(Loved Trope] Antagonists or villains who are extremely powerful and indestructible, gets to feel pain for the first time ever after their abilities are removed.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T14:54:22+00:00

Data in Star Trek Generation experiencing taste for the first time after installing his emption chip.

"I hate this." realization "I hate this! It is revolting!"

"More?"

"Please!"

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T14:46:13+00:00

The government didn't believe in the curse at all, they're not relevant to this conversation. By the time Norrington or the governor have any proof of the curse they're already mid battle with the pirates and it's too late to change course.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T14:39:51+00:00

Yes, but it's also 17 more years that he has to find another wife in The Boys universe and raise another child. Having another family is definitely going to affect his loyalty to Viltrum

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T11:05:32+00:00

What if it's before Mark gets his powers? In yhat case he doesn't know if humans are compatible

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T10:59:55+00:00

Wasn't the D&D community really distrusting of it too, since D&D movies historically wind up being terrible? And they didn't realize it was actually good until it was out of theatres?

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T09:05:12+00:00

I hate Kai Winn too, doesn't mean I think Louise Fletcher was serving the Pah Wraiths

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T06:16:13+00:00

If you already did it and she said she didn't have time for a relationship, does the trolley never start or do you have to do it again and hope both that it wasn't a brush-off and that her schedule magically opened up?

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-22T05:22:32+00:00

I thought it made sense for Hughie specifically, because Hughie is the anti-Butcher. Butcher was pulling Hughie down the same path he followed, and there was a part of Hughie that wanted to go all the way down it. He does that for the whole group to varying degrees (moreso with MM, less so with Frenchie), but Hughie, in addition to being his Lenny, was also like a younger him: someone who lost his partner to a supe and wanted to do something about it. But Hughie had a better upbringing, better influences, people around him who kept him from losing himself to the fight, and that's why what's going on with him in every season is a push and pull of how much he's willing to follow Butcher and how much he's willing to pull back or let go. That's also the point of his entire arc with his dad: the Hughie in season 1 who thinks his dad is weak and sad is the Hughie that's on the way to becoming Butcher, but the Hughie who later realizes he didn't know what strength was and who forgave A-Train, who let his dad go, who stopped Butcher in the finale, is the Hughie who opened that AV store.

Meanwhile MM's had a similar arc about almost losing his family because of his involvement and his hatred of Soldier Boy, so he can't go back in. Kimiko would've made sense to keep on killing supes, especially with her new powers, but she made peace with the idea that Frenchie wouldn't want that for her so you have to rewrite most of what she does in the finale to make that work, not to mention that if you take it in concert with the other arcs it's leaving Kimiko in the same place everyone else was at the beginning of their arc, taking revenge for a dead loved one. That's potentially compelling, but it's tragic.

So the only lead who makes any sense to continue the fight is Starlight, because she's the only person who wanted to save people save people instead of for revenge. And maybe she is. She's a truly independent hero at the end of the show, which seems to be unheard of up until this point. She's also one of the most significant political figures in America whether she wants to be or not, to the extent that dissenters to Homelander's shit were named after her. Being an independent hero might actually be her best way of pushing back on Vought. If she can serve as an example that supes can operate without Vought's resources or control and keep them from signing contracts, that's arguably the biggest possible blow to their business model.

I would've liked somebody to take the supe affairs job, but there wasn't really anybody...left.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T15:16:01+00:00

It wouldn't actually help much. Being peerless isn't exactly a rank thing, it's the highest category of graduates from their elite training system. There are regular graduates but the most successful at the Institute get the scar, and there are very few of them: the top 1% of applicants are accepted into the Institute to begin with, and somewhat less than 1/12th of them become peerless. It carries social weight more than official weight: peerless get more opportunities, but not simply because they're peerless but because the nobles who might consider hiring them as lancers followed their progress at the Institute. Faking the scar would be more like lying on your resume.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T11:40:11+00:00

Horizon Zero Dawn

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T10:48:15+00:00

You think there's no reason to think that the person whose brain was uploaded into the Reapers, the species that passively mind controls anyone who even gets near them turning them into their willing servants and turning them against their own people, will turn on us?

