Trope Talk: Ancient Superweapons
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 ก.ย. 2024
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If you think this is just an excuse for me to talk about my favorite Ghibli movies, you're right! What's your favorite ancient superweapon? Argue in the comments!
Scheming Weasel, Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
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This is why I love Halo so much. The Halo rings on the surface seem like a very formulaic ancient super weapon trope, but it’s actually subverts the trope in several ways. For example, the series bad guys, The Covenant, aren’t trying to take control of the Halo rings to use as a weapon against humanity. They want to control the rings because they’re basically a cargo cult that worships the technology of the ancient Forerunner civilization and think that activating the rings will start “The Great Journey” (basically The Covenant’s version of The Rapture). Not only that, but the ancient civilization that created the rings wasn’t brought to collapse by creating the weapon. They activated the ring in an act of mass suicide to destroy the horrifying Flood parasite and punish themselves for failing to stop the Flood. And even the trope of the heroes trying to deactivate the weapon is initially subverted, as Master Chief initially tries to ask the AIs Cortana and 343 Guilty Spark how he can use the ring to destroy the Covenant before learning why he can’t. Halo may not be the most complex story, but there’s a lot of really neat stuff in it.
Describing the Covenant as a cargo cult is brilliant. I will be using that for now on, thank you
@@TheDyscontinuum Thanks. I think that Halo is a surprisingly deep story even without the extra lore of the books
@@connorwalters9223
It was, until the trilogy ended and we started to get... silly.
Like, I love Halo 4, but the story about an ancient Forerunner returning and Master Chief being some kind of chosen one figure started to lose me. I didn't even play Halo 5.
@@1krani I played almost all halo games and 5 just made me mad for what they did to Cortana
I'm glad I'm not the only one who thought of Halo when watching this video. Also, the Covenant being a cargo cult is very apt.
Legit the “Fantasy world is just a post-apocalyptic version of a Sci-Fi Society” trope is possibly my favorite trope ever
This happens in one of my favorite series, sci-fi people use nanotech to tap into the Etheric (use magic) but on earth, no one knows that and just thinks its a thing people can do
@@glxy_darkshadow149 What series is that? Sounds interesting .
The Kurtherian Gambit by Michael Anderle
The wheel of time series does that a little bit but it's very subtle.
And then you have sci-fi society in a post-apocalyptic fantasy world of another sci-fi society in Nier: Automata
Ancient civilization: "Hey, I know. We should make a weapon that can destroy the world. You know, just in case."
Ancient civilization, a bit later: "Wait a second, we live there..."
Oh no we don’t have the technology to destroy our weapon, let’s just seal it in a vault that can be opened via a sudoku puzzle
Modern civilisations making so, so many nukes
The plot of half the episodes of Stargate that deal with the Ancients...
@@regrettablemuffin9186
Wait... we're the Ancient Civilization?
@@Gospel-xm7vd We are, at least in few stories. Sometimes it is more futuristic take on Earth, but in some cases ancient superweapons are literally nukes. And still nobody seems to spot the warning.
Here's an idea: The villain finds out about the ancient superweapon from this lost civilization that was destroyed thousands of years ago, finds it, only for it to be steel swords. Thousands of years ago steel weaponry would've dominated all iron of bronze weapons, bit is useless nowadays.
There is a theory that IRL this is what the Magic wepons of legend are, Some blacksmits in history could had forge steel wepons But they never pass on the tech, so it was lost until someone else discover it again
Or that they where Star Iron. High nickel content iron from meteors wouldn't rust, would be relatively heavy (which would make them difficult to wield or even lift) and in a time of stone/bronze nearly indestructible.
“ and with this ancient super weapon, my empire will be undefeat…is that a handgun?”
Can I steal this?
That would actually be exceptional.
Villain: "I will unleash this ancient weapon to destroy people"
*ancient weapon activates*
Villain: "Oh wait, a minute, I'm people"
*surprised pikachu face*
I am the most famous man on YouTub! This is not bragging! This is the truth! The truth will set you free, dear mix
Team Aqua and Magma in a nutshell
This trope can be avoided by having the villain be a madman who is aware of how destructive the weapon is and aims to destroy humanity with it. Bonus points if he thinks destroying humanity is actually a good thing because it ends suffering, the world is better off without them, or both.
haha villain your weapon is awesome
@@Omphalite and that had lots of openings for the villain to be an old friend who lost their family or something similarly important and has turned down the path of ending it all.
“For thousands of years i lay dormant”
“Who disturbs my sl- oh it’s you lot”
"Explain idiot."
@@LeviathanTamer31
"3 whole androids, huh?"
@@LeviathanTamer31 "No no NO"
@@1krani "Pretty sure that makes 8. Hm. Never letting the boy live this one down."
What’s the reference?
To answer the question of “if it’s so bad, then why did they make it” I would suggest looking into the Manhattan project that produced the first atomic bombs. The scientists who designed it were horrified when it was first tested. It was way more powerful than they had anticipated. The test explosion destroyed almost all the sensors and equipment set up to record data because they were way too close to the bomb.
Not to mention they'd failed to realize how awful the radiation and fallout would be, as well.
There were also a bunch of people who were worried it could ignite the atmosphere but approved the tests anyway, either because they thought the chance of total annihilation was "not that high" or they were simply willing to risk total annihilation in exchange for the potential for ultimate power.
we all know the famous quote "Now I am become death, Destroyer of worlds"
Well you never know how destructive something unless you test it
@@SparkSovereign the people who thought itd ignite the atmosphere were not the ones who approved it
My favorite twist on the ancient superweapon story is when it turns out that the villain is not seeking it out in order to use it, but to destroy it themselves. Sometimes it's because the villain turns out to actually be a member or descendant of the ancient lost civilization that was destroyed by it, sometimes it's because the heroes were completely misinterpreting the villain's motivations and the villain was not as bad as they thought, and sometimes it's because the villain knows that the superweapon is an even bigger villain and they want to destroy it in order to neutralize any potential rivals to their power.
Doesn't this get less-applied to ancient superweapons and more to magical choosy artifacts? A villain knows they'll never be chosen so they set out to destroy the one thing that could potentially give aprotagonist the power needed to stop them?
I read this as "the villain actually sought out the superweapon to destroy themselves" and that's honestly such a cool concept that I've never seen explored before
@felvahkiir6354 would work well for an immortal villian that's became a villian due to grief and wishes to just die
I mean, spoilers for the anime Gintama, that's basically the goal of the main villain. He was made immortal by the energy of the planet, so in order to finally die, he taps into the energy to destroy it at the source so his life force is no longer being fed by the planet. Of course that would also cause life die off on earth, so you know, bad thing.
Or that the heroes wanted to use it in the first place because they thought it would help and didn’t know it was a weapon
“The villain wants the ancient super weapon because they’re clinging to an idealized version of the past and ignoring the lessons of history due to being blinded by powerlust. The heroes don’t want it because they’re looking towards the future and they understand that some mistakes are too dangerous to be repeated, no matter how appealing they might seem on the surface.”
Never thought about the dynamics quite in that context, but it really makes sense.
When was that said? Time?
@@orrorsaness5942 It’s a paraphrase. Think it was towards the end.
When you put it that way, the villain's motivations sound a lot like fascism: romanticizing a "glorious" past, obsession with military might, and no concern for innocent people getting hurt.
@@Mad_Scientist_IRL What makes it interesting is when said superweapon can be used for other things, and/or wasn't designed as a weapon at all. I really get annoyed by some of the "no one should have this power" story. Especially in some of the Gibli movies where the thing could have been either taken apart or used for actual good without even touching the superweapon part.
We should always be looking forward, but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from or use things from the past. Modern civilization is built on those who came before us after all.
@@Hallows4 I mean which minute? Like for example, 9:30.
I remember a kids show from my youth where at one point an "ancient evil" was released, then was immediately beaten by the group mage. Answering the question "If the old magic was so powerful why did people forget it?" Cause the Old Magic was only considered powerful cause there was nothing before, in the show the modern magic was far and away superior to the "old magic."
Was that the Dungeons and Dragons cartoon or Thundarr the Barbarian? Because that sounds really familiar and those are the two shows that seem to fit most with that concept.
I loved the episode of Buffy where they wake an ancient superdemon that "swords could not harm," only for Buffy to blow it up with a bazooka because weapon tech had advanced so much in the intervening millennia.
@@Stray7 I was literally about to mention Buffy!
That one Final Fantasy dev used the same logic for why the Ultima spell was so weak. In actuality it was a bug, but he was a prideful jerk, and doubled down on the "old magic weak" logic and refused to fix it.
@@eshbena It doesn't sound like anything in the _Dungeons and Dragons_ cartoon. (Presto was... not at all reliable for that kind of thing.)
I think you missed one scenario: "The ancient super-weapon was made to fight some ancient evil... and we need it because the evil is back."
Edit: The fact I still get semi-regular notifications about people replying to this half thought-out comment over a year later is frankly hilarious.
Halo
Doom
BotW
Mass Effect 3
The fifth element
It's also very important to remember that if it's in an anime then it is 100% meant as an allegory for nuclear weapons.
Japan is traumatized.
*AND DON'T YOU FORGET THAT, NARUHITO!*
@@brookedickson4118 for very reasonable reasons
@@funnyvideoguy3216 yknow that trope where a bomb goes off and the guy casts a silhoutte on the wall behind him, and the guy is now this black charred thing that coughs and gets carried off by the wind.
yea nuclear bombs did that.
Even the Eclipse Canon from Sonic X?
Halo’s ancient superweapon is actually a pretty interesting twist on the “weapon was so powerful it killed the creators” thing. Because the people who made the Halos, the forerunners, designed it to do just that. They fired the rings knowing full well it would kill all of them, just to stop a greater enemy from spreading.
