beehammer | Entries tagged with tropes

(archived from tumblr)

I know everybody in the DC fandom likes to bag on Gotham like “Why would anyone still live in a town that gets gassed by a clown once a month and has to dodge an entire colony of man-bats and probably has to measure crime rates in terms of how many people made it home from the office without getting mugged or stabbed this week?”

And this is a completely valid question, because like this is a city that thought stuffing their aged police commissioner in a robot and saying “This is the Batman now” was a reasonable response to losing their normal unlicensed vigilante.

But then we live in America and have like

Donald Trump legitimately running for president
clowns hiding in the shrubs is a nationwide thing and the police would like to remind you that it’s probably not legal to shoot them
Flint is probably a month away from having a cholera outbreak
Florida’s being overrun by giant pythons, and someone's actual-facts solution was to put a bound on dead pythons, at which point a state herpetologist had to explain why it was a bad idea to encourage random citizens to go fight massive apex predators in the swamp.
the justice department is trying to figure out how many people the police face-shoot to death every year and it turns out that’s not something anyone keeps records on
every big city has that one hospital where you don’t go if you can help it because you could legit die in the ER waiting room and the janitor will just mop around your corpse
California’s always both on fire and under water, somehow
the news is like “hurricanes as a zika-fighting strategy: what could go wrong?”
Georgia has an entire police department that doesn’t seem to do anything but have cybersex with pedophiles
civil forfeiture is a thing
the number of times people get shot with arrows in this country every year is genuinely astonishing
Texas just blows the fuck up every so often because EPA and OSHA regs are for commies
Worse Virginia’s been on fire for a century in some places because samesies
like six people got shot (with guns) in one day in Minneapolis and their unanimous response to police was “fuck off I’m not a snitch”

and everybody’s still like “lol love it or leave it buddy."

(archived from tumblr)

Given that Bat-Cow is a real legitimate thing that actually happened, I feel like Red Hood needs a goat. Like, a foul-tempered, vaguely sinister, apparently-completely-normal goat that Damien runs across on some mission, and everybody else calls “Not it” before Jason even knows what’s going on, and suddenly he’s got a goat.

And he tries to leave the goat at the manor, but he gets home and finds the goat in his walk-up, somehow. All the doors and windows are still locked, security system hasn’t been tripped, nobody will admit to having put it there.

“You’re telling me that not one of you is responsible for this. That a goat somehow got itself down ten miles of subway, navigated a switchover to the el-train, climbed six flights of stairs, let itself in, and then locked back up afterwards.”

“Goats are very nimble, Jason.”

And he keeps trying to leave it with petting zoos, but it’s the same thing every time, it always winds up back at his place. Maybe he eventually grudgingly accepts it because it is kind of nice to come home to someone, even if it is just a goat, and it is kind of helpful. He’s lost count of the number of times he’s come home to find that somebody’s clearly broken in--maybe just a thief, maybe someone after him specifically, but whoever they were they got headbutted right back out a window for their trouble.

The goat’s never the worse for wear.

Then he winds up in serious trouble, and in swoops the whole rest of the family at the last second, and he’s like “How’d you find me?” because he’s an independent vigilante who is not wearing a bat-tracker, dad. And Bruce just looks pained and says it doesn’t matter, and Dick does his best to be very serious and tells him that Hood-Goat told them Jason was in trouble, and Barbara’s just like “We’re not calling it that.”

(They are totally calling it that. Turns out it’s really hard to come up with good nicknames based off “Red Hood,” and neither Bruce nor Jason will accept Bat-Goat.)

Jason doesn’t believe them. Tim and Steph immediately whip out their phones and show him videographic evidence, which in this case amounts to the goat jumping around the cave and waving his favorite leather jacket--now half-eaten--around like a flag. Which, okay, is one of the weirdest things he’s seen in a month, and doesn’t explain how the fucking goat got from his apartment to the batcave, but he’s like “Okay, sure, but how’d you find me?”.

