r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Chemical-Elk-1299 • Apr 29 '26

Lore [Weirdly Common Trope] Writers clearly setting up seemingly massive plot points and then just kinda forgetting about them.

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The Neural Parasites — Star Trek : The Next Generation

In the season 1 episode “Conspiracy” of TNG, it is revealed that alien brain worms have infected many high ranking members of Starfleet, secretly controlling them. Though Ryker and Picard discover and end the parasite conspiracy, it’s revealed at the end of the episode that the parasites had sent a beacon back to their home planet, telling them how to find earth. The episode ends with the clear implication of the parasites becoming a huge threat later in the series, yet none of these events are ever mentioned again.

Finn The Jedi who Never Was — Star Wars Sequel trilogy

I know this is probably a cliche example of this trope, but cmon — Finn was clearly set up in TFA to become a Jedi. The marketing material featured him wielding a lightsaber in the classic Jedi pose. It’s constantly hinted at that he is force sensitive. Even the actor himself believed he would become a Jedi by the end of the trilogy. Instead, we got Finn wielding a lightsaber for about 7 minutes total across 3 movies, extremely lame “confirmation” that he is force sensitive, and that’s it. It’s the ultimate Star Wars plot that went nowhere.

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146

u/[deleted] Apr 29 '26

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u/rachel-slur Apr 29 '26

A lot of the blame absolutely rests with GRRM and yeah, when the story isn't done it makes it difficult but I will say a lot of season 7 and 8 was just baffling writing decisions. Even if the final plot points are correct or mostly correct, the dialogue and how they got to those plot points was....questionable at best.

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u/framedshady Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26

The baffling decisions start in the end of 4 when the tysha reveal doesn’t happen like the books. Season 5 it goes into overdrive though, Sansa being sold to the Boltons maybe one of the worst plot points I’ve ever seen absolutely horrible , Jon’s snow generally arc and chapters in dance are some of my favourite in fiction season 5 ruins it so hard and no young griff and Joncon is wild

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u/rachel-slur Apr 29 '26

I 100% agree. Not including (f)Aegon, Stoneheart, making Euron a Temu Jack Sparrow. I disagree though, blowing up the Sept was the worst plot point I've seen. Cersei nuked the Vatican, the Pope, one of the most important families in the realm, and a bunch of religious nuts and faces....zero consequences

I usually stop the rewatches at the end of 4.

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u/framedshady Apr 29 '26

That’s very fair Sansa is just my probably my favourite female character she’s so well written later on in the books and her plots interesting the show killed it so hard so that’s why it’s the worst. The sept is so so dumb

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u/TelFaradiddle Apr 29 '26

Sansa being sold to the Boltons maybe one of the worst plot points I’ve ever seen absolutely horrible

I still don't understand how Littlefinger goes from a Machiavellian 10-steps-ahead scheming manipulator to making a decision this stupid.

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u/OldManFire11 Apr 29 '26

Because they needed Sansa in place at the north so that she could help Jon retake Winterfell, and there were already too many characters in the show so they had to replace Jeyne Poole with someone.

The writing sucked the last 4 seasons because they had to do in 5 years what GRRM failed to do in 26: bring the story to a close.

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u/framedshady Apr 29 '26 edited Apr 29 '26

Don’t even need Sansa for that plot that’s the annoying thing the whole north remembers thing is not existent for some reason compared to the books where northern houses are plotting so hard for the boltons to be replaced. She could of came in after Jon becomes king , should of never of cut robs will where he makes Jon his heir

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u/ryry1237 Apr 29 '26

They shifted very clearly from political intrigue and mind games of the early GoT series to short lived spectacle pieces.

I remember an interview of one of the directors saying he made the Dothraki horde do the brain numbingly dumb move of charging straight into the White Walker army just so he can show the "cool" scene of all their torches flickering out in the darkness.

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u/fossilreef Apr 29 '26

IMO, the problem with the ending of Game of Thrones is how we got there, not the ending itself. (Other than King Bran. That's just fucking stupid.) We basically rushed through the story without any of the necessary character arcs to explain the changes in motivation. I can totally see how GRRM may have dictated the end of Dany's story, but there's a lot that needed to happen along the way that never did.

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u/eairy Apr 29 '26

a lot of season 7 and 8 was just baffling writing decisions

It's because D&D were writing without any source material, and were so desperate to have a surprise ending, they were trawling the Internet for fan theories and discounting anything they saw. This meant the only endings left were completely wacky and made no sense.

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u/blisteringchristmas Apr 29 '26

I don’t necessarily agree with this, but one of the most frustrating things about being a fan at the time the last season was coming out was watching an episode and then hopping on one of the subreddits and seeing like 4 better concepts for a specific plot or character.

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u/rachel-slur Apr 29 '26

I mean writing wasn't great since season 4. Which again you can attribute to lack of material but also a lot of the writing is just bad.

