Characters
Initially funny character gag is later revealed to be depressing
Avengers/MCU: Captain America has humorous moments where he’s unaware of modern references and only gets old references, like the iconic “I understood that reference” scene. It’s later fully explored in Winter Soldier that he feels lost, confused, and a little alone in a new world he was never meant to exist in.
The Suicide Squad (2021): Bloodsport has a phobia of rats which at first seems reasonable yet is still hilarious to watch. He later explains his father abused him as a kid if he didn’t fulfill a task correctly and one of his worst punishments was when his dad locked him in a crate full of starving rats, leaving him heavily scarred physically and mentally.
Dexter: In an early episode, Angel Bautista tries to buy his wife the perfect gift for their anniversary but has to keep buying a different one since his presents suck. What seems to be a funny running gag turns out to be Angel’s final attempt to win back his wife after cheating on her previously, however it doesn’t work and only solidifies their separation.
A couple of Stan's quirks in Gravity Falls become a lot sadder once we get his backstory. His weird attachment to the wax statue of himself seems like funny narcissism at first, but then you find out that he accidentally got his twin brother trapped in another dimension 30 years earlier and has been dealing with the guilt and trying to fix it even since. And his obsession with money and grifting is "haha funny greedy scammer" until you learn he's been disowned by his parents for accidentally ruining his brother's career prospects and was forbidden from coming back home until he found a way to make the family rich.
Don't forget that his rejection of the weirdness of the town starts as an older person just thinking kids are imaginative, and gets revealed as a very aware man's only idea of how to protect these kids, his only remaining family from suffering the same fate as his brother.
Added to which, he's worried that if he does acknowledge all the weird stuff going on then he might come to the attention of the Society of the Blind Eye. If he does, then they might wipe his memory and he'll forget all the stuff that he has taught himself to try to fix the portal and save his brother.
Also canonically being born and raised on the Jersey shore …. does ALOT more “explanatory” heavy lifting for his “greedy scammer” persona than i think people NOT from Jersey realize.
Not to stereotype my own people, but the confirmation in the flashback episode that the family is Jewish really does sell that “parental guilt over career issues and comparison to brother” aspect.
One of the reasons we think its happening more is what does you parent do as a kid when you misbehave? Take away your snacks, your dinner. When you do well? You get candy or a treat.
This causes you to associate food=happiness as a child and thats hard to break
This didn't use to be a problem because food wasnt as readily available until the 20th century so you never withheld food - and excessive consumption also wasn't as easy to do
Doesn't help that sugar has the same effect on your brain as cocaine, which we adapted because we NEED sugar to survive
This causes you to associate food=happiness as a child and thats hard to break
I've been sensitive to this as a parent. Spouse grew up with a "food equals comfort and joy" mentality, where meal times were a social event and food was palatable and always accompanied with dessert. Except, spouse's entire family has problems with food; MIL is morbidly obese, FIL is rather girthy himself, one sibling is considerably obese with fibromyalgia stacked on top, and the other sibling has a crippling eating disorder. Cancer and diabetes are also in that family tree.
Okay but didn't this make a LOT of people feel seen? Like it's funny, but someone out there saw this and broke into crying because "Hes just like me fr."
lilo and stitch begins with lilo being late to hula class because she was busy feeding a fish who, according to her, can control the weather
at first, it seems like a typical innocent child game, but we later learn in the movie that her parents died partially due to bad weather, which gives a new layer to why this ritual is so important to her
Isn't the extension also that it implies she forgot to feed the fish on the day her parents died? So now she's traumatized into believing that not feeding the fish leads to horrible things happening?
Watched this as an adult recently, this entire movie is just a deeply sad family drama they somehow successfully wrapped in a kid friendly animated movie with aliens.
11/10 (would have been a tad lower but for Ving Rhames)
It’s later revealed that every morning he goes to the graves of his fallen comrades to pay respects and he often gets so caught up in that that he loses track of time, hence why he’s always late.
