Characters / MonsterVerse - Russell Family

Main Character IndexKaijuGodzilla | King Ghidorah | King Kong | Mechagodzilla | Mothra | MUTO | Rodan | Skull Island Kaiju & Other Creatures
Humans Families (Russell Family) | Monarch (Dr. Ishirō Serizawa) | U.S. Government & Military | Skull Island Expeditions | Eco-Terrorists | Apex Cybernetics

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Dr. Emma Russell (*Spoilers*)

See The Mole here

Dr. Mark Russell

"You are out of your goddamn mind!"

Portrayed By: Kyle Chandler

Appears In: Godzilla: Aftershock | Godzilla: King of the Monsters | Godzilla vs. Kong

"No, this time we join the fight."

Emma’s ex-husband, Andrew and Madison’s father, Monarch's former senior anthrozoologist, and co-inventor of the ORCA device.

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• Adaptational Dumbass: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization gives him several explicit instances of idiocy that are only implied or absent altogether from the film version.
  • The novel outright confirms several aspects of Mark's parenting style since gaining custody of Madison which are somewhat lacking, all of which were only implied in the finished film. His treatment of Madison like she's Just a Kid and like she's far stupider and more helpless than she is is not something that solely started with Godzilla's attack causing Mark to doubt the latter; it's a result of Mark wilfully forgetting that Madison performed some of the gutsiest acts of heroism in the previous movie, in favor of lying to himself that she's a fragile, naïve and obedient offspring despite the evidence to the contrary. The novel shows that Mark wants to mend his relationship with Madison after being absent for years, yet he's oblivious to the fact that treating a teenager like Madison in such a way as this is completely counter-productive to those aims and is likely to drive her away. It's furthermore confirmed that Mark enrolling Madison in a public school without thinking this course through has made Madison a social pariah in her new educational setting (which one of the most challenging social settings that a kid will ever face in their upbringing no less), yet Mark obstinately refuses to listen to Madison's complaints that defy his own wishes.
  • Zig-Zagged with his attitude to Godzilla's attack. Despite Mark's initial condemnation of Godzilla and insistence that he's just gone bad for no reason because he's the same as Emma was in both versions of the story; the novel shows Mark and Director Guillerman conducting their own investigation into working out why Godzilla is behaving this way, and they catch onto Apex being the culprits even if they're still too slow to see Mechagodzilla coming. On the other hand, Mark and Guillerman in the novel also have a moment of what can only be described as profound incompetence and idiocy which isn't present in the finished film: after Mechagodzilla emerges, Guillerman asks whether they should be rooting for the Mecha or Godzilla, and Mark replies that he doesn't know. Although Mark clearly realizes in his thoughts later on that he's been unconsciously rooting for Godzilla from the battle's start; considering what the MonsterVerse incarnation of Godzilla is normally like, his crucial role in defending the world, and all else that Mark should know at this point^note Mechagodzilla's emergence has confirmed his earlier suspicions that Apex are responsible for provoking Godzilla's rampage in its entirety, and Mark just watched the Mecha deliberately raze half of Hong Kong for no reason beyond Ghidorah-like sadism (in contrast to how Godzilla never attacks without provocation); it's quite jarring to think that anyone in Mark's position would need to take even a fraction of the time he did to realize the blatantly obvious answer to Guillerman's contextually-ridiculous question.
• Adaptational Jerkass: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization hits him with a dose. It becomes clear during a passage from Mark's POV that he's known all along that Madison is stronger and more mature than he's been giving her credit for, and he's been pretending otherwise so he can hide in his Secretly Selfish fantasy of having a normal daughter. This means that he knew he was prioritizing his own selfish wants over his daughter's well-being, and he chose to do it anyway instead of caring about all the strain and unhappiness it's been causing Madison.
• Addled Addict: It's implied that a big part of why his and Emma's marriage fell apart after Andrew's death is that he turned to drinking to cope, and apparently the state this drove him into wasn't exactly something for him to look back on proudly.
• Admiring the Abomination: During the early part of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, for all his ranting and raving against the Titans, he seemingly can't help being entranced when he sees Godzilla up close during the Castle Bravo stand-off, long before he finds it in himself to let go of his grudge against the Titan. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Mark can't help being immediately fascinated despite his horror when he first witnesses Mechagodzilla's emergence.
• Advertised Extra: The Godzilla vs. Kong trailers placed a lot of emphasis on his first scene, but in the film proper that's one of the only scenes featuring him as he's Demoted to Extra.
• Aesop Amnesia: His character development between Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong seems to have reversed, as after Godzilla attacks Pensacola, he refuses to investigate any possible reasons and immediately assumes without evidence that Godzilla has turned against humanity. At least in the movie — the novelization has Monarch conducting an investigation of their own after all.
• Aggressive Categorism: The establishing type. Saying that all the Titans which consist of various super-species are nothing but malevolent monsters because one of them accidentally killed his son seems like a stretch, especially for an animal behavior expert.
• Alcoholic Parent: In the aftermath of Andrew's death, he turned to drinking as a way of coping for a time, and he expresses profuse shame that Madison had to see him like that.
• Anti-Hero Substitute: He's suspiciously similar to Joe Brody, the deceased Decoy Protagonist of Godzilla (2014): both are angsty men whose lives fell apart amidst the emotional fallout of losing a loved one when a city was destroyed by Titans years before the movie's main time frame, both of them have taken on jobs considerably less glamorous than their previous ones at the movie's start, and both of them are experts on the Titans whom are ahead of the curve while Monarch are still scrambling in the dark, and this makes Monarch turn to Joe/Mark as invaluable assets. Both men also became estranged from the rest of their family including their kids due to focusing on their own grief after the loss. However, Mark is shown to be more of an asshole than Joe was: unlike Joe who merely wanted answers to why his wife died; Mark holds a psychologically-debilitating, one-sided Animal Nemesis grudge against Godzilla for being involved in Andrew's death and for not being dead like the MUTOs. Mark is a lot more prone to misdirected outbursts and at first Mark treats his old colleagues like crap even while they're trying to help him find his kidnapped family. Plus Mark can't even claim he did something productive with his grief during the years he was neglecting his family like Joe did.
• Arbitrary Skepticism: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization states he's still unconvinced that Ghidorah was really an alien as the legends Dr. Chen pieced together indicated, despite DNA analysis lending further evidence to back this up. Whilst it's true that it was never explicitly confirmed Ghidorah is an alien... This guy apparently finds the concept of an extraterrestrial Titan to be somehow even less believable than the fact he lives in a world where giant prehistoric monsters exist, including a giant bird who literally has magma for blood and sleeps comfortably inside active volcanoes.
• Armor-Piercing Response: When he rightfully gives Emma a dressing-down for going mad over their son's death and refusing to admit there are things she can't control even if she has to create a global cataclysm to prove it, Emma fires back by calling Mark out on running away from his problems since Andrew died. This renders Mark silent for a moment, since he knows that him refusing to face up to their son's death in a healthy manner is what broke the remaining Russells apart and left Mark living alone in a cabin with the wolves. Then Mark fires back an APR of his own at Emma.
• The Atoner: He realizes how misguided his hatred of Godzilla was after the Oxygen Destroyer almost kills Godzilla and the far worse Ghidorah starts controlling the Titans to annihilate the Earth with a rapid mass extinction. From that point on it's he who comes up with the plan to revitalize Godzilla with nukes, and who later insists the humans join the King in the battle against Ghidorah.
• Badass Bookworm: However lacking his personality is, he's a zoologist and Titan expert who can handle himself quite well in the field. He does a lot of field work in the former profession, including handling wolves in the wild – the novelization even features a scene where he stares off against a wild wolf that gets too close to him as he prepares to defend himself. When Mark intervenes in the firefight between the G-Team and the eco-terrorists, he runs in alone, grabs a handgun off a dead body, avoids sharing the fate of many gunned-down soldiers; and he manages to get in front of the escaping eco-terrorists and hold them at gunpoint, demanding his ex-wife and daughter's immediate safe return.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Mark spends most of the early part of King of the Monsters repeatedly advocating that Godzilla be killed due to his continuing rage over his son's death. Thanks to the military and the Oxygen Destroyer, he seemingly gets his wish — and soon discovers that life without Godzilla, with Ghidorah taking his place as the Titans' Alpha and directing them to actively attack humanity and destroy the world's ecosphere, is a far, far worse alternative.
• Because I Said So: All over the place towards Madison in Godzila vs. Kong, leading to her striking off on her own once she realizes he won't be of any use. In the film, he dismisses everything Madison has to say out of hand when he easily condemns Godzilla, insisting to her that there's no reason for Godzilla's recent actions based on flimsy excuses that he yanked out of the dredges of his own insecurities, and he treats Madison like she's Just a Kid despite her having more than proved her mettle in the previous film. In the novelization, Mark plays this trope habitually in his and Madison's home life: he barely trusts her, seldom explains himself to her whilst expecting her to just obey whatever he tells her to do, and when Madison calls him out on his questionable parenting, Mark pulls rank on her as her father, guardian and a legal adult. Suffice to say, Madison would probably make fast friends with Toph Beifong after enduring Mark's smothering brand of parenting.
• Berserk Button: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, people talking about the Titans is pretty much this for him (encountering them in person, not so much) – he's usually quite rational in that movie when reflecting on some of his own mistakes with his family, when analyzing the Titans' behavior patterns, or when he's in the midst of battling Titans and any ill-advised movement is a matter of life and death for anyone in the line of fire; but when Mark hears Monarch or Emma talking about the Titans too much for his liking or when Serizawa entertains the notion that the Titans aren't Always Chaotic Evil, reason goes right out the window and he goes full blowhard mode.
• Blank Stare: Played for Laughs in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, when Mark responds this way to one reporter asking him if Godzilla's attacking because he hates artificial beaches.
• Brainy Brunette: Downplayed in Godzilla: King of the Monsters – he's genuinely good at predicting the Titans' behavior to the point and is often further ahead of the curve than Monarch are on this front. He's also smart enough to understand the risks behind Monarch recreating the ORCA for use on Titans, and moreso to understand that Emma is playing with fire on a global scale with her plan to use the ORCA to awaken all the Titans. However, unlike most of the other geniuses brunette or otherwise in the movie, Mark's forward-thinking and his opinion on the Titans are limited by his anger over his son's death and his blowhard personality.
• Calling the Old Man Out: Madison doesn't hesitate to give him a What the Hell, Hero? in Godzilla vs. Kong for just jumping to a conclusion that Godzilla's made a Face–Heel Turn before he's even found any evidence. In the novelization, this isn't the only time Madison calls Mark out, as it's confirmed in the novel that Mark's inept parenting style laden with Psychological Projection is making half of Madison's life miserable.
• The Cameo: He has a one-scene appearance in the Godzilla: Aftershock prequel graphic novel, expressing concerns to Atherton about Emma's wellbeing.
• Cathartic Exhalation: A scene in the King of the Monsters novelization portrays Mark breathing deeply after a close call with a wild wolf narrowly ends without incident.
• Character Development: He starts the movie as a Titan-hater to, by the end, understanding that many of the Titans can be reasoned with in some way and starts letting go of his hatred.
• Commander Contrarian:
  • Downplayed and sometimes inverted in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Mark vehemently disagrees with Monarch's approach to handling the Titans (specifically the "not killing them all ASAP" part) due to his personal grudge and cynicism, in contrast to Monarch's sound minds and xenophilia, and Mark takes more than one opportunity to make his opinion clear to the Monarch top brass's faces. But when he's thinking somewhat more clearly, it's Mark who often takes the lead in working out why the Titans are behaving the ways they are and what the most productive course of action would be.
  • Played Straight in Godzilla vs. Kong, however. One of Mark's select scenes in the finished movie consists of him irrationally dismissing Madison's logical advice about the reasons for Godzilla's rampage completely out of hand and Easily Condemning Godzilla, based on no higher cognitive function than his unprofessionally-rampant emotions. The movie's novelization furthermore reveals that Mark is skeptical about King Ghidorah being an alien despite DNA analysis lending it even further credibility, and Mark also pre-judges the Hollow Earth expedition to be nothing but a useless boondoggle off the bat.
• The Complainer Is Always Wrong: His argument that rebuilding the ORCA could end up doing the exact opposite of preventing another Titan attack on a city proves very, very true in the film, but he's initially brushed off by the Monarch brass, partly because it's clear to all that his judgment on the Titans is highly colored by his personal bias concerning his son's death.
• Condescending Compassion: Father or not; Mark gives the teenager who single-handedly escaped eco-terrorists, drew King Ghidorah to Boston, and had the balls to scream in all three of Ghidorah's faces when about to die a good deal of this trope in Godzilla vs. Kong, especially in the novelization – in fact, Mark's entire parenting style in the book can be summed up as this trope. Mark expresses pity to Madison's face that she went through the traumatic experiences she did during the previous movie's events, and he insists that him enrolling her in a public school is her getting an opportunity to rest now that the war against Ghidorah is behind them; yet he doesn't make any real effort to communicate with Madison as an equal or to understand her own wants or her problems (most of which he is the cause of). When Madison tries to make him aware how anxious and miserable she is at the school he threw her into after she'd spent her preceding education being homeschooled, Mark just pulls rank on Madison and says the decision is his instead of hers. This attitude is ironically doing more harm than good to Mark's efforts to reconnect with Madison, as Madison can see the way he's treating her for what it is: he's wilfully forgotten that Madison proved her mettle in no uncertain terms, so that he can pretend she's the naïve, ordinary, obedient girl whom Mark would much rather have over the genuine article, and he would rather let her stagnate cowering at home to fuel his selfish fantasy rather than face his fears of losing her.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: To James Conrad from Kong: Skull Island. Both men had a Cynicism Catalyst before their respective debut movies' starts, both spend their personal character arcs in their debuts gradually overcoming this past and finding an appreciation for the world again via the benevolent Titans, and both men recognize the beauty in dangerous things in nature like Skull Island and Titans; although Conrad admits the latter upfront, whereas Mark emotionally tries to deny it for much of his movie. Conrad's cynicism comes from losing an unrelated girl and half his team on a rescue mission to a sniper abroad, which caused him to lose faith in his government and country; whereas Mark's cynicism comes from losing his son and watching an entire city being devastated by a Titan incident, which caused Mark to become unconvinced that humans and Titans could cohabit the Earth and furthermore caused him to personally hate and blame Godzilla for his son's death. Conrad is an ex-military man gone freelance, and he has no familiarity with Monarch or the monsters in the world until during the movie's events, whereas Mark is an ex-Monarch zoologist and scientist. Conrad, though snarky and cynical at times, was almost unfailingly soft-spoken and clearly lived by the belief that cool heads should prevail; Mark on the other hand is much ruder, louder and more sardonic, and oftentimes he's Hot-Blooded and acts impulsively. Conrad is implied to be a love interest to Weaver as they get to know each-other over the course of Kong: Skull Island, whereas Mark is a divorcee from his ex-wife Emma since before the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Curse Cut Short / Last-Second Word Swap:
  "It's reacting to Big Bird's cries. That means he's coming for a food or a fight or a f-" [glances at Ilene Chen standing in direct earshot] "…something more intimate."
• Cutting the Knot: How Mark deals with a stuck cargo door on the Argo.
• The Cynic: In King of the Monsters, he's very jaded and bitter after his son's death, insisting that the Titans are nothing but a danger to all mankind so long as they're alive. In Godzilla vs. Kong, even after Mark has gotten over his grudge against Godzilla, he's ridiculously quick to jump to the conclusion that Godzilla has made a Face–Heel Turn after his first attack, without any evidence – the novelization also shows that Mark still believed after the events of King of the Monsters that Titans showing activity could only ever be an omen for bad news.
• Cynic–Idealist Duo: Played With. The far more friendly and pro-Titan Coleman wants to form one with Mark from the moment they meet, although Mark is less than enthusiastic. Mark gets a little more friendly with Coleman only after he eats his Humble Pie and after he starts coming around to the idea humanity has no choice but to ally with Godzilla and Mothra for common survival; and even then, Mark and Coleman are only seldom in the same room.
• Cynicism Catalyst: He turned into The Cynic after Andrew's death at the destruction of San Francisco; hating all Titans for his son's death, quitting Monarch due to their reverence of the Titans and refusal to try straight-up killing them, and divorcing Emma and retreating to the mountains in Colorado. He takes something of a level in kindness over the course of the film.
• Deadpan Snarker: Mark has several moments, like when Dr. Chen claims that Emma wouldn't want the Titans destroyed even to save her own life, and Mark (hypocritically) snarks that it wouldn't be the first time Emma prioritized something ahead of her own well-being or her family. Later, when Stanton queries what he's asking to see Godzilla's normal movement patterns for, Mark snarks without missing a beat that it's because he wants to open a boat tour.
• Demoted to Extra: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, he's one of the primary human characters. In the final cut of Godzilla vs. Kong, he makes only sporadic appearances throughout with no real contribution to the plot, while Madison takes up more of the protagonist role in his place.
• Determinator: Zig-Zagged. He initially all but turned his back on Madison and ran away to the mountains for five years after Andrew's death. But once he learns Madison and Emma have been kidnapped by Jonah, Mark joins Monarch in their rescue mission solely so he can get Madison and Emma back safe. After Emma is revealed to be Evil All Along (causing Mark to subtly stop thinking about getting her back), and even when it looks like King Ghidorah's world-ending victory is secured, Mark never stops trying to get back to his daughter. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark, who has since become a helicoptering and patronizing parent to his child-veteran daughter, goes out of his way to cut Madison out of the investigation into Godzilla's attacks, trying to keep her at home and away from Titan business so he won't have to fret for her safety. In the aftermath of Mechagodzilla's death, it's clear in Mark's final scene that finding Madison safe and sound after he's discovered she got herself involved in the Titan crisis because of his attitude is the first thing on Mark's mind.
