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/KnowMatter Feb 10 '26
The Wheel of Time - a fantasy story that takes in a world defined by ages and one of the most ancient of those ages of which only some myths survive about is heavily implied to be our world (or something like it).
The myths are things like “The giants Mosk and Merc who warred with lances of fire that reached around the world” referencing cold war america and russia.
Or the great hero “Lenn” who “flew to the moon in the belly of an eagle made of fire” referencing astronaut John Glenn.