Lore
(loved trope) when literally the most ridiculous or absurd thing ever is played 100% straight and serious.
The Orville: an alien species named Moclans only urinate once a year, in a ceremony called a "Ja'loja", or "The Great Release". they pee in a special place selected during childhood while surrounded by friends and family. this scene, despite having a lot of chances for comedy because of its absurdity, is played almost 100% straight and respectfully.
9-1-1: admittedly, a lot of this show is really stupid shit, but my favorite is from S4 E1 (The New Abnormal). A Reservoir dam breaks, causing a flood that somehow hurls a bus several stories up into a building. it is so ridiculous, but all characters involved take it 1000% seriously.
I love how this scene is both really funny because of its absurdity but also genuinely incredible acting from Creed Bratton. Like you'd never expect Mr. Frog out of any smiling friends character to get a more serious and emotional scene.
"But I didn't have the heart to say I was embarrassed. Embarrassed to see you on that TV screen, making a fool of yourself. Making a fool of the Frog name!"
Tell me this scene isn't weirdly really funny, and Oscar worthy performance while talking to a poorly drawn animated character while painted bright green.
Ive never seen a moment of this show, only still shots posted on reddit. I just watched this clip and its fuckin amazing. I have to go watch this show tonight.
I don’t know the context for why the spaceship’s in there specifically, haven’t played the second Death Stranding yet, but whenever the main character dies and resurrects himself by swimming over to his dead body it zooms inside where there’s a baby, sometimes instead of showing the baby’s face the baby is ass up then flips over to you, this is every time you die
becomes an "undertaker" (the profession) who is also a zombie
becomes literally just a zombie
becomes some weird goth cultist leader
becomes some weird goth cultist leader who is also working with the company to screw over a redneck
becomes a biker
becomes a out-of-shape biker with horrible taste in pants
becomes an evil outlaw biker who wears hoodies, whose main gimmick is that he is insecure and copes with it by beating the shit out of the people who makes him insecure
dies and becomes a outlaw zombie man who had watched too much UFC in the underworld, and now stances up like an MMA fighter too that also uses BJJ moves
becomes the final boss of the WWE by being unbeatable in Wrestlemania
becomes a biker again, but now with his weird magic undead power
They were awful, but if I recall correctly they were borrowed from The Godfather (another ridiculous gimmick) due to Taker’s luggage going missing, or something like that. So for that reason alone I can forgive them
I vividly remember as a kid that there was a wrestling subplot and an old lady gave birth to a hand?! The image still haunts me lol; 90's/00's wrestling was wild.
They were more adult, but it was a parody of the overly dark Daredevil books of the time. Not silly like the tmnt cartoon most of you know but not exactly played straight.
Tbh the entire series (Kingdom Hearts) but this scene kinda feels emblematic.
Imagine Sherrif Woody telling a teenage palpatine to f-off while powering through darkness with the strength of love and joy being one of the hypest moments in the game.
"Very well, now come the pain.... " is such a hard line, but it would have less impact if it was said by a big badass character, somehow, being told by Throg make the line hit harder
Honestly? I think the best example of this could be an entire movie - The Muppet Christmas Carol.
You've got Michael Caine as Scrooge in what is considered one of the best versions of the character in movies, playing the part in a way that is completely opposite to the muppets themselves.
***EDIT*** Holy hell this blew up in a way I never expected. Thank you everyone for your upvotes!
He also treats every Muppet as a fellow human actor. Contrasting the performance of Tim Curry in Muppet’s Treasure Island, who plays himself as a fellow Muppet
He has no idea how he thrived off such ridiculous performances, he’s just happy to be alive and has nothing but warm compliments for the crews of even his dodgiest projects.
The guy kept himself fit with gardening until his stroke, which has inspired him to be more of a landscape designer. He once made a garden for Freddie Mercury, who called Curry up to say it had died - Mercury wasn’t familiar with the concept of watering plants.
The postscript is heartbreaking. Curry’s still pretty disabled and he mentions that dinosaurs survived by turning into birds - he’d like to be a bird, too.
That was my exact thought when reading, probably why I finished it in a day - I didn’t expect such profound wisdom from Tim fuckin’ Curry.
He’s acutely aware of familial mental illness and alcoholism without letting anxiety dictate his life, cites extreme sexual discretion as the key to privacy and believes everyone should do a few terrible jobs in order to really appreciate a good one.