• Detrimental Determination: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Mark is extremely pig-headed in his assertions that Madison is somehow just a normal, ineffectual little girl who can't be trusted to know her own thoughts and feelings or to provide any valuable insights. He's shown to repeatedly hand-wave Madison's complaints about her being miserable in the public school he's forced her to attend and it's implied that this has been going on between them for some time. Mark not only ignores everything Madison thinks about Godzilla's Pensacola attack out of hand (even when she's making far more sense compared to Mark's ridiculous and emotional assumptions), Mark also resorts to helicoptering methods to try and keep Madison away from the investigation into Godzilla's attacks. What really makes this determination detrimental is that Mark makes it clear in the novel that he's acting this way partly because he doesn't want to lose Madison the way he's already lost the rest of their immediate family one-by-one, and implicitly also partly as a way of compensating for the years he was absent from Madison's life (swinging from one parental extreme to the other). Unfortunately, he's too bullheaded and too self-focused on his own feelings while ignoring everyone else's to realize that this kind of parenting, directed at a blatant rebellious spirit like his daughter, will surely push Madison to do the opposite of what he wants and could potentially even emotionally push her away from him all over again instead of mending the rift between them. It takes the realization that his last refusal to listen to Madison in the wake of Godzilla's attack has led to Madison sneaking out and heading into the very danger that Mark tried to shield her from for Mark to even take a single clue and admit to himself that he was wrong to treat her so patronizingly.
• Dramatically Missing the Point: It's shown in Godzilla vs. Kong that despite everything that happened in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, his Humble Pie didn't last and he hasn't matured as a person at all. He's blown his regrets about not being there for five years of Madison's life way out of proportion: overcompensating in the other direction by treating Madison like a much younger and more naïve kid than she really is who needs an authoritative hand. No matter how many times Madison argues with him, Mark can't get it through his thick skull that he's sabotaging his own efforts to reconnect with Madison and is likely going to drive her away from him all over again if he keeps it up. It's only once he learns Madison ran off behind his back that Mark even begins to admit fault, and even then it's unknown if he'll actually internalize his lesson this time considering how little he grew after the last time.
• Drowning My Sorrows: How he initially coped with his son's death offscreen, much to his shame.
• Dumbass Has a Point: He has a couple in the novelization of Godzilla vs. Kong:
  • He's mostly just being obscenely awful at his job when he dismisses Madison's rational pointers about Godzilla's Pensacola attack, but he's not entirely wrong about Mad Truth being full of garbage, even if he's blunt and condescending to Madison when he tells her as much. The podcast's host is a blatant hardcore conspiracy theorist who promotes that kind of mindset to the podcast's listeners (hell, the novelization reveals that Bernie suspects the government are covering up the existence of Santa's elves); even if Mark isn't so much as trying to understand that Madison already knows most of Mad Truth is bogus, and he treats Madison like she's way dumber than she is, and he doesn't himself have any better ideas for working out why Godzilla is acting so aggressive.
  • Despite his Condescending Compassion in regards to throwing Madison in high school after she's been homeschooled for most of her life, Madison's own surprise at how unprepared she was for high school and how hard it is to make any non-adult friends proves Mark's point that her social skills are underdeveloped and rusty; even if Mark's solution to the problem is causing Madison to suffer for the problem more than it fixes it. Furthermore, Madison making one high school friend in Josh was ultimately indispensable to preventing Mechagodzilla from winning the Final Battle, as if Josh wasn't at Apex's HQ with Madison to short out the computer, then Mechagodzilla would have most likely killed Kong, then Godzilla, and then it would have been unstoppable.
• Elite School Means Elite Brain: Mark is an expert zoologist with a keen intuition when it comes to understanding the Titans, plus his Monarch Sciences bio says that he went to the University of California, which is widely ranked as one of the best universities in the world.
• Et Tu, Brute?: He's willing to kill without hesitation when he sees his ex-wife and daughter in mortal danger, but when one of his own loved ones commits a betrayal that he doesn't see coming (namely, Emma revealing that she was willingly going along with the eco-terrorists' plot all along and her gaslighting Madison into staying by the terrorists' side), the look on Mark's face is one of complete confusion and heartbreak. Afterwards, for a moment, Mark can barely speak when confirming what happened to the Monarch top brass. Godzilla vs. Kong furthermore makes it clear that Mark is still haunted by this betrayal with his irrational easy condemnation of Godzilla and his lack of trust or faith in Madison.
• Excessive Mourning: Slightly downplayed. He's had half a decade to finish mourning and pull himself back together since Andrew died, but he acts as if it's barely been half a month since the loss. Continuing to wallow in self-pity and old grief, Mark has become estranged from his daughter and his (now ex-)wife, he's nursing a nasty hatred of the Titans (Godzilla in particular) because he blames them for his son being a collateral of Godzilla's fight to stop the MUTOs, and he's remained at the Colorado mountains as his way of running and hiding from anything that reminds him of Andrew's death. He also frequently uses his grief and anger as a Hot-Blooded excuse to obnoxiously lash out at his former Monarch colleagues because they won't kill the Titans just to satiate Mark's anger against the creatures; even when said ex-colleagues are presently doing nothing else but try to help Mark's sorry ass with locating his missing family. Over the course of the movie, with some help from Serizawa and by finding that Vengeance Feels Empty, Mark learns to let go of his grudge against Godzilla.
• Fantastic Racism: Not unlike much of humanity at the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters; Mark has been nursing a raging bias against all the Titans following the 2014 rampage, because his son was a casualty of the San Francisco battle. He can't get through the briefing on Alan Jonah and his family's kidnapping without losing his temper and flat-out ranting at Monarch that they should kill all the Titans (especially Godzilla) as a way to neutralize the threat the ORCA can pose in the wrong hands. When Mark does pull his head out of his ass however (such as when he's seeing Titans in person), he shows that despite his bias he's well-aware of the power discrepancy between man and Titan, becoming the voice of reason during Monarch's standoff with Godzilla. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, though Mark no longer hates the Titans, he still thinks them being awake spells nothing but bad news for the world and that it's better if they stay asleep.
  "Look, I want him dead more than anyone, but unless this is a fight that you KNOW that you can win, for God's sake stand down!"
• Fantasy-Forbidding Father: It's hinted in Godzilla vs. Kong that he's become one to Madison since Emma's death left him with custody of her; chiding her for trying to contribute to the investigation into Godzilla's attack instead of being in school (note that Madison was originally homeschooled in Monarch but is now attending a public school), openly disapproving of her listening to Mad Truth as he (somewhat understandably mind you) thinks it's nothing but garbage, and going out of his way to dismiss everything she has to say and cut her out of the investigation no matter how insightful she is. The novelization outright confirms Mark is this trope – he all but says to Madison that he wishes she'd never grown into a Wise Beyond Her Years young woman, instead of being proud of her, and he's going above and beyond to try and make her live as normal a life as possible while urging her to stop taking an interest in Titans and Monarch business; partly because he's scared of losing her to a Titan the same way he's already lost Andrew and Emma one-by-one, and implicitly because he's also projecting his own desire for a normal life onto his daughter while ignoring the notion that her own opinions and feelings might run counter to his own.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • He tends to run away from his problems to a point which overrides all concern for both his and his loved ones' wellbeing. He turned into a drunk wreck in the aftermath of Andrew's death, then estranged himself from his surviving family while running away to the mountains, all in an effort to escape anything that reminded him of his son's death or the Titans. Emma calls him out on this with an Armor-Piercing Response.
  • Hot-Bloodedness has been firmly established as this as of Godzilla vs. Kong. Mark's temper and emotions chronically cloud his judgment, unpleasantly color his behavior towards others, and make him jump to conclusions in both movies. Even after letting go of his grudge against Godzilla in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, he still hasn't learned his lesson about this Flaw come the next movie.
  • Another major flaw of his which persists across both his appearances (if the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization's portrayal of him is canon) is that he often gets his head stuck in the past to the point that focusing on the present or future becomes virtually secondary. Before the start of King of the Monsters, he's spent half a decade letting his otherwise-legitimate grief fester into something ugly and destroy his marriage; and when he learns Emma recreated the ORCA, he at first wastes time bemoaning the fact it never should've been recreated instead of doing something to amend the situation in the present. It's hinted in Godzilla vs. Kong and more explicitly shown in the novelization that Mark has a strained relationship with Madison after re-entering her life; not because of his long absence before King of the Monsters, but because he's trying to make up for the years he was absent by fallaciously swinging from one parental extreme to the other.
• Foil:
  • To Emma Russell, his own ex-wife. They both had a lifelong environmental interest (ecology for Emma, wildlife for Mark), and they even take the same path of working on the ORCA in the hopes humans and Titans can coexist, but they went on polarized routes after their son's deaths. They both at points in the film display an appreciation for the Titans' beauty, but Mark became a Tragic Bigot with a hatred for all Titans because of Andrew's death, while Emma became simultaneously pro-Titan and misanthropic — interestingly, in relation to this, Mark outright hates Godzilla most of all, while Emma doesn't hate him but actively releases Godzilla's Arch-Enemy, Ghidorah. Mark initially responded to Andrew's death with alcoholism, while Emma entered workaholism. They also both don't want to lose Madison the same way they lost their other child, and they respectively drop concern for everything else when she's in mortal danger — Mark left Madison and Emma, yet regrets not being there for them when the film's main plot kicks off, whereas Emma retains custody of Madison but manipulates her.
  • Also to Dr. Serizawa, and this gets lampshaded in the novelization. Both of them are Monarch or ex-Monarch scientists with a keen fascination and empathy for the Titans, and both of them firmly recognize that humans shouldn't try to subjugate nature because they're most likely to get anything but the desired result (and both of them learned this due to some kind of tragedy — for Serizawa it was his father's experience in the Hiroshima bombing and/or the Janjira containment breach, for Mark it was a tragic incident where the prototype ORCA caused whales to beach themselves to death). The difference between them is that Mark let himself become consumed by his own grief and allowed it to fester after Andrew's death, whereas Serizawa deliberately avoids falling into the same trap as Mark when he's grief-stricken by the death of Vivienne Graham. Adding irony to the contrast is that Godzilla killing Andrew was completely unintentional, whereas Ghidorah deliberately murdered Dr. Graham in an act of malice.
  • And to Alan Jonah, although their only interactions are very brief. They both tragically lost a child, and it ultimately led to them irrationally hating the group/species responsible to the point of wishing said group were all wiped out (Titans for Mark, humanity for Jonah). It also led to them quitting their respective professions in the initial aftermath (Monarch for Mark, the British Army and MI6 for Jonah). They're both sensible enough despite their grievances as to interact non-violently with the group they hate when it's advisable. Mark only becomes part of Monarch again because he's recruited, whereas Jonah took the initiative himself. However, Mark throws his rash hatred out in the open for everyone to see, whereas Jonah thinly masks his true colors as a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist. At the start of the film, Mark's heart is doused in fire while Jonah's is encased in ice.
• Good is Not Nice: In King of the Monsters, he's a real asshole towards his ex-colleagues even while they're only trying to help him saving his family, because of his biases about the Titans. And even after he lets go of his grudge against Godzilla, he's still as impulsive, condescending (towards Madison) and rash as he's ever been, in Godzilla vs. Kong. But he genuinely loves his family, and he twice notably goes out of his way to help people in dire need in King of the Monsters – in the first instance reluctantly sacrificing a slim chance of getting Emma and Madison back of his own accord to do so – and he's rejoined Monarch in Godzilla vs. Kong.
• Grief-Induced Split: After Andrew's death, him and Emma coped in separate ways, and soon after Mark left both Emma and Madison behind altogether. Emma deeply resents Mark for this, and it's implied during King of the Monsters that Mark comes to regret it.
• Guilt-Tripping: In his first scene in Godzilla vs. Kong, he doesn't hesitate to guilt-trip Madison into ceasing her attempts to talk sense into him and burying her head in the sand, by using his fear of her getting hurt and his own self-pity at being under so much stress against her. It's even worse in the novelization, which shows this isn't the only time Mark guilt-trips Madison into obeying him.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: Subverted between him and Emma. At first, it looks like the two of them will be a straight case with Mark as the dark-haired one being the "bad": he's a lot more cynical, testy, solitary and moody than Emma is but also a lot more pessimistically cautious (especially when it comes to the Titans), and he transparently wallows in his unprocessed grief over Andrew's death whilst criticizing Emma and Monarch's recreation with the ORCA and management of the Titans. However, then we find out that Emma is much, much more amoral and unstable than Mark is.
• Handshake Refusal: Towards Coleman when he first meets the stuttery guy.
• Head Desk: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, he knocks his head thrice against the kitchen table after he spectacularly fails to sit through a breakfast with Madison without an argument starting between them.
• Held Gaze: He has a few in King of the Monsters:
  • Mark twice gazes unblinkingly in a trance-like state when he's close enough to Godzilla to see the proverbial whites of his eyes, to which Godzilla responds by calming down. The second time Mark sees Godzilla's gaze, he has an epiphany about the secret recipe behind the ORCA's alpha bio-acoustics, and it's implicitly also in the same moment that Mark and Godzilla make their peace (the novelization outright confirms this is the moment that Mark fully changes his opinion on the Titan). Mark's Monarch Sciences bio and the novelization note that Mark tends to feel innately connected and synced to animals when he sees them up close, and the novel even shows him briefly staring off a wild wolf and then breaking eye contact to avoid seeming challenging; all of which push Mark's Held Gazes into the Supernatural type.
  • During the Mexican standoff with Jonah, Mark and Emma are looking directly at each-other when Emma is about to blow the ice encasing Ghidorah. Mark looks almost like a confused, wounded puppy in this moment, reflecting not only his first reaction to Emma's betrayal but also how Mark has been feeling at his core ever since Andrew died.
• His Story Repeats Itself: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, most if not all of Mark's issues stem from his firsthand experience of the destruction of San Francisco including Andrew's death there, leading him to hate the Titans and to turn his back on his remaining family and Monarch in an effort to block out what happened. At the movie's end, after Mark has come to regret abandoning his family and has made peace with Godzilla, he faces the same kind of event again when Boston is destroyed by Godzilla and King Ghidorah's Final Battle around him as he searches for Madison before she can become another Andrew, and when Emma is killed amid the destruction. Subverted by Godzilla vs. Kong, which implies that Mark has become overprotective and patronizing towards Madison after this second incident and that he didn't really internalize as much as he could have, which the novelization outright confirms.
• Holier Than Thou: The non-religious type – in the first half of King of the Monsters, he can be easily described as the definition of sanctimonious, his demeanor whenever he chastises his Monarch ex-colleagues about how they're handling the Titans being definitively high-and-mighty. Notably, he has the gall to talk as if he has the moral high-ground over everyone he's talking to or about during two of his Hypocrite moments described below. Mark is also very condescending to Madison when he brushes her off in Godzilla vs. Kong, and in the novelization, he has a habit of talking like he knows what's best for Madison better than she does when he's stifling her. All of that being said, he's not immune to recognizing he's wrong when he experiences the negative results of his folly.
• Horrible Judge of Character: He indulges in this in Godzilla vs. Kong, even more so in its novelization due to taking a level in dumbass. He easily condemns Godzilla's rampage, even though he should know better than most that Godzilla only ever acts aggressive when something is provoking him, and he makes completely irrational and nonsensical excuses for his jump to this conclusion. It's also hinted in the movie version, and outright confirmed in the novelization, that Mark has convinced himself that the now 17-year-old Madison is just a normal and defenceless kid who doesn't know what she's saying; and he's so pig-headed and obsessed with holding up this illusion, he actually thinks that him helicoptering Madison and using authority as her father to browbeat her instead of providing a listening or understanding ear towards her will somehow get a headstrong teenager with a serious rebellious streak like her to do what she's told instead of the complete opposite.
• Hot-Blooded: From his rash hatred of Godzilla and all Titans over the death of his son (which he's furthermore failed to let go of despite his implied efforts after five years of mourning and solitude), his Take This Job and Shove It in the initial aftermath of Andrew's death, and his tendency to pull a Leeroy Jenkins, it's clear that he's no poster-boy for The Stoic or for impulse control. Despite getting over his grudge against Godzilla, this personality trait overall hasn't gone away at all by the time of Godzilla vs. Kong, marking it as a Fatal Flaw.
• Humble Pie:
  • He starts off Godzilla: King of the Monsters being a rude asshole towards his Monarch colleagues, erroneously acting high and mighty about his highly-biased beliefs that all the Titans should be killed for his son's death and talking as if his bias makes him the Only Sane Man among them. The crux of the breaking comes when Mark seemingly gets his wish to see Godzilla killed, at which point Serizawa calls Mark out on his bullshit in front of everyone, whilst Ghidorah promptly shows the world just how bad things can get without Godzilla around to protect the natural balance. Notably, after this point, Mark dials back the attitude considerably for the rest of the movie.
