Terrible Tropes and the People Who Love Them

[beehammer]

(archived from tumblr) 

We’ve all seen The Mummy (1999), right?  Brendan Fraser’s stupid face.  Rachel Weisz’s equally stupid face.  Arnold Vosloo and his unforgivable habit of wearing way fewer clothes than necessary.  Oded Fehr and his actually unforgivable habit of wearing way more clothes than necessary.  In fact, if you haven’t seen it, you should probably do yourself a huge favor and just never, ever watch it.  Ever.

Ahem.

Anyway, the whole plot is basically that Imhotep and the pharaoh’s main squeeze get their rock and-or roll on, and then there’s a murder-suicide, and all this leads directly to Imhotep getting cursed. Or, more accurately, cuuuuuuuuuuuuuursed, cue dramatic music.

The curse is one of those fun curses where you’re listening to the characters talk about it and you’re thinking something along the lines of “Why do you even have that curse?”

“Yes, I’m immortal and have godlike power, but only at the price of shirts and robes refusing to cover my pharaoh-betraying flesh!”

(I totally wasn’t kidding about the unforgivable habit of wearing way fewer clothes than necessary.)

So you have this guy that you hate so bad that you feel like death is too good for him, and you want him to suffer for an eternity.  The side-effect of the thing you have to make him suffer for an eternity is that if he ever, I don’t know, gets out of cursed-people jail, he’s essentially a malevolent god.  Who is specifically pissed off at you, or your descendants, because he’s spent the last mumblemumble years suffering under a terrible curse that you deliberately slapped him with.

Do you a) think about it for a few minutes and decide that just being tortured to normal death is actually good enough for him after all or b) say “Screw it, I’m sure he’ll never in all eternity bust out of this trap” and go for broke?

Because if you always pick “go for broke,” then congratulations, you’re probably one of the idiots who kick off one of these easily-avoidable horror films.  I mean, if you sat down and explained how this happened to the people currently running from walls of sand or an entire city that’s been zombified or a pack of angry vampire mummies, they’d be happy to explain the likely consequences of giving someone you hate the power to do all that.

“This guy is practically omnipotent because…you didn’t like him.  Did it ever occur to you to make sure he…couldn’t do all this?  No?  Okay.  Fine.  No, no, we get it.  Drinking was involved.  Bad decisions were made.  We’ll just get back to saving the world from the machinations of a dude you hated so much that you gave him superpowers.”

I mean, think of the future trouble that could be saved if people back in the day sat down and periodically did a curse-review while they were editing their magic tomes. “What’s the best thing that happens if this gets used?” Somebody you hate has something really, really unpleasant happen to them. “What’s the worst thing that happens if this gets used?” An eternal night filled with blood-sucking monsters that delight in the anguished wails of the living falls, and sunrise never comes.  That one doesn’t make it into the next edition.  Problem solved.