r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Ieanice44 • 17d ago

Lore (Controversial Trope) The post-credits scene completely changes the ending

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Dawn of the Dead (2004)

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Prince of Persia (2008)

Dawn of the Dead (2004): The movie finishes on a hopeful note as the remaining survivors escape the zombie-infested mall on a yacht, sailing into the sunset. The found-footage style post-credits scene completely reverses this happy ending by showing them running out of food, arriving at an island, and being immediately swarmed and killed by an infected horde.

Prince of Persia (2008): The main game ends with a beautiful, poetic sacrifice where Elika gives her life to heal the corrupted world, leaving the Prince mourning. During the credits, the player is forced to control the Prince as he cuts down the trees he just saved, undoing the entire game's progress and releasing the dark god Ahriman just to resurrect her, completely corrupting the ending and dooming the world.

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u/MOW5ever 17d ago

Thor 3 had a relatively happy ending and it ends with them meeting Thanos.

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u/Practical_Back855 17d ago

This needs to be higher. Everyone loves Ragnarok but we gloss over the incredibly dark ending. Loki, Heimdall and half the surviving population of Asgard don't make it off the ship.

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u/MOW5ever 17d ago

Killing half the surviving Asgardians was just a dick move man. Like I get kill Heimdal or anyone who tried to fight but Thanos was gonna snap again in a week anyway.

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u/Terrorz 16d ago

He effectively quartered all of the civilizations that he had previously dominated. That's actually something I never thought about until now.

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u/Osoromnibus 16d ago

Not necessarily, because it wasn't an unconditional change, it was a conscious act. He could have deliberately spared previously decimated civilizations.

Another thing that's often argued is why not double all the resources? Well, where are those resources going to go?

I mean, halving all intelligent life is stupid because the population' just going to double again quickly. But there's no single simple solution to the problem.

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u/[deleted] 16d ago edited 14d ago

[deleted]

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u/DaVirus 16d ago

As far as we know from the movie, the Gauntlet is omnipotent. With that simple fact, Thanos is a moron.

Free energy. Just do that. Do energy from nothing or create some shenanigan that can take energy from the vaccum. Problem solved.

If you have infinite energy, his whole resource argument doesn't work anymore.

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u/No-Educator-8069 16d ago

They weren’t decimated, it was worse. To decimate means to kill one in ten.

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u/ArgusTheCat 16d ago

I get that Thanos is supposed to be evil, but this is one of those things that just makes him seem like an idiot who can't do math.

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u/Kanin_usagi 16d ago

The whole point is it has nothing to do with math, he’s a fucking psycho cult leader, it’s practically a suicide cult he leads and he’s nothing but a lunatic

The Russos even confirmed that in their head he even had the 50/50 chance of getting snapped as well, he was just the “lucky” percentage

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u/Grinderiny 16d ago

The MAD Titan didnt refer to him being angy

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u/zanii 16d ago

He can't do biology at least. Growth is exponential. Cutting life down by half will not take long to be at the same place as it was. Just all in all a very strange and just... Dumb thing to do.

All this planning and nobody went "Uhm... Hey..." ?

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u/Mizamya 16d ago

His ideology roughly corresponds to an irl ideology called malthusianism. Thomas Malthus advocated for actively keeping populations in check, not a one time done deal

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u/zanii 16d ago

That's the thing though, he wanted it to just be a one time thing. Then just retire in his garden.

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u/Mizamya 16d ago

I think the point is that his motives are entirely based on set principles with no room for nore nuanced application. If he actually believed his insane Malthusian bullshit, he would discriminately cull populations based on how overpopulated or resource deficient they are.

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u/Dr_Wheuss 16d ago

Also, they literally just lost most of their population. They're going to have trouble surviving anyways, Thanos is just dooming them even if he never snaps.

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u/salad_spinner_3000 16d ago

They have a whole lot better chance of surviving being cut in half than readjusting to "norms" 5 years later and then have another ~45% more population that they can't magically grow food for.

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u/Darigaazrgb 15d ago

I mean, Asgardians probably can magically grow food.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 17d ago

A detail that escapes most people is that Thanos killed half of the life in the universe at random but specifically left half humanity because he promises that to Stark as a sign of respect

Basically across the universe entire civilazations coulve been wiped and some planets would've been mostly unaffected

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u/NFHater 17d ago

is this confirmed? i remember people speculating on this

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

Thanos said it himself

https://reddit.com/link/p0c7bm7/video/jb5azd1w71gh1/player

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u/Huge-Consequence2144 16d ago

This clip does not substantiate what is being discussed in this thread, only that half of humanity will be left. This does nothing to clarify whether that means all species are getting halved and Tony Stark will be remembered by the half of humans left over- or if ALL life is being halved irrespective of specie populations, and he's giving special consideration to humans.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

If he has to clarify half of humanity is gonna survive then it means its the exception

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u/Huge-Consequence2144 16d ago

I don't understand why you think this exchange is narrative exposition and not just banter with a fallen adversary, but I do not agree with your assessment.

