Monster Verse / Tropes # to H

Tropes # to H | Tropes I to P | Tropes Q to Z | YMMV | Trivia

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Tropes appearing in multiple installments of the MonsterVerse include:

#-A

• 20 Minutes into the Future: Godzilla vs. Kong was released in 2021 while Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire was released in 2024, but officially the first takes place in 2024 (one character states the events of Godzilla occurs ten years earlier) and the latter in 2027.
• Aborted Arc: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) set up a couple new arcs which were unfortunately completely dropped by subsequent installments.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla: Dominion do this to the mass awakening of the other Titans in King of the Monsters. The film makes the Titans' awakening out to be the Dawn of an Era, but Godzilla Dominion ends with Godzilla commanding the newly-awakened Titans to return to hibernation before the events of Godzilla vs Kong, as there's too many of them and resources are thin. However, in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Titans are all awaken again.
  • The King of the Monsters closing credits mentions that Titans are mysteriously converging on Skull Island after the ending. An early script of Godzilla vs. Kong would have addressed this, but it ended up being scrapped, and nothing is mentioned of the convergence again.
• Ace Pilot: Lauren Griffin in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is credited as this, and Kingdom Kong features several of these. Lee Shaw in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a talented pilot when navigating a rustic plane through a violent storm in one piece.
• Achilles' Heel:
  • Godzilla is the King of the Monsters, but his neck is shown in all his live-action appearances to be a weak spot, because despite his crocodilian armor, the gills on his neck are sensitive to attacks.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla is a Humongous Mecha designed to kill the King of the Monsters himself, but it's reliant on its satellite uplink to function even after Ghidorah's consciousness possesses it and makes it sentient — disrupting the satellite uplink causes the Mecha to stall for a moment.
• Action Girl: Mothra once again is a particularly powerful case. Among the humans, there's Mason Weaver in Kong: Skull Island, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and to a lesser extent Godzilla vs. Kong have dropped hints of Madison being a teenage one, plus there's several Ace Pilots who try to fight Camazotz in Kingdom Kong.
• Actionized Sequel: As the franchise trudges along, the films become much more epic and action-centric than Godzilla (2014), which while not entirely without exciting fight scenes between the Kaiju, is an atmospheric apocalyptic horror film compared to its successors.
• Adaptational Abomination: The Kaiju are mostly made out to be a lot more timeless, unknowable, and completely beyond mankind's ability to control, than they were in the earlier Godzilla or King Kong continuities. Their origins are made out to be slightly more mysterious, and most notably, it's impossible for human intelligences to safely and completely control the creatures, especially if they don't want to be controlled.
• Adaptational Dumbass: The novelizations make a few of the characters dumber than they were in the films. Akio is more clueless of his surroundings, while Director Guillerman and especially Mark Russell are shown in the novel's extra scenes to be more incompetent than in the film (Mark as both a "Godzilla expert" and a family man).
• Adaptational Badass: Pretty much all of the major Kaiju carrying over from Toho and King Kong — Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla — get this treatment, becoming far more powerful, skilled and/or durable.
• Adaptational Explanation: The novelizations provide some expansion which clears up a few Headscratchers and other plotholes in the movies.
• Adaptational Heroism: While both of them have always had Tragic Monster traits, Godzilla and Kong are presented as almost completely heroic in this continuity. Kong is explicitly described as protecting the creatures and natives of Skull Island from the Skullcrawlers and only attacks the invaders when they threaten his home or attack him first; he even goes out of his way to help and protect the invading humans as they help him in return. Godzilla, for his part, never directly attacks humans at all, the damage he causes is merely an unavoidable effect of his battles and massive presence.
  • The Skull Island natives themselves are also heroic. While in the original film they practiced human sacrifice to ward off Kong, and in various other adaptions they're monstrously deformed, in Kong: Skull Island they are taciturn but peaceful and friendly to outsiders.