Yeah, Halo plays right into ancient eldritch horror tropes (as do some of Bungie's earlier games). The Flood are an intergalactic-scale telepathic spreading evil that can bend reality and convince godlike artificial intelligences to betray their creators. Even worse, the Forerunners were equipped to deal with the Flood, and they made all the wrong decisions. They were in decline even before the Flood showed up. The Forerunners were so disgusted with how poorly they handled being the dominant galactic power, they handed humans the genetic keys to their technology, and then heroically pushed the "destroy all life to starve the Flood and let our AIs grow everything back thousands of years from now" button.
@@eneekmot Man, Bungie was so cool. To be honest, the one trope that I feel like they should've kept on with is the one that they were *GOING* to carry over from Marathon: the Forerunners were Humanity's ancient ancestors and Humanity were basically a primitive sub-species designed by the Forerunners so that the Flood/Rings power would pass over them (on top of putting a shield on their planet to protect it from the Rings). Basically making Humans their "starting over" race.
@@SomeKindaSpy Yeah, making Forerunners ancient humans would make us being the reclaimers make a lot of sense, as opposed to them just deciding we were cool. Even though we attacked them.
@@RorikH To be fair, whether we "attacked" is up for debate. It was closer to a mass migration, and they technically fired on us first.
@@lolmeme69_ I knew we were running from the flood, but I did not know they fired first.
My favorite answer to "If the ancient superweapon is so powerful, why is its respective civilization gone now?" is:
_It's not supposed to be a superweapon._
That thing you're trying to use as a bomb? That's a spare smartphone battery. That indestructible robot supersoldier? That's a friggin' _Roomba;_ people have evolved to the point where it thinks it needs to do pest control on them. And that floating iron fortress that you're making shoot lasers at global landmarks as a show of force? It's _supposed_ to go into orbit, where its beam degrades in the atmosphere and harmlessly charges your devices.
The ancient civilization's disappearance caused the "weapon" to be hidden, not the other way around.
Pretty sure this is literally the case in Atlantis: The Lost Empire, which Red used clips of.
Alternatively, the "superweapon" is a waste product of some sort that the civilization wanted to dispose of -- one man's "toxic waste" is another man's "goop that spreads plague to my enemies." This is a real thing that real scientists working on nuclear waste storage facilities have put thought into.
The ancient military base of super destructive technology is a theme park. It's just one with very bad safety protocols.
1:45 - 1:47 sooo trueee.
I think this all the time I watch a movie or series along these lines.
When I was playing star wars (I forget which version it was). The ASW was not a weapon per sat but it was a device thing that could locate all potential Jedi (ie. any kid with the force). The evil ones basically wanted to use it to build an army more or less(I mean what else would it be, right? 😂😂) .
And obviously the protagonists wanted to "protect" it by getting there first.
The whole time I was playing the game I was just like "YOU'RE LITERALLY LEAVING THE VILLAIN BREADCRUMBS TO FOLLOW".
Because the villains didn't actually know where it was so it was the protagonist(my avatar) and his squad that was doing all the puzzles and the villains basically follow them. 🙄🙄
I was ANNOYEEDDDD.
Anyway, it ended anyways so...
"Valley of the Dying Things"(?) in Spiderweb Software's "Blades of Avernum"? The plagues and death are caused by a leaking waste dump under not Hogwarts and would've gone away if someone started the incinerator.
Like the RimWorld orbital power beam targeter, a tool designed to order power producing satilites to send a beam of power down to be safely collected in a large power dish, if there isn't one the ground and air will burn with the immense discharge of energy, but only for a few seconds as the satellites will detect the massive heat buildup and shutoff the beam
“Wealth, power and snickers bars” sounds like the one ring has its priorities in order
Bilbo: Benny?
Smaug: What!
Bilbo: Have a snickers bar.
Smaug: Why?
Bilbio: Cause you act right beastly when you're hungry.
Smaug takes the Snickers.
Bilbo: Better?
Sherlock: Better.
Well, if they were really in order it would be snickers bar, wealth, power. ;)
In the UK there is an advertising theme to snickers hinging on the hungry and cranky theme (Hangry?) with the punchline "Not yourself, have a snickers".
The Chosen One has a nut allergy.
@@Akkalia Any time someone mentions a Chosen One, I think of Kung Pow.
So interesting thing about the One Ring. When Sam has it in the book there are a few notable moments of him tapping into its powers and not entirely understanding what he's doing.
For instance, while wearing it, one of the things he does notice is that while his vision seems faded and foggy his hearing is immensely more powerful, able to hear conversations like he's standing right next to them even though there is both distance and a giant rock in the way.
But what he doesn't notice is how it affects the Orcs around him. Whenever they see him, they start panicking and become absolutely terrified of him. He's not even wearing it, but just holding it in his hand is enough to make him seem like an unstoppable titan to them.
The Ring's power comes through it ability to control and manipulate, we frequently see this in action with the main bearers (Frodo, Bilbo and Gollum) and how it corrupts and damages them. When Sam looks over Mordor for the first time he has a vision that is explicitly implied to be from the Ring itself, of him putting it upon his hand and marching through the land, gathering the legions to his own banner and blade and tearing down the Dark Tower, changing the land from a blasted and inhospitable desert to a massive garden tended by the hands of his minions. He realizes that this was not his own desire, and that a single simple garden in the shire is enough for him, beyond that, there was no way he would be able to rally enough to his cause even with the Ring, not with Sauron's will driving the Orcs constantly.
But that is the Ring's power, to dominate and control, even if not direct control (which is what went wrong with the dwarf rings much to Sauron's frustration) but it can still be used to influence and corrupt.
Sauron never desired to destroy Middle Earth in its entirety like Morgoth did, he wanted absolute dominion over it, so he created a Super Weapon that would let him do that.
One of the reasons why I love shadow of war so much
Create another Ring to combat the original
This also kinda fits into the invisibility it grants as it basically gaslights everyone into thinking the wearer is invisible
Not a good way to start a comment. I urge you to drop the "so" thing. It's insufferable.
@ciscornBIG so, even though I'm just mentioning an interesting factoid I remembered while reading the book to help add or inspire conversation, it's insufferable. Good to know.
@@ciscornBIGthe "so thing"? how is a basic word in the English language designed to introduce a sentence "a thing"?
One of my favourite implementations of this trope is actually an SCP entry: SCP-4400. Basically, Foundation agents found a Mayan temple containing nuclear waste, and pieced together that the Mayans had somehow gotten the means to create nuclear bombs, _centuries_ before the Manhattan Project. The temple has carvings depicting the effects of radiation poisoning, and how they've even seemingly enchanted the area closest to the nuclear waste and bombs to make people completely _terrified_ the deeper they go into the temple, to the point where even the most well-trained MTF soldiers literally soil themselves trying.
The entire entry is inspired by the strategies the US government themselves are looking into in order to prevent future generations from disturbing long-term nuclear waste disposal facilities - which itself is basically this trope in real life. It's named after these plans too; "This Is Not A Place Of Honor".
Suddenly the Flayed god makes more sense.
They need better lab security...
I still think Finland's plan with Onkalo is the best. The idea is to basically just bury the waste without leaving any signs of the storage's existence. The site itself is also extremely boring geologically, having no interesting resources and having been extremely stable for hundreds of millions of years.
"Cáceres? Cáceres is a demon that will teach you how to split an atom. I already know of such a demon, and his name is Robert Oppenheimer."
I'm wondering if my Sapphire Swords concept is real and someone bad found them...
I find it difficult to believe that Mayans could have harnessed nuclear energy, considering that what did them in were disease, and men on horseback with muskets.
Had an interesting idea while watching this. A villain and a group of good guys (that includes this wise older historian) are racing to an ancient superweapon, the villain to wield it and the good guys to stop her. But as they journey forward, the villain is gradually more and more shaken by the murals, the messages and the death of her henches in various traps whereas the historian gets more and more excited about coming so close to his area of study. Just as both villain and heroes reach the final chamber, the villain change her mind and decide to not go through with it. That's when the historian reveal he had hoped the villain would succeed so that he could remain morally pure while still seeing the weapon used, admits to and apologises for just being "too curious" and then flips the switch.
WHERE IS THE BOOK FOR THIS I WANT TO READ IT
Pretty solid story there
I was thinking the reveal would be that the historian somehow IS the ancient superweapon. And was fucking with the ENTIRE cast for shits and giggles, THE WHOLE TIME. Then he gives them some sort of lesson about hubris, brings down his ancient home Atlantis style and laughs like a madman whilst the characters try to escape the collapsing structure. Villianess included.
@@thelazyblade1016 Sure, that's a cool take. :) What I found most interesting about my idea though, is specifically how the roles of heroes and villain reverses over the course of the plot. How the villain responds reasonably to people dying in front of her eyes whereas the historian gets caught up in his own obsession and gets *less* concerned about the lives of others because of how interested he is in the weapon.
@Fremen The first ideas that come to my mind: Maybe they wanted it for a specific, narrow purpose but see it only causes widespread destruction and is useless for their goal. Maybe something in the apocalypse logs cuts through her walls and strikes at her remaining humanity. Maybe this was her first dive into villainy and when it comes down to it, she doesn't have it in her to unleash that level of destruction. It's OP's sandbox, and there is a sliding scale from antagonist to absolute monster and the villain can be anywhere in between
“There is an expression in the Wasteland. Old World Blues. It refers to those so obsessed with the past they can’t see the present, much less the future, for what it is.”
Considering how fascinated I am with what is left of the old world, and how fascinated many other fans are with the old world, that theme is disturbingly meta… especially because fallout games center around character epics rather than multi generational planning, building, getting stronger from past mistakes, and actually moving forward….
The building mechanics in fallout 4 and 76 are good steps in the right direction but I wouldn’t be opposed to grand strategy beyond hearts of iron 4 mods
“Beeeethesssdaaaaaaa!”
But what is left behind will be a New World Hope.
There's a fallout analogy to be made here
@@MachineElf_Official You do realize that quote is from Fallout, right?
@@perchy22 i didnt. i thought it was from wasteland, since he capitalized wasteland.
