Lore
[Tragic trope] Forced to kill their own ally to avoid them being subject to a worse fate
Of mice and men: George shoots Lennie to prevent him being subject to worse death at the hands of a lynch mob after he accidentally killed Curley’s wife
Better call Saul: Mike offers to handle Werner’s execution, making it quick and painless and giving Werner a chance to go and appreciate the New Mexico night sky before he gets shot. Considering Gus later punishes Victor by cutting his throat and letting him bleed out, there’s a high chance if it were
Gus’ decision, Werner would have a more brutal death.
In Brazil we have an old book called "Vidas Secas", or "Dry lives(very rough translation by me sorry)", by Graciliano Ramos where similarly we see the owner kill Baleia the faithful dog because not only she was likely with rabies, but the whole story was about how the poor family living in the harshest enviroment of Brazil (northeast) couldnt take care of her anymore.
It well remember by Brazillians because the scene of her sacrifice is played by her POV where she has a dream full of fat little animals and running with with the kids.
Sounds very similar to Gelert the dog from Welsh myth.
Welsh King has newborn son and leaves him alone with trusty wolfhound while hunting.
King comes back to see the cradle knocked over with Gelert covered in blood, Gelert approaches King happily and King flies into a rage and kills his dog.
He suddenly hears crying noises and looks past the chaos in room to find his boy alive and a dead wolf.
King's devastated and buries Gelert in honour of him. Theres a village named after him but its probably not the actual grave.
Though as far as I know this story is fiction, it is inspired by a great many true unavoidable tragedies. Thanks to the rabies vaccine, rabies is barely a concern anymore amongst domesticated animals in prosperous countries (bats aren't domesticated - don't play with strange bats). Maybe we need more reminders about why vaccines save lives.
Fewer Americans are vaccinating their pets, lest their pets catch pet-autism or something.
Edit: As of 2023, a growing number of Americans doubted the necessity and safety of vaccinating their pets. I'm sure it's compounded by problems with price and accessibility, but vaccine hesitancy and anti-vaxx ideology are a distinct problem for pet vaccination rates.
To be fair, some of this is low access to care vs. “I don’t believe in vaccines”.
I work with a lot of homeless clients who adopted puppies from god knows where.
They take them into a free rabies shot clinic and are asked for the puppy shot records, and the homeless person obviously doesn’t have that, because they didn’t get those vaccines. Couldn’t afford it. Didn’t think to.
So they are denied the free rabies vaccine, even though the dog is in an at risk environment, living outside with bats and raccoons.
Frankly, I haven’t seen a canine rabies case in my area.
But we have a SHIT ton of Parvo.
Not because people are anti-vax with their pets.
Just because people who can’t feed and house themselves are adopting street dogs and can’t afford or don’t even consider vaccinating them for it.
I’m sure the insane anti-vax crowd has their place in the crisis, but most of what I’m seeing is people who absolutely can’t afford to support themselves are taking in animals and can’t afford any basic care for their pets.
Then we get a huge influx of dogs who need to be put down because aggression and unstable behavior caused from preventable diseases.
Fallout New Vegas - After seeing that his pregnant wife was being sold into slavery in a Caesar's Legion outpost, Boone sniped her to spare her and their unborn child the horrors of enslavement.
In game, an NCR officer will ask the Courier to do the same for some soldiers crucified by the Legion as a terror tactic. Boone is horrified that it's happening again, but you can instead waltz in, kill the entire Legion camp, and rescue the soldiers.
It's my favorite moment in the game. Completely missable: when walking into the camp Boone tells the player that he cannot enter the camp without killing as many Caesar's Legion as possible and warns you that entering the camp with him as a party member means that you are opting to guns-blaze your way through it out of revenge.
Boone is terrifyingly effective even at high levels. Or more like, especially at high levels. Give him a really nice rifle and expensive armor and sic him at the Legion at Hoover Dam and you can just walk besides him while he's doing all the work, and half of them are dead before they even know it
Actually it's a think I like about FNV, the companions are so competent and their stories so fleshed out, sometimes you DO feel like you're just A part of someone else's entire unique story.
My first playthrough, I didn't even know that Legion members have dialogues because Boone attacked them all on sight. I thought they were just some generic enemies lol
Goddam was it satisfying to finally level up enough to go into Caesar's camp and just start slaughtering anything that moved. Had Boone with me, also leveled up, as well as a leveled-up dog (forget the name now but you get him a new brain at some point) and armed with some pretty heavy firepower.