• Adaptational Intelligence: The non-original Titans in this franchise tend to be among the smarter iterations of their names that have come onto the big screen, with heightened combat prowess in many cases. Godzilla goes from a belligerent and tragic beast, to an animal capable of reasoning with humanity and Kong; Kong has shown virtually human-adjacent levels of intelligence including the usage of sign language; and Ghidorah has been re-railed from the puppet of other alien beings who simply zaps everything in sight, to an independent threat who aims to take control of the other Titans on Earth so that he can use them to wipe out all life as we know it and apparently xenoform the planet into a home for himself.
• Adaptational Mundanity: The MonsterVerse is apparently doing this for the Not Quite Human characters of the old Toho movies. The Shobijin who serve Mothra are instead humans with an uncanny Hereditary Twinhood in their family history and an implicit Psychic Link to Mothra. And the Human Aliens who use Mind Control on King Ghidorah and other kaiju (the Xiliens and others) are substituted for genuinely-human antagonists who find Evil Is Not a Toy and become Big Bad Wannabes when they try to control Ghidorah.
• Adaptational Villainy:
  • Mechagodzilla in this continuity graduates from being a heroic, anti-heroic or soulless machine as it was in previously continuities, to being the Secret Weapon of a mass-murdering Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist which gets possessed by the soul of Ghidorah. Rodan in this continuity is portrayed as more of a demonic creature than past iterations, and he sides with Ghidorah against Godzilla and Mothra instead of vice versa.
  • The official novelizations subtly make the human Big Bad Wannabes out to be viler than their film portrayals. Packard even more knowingly endangers his remaining men without their knowledge; Alan Jonah takes extra measures to stop Emma Russell from trying to stop King Ghidorah's global destruction, and he outright threatens Madison's life more than once; and Walter Simmons is even more explicitly confirmed to be gleefully doing everything he can to maximize the death and destruction which endangers millions of people.
• Adaptation Amalgamation: Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla all mix various distinct traits from their incarnations in past continuities.
• Adapted Out:
  • Toho has to give Legendary explicit approval to use specific Kaiju for the series, meaning that the only monsters that are licensed out to the company are Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah, and Mechagodzilla. Presumably, this is the reason why Rodan is showing up before Anguirus. That being said, Toho is very supportive of the series, and it's likely that the approval process is based on determining what the movies need as opposed to there being real legal red tape preventing certain characters from being used.
  • The MonsterVerse's iteration of Skull Island also adapts out the dinosaurs of older King Kong movies and instead utilizes mostly Big Creepy-Crawlies.
• Admiring the Abomination: The Titans tend to attract awe and amazement from human characters, Monarch in particular, at least once per film. Although this is mostly directed at benevolent Titans who are humanity's protectors, even the genuinely hostile and dangerous Titan miscellanea like Shinomura, Skull Island in general, and the Ion Dragon all attract some awe and fascination from the human heroes at least once.
• Advertised Extra: Joe Brody was heavily featured in trailers for the 2014 movie, but in the movie proper, he dies fairly early on and is barely mentioned again after the Lecture as Exposition. Likewise, the Godzilla vs. Kong trailers put emphasis on Mark Russell and Ren Serizawa, but in the final film, Mark was a minor character with only a few scenes, while Ren despite his connection to the previous films was just an Elite Mook. Promotional materials for Skull Island (2023) emphatically feature a Skullcrawler and a Croc Monster, which are only in one episode of the show for a couple minutes with no bearing on the plot, respectively.
• Aesop Amnesia:
  • Admiral Stenz in the 2014 film went from trying to nuke Godzilla and the MUTOs to conceding Serizawa might be right about letting them fight. Come King of the Monsters, and Stenz has apparently gone right back to considering Godzilla a threat and thinking the military should be in charge of fighting the monsters.
  • In Kong: Skull Island, Dr. Brooks' use of seismic charges on Skull Island while trying to map something he didn't understand causes things to go to pot, indirectly endangers and kills dozens of lives, and nearly puts the civilized world in danger of Skullcrawlers. Nearly fifty years later, in Kingdom Kong, he tries again to use seismic charges on Skull Island and map something there that he doesn't understand, causing things to go to pot — THIS time, Brooks' actions cause or at the very least accelerate the island's extinction.
