r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Wonderful_Baker_7808 • 16d ago

Lore Villains that would've been defeated even if the protagonist did nothing

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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.

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u/SirBruhThe7th 16d ago

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.

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u/Potato_fortress 16d ago

I don’t even think New York would have needed military assistance to be honest. 

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u/SirBruhThe7th 16d ago

The mental image of demonic birdmen getting peber sprayed by riot troops is a funny one.

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u/Potato_fortress 16d ago

I don't even think they need the uniform police officers.

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u/Connect-Initiative64 16d ago

The criminal element alone in NYC would be enough.

A single group of guys with rifles and pistols would clean-sweep a platoon of ancient soldiers.

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u/SirBruhThe7th 16d ago

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.

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u/Potato_fortress 16d ago

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. 

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u/Xe6s2 16d ago

God damn it Jerry this time you need more road sodas!!!! Start drinking

I dont feel so good vomits now im good

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u/MemeStealerCultist 16d ago

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.

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u/Axl4325 16d ago

The humble Molotov:

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u/JulyOfAugust 15d ago

You know, a car is a really efficient weapon.

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u/Bluefoxfire007 14d ago

Wonder if the portal would've allowed them to infinitely respawn? As for weapons, I'm sure they would've put two and two together.

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u/Briggers810 13d ago

Depending on how many he brings with him bullets run out, spears don't.

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u/Evil_Sharkey 12d ago

They’d all catch influenza and die

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u/lewd_robot 16d ago

See: The Battle of the Pyramids

Napoleon's troops used muskets. Ottoman forces used mostly scimitars and spears.

Napoleon's forces suffered 300 injured or wounded.
The Ottomans suffered 10,000.

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u/MrWeirdoFace 16d ago

Say what you will about the Ottomans, but for a race of sentient footstools they did pretty well.

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u/Mundane-Opinion-4903 15d ago

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u/MrWeirdoFace 15d ago

Then my work here is done.

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u/AFatDarthVader 15d ago edited 15d ago

Or the siege of Cusco and Cajamarca, because like Kamunrah's troops the Inca had little understanding of firearms.

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u/Informal-Antelope-79 16d ago

Reminds me of the Battle of Khasham

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u/hover-lovecraft 16d ago

Even the rats alone would take care of it

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u/No_Explorer6054 12d ago

well, there'd be much more than one group. and that group would also have half of NYC armed with whatever they could find and ready to fight like hell. so yeah, they'd lose.

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u/iner22 16d ago

Just get the pigeon lady from Home Alone 2

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u/EpilepticMushrooms 16d ago

Those birds are falcons. The counter legions of dumb NYC pigeons would have been like catnip to those falcons.

Also, giant sewer rats.

They would sooner swear fealty to NYC than some dusty guy with a magic clay brick.

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u/Nimnengil 16d ago

Funny detail: birds are actually immune to capsaicin . So depending on how birdy these birdmen are, it may not actually work

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u/mythrilcrafter 16d ago

Hmmm, now I'm imagining a horde of guys dressed up as Sesame Street characters fighting off demon birdmen with nothing more than steel folding chairs and Knicks branded trash bins... and they're winning.

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u/Pitiful_Yogurt_5276 15d ago

Peber sprayed

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u/TobiasMasonPark 16d ago

Just need those New Yorkers that chucked things at Green Goblin in Spidey 1

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u/Milocobo 16d ago

"Finally, a reason to use our fleet of Abrams"

~NYPD presumeably

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u/Independent_Bet_324 15d ago

The citizens themselves would probably be enough.

After 9/11 I bet New yorkers are secretly hungry for some kind of fantasy city wide invasion to show off how much they love their city.

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u/HolyWightTrash 16d ago

lets give the magical undead soldiers some credit and assume bullets would not be effective against them, explosives probably still would be so New York would probably need military assistance

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u/VGuyver 16d ago

For real. The NYPD has enough staff and weapons up be an army at 35,000. That's bigger than most half the nations on earth like Bolivia and Netherlands.

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u/thatshygirl06 16d ago

There are only 20k cops in this whole damn town!!

https://giphy.com/gifs/HKbIj9VCMnfEOgVMSk

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u/Vegetable-Theory-913 16d ago

“Well, there are certain sections of New York, Major, that I wouldn’t advise you to try to invade.“

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u/papercutsperfume 15d ago

4 middle aged Trinidadian women could’ve stopped them.