  • He gets a considerably milder case in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, when he realizes that his fallacious efforts to keep Madison out of danger (by being a Fantasy-Forbidding Father and dismissing everything she has to say while condescending her) have come to nought, and he mentally admits that him not putting more trust in her or giving her capabilities the credit she's due is what caused this. Even after he very begrudgingly admits in his thoughts that Madison can take care of herself, Mark assumes there's no way Madison can pursue the investigation into Apex across the Pacific Ocean to Hong Kong – of course, he gets proven wrong yet again in that regard by the story's ending.
• Hypocrite:
  • On an Osprey with Graham, Coleman and Serizawa, he angrily responds to Serizawa's suggestion that some of the Titans are benevolent by firmly saying, "Don't kid yourself." Even though he is kidding himself with his pre-judgment of every last Titan species as nothing more than destructive monsters, which is based purely on his subjective personal grief at what two Titan species caused him to lose. Furthermore, Mark says this after studying wolves in the wild, who are frequently a misunderstood species in real life, and the fact he's a professional zoologist makes him holding such a passionate five-year grudge against a giant animal (something which people in his profession should know better than to do) all the more reprehensible.
  • During a tirade, he straight-up scorns the fact Emma tends to put something (in her case the Monarch work she delved into after Andrew's death) before her own wellbeing and before her family. He's one to talk, having put the bottom of a bottle before his own wellbeing (albeit after trying and failing to piece the family back together) followed by running away from his problems to let them fester; all at a time when his still-living family needed him to be strong more than ever before.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, he asks (more like commands) that Madison blindly trust in him and put faith in him, without giving her either of those things in return. This is even more prominent in the novelization than it is in the movie's final cut.
• Hypocrite Has a Point: Whilst he has no moral highground on which to stand when he speaks critically of Emma not putting her family and her mental wellbeing first, he's proven absolutely right that Emma putting her workaholism first is a bad idea for her, just not in the way that Mark assumed: it turns out that rather than risking creating a global Titan catastrophe accidentally, Emma as a direct result of delving into trying to understand the Titans and refusing to process her grief in a healthier way is engineering such a catastrophe deliberately – all in all, she is much more dangerous than Mark.
• Ignored Expert: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, he tries to get Monarch to start evacuating people before Godzilla's first attack when he realizes the Titan is likely going to make landfall at a population center, but his urgings are downplayed because of Godzilla's positive reputation at the time.
• Ineffectual Loner: He's retreated to a mountain cabin to try and work through his grief in solitude, distancing himself from his daughter and ex-wife in the process. He's a competent expert zoologist, but he's not much of a team player when Monarch recruit him to look for the ORCA and his kidnapped family, and he's obnoxiously condescending towards his ex-colleagues due to his personal hatred for the Titans they revere, although he still garners sympathy for his loss from Drs. Graham and Serizawa.
• Insufferable Genius: He's an asshole who seems to think his own feelings are at the center of the universe, and he goes off on a couple tirades at Monarch and uses them as a focus for his anger before he gets better. But he's a competent animal behavior expert who proves to be invaluable during the events of King of the Monsters, working out what's going on with the Titans and working out where the human antagonists are going to strike next, whilst the rest of Monarch are still a step or two behind him.
• It's All About Me:
  • Throughout King of the Monsters, he's more concerned about getting his ex-wife (until the Evil All Along twist) and daughter back, while Monarch are more concerned about the global threat Ghidorah poses. Whilst Mark genuinely has suffered a horrible tragedy with his son's death before the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), he talks as if he's the only one in the world who lost someone, even though the news report in the opening makes it clear that he's one of thousands who went through the same loss and share his feelings on Titans. The notion that other people might be suffering just as much as Mark if not more doesn't seem to cross his mind.
  • Mark hasn't grown past this at all in Godzilla vs. Kong. At least part of his reasoning for jumping to a conclusion that Godzilla has made a Face–Heel Turn is implied to basically be, "Someone betrayed me in the past, and the fact I'm not over it is all the evidence I need to assume it's happening again here with an unrelated creature I know" and he doesn't hesitate to use the stress from dealing with the crisis to guilt-trip Madison into not burdening him with fear for her safety by getting involved. It's also implied in the movie and confirmed in the novelization that Mark has become an over-authoritative, obsessively normal smothering father to Madison, partly because he's projecting his own longing for a normal life onto his daughter while hand-waving all her blatant indications that what she wants isn't what he wants. Mark's poor parenting is also partly a counter-productive attempt to keep Madison from going into danger, but even so, the means he's using to achieve the end, coupled with how he put running away from his problems ahead of being strong for Emma and Madison following Andrew's death; show that Mark mainly only considers how his family affect his own feelings of love, guilt or fear, whilst hand-waving or ignoring the impact that his behavior towards them is having on their feelings.
• I've Never Seen Anything Like This Before: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, this is the experienced zoologist and Monarch operative's internal response to hearing Mechagodzilla's roar for the first time.
• I Will Find You: Mark sets out to save his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter.
• Jerkass: He's very self-pitying and Holier Than Thou when he's at anything less than his best or isn't reeling from recently being proven wrong and he's extremely rude, abrasive and prone to Misdirected Outbursts when he's feeling pissy. Whilst the loss of his son amidst Godzilla and the MUTOs' battle is indeed a horrible trauma, he's spent the following five years continuing to destructively wallow in his grief while practically using it as an excuse to treat all the people he still has like little more than shit: estranging himself from Emma and Madison when they needed him the most and being an asshole to his Monarch ex-colleagues (whilst said colleagues are actively attempting to rescue his wife and daughter no less). Even after Mark has made peace with Godzilla, Godzilla vs. Kong shows that he hasn't changed for the better by much; remaining as egocentric, high-and-mighty and Hot-Blooded as he was at the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Whilst Mark's fear of losing Madison to a Titan crisis is understandable (especially when considering he's already lost his other child and his ex-wife to the same kind of thing one-by-one), his resultant domineering and overbearing parenting style is misguided at best, infuriating at worst; and his treatment of his seventeen-year-old daughter like she's Just a Kid is highly condescending when considering Madison's impressive acts of heroism in King of the Monsters (it's even worse in the novelization, where Mark all but admits that he wants Madison to regress out of being Wise Beyond Her Years and turn back into an ordinary kid he can coddle and better control). Mark acts like the world revolves around his feelings specifically even though he's far from the only human in-universe who lost loved ones in 2014 (as explicitly mentioned in the opening of King of the Monsters); and the causes of his strained relationship with Madison in Godzilla vs. Kong show that he tends to only factor in how his family affect his own feelings such as his guilt or fear, while disregarding or hand-waving the impact his present behavior is having on their feelings.
• Jerkass Has a Point:
  • While his attitude towards the Titans clashes with the film's message of cohabitation, he isn't wrong about the capacity for destruction which exists among even the benign Titans. And while he's not exactly pleased about it, the film's first scene shows he's entirely correct that if the ORCA doesn't already know which frequency to use on a specific Titan, then using the wrong frequency based on guesswork can do the exact opposite of pacify a gigantic, walking, breathing natural disaster.
  • In the novelization, one of Mark's reasons for being pissy that Monarch are trying to keep the Titans alive in containment is because he believes Monarch's spectacular failure to prevent the male MUTO breaking free at Janjira is proof that Monarch's containment protocols won't do any good if any of the contained Titans awaken and decide they want to stretch their limbs. Once Ghidorah awakens all the contained Titans and commands them to attack, the ease and speed with which the creatures destroy the containment outposts around their resting sites proves Mark's point.
  • When Mark sarcastically calls out Dr. Chen and the rest of Monarch for not being prepared for the Titans around the world awakening after Ghidorah's emergence; even if he's wrong to think that all the Titans should be killed, Mark is entirely right that the dormant Titans emerging was only a matter of "when" rather than "if" ^note The movie states that the Titans were already awakening more gradually due to human activity, and the eco-terrorists and King Ghidorah only accelerated the process., and Monarch haven't done anything adequate to prepare for that 'when' whilst maintaining a short-term and rapidly-failing status quo was on their table.
• Jerkass Realization:
  • It appears he has one about himself upon Godzilla's death and a seven-word "Reason You Suck" Speech from Serizawa, as he notably dials back the attitude for the remainder of the film. Allegedly, this would've originally been averted as Mark would've continued making snips against Godzilla in the Hollow Earth — since Mark's attitude in the film already makes him highly punchable in the beginning, one can imagine why this was removed.
  • Downplayed in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization. When he realizes that Madison has run off on her own to work out what's causing Godzilla's rampage, he admits to himself that him refusing to place any trust or faith in her at all despite knowing deep down that she can take care of herself is part of what drove Madison to this, and that he'll need to at least talk to her about it. Gee, Mark, who could've predicted that ordering your blatantly strong-headed daughter around like a soldier and treating her like a shameful invalid at the same time was going to blow up in your face?
• Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Despite all his faults and jerkassery, he very much loves his family (particularly Madison), and he regrets not being there for Emma and Madison (to a fault in Godzilla vs. Kong). He doesn't hesitate to attempt rescuing Emma and Madison from being held hostage during a gunfight, and his only concern after Emma's true colors are revealed and whilst Ghidorah is wreaking the literal end of the world is getting his daughter back. Mark also, to his credit, goes back to save the G-Team from certain death in Antarctica, rather than seize a slim chance to catch up to a departing Emma, Madison and Jonah. Mark isn't afraid to admit he was wrong, as demonstrated when he realizes that Godzilla is the last hope to save the planet from Ghidorah, and he notably tones down his abrasiveness towards his Monarch ex-colleagues after he finds that seemingly getting his wish to see Godzilla killed almost enabled King Ghidorah to destroy the entire world.
• Knight in Sour Armor: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mark is a bitter, egocentric cynic whom is still profoundly troubled by his son's death, but he's vehemently disgusted by the eco-terrorists' plan to put billions of people in mortal danger. Whilst Mark is mainly only on the heroes' side so he can rescue his family rather than out of any commitment to protecting the world at large, he does forego pursuing the eco-terrorists (whom have Emma and Madison) in favor of going back to save the G-Team from almost certain death, despite his great reluctance to let the eco-terrorists get away with his family. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Mark just as cynical as ever before about nearly everything, including the Titans, but he's also now rejoined Monarch to help them keep the peace between man and Titan overall (instead of continuing to wallow at his cabin), and it's implied that Mark has done so more because it's the right thing to do than because he has any desire to see a live Titan again.
• Leeroy Jenkins: Downplayed in King of the Monsters. One glimpse of Emma and Madison over a video feed at Outpost 32 makes him immediately depart from the Monarch top brass's safe distance location, grab a gun off a dead body, charge into the eco-terrorist-occupied outpost, and hold Jonah and his team at gunpoint. Downplayed in the sense that it's hinted Asher would have managed to shoot Mark dead as soon as the standoff started if Mark's distraction hadn't given Foster an opening to shoot Ash first, which in turn put Mark and Jonah on a more equal footing while Jonah's remaining gunmen in the background were occupied covering him and Emma from Ash's shooter.
• A Lesson Learned Too Well: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), he realizes that he never should have abandoned his remaining family after the death of his first child to a past Kaiju battle caused a Grief-Induced Split and sent him into Excessive Mourning, and he reunites with Madison when she almost dies in the havoc of the film's Final Battle after she's been kidnapped by genocidal eco-terrorists. Five years on in Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark has re-entered Madison's life, but it's implied (outright confirmed in the novelization) that he's smothering and borderline-overprotective, and he absolutely refuses to accept that Madison isn't a baby anymore, no matter how much she proves her metal.
• The Load: Averted in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Mark at first spends his screentime from the moment Monarch approach him being insufferably rude and snarky, and what rational pointers he does make are initially brushed off by Monarch as the ravings of a bitter, grief-filled man who isn't thinking straight (and in Monarch's defence, Mark only made either of these pointers when in the midst of one of his tempers). In the novelization, Barnes is explicitly puzzled over why Mark has been brought onboard at all given his initial behavior. Not only is Mark proven right about Jonah's decoy, but he handles himself very well for a non-military during his Leeroy Jenkins in Antarctica; killing one of Jonah's men and saving Colonel Foster's life, plus his actions indirectly make the heroes aware of Emma's betrayal. And Mark only continues making himself useful to the team for the rest of the movie despite his initial attitude. Come Godzilla vs. Kong, however...
• Loner-Turned-Friend: Somewhat downplayed. At the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mark has shut himself away from everyone and nearly everything after Andrew's death, only to get recruited by Monarch's top brass including his former colleagues. At first, he's an obnoxious blowhard who makes his opinionated and biased view on Monarch's ways of managing the Titans clear (yet he somehow attracts Sam Coleman's desire for friendship), but he mellows and he seemingly gets off his high horse as the movie goes on. In Godzilla vs. Kong, the Monarch executives Mark previously worked with are completely absent from both the film and novelized versions of the story as Mark investigates Godzilla's attacks with Guillerman, save for a mention in the novel that Mark wouldn't mind having their help.
• Long Last Look: The person variation. After he's said goodbye to Serizawa, him, Stanton and Chen continue solemnly watching Serizawa's sub as it sinks into the water.
• Misdirected Outburst: In King of the Monsters, his rage over his son's death is directed at the Titans (Godzilla in particular), but instead of lashing out at them, Mark lashes out at his Monarch ex-colleagues and friends when he sees them again. He's annoyed at them because they won't exterminate all of the Titans despite knowing how powerful they are, and it doesn't matter to Mark that they are being nothing but patient and thoughtful towards him nor that these are the people whom are currently working to find his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter; he makes a point of criticizing or snarking at them near-chronically, until his discovery that vengeance feels empty gets him off his high horse for the rest of the movie.
• Misplaced Retribution:
  • Blames Godzilla for the death of his son Andrew in the incidents of Godzilla (2014), even though the MUTOs were to blame for the destruction of San Francisco and Godzilla was actually the one who stopped them. It's implied that it was indeed Godzilla specifically rather than the MUTOs who actually caused Andrew's death in all the havoc, but it was nevertheless a genuinely non-malicious accident on Godzilla's part; a fact which becomes poetic once the genuinely-malicious Ghidorah, who deliberately kills people for fun, shows up. Notably, whilst Mark does admit as the movie goes on that he needs to let his grudge against Godzilla go for everybody's sake, he never actually admits that he was wrong to pin the blame for Andrew's death on Godzilla to begin with.
  • The King of the Monsters novelization also states that while Mark never said it, he blames Emma on some level for Andrew's death because she's the one who took the job that led to the family relocating to San Francisco.
• Missing Steps Plan: In the wake of King Ghidorah's global takeover of the other Titans, and Monarch establishing that nothing can stop him with Godzilla apparently gone, Mark intends to depart Monarch's company to look for Madison before the world ends. This in spite of how Madison and the eco-terrorists could be holed up literally anywhere in the entire world and Mark hasn't got the first idea where to start looking (as Sam Coleman points out), not to mention that Mark's efforts will likely be further hampered by the fact that the world is currently ending, and nevermind the question of how he'll avoid getting shot by Jonah's goons if he does find them without Monarch's military aid. Fortunately, Mothra's timely arrival prevents Mark from going through with this.
• Mountain Man: Downplayed. Mark has been living far away from civilization in the Colorado mountains, based in a solitary cabin since he left Emma and Madison, but he still dresses like a relatively normal man and he still does wildlife photography and research to eke out a modern living from funders.
• Moving Beyond Bereavement: In the five years since San Francisco's destruction, he's been unable to let go of his grief over Andrew's death: he's divorced Emma, become estranged from Emma and Madison, run off to the Colorado mountains to avoid anything that reminds him of his problems^note Confirmed by the novelization, and he's nursing a biased grudge against Godzilla and the other Titans over his loss. He learns over the course of the movie to let go of his grief and spite, gradually accepting that Godzilla didn't deliberately kill Andrew and that he's humanity's best and only shot at survival.
• Murder Is the Best Solution:
  • He can't make it through the Monarch briefing on Alan Jonah without launching into a tirade, saying Monarch should just kill every last Titan to render the eco-terrorists' plans with the ORCA moot; to the visible exasperation of the Monarch brass, some of whom look like they've heard this from Mark before. Mark in the heat of his anger completely ignores the logistical problems of how Monarch would kill all the Titans – how difficult it is to kill the creatures with anything at humanity's disposal, the likelihood that attempts to kill them would only wake them up and aggravate them, the high probability that an extermination would miss a few unaccounted-for Titans, the also-high probability that disrupting the global ecosphere by eradicating the Titans would have devastating long-term detriments for humanity – and how logically and practically, such a plan if pulled off would overall most likely be more trouble than it's worth. The novelization explicitly lampshades this, with Mark later wondering if Monarch could have prevented King Ghidorah's rise by killing him in his sleep while he was frozen, only to begrudgingly concede after considering the logistics that Ghidorah's awakening likely was inevitable and that the eco-terrorists only sped up his revival.
  • Mark says that the military launching the Oxygen Destroyer at Godzilla and Ghidorah isn't a bad idea. He ends up eating those words when the weapon's usage causes absolutely everything to go From Bad to Worse on an apocalyptic scale.
