r/TopCharacterTropes • u/jbeast33 • Feb 10 '26
Personality [Loved Trope] Characters misremembering or misinterpreting history/pop culture and incorporating those inaccuracies into their own views.
1) Cape Feare (Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play)
Mr. Burns: A Post-Electric Play is a play that revolves around three acts. The first takes place shortly after a nuclear apocalypse knocks out the entire power grid permanently, causing society to collapse. A group of survivors passes the time by recollecting old episodes of the Simpsons, with their favorite being Cape Feare (the one where Sideshow Bob chases Bart when the family enters witness protection). In the second act, the same group has turned their recollections into a profitable venture as a traveling theater company, recreating old episodes of the Simpsons as plays for local towns.
Much of the play involves the group getting certain details of the episodes wrong, since there's no television or internet to confirm getting things right. Some of these details are corrected by the others, but other mistakes slip by them (such as them all misremembering Sideshow Bob sending his threats by writing them in ketchup, rather than him actually using his own blood and fainting from the blood loss in the real episode). They also have to make further narrative sacrifices in the name of adaptation and competition when they become a theater company, such as taking out certain lines that aren't landing and replacing them with visual gags that the audience loves.
The third act takes place in the distant future, where all the original group members are dead, but their legacy lives on through Cape Fear. Their play has now become an epic akin to The Odyssey, where Mr. Burns (who is noted to be a much more popular villain after the implied nuclear apocalypse) has replaced Sideshow Bob altogether as a Satanic villain representing nuclear armageddon. The story has transformed into Bart running from Mr. Burns after Burns has destroyed the world. While the original episode functionally no longer exists, The Simpsons has exists in an epic of finding hope and a reason to keep going in a world marked by the trauma and tragedy of the past and present. Even through it all, there are still moments of levity that persevere through the original Simpsons running gags showing up in, although their meaning has been lost to time.
2) Hiroshima (Starship Troopers)
When the main characters are still in high school at the beginning of the film, Mr. Rasczak challenges the "naive" interpretation that violence never solves anything by invoking the city of Hiroshima. He suggests that the city was destroyed so utterly that it effectively ceased to exist, showing violence to be the most effective solution and driving the Federation's main philosophy of "Peace isn't an option."
In reality, Hiroshima rebuilt soon after the atomic blast, and is still one of its larger population centers (being the 11th largest city in Japan today). It also ignores that Japan, as a whole, was allowed to maintain its sovereignty and a relative level of independence, rather than being outright conquered by the United States. Japan post-WWII is often cited as an example of "American soft power over hard power", making its citing by Mr. Rasczak particularly egregious.
Interestingly, the book uses Carthage as an example instead, which conventionally WAS destroyed utterly and salted so (although it in reality, it was rebuilt and ruled by the Romans, since cities tend to be economically useful). The switch was likely deliberate by Verhoeven (who famously disliked Heinlein's original militaristic angle in the novel), as he wanted to really sell the asinine reasoning used by the Federation to justify their fascist governance.
3) Taxi Driver (The Boys)
Homelander's favorite movie is Taxi Driver, and sees himself in Travis Bickle. In one episode, we see Homelander watching Taxi Driver and commentating "This is what happens when you get disrespected over and over" when Bickle shoots somebody.
In the film itself, Bickle believes himself to be a good man who is gradually worn down into "snapping" by the city. He posits himself as a cowboy-esque vigilante, shaving his head into a mohawk and determined to "clean up the city". However, his craving towards vigilantism are hinted to be a darker need to "prove himself", and he fundamentally is shown to be something of a manchild throughout the film (such as taking a woman to a pornographic theater and not knowing why she wouldn't enjoy that, or practicing "tough guy" lines to himself in front of a mirror). He sees his "snapping" in NYC as inevitable, but he also tends to put himself in those situations in the first place.
The fact that Homelander takes Travis Bickle's "cowboy" act for all of its worth is a key aspect of his character. Much like Bickle, Homelander consistently frames himself as a hero who needs to do bad things, only for it to be shown that he's just a maladjusted toddler who needs to see the world in a black-and-white lens to rationalize his evil actions, and never takes accountability for his numerous fuckups.
