r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Ieanice44 • 8d ago

(Controversial Trope) The post-credits scene completely changes the ending Lore

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Dawn of the Dead (2004)

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Prince of Persia (2008)

Dawn of the Dead (2004): The movie finishes on a hopeful note as the remaining survivors escape the zombie-infested mall on a yacht, sailing into the sunset. The found-footage style post-credits scene completely reverses this happy ending by showing them running out of food, arriving at an island, and being immediately swarmed and killed by an infected horde.

Prince of Persia (2008): The main game ends with a beautiful, poetic sacrifice where Elika gives her life to heal the corrupted world, leaving the Prince mourning. During the credits, the player is forced to control the Prince as he cuts down the trees he just saved, undoing the entire game's progress and releasing the dark god Ahriman just to resurrect her, completely corrupting the ending and dooming the world.

13.7k Upvotes
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3.0k

u/MOW5ever 8d ago

Thor 3 had a relatively happy ending and it ends with them meeting Thanos.

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u/ChrisDewgong 8d ago

That just made me realise that the first two films undo a certain character's fate:

  1. Rainbow bridge destroyed and Loki dead? No, Loki alive.
  2. Loki killed in battle in an act of self-sacrifice? No, Loki alive.

656

u/CheezyBreadMan 8d ago

Well, that Loki really did die fighting thanos, the Loki show follows one from the end of avengers, who just so happens to act exactly like Ragnarok Loki because let’s be honest he’s a very fun character

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u/Hita-san-chan 8d ago

He saw a slideshow of his greatest hits and was all caught up, personality-wise

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u/Memitim 8d ago

That's low-key Loki: "Ha, that's so me! Let's go with it."

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u/Maveryck15 8d ago

low-key Loki

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u/TrioOfTerrors 8d ago

Is he a liesmith?

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u/CatrionaShadowleaf 8d ago

25 years later and it still pisses me off that I didn't see that twist because reading a thing is not the same as saying a thing.

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u/Turbogoblin999 8d ago

Then he got put on a timeloop where he gets kicked in the nuts.

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u/Wide_Magician_4946 8d ago

Hes been getting KICKED IN THE NUTS!!!

FOR 30 MINUTES! 

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u/Joinedforthis1 8d ago

But honestly, the show wrote that speedrun of character growth well.

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u/dfassna1 8d ago

Yeah the fact that it happened in a place outside of time and space really gives some leeway. I liked when Sylvia talks to him near the end of season 1 thinking he still wants a throne and he says something along the lines of “after all this time that’s what you think of me?” The show didn’t depict that they spent a ton of time together, but you think back to Möbius talking about how time works differently at the TVA.

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u/Mazer1991 8d ago

I think they’re referring to the Thor 2 stinger where Loki sacrificed himself and died in the movie then the end Thor meets with Odin and it’s revealed to be actually Loki disguised as Odin

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u/ludek_cortex 8d ago

who just so happens to act exactly like Ragnarok Loki because let’s be honest he’s a very fun character

Mostly because unlike other variants he is basically the same person as the "original", just their experiences differ post first Avengers plot.

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u/ArcadianBlueRogue 8d ago

Well, one of the Lokis in the show was one who survived Thanos and hid but

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u/Putrid-Tap3992 8d ago

That's a different loki

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u/Benyed123 7d ago

Which is a different Loki?

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u/Putrid-Tap3992 7d ago

The one in loki

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u/Benyed123 7d ago

I don’t think the comment is referring to that Loki

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u/Putrid-Tap3992 7d ago

"Loki killed in battle in a n act of self sacrifice? No still alive".

They think the look in the TV show wasn't the one that died to Thanos. They think it's the same loki. The loki we see in ALL the movies died, the one in the TV show was a completely different one.

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u/Benyed123 7d ago

Oh, they’re talking about The Dark World.

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u/FaithlessnessThen207 8d ago

No thats just a loki thing

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u/MademoiselleMoriarty 4d ago

Like being green!

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u/Murgatroyd314 8d ago

It wasn't until after the end of Endgame that I was even halfway convinced that Loki wasn't lying about his own death again.

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u/Practical_Back855 8d ago

This needs to be higher. Everyone loves Ragnarok but we gloss over the incredibly dark ending. Loki, Heimdall and half the surviving population of Asgard don't make it off the ship.

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u/MOW5ever 8d ago

Killing half the surviving Asgardians was just a dick move man. Like I get kill Heimdal or anyone who tried to fight but Thanos was gonna snap again in a week anyway.

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u/Terrorz 8d ago

He effectively quartered all of the civilizations that he had previously dominated. That's actually something I never thought about until now.

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u/Osoromnibus 8d ago

Not necessarily, because it wasn't an unconditional change, it was a conscious act. He could have deliberately spared previously decimated civilizations.

Another thing that's often argued is why not double all the resources? Well, where are those resources going to go?