• My Beloved Smother: He's hinted to be a male example after Emma's death left him with custody of Madison and also left him scared of losing his last child. Throughout his argument with Madison, Mark treats her like she's stupid, naïve and incapable, despite the fact she committed acts of heroism that most adults wouldn't have the stomach for in the previous movie. He also cuts her out of the investigation into Godzilla's rampage because he doesn't want to be worrying about her safety. It's revealed in the novelization to be even worse than what the movie shows: before Godzilla has started attacking, the way Mark runs the household is him expecting Madison to follow his word as law without any fair argument; he refuses to internalize anything Madison has to say that he doesn't want to hear; doesn't give Madison any of the trust, faith or respect that he expects her to give him, and barely even communicates clearly to her on Titan-related matters. Furthermore, Mark in the novel tries to have his sister shadow Madison at the house while he's away to make sure that she can't sneak out after he's barred her from Monarch's investigation. Mark all but admits to Madison that he wishes she would stop being Wise Beyond Her Years and regress back into being the helpless little girl he remembers her as from ten years ago, so that HE can assuage his own feelings of guilt about not being there for her; as if the five years of her maturing before the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters never happened. Worse yet, the novelization also shows toward the end that Mark does know deep down what Madison is capable of, but he wilfully ignores it for the sake of living in his self-centered delusions.
• My Greatest Failure: For him it's not being there for Madison in the intervening years after Andrew's death, when she needed him most and he let her down. He expresses a lot of regret for this after she ends up in the eco-terrorists' hands in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, feeling it never would have happened somehow if he'd been there. Unfortunately, it's also what motivates Mark to be a patronizing and helicoptering parent to Madison in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization.
• My Greatest Second Chance: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, one of Mark's biggest regrets, if not his single biggest, is letting Madison down and not being there for her after he abandoned his family, and he expressly says he's determined to make sure that it doesn't happen again with his fixation on tracking her down over the rest of the movie. Deconstructed in Godzilla vs. Kong, which reveals that Mark has misinterpreted the aesop that was to be learned from this mistake after Emma's death left him with sole custody of Madison: his way of making up for being absent from Madison's life during the tail end of her childhood is by helicoptering her and treating her like she's still the little girl he left behind, all whilst refusing to listen or communicate both ways with her when her wants and arguments conflict with his own.
• Naïve Newcomer: He's ironically both this trope and the Team Prima Donna in King of the Monsters: he's technically being brought back into Monarch, but he's been out of the loop long enough for this trope to be in effect. Mark shares in the audience's surprise at the many developments in Monarch that the top brass introduce; such as Emma recreating the ORCA, there being dozens more living Titans besides Godzilla around the world at clandestine Monarch containment outposts, and Monarch having a fancy new base of operations in Bermuda.
• Nature Lover: Since he was a child, Mark has had a strong love of nature. He also prefers fieldwork and being close to animals instead of being in an office. He ends up being a more cynical than idealist version of this trope, as he effectively isolates himself at a cabin in the woods and commits himself to wildlife photography before the film's events, specifically to escape his own problems.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Godzilla vs. Kong, him and Monarch could've caught on to Apex's Evil Plan sooner, maybe even prevented them from seizing the Hollow Earth energy source needed to empower Mechagodzilla, if Mark had actually given Madison some of the credit she was due and listened to her pointers (pointers which consisted of basic common sense that most of humanity was lacking throughout this movie). Because Mark underestimates Madison's intelligence and patronizingly dismisses her out of hand, Monarch end up being Apex's Unwitting Pawns all the way through to Mechagodzilla's empowerment, and it isn't until Mechagodzilla is completed and gets hijacked by Ghidorah's lingering consciousness (earlier in the novelization) that Monarch catch on to Apex's machinations, resulting in hundreds if not thousands of casualties and mass property damage in Hong Kong before Mechagodzilla is put down.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: He's the Inbetween amongst the three Russells who survived the San Francisco battle. He's a lot more compassionate and moral than his ex-wife Emma, and he's completely disgusted by her plan to cause millions of deaths; but he's a lot more self-centered, spiteful, sanctimonious and prone to misdirected outbursts than their daughter Madison is.
• No Man Should Have This Power: Early on in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, he's outraged that Emma rebuilt the ORCA and tweaked it to communicate with Titans instead of whales, angrily insisting it's too dangerous due to the risk that using the wrong frequency could aggravate a Titan instead of pacifying them (not helped by how the original ORCA prototype itself had the opposite effect to what was intended with horrible end-results when it was field-tested, as detailed in the novelization). Despite this, Mark and his family end up using the ORCA more than once to prevent King Ghidorah's otherwise-certain victory and clean up the mess that the ORCA partly contributed to. Regardless of the latter, the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization states that when Mark rejoined Monarch following Ghidorah's defeat, he still insisted that the ORCA was too dangerous and had all work on the project shelved.
• No Sympathy for Grudgeholders: Downplayed in King of the Monsters. Though Drs. Graham and Serizawa both seem to be sympathetic to Mark's grief-fueled anger, they both show that they have their limits. During Mark's tirade in the briefing room scene, Graham rolls her eyes in disgust. At the movie's midpoint, Serizawa doesn't hesitate to give Mark a gentle but scathing calling-out when Godzilla is seemingly killed and the price is the far more malevolent Ghidorah getting to reign unopposed.
• Oblivious to His Own Description: In King of the Monsters, he acts high and mighty when he's criticizing Monarch for "kid[ding] themselves" and when indirectly criticizing Emma for not putting herself or her family first. Both these accusations are things which he in his own way has done and is STILL doing to himself: he's kidding himself with his biased judgment that all the Titans are purely destructive monsters and deserve to die because of his grief over son's death, and he put alcoholism and running away from his problems before his own well-being and his family needing him to be strong more than ever before.
• Obsessively Normal: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, he's somewhat resentful about rejoining Monarch, because he felt morally obligated to do so when he would much rather have nothing to do with Titans ever again; which is implicitly partly why he projects his desire for a completely normal life onto Madison. Mark has moved himself and Madison into an ordinary suburban house (in contrast to his mountain cabin and his family's Monarch outpost-based jungle apartment in the previous movie), and he's enrolled Madison in a local public school (where she ends up ostracized, lonely, and feeling out of place) instead of continuing her homeschooling. Mark not only disapproves of Madison's inclination to continue being involved with Monarch and Titan matters in some capacity, he seems determined to pretend that said inclinations don't even exist, going out of his way to obstruct Madison from returning to homeschooling or directly having anything to do with Monarch and Titan matters, and acting as if Madison will just bow to his wants. This attitude is hinted at in the movie; when Mark blows off everything Madison has to say about the Godzilla-related mystery out of hand, and he just chides her for skipping school, taking a conspiracy theorist podcast seriously, and trying to help her father with his abnormal job.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, when Emma picks up the detonator and the eco-terrorists are about to blow Ghidorah free of the glacier, Mark can only glance slowly towards the vast glacial wall that holds the three-headed monster in silent horror.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, he has a very understandable one when Mechagodzilla arrives in Hong Kong and begins leveling the city, confirming that Madison was right, and Godzilla was trying to stop another malevolent Titan.
    "What in God's name is that?"
• Opposites Attract: Deconstructed. Mark and Emma had an unpleasant Grief-Induced Split after losing a child – which Real Life studies have found usually only occurs if the grieving couple's relationship already had further underlying problems beforehand^note otherwise, it's more likely that the shared suffering will actually strengthen the couple's bonds – and we see a lot of personality contrasts between them in the present.
  • Mark is a brunette with a square-shaped facial structure, whereas Emma is a blonde with a heart-shaped face.
  • Mark thinks that humans should leave nature alone, and that mankind shouldn't be tampering with things they don't understand. Whereas Emma believes that attempting to long-term save the world at large is worth ruthlessly tampering with nature on a massive scale in a hamstrung manner.
  • Mark is, at best, wary and leery of all Titans, including the Big Good, because of their destructive capacities, and he thinks the world is better off without them in it. Whereas Emma believes that humans are ultimately more of a threat to the world than the Titans are, and that restoring balance to the world and ensuring mankind's long-term survival is worth actively setting loose as many Titans as possible to let them reclaim the Earth and cause collateral mass devastation, and she underestimates the possibility that some of the Titans she targets are just as dangerous for the world's balance as the MUTOs and Skullcrawlers were if not more.
  • After Andrew's death, Mark chose to run away from his duties as a Monarch operative and everything that reminded him of the Titan attack. Emma instead felt obligated to stay on and commit herself to finding a long-term "solution" to the disaster and its looming future repeats.
  • Mark is Hot-Blooded, impulsive, self-centered, and prone to throwing pity parties, but he wears his spite, rage and grief over Andrew's death on his sleeve for everyone around him to see. Whereas Emma is a ruthless, cold-blooded schemer who fancies herself a master manipulator; she's been lying to everyone including herself about the true extent of her unresolved grief, to the point where she all but went mad and she's the only one who can't recognize her own instability, and she feels she's working towards the greater good despite her motivations being secretly selfish.
  • Mark is disgusted at the mere thought of people being collateral damage of a Titan's presence, whereas Emma has no such reservations when she forcibly accelerates the Titans' awakenings, knowing full well that hundreds to billions of people will be in the firing line.
  • Mark initially blames all the Titans, especially Godzilla, for Andrew's death in Godzilla and the MUTOs' 2014 conflict. Emma instead blames humanity for causing and continuing to cause the Titans' re-emergences in the first place via our ecologically-unsustainable practices, and our refusal to do anything to address them.
  • Even Emma and Mark's parenting styles after Emma's death are polar opposites, yet both are dysfunctional for their remaining child; who both parents act restrictive, controlling and patronizing towards. Emma is fine with giving Madison a homeschooling and Limited Social Circle within Monarch, and with exposing her to at least one of the Titans she studies. Whereas Mark in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization wants Madison to have as normal a teenhood as possible whether Madison herself wants that or not, so he enrols her in a public school, ignores any criticism that she's not making friends and is instead a bullied pariah, and he wants to restrict Madison as much as possible from having anything more to do with Monarch or Titans again.
• Outliving One's Offspring: His elder child Andrew was a casualty of Godzilla and the MUTOs' battle in 2014. In King of the Monsters, this was ultimately what caused Mark and Emma to divorce and caused Mark to all but turn his back on his remaining family, and it's also the source of Mark's hatred for Godzilla and his wish for all the Titans to be killed off in that movie.
• Papa Wolf: The moment he sees his ex-wife and daughter being held hostage during a gun battle, he leaves the other scientists behind, grabs a pistol, and attempts to rescue them himself. Throughout King of the Monsters, after Emma's betrayal is revealed, finding Madison and getting her back is ultimately what Mark is first and foremost concerned about. Somewhat deconstructed in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, where his parenting style since coming back into Madison's life consists of trying to brow-beat and shelter the most brass-balled teenager in the MonsterVerse into cowering at home from the monsters for the rest of her life, something which Madison briefly calls him out on.
• Parents as People: He's arguably become this after re-entering Madison's life and after lightening up over the course of King of the Monsters. Whilst Mark does love Madison, he's evidently overbearing and very condescending towards her in Godzilla vs. Kong; treating her like she's Just a Kid despite her highly-commendable acts of heroism and cunning during the previous movie, and wanting her to stay out of the investigation into Godzilla's rampage so that he won't have to worry about her life. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Mark's treatment of Madison crosses into My Beloved Smother territory.
• Past Experience Nightmare: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization states that he still has recurring dreams of the moment he found Madison near-dead in the rubble of Boston during Godzilla and Ghidorah's battle.
• Perma-Stubble: He's a bitter and cynical man due to the death of Andrew, and he has a 5 o' clock shadow in both his film appearances.
• Plagued by Nightmares: Mark's aforementioned recurring Past Experience Nightmare in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization highlights his overprotectiveness of Madison since the incident and his inability to move past any of his trauma.
• Pointy-Haired Boss: In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark is working for Monarch once more in a managerial role, but all his smarts as a so-called Titan expert apparently disappeared with Boston in the previous movie. He's of no help throughout the crisis with Godzilla's rampage; refusing to listen to Madison or let her get near Monarch's investigation, only arriving to Godzilla's Hong Kong attack after Guillerman has already begun the evacuations of his own initiative, and being none the wiser to Apex's evil plans progressing underneath Monarch's noses until the Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla that Apex made is already slaughtering half of Hong Kong. In the novelization, Mark does cotton onto Apex's true colors, but not quickly enough to stop Mechagodzilla's rampage, and worse yet he's stupid enough to temporarily wonder if they should let the Ghidorah-possessed Mecha kill Godzilla. Serizawa's trust that Mark would be up to carrying on his legacy in the previous movie was clearly misplaced.
• Psychological Projection: Oh, he definitely has a knack for this.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, he thinks Monarch are deluding themselves with their assertions that humans can coexist with Titans, ignoring that he is deluding himself by asserting in this setting that all the Titans including Godzilla are monsters that should be wiped out; assertions that are based in Mark's rage over his son's death more than the objectivity of the sheer destruction that a Titan is capable of. In the same movie, Mark criticizes Emma putting her commitment to her work and the Titans ahead of her own well-being and her family's welfare, which is exactly what Mark has been doing with his own rage, drinking problem and inability to confront his unresolved grief ever since Andrew died.
  • In the novelization of Godzilla vs. Kong, it's implied that part of the reason why Mark has become an Obsessively Normal smotherer to Madison, and why he's irrationally acting like he knows what Madison wants better than Madison does whilst being wilfully ignorant of the problems he's causing her, is because Mark is projecting his own desires for a normal life (which he can't have since he rejoined Monarch) onto his daughter.
• Really Moves Around: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization mentions he and Madison moved four or five times per year and went all over the globe after he rejoined Monarch.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Zig-Zagged in Godzilla vs. Kong, where he's rejoined Monarch and apparently become a "director". Although he's no longer vengeful over his son's death, he's still as Hot-Blooded and judgmental as ever. He dismisses everything Madison has to say to him about a possible lead on why Godzilla's rampaging because he wants her to stay out of the whole thing out of fear for her life, even though her pointers (regardless of where she obtained the evidence) only amount to common sense. The novelization also shows that Mark is a very far cry from a reasonable authority figure in Madison's home life. All of that being said, Mark is sensible enough to know that Monarch should prioritize getting citizens out of Godzilla's way over trying to engage him, and the novel shows that he's quick to suspect Apex and (reluctantly) admit to himself that Madison might've been right as the evidence against Apex racks up.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • He both hands one to Emma and gets an Armor-Piercing Response in turn.
  • It's so short it's barely a speech, but when Godzilla is seemingly killed, Serizawa perfectly sums up the folly of Mark's grudge against Godzilla in light of what's happening in just seven words, and it seems to give Mark a Jerkass Realization based on his subsequent change in behavior.
    "Looks like you got your wish, Mark."
  • Barnes comments that if he had parents like Mark and Emma, he'd run away from home.
  • Madison briefly gives him a well-deserved one after he tries to guilt-trip her into obeying his wishes of her, in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization:
    "You're blackmailing me. With your fear. I'm supposed to cower at home for the rest of my life because you're afraid something might happen to me?"
• Resigned to the Call: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization indicates that Mark isn't exactly thrilled about rejoining Monarch, and he would much rather have a normal life where he doesn't have to see another Titan again, but he believes working for Monarch is the right thing to do. So instead, Mark projects all his longings for a normal life onto Madison.
• Revenge Before Reason: Averted. He's initially hellbent in his belief that every monster on the planet should be killed, Godzilla in particular, but he's at least sane enough to recognize a situation in which taking Godzilla head-on is tantamount to suicide, and orders everyone to lower their weapons to show Godzilla they're not posing a threat. In the novelization, Mark finds himself begrudgingly rooting for Godzilla in Antarctica and at Isla de Mara, and he's doubtful when he declares the military launching the Oxygen Destroyer at Godzilla and Ghidorah is "not the worst idea" because he realizes that killing Godzilla is tantamount to killing humanity's best defence against any other Titans that might pose a threat. Mark eventually comes to accept that while Godzilla did cause his son's death, he's also the best chance at saving the planet from Ghidorah, and so Monarch and the military must help him however they can in the final battle.
• Revenge Myopia: For the first half of King of the Monsters, Mark doesn't care that Godzilla is a gigantic animal who didn't in any way deliberately cause Andrew's death, he just wants Godzilla dead out of rage. This is made all the more egregious by the fact Mark is a professional zoologist and should therefore know better than most people not to attach such feelings to an animal.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, his prediction that recreating the ORCA for communicating with Titans would lead to the creatures causing "a thousand San Francisco's" ends up being semi-prophetic, but the ORCA doesn't cause it for quite the reasons that Mark believed it would. Mark predicted that using the wrong frequency on the wrong Titan would incite a Titan rampage, but the global Titan rampage is ultimately caused by the eco-terrorists deliberately using the ORCA to indiscriminately incite as many Titans as possible to awaken; including one Titan who has both the power and the intent to create the absolute worst-case Titan scenario. The "Wrong Reasons" part is somewhat subverted when it's revealed in the film's ending that advanced ancient civilizations likely fell because they tried to use artificially-replicated bio-acoustics to manipulate the Titans, supporting Mark's concerns about the ORCA being used to manipulate Titans for human ends.