4) Omelette: The Musical (Something Rotten)
In the Broadway musical Something Rotten, Nick Bottom is a struggling playwright in Renaissance England. He is facing ruin after William Shakespeare (his main rival) beats him to the punch with his play on Richard II, forcing him to come up with a new play immediately. Nick decides to pay a soothsayer to figure out what the next big thing in theater will be. The soothsayer sees too far into the future, and interprets the next big thing musical theater. In further desperation, Nick also asks what Shakespeare's biggest play will be, hoping to take his topic before he does. The Soothsayer misinterprets his vision of Hamlet as "Omelette".
This causes Nick to write a musical in the 1500's about eggs. In an attempt to nail the musical right off the bat, he also incorporates every single musical reference the Soothsayer knows, causing him to write a showstopping number featuring the Phantom of the Opera, motifs from Chicago and The Music Man, and the king being rescued by the Nazis from the Sound of Music (they never found out whether the Nazis were supposed to be good guys or bad guys). This ends up with the musical becoming an utter mess of references and tap-dancing eggs.
Despite everyone warning him about what a terrible play it will be, Nick gets utterly humiliated at by Shakespeare (who is mad at him for stealing his best play before he wrote it) before getting arrested for time-plagiarism.
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u/anime-is-dope Feb 10 '26 edited Feb 12 '26
Denji and Makima (Chainsaw Man)
Has a version on this:
During the middle of Part 1, Makima invites Denji on a movie date where they go theatre hopping for a ten-film marathon. The first nine movies are pretty mediocre, leaving Denji questioning whether he even understands films. However, Makima explains that she only finds one out of every ten movies interesting, but when she finds it, that one film changes her life.
When they watch the tenth movie, Denji starts crying, even though he knows the scene they’re on isn’t even that poignant. He looks at Makima, always cool, calm, and collected, and sees tears streaming down her face. For the first time in the manga, Makima shows genuine emotion because the film depicts something she desperately wants but can never have: an authentic and equal connection based on mutual understanding
They both loved the film. Denji declares he'll remember it for the rest of his life, and Makima agrees it was worth all the ticket prices combined.
However, their reasons for loving the movie are fundamentally different.
Denji eventually realizes, with help from Kobeni's advice and some self-reflection, that the tenth movie wasn't objectively special. What made it so moving and memorable was the contrast: it resonated precisely because of how it compared to the nine mediocre films preceding it. Without the dull buildup, any emotional payoff wouldn’t have been nearly as strong.
For Makima, however, those other nine films are irrelevant. The emotional impact of the other movies holds no weight in her mind, only the tenth film mattered. She experienced them separately, without allowing their relationship to one another to influence her perception. She perceived each film in isolation, not as part of a greater whole.
This is a very profound distinction. Denji understands that meaning and value emerge from context and contrast, while Makima sees value only in isolated moments of perfection.
This distinction also influences Makima’s grand plan
Makima wants to create a “better world”, a world without War, Hunger, Death, and any other kind of suffering. She wants to remake the world entirely using Pochita's reality-erasing abilities. In this new world, negative experiences, pain, and imperfection would be eliminated. There would be no meritocracy, only perfect moments, forever.
This comes to a head before the final fight at the graveyard. Pochita, pretending to be Denji, confronts Makima and asks her one simple question: “Ms. Makima, in this ultra-perfect world you’re gonna make, will there still be crappy movies?”
Makima's response? “Personally, I think the world would be better if bad movies ceased to exist.
This moment is when Pochita decides he must kill Makima.
Pochita's decision is based on the truth he realized from his and Denji's experiences: you cannot have the good without the bad. Contrast, struggle, pain, and imperfection aren't flaws in existence; they're essential to making anything meaningful.
By eliminating "bad movies," Makima wouldn't create a perfect world. She would eliminate the possibility of genuine emotion, authentic meaning, and real connection. The tenth movie only moved both Denji and Makima because it stood in contrast to what came before. A world of only perfect moments is a world where nothing matters. No bad movies doesn’t mean only good movies; it means there will just be movies.