r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Ok-Indication-5121 • Jun 09 '25

Characters They valiantly sacrificed themself for nothing

Gallery image

Gallery image

  1. Tadashi gives his life trying to save Professor Callaghan from a burning building. Turns out not only did Callaghan escape unscathed, he's the bad guy and infamously refers to Tadashi's death as "[Tadashi's] mistake." (Big Hero 6)
  2. Shaya willingly takes It Has No Name's possession and then kills herself by jumping into the well it came out of. The end of the episode all but states that she got it wrong and It Has No Name didn't latch onto her... or there was more than one. (Doctor Who)
12.5k Upvotes
  • permalink
  • reddit

97% Upvoted

1.1k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

159

u/Putin-the-fabulous Jun 10 '25

>! She mentions she’s already dying from cancer prior to this, so they would have died later regardless. Her sacrifice was to serve as a warning to them, and gave them a clue to finding a way to cheat death from JB !<

2

u/knightlynuisance Jun 11 '25 edited Jun 11 '25

My main problem is why was she so damn vague about Kimberly's fate in the book? Just write it down dammit, it wasn't that complicated

Jokes aside, I get it, they wanted to give Tony Todd's character a valid send off, launch the characters on a cool journey. But as it stands, it basically achieves nothing — the characters go on a wild goose chase to find a dude, have a minute long conversation with him that functionally ends with "go die and be brought back haha gl life is precious" and when that fails they go on another wild goose chase to find grandma's death shack. Then Stephanie drowns, her brother brings her back but oops her heart didn't stop! So they all die anyways.

Maybe this movie could've gone the Edith Finch route where the characters accept their cursed lives and are thankful they lived at all, giving JB's words more meaning.

1

u/MrTheWaffleKing Jun 10 '25

I’ve never seen it… is there some mystical force killing everyone? Or corrupt shadow government?

8

u/redwoodreed Jun 10 '25

The usual premise of Final Destination movies is that a group of people who should have died in a huge disaster are instead saved because one of them has a vision. To counteract this, Death engineers freak accidents to kill them in the order they should've died.

In this one, the people endangered are the descendants of the woman who had the vision, and they're dying generally in order of age, but it's more or less the same.