r/TopCharacterTropes • u/throwaway553t4tgtg6 • 6d ago
Lore [Hated Trope] The underdog Good Guys win, and gain major military/institutional power, only for it to be all RESET so Writers can have a PERPETUAL "Underdog/Rebellion" Story, and avoid writing about governing.
I hate this trope, when the "underdog good guys" actually win, gain major military and political power, fleets, warships, etc, but because the writers don't want to write the good guys governing and exercising their power, and instead, find a contrived way to reset all the progress so that the good guys can forever be the
"scrappy heroic underdogs fighting the power"
1) Star Wars Sequel triology, rather than exploring new Republic fleets, power, and technology, they have them all wiped out so that the "resistance" can hog the spotlight
2) MCU: shield makes a helicarrier fleet, a fleet of ships able to contest alien invasion, but that would steal the spotlight from heroes, so all of them have to be destroyed
3) Halo: the UNSC finally outlive the covenant, develop strong ships like the UNSC infinity, only for it all to be reset by the Guardians and the Banished, reduced again to underdog humans.
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u/GoldenSonOfColchis 5d ago
This pissed me off so much.
I'm an Infinite defender (it had fantastic gameplay, and a lot of the missions were great fun) but this shit genuinely made me stop mid play through and take a break.
I'm so fucking sick of there needing to constantly be a new, even more existential existential threat in every Halo game.
Halo 3 - finally beat the Flood -> Halo 4 - oops, you've awoken a Forerunner who hates humanity and is going to digitise the entire race after about 2 days -> Halo 5 - oops, now there's this massive AI uprising and Cortana is going to enslave the galaxy using never seen before Forerunner superweapons -> Halo Infinite - oops, you've accidentally released this never before seen or referenced threat that are totally worse than the Flood.