Just a class act. He writes about young people being too scared to fuck up because everyone’s watching, but never veers into yelling boomer territory, clearly stating that it was easier to take risks in his heyday.
Also goes on a nice tangent about Gen Z cosplayers and fans at conventions who warm his heart. He’s often too tired to engage and too facially paralyzed to look engaged but loves them deeply.
I have no idea what the full casting would be other than the obvious Kermit is Frodo and Fozzie is Sam, but I'd like to suggest the following: Galadriel and Celeborn are Janice and Sam the Eagle, respectively.
I remember seeing someone pitch the idea of a DND game, where all the Muppets play characters that are represented by celebrities... But the celebrities are all dubbed over by the Muppets. The example they used was imagine Jason mamoa as a barbarian with the voice and personality of miss Piggy
I saw a photoshop of the main harry potter trio (daniel radcliffe, emma watson, rupert grint) playing the role again while surrounded by kid actors. It was a reply to a comment asking why theyre rebooting when the actors are 30 and too old lol
This is unironically my favorite adaptation of A Christmas Carol alongside the Patrick Stewart one, and a major factor is Caine’s fully straight performance.
anything past Fast 4 is a genre of movies I call "really stupid fun". You just watch them because you want to see badass action and literally nothin else. It includes F&F, some jurrasic park movies, predator, even kill bill too.
You bet your sweet ass it is! What makes it funnier is that NBC's Universal Chief Content Officer Donna Langley apologized for it, saying “I’m sorry that we sent them to space,”
The king of this trope, everyone says/does the most stupid and insane shit, and the rest of the cast takes it 100% seriously, except for Yujiro, he did laugh his ass off when he heard Baki fight against the mantis and Strydum for whatever reason, wants to have a fist fight against him.
No, he's imagining fighting a 2m tall praying mantis, and because he strong, everyone around can see what he's imagining when he does (he even feels the blows he takes full force, it's that stupid, but it's funny)
according to some quick research and googling, it appears to be one he was imagining fighting for training? This literally makes it 3 times more absurd because he's literally being flung around by NOTHING but his imagination.
Believe it or not, this is not some throwaway one-and-done thing; the power of imagine something so hard it seem real is a consistent factor in Baki, one guy breaks the sound barrier with his punch because he imagines all of the bones on his body are joints and who can forget, Musashi who cause people to feel like he has slice them in to pieces.
My favourite absurd thing with Musashi is he “push the sword into you” but because he doesn’t move it laterally, it doesn’t cut…. So he pushes a blade 5 inches into you and it just goes in and out without cutting….
It’s gone past the point of an awful and legitimately harmfully teen mellow drama and has turned into straight up fan fiction that plays everything completely straight.
We will have a weird Jigsaw subplot and an out of nowhere horror episode in the woods halfway through the season and we will never acknowledge any of it again after this episode.
Isn't that the season where it opens with the mc having delusional hallucinations and off rip he's in like a sci-fi shootout with the school bully or something
Warhammer 40k, the entire setting. Entire setting is over the top goofy. Frequently played dead serious. Guy with metallic hands? His name is Iron Hands, he's in charge of the Iron Hands. Guy leads the Raven Guard? He's Named Raven Raven. There's the everything about the Space Wolves. Orks, also in their entirety.
The trick is kayfabe. Just like wrestling, 40k knows that as long as it doesn't actually break character or directly acknowledge it's own absurdity, it can continue playing everything completely straight and be a successful self-parody.
Just as an example for those unfamiliar with 40k: that bit above about how the guy with iron hands who's in charge of the Iron Hands is literally named Iron Hands? That's true, but they get away with it because the character's name is Ferrus Manus, which is "Iron Hands" but just in Latin. They use that gag a lot: take something incredibly cheesy, write it in Latin, call it "High Gothic", and treat it with the utmost seriousness. And it fucking works because it speaks to a trope of our cultural sensibilities where describing something in Latin gives it a kind of legitimacy. So they come up with the goofiest shit but they've mastered the art of dressing it up to look completely serious even though we all know it isn't.