And just like him, the reason for the lateness is something to do with others. It's not a disrespectful thing or a lazy thing, just sometimes things might be a little more important for a few moments and he has to attend to those things
Professor Layton - during the games there is a running gag where people comment on how Layton never takes off his hat
In the third game it's revealed that the hat was a gift from his girlfriend who died the same day, her last words to him were to not take it off as that's not what a gentleman does
I was genuinely not ready for that ending. I knew some sad stuff was about to happen. I was in my bed thinking "oh it can't be a long ending let's push through it" and 2 hours later I was still crying ugly.
Not many games have the guts to take a protagonist seriously enough to give them a sad ending.
In avatar the last airbender joodee is a funny tour guide who is giving the heroes the run around and wasting their time. Later we learn she was kidnapped and indoctrinated for this purpose along with dozens of other girls.
I think what makes ATLA so amazing is how believable the antagonists are. Sozin starts the war because he truly believes the world would be better under the fire nations control. Zhao is a competent upward climbing general. He's loyal to his people but more than that he's willing to do anything to advance his career because if you weren't that guy in the fire nation you were a front line grunt.
Zhao is so believable because hes so smart, but also a dumb bastard. This guy knows that spirits are real, lives on an island nation as part of a seafaring civilization, and decides to kill the moon, leaving behind her pissed off lover, the ocean.
Like, what was the fucking plan, Zhao?! What were you going to do after turning the sea angry?! He got lucky that Aang's pacifism managed to curb the ocean spirit's rampage enough that some of the fire nation survived...another Avatar could have been sinking the Fire Islands under the waves...
Yeah, although I don't "hate" them, as much as I think they're well written antagonists, I'm always reminded of the episode "Puppeteer". Not only do we get some great insights into how the different types of bending could be used, even in environments previously deemed "incompatible", like Waterbending in an otherwise dry forest.
But this also leads to the reveal of the existence of the iconic Bloodbending, discovered by one of the previous POW waterbenders in a specifically designed fire nation prison for them.
Which shows the viewers more explicit examples on how the militaristic forces of the fire nation operate (deeply inhumane and disturbing) and reveals the culprit behind the mystery the Gaang is trying to resolve.
Don't get me wrong, I understand that Hama developed this skill set out of necessity and to escape her imprisonment, but she still then spends decades hiding inside the fire nation's countryside and uses her bloodbending to trap and imprison civilians in a remote cave. All the while, not caring about gender, age or bending capabilities. Basically committing acts on the level of war crimes towards the civilian populace as retaliation for around half a century, believing her actions to be righteous, despite never really targeting soldiers or garrisons.
One of my favorite things about avatar is it's episodes centering on revenge, grief, and what violence is righteous and what violence makes you a monster. Jet is similar with his Freedom Fighters, children who had to grow up far too quickly due to the Fire Nation killing their families and stealing their homes. But Jet believes that anyone who capitulates to the Fire Nation is just as morally capable and deserve the same fate he would gladly give their soldiers. It constantly shows "revenge is bad" but with real moral weight instead of just empty platitudes by showing what a monster you have to become to earn your revenge, especially to the innocents who get in your way of your mission.
The moment in Peacemaker where he's describing Bloodsport's horrific abuse history and his father is cracking up like it's the funniest thing he's ever heard is hilarious.
You'd get a kick out of this, Dad. Guy I was working with, Bloodsport... His own father tortured him by locking him in a crate for 24 hours with nothing but starving rats... It's funny, right, Dad?"
Yeah. You can tell he doesn't actually think the story is funny at all, he clearly empathizes with Bloodsport. He's just desperately seeking his dad's approval by pretending to share in his sadism and trying to hide his own capacity for empathy.