A pleasant surprise when I read the Lord or the Rings books recently was that Saruman wasn’t a minion of Sauron so much as he intended to supplant him by claiming the Ring for himself, and that was something that Sauron actually feared. Sauron was constantly watching for which character would become a dark lord strong enough to overthrow him, which is why he totally missed the hobbits and never expected anyone to DESTROY the Ring. Neat.
This is still pretty apparent in the films, too. Saruman is clearly a conniving bastard with a hidden agenda, and specifically grooms the Uruk-Hai to serve "none but Saruman."
He never expected anyone to destroy the Ring because he thought all craved power.
I think the book also straight-up says that Sauron's greatest fear (at one point in the plot) is that Aragorn might wield the ring against him
@@chaotixthefox Sauron was actually right, nobody could deliberately destroy the ring.
@@EllipticalReasoning Yes, Sauron threw his entire reserves against Aragon in the hope he could reclaim the ring before Aragorn had mastered it.
I like the way Halo did this. The superweapon was planet size, designed to wipe out all life in the galaxy to starve out a hyper intelligent race of space zombies. The weapon worked. It did exactly what it was meant to: kill literally everything, including its creators. And of course the robots left behind repopulated the galaxy with stored DNA
But also, the evil aliens who want to use the superweapon don't want ultimate power...they worship the Halo rings and think that activating the rings will make them gods.
Very interesting storytelling
Exactly the type of point I wanted to make. I figured this being released at the same time as Infinite was on purpose and I was really surprised when it wasn't referenced. Halo wasn't quite matching to any of the tropes that were being discussed and just made me realise that I can't think of any other ancient superweapon style plot like it. It was built to destroy THEIR OWN civilisation, and the "bad guys" trying to activate think it will cause them to ascend (which could be argued is still a kind of power grab, but also could be argued its because according to their religion, its the good thing to do)
The Halo rings are unique among fictional superweapons because they end up being used exactly as intended during the story itself, and that’s not painted as a bad thing. In the story of Halo 3, Installation 08 fulfills the rings’ intended purpose almost to the letter, destroying the Flood once and for all (probably). The Halos saved the galaxy twice.
And the thing that makes it work is that it was literally the very, VERY last resort. In the some of the Terminals and in the books its stated that the forerunners spent the last 300 years before firing the rings trying every conceivable option to eradicate the Flood. No strategy, no cure, not even digitising themselves in the Domain was effective against the flood as they would just adapt and keep coming. Not even AI were safe against their corruption. Suicide on a Galactic scale was the only option they had because it was the only option that hadn't been tried yet.
@@a.morphous66 there are more halos and all of them contain flood upon it
@@th3thatguy631 That’s why I said probably. I was specifically talking about the narrative structure of the original trilogy. It might not have totally annihilated all the Flood everywhere, but it destroyed the currently problematic outbreak and resolved the plot.
The point you made about life moving on while civilizations fall is a big reason why I love Breath of the Wild. There's this melancholy of stumbling across the various ruins scattered across Hyrule and seeing the lair of the thing that caused its destruction just over the horizon, and realizing that people once lived here. Just wandering around you can see there was something greater here, something that met a horrible and violent end, and that civilization is still picking up the pieces a hundred years later. But the deer don't know that. The trees don't care. Life just continued to thrive.
With that the humans (hylians) are also just people. Their side quests are I want to see this fire rod or I heard there's a really cool horse. And that feels very good to see especially really soon after a big bad thing they're just continuing being people.
@@troylarsen10 and it is a unique case (even for a Zelda game) as the apocalypse wasn't just last week or a thousand plus years ago. Or 10,000 *which the previous one was but that is so long ago that its downright silly to act like its common knowledge*, no, in Breath of the Wild, the most recent apocalypse was 100 years ago, instead of a real world comparison being wandering about some stone age apocalypse it would be like if the apocalypse happened in 1920. Not so recent its in living memory but not so long ago that its a thing of myth and legend. To the Hylians this is a story from their great grandparents time that they can still remnants of but are trying to live their lives. Meanwhile the Sheikah and Zora with their much longer life spans regard it as a recent event. It creates a nice middle ground and relative reaction to it.
It's funny to think that Breath of the Wild is the aftermath of an Ancient Superweapon story. The good guys went searching for Ancient Superweapons, and when it was time to use them, they were turned against the good guys by the bad guy. This sounds like it would be a great setup for the protagonist to put the Ancient Superweapons to bed once and for all, but instead, he reclaims the Ancient Superweapons and uses them to fight the bad guy as originally intended. The people who unearthed the Ancient Superweapons were right to do so all along, there were just some hiccups on the way.
And all because the people at Nintendo who made the game REALLY loved Ghibli films and wanted to do an homage of sorts...as is right and proper.
I'm an unapologetic Ghibli fan and Zelda fan. BotW united two of my great loves. I had no chance and will be falling down this pit forever...and I'm okay with that!
I remember that one episode of ben 10 where grandpa max gets all super serious about getting to an ancient aztec super sword before a villain gets to it because it would let the wielder rule the world or something, after getting his head straight about taking care of his two grandkids above the damn sword, the villain gets to the sword first...at which point the sword crumbles to dust in the villain's hands.
Grandpa max looks at this for half a second before laughing almost hysterically and goes "that's what happens when your super weapon is 4000 years old!" classic
My favorite version of this trope has always been the “good super weapon.” The version where the ancient super weapon was created to defeat an ancient evil but was ultimately lost and forgotten because the ancient evil was defeated or destroyed.
As soon as I read that, my mind immediately jumped to the oxygen destroyer (even though it's barely similar to your description)
Mine went to Rasputin from Destiny
Reminds me of the Divine Beasts and the Guardians from Breath of the Wild. Just... You know... BEFORE they get hijacked by the ancient evil that came back lol
First thing i think of are the Halo rings from Halo.
This made me immediately think of the Halo Arrays. Massive Rings that were made to wipe out all life in the galaxy. With this info alone you would think it could only be made for the sake of Pure Evil. Like some crazed mastermind just hated everything and wanted to destroy all life for the hell of it, but with the knowledge of why it was made it becomes a very unique example of a Super Weapon.
This weapon was made to fight the Flood, a galaxy wide entity/race that’s sole purpose is to consume life and grow. This was an unstoppable force that was so big and powerful that the Forerunners, an advance race of humanoid beings that while having weapons perfect for fighting the Flood (plasma/burning weapons) were still powerless to stop them.
Their only option after a long struggle with the parasite was to make the Halo Arrays which as I said before will destroy all life in the universe/galaxy/whatever, not to kill the Flood (side note they didn’t know if there was more flood outside their universe) but instead their food. Even if some Flood survived they would eventually starve to death in a vacant galaxy.
After they starved the Forerunners machines would automatically repopulate the galaxy with species they collected prior to the Rings firing.
Okay, hear me out: Journey to the West is the story of someone unlocking the Ancient Superweapon but instead of it unleashing chaotic ruin, it's forced to do good and help the hero on their journey.
same for Breath of the Wild
And gamera but thats more evil weapon vs good weapon
Thay took the unthinkable evil and made it thier buddy
Da fucc- I wanted to do that reference
Omg, yes 😂😂😂
A couple of thoughts:
- while no-one ever gives it much thought, there's an ancient superweapon in the Narnia series - in the Magician's Nephew, the protagonists unintentionally awaken the sole survivor of a dying world who, it turns out, used something called the Deplorable Word to "win" against her sister. Luckily, it seems the rules of magic vary from world to world, so she doesn't have that sort of power when she ends up in Narnia.
- Horizon: Zero Dawn is the result of Ted Faro almost accidentally destroying all of humanity twice over. Once by creating the superweapon that does successfully destroy all life, leaving only GAIA to recreate the biosphere; and a second time by deleting Apollo, thereby breaking the programs intended to raise the first generation of new humans - if there hadn't been multiple levels of failsafes built into the programs, the new humans would have starved to death in the creche regions, unable to pass the Apollo-mediated tests to progress into the education regions...
H:ZD’s story is fun to think about in context of game development (I recommend the amazing NoClip documentary): they started with “Bronze Age fighting/disassembling robot t-rexes” gameplay, and built a story around that (hiring the one of the extremely talented Fallout: New Vegas writers for the role).
So, how do you end up with Bronze Age people fighting robot animals? Well clearly you need an advanced civilization to have created the robots, but they’re gone. So: there must’ve been an apocalypse. Why are there Bronze Age humans, and not more advanced? Well, some population of humans must’ve survived but lost all knowledge. So: Atlas deletion sub-plot.
It’s superbly corny, but it fits the setting. (And I still felt the tragedy when discovering the room full of the dead directors)
You mean she said "f*ck", right?
And then she fled to the outskirts for hundreds of years before assuming the mantle of The White Witch and making a vile nuisance of herself.
damn,how much of a dipshit do you have to be to accidentally destroy humanity not once but TWICE
@@carlosroo5460 probably "n*****r"
There's another variant of the "sentient superweapon" trope. Sometimes, the superweapon is a person, or the person is the key to the weapon, and instead of being a villain, that person is a kid or someone else fairly innocent. The example I'm thinking of is Bessie from the Percy Jackson series. Bessie is an ancient creature, and it's prophecied that whoever kills her will bring about the destruction of the gods. She's built up as a formidable weapon, but turns out to be a very sweet innocent sea cow. That twist creates a moral question for the protagonists: this is a very dangerous weapon, who should be sealed away or destroyed. But it's also completely innocent, and hasn't done anything to deserve that fate.
My favorite rendition of the variant is from the Secret Saturdays. Everyone spent season 1 trying to find the pieces of a map to the ancient superweapon creature only to find out it was very much not where it was supposed to be and was actually the 12 year old son of the protagonists who’s actually been using the powers the superweapon gave him for good pretty much his entire life. But now that everyone knows what those powers actually are and where they came from everyone thinks Zak is suddenly gonna become evil and turn on everyone and help the BBEG bring about the apocalypse. Which lead to the most heartbreaking line in the entire series when Zak realized everyone was afraid of him now despite the fact he hadn’t actually changed at all. And it also lead to Zak making some very questionable choices and almost getting his soul ripped from his body.