Steph fast-fowards to the part where the goat headbutts a map case open and stamps its hoof on the warehouse they’re all standing in right now, and Jason’s just looking at the goat, who is of course now loitering in the background like there’s nothing unusual about this at all, and going “You guys didn’t bring it with you, did you?”

And then Jason’s looking at Bruce, because of course they didn’t bring the goat with them, and going “Do you think maybe Zatanna could...?”

And Bruce is like “It’s your goat, Jason. Part of being a responsible adult is arranging for its exorcisms yourself.”

Meanwhile Damien’s assuring the goat that it’s just perfect the way it is and probably doesn’t need the devil cast out of it.

Then the outlaws phase hits, and Roy is just so unbelievably stoked about the goat, and Jason realizes that he's stuck in a live-action reenactment of Goat Simulator. And he is so 1000% done with life. Every time one of the other Robins or Bruce asks him for help, he just texts a picture of the goat in yet another Arsenal-provided get-up and tells them that they did this to him and he's never helping them again.

(archived from tumblr)

I feel like now that Daredevil has established that Madame Gao is still hanging around, doing her thing, we could actually maybe get some non-racist, perfectly ridiculous goon-swarms going.

Like, she’s clearly a charismatic leader, she runs a bustling drug-trade empire with lots of cash and a rolodex full of people up to their eyeballs in debt or wanting a free month’s worth of drugs, and she seems to take at least pretending to be polite about shit pretty seriously. And Matt just will not fucking stop kicking down her doors and beating up her henchmen and being super-rude about everything.

So, you know, just like once a month, she checks her Annoying Vigilante Calendar and sees what he’s up to, calls in one of her more creative lieutenants, and tells him she wants word put on the street about something Daredevil won’t be able to resist investigating. Also, she wants fifty people they can afford to lose to dress up like the cast of Evil Dead and be waiting for him at the bait-address where the fake dog-napping ring or whatever is supposed to be. Matt shows up, kicks down the door, and suddenly there are guys with chainsaws and people pretending to be zombies and somebody threw pig’s blood (?!) on him and then ran away and he does not understand what’s going on but there are dogs to be saved, so he’s going to fight his way through it come hell or high water or ten guys who appear to be walking trees okay this has got to be a dream.

Meanwhile she’s just watching this on a livestream and laughing her ass off, and it’s almost as good as the time she got a bunch of shriners, complete with miniature cars, to take him on for what they thought was a charity bout.

After half a year of this, Matt’s about to have a nervous breakdown because seriously, what the fuck is even going on in this town, and Karen keeps insisting that no, Matt, I swear on a stack of Bibles that there isn’t a gang of villainous Harlem Globetrotter-wannabes with attacks based on trick-basketball moves carving out territory in Hell’s Kitchen, I think someone besides you would have seen them by now if they were, why would that even be a thing? Claire hung up on him after the “evil clowns” call, and Foggy told him to stop falling asleep watching the news after the time with the Sexy Avengers, and Madame Gao’s expanding video library of Daredevil’s Greatest Hits is proving surprisingly popular with all the guys he keeps punching in the face because Daredevil doesn’t do doorbells.

(archived from tumblr)

Bogue: I need an army.

Posse Depot clerk: Okay. Purpose of the army?

Bogue: For...normal army things. You know, just perfectly ordinary, army purposes.

Posse Depot clerk: Oooookay. Do you maybe just need the Army, then?

Bogue: No. Absolutely not. It would be terrible if the actual Army showed up.

Posse Depot clerk: So you need an army, and definitely not the Army, for perfectly legitimate and normal reasons.

Bogue: Yes. I need an army to accompany me on a three-day ride to the middle of nowhere and do legitimate, completely legal army things there.

Posse Depot clerk: Sounds good, please sign here.

Cut for: Continuity. An earlier re-write clearly shows Bogue delegating this task.

Townsfolk: You can’t do this! These are our homes! This is our land!

