|
|
The villain is merely told to stop his evil scheme, and he does. Usually, this is a way to teach the audience a lesson about the importance of communication, and sometimes it stands as a testament to the hero's badassery, but just as often it's Played for Laughs due to the sheer unlikeliness of the idea.
It's the moment of truth. The villain, cackling, stands before his doomsday device. His finger hovers unsteadily over the big red button, and you know he's enough of an asshole to push it. All hope seems lost... but then, the hero kicks open the double doors and bursts into the room. He looks at the villain straight in the eye, points his index finger at him, and says:
"Stop it! Stop it! What you are doing is wrong!!"
The villain concedes. He powers down the machine and turns himself in. Battle over. Everyone lives happily ever after. And the viewer is left thinking, " Worst! Anti-Climax! Ever!"
Compare Talking the Monster to Death, where the hero has to spend some time speechifying first. Contrast Unhand Them, Villain! where the villain obeys the hero's Exact Words in a way not intended.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertisement
- Sometimes, the Hamburglar from McDonald Land succumbs to this.
Anime And Manga
- Tried and failed by Yu on Final Fantasy: Unlimited. Possibly tried by other characters as well.
- The ending of Digimon Savers. Though the final enemy puts up more of a fight than season two's infamous Talking the Monster to Death sequence, it still ends with the villain finally listening to what the heroes had been yelling at it for three episodes straight. It came off as something of an anticlimax anyway - it was like "so, you really, really don't want me to destroy the world? Oh, okay. [Leaves]"
- Dragon Ball Z had Mr. Satan befriending Majin Buu when all the rest of the characters were utterly focused on killing him. It turned out that Buu honestly didn't understand that wanton destruction and murder were bad things, and when Mr. Satan tells him this, he immediately promises to stop. Of course, his evil side soon separates from him and becomes the villain, because they needed someone to have epic drawn-out fights with.
Film
- In Recess Schools Out, during the final confrontation, Gretchen asks the villain to stop his huge machine that would destroy summer. He asks if anyone honestly thought that would work after all of the work it took for him to get there. Mikey asks if it would work if they added "please", but it still doesn't work.
Live-Action Television
- A sort of bottle-episode of The Cosby Show featured the casts as characters in a story by little Rudy. The nice meek townsfolk get overrun by the greedy jerks next door (led by Rudy's rival for cuteness, Kenny). The climax of the story has Rudy (as the princess or what-have-you of the nice folks) just going up to the mean folks and telling them to STOP. And they do. Rudy mentions that someday, when she's the President, she'll just tell everyone to get rid of guns and be nice to each other. Her parents are skeptical but impressed by their daughter's faith that people will listen to reasonable authority figures. The episode ends with them turning on the news for a quick run down of all the violence and crises going on. Cliff yells upstairs to Rudy that she had better hurry up, looks like they need her.
- This is actually one of the tools that Patrick Jane employs on The Mentalist. Not that he really expects it to work on its own, but it's all part of the psychological games that he uses.
- In The Big Bang Theory the guys are on the way to an out-of-town con when they stop at Kirk's Rock. While posing for pictures (they are cosplaying as Star Trek: The Next Generation characters), Leonard's car gets stolen and Sheldon tries to get the car thieves to stop by telling them to stop and what they are doing is illegal. It doesn't work.
- The hokiness and lack of believability in After School Special episodes can sometimes be due to an excessive faith in this tactic. Particularly notable is one video against sexual harassment in schools where a group of boys ogling girls are stopped by another boy shouting "This school has rules!"
Video Games
- An inverted example in Mega Man 7; Dr. Wily, about to be shot by Mega Man, brings up the fact that robots can't harm humans, and Mega Man just stops. In the North American version, he proceeds to say "Die Wily!"... and do absolutely nothing.
- Star Control II: The Ur-Quan Masters: The titular Ur-Quan generally attack and kill anyone who is not either an Ur-Quan, or a 'Battle Thrall' in their service, owing to a huge (and fairly well-justified) sense of paranoia regarding any sentient species other than their own race. However, one of the tenets of their shared philosophy involves the Question; if one of their enemies does ask in the proper way, the Ur-Quan captain has a moral duty to stop firing and explain the Ur-Quan's history and the reason why it has them killing and/or enslaving every sentient race in the universe. (Interestingly, once you hear it, they're actually pretty damn well justified overall.) However, once they've finished explaining it, they'll get right back to shooting at you.