Gosalyn from the pilot episode of Darkwing Duck.
The man with an emerald in his chest in Dragonlance. Not the superweapon, but the way to seal the superweapon. I think. it's been awhile since I read the books
Yes, in fact in explaining why Bessie the Ophiotaurus is such a dangerous "weapon" one of the gods (I think Poseidon but can't remember exactly who) outright says there is power in killing the innocent. The gods then show how fallible they can be by wanting to kill him (and Percy) so he doesn't become a threat. It is only after Percy asks him does Poseidon declare the sea creature under his protection. I know Red doesn't seem to like the Percy Jackson books, but if you get past the inaccuracies to many of the original myths, the books do have some good themes. And at least she has also previously said that she likes the character of Percy.
Ooh, this reminds me of Aurora in the Professor Layton game "The Azran's Legacy", who is a kid but also treated by the villains (and sometimes the main cast) as a key to unlocking Ancient Knowledge... who then transforms into a test that, if humanity fails it, would destroy them all like it did the Azran civilisation that came before them
Wait a minute, shiny and awesome, everyone wants it, the audience doesn’t really know what it’s about until it’s revealed, TROPE TALKS ARE MAGUFFINS!
except they do fulfill a more specific narrative purpose, of teaching u abt tropes , so u can get better at writing or just go Hmmmmmm
a plot plot device
no, they are SUPERWEAPONS in disguise.
@@brakpak technically they could be anything (fridging, super weapons, smart guy, big guy) but they still fill the same narrative purpose, Teaching! 😜
Always have been
cue inception
I love seeing Atlantis: the Lost Empire referenced. Truly an underrated Disney gem
It's just a Laputa rippoff.
I really liked that movie, but I understand why it didn't do well.
The side characters are the best part about it, and yet you could completely remove them and the story wouldn't change at all.
@@DaDunge You should watch the original Stargate movie.
@@generalcatkaa5864 vinny and sweets are my favorite characters
This ep made me wach the movie again. Lols.
It’s strange how common this trope is for being so specific, from Pokémon X and Y’s Ultimate Weapon to Kirby’s Clockwork Stars the Nausicaa’s God Warrior and just about everything in between.
I think Halo: Combat Evolved is my favorite version of this story just for all the twists and turns it has. For one, there isn't a big search to find the weapon, it's discovered by accident and only even enters the story by the necessity of the Pillar of Autumn taking so much damage that it needed to land somewhere and the Halo Installation just so happened to be the closest somewhere. You don't even know what the thing even is, much less know that it's a weapon for half the game. It's just this weird ring world you happen to be shooting aliens on. And then you learn that the ancient weapon was also actually a holding ground for an even more dangerous threat. And THEN you learn that the weapon is used specifically to destroy the ancient evil and almost activate it only to learn that you were being deceived by omission for the last few levels because the weapon only works by starving out the Flood by killing all other life in the galaxy. What a great goddamn story that first game has.
This never crossed my mind I just liked being green man
Halo is definitely one of the best examples of this trope
"Let's stay focused. Halo, how do we use it against the Covenant?"
"This isn't a cudgel you barbarian, it's something much more important..."
The funny thing is that Cortana subsumed the data and quickly behaved (condescendingly so) like the information was common knowledge. Characterization!
And the sealed up ancient supervillain can go to the Didact from Halo 4
Then as the trilogy progressed, we see how the Covenant misinterpreted/twisted the true origins of the ring into a fascinating but ultimately false religion. Completely unintended or foreseen consequences of the Forerunners' plans.
The podcast “among the stars and bones” is an excellent exploration of this trope imo. It’s about a group of human archaeologists in the far future exploring the ruins of an ancient alien civilization, and their employers want them to bring back alien tech they think can be weaponized. The cool thing about it is that you get all the characters’ opinions on the whole alien superweapon thing in a lot of detail. The pro-weapon side is actually more sympathetic than usual, there’s a really bloody war going on in humanity’s home system and the military character wants to bring home a powerful weapon to end the violence. The story overall is still pretty anti-superweapon, but the nuance is still interesting. There’s also the fact that the tech itself wasn’t actually designed as a weapon, and the story does a lot of fun things with that that I don’t want to spoil. Please listen to it if you like this trope, it’s really good and I want more people to listen so they make another season.
The first season of Juno Steel from The Penumbra Podcast explores this as well!
Another great podcast like this is Janus Descending, though without spoilers I will say its not quite a weapon, but it has a similar vibe
Maybe the real superweapon, were the friends we made along the way.
Nice, I’ll check it out. Thx!
It turns out the ancient super weapon was the friends we made along the way.
The real ancient super weapon was inside us all along
Based Harry Potter vibes
literally, in one piece's case
It's true in Equestria
The plot of She-Ra in a nutshell.
The funny thing about the Halo rings is that they ARE actually the reason the ancient civilization is ded, but ALSO totally worked as intended, disinfecting the galaxy and cleaning away 99.9% of lifeforms...
I was wondering when anyone would bring up Halo.
I don't know much about Halo so it's interesting to hear that the rings were basically the hand sanitizer of the universe, got it. Just missing that 0.1%, lol
Yep, halo's lore is neat. Although, I do wonder, why did the forerunners sacrifice themselves? There's clearly ways to survive it, or at least preserve their species, so you'd think they would have done so, setting it up as a "in case of flood 2, electric boogaloo" situation.
I know the actual reason was that originally, the forerunners were supposed to be ancient humans, which explains why all the forerunner tech is so easily used, and outright welcoming, to humans. Humanity was that "in case of sequel" plan. Then 343 decided to retcon it so that the forerunners are aliens, but they couldn't figure out a way to justify why this hyper-advanced civilization no longer existed. So, they tried to add weird reasons to justify why the forerunners resurrected everyone BUT themselves, why they designed all of their equipment to welcome humans, who were their mortal enemies at the time, and why they referred to Master Chief as "reclaimer" (as in, claims something they once owned).
@@LilianaKali The 0.1% was entirely intentional, as technically the 99% weren't even what the ring was trying to kill.
The basic gist is the rings were designed to defeat a massive alien parasite that was, at the time, halfway to eating the entire galaxy. While the Halo rings couldn't kill this parasite (called the Flood), the rings could quite easily get rid of every living thing in the galaxy, depriving the Flood of the food and technology it was expanding with.
The forerunners grabbed samples of as many living things across the Galaxy as they could find, and stuck them in a handful of protected worlds around the place that would be immune to the ring's firing. Eventually their war against the Flood went south, and we were well on our way to having the entire galaxy nommed, so the Forerunners decided to go out on their terms and fired the rings, wiping out every living thing in the galaxy.
A couple thousand years pass, and 'wild' flood dies off. Automated systems on the Shieldworlds start seeding the galaxy, and life starts returning to normal. The catch here is that the Forerunners who made the rings made the classic mistake of storing 'samples' of the Flood here and there, kept in self-sustaining security systems to stop it from escaping. Eventually other aliens (like Humanity and the Covenant, the two main nations of the story) bump into these rings and accidentally let the Flood out, leading to the plot of the first 3 games as the Humans and Covenant are still at eachother's throats, while a small subset of both sides are desperately trying to stop the flood without genociding the entire galaxy again.
@@MatthewSmith-sz1yq The forerunners as ancient aliens who have a hard-on for humans for no reason sucks. Them being ancient humans is still the better choice in the matter.
On Regrowth: At the end of She-Ra, rather than blowing up the bad guy's ship, the Ancient Superweapon is used to grow a forest through it. I really liked that.
Also: Mob 100. Lets turn a nuke into broccoli!
In the wise words of Captain Mercer "Happy Arbor Day!"
@@pathwaystoadventure and then the broccoli turns into a [MANGA SPOILER]
8:24 "This implies that the ancient civilization in question was fairly self-aware, but does beg the question of why they built it in the first place, and then why they didn't destroy it when they realized it was bad"
I have grave news to share about a famous superweapon and its continued existence to this day
Knives
It's shocking that so many ancient superweapons are built by a single ancient advanced civilization, as opposed to just one of multiple. It gives a better excuse for your ancient civilization to be investing in superweapons in the first place _and_ makes any relevant themes a lot plainer.
Nukes?
Is it Halo?
@@timothymclean Well, if they created such a powerful weapon to destroy their enemies and got nearly vaporized by the consequences, it's only logical that the actual targets ended up even worse off, but otherwise I get what you mean.
The footage of ghibli movies with the narration about “being too on the nose” kind of does a disservice to japan’s history with actual world-wrecking weapons. In fact, a lot of this trope makes more sense when you remember nukes exist.
Ayup
Talking out of my ass here, but it wouldn't surprise me much at all if this trope truly took off/was created in reaction to nuclear weaponry. Like MOST of Ghibli's movies revolve around this theme (almost as if those weapons were unleashed onto japan, huh...), and all the other examples I can think of (and esp those used in this video) were all made after 1945.
@@Charmlethehedgehog Nope, Miyazaki was a child at the time of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and has stated in interviews that those bombs being dropped and what happened afterwards was a defining moment for him (and a lot of Japanese people) and that was a direct inspiration for him for many of his films, Laputa and Nausicaa most notably.
@@eshbena Note, that he saw firebombing, not nukes specifically
The various Stargate series often had the inversion of this trope; namely it was usually the highly-outmatched good guys looking for the ancient superweapons as their only chance to defeat whoever the storyline's current megavillain was.
But also the "oops I didn't understand this non-weapon and now I've doomed the planet/galaxy by accidentally making a super weapon " version.
Then the replicators happened and suddenly, old fashioned ballista rifles were the way to go. Lmao
I was trying to think of a way to subvert the “sealed ancient super power is a sentient villain” by asking what if they were actually a hero that gets woken up and realized that it is basically Aang from avatar or Link from botw
or Doom Slayer
Or the Tenno from Warframe.
If there's any hero who could be considered an ancient superweapon, it's Doomguy.