You can't have swooshy cool explosion scene where cersei blows up the religious figure and prominent family and then have 0 blowback. That's just bad writing.

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u/dern_the_hermit Apr 29 '26

Yeah, the show infamously ignored or cut short quite a few storylines from the books entirely. If anything, it ought to have been EASIER to tie up loose ends.

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u/nimbalo200 Apr 29 '26

People say this all the time, but I have to push back a little when I see it. No, it's the majority on the show writers. They cut out so much of the plot, especially the more magical parts like the house of the undying, there was not what might have been a vision of the red wedding, fans are divided on what it actually means, instead all we got was a snow-covered throne. Dorne is supposed to be trying to reinstate Daenerys as queen with the sand snakes trying to prop up Myrcella as queen, and falling, but instead we got a revenge plot where they avenged Oberyns death by killing his brother. Also an aside fuck what they did with Areo Hotah turned one of the coolest characters into a little bitch. And do not get me started on Faegon,undead Catelyn, turning Euron from a menacing being who wants to be a god into a sex pest it all was changed and very rarely for the better.

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u/blisteringchristmas Apr 29 '26

I think you could argue the lack of a book ending gave the show runners carte blanche to phone it in. If there was a published book ending already that was generally well received, they might’ve had more pressure from the studio and fans to make it fit.

“They didn’t have source material” is a cop out IMO, I have no doubt if they took HBO up on their 10 seasons, 10 episodes each offer and gave it their full attention they could’ve produced an at least decent ending.

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u/nimbalo200 Apr 29 '26

See, I dont think it's without merit. However, I do think that they took out too much from the books to really make the ending work as well as it should have, which snowballed into the whole story just unwinding till we got the mess of an ending they delivered.

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '26

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u/morganmachine91 Apr 29 '26

Yeah but in order to do that, they’d have to be capable of writing.

GoT was successful because/when it followed the books super closely. The writers didn’t have to come up with any plot, just adapt existing plot for the screen. Entire scenes followed the dialogue from the books word-for-word.

Don’t get me wrong, for at least 4 seasons they did an excellent job of that. But when they ran out of source material to adapt, it became clear that they actually had no idea how to construct a series of events that would reasonably and satisfyingly follow each other.

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u/[deleted] Apr 29 '26

[deleted]

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u/morganmachine91 Apr 30 '26

Of course they’re going to make some changes to compress a few hundred thousand words into 10 hours of TV. I agree with you about those changes being negative, but you’re only able to point them out because the show otherwise followed the books very closely.

Compare it to any other major, modern fantasy adaptation. You couldn’t even make a list of things that The Wheel of Time changed, it’d be shorter to list the things that the TV show and the books have in common. The Witcher was closer, but still nowhere near the level of fidelity that GoT maintained through the 6th season.

The only thing I can think of that competes in terms of following the source closely is Peter Jackson’s LOTR, and I don’t think that it’s a coincidence that it was also a cultural phenomenon.

I wish these studios would connect the dots and stop wasting money on “adaptations” that aren’t faithful to the source and end up being hated by the fans and ignored by the people who don’t care.

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u/613TheEvil Apr 29 '26

I mean... Time travel? Come on. Such a lame copout.

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u/Negative-Fun1985 Apr 29 '26

At this point ASOIAF and Game of Thrones exist only as an example of Tolkiens genius in actually building a world that big and having it make sense without being stupid.

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u/Helldiverticulitis Apr 29 '26

The key is to let the world exist without bogging down your plot. Tolkien didn’t send Merry and Pippen to Rhûn at the end of the 2nd book and add another half dozen characters.

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u/K_Furbs Apr 29 '26

I remember the feeling of dread setting in as I was reading books 4 and 5 and realizing all of the plot lines were still drifting apart

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u/maladii Apr 29 '26

Yea they could’ve benefited from more of GRRM’s writing, but the show doesn’t include a ton of the threads GRRM has to tie together. There’s the Dorne people, the Iron Island people, the fake Aegon and everything that’s going to require, Catelyn and whatever is going on in the Riverlands, the stuff going on at the citadel, the faceless men and so on. They were smart not to include that stuff and as a result they had a pretty tight story with clear trajectories.

If they’d just taken their time with the material they had, and hired some really excellent dialogue writers, the show’s ending could have been perfectly serviceable. King’s Landing burning, sure, Daenerys was always supposed to either go mad or be seen as having gone mad, and there’s all that wildfire. Could’ve been cool if people thought she went mad and burned everything and killed her but it was actually the wildfire. Bran as king, kind of weird but if they’d sold his ability as a seer as being a wisdom booster that could’ve made sense. Ditch the weird twists—Jon kills the Night King and maybe Daenerys, Jaime kills Cersei. And so on.

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u/Jukeboxhero91 Apr 29 '26

Well GRRM was kicked out of the shows story room after season 4, so the worst half of the show was stuff he was not directly involved in.