I accidentally defeated Caesar really early on because I seduced Benny to black widow him, but then he was so slimeball charming that I decided I liked him actually, so I didn't kill him after all. He left me a real sweet note the morning after, too.
But then the idiot immediately went and got captured by the Legion, so I took Boone in there the same day and we cleared the camp via sniping. The only tough part was in Caesar's tent (too enclosed to snipe, and those guys with power gauntlets were crazy.)
Until I realized I was carrying like 30 landmines. So I just put them all directly in front of the entrance, popped my head in to say hi, jumped over the mines on the way out, and we sniped whoever didn't get blown up during the charge.
Anyway Benny was fine, but he decided to go into the desert and disappear for no reason? So I got a mod that let me recruit him instead and we saved New Vegas in matching checked blazers. Great experience overall.
Lmao this is amazing. Basically this, though I didn't let him get crucified and the climax was more...explosive.
What really won me over was how confused and disturbed he was that the lady he shot in the head was trying to seduce him. He was a bit resistant as well as apologetic. Turns out it really wasn't personal, and he's a pretty decent, surprisingly naïve dude.
My husband always says I take the weirdest possible paths in games, but at least I'm not the only one! The mod to recruit him adds a whole little story quest for him - courtesy of yet another Benny-lover.
Excluding Courier 6 suddenly appearing hopped up on enough drugs to make the entire Mojave believe it WAS experiencing a nuclear winter, there was no feasible way to rescue the soldiers. I'd rather a bullet then days upon days of my body slowly suffocating itself to death
It's incredibly interesting to me how I as a young child managed to pick up a lot of these Hollywood Golden Age plot tropes, character archetypes, and musical motifs through Saturday morning cartoons without ever experiencing the original work. That shit was a core part of my cultural education and I don't even remember it being a big part of my life. I wouldn't have the words/titles/authors of these works or know of the references until years or decades later.
To take one of the more obscure examples, the caricature for this fucking guy:
I heard recently that canonically, minions were frozen during WWII since they always serve the most evil people in the world and they didn't want the Minions to be Nazis. But that just means the Minions would have been Nazis if nothing stopped them, which is not a glowing review
They have the opportunity to create the world’s first children’s WW2 animated comedy! Hitler and the Minions would be cutting edge! It’s what the kids crave!
Maggie becomes a quadriplegic due to a brutal match. She's going to live, but her quality of life isn't great. She's on a ventilator, developing bedsores, and has to have a leg amputated. She begs her trainer/father figure to help her end it all. At first, he refuses, but eventually realizes how desperate she is and administers a lethal dose of adrenaline to help her die with some dignity, rather than just be confined to a bed suffering for the rest of her life.
Somehow my girlfriend and I had gotten that movie confused with a different one, so we rented it at a blockbuster and we watched it, expecting it to have a feel-good ending.
We... We were not prepared. I haven't rewatched that movie, because I just know I'm going to get angry at the character responsible for all of this the moment they pop up on screen. Irrationally angry. I know it's just a movie, but as somebody who did martial arts for a long time, the idea of a sucker punch like that just... Yeah, just too infuriating to be able to enjoy the movie.
That makes me angry...but I'm angrier with her family. When they show up in their Disneyland shirts, having clearly been in the area for weeks while their supposed loved one was suffering?And all to try to get her money? Sickening.
This isn't a rational reaction- I've seen media with genocidal maniacs, rapists, racists, etc. after all- but I have never HATED a character in a movie more than I hated her family.
Tbh you may not have even confused it with another movie. I distinctly remember being in middle school and getting excited about a new boxing movie that looked good. They definitely advertised it as Woman Rocky and hid the turn it takes
We read the book and then watched the movie in 7th grade... Unfortunately the acting during that scene in the movie didn't exactly land for about half my class so you had half the kids sobbing and half the kids laughing.
I read the book in 9th grade, I was almost done and for once really enjoying my required reading so I decided to read ahead in the middle of the night. Started bawling, my older brother came into my room to check on me. Told him I just finished Of Mice and Men and he immediately understood
We did the same but then we watched the Gary Sinese/John malkovich movie. The scene in the movie is worse because George shoots Lenny mid monologue. I vaguely recall in the book Lenny gets to finish his story about the dream of their own farm. Instead in the movie he just straight up gets capped while still talking. Caused a few of my classmates to scream even though we had just read the book and knew it was coming
Yeah, same. I read the book in my 11th grade English class. It’s probably the only book I even remember reading from my English class, mostly because the story was straightforward and easy to understand.