Denali: Oh, suddenly there’s a problem with forcibly relocating entire communities with little to no compensation for lost property or livelihood and no concern for the well-being of those displaced? That’s a thing we take exception to, now?

Townsfolk: ...

Bogue: ...

Hired goons: ...

[credits roll after forty minutes of increasingly awkward silence]

Cut for: Time.

Bogue: Hello, good morning, I need another army.

Posse Depot clerk: Wait, another army? What’d you do with the last one?

Bogue: No, sorry, I misspoke. I need an army. My first army. Ha ha, what a slip of the tongue, who even needs two armies.

Posse Depot clerk: No, I think I remember you now. Bartholomew Bogue, wasn’t it?

Bogue: No, no, you’re thinking of my brother. He hired an army here a week ago. He said this place was great, and that he was very happy with the army he got here, and they’re definitely still all riding around somewhere and positively not blown to bits by a weird pack of outlaws. I’m...Shmartholomew Shmogue.

Posse Depot clerk: If you’re brothers, why’s your last name different?

Bogue: Um. The doctor who filed my birth certificate was very drunk. But we’re definitely brothers, and this is definitely my first army.

Posse Depot clerk: I’m charging you a deposit this time.

Cut for: Continuity. This scene was shot before script revisions calling for Bogue to be killed on-screen during the climax were adopted.

Denali: *laughing to himself*

Bogue: What’s so funny?

Denali: You know how you asked me how I got so many men for so cheap, and I said ask me later?

Bogue: Yeah.

Denali: I told them all we were going to Six Flags.

Bogue: Well, that’s just mean.

Denali: *laughs louder* I told them all they could go on El Diablo, even if they had a bunch of corndogs first.

Bogue: Jesus, Denali.

Denali: They’re going to be so mad when they find out the truth. Those townsfolk don’t stand a chance.

Cut for: Characterization; historical inaccuracy. As much as a large band of frontier mercenaries would have doubtless enjoyed them, corndogs were not invented until the 1940s.

A prolonged argument between Chris Pratt and Denzel Washington over a scene in which Chisolm is supposed to do Red Harvest’s warpaint for him.

Denzel swore never to lift a brush again after an incident in college and proposes the scene be rewritten to replace Chisolm with Faraday, but Chris feels his fifteen years of semi-professional watercolor painting is less important to the potential revision than Faraday’s lack of emotional connection with Red Harvest.

Martin Sensmeier is asked for his opinion on the issue, but he pretends not to hear them and continues to eat his lunch as if the argument is not happening. Chris claims that this is because Martin agrees with him, and Denzel says that after this display he regrets defending Chris’s character when he was ranked least trustworthy of all the Marvel Chrises.

Matt Bomer, back on set for a last-minute reshoot, suggests avoiding the scene entirely by hanging several very clean mirrors around the town to make it clear to the audience that Red Harvest can do his own warpaint, no matter how out of hand the make-up artists’ one-upmanship of each other gets.

Denzel apologizes for what he said about Chris, and Chris appears to accept the apology but is still obviously hurt. Martin covers the ensuing tension by opening a bag of sunchips and eating them very slowly.

Cut for: Quality. The argument was surreptitiously filmed by Vincent D’Onofrio on his cell phone while he pretended to be texting Ayelet Zurer about whether she’d bring her new dog on set for him to meet when Daredevil starts filming again, and is consequently poorly lit and badly shot and features no mic dampening once the sunchips are in play. It will, however, be included as an extra on the blu-ray release.

(archived from tumblr)

I just want to see one of those dopey supervillain team-up things where instead of everybody being like “All right, time to fight us some heroes!”, every last one of them has an existential crisis because somebody lumped them in with the rest of these fucks.

Dr. Doom’s all “Doom will usher in a new age, a golden utopia, free from the burden of want or indecision or petty dissent! Doom knows what’s best for mankind and will bring it about! These peasants are mere jailbreakers and thieves! How has it come to be that Doom is numbered among their ranks!”