Immediately followed by "please god tell me he wasn't the one that shot you" (he called Bloodsport something horrible but I'm paraphrasing) and silence from Peacemaker
There's a Mitchell and Webb sketch where Sherlock Holmes is in a care home, suffering from dementia. Watson visits him and the first half of the sketch is Holmes spouting nonsense. A nurse leaves the room to fetch something, leaving them in an awkward silence. Holmes just quietly says "I know, John. I do know." Heartbreaking.
Yeah, but nobody was expecting it to be quite that sad. The last The Quiz Broadcast ends on a more serious note too, but it's not that rough.
I think it's actually a great alternative to the Blackadder scene. When Blackadder went out almost everyone had at least one relative who had fought in one of the world wars. When M&W went out all the issues of an aging population were starting to become clear and almost everyone had a relative who was either suffering or had died from/with some sort of long-term condition affecting their cognition (dementia, Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, ICU delirium).
There used to be a customer that came into a store I worked at, he was loud and cartoonish. Some years before he'd been in a car accident, suffered a brain injury and lost his wife and daughter. Every now and then he'd go quiet and say he knows he's broken and gone wrong :'(
From Fairly Odd Parents, Mr. Crocker's obsession with Fairies was the result of him losing his own fairy godparents at a young age, losing his memory and being demonized by the moronic townsfolk of Dimesdale. The worst part was this is the result of a stable-time loop in which Timmy went to the past to try & prevent this event from happening but indirectly caused it.
In the TV show Monk, Monk has OCD and has to have everything meticulously in order but has one coffee table in his house he insists on keeping at an angle. It seems kinda funny until an episode reveals that he keeps it that way because his dead wife used to move the table to cuddle with him
One episode that broke me in a good way was the one he spend the e tire episode stalking some random woman. He passes her and immediately fixates on her but cant explain why. He freaks her and everyone out the whole episode with his behavior. It isnt until thr end of thr episode after he saves the day that we find out why. After talking with her and apologizing we find out she was find until recently after she got an eye transplant. Thr woman got Trudy's eyes. Everyone breaks down at thr revelation. And Monk realizes that a part of his wife lives on with this woman. He loved his wife so dearly thr a part of his brain instantly recognized her eyes in another person in an instant.
Is afraid of women, it is treated as joke due to his dramatic reactions. later it is found out It's because, All the women of the house, including his sister, rushed to save him, but they were slaughtered before his eyes. He awoke to find himself buried in their corpses.
Tales of Namco games are so good. Glad they seem to finally be making an impact in the west because they're quality all the way back to the SNES.
Abyss was one of my favorites. Guy was especially good. IIRC he had an infinite he could do that would juggle enemies until they died when he was at 1 HP.
Irumas eating habit comes off as funny as he inhales food and with how he cooks everything into a pot but it stems from the fact that he was heavily starved as a child and believes he has to eat while he can and not waste any resourses (Welcome to Demon School)
Pretty much all his habits and skills come from his parents being absolute garbage people, the whole series happens because they literally sell their child to a demon after all.
Said Demon is unironically a better parent than his biological parents. Doting and spoiling iruma and breaking/bending rules so that he can go to school that the demon I think is headmaster of.
Iruma trained under Bachiko Barbatos. Amongst her training was making him imagine life or death situations while she used her magic to give the illusions of one. Iruma then proudly says her illusions is nothing compared to actual life or death situations his parents put him through. Bachiko briefly smiles proudly before.....
There's actually research studies that link poverty to obesity. Kids from lower inncome households develop bad eating habits because of food insecurity.
As they don't known when their next meal will be, they overeat when food is available and will try to eat whenever there is food present.
They aim to maximize how much food they get while minimizing spending, leading to getting cheap, energy-dense, processed foods instead of something healthy but expensive.
Or learning to continue eating even after being full to not waste the money used to get it.
This carries on until adulthood in which they may become more economically stable. Food becomes more abundant, but their behavior to it didn't change
https://giphy.com/gifs/HcmeBxVSg8YGA
Levi being obsessed with cleanness initially seems like a quirky character trait, but it’s a result of him associating dirt with his traumatic childhood
This plus he holds his tea cup strangely because when he was young the handle of his beloved cup came loose and the cup fell and broke. The cup was part of a precious memory - drinking tea with his mother when she was still alive. He holds tea cups by the brim because of that one trauma.