  • Mark Russell spends the course of Godzilla: King of the Monsters transitioning from using unresolved grief as justification for hating Godzilla's guts, to realizing that kind of outlook puts the whole world in danger from even worse monsters, to making peace with both Godzilla and himself. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark has gone back to being an inharmonious man, using unresolved angst to justify him distrusting Godzilla, which once again puts the fate of the world at stake, showing that he didn't internalize anything.
  • The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization has extra cases of characters forgetting lessons they learned during the previous movie's events. Godzilla: King of the Monsters ended with Monarch building a more open and trusting relationship with the public (due to the harm their continued secrecy caused with the government and military trying to take managing the Titans into their own hands), and with humanity realizing that they can coexist with the Titans and flourish on their presence without harming the planet. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Monarch is portrayed as withholding secrets from the public once more, and humanity generally are going back to their old ways of over-exploiting the environment.

• Age Lift:
  • Godzilla has always been described as ancient, but in this continuity he survived the Permian Extinction, which happened 252 million years ago.
  • Judging by The Stinger of Kong: Skull Island, Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah are also a lot older than their Toho counterparts. The original movie involving Ghidorah mentioned that he was over 5,000 years old, but based on Godzilla's own Age Lift and the fact that the two have already fought at some point in ancient history, he's most likely significantly older here.
  • In the meantime, Kong is conversely much, much younger than the other versions of the character, which are described as being prehistoric in nature. While his species of ape has been around for that long in this continuity, Kong himself is only a teenager in The '70s and still growing.
• Agent Mulder: Serizawa's grandfather Eiji firmly believed in Gojira at a time when the rest of the fledgling Monarch thought the creature only existed in stories, in Godzilla: Awakening. Bill Randa was open to just about every crackpot theory about the Titans including a teleporting Godzilla, as shown in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, with the only exception that he thought was nuts ironically being aliens. Dr. Rick Stanton alone among the Monarch brass believes the Hollow World theory to be true in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. And Bernie Hayes in Godzilla vs. Kong is a Cloud Cuckoolander Conspiracy Theorist who's entirely Properly Paranoid about Apex Cybernetics.
• Aggressive Categorism: Packard, the main human antagonist of Kong: Skull Island, only sees the world in terms of "ally" and "enemy", and this becomes increasingly apparent as his sanity erodes. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Emma Russell believes that all the Titans are ultimately beneficial for the world regardless of their variations in behavior, while Mark Russell believes that all the Titans are monsters that should be wiped out regardless of their variations in behavior.
• Alien Blood: Some of the creatures on Skull Island bleed black, green or even white blood; as do the Warbats in Godzilla vs. Kong, the Ion Dragon in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters; and Scylla, the Wart Dogs and the Drownviper in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. And Ghidorah, who is an actual extraterrestrial, in Godzilla: King of the Monsters bleeds black blood that's compared by the novelization to oil.
• Allegorical Character:
  • Godzilla, rather than specifically representing atomic weapons as he previously did, instead represents nuclear power generally. An extremely powerful, universal natural force unlike anything else with destructive potential, which has always been in the world since before humanity first noticed it in the 20th century, but which is also only dangerous to humans when tampered with or aggravated and can otherwise be extremely beneficial.
  • King Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters represents climate change. He's thawed out of the Antarctic ice by human actions, he causes nature (the other Titans) to become more hostile to humanity on a global scale, and he radically de-stabilizes the global climate, changing it in such a way that human life and most other existing life on Earth cannot survive. He's opposed by Godzilla, who acts as a guardian of nature's balance, and by Mothra who is essentially Mother Nature incarnate.
  • Walter Simmons in Godzilla vs. Kong is a fairly two-dimensional embodiment of mankind's pride and hubris. He's a rampant technophile who believes in the march of technology and the march of human domination of the planet via subjugating nature, despite everything that's already happened in the MonsterVerse by the time that he shows up to disprove mankind's notion that we're bigger and badder than Mother Nature and can control her, and he has no concept of caution and restraint. He even tries to make his own mechanical Godzilla in the real thing's image with the aim of toppling him, but his impatience and recklessness leads to him losing control of his own creation.
  • The anthropomorphic Skar King in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire represents tyranny in its purest form. He's a dictator who makes the majority of his people suffer so that the few — himself and his inner cabal — can prosper, he further abuses them by coveting breeding slaves to himself and using his resulting children as cudgels, and he's a warmonger who actively attacks new territories with the aim of conquering them for his own aggrandizement and power.
