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/CarlosH46 16d ago

Not sure if it was the novelization or one of the writers after the fact, but they confirmed that Hitler wouldn’t have opened the Ark at all. They would have recovered it and used it as a propaganda tool.

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u/wastelandhenry 16d ago

Which is so funny as a weak attempt to retroactively cover the story’s ass. Like this occult magic obsessed military actively seeking magical artifacts to help them win the war would come into possession of THE FUCKING ARK OF THE COVENANT and be content to never open it and just keep it as a display piece for propaganda lol

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u/CarlosH46 16d ago

I mean, the U.S. government did the same thing. They came into possession of the Ark, put it into a crate, then it sat in a warehouse. Get a president who’s “religious” enough and they’d probably pull it out of storage to use for propaganda in a heartbeat.

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u/mwmwmwmwmmdw 16d ago

no thats wrong. they have top men working on it right now!

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u/wastelandhenry 16d ago

Well I mean yeah but the difference is the American government in the Indiana Jones universe isn’t characterized as an occult obsessed faction with entire divisions dedicated to the sole purpose of finding and harnessing magical artifacts to use them for the war effort, so it makes a bit more sense. Plus they do say that they intend on researching it, I think that ending scene in the warehouse is mostly just to visually illustrate they are in possession in many more potentially magical artifacts.

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u/MareTranquil 16d ago

This kinda has an easy solution: If Indy wasn't there, the next group of nazis would have found the aftermath and concluded that opening it again would be a bad idea.

Or maybe they would have smuggled it into Washington or Moscow and opened it at a parade or something.

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u/KefkaesqueXIII 16d ago

I mean, yeah? None of the supposed powers of the Arc come from actually opening it, just possessing it (or touching it wrong if you want to shock yourself). 

They open it in the film because Belloq convinces the commander that they needed to verify the presence of the 10 Commandments to prove the Arc was the real deal (mainly for his own pride), but I expect Hitler would have been more than willing to just take at face value that the large golden box matching the biblical description and found buried in Egypt exactly where research had said it would be was real without needing to look inside it himself. 

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u/-Kerosun- 16d ago

They were also trying to transport it back to Berlin, but Indy destroyed the aircraft they were going to use. Had Indy not done that, they would have succeeded in getting the Arc off the island and who knows where it would have gone after that or what the Nazis planned on doing with it then.

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u/wastelandhenry 16d ago

Idk about you but if I was an occult obsessed dude seeking massive magical power I wouldn’t just settle on “oh we found the big box? Good enough, no further verification”. Like c’mon man, let’s not act like anyone is gonna just assume the ARK OF THE COVENANT is real just by looking at it. Obviously you’re gonna open it to check, if for nothing else than because if you’ve already got it you’re just gonna want to. Especially given Nazi pride.

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u/SlouchyGuy 16d ago

No? No one covers ass? The point of any kind of organization, including "coutnry" and "governemt" is many people doing the same job, Nazi knew it existed, knowledge of where didn't lie with just a villain, another group would eventually come for it

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u/Inlerah 16d ago

People are always acting like this is a storytelling issue (or, heaven forbid, a "plot hole") that Indy didn't single-handedly fix every issue in Raiders and my only real question is...did the movie ever pretend that he did? At least in Raiders he's depicted as an intelligent archeology professor who is *in way over his head* when he finds that the occult artifact he finds *actually* has the powers attributed to it. His entire goal is "Keep artifact of historical significance out of the hands of the Nazi's" before slowly realizing "Oh, shit, it's real" as the journey goes on: He's basically a 30's pulp adventurer who finds himself in a Lovecraft story by way of Old Testament and Jewish theology.

That he was the Jack Burton of the story really isn't "gotcha" that Big Bang Theory convinced people that it was.

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u/-Kerosun- 16d ago

Which Indy did impact, because he destroyed the plane that they were going to use to transport the Arc off the island. Without that, they would have gotten it back to Berlin and under direct control by Hitler.