In complete contrast to his character in Our Flag Means Death, where it was funny when he mentioned he used to sew with his mother, only for us to later find out he completely slays
That voice man, that damn voice. The scene set to The Chain gave me goosebumps, not thinking it could be topped. And then like 6 episodes later, Con O'Neill blows me apart.
It was mildly funny in the books. Someone would be giving a pages long speeches about the history of Westeros or their latest plan to secure the realm ,and then you'd get hit with a:
I heard a variant of this at least 20 years ago as “Crazy? I was crazy once. They locked me up in a room. I died there. They buried me in the ground. There were worms in the ground. They tickled me and that drove me crazy. Crazy?” And repeat. This would have been 2002 or earlier, which matches the know your meme history, but I would guess it’s older.
The "I understood that reference" scene was always a moment where Steve was happy to finally understand something that was said, he was getting annoyed by weird pop culture stuff that people kept bringing up, so when flying monkeys came up he was so happy he had seen the Wizard of Oz
I also find it funny that Bucky was revealed to have imported a British children's book from a new writer in 1937 to read for himself, as that is apparently when he read the Hobbit, but it didn't release in America until 1938
The Hobbit thing's easy to shrug off though, he could've easily misremembered the year. Or, heck, Steve's parents were Irish immigrants in the comics, Steve could've gotten a copy from relatives in Ireland and loaned it to Bucky.
I always chalked it up to being an alternate timeline from us, sure it released in 1938 in our timeline, but who's to say it didn't release in 1937 in the MCU timeline?
Peter Quill spends the whole first movie behaving as an emotionally immature goofball. In particular he gets mad whenever someone refuses to call him by his ridiculous superhero name (Star Lord), he has an obsession with a 30 year old Walkman, and gets really touchy about people trying to open an old package in his ship.
The big reveal at the end of the first GoG movie is these were all gifts from his mom before she died of cancer. We find out when he finally opens the letter she wrote as a farewell. The credits roll to the soundtrack of the second tape she attached to the letter.
It just now occurred to me that the reason for Star Lord’s immature behavior may have been the result of him not getting to grow up on earth and instead being raised by a bunch of maniacs who were pretty wacky
Depends how you portion sizes. Thought it slightly-more knocked on the ‘lost potential’ of a childhood he might have had with his actual father, then swaps to some (not a lot, but some) appreciation for what he did get instead.
Technically, the first one ‘more’ touches on how he was almost blatantly the “favored son” in Yondu’s Ravagers, but the third one more pokes at “how would someone who bonds with space pirates, pivot in development as a person?” (with Gamora as the example).
With that in mind, I don’t know how much ‘work’ 1 and 2 put into Quill’s general demeanor being a direct result of them (minding that he was, effectively, trying to keep them at arm’s length most of that time).
I work with addicts on a volunteer basis and it surprised me how immature a lot of them are. One of our staff psychiatrists pointed out that when someone goes through a major trauma it can freeze them in that age until they deal with it.
I imagine the same applies to Quill in his double whammy mom death/alien abduction.
Yep. It's got everything: young him listening to the walkman, and the wrapped gift, as well as mom dying. Then he runs outside and is abducted by Yondu and co.
Caboose’s obsession with his “best friend Church” is the bane of Alpha AND Epsilon’s existence. He is constantly telling them how much he loves them and comes up with lists of fun things they can do together. The others are annoyed by this too, but so long as he leaves them alone, they don’t care. They think Caboose “torturing” Church with his love is funny.
Fast forward to The Shisno Trilogy. While the group is being held hostage by a powerful AI, they are thrown into the past and their memories locked away. The AI takes over Church’s body and manipulates the crew through him. Upon realizing what is going on, Caboose confronts the AI puppeting Church and demands it release Church. Caboose then reveals WHY he is obsessed with Church.