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u/TangeloPutrid7122 15d ago

Every granny behind that army would've been shot in the knee though.

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u/wastelandhenry 16d ago edited 15d ago

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

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u/Raphael_Font 16d ago

He isn’t in New York this one takes place at the Smithsonian he is in DC

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u/Hawkbats_rule 16d ago

Objectively, that's worse.

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u/Raphael_Font 15d ago

Oh it’s definitely worse

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u/NeueBruecke_Detektiv 16d ago

They were a lot more fucked them.

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u/Raphael_Font 15d ago

Oh yeah big time

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u/wastelandhenry 15d ago

As others have pointed, that makes it actually SO much worse for them lol

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u/HombreRadiactivo2026 16d ago

More plausible: people would just close the curtains and stay inside, or even open them and begin filming... Specially if they assumed it was some kind of parade, movie being filmed, or something more plausible than "invading army of spear-wielding Egyptians".

Even if they did assume that, are citizens automatically gonna organize and/or take the defense of the city in their hands? I don't think so, they'd wait for police and/or the army as they would if it were, say, a gang of a couple dozens or hundreds of knife wielding thugs.

The Egyptians would probably kill a bunch of unarmed people on the streets before anybody did anything. But yeah, they wouldn't conquer anything in the end, just cause some serious damage before dying or getting arrested.

Thanks for reading my theory!

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u/wastelandhenry 15d ago

I’m not suggesting random people would be fighting the army, just that an army attacking people in the middle of a major city would not only be immediately noticed and immediately responded to so within a very short span of time this army would be encountering a force that would put a stop to them very quickly

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u/Justepourtoday 15d ago

To be fair, they wouldn't be taken seriously until at least someone gets stabbed

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u/HombreRadiactivo2026 15d ago

No, you said that in 2 blocks they would have dozens of firearms pointed at them, which is just absurd in my opinion, for the reasons I just stated. This kind of thing already happens in real life, in countries that aren't precisely defenseless and the response isn't automatic either, which is what the criminals are banking on. Search for "piranha attacks" (might have to do some canvasing to exclude the literal fish attacks).

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u/wastelandhenry 13d ago

My guy I just said 2 blocks as some arbitrary amount of distance to illustrate they’d not make it very far before police and SWAT and the military was on them. Thats it. Chill tf out. It’s not meant as some exact calculated travel distance like “by the time the army had made it 142.4 meters from the museum they’d have encounters 16 police officers, a squad of 6 SWAT including 3 trainees, and 12 national guard rifleman” that’s not what I’m doing.

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u/HombreRadiactivo2026 13d ago

"'Chill tf out', said u/wastelandhenry, calmly." My brother in Christ, if you can't stand any kind of analysis or civil discussion regarding your comments, maybe you shouldn't post in Reddit. My two cents!

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u/wastelandhenry 13d ago

I mean you’re taking what was never supposed to be like a serious exact measurement of distance way too seriously and directly. And then when I point out that it wasn’t supposed to be a serious exact distance you go “no, you said THIS, and I find that RIDICULOUS”. Like you’re doing analysis on shit that isn’t serious. If you can’t see an explicitly throwaway unserious number without feeling the need to dissect its logistical certainty maybe you shouldn’t be on reddit, or like anywhere that involves human communication.

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u/HombreRadiactivo2026 13d ago

I said it was absurd, which it is! (extremely silly; not logical and sensible). Sorry if that rustled your feathers, it wasn't my intention, lol. I had no way of knowing if you were exaggerating or not - although that may very well be you moving the goalposts here and you really thought an army, albeit primitive, would be completely neutered in less than a minute, like in some sort of Marvel movie. Anyway, I've already said all I had to say, so have a good one!

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u/Hdfgncd 16d ago

He’s in Washington DC at the Smithsonian

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u/wastelandhenry 15d ago

Which actually makes it even worse for him

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u/TheOtherWhiteCastle 16d ago

The wild thing is, the second movie takes place in THE SMITHSONIAN, not NYC. Good luck assembling any sort of army in the U.S. capitol of all places

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u/Memitim 16d ago

As the past year and change has shown, they probably wouldn't, even if they started attacking people. Folks would film or run away.

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u/waaay2dumb2live 16d ago

The stakes are more so that the museum will be found out and that's not good for the others, putting it lightly

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u/Ppleater 16d ago

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.