- The main plot of Rosenkreuzstilette revolves around Spiritia fighting against her colleagues for the whole Swiper, No Swiping! deal of convincing them that fighting against the Holy Empire isn't exactly the way to go about the whole "fear and persecution" stuff. But without knowing that the Empire didn't really persecute the magi of RKS at all but actually wanted Iris dead as Iris was planning to have RKS fight against the Empire For the Evulz.
- A lot of solutions to problems when going Paragon (and even a few Renegade solutions as well) in Mass Effect are just a well-chosen remark that makes the other guy see things your way. In fact, a lot of neutral responses have the same effect. You kind of have to make an effort to make things get out of hand, sometimes.
- In fact, if your Charm or Intimidate scores in the first game are maxed, you can talk The Dragon into shooting himself in the head rather than fight him.
- In Iji, Dan's plan to get rid of the Tasen and later, the Komato, is to have Iji do this to their respective commanding officers. It doesn't work the first time because the Tasen commander is a major General Ripper. It does work the second time on General Tor, but only after Iji has given him a thorough ass-whooping.
Theater
Webcomics
Web Original
- Dora the Explorer: The Search for the Infinity Orb
 , used as the money line at the end. (Unfortunately, this isn't real, it's just a fake trailer, albeit a really well done one, with Ariel Winter as Dora.)
- This fake trailer led to the creation of a mini-series, with part one here and part two here. The last part will be released April 2th, in which she will finally say the trope line.
Western Animation
- The Trope Namer is Dora the Explorer, wherein Dora would often stop Swiper the fox from stealing something (usually of little value) from her or her friends by putting her hand in front of his face and repeatedly chanting the trope name at him, making him say "Oh, Man!", although it didn't always work. In fact, she would ask us to do that for her.
- In an ironic twist, it's subverted in the Yet Another Christmas Carol episode when Swiper himself tries it on his future self. Future Swiper just laughs at him, tells him it doesn't work anymore, and swipes the object in question anyway. Turns out that Swiper was just being polite and listening to Dora, when he got put on the Naughty List, he stopped listening and swiped so much stuff that the future Dora angrily tells the present Swiper there's nothing left to steal.
- Police Sgt. Mike Cosgrove from Freakazoid! can stop any criminal from carrying out his act by looking at them straight in the eye and saying, "Hey. Cut it out."
- The fact that this works on The Warners speaks volumes about how effective it is.
- In Family Guy, Peter watches The Passion Of The Christ and states that if he were Jesus, he wouldn't have taken the Romans' cruel treatment so lightly. Cut to Peter's imagination, wherein he, as Jesus, orders a Roman sentry to stop whipping him by standing up and yelling, "No, no! Stop it, stop it!" in a stern, parental voice.
- In Adventure Time, Finn stops a "bazooka goblin" from shooting him and Jake by shouting, "Don't do it, man!"
- Go Diego Go (a Spin-Off of Dora above) "Freeze, Bobos!" in response to the antics of the Bobo Brothers, the two monkeys who are always causing trouble in the series. Though to be fair, unlike Swiper, they're not trying to cause trouble, so telling them to stop and them listening makes more sense. What doesn't make sense is that, also unlike Swiper, telling the Bobo Brothers to freeze makes them stop, even in midair, to apologize (Oops. Sorry!). This means that Diego (and the viewer) isn't just telling the Bobos to cut it out, but also the laws of physics.
- Done in The Powerpuff Girls when a Godzilla-like monster rampages in Townsville. Blossom believes in strategy to take it down while Buttercup believes in brute force. Both tactics fail and Bubbles, getting fed up with her sisters' bickering, just flies to the monster and politely asks it to stop. It works (though more than likely the monster was getting tired of Bloss's and Buttercup's arguing as well)
Oh, man!
|
|