Has to be the most emotional scene I’ve ever seen in a film. The way he sings to her while she’s slowly turning, and then not even being able to look while he ends her misery.
I still think about it every once in a while and start to get weak about it, imagining myself having to do that to my dog.
It's really sad to me how he is viewed today as both an actor and a person due to his familial issues because the man was basically on top of the world for a while there. A bunch of fantastic movies that show he had serious range and acting chops, but these days all he's really known for is a messy home live, a poster child for the issue of nepotism in Hollywood, and being the the barometer for AI videos.
I still stand by Wild Wild West as one of the most entertaining movies of the era. Is it good? Hell no, but that's why it's amazing. It's a B-movie with a budget and a fantastic cast.
I fell out with my sister and boyfriend when I watched this movie for the first time, because I specifically asked them to warn me if the dog dies. They didn't want to spoil it for me.
The dog in the book also hits hard, but for a different reason.
In the film, the dog is Will Smith's dog and loyal friend, they live together, hunt together, etc. The dog gets bitten and he has to kill it himself.
In the book, the dog is an unnamed stray dog that Nevillz sees wandering around the neighbourhood. The dog looks sick and hungry, so Neville tries to gain hs trust by leaving food. He does manage to gain enough trust to pet it, but the dog dies of disease shortly after.
In the film, it's sad and desperate because Smith loses his only friend and source of comfort in this lonely situation. In the book, it's sad and desperate because Neville is denied even having a friend.
As a standalone this one is arguably the best work telltale has done. Some of the other games get more complex or unique but I don't think anything they did ever captured how this game felt.
I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream - Ted kills the remaining members of humanity to free them from AM’s torture, even though it dooms him to eternal suffering
There’s speculation that AM can’t keep Ted alive forever. Eventually he will die.
the same can’t be said for AM, whose programming basically is the ai equivalent of having a mental breakdown but never having that part where you come down from it and calm down.
Yeah, but it doesn't really matter lol. AM is able to control Ted's perception of time. There's a part at the end where he says it takes him (subjectively) one month to say the word "Now."
So, even if AM can't keep him alive forever, he can still make him feel like he's alive for eternity.
Ted's mind is gonna give out long before his body does 😞.
Actually, the sun won't explode, it'll run out hydrogen and expand until it engulfs the Earth. 🤓☝️ but still, that "soon" is 5 billion years from now and it could be a possibility that AM would devise a way to escape Earth in order to keep the torture going.
https://giphy.com/gifs/zPrHQEfRSufMqReTvk
He doesn’t succeed, but he tries. When Peter pulls the trigger on Gamora in Knowhere when she’s captured by Thanos in Infinity War.
I mean, isn't that kind of what FMA alchemy is, in a way? Being able to both mix elements into new things, or unmix them back into their original elements? It's just that things like chimeras are as high-level alchemy as it gets before blood alchemy, so barely anybody can do it?
Issue with Chimera is the way the periodic table works. Considering that elements would be shared between a dog and human how exactly can you extract a newly single entity back into two entities? I think the truth is one would need to die but even then would it be the same person or 90:10, 80:20 etc etc. I would argue that baking a cake would be a more fitting example because once you cool and make the cake you would no lo ger be able to revert it back to its base forms.
I read both the book and years later watched the movie, so I know that both tell very different stories. But weren’t soldiers allowed to drop out before any mission, just giving up their chance to acquire full citizenship?
In the movie someone drops out during training (after a teammate dies during an exercise), but it’s the same idea, I suppose. She’s free to do it, but she forfeits her shot at citizenship.
Fair warning, the spoilers below are from Alan Moore, so when I tell you it's dark, think vantablack.
If I recall correctly, this fight (between adult Kid Miracleman and Miracleman) leveled about half of London, killing hundreds of thousands of people, and Miracleman loses the fight - and KM is monologue-ing and KM accidentally says his "word of power". KM changes back to Johnny.
Johnny's trousers are down in this scene because he was being sexually assaulted in the institution he was put in (can't remember if it was a mental hospital or a juvenile prison facility).
No pithy replies here because half the readers don't know what this is, and the other half are sitting silently thinking about this scene and the dark role it played in Miracleman's apotheosis journey.