    • If the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization is to be believed, the "Wrong Reasons" part didn't stop Mark from still insisting that the ORCA was too dangerous to use after the device prevented Ghidorah's otherwise-certain victory, and his solution was to have the project scrapped when he rejoined Monarch.
  • In the aforementioned novelization; Mark, during the investigation into Godzilla's attack, derisively calls Team Kong's efforts to reach the Hollow Earth with Kong (to help Apex ostensibly neutralize the rampant Godzilla) a boondoggle^note meaning a wasteful, unnecessary and fraudulent project. He's half-right; it's not that the expedition is a waste of time, but rather that it's actually aiding the evil plan of the Corporate Conspiracy whom are the true culprits behind Godzilla's rampage, a plan which involves activating a part-Ghidorah Humongous Mecha.
• Rightly Self-Righteous: Zig-Zagged. Mostly, he's just plain self-righteous, but in King of the Monsters he does have a couple moments where he's in the right while acting in such a way. As high-horsed and pointlessly rude as he is about it, Mark is right when sarcastically calling out Dr. Chen and the rest of Monarch for pretending that the Titans' awakening was anything other than inevitable and for not focusing on making any adequate preparations for when it came to fruition. Mark is also very right to call Emma out on all but losing her mind after Andrew's death in such a horrific way, for putting their only surviving child's life in mortal danger, and for planning to kill billions of people by proxy whilst taking the fate of the world into her own hands.
• Robbing the Dead: When he runs into the eco-terrorist occupied Outpost 32 on his own looking to save Emma and Madison, he picks up a dead operative's handgun for use against the eco-terrorists.
• Say My Name: He shouts every one of his family members' names at the top of his lungs at least once for each of them throughout King of the Monsters. He repeatedly howls Andrew's name in desperation when he's trying to find his son amid the devastation in the opening flashback. He does the same for Madison when he's searching for her amid the movie's chaotic final battle in Boston. He also screams Maddie's name in despair in Antarctica after Emma and the eco-terrorists have taken Madison back, blown the explosives, and left Mark to die. Finally, in the movie's last scene, Mark screams out Emma's name when she rushes off to her certain death by Heroic Sacrifice.
• Scrap Heap Hero: He became a wreck in the aftermath of his son's death, quitting his job at Monarch and running away to the Colorado mountains as a wildlife photographer. Godzilla: King of the Monsters sees Mark being brought onboard by Monarch to help them stop the eco-terrorists and later King Ghidorah with his expertise, and despite a rocky start, he gradually manages to get through his grief. Come Godzilla vs. Kong, and Mark has officially returned to active duty in Monarch – although his worst impulses haven't gone away, and his performance as a parent to Madison is questionable.
• Secretly Selfish: He overall shows multiple signs of thinking more about his own feelings than about those of his loved ones or his son's memory. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, after he tries to guilt-trip Madison into obeying him in an attempt to keep her away from Titan-related danger, she calls out his oppressive and authoritarian conduct as a parent. Mark is convincing himself that he's keeping Madison safe by ordering her around and helicoptering her with his sister's help, and that her being mad at him for it is a worthwhile price; but Madison points out that he's really putting his own fear of losing his surviving daughter ahead of any consideration for her emotional needs or her own feelings, and he'd rather feel sorry for himself than consider the possibility that his shoddy parenting methods are going to either stifle his highly-capable daughter's growth and potential or just push her away from him all over again. Worse yet, it takes finding out that his authoritarianism and patronizing of Madison only pushed her to strike out on her own for Mark to even take Madison's point seriously.
• Selective Obliviousness: His entire character in Godzilla vs. Kong can be summed up as this trope.
  • In the film version, Mark just as blind as Team Kong and the rest of the world are to the suspicion that should be falling on Apex in light of Godzilla's attack on their factory, but he takes it a step further. He irrationally descends into denial that there's any cause or reason for Godzilla's seeming hostility save for Mark thinking that HE is reliving a repeat of what previously happened with Emma: as a result, Madison is forced to give up trying to talk sense into the idiot. This gets somewhat subverted in the novelization, where Mark and Guillerman are conducting their own investigation into Godzilla's attack and they don't hesitate to suspect Apex.
  • It's strongly implied in the film, and outright confirmed in the novelization, that Mark is in denial that Madison is really an Action Girl even after she's explicitly proven her capabilities during the previous movie's events. He stubbornly persists in pretending that she's a naïve, ordinary girl in need of shelter, because that's what he wishes he had for a daughter instead of facing up to and dealing with what he's really got for a daughter, even as Madison makes it increasingly clear how unhappy Mark is making her and as their relationship becomes increasingly strained because of his obstinate adherence to his B.S.. Worst of all, the novel shows when Mark realizes he drove Madison away that he knows deep down that Madison is strong, capable and independent, he just wilfully chooses to ignore it; meaning that not even being a Horrible Judge of Character can excuse his shortcomings as a father, and showing how Secretly Selfish he really is.
• Self-Serving Memory:
  • Implied in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. He rants about how Godzilla is responsible for his son's death in the San Francisco battle, whilst never making any mention of the MUTOs who actually instigated the destruction before Godzilla stopped them. (Notably, even when he admits that he needs to let his grudge against Godzilla go, he never actually admits that he was wrong to blame Godzilla to start with.) The implication is that Mark was so desperate to have something living to hate over Andrew's death, that he projected all of his rage and blame at the Titan who ended the disaster instead of taking comfort in knowing that the MUTOs which really started the destruction were also dead by dawn.
  • Played Straight in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, where Madison mentally observes that Mark seems to have wilfully forgotten all about how she committed some of the greatest acts of heroism out of the entire cast during the previous movie, in favor of viewing her as what he wishes she was and ignoring what she's clearly proven herself to be in reality.
• Sensitive Guy and Manly Man: In King of the Monsters, he's the Manly Man to Sam Coleman's Sensitive Guy. He's a physically-fit wildlife photographer and former zoologist who has been living in the Colorado mountains (unlike the skinnier, more indoorsy Coleman), and compared to Coleman, Mark is cynical, bad-tempered, impulsive, outspoken and emotionally self-focused.
• Shared Family Quirks: With his daughter Madison. Despite her being much less Hot-Blooded, egocentric and distrustful of the Titans and being more sound-minded than her father, Madison does share Mark's love for outdoors field work. One thing Madison has inherited from both her parents (particularly her father) is a keen connection to the Titans.
• Shut Up, Hannibal!: He's completely unimpressed by Emma Russell's explanation of why they're working with Jonah to awaken all the Titans. The moment Emma deconstructs Serizawa's inaction and failure to do anything to stop The Government, Mark furiously rebuffs Emma, calling them out for putting Madison, their own child, in mortal danger, for thinking they alone have the right to decide the fate of the world for everyone else, for overestimating their ability to control the Titans, and above all for responding in such an insane way to Andrew's death.
• So Proud of You: Played With in the King of the Monsters novelization. Although he never states it openly, the novel portrays Mark inwardly feeling proud of Emma and Madison several times within the confines of his mind: he can't help feeling proud that Emma perfected the ORCA even if he seethes at the fact she remade it with the intention of using it on Titans, he feels a swell of pride in Antarctica when he realizes that Madison is using the ORCA to disorient Ghidorah before the hydra could menace Mark and the Monarch top brass, and he feels a swell of pride in Emma during the latter's Heroic Sacrifice to stop King Ghidorah.
• Sour Outside, Sad Inside: Downplayed, and a case who's more openly self-pitying than usual. At the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mark is a recluse living in the country, and he quickly shows himself to be bitter, spiteful, snide, anti-social and sardonic; taking nearly every opportunity to lash out at the rest of the Monarch cast. Mark acts this way due to his unresolved grief and trauma over his young son's death in the destruction of San Francisco when he and his family were caught up in the Behemoth Battle, plus his subsequent failure to keep the rest of his surviving family together, running away from everything that reminded him of his problems. That having been said, the next movie demonstrates that it was only Mark's reclusiveness and sarcasm that was tied to his unresolved grief: his idiocy, impulsiveness, high horse, and leeriness of Godzilla are all personality traits that stick past the point where he seemingly made peace with his son's death.
• Speaks Fluent Animal: When he was a kid, Mark swore he could talk with his pet German Shepherd and understand what it was saying. Being a respected expert in many fields focused on animals, Mark understands how they live and communicate. The novelization further explores Mark's sense of connection to animals and their bio-acoustics, with the wolves and Godzilla.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute:
  • Mark's backstory of being defined by the loss of a loved one, failing to get over it years later, going into isolation, and having a strained relationship with his living family makes him suspiciously similar to Joe Brody from Godzilla (2014). They're also both angry at Monarch: Joe because they're lying to him and the world about what killed his wife, Mark because they won't kill the Titans he blames for his son's death.
  • And to Preston Packard in Kong: Skull Island. They both have a judgment-clouding vendetta against the protagonist Titan of the movie which either human respectively debuts in (Kong for Packard and Godzilla for Mark), and it's based around said Titan killing people close to Packard and Mark while the Titan was doing what was necessary to defend its territory's balance. Both men also clash with other members of the main human cast who have a more reasonable if not outright pro-Titan disposition towards the object of Packard/Mark's vendetta, and both men are capable of feats of courage. However, whereas Packard ends up completely consumed by his vendetta after going beyond all reason to fulfil it, and causes his own death; Mark, even at his worst, has enough sense to defuse a suicidal direct confrontation with Godzilla, and he learns to let go of his hatred with time. Whereas Packard ultimately manipulates and exploits his men's genuine loyalty to his own ends, Mark passionately cares about his family first and foremost (although the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization shows even Mark isn't above emotionally manipulating Madison out of selfish desires when he feels desperate).
  • Mark is also similar to Haruo Sakaki from the 2017-2019 AniGoji trilogy. Mark too is Hot-Blooded and wants to see Godzilla killed because Godzilla caused the death of his family-member (Mark's son instead of his parents like with Haruo), and Godzilla vs. Kong also demonstrates Mark is slow to grow past his Fatal Flaws like Haruo proved to be across the trilogy's latter two movies. However, Mark isn't nearly as reckless and inconsiderate of other people's lives as Haruo was in the pursuit of revenge; and Mark, despite nursing a hatred of Godzilla, was fine with personally leaving him and the Titans alone so he could stew in his own grief, in contrast to how Haruo seeks out a fight with Godzilla.
• Take This Job and Shove It: After his family's loss during Godzilla's fight against the MUTOs in San Francisco, Mark quit Monarch.
• Team Prima Donna: He's ironically both this trope and the Naïve Newcomer in King of the Monsters. Despite having been brought onboard so that he could help the team rescue his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter, Mark acts completely ungrateful, self-absorbed and morally superior; hurling misdirected outbursts at Monarch and criticizing them because they won't kill all the Titans just to satiate his rage. However, Mark makes himself genuinely and invaluably competent at predicting the Titans' behavior, averting multiple failures and losses of life over the film, and even when he pulls a Leeroy Jenkins in Antarctica, it works out. Mark more or less gets off his high horse halfway through the film, when him seemingly getting his wish both fails to satisfy him and enables King Ghidorah to begin creating a global apocalypse.
• There Are No Coincidences: This overall appears to be his mindset in King of the Monsters; believing Godzilla's unusual activity at Castle Bravo is linked to the ORCA, piecing together that Rodan's awakening is what has caused Ghidorah's sudden change in direction, and realizing how Emma created the ORCA's Alpha frequency after appearing to briefly synchronize himself, a human, with Godzilla (a.k.a. the Alpha frequency's two bio-acoustic components). Regardless of how well-founded or rational Mark's assumptions are, he tends to be right.
• Took a Level in Dumbass: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, he could be insufferable, but he genuinely knew his stuff when it came to predicting Titans' behavior and knowing when they were helpless to stop a Titan. Five years later in Godzilla vs. Kong, he's nothing more than an ineffectual moron who obstinately refutes Madison's arguments about finding out why Godzilla's attacking (which unwittingly fuels the success of Apex's plot, leading to thousands of deaths that could have been avoided if he'd been more reasonable), predicated purely on his own projection of past trauma which is completely unrelated to actual events and newfound lack of common sense. Even in the novelization's expansion, Mark is constantly one step behind everybody else during his Guillerman's independent investigation into the crisis; and he’s not only refused to acknowledge his daughter as anything more than a helpless invalid who needs to be sheltered after her Damsel out of Distress actions in the previous movie, he's actually stupid enough to think that helicoptering Madison and bossing her around is going to accomplish anything except for pushing her to do exactly what he's trying to avoid.
• Took a Level in Kindness: He starts King of the Monsters as a hot-headed, self-pitying jackass who wants Godzilla dead and who lashes out at nearly everyone around him, but he cools his jets and dials back the attitude as the movie progresses, becoming notably more respectful in short time after Godzilla's apparent death leaves him finding Vengeance Feels Empty. He seems to further dial down his Fantastic Racism against the Titans after witnessing archaeological evidence indicating that ancient humans once lived in harmony with the Titans.
• Tragic Bigot: The battle between Godzilla and the MUTOs caused his family unit to collapse in the face of his son's death, and he has been unable to let go of that pain since; blaming the Titans and saying they should all be wiped out.
  Jackson Barnes: Dude hates Titans.
  Sam Coleman: Yeah, well you would too if you were him.
• Two First Names: An American hero in an American Godzilla movie, whose last name is also traditionally a first name.
• Underestimating Badassery: In Godzilla vs. Kong, he treats Madison like she's Just a Kid who doesn't have a clue what she's talking about, even though Madison's advice only amounts to common sense (something which the rest of the human race including Mark are currently lacking) and ignoring how Madison's impressive acts of heroism in the previous movie have proven that she is not some naïve schoolgirl. The novelization reveals this is Mark's fallacious attempt to keep Madison on a leash and out of danger, and Mark inwardly knows that she's more capable of taking care of herself than he gives her credit for, even if he's very reluctant to admit it. However, even after Mark in the novel realizes that Madison was probably right and that she snuck out to pursue her own investigation into Godzilla's rampage, he's still convinced Madison can't cross continents in her own search for answers — apparently, he forgot or just wilfully ignored that his daughter is the same girl who spontaneously disrupted Ghidorah's global Titan control and drew the three-headed monster to Boston.
• Ungrateful Bastard: During the first act of King of the Monsters, Mark acts snarky, sarcastic and rude towards The Team whilst throwing his misdirected outbursts around at them, and he at one point emphatically accuses them of not caring about his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter. These are the people whom are currently trying to find Mark's kidnapped family for him, yet he can't be bothered to show them a decent modicum of gratitude or even respect during the search – not a very decent or even smart thing to do, considering that this team's actions and motivation could be the entire difference between Mark getting his loved ones back safely or never seeing them alive again.
• Vengeance Feels Empty: When Godzilla is seemingly killed by the Oxygen Destroyer, Mark visibly isn't satisfied that he's apparently gotten his wish to see the Titan he blames for Andrew's death killed, especially once Serizawa rightfully calls Mark out in front of the Monarch brass. The fact that Godzilla's seeming death has left Ghidorah free to reign over and slaughter the planet practically unopposed likely didn't do anything to make Mark feel better.
• What Is Going On?: In King of the Monsters, he approaches Dr. Chen and asks her what's happening when Castle Bravo begins trembling prompting her to inform him succinctly that an abnormally-erratic Godzilla is approaching them.
• Why Couldn't You Be Different?: Godzilla vs. Kong drops some notable hints that he's become a Fantasy-Forbidding Father type to Madison, whilst the movie's novelization outright confirms that Mark wishes Madison was an ordinary girl who would obey him and whom he can coddle, instead of the brave, heroic and rebellious young woman that she is. Worse, Mark has convinced himself to the point of Self-Serving Memory that Madison really is the kind of daughter that he wishes she was, and that all he has to do is make her live the kind of life he considers ideal (even if he has to shove it down her throat and ignore all her feelings); and it takes Madison sneaking out and heading towards mortal danger in response to listen to her for Mark to even begin to admit that he was wrong at all.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: In King of the Monsters, Mark when working with Monarch initially seems to think he's the Only Sane Man among a bunch of reckless negative-type zombie advocates, based on the way he holds himself when chiding Monarch. Even if he's not completely wrong about the dangers of meddling with the Titans, he's actually the center of a Vengeance Feels Empty and forgiveness character arc in a story with a Green Aesop, and the zombie advocates he criticizes are actually a case of Good Is Not Dumb.
• The Xenophile: Despite his rage towards all Titans and particularly Godzilla for his son's death, he's still capable of admiring them seemingly without conscious input even before he gets over his issues, and his zoology expertise enables him to predict their behavior quite well during King of the Monsters. It's heavily implied that on a subconscious level, Mark knows that he's in the wrong to hate the Titans over his son's death, but he's too Hot-Blooded to admit it.
• You're Insane!: Says as much to his ex-wife when he hears the full extent of their plans, her justifications for them, and the fact that she got their remaining child involved and put her in harm's way.
• You Remind Me of X: A downplayed but clear case occurs in Godzilla vs. Kong, when Mark justifies his feeble and irrational assertion that Godzilla has turned against humanity for no reason by stating that "creatures, like people, can change"; clearly projecting his trauma from Emma's unexpected and staggering betrayal five years prior onto Godzilla. Furthermore, in the novelization, Madison inwardly suspects that the reason he's so unwilling to trust her or show any faith in her is because he transferred all his trust issues with Emma onto Madison after Emma died.