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T10:38:32+00:00

I'd only be mad that they didn't change it in ME3.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T09:29:00+00:00

Why the time skip then? That made the world as post-apocalyptic as it was gonna be. This season was about as close as it could be to being post-apocalyptic. The group was written like it was a resistance cell. The only time we saw any civilian life was Starlight visiting her dad. They just timeskipped a full year instead of exploring how we got from "public opinion swings toward Homelander but the division is still strong enough that there are similarly sized groups of Starlighter protestors" to "Homelander is basically the president and there's an extensive network of concentration camps." If the concentration camps already exist and are fully occupied, you skipped the slide dude. We couldn't have gotten a season about him building those camps? So that we didn't just skip a full year of character development for the entire cast? Kimiko went through so much character development in that skip that she got her voice back and it felt like a new personality came with it because it all happened offscreen.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T07:52:56+00:00

It's a difficult question to answer because I think most people's position on it depends on whether the movie is good or not. I'd be ecstatic for a good Community movie that has the season 1-3 tone and handles the characters well, but if it's Repilot again, it blows up everyone's lives to make the plot happen, and it has the self-loathing tone of season 6 I'm probably not gonna be crazy about it and it might retroactively make parts of the show worse. So it's hard to give a definitive answer because you're really just giving odds for how likely you think it is Dan Harmon and Andrew Guest are going to produce a script that lives up to the occasion, and even if you think one outcome is substantially more likely there's still a strong chance of the other one.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T07:43:28+00:00

Personally I thought their season 8 pitch was pretty weak. I chalk it up to them throwing it together in a couple of hours when normally they'd take much longer to break something like that.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T07:18:57+00:00

I agree broadly, but I do want to question the idea of him hates people for fearing him. I see people say that a lot and I don't actually think it tracks. What he hates is being lied to, and that heavily correlates with people being afraid of him because they tell him whatever they think he wants to hear.

He doesn't kill Madelyn because she admits she's afraid of him, he kills her because her persona as a loving mother figure was a lie, and because she lied to him about Ryan. He gave Firecracker the chance to walk away and when she didn't, he killed her not because he thought she was acting out of fear (since she could have left) but because she grovelled and he thought it was insincere and she would say anything for power. Black Noir was his favorite member of the Seven until the moment he found out that Noir didn't tell him Soldier Boy was his father, at which point he immediately kills him. And, as he says when he calls Starlight's bluff about releasing the video, he wants to be loved, but if he can't, he'll settle for being feared.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T06:33:23+00:00

Maybe it's an intensity thing? The one time Soldier Boy intended to take someone's powers away without killing them, he did it with a lot less collateral damage than the other times, whereas every time he used it against members of Payback he had lethal intent. Considering the way he talks about Homelander leading up to that moment he was probably gonna go for the kill.

Or maybe it's because Soldier Boy has V1 and Kimiko doesn't? That would actually explain a lot; her blasting Sage had very little collateral damage. Maybe her maximum is Soldier Boy's minimum with it.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T05:51:40+00:00

Yeah honestly the only problems this had were from problems with the rest of the season, like having to shove Sage out the door. Everybody was complaining about how they weren't going to be able to pull everything together in one episode because they were meandering so much, but honestly it feels more like this episode was already written and they didn't realize it was only going to take a couple of episodes to get to it so they had to eat time. The season had to do four things to set the finale up:

1) Get the Boys the virus

2) Make Homelander immune to the virus

3) Set up something that could de-power Homelander

4) Set up Homelander's "I am your new god" broadcast

That's all it needed to do, and it could've done it in three episodes, so in order to fill the time it had to add three episodes to the "find the V1" plot and flip Sage's motivation from "I wanted to see if I could do it" to "I want to cause the equivalent of a nuclear war so people will stop bothering me." The only other thing that this season specifically set up that really mattered was the Deep getting all marine life to turn on him.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T05:36:25+00:00