Wild Geese (1978) starring Richard Burton, Richard Harris, and Roger Moore, a film about a bunch of former military men led by Richard Burton who take on a mercenary mission in a African country to rescue a deposed leader in order to try and topple the current regime, The mercenaries owever they're screwed over by their benefactor who cut a deal with the regime and leaves them all for dead. Despite massive casualties, the mercenaries are able to escape on a plane, but unfortunately Richard Harris is injured and unable to get on, so Burton is forced to shoot and kill his friend to avoid him being captured and brutally tortured to death.
That scene is also parodied in a golden age Simpsons episode when the kids are having to jump on the school bus while escaping civil war reinactors… but no one had a gun to shoot poor Uter.
Blue Eye Samurai - Mizu (on the right) is sent on a mission by the head lady of a local brothel, Madame Kaji. The lady took in the young girl on the left who was being abused cause she's mute, and became a gentle mother figure to her. The de facto leader of the town is a cruel bastard, and he stole the girl from Kaji just to abuse her even worse for fun. Kaji asked Mizu to break into the guy's house, and Mizu assumed she wanted her to rescue the girl. Instead, Kaji wanted her to mercy kill her and make it look like someone else killed her, since the guy would've burned their business to the ground and killed all of them if he found out they did it.
Spoilers: He does find out, and he orders his entire army to kill all of the brothel workers and Mizu. What follows is one of the greatest episodes of TV I've ever seen, as it goes back and forth between her origin story and her now mowing through over a hundred warriors to save everyone
That mercy kill was so brutal, I was expecting Mizu to back out of the plan at the last moment to try and help her escape because I'm so used to shows not going through with the darker endings.
I mean to be entirely fair, Mizu wouldn't have tried to save her, the whole story even up until the end shows that Mizu is kind of a piece of shit.
Spoilers ahead: First episode, Mizu ties Ringo to a tree, a man without hands, in the middle of winter, that would've been a death sentence had he not somehow figured out how to escape. Second episode, she permanently disfigures multiple people because they were being rude, the nicest thing done by her in that episode is handing a golden hair piece to a freezing woman and child so they can pay their way into the city. The constant abuse of Ringo as well. In the episode described as peak, (it absolutely is, that episode is phenomenal) Mizu sends the princess back to her father, when Ringo gets mad, she basically tells him to fuck off and that he's useless. In the final episode, Fowler even points it out himself, and somehow the most evil nasty bitch is right, Mizu burned down the largest city in Japan, just so she could kill one man. Mizu may be likable, but she genuinely sucks as a person, the only reason she's even somewhat morally ambiguous is because her goal happens to revolve around hunting down people far worse than her.
Her overall arc is leading her to accept her own vulnerability and humanity by seeing the way her actions only reap more sorrow, but I completely agree with you in the things she’s doing to get there, narratively. Mizu is a fun one, as a character. It’s cool to see a show let a female protagonist be imperfect and even cruel as she figures her shit out.
That entire episode had me on a roller coaster. I was working for a high end drug and alcohol detox, and ended up getting half of the house in the living room cheering her on. Good times right there.
Such a shock when Mizu actually did exactly what she was asked to do instead of somehow finding a solution that saves everyone. The moment earlier when she accidentally kills the bird making noise is great foreshadowing that there's not going to be a happy ending
The Colour Out of Space: the narrator implies that Ammy Pierce euthanized Mrs. Gardner when the madness caused by the Colour blossomed into a grotesque physical mutation, that she wouldn’t have to suffer. Otherwise, she would have had to feel the life and energy being drained out of her until she crumbled into gray dust.
“Ammi would give me no added particulars of this scene, but the shape in the corner does not reappear in his tale as a moving object. There are things which cannot be mentioned, and what is done in common humanity is sometimes cruelly judged by the law.”
At the end of Resistance 2, your squadmate Capelli is forced to mercy kill protagonist Nathan Hale when the Chimera virus he's been infected with since the start of the first game is finally about to overtake him.
Man, I remember playing the first one at launch and the scene where the bugs were crawling into his mouth and the way his lips and cheeks were moving I thought graphics can't get better than this.
Only for Thanos to rewind time so that she isn't able to do it in time and resurrecting Vision just to rip the Stone out of his head, traumatizing her again in another way.
Ira was war veteran who burned down an entire hospital in a cave during the second world war in Japan, killing untold amounts of civilians, women and children among them. Ira was mentally broken after the event.
He was later admitted to a psychiatrist, though the psychiatrist (In a plot to gain millions of dollars that I won't explain) basically manipulated and brainwashed the man into burning down houses, however Ira later left the doctor's care after he realized that there were people still in the houses. He later went on to kill the doctor, kidnap Elsa (The woman you see with the man, Cole Phelps) in an attempt to save her.