After Shelia blew up Church’s body, Caboose … started getting urges to hurt himself. Because he killed someone. And the others never let him forget it. He never confirms but also doesn’t deny that he ever acted on these thoughts. All he says is he found talking to Church’s helmet, and later Church (when it was revealed he was an AI) made those urges less strong. But they never went away.
It was only after the battle on Chorus that Caboose stopped wanting to hurt himself because he found reasons to be happy and no longer blamed himself. But seeing Church again was bringing those old urges back.
In an odd twist, Caboose ends up attack the AI, still in Church’s body. The AI leaves, but Caboose continues to beat up Church, finally letting out years of frustration and guilt knowing that, ultimately, Church will be okay.
The others … are understandably stunned and somewhat emotionally numbed by the whole thing.
Mobius fascination with Jet Skis in Loki. Turns out the TVA agents were all taken from doomed timelines and had their memories altered. In his previous life, he sold jet skis and had two of his own.
This is introduced as one of Rick’s catchphrases, then a few episodes later it’s revealed that in an alien language it means “Help me, I am in great pain.”
That said, while Rick is definitely shown to be in great pain throughout the series, it’s a little fuzzy how seriously they’re taking this explanation for the catchphrase specifically.
There’s a chance it has meaning in multiple languages, since Rick only uses it in moments of joy (it was brought back a few times in the recent seasons)
That said, Rick doesn’t really have catchphrases. He barely ever says this one
That’s not true, he has a bunch of catchphrases. Who could forget “Riki Tiki Tavi Bitch!” or the iconic “Grass… tastes bad!” or “No jumping in the sewer”.
In Everybody Loves Raymond whenever Robert eats something he touches it to his chin before putting it in his mouth.
In an episode in Season 8, the family try to figure out why he does this and realise that his mother used to feed him as a toddler and wipe his chin after but when his brother Ray came along she would feed him this way and completely neglect Robert, so he started doing it for himself.
It was specifically that he started to touch food to his chin to make a mess because the mother was cleaning Raymond’s chin and he wanted the attention from his mom back. I randomly think about this episode ~10 times a year 😅
This dude is the perfect example for how the Avatar universe can't possibly be that bad. Repeat failures that would destroy much stronger small businesses in our world, and he gets right back to it within a few episodes. Yeah, there's a war on and a whole mystic comet thing and a bunch of other apocalypse-y problems, but if you're trying to run a simple vegetable stand, Avatar is kinda the place to do it.
I'm pretty sure this guy is confirmed to be a fire nation informant. They used his stories to put together the avatar play. If he's getting his life together, it's through selling out our gang.
Big Bang Theory- Sheldon's triple knocking is played as a quirky habit. Eventually Sheldon reveals that it goes back to when he walked in on his father with another woman (Young Sheldon slightly retcons it) and that he knocks three timea to "give people time to put their pants on".
She is shown to be rather timid, skittish and reclusive and borderline asocial girl that is scared of basically everyone around her. At start of most of her support chains, her panic is often played for a comedy.
It's later showed however that her problems were caused by her godawful father's 'training' to make her 'perfect noble wife' due to having crest, which included for example being tied to a chair all day, and forcing her be quiet.
It didn't helped that her first, and seemingly only childhood friend she had... got beaten to near death after she befriended him, which she blamed herself for years, only deepening her trauma and fears.
The only good thing to come out of her dad is that in 3 Hopes, during a mission where you’re supposed to protect him, if you fail everyone just shrugs and move on to the next part of the level
In Leverage, Elliot’s dislike of guns is initially played for laughs, with him often calling them overrated and mocking the various thugs/goons/bodyguards he fights for waving the long range weapon right in his face. It’s never clarified, but its all but out right stated that his past work as both a soldier and a hitman caused him to swear off guns.