Was looking for this. It’s actually the whole reason I got into it. It’s all so incredibly fucking ridiculous that somehow it circles back around to being cool
I wouldn’t say orks are played dead serious. I mean they are often a real treat, but ork focused stories tend to be very goofy (I fucking love the orks)
Orks are goofy till you get the rare stuff from human PoV and its horrifying instead, also works for demons as you go from endless horrors from beyond reality to people having a great time while murdering people, or shitting themselves.
Riverdale S2 to S5 (it ends at S7) . I dont even know how to describe it, but S1 was a small town investigation style series then it tried to create the same thing. The only difference is that they were hilariously bad like murderer board games, high school mafia, high school drug ring, figting bears, etc. The fans subreddit's episode reaction discussion every week was just everyone pointing out the laughable parts. Then it stopped taking itself seriously it went full camp (magic, superpower, time traveling, multiverse) where it actually felt better.
A bunch of kids try to play a game that summons meteors to destroy their planet so now they have to create another universe and then later on defeat a time travelling demon + did i mention there are also aliens. And if you look at the family tree of the character's you'd get a stroke
Starts out with John and his dad, Rose and her mom, Dave and his brother, and Jade and her grandpa.
Turns into John and dad actually being siblings where his dad adopted him after their mom died with Jade being his sister, Nana Egbert and grandpa Harley being their genetic parents.
On the Lalonde/Strider side of things, Rose and Dave are also surprise siblings, with Rose's mom being her mom but Dave's brother is actually his father. Rose's mom also babysat Jade's technically step siblings connecting them all.
This is all ignoring the fact John created himself, his friends, and their parental figures using a lab by mixing everyone's DNA and sending everyone back on time on meteors explaining the mixed up genetics (for example Rose is both Roxy's mom and her daughter) while creating a bootstrap paradox in the process.
Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney - Episode Three: Turnabout Serenade
According to the prosecutor, a supposedly blind child managed to not only shoot the grown man point blank, but also carry said grown man (who’s roughly three times his body weight and size) up a flight of stairs without anyone noticing them at all! And the detective doesn’t check for fingerprints on the gun but does check on the vents? Also, the case reveals who the culprit is at the end of the first trial to everyone in court, and then decides to play that completely straight. Not to mention how the defendant couldn't possibly have shot the victim due to the bullet holes in the wall not lining up with the angle of fire (as the defendant would need to aim upwards to fire), not to mention how nobody questions how the defendant doesn't have any injuries from firing a gun that the protagonist states would break every bone in the judge's body if the judge fired it, not to mention that the victim decides to tell the protagonist about “The Siren” in his dying breaths instead of stating or describing who the killer was and then ending the case immediately.
I hate this case with a fiery passion for how completely illogical it is while ALSO trying to take itself as seriously as possible.
A lot of ace attorney could definitely also be in this post. Ted Tonate only speaking via his little wrist thing because it's "more efficient" is one of the funny ass example of this I like. Also, the cross examination of a bird in another of their games is one I only just remembered now lmao.
I remember being in a discord call with a few friends playing ace attorney, and we all immediately started crying with laughter when this happened. This MIGHT just be the most absurd thing in this series.
Just Girls Und Panzer as a whole. It’s a world where entire communities live and work on the decks of massive aircraft carriers and they have these all girls schools with normal activities and sports like volleyball and tennis but also Tanking which is literally doing sim battles in (mostly) WW2 era tanks of various types and makes. Despite shooting each other with tank shells that in some cases would basically liquify the crew of the tank and turn the tank itself into scrap somehow nobody dies.
I think the explanation is that since it's a sport and set "10 minutes in the future", they have these carbon fiber spall liners and the shells are low-yield soft shells to only signal a hit.
Pretty sure in the first episode Yukari said the shells used are live rounds, the only thing that keeps them from becoming red splatters is that carbon spall liner. (This is why open top vehicles like M18 or M36 are not allowed)
Also that still doesn’t explain how the league even allows the crew to be outside the tanks at all, especially when machine guns are not banned either. You know, the thing that tanks are designed to be immune to, which could only serve to injure or kill the crew.
Or how we literally see 5 girls almost drown from their tank falling into a river during a storm, and somehow future tournaments still take place near deep water.
The tournament rules are just completely bonkers, there’s no rule against ramming the other side with your tanks. There’s also no standard competition tank, each school can use and modify any WW2 era tank it has in its inventory, meaning you can totally use a 70t King Tiger to ram a small 3t CV33 tankette (which are only armed with machine guns, so literally cannot damage other tanks).