• All There in the Manual: In the lead-up to the home release of Kong: Skull Island, social media pages for the movie have been releasing video timelines for the MonsterVerse. Notable events include the establishment of a Monarch research base at a Caribbean volcanic island in 1991 (presumably Rodan's roost), the discovery of Mothra's cocooned form within her temple in China in 2009, and finding Ghidorah frozen in Mysterious Antarctica in 2016. The spin-off graphic novels and the novelizations for each film provide quite a bit of lore expansion.
• Ancient Evil: Not all of the long-dormant prehistoric Titans are bad, but not all of them are good either. The MUTOs in Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: Aftershock are amoral explosive breeders which caused at least two of the planet's past mass extinctions before their contemporary awakenings. King Ghidorah in this incarnation has been frozen in the Antarctic ice for thousands of years before he's thawed out in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), and he's just as much of a planet-threatening, sadistic Omnicidal Maniac as ever. Kingdom Kong reveals that one of the other prehistoric Titans, Camazotz, was a gigantic monster bat who went on to destroy Skull Island and almost all its inhabitants after he awakened. The Skar King in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has been imprisoned in a lower layer of the Hollow Earth since he was defeated by Godzilla in ancient times, after he attempted to conquer the surface world and enslave all other life for himself.
• And Man Grew Proud: A recurring theme throughout the MonsterVerse's mythology is past and present civilizations and organizations that built and achieved grand and amazing things falling into utter and irreversible ruin, often as a result of hubris when it came to trying to manipulate, conquer or destroy the greater Titans like Godzilla for their own benefit.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters reveals that Advanced Ancient Humans like those who built the Advanced Ancient Acropolis in the Hollow Earth attempted to enslave the Titans as war machines, which led to a human-Titan war which ultimately decimated both sides and destroyed the human civilization.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong reveals that Kong's and the Iwi's ancestors built a vast temple in the Hollow Earth, and the Titanus Kong crafted weapons out of Godzilla's brethren which harnessed Godzilla's bio-atomic powers, but a Great Offscreen War occurred between the T. Kong and Godzilla, and now Kong is the Last of His Kind, living a completely primitive lifestyle after his ancestors were forced to migrate to Skull Island and were whittled away by the Skullcrawlers. The hi-tech corporation Apex Cybernetics become a present day example: they, ignoring all the lessons in humility and harmony with nature that were apocalyptically enforced on humanity in previous MonsterVerse instalments, attempt to usurp Godzilla and the Titans for themselves by building a Humongous Mecha in Godzilla's image so they can conquer them, and they're arrogant enough to essentially use Ghidorah's brain as Mechagodzilla's brain and use little-understood Green Rocks as fuel, which leads to Ghidorah's subconsciousness taking control of Apex's Mecha and using it to destroy them, threaten humanity once more, and presumably annihilate the corporation's name.
• Animal Nemesis: Both of the main protagonist Kaiju, Godzilla and Kong, have respectively been this to various human characters at times, and every time they have, it's either the deconstructed version of the trope or said humans are presented as fallacious and vindictive antagonists. Packard in Kong: Skull Island is obsessed with killing Kong, as is his Suspiciously Similar Substitute General Ward in the Skull Island Cinematic Adventure tabletop game; whilst Mark Russell in Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Ren Serizawa in Godzilla vs. Kong both respectively want Godzilla dead due to Misplaced Retribution over Godzilla's indirect role in their loved ones' deaths.
• Animals Respect Nature: Godzilla and Kong in this continuity are basically an Animalistic Abomination and a colossal Gentle Gorilla respectively, who each in their own way keep the ecosystems they govern in check: Kong maintains Skull Island's ecosystem, while Godzilla maintains the global ecosphere as his own territory, as they combat Kaiju-sized invasive species which threaten the ecosystems. Spin-off materials such as Godzilla: Dominion and the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization outright confirm that Godzilla is conscious of the positive effects his victories have on the world's ecosphere and he considers them good. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) in particular explores the notion that the majority of Earth's Kaiju (Titans) are guardians and antibodies which maintain the balance of nature, although it's ultimately shown that most of those other Titans only enforce the natural order when they're strictly under Godzilla's control, not when they're following their own whims or when they're under the control of a more malignant Alpha Titan.