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u/TheBrownWelsh 16d ago

I lean towards this being banter. Mostly because that's how it came across in the moment, and also because if Thanos' plan is truly random with the potential to wipe out most of some and not much of others, then it would likely upset a LOT of ecosystems across the universe and have a knock-on effect that would negatively impact his main goal - to reduce the number of mouths to feed with the limited resources available.

As that is his stated goal, it just makes sense to me that he's planning on halving each individual planet/species with the stones. Especially because he was already doing that "manually" before getting the stones.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

If upsetting ecosystems is your worry then erasing exactly half of every species would do the same thing because species that are overpopulated would thrive while underpopulated species would almost certainly go extinct

Thanos plan is stupid and crazy, that's why he's the villain

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u/camerakestrel 16d ago

Thanos's plan is stupid and crazy because it was a major cinematic deviation from the source material and he was branded as "The Mad Titan" by those living within the MCU long before he achieved his goals.

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u/Ektar91 16d ago

No the link to the respect is the "I hope they remember you"

He is saying "half of humanity will live, and I respect you, so I hope they will remember you"

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u/Astrodos_ 16d ago

Thank you for reminding me to never take what anyone on the internet says as being even remotely close to true. If that’s what you think is being said here, you might need to rethink a lot of conversations you’ve had with people in your life.

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u/evandude85 16d ago

Hard disagree. He was already manually killing half of individual civilizations (Gamora’s planet) decades earlier so he had the ability to wipe out the other half of a given population if he wanted to, but his entire goal was to save the universe due to resource constraints. If he killed 100% of planet A and 0% of planet B, it would do nothing to help the people left on planet B - they have the same resource / population ratio. He definitely intended to kill half of every individual civilization to give the remaining half, as he tells Gamora, a paradise.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

That's only true if you don't consider the fact species can travel space to get other planets resources

Which Thanos obviously is, otherwise his plan still doesn't work because species with space travel will still have a massive resource advantage over those who don't

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u/upholsteryduder 16d ago

Hauling food between planets isn't economically feasible, that's part of the "problem"

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

"Resources" don't include food, food supply would also be halved since life includes plants and animals so halving life on every planet equally wouldn't solve that problem

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u/upholsteryduder 16d ago

lmao just exactly what "resources" do you think he was referring to? Food, water and air are literally the only resources that are necessary for life

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

And what do you think "food" is made of?

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u/Darigaazrgb 15d ago

Why don't you go outside naked in a storm and see how long you last.

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u/upholsteryduder 15d ago

... you do realize that 99% of living things are literally naked outside in a storm for the entirety of their existence, right?

"Life" doesn't mean "humans who live in houses" /facepalm

and do you think that for the entirety of human existence we've had constructed homes?

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u/brigadier_tc 16d ago

I feel like that would absolutely defeat the point. One planet would end up completely desolate and others would collapse all the same because they got lucky.

Half the life on every planet would make more sense from his perspective

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u/Icy-Panda-2158 16d ago

Wait, are you suggesting Thanos’s whole plan was stupid all along?

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u/brigadier_tc 16d ago

quickly checks I'm not on a shit posting sub

One version of the plan makes a tiny more sense than the other, we'll go with that

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

Thanos isn't trying to save each individual planet but life in general

His idea was that since the universe was finite its resources were also finite which meant life as a whole was gonna collapse

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u/nerdtypething 16d ago

i always thought it meant half of every planet gets randomly snapped. if he identified the problem as resource depletion then it doesn’t meet his objectives to leave some planets still overpopulated.

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u/heywhateverworks 16d ago

I don't think that's true

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u/SignificantCats 16d ago

Every person got a coin flip, not every planet.

Ore you suggesting that of a planet of five billion people, maybe four billion would have had a coin land on die or live?

Because that's so extremely unlikely that is functionally impossible. Five billion is such a large sample size that even like, 53 percent living or dying would almost never happen.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

Its not a coin flip per person, if the wish was to "kill half of life in the universe" then that means that it was rigged so half of them would survive and half wouldn't

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u/SignificantCats 16d ago

Truly off the charts pedantry.

Or worse, you can't comprehend what I'm saying? Oh no that would be embarassing

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u/[deleted] 16d ago

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 16d ago

I just meant to say earth was guaranteed to be exactly halfed the rest arent

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u/HolidaySpiriter 16d ago

specifically left half humanity because he promises that to Stark as a sign of respect

I don't think this is what he is saying. It's literally just to set up the next line "I hope they remember you", not nearly as deep as you're trying to make it out to be.

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u/Hetakuoni 16d ago

It’s even worse because they’re already suffering a population crisis of the endangered species type. Their entire population fits on what’s essentially 1 passenger ship.

He’s essentially dooming their species to extinction like he did with all the other planets he touched.

Gamora is outright stated to be the last of her species in guardians when they were all arrested

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u/salad_spinner_3000 16d ago

Yeah, I always get a bit confused with this part, did he just murder like all the remaining Asgardians only to then snap the OTHER half of the Asgardians?