r/TopCharacterTropes • u/danfenlon • 9h ago
miscellaneous A description more vivid than if they actually showed it
Funny enough both of my examples are from the venture brothers
Episode 2 s7; the Rorqual Affair
Dr mrs the monarch: Wait. You were at movie night?"
Red death: "The Guild, before your time, tried to do a hostage thing. Jonas Venture. The big man and his space station. Ah, the '80s. We did that back then.
Dumb kids gonna get famous. Notorious.
We dressed as crew members. Some of us had our space suits on, some of us didn't. With this face, the helmet never came off. Went perfectly. Flawless. Well, until someone opened the bay doors. No one knew who did it.
The crew shot out like their mamas were ringing the dinner bell. You ever see a man die in space? You can tell the ones that held their breath. Their lungs rupture from all that gas expanding. Blood from their mouth like a torn pillow stuffed with red BBs. Stab Girl, she was a little thing, carried switchblades. She knew to exhale.
Watched her for a full minute. Puffed up like she had a peanut allergy. Floating by me with her mouth open, screaming, making no sound, spit on her tongue boiling.
anyway, got to see a little "Sharky's Machine.""
Episode 6 season 7: the bellicose proxy
Dr. Mrs. The Monarch
: Well, that's treason. The punishment for that is a classic. It's called the Tub. It's filled with milk, you lay in it, if you're hungry we pour honey on your face.
Guild Stranger S-464: That sounds kind of nice, actually.
Dr. Mrs. The Monarch: At first — ya know, till the milk spoils. Soon the tub fills with your excrement, then the flies, and their maggots. At first it itches a bit, then it starts to burn. Your skin peels away with every scratch you can't stop yourself from making. The blood mixes with the foul milk and excrement, seeping into your open wounds. The smell of your own death causes you to vomit into your already toxic coffin. Then the rats.
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u/VictoryBeardWrites 8h ago
South Park. After toilet papering their teachers house, the boys are scared that they're going to get caught. Cartman comes up with this alibi: "Last night, all four of us were at the bowling alley until about 7:30, at which time we noticed Ally Sheedy, the Goth chick from the Breakfast Club, was bowling in the lane next to us, and we asked her for her autograph, but she did not have a pen, so we followed her out to her car, but on the way we were accosted by five Scientologists who wanted to give us all personality tests, which were administered at the Scientology Center in Denver until 10:45, at which time we accidentally boarded the wrong bus home and ended up in Rancho de Burritos Rojos, south of Castle Rock, and finally got a ride home with a man who was missing his left index finger, named Gary Bushwell, arriving home around 11:46."
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u/TrashCube-6800 8h ago
Mike Ehrmentraut delivering the Half Measures monologue.
One line always sticks in my head. "There was so much blood you could taste the metal."
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u/ncghgf 9h ago
Nora in the series finale of The Leftovers.
She recounts her alleged journey to another universe where the those that disappeared during the Sudden Departure went too. A version of Earth where 98% of people vanished instead. How she found that her vanished family had a made a new life for themselves here and stopping herself from greeting them. Instead returning to her world to live as a hermit. Of course this probably never happened but that’s not really important.
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u/Disastrous_Wing7084 9h ago
I think the fact it might never have happened is exactly why it works best without showing it, if you show it then it implies it definitely happened which defeats the point of the ending
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u/Lokicham 8h ago
Fun fact: The torture she described was a real thing. It was called Scaphism.
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u/Egg_Guyboithing 6h ago
Christopher’s Description of Hell - The Sopranos
After a failed hit on Christopher, he ends up in the hospital, and after his heart stopped temporarily, he was considered dead for at least a minute. After he was resuscitated, he speaks to Tony and Paulie, telling them of what he saw after his death. He saw their version of what he believes is Hell: An Irish bar called The Emerald Piper, where it is permanently St Patrick’s Day. He sees people that he knows, his father, his friend Brendan along with a guy Christopher helped kill, Mikey Palmice.
There is no official confirmation on whether or not this was just a delusion or actually hell, and better, all we get is Christopher’s description, nothing else.
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u/frostmourne16 9h ago
Action #2 is simply the Inquisitor describing to their interrogee all the myriad ways of suffering the next 7 actions involve, all of which are progressively-horrific forms of torture. This is usually enough to get them to cave and cooperate.
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u/Jail_Chris_Brown 8h ago
Living with Dying (I want to eat your Pancreas)
After we get to experience the whole story through the detached MC's eyes, we get a beautiful perspective change through the devastating window that is her diary. It shows us Sakura's internal fears, her genuine appreciation for the mc, and the thoughts she purposefully hid behind her cheerful facade. That is vastly superior to what a flashback could've shown.
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u/GetReadyToRumbleBar 6h ago
I can hear Clancy Brown rn. Thanks OP.
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u/danfenlon 5h ago
"Before there were loud mouth buff guys in spandex. There was the gentleman villian!"
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u/UnpricedToaster 4h ago
I can hear his voice saying so many things,
"The enemy cannot press a button, if you disable his hand." ... "Medic!"
"It's better to burn out than to fade away!" Twirl.
"You eat when we say you eat! ... Wait, wrong role..."
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u/Krieger-San1862 7h ago
Sam Rockwell's character's journey into sexual depravity monologue in White Lotus
One of the all time best deliveries
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u/UnpricedToaster 4h ago
Crazy how there was no script, just Sam Rockwell recounting his vacation to Thailand.