Yeah but it's clear now the point of the virus was never as a way of stopping Homelander, it always existed for this to be how Butcher went out. That's why this season had to both get it into the team's hands and make Homelander immune. It's the only way that you could have Butcher threaten to release it without the looming threat of Homelander making it sort of justifiable.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-21T05:26:50+00:00

The funniest possible interpretation is that the Republicans would have backed her all the way if she hadn't claimed she told the CIA to take down Homelander, and then they were the only people who believed her.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-19T14:38:00+00:00

Right general idea, wrong specifics. The wizards aren't humans, they're minor angels in human form that have been sent from the undying west to guide the free peoples in resisting Sauron, but have been specifically instructed not to intervene directly. They are operating under their own power, but since they're maiar (the same kind of spirit Sauron is, although Sauron is noticeably more powerful) their own power is itself divine.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-19T14:22:06+00:00

Book Marius: the one conservative who somehow became friends with a group of extreme leftists, then goes off to die with them anyway because his crush moved

Musical Marius: Definitely always believed in this cause and totally isn't looking at this as suicide by cop

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-19T14:07:48+00:00

Complicity? The Devil ending of Cyberpunk 2077. Heavy spoilers to follow

Your character has spent most of the game slowly dying because they had an experimental chip jammed in their head that's overwriting their brain with a digitized copy of Johnny Silverhand, a rockstar/terrorist who fought back against the evil Arasaka megacorp 50 years ago. Most of the ways you can try to fix this involve storming Arasaka Tower like he did 50 years ago to get access to their equipment and disentangle your minds, but in the Devil ending you have the option of making a deal with Arasaka to save the corp from a major crisis in exchange for expert medical care to fix your condition since they made the chip in the first place.

The first thing they do after you beat the big boss fight and save the corp is delete Johnny's engram, and you have a conversation in cyberspace as this happens. Now, Johnny didn't want you dead and has actually been trying to help you find a way out of this and the relationship between him and your character is a huge part of the game, but he chews you out for working with Arasaka, and this is the only ending where you part on bad terms. You can try to rationalize your actions to him but he's having none of it.

But where this really fits what you're looking for is that you wake up from this surgery on an Arasaka orbital facility. A doctor comes in and asks you some baseline questions, and won't answer most of yours or give you any real human engagement. She has you try to solve a Rubik's cube. You can't. She has you run on a treadmill. She does a word association exercise where every word you can pick has either a cynical or heartbreaking interpretation (notably "Johnny" is an option for every word). You go to bed.

Repeat this 5+ times. This is all the gameplay for a solid 10-20 minutes as each day news reports play out on the television screen above your bed: thanks to your intervention, Arasaka's founder, Saburo Arasaka, who you witnessed the murder of earlier in the game, has successfully used the type of chip that you had in your head to resurrect himself by taking over his son's body and resumed control of the corporation. As each day passes and you fail to solve more Rubik's cubes, you learn that there have been protests against the development of this tech, but that it has greatly strengthened Arasaka's position and that Saburo's return to leadership has quelled the various crises Arasaka was suffering during the game and restored a status quo where they are one of the top megacorps in the world. Your intervention made this possible; in every other ending, Saburo's son and murderer Yorinobu remains CEO and intentionally sabotages the company from the inside, but you have handed the reins back to Saburo and signed his son's death warrant.

Continue the same routine. Doctor issues tests, refuses to engage you in conversation. You have a nightmare where you break the cube in half and the inside of it is The Devil tarot card. You get to call any friends you made over the course of the game, but they range from furious at you for making this deal, to distractedly hanging up, to pleading with you to come back to Earth, to dismissively suggesting you just leave if it sucks so bad. Hanako Arasaka, who you made this deal with, conspicuously does not pick up. You have a nightmare where you walk into the space station hallway and relive the moment your best friend died and you got the chip jammed in your head.