The Doctor.
Here's a twist on the trope: what if it wasn't intended to BE a superweapon, and it was just way more deadly than anyone expected. Say, a magical power source, for example; Intended to give off light and heat endlessly that the civilization could harness, that worked a little too well, and BLEW UP the building that was meant to harvest its endless energy, and they were forced to deactivate it before it scorched the earth to ash like a second sun. So when big bad comes stumbling in after the heroes, not having read the test results that they did... KABOOM. Or maybe some plasmacutter tools got in the hands of a criminal group who began slaughtering everyone with their newfound lightsabers untill the cibilization collapsed into anarchy, and a folk hero once had "a sword that could cut through anything that he found in those ruins over there, so go find another to help take down evilus maximus!" Mundane objects that, if made incorrectly or accidentally overcharged, became superweapons and sent the civilization spiralling into chaos and ruin. One man accidentally twists the dial too far on his magic toaster and invents the flamethrower, trying to make a superdense metal accidentally made uranium detonate, which is why everyine thinks the civilization had a superweapon, when actually even they had just stumbled upon it.
accidentally constructed superweapons are a fun idea, in my opinion.
And pretty realistical, especially if the People who created them are depicted as pretty much into inventions and scientific breakthroughs.
You may want to look in on a game called Haven. Its background story is the aftermath of that idea.
Doom 2016 theme starts playing (they found a power source that is a portal to hell)
Isn’t that part of the plot of Aquaman?
To add to that it would be interesting if while trying to reactivate the ancient "superweapon" with modern tech they actually made it work like it was supposed to and the villain can't really do much with it
One of my favorite moments with these kinds of stories is always when it turns out that it wasn't actually intended as a weapon. Few things are more terrifying than learning the super powerful robot that is currently destroying one army after another was just something like ordinary construction equipment back in the time when it was built.
as the saying goes "Anything is lethal in the right (or wrong) hands..." I, personally, like the trope being used like this, as it's a statement to the original designer(s)'s oversight to the amount of danger their creation had within them. "That super laser creating massive trenches? It was for agriculture and canals! Does it have too much power? mmm nah, it was designed for hardier rocks and such. Can you just as easily turn it into a weapon? yes. yes you can."
A nuanced way to do the "villain sealed away" version of this trope could be that once the villain, known for being the Worst™ and the downfall of civilisation, is revived, the heroes (and also the previous bad guy) realise that this isn't some demon or monster, it's just like, a politician or something. And, what's worse, by the standards of modern society is actually... decent. The heroes are left to reflect on the fact that, to their ancestors, they are living in the worse possible scenario, and the villain played no part in it.
Outer Wilds DLC
1:45 - 1:47 sooo trueee.
I think this all the time I watch a movie or series along these lines.
When I was playing star wars (I forget which version it was). The ASW was not a weapon per sat but it was a device thing that could locate all potential Jedi (ie. any kid with the force). The evil ones basically wanted to use it to build an army more or less(I mean what else would it be, right? 😂😂) .
And obviously the protagonists wanted to "protect" it by getting there first.
The whole time I was playing the game I was just like "YOU'RE LITERALLY LEAVING THE VILLAIN BREADCRUMBS TO FOLLOW".
Because the villains didn't actually know where it was so it was the protagonist(my avatar) and his squad that was doing all the puzzles and the villains basically follow them. 🙄🙄
I was ANNOYEEDDDD.
Anyway, it ended anyways so...
Doctor Who, The Pandorica Opens.
The "Villain" inside WAS a villain... to those who feared him (because he was super deadly and destructive to them... because THEY are genocidal, enslavers, and such with a misguided fear that he will eventually destroy the entire universe they, and everyone else in the universe, exist in.)
Ironically, it's BECAUSE of him being sealed that he is unable to STOP the event that ends the universe in the first place. (He does manage to fix it, mostly.)
On the flip side, the person inside is actually the biggest hero of all the universe, who has saved toys, pets, babies, children, adults, societies, worlds, universes, and even reality itself from destruction (all at various times), a hero with hearts of gold despite bearing the mental and emotional burden of having done things that has resulted in him being known by some peoples by titles such as "The Oncoming Storm" or "The Predator of the Daleks" because of the sheer destruction (near-genocide and planetary destruction included) he has been forced to commit to save the lives of countless innocents around the universe.
There are a few Stargate SG-1 episodes that do this, from having another planet asking for help turn out to be eugenic favoring Nazis therefore making our heroes the 'villains' to them(via using ancient mcguffin to contact them, to accidentally reviving a religious zelot and having them do a local terrorism on their own planet, to literally having a politician get 'possesed' by another alien polititian and having them try to kill our heroes with their own politics.
My memories not great but can't remember if, aside from being godless heathens, they ever unleashed a 'villain' that was equivalent to their own ways of life.
Another great way to do the villain sealed away trope is to make them some form of deity linked to the hero or bound into eternal struggle with another deity. This can often be part of a "return to balance" storyline where protagonists have to learn and accept the existence of evil/chaos/death as a natural and important part of the universe. It can also be a great moment for a protagonist to be forced to make a sacrifice because they learn that themselves or a close friend is directly linked to this deity's power and danger. I'm personally very fond of stories where the sealed away villain is evil because they are so incredibly powerful and knowledgeable that they probably can remake the universe as a utopia, but it requires incredible destruction to life or at least the things we hold dear as humans (Example: Reawakened evil will turn the world into a utopia they desire but they must remove all free will so evil isn't possible).
My favorite version of this trope is when The Ancient Superweapon is combined with the Chosen One trope where basically The Superweapon can only be used by a specific person, last surviving members of a bloodline or race and etc. where it's only dangerous in the wrong hands or proof that this character is the true ruler, sometimes having to unite a shattered kingdom.
Final fantasy brave exvius?
I'm currently trying to do that!
I'm trying this idea as well. Pretty much my protagonist's allies are gonna let her sentient and very angry giant robot storm the fortress where they're keeping her and said superweapon because it's easier letting it go berserk than trying to calm him down
Brandon Sanderson's Mistborn does this perfectly
I kinda miss when this was like an everyday trope in video games. Often brought a fun mix of sci-fi, ancient mysticism, conspiracy theories about fictional worlds, and weird tree guns or space ships popping out of nowhere.
JRPGs taught me that if you want to wrap up the second half in a hurry, you might as well light all the fireworks at once to make a show of it. It's doesn't look like a dumpster fire if it sparkles.
Everything has to be so nuanced nowadays that one sometimes forgets that in simple potpourri storytelling is something charming and sincere.
I don’t know why my mind automatically went to this game specifically when I saw this comment, but I was reminded of Skylanders Giants lmao
@@JacobTheToadMan not surprised you thought of it.
Seriously, it feels like that series had damn near every major story trope under the sun.
From a great evil to precursor superweapons, and everything inbetween.
I'm in the early stages of a DnD campaign, and this really helped me solidify how the final act is gonna go down (unless the entire campaign gets derailed)
Ah! Many hours of good fun to you, my friend!
Write it down and keep it. You never know when it will fit your campaign.
But most definitely it's not going to be this one. 🤣🤣🤣
it will get derailed for sure. thats just how DnD is
An interesting possible version of this trope could be that there are actually two opposing superweapons, from ancient rivals. This could be fun in that if the weapons are sentient, maybe their coding forces them to fight until one wins, and the reason they were sealed was an agreement between the nations that their fallout was too dangerous to allow to come to pass.
It's exactly the plot of Fuga: Melodies of Steel, you should try it !
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha has a lot of fun with this trope. The show's setting is heavily implied to be sitting on top of two separate interplanetary apocalypses, leaving behind so *many* ancient superweapons that people are practically tripping over them. The protagonists end up working for an interplanetary governing body whose primary role is literally just to run around clamping down on any that crop up and making sure people aren't purposefully digging them up or making more of them. For bonus fun, the second season includes a five-in-one sentient ancient superweapon, who do actually get won over by negotiation on account of actually having pretty solid motivations. With the sort of anime this is, by next season four of those five superweapons are party members fighting other superweapons, which is...an interesting situation, in my opinion. X P
YES! Another Nanoha fan!
And a good description! I love how the TSAB is actually on board with accepting literal superweapons into their organization.
Now I have something to watch :) thanks
Also one of those superweapons plausibly comes down to an ancient software bug. Like there are no villains all season, just people circumstantially forced to be antagonists, and a couple of "for the greater good" types.
Its funny when thinking about it, Triangel Hearts 3 is just a kendo/spy-based eroge story while on the opposite side, we have an entire lore based on what is essentially the loli character of that eroge becoming a magical girl.
MGLN is still my favorite anime series to this day, at least the three seasons of the primary continuity. I'm not as much a fan of the spinoffs.
That said, I love it for the very reasons you point out. It's a surprisingly grounded science fiction story in the guise of a generic magical girl anime, the characters have clear motivations and goals, and the plot almost never pulls things out of thin air. Even the magic system is relatively well grounded and its limitations are pretty clear.
You do have to omit the Force manga though, since that basically ruins most of what's great about the original series.
Imagine, a story where the HEROS need the ancient super weapon, and the villains are trying to stop them from getting it, because the villains belong to an evil empire, and the good empire the heroes belong to is MASSIVELY underpowered in comparison. The super weapon is going to be used to even the playing field, and it does that purpose perfectly
The reason it was sealed away is the technology of the time was so comparatively primitive, that it was “too powerful” for the world of the time. But compared to modern technology, it’s only slightly more advanced.
Ace Combat
star wars???
That's kinda sorta what happens in Turn A Gundam. Basically Moon People who survived the apocalypse is invading with giant robots so the Earthlings (who in the anime had reach around Victorian era Europe in technology and culture) had to dig up ancient machines (that are not only giant robots but also reference to previous seasons which has some grim implications) to fight back.
Edit: just remembered that one of the weapons they found also just so happens to be multiple nukes from before the apocalypse. Which surprisingly, was not the source of THE apocalypse.