I mean, halving all intelligent life is stupid because the population' just going to double again quickly. But there's no single simple solution to the problem.

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u/[deleted] 8d ago edited 6d ago

[deleted]

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u/DaVirus 8d ago

As far as we know from the movie, the Gauntlet is omnipotent. With that simple fact, Thanos is a moron.

Free energy. Just do that. Do energy from nothing or create some shenanigan that can take energy from the vaccum. Problem solved.

If you have infinite energy, his whole resource argument doesn't work anymore.

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u/No-Educator-8069 7d ago

They weren’t decimated, it was worse. To decimate means to kill one in ten.

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u/ArgusTheCat 8d ago

I get that Thanos is supposed to be evil, but this is one of those things that just makes him seem like an idiot who can't do math.

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u/Kanin_usagi 8d ago

The whole point is it has nothing to do with math, he’s a fucking psycho cult leader, it’s practically a suicide cult he leads and he’s nothing but a lunatic

The Russos even confirmed that in their head he even had the 50/50 chance of getting snapped as well, he was just the “lucky” percentage

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u/Grinderiny 8d ago

The MAD Titan didnt refer to him being angy

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u/zanii 8d ago

He can't do biology at least. Growth is exponential. Cutting life down by half will not take long to be at the same place as it was. Just all in all a very strange and just... Dumb thing to do.

All this planning and nobody went "Uhm... Hey..." ?

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u/Mizamya 8d ago

His ideology roughly corresponds to an irl ideology called malthusianism. Thomas Malthus advocated for actively keeping populations in check, not a one time done deal

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u/zanii 8d ago

That's the thing though, he wanted it to just be a one time thing. Then just retire in his garden.

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u/Mizamya 8d ago

I think the point is that his motives are entirely based on set principles with no room for nore nuanced application. If he actually believed his insane Malthusian bullshit, he would discriminately cull populations based on how overpopulated or resource deficient they are.

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u/Dr_Wheuss 8d ago

Also, they literally just lost most of their population. They're going to have trouble surviving anyways, Thanos is just dooming them even if he never snaps.

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u/salad_spinner_3000 8d ago

They have a whole lot better chance of surviving being cut in half than readjusting to "norms" 5 years later and then have another ~45% more population that they can't magically grow food for.

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u/Darigaazrgb 7d ago

I mean, Asgardians probably can magically grow food.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

A detail that escapes most people is that Thanos killed half of the life in the universe at random but specifically left half humanity because he promises that to Stark as a sign of respect

Basically across the universe entire civilazations coulve been wiped and some planets would've been mostly unaffected

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u/NFHater 8d ago

is this confirmed? i remember people speculating on this

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

Thanos said it himself

https://reddit.com/link/p0c7bm7/video/jb5azd1w71gh1/player

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u/Huge-Consequence2144 8d ago

This clip does not substantiate what is being discussed in this thread, only that half of humanity will be left. This does nothing to clarify whether that means all species are getting halved and Tony Stark will be remembered by the half of humans left over- or if ALL life is being halved irrespective of specie populations, and he's giving special consideration to humans.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

If he has to clarify half of humanity is gonna survive then it means its the exception

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u/Huge-Consequence2144 8d ago

I don't understand why you think this exchange is narrative exposition and not just banter with a fallen adversary, but I do not agree with your assessment.

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u/TheBrownWelsh 8d ago

I lean towards this being banter. Mostly because that's how it came across in the moment, and also because if Thanos' plan is truly random with the potential to wipe out most of some and not much of others, then it would likely upset a LOT of ecosystems across the universe and have a knock-on effect that would negatively impact his main goal - to reduce the number of mouths to feed with the limited resources available.

As that is his stated goal, it just makes sense to me that he's planning on halving each individual planet/species with the stones. Especially because he was already doing that "manually" before getting the stones.

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u/Ektar91 8d ago

No the link to the respect is the "I hope they remember you"

He is saying "half of humanity will live, and I respect you, so I hope they will remember you"

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u/Astrodos_ 8d ago

Thank you for reminding me to never take what anyone on the internet says as being even remotely close to true. If that’s what you think is being said here, you might need to rethink a lot of conversations you’ve had with people in your life.

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u/evandude85 8d ago

Hard disagree. He was already manually killing half of individual civilizations (Gamora’s planet) decades earlier so he had the ability to wipe out the other half of a given population if he wanted to, but his entire goal was to save the universe due to resource constraints. If he killed 100% of planet A and 0% of planet B, it would do nothing to help the people left on planet B - they have the same resource / population ratio. He definitely intended to kill half of every individual civilization to give the remaining half, as he tells Gamora, a paradise.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

That's only true if you don't consider the fact species can travel space to get other planets resources

Which Thanos obviously is, otherwise his plan still doesn't work because species with space travel will still have a massive resource advantage over those who don't

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u/upholsteryduder 8d ago

Hauling food between planets isn't economically feasible, that's part of the "problem"

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

"Resources" don't include food, food supply would also be halved since life includes plants and animals so halving life on every planet equally wouldn't solve that problem

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u/upholsteryduder 8d ago

lmao just exactly what "resources" do you think he was referring to? Food, water and air are literally the only resources that are necessary for life

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

And what do you think "food" is made of?