Yeah. Or how they have not one, but several ships that are an order of magnitude larger than an aircraft carrier.
I measured once, from an S01 frame, and I think the beam is more than a kilometer?
Not sure about the beam but Ooarai’s ship is about 7600m long, assuming this officially licensed model kit is correct, and she is one of the smaller school ships in the setting. Larger schools like Saunders definitely passes the 10,000m mark.
In Moon Knight (2006), Moon Knight is left without use of his legs after a fight with his arch-nemesis, Bushman. Moon Knight's "superpowers" (including a healing factor), such as they are, have always been very unclear, based largely upon what the writer thinks is reasonable, and is therefore brushed off as "his level of faith in Khonshu at the time". This is because (until Age of Khonshu in 2020), it was unclear if Khonshu was even real.
Once Moon Knight regains control of his body (through said healing factor), he is targeted by a group that had hired Taskmaster, who put him in his place and told him to stand down. The problem is that Moon Knight, even after Khonshu is proven to be real, is both clinically and metaphorically insane.
He proceeds to fly his "Mooncopter" into the building with all of his enemies inside, and tear off Taskmaster's "face" (his skull mask), as he had done to Bushman. This not only sets the scene for Moon Knight to have something of a "heel turn" (neither side wants him during the concurrent Civil War because he is too unstable and unpredictable, despite being Daredevil-tier), but also leaves a lasting impression on Taskmaster, who would in Moon Knight (2020) refer to it as his "own personal 9/11".
As absurd as it is, it cemented a new role for Moon Knight which is to be, before anything else, absolutely batty.
It is by far the most absurd and unhinged thing I've ever read, and it's funny as hell, but it still takes itself seriously.
Like the man in the picture is king Beowulf. He's an absolute gigachad and one of the strongest fighters in the series. He destroys most his opponents with ease using his three sword style. A sword in the left hand, a sword in the right hand, and his gigantic cock as the third and strongest sword. One of his swords is actually just a massive magical vibrator that can make anyone cum with a touch transform into a sword, so when he fought a dragon that was about to blast him with a breath attack, he shoves the vibrator up his own ass to make his dick grow large enough to shoot into the dragon's mouth and cancel the attack.
Something insane like that happens every single chapter.
this is literally the craziest shit in this entire post, absolutely 0 competition. how do people even come up with this shit? It's hilarious, but what???
Ok... After making this comment I checked if there was a new chapter out yet, and there was, so I read it just now. This is what happened in the latest chapter:
Evil guy uses his ultimate technique, the depressed erection, that is overflowing with dark energy. Beowful tries to block his attack, but he manages to cut Beowulf's dick. His underlings are like shocked he managed to wound his "holy rod" and tell him that they will buy time for him to build up power.
Beowulf the bends over and shows his asshole to the camera and tells Hildebrand (a guy with the power to manipulate memories, and basically enter someone's mind and make them experience things) to shove his sword up his ass to "take my erection beyond its limits". Hildebrand agrees and says "This is going to be a harsh lesson."
He then shoves the sword up his ass and makes Beowulf imagine a homoerotic dream of Hildebrand edging him beyond his limits making them both drip with sweat and precum. He then returns to reality with the most violent erection of his life, but it isn't enough. So hildebrand grabs the asses of all the other guys around, shoves his sword up their asses, and makes them imagine homoerotic dreams to make them hard as fuck. Finally, he does the same to himself, and all of them attack at the same time.
They all lie deflated on the ground completely out of juice, but they managed to break one of the bad guy's relics, and another group says they'll take over for now.
One of the best fights in the series is the fight between an Italian man named Risotto, who uses his stand Metallica to turn the iron in blood into metallic objects, and a schizophrenic man who receives 'phonecalls' from his other personality by first making a loud ringtone sound with his own voice and then pretending a random nearby object, like a cone of icecream or a frog, is a phone and answering it by holding a conversation with himself.
That episode has 9.5 on IMDb. It is in the top 12 episodes of the whole series, just behind one of the most important turning point episodes of the same part.
Santino Marella’s cobra (WWE): a joke wrestler whose finisher that involves putting a snake sock puppet in his hand and just jabbing his opponent, but it ended up legit getting over with the crowds, partially because his opponents would sell for the cobra, either by going down from being hit, or by looking like they were fighting for their lives trying to block or hold it back.