Most Protoss tech from Starcraft is like that. Blizzard overuses this trope so much, it borders on lazy writing.
(still, it can be fun when used more sparingly)
first half of your comment, tower of god and the thorn of enryu.
in tower of god, combat is done by reshaping the air around you into attacks. the thorn of enryu is a tool brought in to the planet-sized tower by a person from the outside world and is able to _forcibly override other people's powers._ basically, if someone tries to throw a fireball at you, you can say "no" and turn off their fireball, no matter who they are or how strong they might be.
basically, it's a tool that lets you kill a god, which is the first thing enryu did with it. then he dropped it off for a prophesized child who would enter the tower, claim the thorn and tear apart the totalitarian empire ruling the place with it's power.
the entire point of the thorn is that the main character is thousands of years behind the curve. the immortal king of the tower has had millennia to practice and develop his strength, and the main character needs something that will jack him up until it becomes a fair fight. since fate is at play, the MC is the only one who can unleash the full power of the thorn, which is why nobody else who has a piece has used it to become god.
9:40 The ring seems to enhance the innate magic power of the bearer; this is why galadriel or gandalf REALLY don't want to wear it, and this is why hobbits turn invisible; tolkein mentions that hobbits have a small magic talent to hide from unwanted eyes, that times ten thousand equals full invisibility. Galadriel is supposedly already super powerful, so she starts RADIATING LIKE A STAR just from PROXIMITY to it. If she WORE it?! she'd be more of a threat to middle-earth than any puny dark lord or their armies. She'd be a living nuke, consumed with power and irradiating the countryside CONSTANTLY. Long story short, don't let it get in the hands of powerful people.
So *Thats* how it works :O
I thougth is something like a dimensional shift between normal word and spiritual.
@@Karak-_- It does that too.
A twist I saw on this was that the “ancient super weapon” was essentially just a scared child that wouldn’t harm anyone, but the people of the civilisation were scared of their power and tried to destroy them, which is what caused the end of said civilisation.
That sounds vaguely familiar, do you got an example where that was done?
Isn't that just Paranorman?
@@Daddy_Skeletor I loosely pulled the example from a game called Tales of Graces
This actually made me realize that a character in some of my own writing is a living weapon that was sealed away, recovered generations later, and is actively getting past both his own and society's preconceived notions about what and who he is.
Thanks, Red!
What does society know about his status as a super weapon? I'm working on a story about a character who fits the super weapon trope, made as a state of the art defense system to defend a vast repository of knowledge, things didn't end well and she was buried underground for a few thousand years. I like the idea of using 'ancient' knowledge in a post apocalyptical world to benefit others, and it's bound to lead to conflict when people get suspicious and ask "where did you learn that?" Even with no motive other then helping people they become a threat to all the power structures as they bring change that isn't controlled.
@@orochifuror7148 Isaac Asimov's "Foundation" series is pretty much what happens to societies and how they evolve after an galactic wide civilization crash. One person, before the Fall, used math and science to predict what would happen, and so prepared a small pocket civilization out at the edge of the galaxy to try to survive, with one key thing at their disposal: they retained the knowledge of atomic weapons and technology, using that to their advantage and to try to make the Galactic Dark age significantly shorter.
It's a good, if admittedly dull, series, that makes a couple of interesting left turns in the 3rd and 4th books.
@@orochifuror7148 Wow, okay, youtube doesn't want me actually answering your question. Every time I do the comment gets deleted.
I suddenly have to think of that one Star Trek episode. I think it was called "The Chase" where the Enterprise, Klingons, Cardassians and Romulans were looking for a secret from an ancient civilzation that predates every other civilization. And they all think its some kind of unlimited power source or superweapon.
But then it turns out to be a message of peace and unity from that ancient civilzation that reveals that they seeded their own DNA onto different planets, which is why humans, Klingons, Cardassians, Romulans, etc are all distantly related.
There's another trope that I feel got overlooked, and that is, the "Helpful Ancient Superweapon" Basically, a weapon the ancients tried to build to stop the world ending threat, but failed. There are 2 well done examples of it: Enderal, a *massive* overhaul mod for TES5 Skyrim, and Mass Effect 3
It's always unfinished or underpowered at the time of its creation
I think that also counts as "Cast A Light Into The Future".
A simple version of that is found in a short story by Fred Saberhagen. An ancient planetary defense system completely forgotten by the pastoral civilization living among the ruins of the old civilization. A lonely herder who is afraid of the wolf stalking his sheep. And the controlling AI really, really needs human permission to unleash hellfire on the as-yet unseen (by anyone else) enemy.
Did I mention this story is one of Saberhagen’s BERZERKER series?
would the Halo-Rings count as those or does it require the wepon to have failed/nor being ready
Well that last point is debatable.
Konosuba:
"Those idiots want me to build a super weapon, let's try to prolong the proecess as much as possible."
_later_
"Damn I did it in the end... everyone is dead. I'm terrified. But it works, I'm proud and honestly, serves them right!"
Love that series
You know I’m glad that you had the same thought as I did. Seriously though how does one man make a deadly spider fortress, an explosion powered gun, a giant snake weapon, a robot dominatrix, and an entire fantasy race that literally redefines the meaning of the word EXTRA all because he was bored?
@@HoustonRLamb the guy is probably this world's Da Vinci - except totally lacking in common sense. Now Aqua's track record is 1:1. She send a good guy (aka Kyoya) and an idiot (the inventor dude) into the world. Depending on what Kazuma ultimately accomplishes that shows how well her judgement was. And considering it's Kazuma he might defeat the demon lord by coincidence/dumb luck - or nuke the entire land.
Halo has my favorite use of this trope. Everything from how the Halo's were a last ditch attempt to save the galaxy from a eldritch horror (by wiping it out), to how the Covenant are unknowingly trying to wipe the galaxy out, builds this complex undertone that perfectly sets up the rest of the story.
I was rewatching this and realized i slapped one of these into my dnd campighn wothout even thinking about it
I love how in Konosuba, an Ancient Superweapons was made by a guy who had no idea what the hell he was doing, and each attempt to make it look like he knew what he was doing just made everything worse, culminating in it destroying the kingdom while the guy who made it watched from the broken control center, drunkenly slackjawed
I feel like Leeloo is an interesting take on the ancient sentient superweapon. She was unknown to humanity as a whole because her existence was for a very specific circumstance and she was kept secret by an ancient religion. When awakened, she was naïve and pure, not pure evil as the trope normally functions. And on top of that, using her power required a ritual and convincing her that humanity was worth saving. She was literally an ancient super weapon that could not accidentally go off or be misused.
Fifth element is probably one of those movie where the style takes over the plot but it’s plot was pretty good.
In that same vein is the super android from El Hazard, the villains release it to conquer the world but the main protagonist has the tech-talk super power (its a weird anime where humans get superpowers going to their world but the two main teenage good guys got really situation specific powers, tech-talk/puppetry, and the other automatic true sight through illusions without seeing any hint of the illusion being active), well in typical anime fashion the super android pretty much falls in love with the main protagonist.
To be fair, wasn't she only naive and pure because she was essentially cloned?
@@danielf.7151 Yeah basically, but the point was that she was subverting the trope, regardless for the in universe reason.
00:03 Nah.
World-Anvil is the name given to the ancient super-tool used by the Ancients to create entire galaxies,
when used correctly it's a tool of creation.
when used badly it can be a tool of mass destruction on a scale we can't even comprehend.
brb, gonna write a new campaign.
What if the ancient weapon was a villian, but after being sealed away for centuries, turned good? Like, the main villian is looking for it to unleash it on the world but instead, it joins the hero's and, after the story, shuts back down or leaves until it's needed again
I don't remember the specifics of it, but I really liked what Archer did in it's space season. It had a sentient ancient super weapon that only wanted to die because it didn't like being a weapon, but it needs a living thing to kill it, and it dying would destroy a whole solar system. So you had the moral dilemma of killing this one crew (Who he had emotionally connected with) or be caught by the bad guys who would repurpose him into the super weapon he was supposed to be, and kill millions more. Really great concept.
1:45 - 1:47 sooo trueee.
I think this all the time I watch a movie or series along these lines.
When I was playing star wars (I forget which version it was). The ASW was not a weapon per sat but it was a device thing that could locate all potential Jedi (ie. any kid with the force). The evil ones basically wanted to use it to build an army more or less(I mean what else would it be, right? 😂😂) .
And obviously the protagonists wanted to "protect" it by getting there first.
The whole time I was playing the game I was just like "YOU'RE LITERALLY LEAVING THE VILLAIN BREADCRUMBS TO FOLLOW".
Because the villains didn't actually know where it was so it was the protagonist(my avatar) and his squad that was doing all the puzzles and the villains basically follow them. 🙄🙄
I was ANNOYEEDDDD.
Anyway, it ended anyways so...
The way that particular episode ended was also an incredibly good twist to the concept. Archer is just standing there wondering if what they did was the right thing. And also saying that whatever happens next they are completely free of any responsibility or fault or blame
Ended well**
My favorite subversion of this trope is that the Superweapon is talked up in-story by legends and lore and all the normal stuff you tend to get for such things, about how it is "so powerful" and was "unbeatable" and all that jazz and when the characters actually get to the thing past all the traps and seals and puzzles and what not it's just a really good club, or a prototype black-powder pistol when the current-age people already have cartage fire rifles or some other weapon that is _now_ really primitive and out dated but _back then_ was actually really powerful for the wielder.
And it's not that the the ancient superweapon is enchanted or anything, it was just really stupid strong _for its time_ but has long since been outdated. But you can't retract the stories and legends made for it, the myth surrounding it and all that is out there and in time got built up and over played or just misinterpreted so it winds up that the weapon isn't any good for the current age people.
It makes for a good Shaggy Dog Story, at least to me.
Thanks for the video Red.
One word, one game: Ultima, Final Fantasy II.
Not on purpose. It was a bug that left the spell doing no more than 500 damage. A programmer found it too funny, and left it in the game with the others being none the wiser.
