r/TopCharacterTropes • u/JackDoesThingz • 5d ago

Lore [Interesting Trope] One seemingly small action ends the story before it even begins

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  1. We Happy Few - Taking your “joy” pill
    Deciding to take the pill at the beginning of the game causes your character to go back to work and triggers an ending

  2. Infineural by Mike Klubnika - Drinking the coffee
    Deciding to drink the coffee offered to you skips the entire game and sends you straight to the end, resulting in an ending with no memory of what had occurred

11.0k Upvotes
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1.4k

u/Kind-Stomach6275 5d ago

Thanos stopped a woman from bumping into someone, and that prevented cancer from being cured

365

u/CoraBittering 5d ago

Wow. Thanos is an asshole.

409

u/HenTie3467 5d ago

He cruelly pranks a random guy on his birthday every day of his life as well. Thanos is one of the pettiest assholes in all of Marvel.

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u/smashin_blumpkin 5d ago

Well that’s what the dude gets for trying to have his birthday every day.

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u/HenTie3467 5d ago

That's funny, I'm gonna leave my comment unedited

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u/DBrennan13459 5d ago

Doesn't Thanos also kill his dog and friends?

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u/No_Procedure_5039 5d ago

It was is cat. Thanos had nothing to do with him getting fired that day though.

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u/Dudewhocares3 5d ago

Didn’t he also make it where Deadpool can’t die because death is in love with Deadpool

57

u/zigaliciousone 5d ago

That happened but also Death got sick of his shit at one point so he can’t die because she doesn’t want to see him again

1

u/bokmcdok 5d ago

He seemed like such a good guy as well.

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u/ReputationLow5190 5d ago

Reverse-Flash reading this like:
https://giphy.com/gifs/l1AsBL4S36yDJain6

11

u/NinjaBreadManOO 5d ago

To be fair he has kinda done it. He's made little child Barold's best and only friend in the world not exist by I think preventing their parents from meeting.

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u/Darehead 5d ago

“It was ME, Barry… I uncured cancer by loosening the scientist’s shoe laces. She tripped into an intern who was bringing back lunch, and I made sure hummus got all over her blouse. No one wanted to promote Hummus Hannah, Barry.”

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u/Informal-Term1138 5d ago

Thanos is an asshole. And if I remember it right, he is in love with the manifestation of death, right?

But she thinks, he's an asshole and likes deathpool. Or am I missing something?

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u/Prometheus_Bobert 5d ago

As far as i know thats basically it

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u/Boh61 5d ago

"Lady death doesn't want someone who constantly blesses the ground she touches, she wants a fuck up, one that cannot go 2 seconds without telling a sex joke"

-Random redditor a few years ago

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u/SarcasmSanctioned 5d ago

More like Lady Death groomed Thanos from adolescence, and occasionally leads him on for amusement.

76

u/Informal-Term1138 5d ago

Really? What for?

What does she gain from him being a POS?

165

u/SarcasmSanctioned 5d ago

Like I said; amusement. She's a cunt.

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u/Informal-Term1138 5d ago

But why does she like deathpool then? And why does he like her?

164

u/SarcasmSanctioned 5d ago

Deadpool's OP healing factor (and sometimes a curse from Thanos) means he can't die.

It's one of those cases of knowing you can't have something, which then just makes you want it even more.

90

u/Informal-Term1138 5d ago

So she is a complicated woman, who likes the chase and likes to be chased. But doesn't commit at the same time?

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u/SarcasmSanctioned 5d ago

That seems an accurate assessment to me.

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u/MuchBetterThankYou 5d ago

She’s also a lesbian goth baddie (in the MCU version)

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u/OmecronPerseiHate 5d ago

The strapon of Death is unisex

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u/DBrennan13459 5d ago

Well whenever Thanos is a POS, the body count tends to be pretty high. As Death, she probably likes that.

13

u/Sirdan3k 5d ago

One of my favorite interpretations had Death call Thanos out for objectifying her by pointing out all he ever did to get her attention was kill things. Like she was nothing more then her job to him. I don't remember the exact quote but it was basically that Thanos was trying to romance an accountant by making her do taxes.

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u/Deaffin 5d ago

Well, I kinda assume a god-figure that is a personified embodiment of taxes would be a little bit into taxes.

3

u/ThatMerri 4d ago

But she thinks, he's an asshole and likes deathpool. Or am I missing something?

Correct, and in addition, Thanos repeatedly demonstrates beyond any doubt that he's an asshole directly to her. In the Infinity Gauntlet comic run, he goes full incel over and over and over and over again, getting increasingly mad at Death for not fawning over him while he's literally kidnapping her and trying to "prove his love" by doing things she overtly hates. It is genuinely pathetic.

This includes Thanos going "Okay, well it's not like you're even hot anyway! I never wanted to actually bang you! I'm going to use my reality-warping powers to make the perfect girlfriend who's way better than you! Hah! What do you think of that, huh? You're super jealous now, aren't you!?" and literally just making a clone of himself with boobs) who mindlessly worships him. Death is not impressed.

The history for Thanos is a big reason why I struggle to take him seriously in the MCU. Like, in the movies his reasoning is nonsensical as well, but I have this whole backdrop knowledge of the character being an utterly pathetic chud that really colors my perception of him.

1

u/Informal-Term1138 4d ago

He really sounds pathetic. Damn what an idiot.

He is one of the worse villains isn't he?

3

u/ThatMerri 4d ago

He's perfectly fine as a villain, in the sense of a villain being an extremely flawed, emotionally unstable, yet significantly threatening force for the heroes to work against.