And like Sandman’s sitting there going “Dude, I just... I steal shit. Sometimes I team up with guys who also don’t like Spider-Man. Worst thing I ever did was slap an old dude, and I felt really bad about it for weeks. That guy’s been sanctioned by the UN three times and counting for running death camps.”

“The skulls of Doom’s enemies pave the road to a better tomorrow!”

Three guys’ve got their hands up like “We literally just fight the Avengers for kicks. Pretty sure that ain’t even illegal.”

General Ross is sitting there glaring at everyone and going “I’m still a general. I work for the US government. I’m being paid, right now, out of taxpayer funds. You’re all going to super-jail as soon as I get my phone back.”

Everybody’s side-eyeing Kraven like, it’s 2016, bro, stop killing endangered animals for fun, and he’s looking at them like he doesn’t even know what to say to someone if it’s not about hunting.

Wolverine and Deadpool are somewhere in the back, bickering with one of the roster-guys about how it shouldn’t count if the hundreds of dudes you’ve knife-murdered were knife-murdered for good reasons.

It’s just the most demoralizing thing since Osborn got elected president. Super-crime plummets 50% in the next three months as everyone takes some time to reflect on their lives and try to get their shit together.

(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.

One of my favorite tropes of all time--and I know this is a weird one to the point of possibly not being a recognized trope, but bear with me--is probably the Incompetent Mentor.

You know the one. Some kid's the Chosen One, selected by Destiny to slay the Great Evil, and then it turns out that the person put in charge of making sure they lived to hit puberty never bothered explaining the job to them.

Obi-Wan Kenobi's probably the most famous example of this. Dude's got almost twenty years to spend teaching Luke to at least not be such a jackass, and what does the kid get? Half an hour with a training droid, a pack of lies about his father, and a second-hand laser-sword.

"I'm going to be honest with you, Luke: I completely fucking forgot about you roughly two weeks after I dumped you on your aunt and uncle's doorstep."

I don't even know why I love it so much. I just do. Just whenever you've got some teenager running around as poorly equipped for their grand destiny as humanly possible and a caretaker who knew this was coming and did fuck-all to prepare them for it, I can't stop snickering to myself. It's just like, you had one job. And who even put them in charge of raising the chosen one in the first place?

I mean, if you're entrusted by the High Council of Stuff with the future savior of the world, it seems reasonable to think that somebody would have checked your references and made sure you're not a slack-ass loser, right? Did the All-Knowing Wisdom-Havers of Ancient Power just pick some asshole at random and tell them to raise the hope of all mankind? Did they look at the resume that includes "Fucked Up Royally Last Time This Happened, 1189AD-current" and hand the baby over with a shrug and a "Surely you won't make the same mistake twice."?

We're not talking about the stories where an infant of dubious identity is smuggled out of a burning castle by a half-senile washerwoman and raised by her unwitting grandchildren as a foundling. That can't really be helped most of the time, because it's a huge fucking surprise to everyone when the kid can shoot lightning bolts from their eyes and fly on alternate Tuesdays. I mean the stories where the kid starts shooting lightning bolts from their eyes, and good old Uncle Jim goes "Okay, time to take your proper place in the world as Wizard Jesus. Did I mention that magic is real? Because magic is real. So, let's hit the road."

And sometimes you can chalk it up to the fact that they were in hiding, but most of the time the kid's been left wildly incompetent even by those standards. Like, okay, you couldn't teach them magic with the massive, perpetual, kingdom-wide witch-hunt on for any unapproved sorcerers. But you probably could have gotten away with teaching them how to whack somebody in the face with a cudgel really well and how the government works. Maybe explain the basics of the economic system and that stormtroopers aren't your friends. Maybe "Dragons are fantastical creatures, but if they were real, you'd probably kill them by shooting them in the heart with an iron arrow."

But it's just like, nope! The most incompetent mentor available taught them to grow turnips really well and never let them leave the farm or watch the news, so you better hope they're a quick study or can find a way to weaponize turnips.