Madison Russell

Portrayed By: Millie Bobby Brown, Alexandra Rabe (young)

Dubbed By: Clara Soares (European French), Mana Ashida (Japanese)

Appears In: Godzilla: Aftershock | Godzilla: King of the Monsters | Godzilla vs. Kong

"You said that you were gonna be careful. That you'd release them one at a time, that you would restore balance!"

Emma and Mark's daughter, and Andrew's younger sister who survives after him.

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• Action Girl: Downplayed. A deleted scene shows Madison sparring one of Jonah's men in boxing practice, unleashing all of her frustrations, true to Emma's claim that she "trained [Madison] to survive". In the novelization, when Madison tries to steal the ORCA, she's confronted by a particularly imposing mercenary, who she catches off-guard and manages to incapacitate with a stun gun.
• Admiring the Abomination: She's pro-Titan like her mother, though she still grows increasingly horrified by her mother's and Jonah's plot to inflict millions of deaths. Notably, she was audibly amazed when she saw Godzilla during the San Francisco Incident when she was seven or eight years old. Averted with King Ghidorah, whom she screams defiantly in rage at after everything the three-headed sadist monster has done when he's about to kill her.
• All of the Other Reindeer: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization indicates she's a social outcast at school and the victim of bullying. Pretty shitty of those other kids, considering how she directly helped save the world during the crisis with Ghidorah.
• Armor-Piercing Question: When things escalate out of control after Ghidorah wakens the other Titans, Emma tries to claim to Madison she can fix this. In response, Madison queries that she thought she was doing it all for Andrew's memory — would he have wanted any of this? It renders Emma totally silent as her daughter storms off.
• Be Careful What You Wish For: Her Godzilla: King of the Monsters Monarch Sciences bio says she wants to be a normal teenager. Come Godzilla vs. Kong, and she's now attending a public school, but doesn't fit in and is miserable, and she can't get her stubborn and controlling Fantasy-Forbidding Father to listen to her and let her go back to homeschooling.
• Berserk Button: Downplayed, but the novelizations show that it really fiddles her button when people treat her like she's Just a Kid who isn't equipped to get involved in Monarch/Titan matters.
• Betrayal by Offspring: After renouncing her mother for betraying Monarch and killing millions of people, Madison takes it upon herself to abandon her mother's plan and help Monarch and her dad. Emma is visibly stung when she learns what Madison has done, as she seems to realize just how severely her own actions have nuked what remained of her family.
• Big Damn Heroes: Madison's first act of defiance against her mother has her snatching the ORCA from Emma and using it to distract Ghidorah in a bid to save her father. After witnessing the destruction Emma and Jonah's plans have caused, Madison steals the ORCA, sneaks out of a bunker full of armed terrorists, hikes miles to Fenway Park, and uses the ORCA to disrupt Ghidorah's communication with the other Titans, meaning she pretty much singlehandedly helps save the world.
• Big "NO!": She screams a frantic string of them when her mother moves to make a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Brainy Brunette: She's apparently inherited her father's brown hair, and supplementary materials note that she's an exceptionally academically-smart kid – she's also, despite her young age, one of the gutsiest human characters in the entire MonsterVerse period when it comes to using her intelligence to help the world at large. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Madison demonstrates that she knows how to operate the ORCA thanks to her mother, and she has the smarts to steal it from Jonah's eco-terrrorists and navigate her way out of their bunker undetected. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Madison is well-aware that they have to work out why Godzilla is rampaging whilst everyone else is either easily condemning Godzilla or operating on a "shoot first and ask questions later" mentality, and to that end, Madison single-handedly tracks down the enigmatic and paranoid Mad Truth podcaster's real identity and address.
• Break the Cutie: She already went through the first stage starting from the age of seven, when her older brother died and her parents' marriage collapsed soon after. Despite this, she's still a Wide-Eyed Idealist at the start of the movie with a profound awe for Titans such as Mothra and concern for her parents' welfare (especially her father's). Then she gets dragged by her mother's manipulations into an Eco-Terrorist plot where she's forced to watch Monarch operatives she grew up around get massacred by the dozens, she watches her own mother knowingly leave her father to die while unwittingly unleashing a world-ending force which triggers a global apocalypse, she suffers a Near-Death Experience while caught in the crossfire of a city-destroying Titan battle, and finally she helplessly watches her mother die under very similar circumstances to her late brother. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization reveals that Madison has PTSD from her up-close experiences of Jonah massacring Monarch outposts and her close brush with Ghidorah when the monster was actively hunting her.
• Broken Tears: She's reduced to tears when Emma sticks to and enacts the deathly next stage of her plan by awakening Rodan whilst hundreds if not thousands of islanders are in the line of fire after Madison profusely and desperately pleaded with Emma not to. Madison's tears continue rolling when she calls her mother a monster after Ghidorah, one of the Titans Emma earlier awakened as part of her plan, has overturned her plan entirely, and also when Madison subsequently calls her mother out on how Andrew would be horrified by what she's done. It's subtly implied that Madison's tears are not helped by the knowledge that she was complicit for a while in the mass death and destruction her mother has unleashed due to her blind obedience to the woman before her Heel Realization.
• Calling the Old Woman Out: She raves at her mother over how the latter's plan has spiralled completely out of control after Ghidorah takes over the Earth's Titans, for not thinking of a better way to prevent the government from trying to kill the sleeping Titans than eco-terrorism and sacrificing millions of lives, and most of all, for doing all this in Andrew's name when any sane person in Emma's position should know that their child would never have wanted this.
• Censored Child Death: Downplayed when she has a Near-Death Experience in King of the Monsters. She gets crushed by the rubble of a collapsing house offscreen, before she's dug out by her parents and the G-Team in the midst of an NDE and resuscitates.
• Child Prodigy: Her official profile lists her as one. Not entirely surprising, given she's the daughter of two brilliant scientists, though she would rather learn through hands-on experience outside of a classroom much like her outdoorsman father.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Played With. In Godzilla vs. Kong, she's a regular listener to Bernie's Mad Truth podcasts to the point of avidly reading between the podcasts' lines as it were, and she's wholly convinced that Bernie is barking up the right tree by investigating Apex Cybernetics. The novelization specifies that Madison is well-aware most of Bernie's conspiracy theories are hocum, but she's listening because he tends to bark up the right tree when it comes to Titans.
• Cowardice Callout: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, she rightly chews out Mark when the latter attempts to use pity for himself to emotionally blackmail her into obeying him; pointing out that Mark's authoritarian and insensitive parenting style isn't motivated by legitimate concern for her welfare, but by him being completely wrapped up in his self-pity and his terror of losing her to the point that he would rather helicopter his daughter into helplessness (or unwittingly sabotage his relationship with her while trying) than put what Madison needs (support, encouragement, and thoughtfulness from a father) ahead of his own insecurities and self-absorption.
• Damsel out of Distress: In King of the Monsters, she proves herself to be this. It isn't obvious how well she can take care of herself at first, due to subservience to Emma making her stay with the latter and Jonah's goons, and everyone — from Emma to Mark to Jonah — assumes she's Just a Kid who can't do much about her de facto hostage situation on her own. But after Madison realizes how low Emma has sunk and that they're on the wrong side, and she gets an idea about how to stop the Titans' global massacre; she proceeds to steal the ORCA out from under the eco-terrorists' noses, escape through a ventilation shaft, and walk on foot away from the bunker and into Boston to save the world, with her actions ensuring that the devastating Final Battle occurs in a relatively-empty city.
• Deep Breath Reveals Tension: Invoked just after the massacre of Outpost 32, when Emma tells Madison to take deep breaths "just like we talked about" to keep herself calm, when they're walking with Jonah's mercenaries past dozens of fresh corpses.
• Deer in the Headlights: In Godzilla vs. Kong, when Skullcrawler Number Ten is being released from its paddock, Madison at first freezes up while Bernie and Josh immediately make a break for it. The novelization confirms this is due to the sight of the Skullcrawler triggering her PTSD from her experiences in King of the Monsters.
• Defiant to the End: When Ghidorah has her cornered with no escape and is about to blast her with all three heads' worth of Gravity Beams, Madison just screams at the dragon in defiant rage. Fortunately, Godzilla shows up just in time to ensure this doesn't end up being her final moments.
• Deuteragonist: She's the Kid Hero version where she takes up the last act of the second film luring King Ghidorah to Boston. She takes the protagonist role on Godzilla's side of the story in order to figure out why Godzilla's sudden attacks are directly towards Apex and not humanity as a whole.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Luring Ghidorah to Fenway Park using the ORCA's signal, and then staying put and looking out for signs of the pissed three-headed monster's arrival instead of getting the hell out of dodge, wasn't particularly smart. The novelization explains she remains put both to prevent anyone else finding and turning off the ORCA (at which point the Titans will fall back under Ghidorah's control) and because she incorrectly guesses that Jonah's forces will be out in the city looking for her and the ORCA.
  • When Ghidorah arrives at Fenway Park, Madison unplugs the ORCA from the stadium's PA system but doesn't turn off the device itself, which leaves the signal that had originally been broadcasting over the PA speakers now coming from the ORCA's own speakers in her hands. Which allows all three of Ghidorah's heads to almost instantly zero in on Madison's exact location, staring through the windows right at her. Additionally, because she did unplug the ORCA and leave it on, the three heads catch her red-handed at the source of the Alpha frequency, and they correctly conclude that she's Ghidorah's new challenger for dominance which has disrupted their global Titan control, prompting Ghidorah to go all in trying to vaporize his tiny new rival.
• Did You Just Flip Off Cthulhu?: Her response to Ghidorah cornering her and preparing to blast her with all three heads' Gravity Beams at once? She just screams defiantly right up at the 500-foot monster as he's charging his Gravity Beams.
• Distress Ball: She's sharp enough and brave enough to use the survival training her mother taught her to steal the ORCA, sneak through ventilation shafts, and be miles away from the eco-terrorists' base before they even know where's gone, with a plan in place to help the heroes to hinder Ghidorah and his Titan army's global rampage whilst luring Ghidorah to an empty city for the Final Battle. But once she starts broadcasting the ORCA to lure Ghidorah in, Madison doesn't have any plan to avoid being vaporized by the incensed hydra when he arrives, nor does she even seem to see the need to: she stands outside on Fenway Park's rooftops, looking for signs of Ghidorah coming with a pair of binoculars. This leads to Madison almost getting fried by Ghidorah's Gravity Beams once he catches her red-handed, holding his bio-acoustic Berserk Button, before Godzilla arrives.
• Don't You Dare Pity Me!: Downplayed, but both the Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong novelizations show that Madison doesn't appreciate being treated like she's Just a Kid, and she refuses to be a victim no matter what she's been through.
• Et Tu, Brute?: She's hurt and horrified to the point of tears when she discovers what kind of a person her mother really is, with the latter going through with awakening Rodan despite both Mark and madison's conscientious pleas to at least give the desperate islanders time to get to safety. The novelization has this to say about Madison's feelings in this moment:
  Maybe her mother hadn't lied to her, not exactly. But she felt fundamentally betrayed, in a way she never had before.
  She'd thought she knew her mother.
  She knew now that she did not.
• Famed In-Story: In Godzilla vs. Kong, she's apparently somewhat well-known in powerful and influential circles, due to her mother's world-changing and controversial legacy and her father's high-ranking job in Monarch. Bernie has heard of both her parents, and corporate billionaire Walter Simmons quickly recognizes her as Mark Russell's daughter by having seen her face somewhere before (possibly in a news report).
• Flipping the Bird: When Jonah attempts to amuse her while they're going down in an elevator, an unimpressed Madison responds to the ruthless killer's display with a middle finger thinly veiled as an eye-rub.
• Foil:
  • To Bernie Hayes. They've both lost people close to them under tragic circumstances, but Madison still has her father after losing her brother and mother, whereas Bernie apparently had no-one after his wife died. Madison is on the receiving end of Underestimating Badassery after the events of King of the Monsters, while Bernie is a Cloudcuckoolander who uses Obfuscating Stupidity to make others underestimate him, and both of them prove to be quite skilled at wiling their ways around security and sinister organizations to get what they want. Bernie is quite a silly and goofy-seeming grown man though not quite a Manchild, while Madison is a teenager who's Wise Beyond Her Years. Madison is somewhat Famed In-Story as Mark and Emma Russell's daughter in Godzilla vs. Kong, while Bernie is an unassuming Apex employee in real-life and a somewhat well-known anonymous podcaster on the internet.
  • And to Ren Serizawa, something which is slightly highlighted by the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization. They're both cases of Like Father, Unlike Child. Both of them were raised by their respective fathers in a way which worked for said father but not for their child and caused strain in their relationship (My Beloved Smother with a dash of Fantasy-Forbidding Father from Madison's father and Parental Neglect from Ren's father), and it leads to both of them respectively rebelling against their fathers' beliefs (Ren on a much more massive scale than Madison). They also both lost their mothers at a young age. It can be argued that Ren and Madison are both somewhat reckless in regards to their self-preservation: Madison tends to head towards danger when she sets her mind on helping, and though she has succeeded in being a massive help, she's also twice almost been killed by a Titan and saved by sheer luck; while Ren is an Evil Genius who commits to a horrifically arrogant and Too Dumb to Live method of achieving his Evil Plan which ultimately leads Ren and his allies to their destruction. Where Ren and Madison differ is that Madison still has her father, whilst Ren implicitly went dark-side as a result of his father dying before they could reconcile. Madison has a profound connection to the Titans but is highly compassionate when human lives are endangered, while Ren is a Muggle Power supremacist who callously and hypocritically puts thousands of innocent lives in Godzilla's warpath without a second thought.
• Friendless Background: The Godzilla: King of the Monsters novelization confirms that outside of Monarch staff, Madison doesn't have many friends due to traveling a lot with her mother. According to the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, this hasn't changed much since Mark made her start attending school: she's an outcast among her school peers and hasn't made any friends her age except for Josh.
• Friend to All Children: In the King of the Monsters novelization, she takes a moment to flash a terrified child a reassuring smile at the Fenway Park evacuations.
• Friend to Bugs: She shows signs of forming a profound connection with the lepidoterran Mothra, and her Monarch Sciences bio and the King of the Monsters official novelization both furthermore state that Madison likes to spend free time studying insect ecosystems generally.
• Good Angel, Bad Angel: In King of the Monsters, she and Jonah form a metaphorical version of this ensemble, with Emma as the person they're trying to influence. Madison is the Good Angel, positioned by the cinematography on Emma's right shoulder and trying to convince Emma to not allow Rodan to be awakened while there are still people caught in the way, while Jonah is the Bad Angel on Emma's left who is trying to get the latter to stick to their plan. The Bad Angel wins.
• Hair-Contrast Duo: Ultimately inverted between her and Emma. Madison has inherited her father's dark-brown hair color, and she's firmly the Light Feminine and the good one of the two: starting out as a Wide-Eyed Idealist who's trying to please her mother, and being utterly horrified by the atrocities her mother orchestrates to the point of eventually turning on Emma in disgust. On the other hand, Madison has a sneaky, rebellious and intelligent streak of her own.
• Harmful to Minors: She was only seven years old when the cinematic embodiments of atomic weaponry destroyed her home and the surrounding city, with her older brother being found dead; and in the aftermath, she watched her father slip into alcoholism while her mother immersed herself in work. It gets even worse by the time Madison is twelve: she witnesses first-hand armed men whom she and her mother are in cahoots with massacring dozens of people including her personal mentors in a haze of gunfire, and that's before she, and her loved ones in full view of her, start having life-threatening close calls with the Titans.
• Heel Realization: In King of the Monsters, Madison is distressed from the very beginning by Jonah's merciless slaughter of people in Monarch who Madison knew (something which Emma had neglected to mentally fortify Madison against whilst indoctrinating her), but Madison begins to seriously doubt the Eco-Terrorist plan her mother has pulled her into going along with during Ghidorah's awakening; realizing from the sight of the awakened hydra that this is a Titan humans can never coexist with^note Described in the novelization, and being horrified when her mother forces her to leave her own father for dead and at Ghidorah's mercy. Madison's doubts increase after she overhears Mark's scathing deconstruction of Emma's grief and his criticism of her deciding the fate of the world for everyone, and it pushes Madison to try talking Emma out of releasing Rodan whilst people are still in danger. When Emma doesn't listen, and when Rodan's awakening is shortly thereafter followed by Ghidorah taking control of the other Titans, this is the final straw which makes Madison realize her mother is not the hero she thought she was and she's on the wrong side.
• Held Gaze: Antagonistic type, in the King of the Monsters novelization. When Madison is trying to convince Emma that they don't have to do what Jonah expects them to, Jonah responds to Madison directly telling him to bite her by locking gazes with her and gesturing to his gun, which briefly cows Madison.
• "Hell, Yes!" Moment: This is written all over her face when Godzilla shows up to battle King Ghidorah at Boston.
• Heroic BSoD: According to the production crew, and more expressly spelled out in the novelization, her retreating back to her parents' house in the heat of a city-destroying kaiju battle is this. As Godzilla and Mothra fight Ghidorah and Rodan, Madison tries to flee the battle to avoid being unwittingly stepped on, only to realize that no matter how far she runs the Titans can cover that same distance in a heartbeat. Panicking, she runs to the one place she associates with safety — the home where she grew up — and then breaks down upon realizing that it's no safer than anywhere else in the city.
• His Story Repeats Itself: Though she's coped with her brother's death and the San Francisco destruction in a much healthier manner than either of her parents, it's still implied that Madison developed her "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl tendencies at the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters amidst the initial fallout among the family. Madison outgrows this as she becomes disillusioned with Emma and realizes how heavily the woman has manipulated her, before she finally watches her family's original home city get destroyed by another Titan battle that involves Godzilla, and she loses another member of her family to the destruction. Godzilla vs. Kong shows Madison has become a much stronger person for what she went through, in contrast to Mark who has only exchanged his old shortcomings for new ones or has failed to shed them at all.
• Homeschooled Kids: She received this kind of education during the years she was living with her mother and traveling the world with her and Monarch. Come Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark has enrolled her in public school, but she would much rather return to homeschooling, except she can't, due to Mark's unmoving stubborness and refusal to seriously listen to her.
• I Just Want to Be Normal: According to her King of the Monsters Monarch profile, despite her natural scientific prowess and curiosity, Madison wants to be a normal teenager and live a normal life. She appears to have changed her mind after finding herself less than satisfied with her father's somewhat overbearing attempts at normalcy in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization.
• Idiot Ball: Even though she knew that being with her dad was safer, Madison still decides to stay with Emma Russel, despite knowing that they’re with dangerous people in a dangerous place.
• The Insomniac: Somewhat downplayed, but in Godzilla vs. Kong: The Official Novelization, she has frequent sleeping problems due to PTSD from her experiences in the previous movie.
• Interspecies Friendship: She forms a fledgling bond with the giant insectoid Titan, Mothra. In the novelization, Madison has something like an out of body experience and her connection with Mothra and her memory of the Titan somehow resuscitates her after she's buried by her house collapsing.
• Jumped at the Call: In Godzilla vs. Kong, she has no interest in staying in school as Mark wants of her when Godzilla starts rampaging, particularly when she realizes no-one but her is actually going to have the basic common sense to investigate the targeted Apex facilities before it's too late. The novelization expands on this, showing that Mark has become a smothering and helicoptering Fantasy-Forbidding Father who wants Madison to have as normal a life as he can imagine, but Madison would much rather return to being homeschooled as she'd been for most of her life before ending up in Mark's custody.
• Just a Kid:
  • It's never said to her face, but in the King of the Monsters novelization, Dr. Mancini feels this way about Madison's presence, which inwardly irks her. It's also implied this trope causes Madison's parents and also Jonah and his goons to underestimate her capabilities.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark doesn't say it outright, but it's fairly clear part of the reason he's so condescending and dismissive of her when she tries to approach him about Godzilla's attack is because he still sees her as the little girl he left behind almost a decade ago rather than an equal, despite ALL evidence to the contrary. Things between Mark and Madison are even worse in the novelization's Adaptation Expansion, where Mark is shown to be a smothering and over-authoritative Fantasy-Forbidding Father who doesn't listen to anything Madison has to say nor give much thought to her feelings if they run counter to his own wants, and he acts like Madison knows less than him about what's best for her. In the novel, Madison also attempts contacting other Monarch operatives after she's unable to talk any sense into her father, but all of them respond to her about the same way Mark did.
• The Leader: Of Team Godzilla. She leads a team consisting of herself, her friend Josh, and a Titan conspiracy theorist named Bernie as they go to the Apex bases and try to find out why Godzilla has been attacking them.
• Light Feminine and Dark Feminine: She's the Light Feminine to her mother's Dark Feminine in King of the Monsters, which is ironic considering Madison's darker brown hair comparative to her mother's light blonde hair. Madison has an intimate connection to benevolent Titans including an almost maternal link to Mothra, yet she's far more compassionate and empathetic than Emma when it comes to people's lives. Madison also starts the movie as a little bit of a Wide-Eyed Idealist due to her mother's manipulation, but she proves to be much more emotionally mature than Emma once she catches on to just how dangerous some of the Titans are and how serious the stakes are.