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u/Signor_Talunque 7h ago
The monologue of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in the First film "Jaws"
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u/UnpricedToaster 4h ago edited 4h ago
"Japanese submarine slammed two torpedoes into her side, Chief. We was comin’ back from the island of Tinian to Leyte. We’d just delivered the bomb. The Hiroshima bomb. Eleven hundred men went into the water. Vessel went down in 12 minutes. Didn’t see the first shark for about a half-hour. Tiger. 13-footer. You know how you know that in the water, Chief? You can tell by lookin’ from the dorsal to the tail.
What we didn’t know, was that our bomb mission was so secret, no distress signal had been sent. They didn’t even list us overdue for a week. Very first light, Chief, sharks come cruisin’ by, so we formed ourselves into tight groups. It was sorta like you see in the calendars, you know the infantry squares in the old calendars like the Battle of Waterloo and the idea was the shark come to the nearest man, that man he starts poundin’ and hollerin’ and sometimes that shark he go away… but sometimes he wouldn’t go away.
Sometimes that shark looks right at ya. Right into your eyes. And the thing about a shark is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, he doesn’t even seem to be livin’… ’til he bites ya, and those black eyes roll over white and then… ah then you hear that terrible high-pitched screamin’. The ocean turns red, and despite all your poundin’ and your hollerin’ those sharks come in and… they rip you to pieces.
You know by the end of that first dawn, lost a hundred men. I don’t know how many sharks there were, maybe a thousand. I do know how many men, they averaged six an hour. Thursday mornin’,
Chief, I bumped into a friend of mine, Herbie Robinson from Cleveland. Baseball player. Boson’s mate. I thought he was asleep. I reached over to wake him up. He bobbed up, down in the water, he was like a kinda top. Upended. Well, he’d been bitten in half below the waist.
At noon on the fifth day, a Lockheed Ventura swung in low and he spotted us, a young pilot, lot younger than Mr. Hooper here, anyway he spotted us and a few hours later a big ol’ fat PBY come down and started to pick us up.
You know that was the time I was most frightened. Waitin’ for my turn. I’ll never put on a lifejacket again. So, eleven hundred men went into the water. 316 men come out, the sharks took the rest, June the 29th, 1945. Anyway, we delivered the bomb."
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u/USSMarauder 5h ago
Beat me to it
Robert Shaw does that monologue so well, complete with the thousand yard stare of a man who has seen death literally just pass by him and pick the guy next to him
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u/rynolaw 4h ago
That monologue is incredible.
Tangentially related, the first time I ever heard about the U.S.S. Indianapolis was when I was in middle school (like 7th or 8 grade) back in the 90's, in Health class, our teacher brought in someone (I want to say his uncle, but also could have just been a family friend, it's been decades, so it's hard to remember), who was one of the actual survivors, and he talked about his experience.
While there were sharks, and some people were killed by them, there were more deaths due to dehydration, exposure & such, since there weren't enough rafts, and a lot of the "rafts" were just balsa wood frames with nets in the middle, so even if you were in it, you were also still in the water the whole time.
Also, after a few days they ran out of fresh water, so some people started drinking seawater out of desperation, and could become delusional. He specifically mentioned that his best friend had been in one of the "rafts" with him, and started to believe that the ship & the rest of the crew were all still alive under the water, and eventually decided that he was going to swim down to them, never coming back up.
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u/Tosslebugme 9h ago
Obsession- freaky Nikki goes into painstaking detail the experience of dying by suicide.
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u/alreadykaten 7h ago
Mean Creek - When Josh revels in describing in detail the death of his bully’s father
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u/mt_n_man 1h ago
The "to the pain" description in The Princess Bride: "'To the pain' means that the first thing you lose will be your feet below the ankles. Then your hands at the wrists, next your nose... The next thing you lose will be your left eye, followed by your right. [...] Your ears you keep, and I'll tell you why: so that every shriek of every child at seeing your hideousness will be yours to cherish; every babe that weeps at your approach; every woman who cries out, 'Dear God! What is that thing?' will echo in your perfect ears. That is what 'to the pain' means; it means I leave you in anguish, wallowing in freakish misery, forever."
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u/StyleRoutine2331 42m ago
Monika about Sayori - Doki Doki Literature Club
“I know how much you cared about her, so it only feels right to share her final moments with you. you know how Sayori is really clumsy? well, she kinda messed up the whole hanging thing…
you’re supposed to jump from high enough that the rope snaps your neck, making it quick and painless. but she used a chair, meaning she kind of just let herself asphyxiate. but a few seconds in, she must have changed her mind or something, because she started clawing at the rope trying to free herself. she must have kept up at it all the way until she lost consciousness. that’s why her fingertips were all bloody. come to think of it, it was probably less her ‘changing her mind’ and more just her survival instincts kicking in. so you can’t really fault her for that.
it’s easier to think she wouldn’t have changed her mind anyway, right? it’s not healthy to think about the things you could have done differently. so just remember that even though you could have saved her, it’s technically not your fault she killed herself.”
Monika has a lot of disturbing dialogue like this in act 3 if you sit there with her for long enough (like describing the pain she’s in when you close the game), but this one was especially horrific to me. i never even thought about the fact that Sayori’s fingers were bloody. to make things worse, i got the rare “red filter” event on my first playthrough, which puts a red filter over the room with veins around the edges, muffles the audio, and plays choking and gurgling sounds until it’s over. this event is meant to be Sayori’s POV while she’s choking to death, except instead of her room it’s normal gameplay.
every time i start to forgive monika completely, i remember this conversation and i can’t bring myself to fully do it. i understand a lot of her struggle and pain, and i really do like her, but i can’t forgive her for this
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u/Shikoda0 9h ago
I think OP loves Venture Bros
https://giphy.com/gifs/UMhaGlCTAXnJS