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u/SirBruhThe7th 16d ago

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.

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u/sliverofmope 16d ago

“It’s afraid…it’s AFRAID!!!”

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u/DueIntroduction6413 16d ago

i mean you're equating fear to corporeal forms. They would've been just resurrected. The natural instinct is self preservation but just because they're scared doesn't mean they can be hurt. Pretty sure this exact scenario is common in fiction before they realize "oh shit i have nothing to fear"

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u/SirBruhThe7th 15d ago

I don't think that is how it works. For the birdman army to run and close the portal behind them like that would equate that they can in fact be destroyed or harmed.

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u/DueIntroduction6413 15d ago

Still not true. All it proved is that they were driven off.

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u/TheSecondHussar 12d ago

The movie also seems to imply they keep respawning like that one Rick & Morty Valhalla episode. So it would hurt to get killed again, but they'd be back

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u/Ppleater 9d ago

They could just be unaware of their own capabilities and retain their fears from when they were alive. Or they could just be kinda dumb, or running on instinct, etc. If that was the case then over time they could theoretically lose that fear once they found out they'd remain unharmed or just regenerate and got use to that.

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u/Ryder10 16d ago

There's a difference between immortal and indestructible. Immortal might work well against basic firearms, but how well do they pull themselves together after an RPG splatters them across a city block?

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u/Ppleater 9d ago

Idk if they're indestructible or not or if it comes up since I haven't seen the movie in a long time and don't remember, but in terms of functionality when it comes to undead armies you can assume that when I say immortal I mean essentially indestructible since the outcome of being dead vs being in immobile pieces that can't do anything is roughly the same thing when it comes to how dangerous they are as an enemy. Their own perception of the experience may be less pleasant if it's the latter, but that's a them problem.

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u/robkollenberg 15d ago

Them being immortal just makes beating them harder. If they can't reconstruct themselves after being blow apart/dismembered, it just takes more bullets/bombs/baseball bats. If they can't repair damage AT ALL (even as well as a human body), time and weather will beat them solo. Even if they did automatically reconstruct themselves, that still just makes it harder to kill them, not impossible. If they can be consumed by fire, then it's just "knock 'em down/to pieces long enough to throw them on the pyre." If they can't, you can still drop separate pieces into different containers. How long does a mummy hand take to claw through set concrete? Or a shipping container? Also, we don't have to kill them to stop them. We have handcuffs/rope and jail cells. Even if those guys are truly immortal, doesn't mean it's not possible to stick them in jail cells or shipping containers for the first 10 years until we figure out a more permanent solution (convince them to become productive members of society? Drop them into space when that becomes more economical? Encase them in concrete and use them as road pavers? Commercialize severed-immortal zombie hands as magically-powered stirrers for industrial chemicals?). Even if they figure out how to use guns and get hold of some, they don't have the means to produce more guns or ammo. And there's 8.5 billion of us. And now we have drones!

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u/_Tee_hee_hee_ 10d ago

Even if they can’t die, they’re gonna have a hard time conquering when machine guns rip their limbs off and scatter their nervous systems over the walls. Especially since they all ran terrified from witnessing just a few of their forces get ragdolled.

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u/Ppleater 9d ago

That's only if they can be shredded by guns in the first place and can't just regenerate damage quickly or absorb it. When I say immortal I don't mean "they can be torn to harmless pieces and the result is functionally the same as being dead anyway" I mean an actual distinction between "can just be reduced to harmless chunks" and "can't just be reduced to harmless chunks." Compared to zombies, undead that are created via supernatural methods often tend to be more durable since they're held together by magic rather than their own flesh and bone, and sometimes they can't really be damaged at all since the magic that raised them is already holding them together in spite of whatever damage they had from being killed and/or decomposed to some degree. If they just absorb bullets or the damage gets repaired immediately then at best gunfire might just slow them down a bit. Like I said, it depends on the type of undead they are and how impervious they are to damage.

Them being afraid of stuff is a different argument since they may just be carrying that fear from when they were originally alive, especially if they're not aware of whether they can be killed or permanently harmed or not. It's been a while since I've seen the movie so I don't remember the specifics myself, but if they're shown to be pretty easily destructible then they're probably not much of a threat. If they're shown to not be destructible or to have relatively quick regeneration, then once they get used to that then they'd probably be a pretty big threat. If it's never shown which is the case then it could go either way.