• Like Father, Unlike Son: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, she and her father differ in that Madison has no interest in being normal following her early upbringing with her mother in a Limited Social Circle at Monarch, and her experiences in King of the Monsters which turned her into a Shell-Shocked Veteran. Mark on the other hand has implicitly rejoined Monarch solely out of a sense of duty, and he would be all too happy to never deal with Titans again if it could be helped, and unfortunately; he's implicitly projecting his own longing for a normal life onto Madison. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization also notes that Madison vehemently refuses to be seen as a victim (despite what her father thinks of her), which stands in stark contrast to Mark's chronic self-pitying tendency.
• Limited Social Circle: Given how she was homeschooled and traveled a lot growing up with both her parents in Monarch, Madison doesn't have many friends outside of them and other Monarch employees, as confirmed in the King of the Monsters novelization. In the novelization of Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark attempted to defy this trope for Madison by enroling her in a public school and expecting her to make normal friends her age, but the only friend she's made is Josh whilst being an outcast among the rest of her school peers.
• Little Miss Badass:
  • When a 12-year-old girl steals a high-tech gadget from a ruthless terrorist group right under their noses because it's the right thing to do, and then uses it to pacify a host of giant monsters and in doing so incur the wrath of what is basically the Satan of Titans in order to save mankind from certain annihilation, you know she's got balls the size of Ghidorah's heads. Best of all, she succeeds where all the militaries on Earth would've failed miserably, effectively saving the world.
  • Three to five years later as a teenager, she's practically the only human on Earth who has the basic common sense to ask why Godzilla attacked the Apex facility, acts an Amateur Sleuth by tracking down Bernie Hayes, break into Apex, discover their plans to create a Titan-killing death machine in the form of Mechagodzilla, gives Walter Simmons a Reason You Suck speech, and is basically responsible for her team being in a place to help Godzilla and Kong take down Mechagodzilla. At this point the girl deserves a medal for basically saving the world twice.
• Loud of War: In King of the Monsters, she tries to distract Ghidorah in order to save her father's and the Monarch top brass's lives by activating the ORCA and seemingly amplifying its bio-acoustic signal massively (based on how its pulses are much more rapid), an act which causes Ghidorah to outright scream in pain. It only works until the ORCA is turned off just before Ghidorah can try to shut the noise up himself.
• The Meddling Kids Are Useless: Subverted by her and the rest of Team Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong. Their investigation into Apex doesn't affect the plot and it merely serves as a plot device and P.O.V. for the audience to uncover Apex's true intentions. Until the battle against Mechagodzilla, where Bernie and Josh both being in the right place at the right time due to Madison bringing them along in her investigation was pivotal to Mechagodzilla's downfall – if Josh and Bernie hadn't been there at that moment to short out Mechagodzilla's computer and cause it to briefly stall when it was in the middle of trying to kill Kong, then Mechagodzilla would have likely won.
• The Millstone: Justified when she's on the villainous team in King of the Monsters. She's basically just being dragged along by a mother whom she initially wants to please; a mother who failed to do anything to properly condition Madison for the horrors they were going to partake in (much to Jonah's ire), meaning Madison is struck by horror at the atrocities she's complicit in by association, and she only ever takes an active part in what's happening when it's to the eco-terrorists' detriment. Madison uses the ORCA against her mother's and Jonah's demands in order to save her father and the Monarch brass's lives by disorienting Ghidorah, at the price of almost getting herself and all the eco-terrorists shot out of the sky by the hydra; later on, Madison argues with her mother against awakening another Titan while their time window to continue with the group's plan is rapidly closing.
• A Minor Kidroduction: She makes her very first appearances as a nine-year-old girl in the opening flashback of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and in the prequel graphic novel Godzilla: Aftershock which was released to promote the movie before its premiere. In the former, she expresses awe at the sight of Godzilla despite the destruction surrounding her, and in the latter, she has a moment of intelligent empathy for Godzilla when she recognizes that he's hurt; foreshadowing her sense of emotional connection to and positive view of the Protector Titans like Godzilla, and her ability to look deeper at them past the destruction their presences cause. The young Madison is also physically close to and being held/supervised by Emma, foreshadowing that she's closer to her mother in the King of the Monsters movie's present at first, and that Emma has a powerful emotional grip on Madison.
• Missing Child: She's kidnapped by Alan Jonah and his mercenaries alongside her mother (in reality, she was manipulated by her mother into going along with their plot willingly). From there, Monarch's and especially Mark's objective is getting Madison and her mother back. After Emma is revealed to be Evil All Along, finding Madison alone becomes Mark's main focus, with the G-Team accompanying him into Boston to look for her and the ORCA.
• Mouthy Kid: She nonchalantly flips Jonah — a murderous eco-terrorist who kidnapped her and her mother — the bird, and isn't afraid to stand up to her mother. She flat-out rhetorically asks Emma if Andrew, whose name she's dedicated her actions to, would be pleased knowing what Emma has done, which sends Emma into tearful introspection. In the novelization, after Jonah condescends Madison for buying into a completely sugar-coated version of the eco-terrorists' plan which her mother told her, she gives him this reply:
  Madison: Bite me, dickhead!
• Must Make Amends: The King of the Monsters novelization shows that after Madison has completed her Heel Realization, she's motivated by making up for her own part in helping Emma and Jonah to unleash Ghidorah on the world and indirectly jump-start the global apocalypse when she steals the ORCA and disrupts King Ghidorah's global Titan control.
• Nature Lover: She's had a fascination with nature and the outdoors (particularly the entomology of insects), not unlike her father's, since her childhood.
• Near-Death Experience: The novelization confirms she has one when she's buried under debris while hiding in her home's bathtub before awakening. It also indicates Mothra's intervention is responsible for resuscitating her.
• Nice, Mean, and In-Between: She's firmly the Nice among the three Russells who survived San Francisco, possessing all the best traits and none of the worst traits of both her parents. She passionately and selflessly cares about other people as human beings (unlike her mom), and she lacks her father's bull-headed tendencies and his self-centered streak.
• Not Now, Kiddo: She's on the receiving end in Godzilla vs. Kong. She's pretty much the only person in the world besides Bernie who's not being selectively oblivious to the obvious pattern when Godzilla begins attacking population centers and concentrating the destruction on local Apex facilities, but Mark (and multiple other people in Monarch whom Madison tries to alert in the novelization) dismiss her out of hand.
• Obfuscating Stupidity: In the King of the Monsters novelization, she pulls the "innocent kid" act when caught by a Mook trying to steal the ORCA, before she tazes him.
• Oh, Crap!:
  • When she realizes Ghidorah has zeroed in on her at Fenway Park, all she can do is slowly turn around to see Ichi, Ni and San are looking through the window right at her, and the middle head is visibly pissed. She promptly says "Oh shit!" and makes a run for it.
  • The King of the Monsters novelization's version of Madison's first scene in the present shows that she's inwardly dismayed and cursing when Emma arrives in the kitchen, realizing that her mother is all the more likely to catch her trying to contact Mark given Emma's perception skills as a paleobiologist. Madison also inwardly curses in panic the moment she realizes her mother is about to risk going into an aggravated Mothra's chamber in an effort to calm the Titan down herself. During the battle in Boston, she quickly realizes that she's in danger of being unwittingly stepped on and flees through the city in terror back to the only place she instinctively thinks of as safe: her childhood home.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, her face fills with horror and she says "Oh, my God!" when she comes across Ghidorah's wired-up skull in Apex Cybernetics' headquarters. When Bernie promptly identifies the creature, Madison is visibly on the verge of dread-fueled tears, whispering the name of the dreaded nightmare dragon which almost ended the world, tried to kill her, and caused her mother's death.
• "Oh, Crap!" Smile: Subverted in the King of the Monsters novelization, when she's caught by one of Jonah's men. She puts on a sheepish, innocent smile to catch him off-guard before she tazes him.
• Only Sane by Comparison: She has shades of this amongst the three-man Team Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong. She's debatably the most intelligent of the trio, if one subtracts intelligence points from Bernie due to him being a hardcore Conspiracy Theorist and Cloudcuckoolander, despite him having more resources than Madison at the movie's start. She's also a lot more serious than the other two team-members, with their comic relief tendencies. That being said, Madison still has no compunctions against going head-first into probable unknown danger if it'll get her closer to the answers she seeks; a trait she shares with Bernie, but the cautious Josh notably lacks, so ultimately this trope is Played With between her and Josh.
• Only Sane Woman: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, she's effectively this among her surviving family: between her father the cynical Titan-hater and her mother the pro-Titan radical Eco-Terrorist, Madison is by far the most well-balanced and well-adjusted of the three surviving Russells. She lacks her father's hot-bloodedness and rage against the Titans, yet she's far more moral and empathetic than Emma when it comes to bloodshed and sacrificing millions of innocent lives; and she's delighted by benevolent Titans such as Mothra, but she realizes far sooner than her mother does that an awakened Ghidorah is bad news for humanity.
• Parental Neglect: She was on the receiving end of this after her brother's death: her mother became a workaholic, while her father turned to drinking, divorced Emma and became estranged from Madison. It's hinted in Godzilla: Aftershock and outright stated in the King of the Monsters novelization that the presence of Madison's Honorary Aunt Vivienne Graham was a source of stability for her during this period. Five years after Andrew's death, Madison and Mark have only sporadic contact^note Described in the novelization (although it's subtly hinted, and further implied in a deleted scene and the novelization, that this is partly due to Emma trying to alienate Madison from her father out of spite), and even Emma is somewhat distant. It's revealed to be horrifically downplayed in Emma's case: she's been giving Madison survival training, trying to bond with her by letting her participate in Emma's Monarch work, and she's indoctrinated Madison into her and Jonah's Eco-Terrorist plot without doing anything to in any way give Madison the mental fortitude to expect and bear the plan's bloodshed; causing Madison to be traumatized when the plan starts, whilst Emma seems to take a very long time to twig the seriousness of this due to her mental instability. By the time of the Final Battle, both of Madison's parents have come to regret the way they've treated their surviving child.
• Pursuing Parental Perils: She's just as passionate about and drawn to Titans (particularly Godzilla and Mothra) as her mother whilst having none of Emma's more... unsavory qualities, despite Madison's brother and mother being casualties of Titan attacks which she and her family got caught up in. In Godzilla vs. Kong, she's determined to do anything and everything she can to get stuck in and work out what's provoking Godzilla's attacks. This is a source of friction between Madison and Mark in Godzilla vs. Kong, as Mark wants her to stay away from Monarch and the Titans partly because of the loved ones they've lost to the creatures.
• Really Moves Around: As noted on her Monarch Sciences profile, she's been moved around the world for most of her life due to her mother's job at Monarch before the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, it's stated that after Emma's death left Madison in Mark's custody, the latter's re-employment with Monarch led to them moving around the world, until Mark insisted on settling down in Pensacola a year before the main time frame.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech: Delivers an absolutely brutal one to her mother; calling her out for killing millions if not nearly causing the extinction of mankind, all in the name of her deceased brother when she knew fully well Andrew wouldn't have wanted that and Emma was doing all this for her own delusional misguided reasons.
  • Gives Walter Simmons the same, if briefer, treatment when she confronts him about building Mechagodzilla as a weapon to protect humanity, when doing it so actually endangered it.
• Rebellious Rebel: She ends up rebelling against a rebel group in King of the Monsters. She's been manipulated by Emma into joining her and Alan Jonah's anarchist plot to set the Titans loose on the world in the name of creating a utopia, but Madison becomes disgusted and disillusioned when she realizes just how happy Emma and Jonah are to murder billions of innocents, just how little control Emma really has, and just how dangerous the Titans are under King Ghidorah's control. It culminates in Madison betraying Jonah's faction by stealing the ORCA out from under their noses and slipping away after she overhears Jonah refusing to try and combat the threat of Ghidorah.
• Rebellious Spirit: Somewhat downplayed. Madison is a consistent rule-breaker who doesn't care much for listening to authority if she doesn't agree with it. Her Monarch Sciences bio notes that she's committed more than one security violations while growing up in Monarch, she doesn't hesitate to defy Dr. Mancini by stealing his I.D. card and using it to access Mothra's inner sanctum when her mother is in danger, and she chafes the entire time she and Emma are around Alan Jonah despite the fact this is Jonah we're talking about. To say nothing of when Madison steals the ORCA from Jonah, her mother and the other eco-terrorists of her own initiative, nor when Madison rebels against Mark's smothering shtick in Godzilla vs. Kong; in order to do what's right both times.
• The Runaway: Madison runs away with the ORCA from the Monarch bunker that Alan Jonah and his mercenaries are in by sneaking through the air ducts so that not even Emma can hear it.
• Shared Family Quirks: A Daughter variation regarding both her parents. Despite being much less Hot-Blooded, egocentric and distrustful of the Titans and being more sound-minded than her father, Madison does share Mark's love for outdoors field work. Compared to her mother, Madison is much more moral and compassionate with a far better sense of right and wrong, but the Monarch Sciences website reveals Madison does share her Rebellious Spirit with Emma. One thing Madison has inherited from both her parents (particularly her father) is a keen connection to the Titans.
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization confirms that she has PTSD after her traumatic experiences at Outpost 61 and Boston during the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Short Teens, Tall Adults: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters where the character is supposed to be a preteen (but is portrayed by the then mid-teenage Millie Bobby Brown), Madison is notably shorter than most of the adults around her including her mother, but only by half a head. Due to Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong being filmed back-to-back with each-other, Madison appears to be about the same height relative to adults in Godzilla vs. Kong despite the narrative's Time Skip meaning she's now seventeen.
• Sins of Our Fathers: A mild case in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, which mentions that her mother's infamous actions in King of the Monsters are one of the reasons why she's bullied and ostracized at school.
• Socially Awkward Hero: Madison can summon up the courage to steal the ORCA single-handedly out from under the noses of murderous eco-terrorists, she can scream defiantly in Ghidorah's three faces whilst Ghidorah is lazer-focused on murdering her specifically, and she can get a high-schooler and a conspiracy theorist to help her break into Apex Cybernetics... but, as revealed in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, she can barely stand enduring the snickers, ostracism and ugly looks of kids in high school, not helped by the fact she was completely homeschooled for several years of her education before Mark decided the best way to get her social skills refined was by throwing her in the deep end and making her stick to it.
• Stress Vomit: The novelization mentions she had one offscreen in response to seeing the massacre's aftermath at Mothra's temple.
• Strict Parents Make Sneaky Kids: Both of Madison's parents have proven to be restrictive with her in their own ways: Emma tried to restrict her security access within Monarch and even worse she brainwashed Madison into blindly serving her Eco-Terrorist agenda without question, whilst Mark after gaining custody of her has been a helicopter parent who refuses to have any trust or faith in her (''especially' in the novelization, where he projects his own wants in life onto her and refuses to communicate mutually with her). Not only has this failed to temper Madison's independent streak in any way, but it's taught Madison to go behind either parent's back when she needs to, and she has a knack for this: successfully stealing the ORCA and escaping without Emma knowing what's happened until Madison is far away, and rebelling against Mark's efforts to keep her at home and under watch by convincing Josh to steal his brother's truck so she can sneak out with it and investigate Apex Cybernetics.
• Strong Family Resemblance: She technically looks like her mother, Emma Russell. Due to their similar hair shapes. The only difference being that Madison’s hair has darker shades.
• Tagalong Kid:
  • Due to her Limited Social Circle when growing up as a homeschooled Monarch kid and forming friendships with her mother's co-workers, and also due to being a Child Prodigy; Madison was essentially a tagalong kid to Monarch in the years before the events of King of the Monsters
  • After she and her mother are kidnapped by Jonah – actually, Emma and a manipulated Madison were both in on Jonah's plan and being "picked up" – she gets pulled along with Emma, Jonah, and the latter's paramilitary troops as they go around the world to free the Titans. More than that, due to Madison's mother indoctrinating her into the plan yet doing absolutely nothing to mentally condition her to deal with the horrible side of it, Madison deliberately makes herself The Load among the eco-terrorists while trying to sabotage some of their worst acts (snatching the ORCA and nearly getting the Osprey they're all on shot out of the sky by Ghidorah in a desperate effort to save her father, and trying to stop her mother from releasing Rodan while there's people in danger); much to Jonah's ire, although he's forced to keep lagging Madison around in order to maintain Emma's cooperation, until Madison bails.
• Time-Shifted Actor: Millie Bobby Brown is her main actress, but Alexandra Rabe portrays her child self in King of the Monsters.
• Token Good Teammate: She ends up being this among Jonah's paramilitary. A deleted scene which depicts Jonah and several mercs watching Madison's kickboxing lessons seems to indicate the organization officially consider Madison one of them. Yet she's expressly horrified and disgusted by all the slaughter that Jonah and his mercenaries commit and by Emma's willing complicitness in it. Jonah for his part seems to be quite annoyed (particularly in the novelization) that he has to drag around a conscientious liability in order to maintain Emma's cooperation. It ends with Madison jumping ship on the organization.
• Tomboy: Specifically an Effeminate Tomboy. She's scientific-minded, she swears a lot, and she has very few known traits that would be traditionally considered "girly".
• Tomboyish Name: She's overall quite a tomboy, and the name Madison is technically a unisex name which originally means "son of Matthew".
• Trauma Button: In Godzilla vs. Kong, when Team Godzilla first see Number Ten emerging, if one looks closely, Madison temporarily freezes up whilst Bernie and Josh are already running for their lives. The novelization confirms the movie's hint that the sight of the Skullcrawler triggered Madison's PTSD, causing her mind to briefly go back to her nightmarish encounter with King Ghidorah at Fenway Park.
• Two First Names: An American hero in an American Godzilla movie, whose last name is also traditionally a first name.
• "Well Done, Daughter!" Girl: It's implied in King of the Monsters that a desire to please is part of the reason why Madison went along with her mother's plan for the ORCA and has been so easily manipulated by Emma until the bodies start dropping – the novelization outright confirms it, saying that Madison felt she needed to please both her parents after Andrew's death, then that she had to please her mother after Mark left them. It rapidly goes away as Madison rapidly realizes just how far her mother has fallen and that Emma doesn't know nearly as much about what they're doing as Madison thought she did, Calling the Old Woman Out and turning her back on her.
• What Is Going On?: In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, she asks her father this question over the cellphone when he calls her cellphone and orders her to prepare to be picked up and have an overnight stay. He doesn't give her a straight answer to the question, and Madison finds out herself when we next see her that Godzilla is lashing out.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Early on in Godzilla vs Kong, she doesn't hesitate to call her father out, for just jumping out of hand to the conclusion that Godzilla's attacks mean he's turned against humanity without any evidence and without even trying to find a cause, insisting there has to be a cause after what they both saw of Godzilla's heroic actions during the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: At the start of King of the Monsters, she admires the Titans, but her mother has only given her exposure to highly-benevolent ones such as Mothra, and she furthermore sugarcoated the other Titans' temperaments while indoctrinating Madison into the eco-terrorists' plan. As a result, Madison initially doesn't think there'll be much of a problem with the other Titans awakening. She rapidly begins realizing how wrong she was when she has her first encounter with a hostile Titan, specifically the evilest Titan of them all: just seeing Ghidorah when he rises, and witnessing the carnage he quickly inflicts out of pure malice and hatred, makes Madison realize that some of the Titans might not be nearly as nice as Emma led her to believe.
• Wise Beyond Their Years: Despite frequently being on the receiving end of the Just a Kid trope, Madison in both her movie appearances has displayed courage, ingenuity and independence that goes well beyond her age (she's only twelve years old in Godzilla: King of the Monsters and seventeen in Godzilla vs. Kong), and it's implied in Godzilla vs. Kong that her traumatic experiences have increased her toughness and resolve. Her capabilities, intelligence and strength of character have enabled her to work her way around Alan Jonah's paramilitary and escape their base, on foot, with one of their most prized assets in hand, and they've also enabled her to succeed where adult so-called professionals around the world failed at catching onto Apex Cybernetics' role in Godzilla's rampage. That being said, Madison still displays signs of her true age at times: in Godzilla vs. Kong, she shows slight Jumped at the Call tendencies, and her close brush with death by Ghidorah's Gravity Beams isn't enough to stop her feeling anxious of school bullies in the novelization.
• You Monster!: After Emma makes the call to awaken Rodan in spite of Madison's protests, which escalates into Ghidorah forcing Rodan into submission, Godzilla accidentally being taken out by the military's Oxygen Destroyer missile, and the other Titans awakening to go on the rampage at Ghidorah's command; Madison hits her mother with this.

