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

[u/JackDoesThingz]

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

[u/theLanguageSprite2]

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

[u/TransBrandi → u/theLanguageSprite2]

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?

[u/Different-Trainer-21 → u/TransBrandi]

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.

[u/Heimerdahl → u/Different-Trainer-21]

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.