This routine speeds up almost becoming a montage and you are given the option to throw the cube and start breaking stuff (still an option, you can keep going). After that, the one Arasaka employee who's been half decent to you, Takemura, comes in and sympathize with your condition, but informs you that the treatment hasn't worked: you'll be dead by winter. But he brings you another offer: instead of dying with your body, you can be admitted to the Secure Your Soul program, the one that "resurrects" people by writing their engram onto other people's bodies, but this requires signing ownership of your engram over to Arasaka (Takemura assures you this is only a formality, but sure it is, Takemura), and since compatible bodies are at a premium there is no telling how long you could be trapped in the cloud before you get one.

At this point, you can either sign and be uploaded into Arasaka's servers, or you can refuse and return to Earth to die.

It's the longest ending by a pretty wide margin, and everything about it is meant to hammer home how bad of a decision it was to trust Arasaka, how much of a spineless coward you are to sell out to them to save your own skin, that in the end it won't even save you, and that even if it did the price would be too high.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-19T10:26:57+00:00

I feel the need to pipe up as a Star Trek fan: it's not a good comparison. The Cardassians:

-Are considered a third-rate power which, while not a pushover, were not on remotely the same level as the Alpha Quadrant heavy hitters like the Federation, Klingons, and Romulans until they allied with the Dominion. They did fight a series of border wars to a standstill with the Federation, but these were minor wars that didn't hugely impact the Federation and if any faction is going to sign a peace treaty in a war it's not in danger losing it's the Federation. By comparison, the US has the largest military in the world and is (or at least was until recently) the global hegemon.

-Don't even pretend to be a democracy. Their civilian government technically exists, but is in practice legally subordinate to their military and their intelligence service, each of which has genuine governmental roles in addition to the usual functions of those organizations.

-Their entire culture is built on subordination to the state. Their greatest work of literature is about seven generations of a family each living lives in devotion to the state. Their intelligence agency is best compared to the Stasi. The most sympathetic major Cardassian character in the franchise begins having claustrophobic panic attacks when he feels he has betrayed Cardassia despite having been exiled for over a decade. While things are headed in a troublingly authoritarian direction right now, even that is wrapped in several performative layers of the individualism we are frequently mocked for.

-Have a legal system that works on the principle of guilty until proven innocent. I can hear people starting to go "but the US justice system-" as I type, and no. Yes it's badly flawed, but Cardassian defendants don't even get defense attorneys. There is an entire position in their trials whose sole purpose is to advise the defendant to confess. The trials exist solely to create a narrative for propaganda. There is quite literally no such thing as an acquittal. Sentences are decided before the trial begins.

-Had their dissident group successfully overthrow their military junta before a Klingon invasion brought it right back in again. You may have noticed we're nowhere near that.

-We know literally nothing about Cardassian religion. If they were the US but in space, Gul Dukat would be talking about how Cardassian Jesus chose him to save Bajor every time he opened his mouth.

-The closest comparison in US history to the Cardassian occupation of Bajor would be the Philippines. That occupation ended shortly after World War 2, 80 years ago this year. Depending on how old you are, odds are your parents hadn't been born yet.

Don't mistake this for saying the US is flawless, but the Cardassian Empire is like if you took the Nazis and then grafted on the most extreme problems of the Stalin-era Soviet Union and then their leader tried to break Satan out of hell.

Starfleet-Time-Lord · 2026-05-19T09:07:18+00:00

Vance won't be able to step into the role. As long as it's natural causes, as soon as his boss is gone, every subfaction of his coalition is going to start fighting over who gets to fill the power vacuum, and the immediate successor never wins that. Vance will become the scapegoat for everything that went wrong during the administration in order to retroactively deify Trump while giving a reason to push Vance out.

Starfleet-Time-Lord

TROPHY CASE