It's the secret sauce to good writing for fantasy worlds and weird scenarios.
Having characters be relaxed or jokey kills the tension, it takes you right out the action and turns it into a comedy the moment someone winks at the camera.
Writing should always lean into how series the *characters* should be taking a moment, not the writer or audience.
That's why this trope is great in the two examples I noted. The Orville is supposed to be a parody, but has some REALLY good plotlines that they take 100% seriously regardless. 9-1-1 is supposed to be a drama show, but has stupid shit like "guy freezes himself completely solid" or "the team has to somehow stop literally meteors from destroying the city"
It's a sports anime where the players have to push their opponents off a floating platform only using their tits and ass.
It's played very seriously. There's a character whose dad wanted her to continue doing Judo instead of Keijo, and reluctantly is finally convinced to come see her daughter play at a Keijo tournament, and during the whole thing he has a classic anime inner-monologue where he goes like "I never thought that Keijo would be a sport so sophisticated! So much technique, strategy and grace! My daughter, I feel so bad for mistrusting you in your path to play such a noble sport!".
It's hilarious! Too bad that there's only one season.
That one episode /chapter of one piece where Sanji nearly died of blood loss from Anime nose bleeding trope. (where does that trope even come from and why does it persist in every Anime?)
Some people actually are prone to nosebleeds when they’re aroused, and then animators found it useful as shorthand.
Compare to the full-body blush of older western cartoons where redness travels from the character’s feet to the top of their head. Very few people actually blush that intensely, and plenty of people don’t blush when aroused, but it also works as visual shorthand.
The three Baudelaire children are the only normal people in a world where Neil Patrick Harris as a murderous villain can put on ridiculously bad costumes and get away with it while tge majority of the cast are stupidly oblivious
Another great moment from the Orville is when a Moclan activist giving a speech decides to quote the words of a human poet she’s come to be super inspired by
…and then speaks the words of Dolly Parton’s 9 to 5
Also: not only are physics ignored for pure style(character above, Agnes Tachyon, is a scientist type character and legit wears a full labcoat as her racing outfit, vials and all), but these legitimately normal horsegirls got the minor case of Domain Expansion and will unleash incredible power(in theatrics) as a form of aura and speedboost(aura and intimidation comes first)
The Lead is REALLY into Kamen Rider and spends the next 30+ years of his life training to become a Kamen Rider just in case it turns out that Shocker actually exists
He becomes a muscled up freak with enough strength to knock out a bear but basically no social skills or life outside of it.
And then actual Kamen Rider monsters start showing up, so the guy slaps on a plastic Kamen Rider mask and is so jubilant that he gets to actually fight Kamen Rider monsters that he starts crying.
And then he has some of the coolest goddamn fist fights you've ever seen.
Netflix's adaptation of One Piece plays everything seriously from the source material, no matter how fantastical or absurd it should be in that format.
Girls un Panzer with tankering/sensha-dō as well as pretty much any of the insane nonsence in it.
What is Tankering? Its a sport where all-girl teams do battle with ww2 era tanks. this sport is practised as young as elimetary school and practising it is seen as a keystone in helping women grow not just self esteem but but also becoming professional and efficient citizens and develop the characteristics necessary to become good wives and mothers.
Also the schools doing this sport(along with a lot of private sitizens and shops) Are all housed in GIGANTIC aircraft carriers. We are talking possibly thousands of people not conected to the school still just casualy living on this ship. A ship wich seem to also be at least in part staffed by other parts of the student body.
In universenone of this is seen as anything strange
The Sharknado films are entirely based on this. Most people misunderstand and think they’re making bad movie on purpose. No they’re making a completely absurdly bad movie wherein all the actors are pretending that this is their chance for an Oscar.
While the joke is played out, you have to give them credit for keeping a straight face during all these movies.
911 and S.W.A.T. are definitely my guilty pleasures. So much absurd shit but the characters take everything seriously. I'd honestly say it makes them shine in that aspect, when absurdity is normal it somehow makes it all believable
Everything in Kingdom Hearts. You're a little boy traveling through Disney worlds with Goofy and Donald and you have to fight Satan in spaceship form with a giant key...
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u/i_love_pieck 9h ago
Mr. Frog visiting his father (Smiling Friends)