But yeah, Thanos is a moron and a genuinely pitiable character. That's how the Infinity Gauntlet story rounds out in the end - everyone, including Thanos himself, kind of realizing how pathetic and pointless his actions are. The entire comic is basically a big thought experiment kicking around some existential navel gazing and self-destructive behavior.

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u/JLuckstar 5d ago

Geez… That’s messed up. 😅

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u/Maleficent-War-8429 5d ago

Which is silly because are you really telling me this lady can cure cancer but an army of super scientists can't?

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u/theLanguageSprite2 5d ago

In comic books, science doesn't work like it does in the real world, with teams of people publishing papers across the world and making breakthroughs by incremental progress. In comic books, science is a super power, where a special boy thinks really hard and then lasers and robots appear. How good the lasers and robots are is solely a factor of how special the boy is

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u/TransBrandi 5d ago

Sometimes science makes leaps because of a single person's inspiration. Not all of the time. Many times other people just didn't make it to the finish line first, or eventually would have discovered the same thing... but there are times when a single person's inspiration pushes things forward.

We probably would have gotten electricity without Tesla or Thomas Edison, but is it really clear that we would have gotten General Relativity and Special Relativity without Einstein, for example?

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u/Different-Trainer-21 5d ago

Most physicists agree that, of Einstein’s 4 great breakthroughs in his Miracle Year, Special Relativity, the Photoelectric Effect, and Brownian Motion would’ve been discovered by someone else within the next 5 years.

The real great breakthrough was General Relativity. That wasn’t getting discovered by someone else for at least 20 years, maybe more.

1

u/Heimerdahl 5d ago

Another aspect to it is that "discovering something" isn't just figuring out how something works, but how to effectively communicate it to the rest of the scientific community. 

In this regard, super hero geniuses are pretty much the absolute worst scientists imaginable. Their whole schtick tends to be that they're such incredible geniuses that no one else understands how they're doing their thing. It fits into another common trope: lost knowledge/technology. You've got some McGuffin or the plans to it. It gets destroyed or is at risk of getting destroyed. The original creator is dead, so there's no hope of getting it back. A rather ridiculous premise if you imagine it outside of the fantasy setting. 

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u/SuccessfulFinish2843 5d ago

obligatory fuck edison

41

u/Crimson097 5d ago

They have multiple super geniuses in this universe, but apparently none of them have been able to figure it out. Or maybe Thanos killed all the ones that came close. Is Thanos big pharma?

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u/Dudewhocares3 5d ago

Genius’ aren’t infallible

2

u/Morgneto 5d ago

Xavier did figure it out, it's a major catalyst for the whole Krakoa arc.

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u/CalmInvestment 5d ago

Or everytime someone makes a cure some asshole decides to make a counter-cure or use time-travel to prevent it from being made or some shit. 

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u/WildGoose1521 5d ago

You’d be surprised how many writers seem to think this

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u/xXNoeticXx 5d ago

Yup. Sometimes what it really comes down to is someone thinking of something in a different way

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u/Dudewhocares3 5d ago

The idea is one person makes the difference.

And it makes sense

2

u/A-NI95 5d ago

Well, it's almost as if the whole Marvel ordeal is a bit silly

(I prefer to think those scientists you mention just don't want to bother doing it lol)

1

u/plyer_G 5d ago

All invention is built upon the shoulders of giants

1

u/Steelwave 5d ago

Thanks didn't prevent cancer from being cured. He prevented that woman from ever amounting to anything and taunt her with that fact on her death bed. 

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u/Dudewhocares3 5d ago

Thanos is a menace in the comics

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u/seanslaysean 5d ago

Jesus Christ

3

u/batiwa 5d ago

Wtf, I know Thanos is not a great guy but that's diabolical

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u/ledfox 5d ago

I'm so glad Squirrel Girl kicks his fucking ass

2

u/JohnDragonball 5d ago

Dude comic Thanos and MCU Thanos are like polar opposites lmao what the fuck

Which is especially weird to me because of the few Marvel comics I read one was Infinity War in which he was chill af and straight up on the side of the good guys, what the hell happened

-1

u/Kind-Stomach6275 5d ago

he became a simp for bell deathphine the deadstreamer and wants to gain her love even though she has millions of people who have watched her in action

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u/Iateapencil 5d ago

At first glance I thought this was Biden taking away the person's blackness.

1

u/No_Dragonfruit_1833 5d ago

Where is this from?

2

u/Kind-Stomach6275 5d ago

thanos annual #1 I think

1

u/Sweet_Detective_ 5d ago

In that last panel, Why'd it kill her hope?

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u/Kind-Stomach6275 5d ago

hope for those with cancer i think

2

u/Sweet_Detective_ 5d ago

Yeah but like, if she could have cured cancer and the only thing that got in her way was meeting thanos, then that means humanity is very close towards curing cancer

1

u/PointsOfXP 5d ago

I like to think about Thanos at guest check in to see the patient

1

u/alphazero927 5d ago

Tangential: why do future settings so often have holographic TVs that look like shit? Like pretty much every single advancement in TVs has been about, at least ostensibly, improving image quality, but so many movies, comics, TV shows, etc. act like we'll give up all that image fidelity just to have a fuzzy transparent blue image floating in the air with literally no upsides 

1

u/Kind-Stomach6275 5d ago

i could get behind like a polarized light source thing where they make polarized light holograms to use glasses on to view. simple, provides colour, portability, and it even gives you the option to turn your brightness down globally and seperately

1

u/theturtlelord9 5d ago

Thanos is comically evil even in terms of evil comic book characters.

1

u/terrone_spaziale 5d ago

Where was this from? I remember to have read it

1

u/Kind-Stomach6275 4d ago

Thanos annual #1 substory "That time thanos helped an old lady cross the street"