That's kinda what I think "greek fire" is in real life. We learned in school of its legendary properties: some secret substance that would be thrown on enemy ships and would burn forever.
Even reading the wikipedia's article right now makes it sound like an ancient superweapon that is still a secret.
Ill bet it's like, refined olive oil or petrol or something really primitive by modern standards
@@app2530 I think Greek Fire is just an early version of napalm or some sort of alkali metal mixture. Caesium has a pretty explosive reaction to water after all.
That kind of set up could also work with nukes. Like advanced far future humans who have lost most history about our current age read ancient texts that talk about these devastating weapons whose creators were at one point worried it would set the entire planet on fire. When they protagonists finally find a working example, they are disappointed to find out its yield is only equivalent of mass-energy of few grams of antimatter, which the future humans have easy access to
I love that idea, however I feel like a plot progression like that would probably feel pretty disappointing to a lot of people (subverting expectations). I would probably love it for its more realistic depiction on how myths get retold and exagerated over time.
There was an interesting use of the Ancient Superweapon trope in Mortal Engines - the Medusa device, a weapon whose full potential is only hinted at throughout most of the story, and the mad pursuit of which induced one of the main characters' Tragic Backstory, is revealed later to have been relatively ordinary tool of warfare (as far as these things go) - it's destroyed in the end, as often happens, but there remains the terrible, looming question of: "if this was normal, then what kind of horror could have ended all of civilisation in just under 60 minutes?"
“If this weapon’s so powerful, why didn’t it’s creators conquer everything and instead died out?” I like alternatives to this where because of (or in large part due to) the super weapon, they did. But either from the long term affects of the weapon or something unrelated, they died out anyway. See the Rakatans and their Infinite Empire in Star Wars Legends.
A variant here is that what the long-term effect of the weapon was was… simply shutting down at a point when they'd been relying on it for too long to keep things together without it. This would usually switch the plot to one of hunting down the means of powering it up again (unless it could do it on its own but needed so long that by the time it was done it was lost and mostly forgotten) or finding the means to repair it, but otherwise it can keep most of the beats. After all, even if the same thing would eventually happen again, that doesn't change the villain(s) having it here and now. Might and Magic 7 does something like this, although it is only revealed in the endgame if you are villain protagonists and do help to make it happen.
I was looking for someone else to mention this one.
Also oddly one of the rare times where the villain starts out with the super weapon.
Numidium comes to mind. It wasnt so much as a weapon to conquer (that would be how Tiber Septim used it, and hoo boy did he conquer the Summerset Isles), despite being a literal thousand-foot tall robot, but a way for the Dwemer for to achieve apotheosis through its power source: A heart of a dead god. Said thing was turned out to be the very reason for them being poofed out of existence.
That's why my favorite was the Vulcan superweapon that redirects aggression and negative emotions back at the enemy.
They got rid of it, not because it stopped working or because it was too dangerous or anything like that, but because it had no use in a world of pure logic.
Sc2 spear of adun. A massive ship that could have seen them win in sc1 if they ever bothered to start it up.
Alarak even questions why the ship alongside it's sister ships were sealed away, cause why prepare for the apocalypse, when you can be the apocalypse.
Supposedly the designers of the ships thought they'd be misused and sealed them away
The one ring basically will amplify the power of its weilder drastically, which is why Galadriel, Gandalf or Saruman would be so dangerous if they had it (not to mention granting them control of the 9 Nazgul) and why it wasn’t as much of an issue when hobbit or Gollum had it
Not to mention the fact that the temptation would be far greater in the hands of someone who was already inherently powerful. Someone like Gandalf or Galadriel would be perfectly aware of what they *could* do with the Ring, and from there it's a much shorter step into being convinced (with the persistent mental prodding of the Ring) that they *should* do those things. Someone like Frodo or Gollum, lacking anywhere near that level of innate power, also wouldn't have the same dangerous ambitions. You can really see that in the contrast between Boromir's lines to Frodo in Fellowship (right before he tries to take the Ring), and Sam's thoughts in Return of the King before he rescues Frodo.
It's also why Hobits become invisible when they wear it, it's an improvement on the Hobbit ability to not be seen. In the books it doesn't do that for humans.
for the one ring, the promisse of "if you're strong enough, you can do so and so" is a really good way to work with characters that are selfish and/or have a big ego, because they'll think they're the ones that ARE strong enough to wield it, only to fail in the process
Breath of the Wild is an interesting variation: the guardians and the divine beasts were useful for beating Calamity Ganon and worked without a problem... the first time they were used, then they got unearthed 10,000 years later to be used again against Calamity Ganon and everything went wrong because they didn't count on Ganon learning from the last time it got defeated and taking over all these ancient superweapons.
I was thinking of the Guardians and Divine Beasts too! Given that Breath of the Wild has been featured in the streams a decent number of times, I’m kind of surprised that Red didn’t mention them, especially given how interesting an example it is. It's also an example where the heroes are looking for the super weapon with the express intent of using it, but don’t come across as selfish and unheroic since they're seeking to use the Guardians for their intended purpose: stopping Piggy McApocalypse.
Chaos from the first Sonic Adventure managed to do the "ancient supervillain" while giving it a motivation, mystery and themes.
It would be interesting to combine the ancient superweapon and supervillain, like the villain was a literal or figurative weapon made/aided/trained by/is somehow the product of an ancient civilization or whatnot and the villain turned on them as revenge for being turned into a weapon, you’d get all the same themes of hubris and power and corruption that comes with the superweapon trope and have some interesting depth to the villain’s past and characterization beyond “was evil, was sealed away, is back, still evil”
I remember a Doctor Who Episode covering it that way. In "A town called Mercy" the 11th Doctor comes across a scientist, who is hunted by a cyborg-soldier. Turns out that the cyborg was actually created by the scientist for a distant war, and when that war ended the Cyborg startet to hunt his creator for all the horrible shit he had to go through.
Iron giant
@@swordofstabbingold Iron Giant is sort of an odd case because while he's clearly a weapon of mass destruction, we really have no clue about his origins, and his purpose on earth is mostly speculation, though it seems likely that it wasn't a peaceful one.
Isn’t this the plot of Dingo Doodles’ Fools Gold?
That sounds like what Game of Thrones INTENDED to do with the White Walkers, actually. Of course, now we need to wonder what GRRM intended
The ring of power is a power amplifier, hobbits are naturally sneaky so it makes them supernaturally sneaky
What's funny is I almost immediately thought of Atlantis, but then I thought w
"Wait that didn't work out to actually be a good weapon, so isn't that a regular MacGuffin?"
Glad you answered that question immediately
A trope I think would be cool for you to talk about is the Ace/broken ace: a person who is good at just abou everything( or at least good enough) and what that can do for a story. And it’s sibling trope the broken ace, a character who is good at just about everything they put their mind to but are functionally miserable, be it from a personal tragedy, being maimed in an accident, possessing ptsd or some other mental disorder, or just becoming jaded from years of doing the same thing for years. I think it’s interesting to read about the kind of person we all want to be and that person in our life we are all jealous of and what they go through and then seeing what could break them or make them struggle.
I personally have a take on this where it's the SEAL that can actually be weaponized. Basically, how much can we take out till the ancient evil escapes? Still a take on hubris, because they obviously use too much.
There is also the option where there were other ways to deal with the sentient ancient superweapon without sealing them up- just no one bothered to try because they couldn't see them as anything more than a monster
Stealing this!
I'm amazed at how she's able to talk about every major plot point of the first Halo game without once referencing it
Food for thought, can the artifacts in the "Chosen One" trope be considered ancient superweapons, because heroes go after them all the time?
i think it depends, because sometimes there's the chosen one's sword or whatever that only works when used by the main character or perhaps other 'good' characters, and a villain would at most only go for it either to stop the hero from obtaining it or they dont know they cant use it (in which case, fake ancient superweapon? makes for a good plot twist if done well)
@@kirtil5177 Well, In wheel of time, (anti spoiler mode activate) {redacted} obtains the "Sword that is not a sword", marking them as the {redacted} according to prophecy, letting the whole world know.
It happens to be a super weapon from the previous age, letting appropriate wielders channel vast amounts of power without blowing their own brains out.
Can 'The Chosen One' wipe out the entire evil hoard with one swing of his artifact? How "Super" does a super-weapon need to be? I think most artifacts are just 'Pretty Cool Weapons'
I thin if 'The Chosen One' can wipe out the enemy instantly, then the producers were probably running out of time and budget.
Saidin amplifier I think, only channeling guys get the benefit also for a significant part of the timeline any non forsaken using it gets accelerated insanity.
It occurred to me that Psychonauts 2 is an “ancient supervillain” plot that I think avoids a lot of a pitfalls that Red mentioned
"The horror of the past is real, but so is the gentle future." Love it.
Now I somewhat want to see a story where the protagonist is looking for Excalibur or some equivalent in order to defeat their villain, but upon finding it, the weapon turns out to be an ancient superweapon. Not necessarily evil, but like, there was definitely a reason that everyone made the person who pulled it out the king.
I’m surprised Red didn’t bring up Halo as a really unique example of an ancient super weapon where the only reason it was used initially was to save the galaxy even though the society that made the array knew it would kill them all. Then you have the Covenant who also knew that the array would kill everyone but had that as a focal point of their religion.
An idea about "evil villain sealed away and unleashed": what if the reason they were considered evil doesn't apply anymore? For example, a super powerful wizard uses their power to change gender and all the other wizards think "ew, evil," but because they can't kill the wizard, have to just seal them away.
Or a general who tried to take over the world because he... basically wanted the world to be America before America was. You know, checks and balances and limits on power and stuff.
"This murals tells of a terrible immortal wizard who got sealed away for his evil deeds."
"By God, what did he do?"
"He argued for racial equality..."
@@schw4rztee502
"There were some who called him... Martin."
The Lazy Guns (from Banks, Against A Dark Background) had personalities but not agency - but they were a little psychic so they tried to convince people to use them. More "character" than "artifact" without actually being villians. (Also an interesting take on just *how many* times civilization can fall, stuck in a single solar system in a rift between galaxies. And some clever tamper-proofing...)