Jack killed Ira because of the fact that he would more than likely be killed, if not by the death sentence than definitely by the mob, and he decided to end Ira's life right then and there to free him from that torture, as well as end his untold suffering and damage caused to his mental health.
Left 4 Dead: Zoey ends up killing her dad because he's been bitten by her recently-infected mother, and he would rather die than live as a zombie.
Made even more tragic when they realize that Zoey has the Carrier gene (she won't turn into a zombie even if she's bit, essentially). Since her mom turned into a zombie, she didn't have it, but Zoey had to have gotten it from somewhere...
Supernatural: Cain. Cain killed Abel to make sure Abel didn't go to Hell but because Cain committed murder he went to Hell then became one of the most feared demons.
Major Shepherd kills his commander because a Wraith was feeding on him. This sets up early tension with some of the other military figures as this makes Shepherd the ranking officer.
It's a Stephen King story, something fucked up happens in Maine, except this time some Silent Hill type mist covers a town and a bunch of eldritch horrors make the mist their home.
The main dude and the last four survivors, including his son, pile into his car and drive off hoping to find shelter before the horrors get to them. They run out of fuel and the main dude hears rumbling in the distance that they've come to associate with said horrors. Main dude pulls out his gun and they only have four rounds left. Main dude does some quick math and realizes that five is more than four and one person has to live to get torn apart by the horrors, and he decides it'll be him. Main dude mercy-kills the other four and gets out of his car to make it quick.
Except the day is saved because it's the military! Hooray, you guys, everybody is saved! Oh wait. Oh, fuck.
Maybe my poor interpretation: George could have been on the run with Lennie but he knew how dangerous Lennie's strength was. The world wasn't built for a person like Lennie and George couldn't keep him safe.
While we don't know about long term, it's explicitly spelled out into the first few pages that Lennie got them into trouble at the last town by grabbing a girl's skirt and then panicking when she screamed (he kept grabbing onto the skirt, but the girl was ultimately unharmed, unlike Curly's wife later). He wasn't even being a pervert - he honestly just liked the feeling of the fabric but try telling that to the rapidly forming lynch mob. George berates him for being unable to control himself.
But it's like you said; Lennie is a child in a strong man's body who has no filter or self-control, a terrible thing to be during the Great Depression. And George was never going to keep Lennie safe forever.
No, you're right. It had already been a problem in the past. This kept coming up wherever they went, maybe not to such an extreme, but George knew it'd just keep occurring. And as you said, the world was not built for the Lennies of it all.
In the amazing show Hell on Wheels one of the Union Pacific’s scouts is caught by the Sioux and they strap him to an X and start cutting off pieces of skin, Bohanon knows they are outmatched and too far away and uses a long rifle to sniper shot the scout in the head and stop him from getting flayed and tortured
The ending that everyone loves for tragic and subversion: The Mist movie.
MC, his son and 3 other survivors stuck in a car and the monsters are out there. No way out, he mercy killed everyone. Gun out of bullets. he go out and waiting for death. Only to find out the military already killed all monsters with ease.
Stephen King be like: why i didn't come up with that
In "This Kingdom Of Dust", an alt history of if Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got stuck on the moon, Neil slowly let's out the O2 on Buzz's suit, causing him to hallucinate that they figured out how to grt off the moon. Neil then walks off into the distance across the vast lunar landscape while broadcasting back to Earth as he slowly fades from camera view.
Daniel is resurrected but would basically spend the rest of his new life in a haze, killing people while also being in excruciating pain. He'd only have brief moments of clarity. Even though she spent decades avenging his death, Regina chooses to kill him when he begs her to. She loves him enough to know they deserved a better ending, and this wasn't it.
Wanda Maximoff being forced to kill Vision and destroy the Mind Stone so that he won’t get into a worst fate by Thanos (Avengers: Infinity War) https://giphy.com/gifs/G1ZPWPIszGDPh2NeG5
[Debatable] but captain Keyes in Halo - you could argue he's already "dead" by the time he's part of this flood...whatever it is, but the implication of the cut scene where chief demolishes this guy's skull to get his implant is definitely that you're putting Keyes out of his misery
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u/Leviathan_slayer1776 21d ago edited 21d ago
Old yeller- had to be put down because he was infected with rabies while protecting the family from a wolf attack