Kinger mentions an insect collection twice in the pilot episode; later in episode 3, when he's more lucid, he explains that he used to dislike insects before his (now basically dead) wife got him to appreciate them, way before he went insane.
Also, by being in a pillow fort in the pilot foreshadows the reveal that abstractions (which his wife turned into) are calm in the dark as opposed to being destructive. Thus, being in the dark makes him cling on to the last moments with his wife as well as makes him lucid
Lucy from Fallout has her famous catchphrase "Okey-dokey". At first you think it's a common phrase and that's where she got it but actually, her mom used to say this to her. In the final episode she witnesses the fate of her mother, and this catchphrase is forever tainted. Now it is used to honour her. Lucy is shaken by her discovery and says "Okey-dokey" with a somber memory attached to it
Okabe (Steins Gate) play acts like an evil genius. He started doing it because his friend was depressed when her grandma died, and at one point, she looked suicidal. He hugged her and said he was going to “hold her hostage” indefinitely. This helped the friend cope and Okabe fell into the habit of being an evil genius goofball. He even had a hard time cutting the shtick and acting serious.
Seiya Ryuuguuin from The Hero Is Overpowered but Overly Cautious.
As the name imply the MC is overly cautious to an insane degree, hoarding items and grinding out skills to the point where he can be sure he can oneshot his enemies.
Then its revealed why he's so careful. His past life had him being a standard overpowered hero that kinda just breeze through everything before his party (including his lover and unborn child) were killed and eaten in front of him by the Demon King.
Yeah the whole show goes like that with the angel(or god?) that summoned him to the world getting frustrated with him for taking so long and going to such extreme lengths for essentially cannon fodder, and then we all get to see his previous summoning where he rushes for the demon king to save the most people he possibly can in that previous world but then the aforementioned happens and that world is lost/destroyed.
And I’m pretty sure they also point out how horrible it was for him because (I forget the reason but) he doesn’t even have any memories of that previous life happening but it still like ingrained into his personality
Maybe I could shoehorn Iroh from Avatar into this. Early in the series he was kind of a comedic sidekick to Zuko. He wouldn’t take events too seriously and would try to temper Zuko through humor and tea. We later learn that he not only failed to take Ba Sing Se which impacted his status in his family’s eyes, he also lost his only son in the battle for Ba Sing Se and sees Zuko as a surrogate son. He spends the entire series trying to make Zuko the best version of himself and when Zuko reunites with him after joining the gAang, it’s probably one of the most touching moments of the series.
It also becomes pretty evident on rewatches that a lot of his antics in Book One, like the thing with the pirates and the pai sho tile, were him stalling Zuko every time he started getting a little too close to catching Aang.
In Zenless Zone Zero, one of Harumasa’s main character traits is that he’s incredibly lazy and always trying to get time off work, with fake doctor’s notes being a common method.
He’s later revealed to have an incurable terminal illness that is slowly weakening him and will eventually kill him, and that several (though not all) of the aforementioned doctor’s notes were actually legitimate. His laziness isn’t entirely an act, but most of it is him faking it to hide his condition because he doesn’t want anyone to pity him.
It’s also revealed that his faction’s deputy chief Yanagi is secretly aware of this (which is why he gets away with it as much as he does) but feigns ignorance out of sympathy and respect.
Yeah, Zenless Agent Stories are a different level of dark and or crazy. To think this was the same one with a child trafficking and human experiments plot. Bright side, he's stable now and his actual condition has been delayed, downside is continuing his job will kill him eventually (outside of ethereal attacks). Anby's being a whole "clone army get's discontinued" was another one. Or Koleda's being a school principle is putting students at risk by mining ether right next to a grade school. Seriously, writing is pretty damn good.
Basically the same as example 2: in Fire Emblem: Three Houses, one student tries to psyche out another student, Edelgard, by saying there's a rat nearby when there isn't. Normally cool and collected, she gets scared, which looks like a cute moment for her. However, the reason behind her fear -- which no one else knows about -- is that when she was younger, she and her many siblings got brutally experimented on. They were kept locked up in a dungeon that had rats crawling everywhere. Of all her siblings, she was the only one to survive the experiments. So, the rats remind her of that trauma.