I loved how this trope was used in One Piece. Where in the span of like 800 chapters we come to see how devastating and powerful the weapons are and how they can change the world. But then we learn of how despite having these powerful weapons the ancient civilization was destroyed by an even stronger force which may still be around today. Really cool way to set up a final villain.
May??? It's been confirmed the World Government was that force for a pretty long time now.
One of my favorite examples of the Ancient Superweapon is in Halo. Probably because the Halo Array was intended to be more than just a superweapon: they were intended to be refuges, vast orbital habitats that were, in the words of Despondent Pyre, "ecosystems to preserve life. And when necessary, destroy it, for the greater good."
The sheer fondness of this trope talk nearly inspired me to add "story with forgotten superweapon" to my WIP lineup.
Xanu from Fools' Gold is a rare example of an ancient villain that is still thematically interesting. Of the 3 subplots when the party was split, him interacting with Sips was easily the best, and everything from his motivations to why he's in his current position all make sense.
9:35 I dont think Golum was getting alot of snickers.
"We promise precious the hobbites has the snickers"
"Whats a Bagginses, Bagginses HAS snickers?"
"Baggins forgot the snickers"
"BAGGINSES FORGOTS THE SNICKERS PRECIOUS!"
Oh that scene played out in my head and it was too funny not to share. Also if the one ring keeps offering things does that make it a "Promise Ring" lol? I'll see my self out now.
Standard ancient superweapon story: villain looks for the weapon, heroes try to stop them, the weapon is either never fired or doesn't work as intended.
Stargate ancient superweapon story: the heroes look for the weapon to defeat the villains, the villains try to stop them, the weapon works as advertised.
Which makes starcaster even more amazing, evading the usual tropes
Megaman Legends and Legends 2 are a fantastic example of this trope and I appreciate that
One thing I'd like to see from the "superweapon is actually a supervillain sealed away for thousands of years because its evil" trope is the idea that the new villain, after having been sealed away for thousands of years, just... doesn't want to do its job as a destructive force. Like imagine this being who destroyed half the world in its time of conquest and devastation before being sealed away. They've just been sitting there, for thousands of years, reflecting. And they came to the realization that they just don't want to do the destruction shtick anymore.
So when the antagonist comes in, breaks the seal and starts commanding the being to go destroy whatever the antagonist wants it to destroy, the being is all like "Actually, I'd rather just go and see the world. I've been cooped up in a box for thousands of year I wanna go see whats new, you know, see if any of the craters I caused last time I was around are still there."
It's a bit anticlimactic sure, but if the message of the story was "hey the power ain't worth it, because once you have it and do everything you wanted with it, you've got nothing left" then supervillain superweapon saying no more is your best bet.
What about if the sealed beings violence was motivated by a specific thing from it's own time and when it learns that thing is no longer around, they just go 'Whelp, guess I'll start a dairy farm' then fucks off after dealing with the antagonist.
Berem from the Dragonlance series who eventually offs himself to impair Takhisis is not that.
"[The One Ring, the thing that sets the plot in motion, tears apart friendships, gets thousands killed, and is the most powerful object in the universe with the possible exception of a copy made by a Vala] doesn't play a very active role in the story" -Red from OSP
Well, it's acting passively. It's a ring afterall, it only has limbs to do stuff when someone wears it.
@@AntediluvianRomance the ring actively, explicitly manipulates characters throughout the story. From the very beginning in Book 1 chapter 1, Bilbo is reluctant to give up the Ring and becomes hostile to Gandalf he presses Bilbo to give up the ring.
There are further incidents in chapter 3 at both encounters with the Black Rider, chapter 7 in the Barrow, and chapter 9 in Bree where Frodo has a sudden, intrusive desire/compulsion to put on the Ring.
Book 1 chapter 11, on Weathertop: "Frodo was hardly less terrified than his companions; he was quaking as if he was bitter cold, but his terror was swallowed up in a sudden temptation to put on the Ring. The desire to do this laid hold of him, and he could think of nothing else. He did not forget the Barrow, nor the message of Gandalf; but something seemed to be compelling him to disregard all warnings, and he longed to yield. Not with the hope of escape, or of doing anything, either good or bad: he simply felt that he must take the Ring and put it on his finger. He could not speak. He felt Sam looking at him, as if he knew that his master was in some great trouble, but he could not turn towards him. He shut his eyes and struggled for a while; but resistance became unbearable, and at last he slowly drew out the chain, and slipped the Ring on the forefinger of his left hand."
The desire is always sudden and against Frodo's best judgment. He repeatedly begins reaching for the Ring without intention, only catching himself partway through the act of putting on the ring.
Then of course there's Boromir. Throughout book 2 he is tempted by the ring, culminating in chapter 10 when he tries to take the Ring from Frodo. He falls into a rage when Frodo refuses (compare Bilbo's reaction when Gandalf presses him to give up the Ring), and when he snaps out of it he says "A madness took me, but it has passed." Again, the compulsion is external, not internal.
There's more throughout books 4 and 6, but one of the most explicit moments is in book 6 chapter 1, when the Ring tempts Sam: "As Sam stood there, even though the Ring was not on him but hanging by its chain about his neck, he felt himself enlarged, as if he were robed in a huge distorted shadow of himself, a vast and ominous threat halted upon the walls of Mordor. He felt that he had from now on only two choices: to forbear the Ring, though it would torment him or to claim it, and challenge the Power that sat in its dark hold beyond the valley of shadows. *Already the Ring tempted him*, gnawing at his will and reason." He goes on to have fantasies of overthrowing Barad-dûr and making a garden out of Mordor. "He had only to put on the Ring and claim it for his own, and all this could be."
TL;DR the Ring is an active actor that manipulates the Ring-Bearer and those around them, thank you for coming to my TED Talk.
@@wcassidy2170 Insert a rant about meanings of the words "active" and "passive" here.
@@wcassidy2170
Passive [PAS-iv]
adjective
2. not participating readily or actively; inactive: a passive member of a committee.
3. not involving visible reaction or active participation: to play a passive role.
Active [ACT-iv]
adjective
1. engaged in action; characterized by energetic work, participation, etc.; busy: an active life.
3. involving physical effort and action: active sports.
The One Ring is passive. I'm sorry you wasted all the time on that essay when checking a dictionary would've ended the discussion there and then.
@@wcassidy2170 So in summary: Though the rings full potential was never shown, the effects it has on others was in full display and it also played a vital role in moving the story forward.
"They don't tend to have much in the way of personality. This might be because if they had any motivation beyond pure evil, there probably would have been an easier way to deal with them other than sealing them away for centuries."
.... Remembers Majin Buu, or at least Fat Buu, was turned by friendship and promises of snacks if he was good.
Yeah, but Red's definition specify that the villains don't know the weapon they are looking for is a living being, Babidi already knew Buu was living creature, so I don't think it counts.
Buu was an interesting exception. In the DB Super manga, we actually learn why Fat Buu was as innocent as he was and able to be turned by the power of friendship (won't drop spoilers here).
On the superweapon actually being a villain side of things.
I've got a good one for that that *does* have nuance to it while keeping the 'weapon' as something the hero's can't just beat or talk down
My gripe with this trope is an aspect Red sort of glossed over in the talk: the inciting incident for these stories, the villain's discovery of the super weapon they then begin to quest after. There has to be a reason why only /now/, the present day in which the story is set, the villain is making their move on this ancient weapon, and sometimes that reason ends up being awfully weak.
You forgot one question to cover. "What do you do when your Protagonist has/defends the Ancient Superweapon?" He-Man has a sword that makes him into a demigod to defend the secrets and power within Castle Greyskull. That mean he has the Ancient Superweapon already, and the villains want it. What kind of stories can you tell when it's your protagonists defending the stockpile of world reshaping devices from creatures/characters who would use them for themselves?
Well one example of that is Attack on Titan specifically Eren and the Founding titan, though in that case the enemy knew all about the destructive potential and were trying to secure it while the heros were slowly understanding the potential apocalyptic yield of that power, which is kinda funny when you realize that Marley created a self fulfilling profacey in the process
@@denvervandrey2883 Yeah I was just thinking about AOT...Eren *is* the ancient superweapon, but it takes him a while to fully understand the implications of it all. And once he does, the results really, really aren't pretty. It turns out "fight, fight" may not be such a great idea when you're in possession of an apocalyptic power.
1:57 I don't know if this was deliberate, but I adore how much these three resemble Sheeta, Pazu, and Muska.
As a One Piece fan, I am contractually obligated to point out that the scope and size of the manga has caused at least 3 seperate story arcs intertwined with the ancient superweapon trope, with more plotthreads leading to a definitive climax for the central mystery focused on this apocalyptic event in the next few years. If you find this type of story interesting or compelling, the clock is ticking for you to see this story unfold, spoiler free.
This has been an announcement from that one obnoxious commentor obsessed with One Piece.
how TF do you even start with OP
@@ThylineTheGay Chapter 1, Page 1 :)
No seriously. One Piece is very long and seems daunting to get into. However, it is also structured into story arcs which are more digestible chunks. In that regard it isn't that much more complex to get into than say Dr. Who or the MCU. The only difference is that unlike those stories which are split up into discrete seasons and movies, One Piece is a continuous series. However, that doesn't stop you from taking breaks in between reading it and remember what chapter or volume you are at and continue when you pick it back up.
I would however definitely recommend to read it rather than watch the anime adaptation, which is unfortunately plagued with filler and drawn-out sequences in order not to catch up with the source material, which ruins the pacing.
Kinda surprised Red didn’t mention Breath of the Wild.
It’s not the typical Giant Weapon plot, but the Divine Beasts do have a lot of the tropes mentioned in the video.
Man, Red gives me such good ideas for stories. I just wrote one in response to this. Follows the trope entirely but on two wavelengths and with a twist not discussed here. This is why I love this channel. Thank you very much, Red.