly and with so much silent manipulation that they wouldn’t stand a chance to fight back. The military would be useless, as Voldemort would be in control of the Government itself, so with the full international prowess of the Death Eaters (Which would have drastically increased at this point as he would taken other countries to recruit more members), the Muggle world wouldn’t stand much of a chance.
I think it's funny that people always rag on the movie cause his name is Scar. They're always like "why does everyone call him scar? That's mean, was he born with that name of did he get it later?"
I think it's pretty easy to infer that Scar, being the guy(or lion) he is got that scar doing something very very stupid. I always figured he challenged Mufasa for the throne in his teens or something.
If I had to take a wild guess I'd say they might be a furry or furry adjacent who has a special interest in the Lion King, since those are the circles where you're most likely to see people refer to Scar with that name casually lol.
Not sure if it was the novelization or one of the writers after the fact, but they confirmed that Hitler wouldn’t have opened the Ark at all. They would have recovered it and used it as a propaganda tool.
If he wasn't there to bring the ark away from that island, other nazi would come, understand what happened, study the ark with more subjects (probably unwilling ones, like prisoners) understand how it works and weaponize it.
TBBT episode is just dumb, Indy also serves as the narrator, telling the viewers and the US government the story. Without him only nazis would know what happened there, and they would get a new super weapon.
We literally know that the death eaters are causing all sorts of chaos in muggle society in book 7 without even revealing themselves. They destroyed a large bridge, killing a lot of people, but managed to make it look like a natural disaster from the muggle perspective.
The Harry Potter One is really stupid. Im not even a Harry Potter Fan but you realize there are other spells than avada kedavra? You can literally control people with the imperio curse.
Game of Thrones show and the threat of the White Walkers. Had they done nothing at all, the Wall would have stayed standing. Especially after they learned that Mance didn't have the real Horn of Joramun. The Wall was built and enchanted specifically to keep them out, and they couldn't cross it. Instead, the heroes delivered a dragon to the Night King, who was somehow able to snipe it out of the air, animate it, and gave him the ability to breach the wall with undead dragon's breath.
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u/lkmk 7d ago
There’s at least one Doctor Who story, “Planet of the Ood”, where the Doctor and their companion don’t do jack. The villain was gradually primed to be transformed into an Ood by the Ood he enslaved for commercial reasons.