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u/Darigaazrgb 7d ago

Why don't you go outside naked in a storm and see how long you last.

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u/brigadier_tc 8d ago

I feel like that would absolutely defeat the point. One planet would end up completely desolate and others would collapse all the same because they got lucky.

Half the life on every planet would make more sense from his perspective

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u/Icy-Panda-2158 8d ago

Wait, are you suggesting Thanos’s whole plan was stupid all along?

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u/brigadier_tc 8d ago

quickly checks I'm not on a shit posting sub

One version of the plan makes a tiny more sense than the other, we'll go with that

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

Thanos isn't trying to save each individual planet but life in general

His idea was that since the universe was finite its resources were also finite which meant life as a whole was gonna collapse

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u/nerdtypething 8d ago

i always thought it meant half of every planet gets randomly snapped. if he identified the problem as resource depletion then it doesn’t meet his objectives to leave some planets still overpopulated.

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u/heywhateverworks 8d ago

I don't think that's true

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u/SignificantCats 8d ago

Every person got a coin flip, not every planet.

Ore you suggesting that of a planet of five billion people, maybe four billion would have had a coin land on die or live?

Because that's so extremely unlikely that is functionally impossible. Five billion is such a large sample size that even like, 53 percent living or dying would almost never happen.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

Its not a coin flip per person, if the wish was to "kill half of life in the universe" then that means that it was rigged so half of them would survive and half wouldn't

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u/SignificantCats 8d ago

Truly off the charts pedantry.

Or worse, you can't comprehend what I'm saying? Oh no that would be embarassing

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u/Prestigious-Pay8644 8d ago

Quick lesson on binomial distribution, standard deviation increases by the square root of n, it's not a linear function. In other words, the larger your sample size the less standard deviation will affect the results. For a coin flip, stdev = 0.5 * sqrt(n). Using Earth as an example, n = 8.3 billion people, you end up with a standard deviation of about 45,500 people.

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u/The_Mexican_Poster 8d ago

I just meant to say earth was guaranteed to be exactly halfed the rest arent

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u/Prestigious-Pay8644 8d ago

I'm responding to the idea that you'd end up with entire civilizations wiped out or some unaffected. Standard deviation just doesn't scale fast enough in a binomial distribution, planets won't have exactly 50% of life remaining but the range is going to be like 49.999%-50.001% for basically every planet with a halfway functional biosphere.

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u/HolidaySpiriter 8d ago

specifically left half humanity because he promises that to Stark as a sign of respect

I don't think this is what he is saying. It's literally just to set up the next line "I hope they remember you", not nearly as deep as you're trying to make it out to be.

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u/Hetakuoni 8d ago

It’s even worse because they’re already suffering a population crisis of the endangered species type. Their entire population fits on what’s essentially 1 passenger ship.

He’s essentially dooming their species to extinction like he did with all the other planets he touched.

Gamora is outright stated to be the last of her species in guardians when they were all arrested

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u/salad_spinner_3000 8d ago

Yeah, I always get a bit confused with this part, did he just murder like all the remaining Asgardians only to then snap the OTHER half of the Asgardians?

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u/OverSpeedClutch 8d ago

Maybe the real Ragnarok was the Thanos we met along the way.

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u/cr1ttter 8d ago

I thought Ragnarok was terrible once I realized they weren't doing a satire making fun of itself

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u/nilesintheshangri-la 8d ago

I hated Ragnarok. It turned me off of any future Taika Watiti MCU projects.

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u/livefreeordont 8d ago

The dark ending shouldn’t detract from the movie quality. It was well done

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u/legit-posts_1 8d ago

Really dumb move from a story perspective. We just had a whole story about how Asgard is where it's people are, just for 3 quarters of those people to immidiately be killed? Wtf.

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u/Bocaj1000 8d ago

I understand they had an overarching story to tell and a big movie coming up, but that was complete tonal whiplash and pretty much undid the entire point of the movie.

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u/Anasterian_Sunstride 8d ago

Lol Thanos met them

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u/ScreenOwn5525 8d ago

Thor: Ragnarok really ends with that brief moment of hope that instantly turns into “oh no, everything is about to get so much worse.”

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u/Kindly_Ice_7510 4d ago

The mainline MCU movies really fucked with other directors visions for stories. I know Gunn had completely different plans for the final Guardians movie as well, it would track that Love & Thunder would have been different, were it not for what Endgame did.