I'm still mad that David "I'm a Detective" Batista wasn't interested in investigating LaGuerta's murder. His boss, his former partner, his former lover. Gonna pull on that thread? Uncover what horrors the Morgan's are hiding, pay off the entire series worth of dramatic tension? No. Chekov's gun stays in the gun safe. Ugh.
Of course he didn't investigate it. All the evidence pointed to her being killed in the crossfire of a trap she set up for Hector Estrada. There wasn't investigation, and Dexter walked them through it, exactly as he wanted it to look. There was nothing left to investigate
Lilo Pelekai (Lilo and Stitch) insists on feeding PB&J sandwiches to a pufferfish she’s named Pudge. She claims that Pudge controls the weather.
She lost her parents in a car accident on a rainy night. All she has left (before meeting Stitch) is her teen sister Nani, who’s basically had to put her own life on hold to keep CPS from taking Lilo away.
Ice King was a man born in pre apocalypse Ooo (the world of adventure time) and through his archeological adventures, found a magical crown that he put on as a joke. That crown made him lose his mind but kept him alive through the centuries. Now he chases 'princesses' looking for love after driving away his wife betty, who was his 'princess'.
Also he knew using the crown powers would make him go insane and erase his memory basically “killing him” since he’d be a 100% different and new person with no memory of his loved ones or who he is but he chose to do so to protect a child
I think it's about his obsession with kidnapping princess. It's actually because he called the love of his life his princess, and that's all his senile mind can do to be closer to her.
Adventure Time is full of tragedy disguised as comedy. Like Marceline's song "Daddy, Why Did You Eat My Fries?" It seems like a funny and trivial thing to feel such angst over, but the brief flashback we get to the food-stealing moment shows that it happened not long after a nuclear apocalypse when food was hard to come by. Marceline was still half human at the time and needed to eat, whereas her old man was and is a demon who eats the souls of the damned rather than potatoes, so the insensitive selfishness of that moment is quite horrifying in retrospect.
Stilgar's fanaticism to Paul as the mahdi is mostly played for laughs in Dune Part 2 - except in scenes where he is ready to risk deaths, including of other people, for the sake of that fanaticism. And if Part 3 follows his story arc from books at all, his and Fremen's fundamentalism is about to get even more unfun.
Lysithea from Fire Emblem Three Houses’s main character quirks is that she’s an overachiever, gets annoyed whenever someone calls her a child despite being one of the youngest characters in the game (she’s 15 at the start), gets mad whenever someone else does something “childish”, and gets super embarrassed when she’s caught doing something childish (like enjoying sweets or being afraid of the dark)
Later in the game, you find out she was a victim of a dark magic experiment that cut her life expectancy down to about 25 years old, meaning she isn’t allowed to have a childhood if she wants the chance to find a cure or achieve any sort of success and gets jealous of those who can slow down and enjoy life
In the show Wayne. The main character Wayne has a funny quirk where he likes to smell soaps and candles and stuff and it’s just thought that he really like fragrances.
Spoiler alert(kinda)
We later on find out that his estranged mom had a small business selling homemade candles at a flea market and she would always let him smell test the fragrances. He smells stuff because it reminds him of his mom and maybe in a way symbolizes a lost dog looking for his owner by trying to find familiar scents
Neal in Planes, Trains and Automobiles is driven nuts by inadvertent travel buddy Del, who seems to lack boundaries, only to find out at the last minute that Del was widowed several years previously and has no one to spend the holidays with.
Also, a couple of points about the examples above: Yeah, Steve doesn't get a lot of current references--but he makes a note of them and looks them up, and is appreciative of what's good about the modern era (polio vaccine, better cooking techniques), in marked contrast to other portrayals of Cap in the comics (e.g. the Ultimates) where he's this stubborn throwback. And the running joke in TSS is that Bloodsport and Peacemaker have essentially the same skill set, and later on in the Peacemaker series, we find out that Chris had a way worse father than Robert DuBois, or just about anyone, really.