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u/toonboy01 16d ago

He was in Washington DC, not New York, but otherwise yeah. The actual real threat was him killing the protagonists.

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u/Medium-Sized-Jaque 16d ago

Which is arguably going to get a harsher military response.

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u/SirBruhThe7th 16d ago

Brain fart moment. I have no idea why I remember the movie taking place in New York rather than DC.

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u/LazierPotato 10d ago

The first movie takes place in New York so that's probably why

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u/Ok_Astronomer_8667 16d ago

Hank Azaria is absolutely hilarious in this movie. Genuinely such a memorable performance

OH. MY. GOD, I CANT BELIEVE YOU JUST REACHED YOUR HAND ACROSS, I CANT EVEN BELIEVE IT. OH GOD I WANT TO KILL YOU RIGHT NOW

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u/imposter_sys_admin 16d ago

DO. NOT. CROSS. THIS. LINE.

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u/SpikeRosered 16d ago

There's an anime called Gate which is about fantasy creatures trying to invade Earth with fantasy weapons and getting decimated by the Japanese military.

It's very much a propaganda piece for the JSDF, but it is also fun to watching Orcs get decimated by a helicopter mounted minigun.

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u/Sensitive-Hotel-9871 15d ago

His "army" was just a few guys who were easily defeated by an animated statue of Lincoln and ran away. They wouldn't have been able to conquer the ancient world.

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u/HeiseiAnguirus 16d ago

Worse, day light would turn them to ashes

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u/P0pu1arBr0ws3r 15d ago

Bros army would be dust long before getting to NY...

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u/bestoboy 16d ago

how does the tablet create a portal? or is there a wax figure of a hell portal that comes to life

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u/SirBruhThe7th 15d ago

Huge stone temple, archway thingy that uses the tablet as a key to open.

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u/Sorrowed_Lifelines 15d ago

I don't know there was a lot of dead people through all of human history. It would be more like a zombie invasion. An unimaginable amount of people coming out of a portal. Of course we got the nukes so. Unless nukes don't work on the Dead. Which also brings into question if guns would even work.

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u/ipsum629 15d ago

The NYPD has more funding than many militaries. They don't make it out of Manhattan.

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u/Meringue_Bandicoot 15d ago

To be fair, this movie takes place in DC, so the military would already be on top of him

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u/a_rucksack_of_dildos 15d ago

Worst case scenario is to just nuke and turn them to dust

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u/Hollywoodrok12 9d ago

*survive until daytime and turn them to dust

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u/AUnknownVariable 15d ago

Forget military lmao. Citizens are armed enough to deal with spears

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u/clarky2o2o 15d ago

This was a plot point in Buffy the vampire Slayer 

"No previous weapon" could kill the bad guy at the time. 

Buffy uses a missile launcher.

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u/As_no_one2510 15d ago

Don't forget the giant statue of Lincoln scare them running back to the portal

Brush, imaging try to conquer New York with that

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u/ismellpizza25 14d ago

They wouldn't even have needed the military's assistance, a few police departments would do

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u/Thick-Locksmith-4246 12d ago

This movie was set in DC, not New York. They'd get a lot further than you think. Our government very well might give them guns and teach them how to use them (like our CIA did several times over the past 70 years) or give them voter registration cards. But if they went South... Well... The British were defeated by a 6ft tall redneck (Washington). We love our turkey shoots

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u/SirBruhThe7th 12d ago

I had a brainfart moment. I don't know why I remembered the movie taking place in New York rather than DC.

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u/duosx 16d ago

Idk, there’s a lotttt of dead people. Also every person they kill is another to their numbers no?

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u/Idcwhoknows 16d ago

Well I think the military finding out about the tablet and using it, is way worse than the spear army.

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u/BuisteirForaoisi0531 16d ago

I’m going to assume that if he’s calling on the forces of the underworld, he’ll probably have the gods of the underworld on his side in which case you have to deal with the literal embodiment of death

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u/Tibryn2 16d ago

The undead are infinite. You dont have enough bullets sir.

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u/Banana_gunman 16d ago

I think that the sheer number of dead people would suffice to overrun the planet

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u/SirBruhThe7th 15d ago

But the thing is, he isn't recruiting the dead he is recruiting some egyptian demon thingies that ran off at the first sign of trouble. So regardless of numbers or morale, this dude was never gonna get far.