Andrew Russell

Portrayed By: Tyler Crumley

Appears In: Godzilla: King of the Monsters

Mark and Emma's son, and Madison's older brother. He died amidst Godzilla and the MUTOs' San Francisco battle in 2014.

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• Censored Child Death: When he dies amidst the destruction of San Francisco, we never see his death nor his body, we just see Mark desperately searching the rubble and yelling out his name; although the novelization explicitly confirms that Mark found Andrew's body offscreen.
• Death by Origin Story: His death five years before the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters is the source of both his parents' angst in the movie. Because of his death, Mark became an embittered Titan-hater with a grudge against Godzilla in particular, whilst Emma made a Face–Heel Turn and blamed humanity for causing the Titans' rising which led to Andrew's death in the first place, becoming an Eco-Terrorist who betrayed all of Monarch.
• Never Found the Body: Implied in the movie and a deleted scene, where it's never shown nor mentioned if the Russells found Andrew's body even in flashback. The novelization however confirms that Mark did eventually find Andrew's body crushed under rubble.
• Plot-Triggering Death: His death basically sets up the events of the entire movie by causing his mother's Face–Heel Turn, which leads to her releasing Ghidorah; the true Big Bad of the movie.
• Posthumous Character: He died before the start of King of the Monsters in the Battle of San Francisco, but he has a major effect on the plot and on both his parents. He only appears in photos and a family video.
• Precious Photo: Photos of him with his family are seen at different points in the movie, a reminder of his lingering influence on the choices they make coming to terms with his absence. It takes Madison shattering the photo on her tablet to make Emma realize how much she's destroyed her family.

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