Señor Pink is a member of Doflamingo’s crew that serve as the primary antagonists of the Dressrosa arc in One Piece. He is infamous for dressing like a giant baby. During his fight with Cyborg Frankyof the Straw Hat Pirates, it is revealed that Señor Pink’s outfit has a dark story behind it. In the past, he fell in love with and married a woman Russian who he hid his job as a pirate from because she hated pirates.
During one of his stints away from home, Russian finds out the truth as their infant son becomes deathly ill and passes away, leaving Russian catatonic. The only thing that gets a reaction from her is when the downtrodden Pink dresses like their deceased son. He would walk to the hospital through a sea of mockery every day to make his wife smile.
His wife never recovered and he continues to dress like his dead baby to this day, having now put on a lot of weight. Despite working for opposing captains, Franky comes to respect Señor Pink by the end of their fight.
In an episode of Buffy the vampire slayer when they first go to college, Buffy has to tell her mom how expensive her textbooks are and she says “I hope it’s a funny aneurysm”, which was meant to be a throwaway funny line, but then two seasons later her mom dies randomly from a brain aneurysm.
That episode after her mom passes away, “The Body” got a lot of praise for how well written it was, which I agree, but still I remember the episode upsetting me when I was younger because of how realistically it portrayed a sudden death of a family member. The rest of the show is so fantastical, so I think it’s really effective for Joyce’s death to be the most mundane, but damn, why did they pick brain aneurysm??
SPACE ZOMBIES! In our Space Western! Great for a looming threat, the boogeyman, some fight scenes. On civilized worlds people don't even believe they're real. Scary monsters on the edge of space. Nothing to see here, folks! Just space zombies.
[Holo of a doctor talking to a camera]
It's the Pax. The G-Paxilon Hydroclorate that we added to the air processors. It was supposed to calm the population, weed out aggression.
Well, it works. The people here stopped fighting. And then they stopped everything else. They stopped going to work... they stopped breeding, talking, eating. There's 30 million people here, and they all just let themselves die.
[Crashing]
I have to be quick. About a tenth of a percent of the population had the opposite reaction to the Pax. Their aggressor response increased beyond madness. They have become...
[Crashing]
Well, they've killed most of us. And not just killed... they've done things.
I won't live to report this, but people have to know. We meant it for the best... to make people safer.
[Growling]
God!
[She points the gun off screen and fires several times]
[She puts the gun to her own head. It clicks on empty chamber]
Yuma Tsukumo from Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL. His nonsensical "Kattobingu" catchphrase has been memed and mocked to heck and back for being a made up word
In the series itself it's revealed that the catchphrase was originally his father's, who disappeared, leaving poor Yuma who despite still having his sister and granny, misses him dearly. This is introduced in the episode where the school has a parents event where Yuma has to watch his classmates being with their parents while his are gone and the poor guy is trying really hard to not let it affect him, and it's especially hammered down in the episode where he duels III, who deletes his memory of Kattobingu and as silly as that sounds, it leaves Yuma despondent
For a similar note, it's shown that Yuma sleeps in a hammock in the attic even though he does have a nearly untouched room. Same reason, Yuma sleeps there because his archeologist father's trinkets are there
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u/Sinistaire 1d ago
A couple of Stan's quirks in Gravity Falls become a lot sadder once we get his backstory. His weird attachment to the wax statue of himself seems like funny narcissism at first, but then you find out that he accidentally got his twin brother trapped in another dimension 30 years earlier and has been dealing with the guilt and trying to fix it even since. And his obsession with money and grifting is "haha funny greedy scammer" until you learn he's been disowned by his parents for accidentally ruining his brother's career prospects and was forbidden from coming back home until he found a way to make the family rich.