• Anti-Hero Substitute: Several of the major characters who featured in the first MonsterVerse movie, Godzilla (2014), have had more morally-dubious characters who fill similar roles to them in the cast and mirror their own ideals turn up in the sequels.
  • Joe Brody, the heartbroken, unintentionally-neglectful and -obsessive workaholic determined to find out what Monarch are covering up that caused his wife's death which he blames himself for. His substitutes in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters are Mark Russell and Hiroshi Randa respectively, whom were both acting much more deliberately when they abandoned their remaining children and loved ones. Mark is a rude, self-pitying man with a hate-on against the Titans and especially Godzilla, while Hiroshi has a secret double-life with two wives and children whom he was always distant toward.
  • Dr. Ishirō Serizawa, the thoughtful, cautious and wise naturalist figurehead of Monarch who worships Godzilla and professes to value all life. In Kong: Skull Island, his substitute is Bill Randa, who leads the Monarch expedition to Skull Island, but is a Manipulative Bastard who tricked dozens of returning vets and civilians into mortal danger, and Bill initially believes that all the Titans are monsters that need to be wiped out for humanity's survival. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Serizawa's substitute is Monarch's Deputy Director Natalia Verdugo, an acidic Mean Boss who is resentful of being only the deputy and is willing to sacrifice the few for the many.
• Anti-Villain: The MUTOs in the original 2014 film are by far the least malevolent kaiju antagonists in the franchise, being motivated solely to reproduce and carve out territory. Godzilla himself ultimately becomes this in Godzilla vs. Kong when he goes on a rampage trying to find Ghidorah's Not Quite Dead remnant. Admiral Stenz, with his wrong assumptions about the Titans just being a threat per the genre norm, and with his inability to learn his lesson coupled with his genuine well intentions, can be seen as this. Lee Shaw in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is trying to help both humanity and Godzilla, and to atone for his own perceived failures, via forcibly sealing all the Vile Vortexes on Earth to cut humanity and the Hollow Earth off from each-other forever, oblivious to the dangers of his plan backfiring; and he never directly sacrifices or endangers innocent human lives to realize his plan.
• Anyone Can Die: The whole franchise is fond of decoy protagonists and Surprisingly Sudden Death. Curiously, and unusually for this trope, the overall series hews heavily to the Idealistic side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism.
• Apocalypse How: The MUTOs successfully repopulating and infesting the world will cause global civilization collapse, and they have the potential to destroy entire ecosystems and cause mass extinction in that scenario. If King Ghidorah succeeds in reshaping the Earth's environment, he'll strip the entire biosphere save himself back down to pure bacteria — before he's defeated, Ghidorah manages to destroy multiple cities globally and (in the novelizations), he destroys a few ecosystems beyond repair. Shimo was the cause of a previous ice age or several in the Earth's relatively recent history, and the Skar King tries to force her to cause another one to decimate the surface world in the present.
• Apocalypse Not: Godzilla: King of the Monsters saw the greatest Titan cataclysm in any MonsterVerse installment to date; with Ghidorah being unleashes and with his alpha call causing over a dozen Titans to spontaneously devastate the world, and with Ghidorah himself causing the complete destruction of Washington D.C., Boston and (indirectly) the displacement of an entire Mexican island's population. In subsequent instalments, this seems to have been largely brushed under the rug: the film's ending was retconned so the awakened Titans returned to hibernation instead of re-entering the global ecosystem as the film implied, a remark by Dr. Brooks in Kingdom Kong hints that Washington D.C. might have been rapidly rebuilt and re-settled by the U.S. government, and the socio-political, environmental and economic impacts of King of the Monsters' events aren't explored.
• Arch-Enemy: Godzilla's most notable enemies are the MUTOs (recurring antagonists which are one of the reasons he's the Last of His Kind after they killed the others to breed), and Ghidorah/Mechagodzilla (two of his most iconic enemies brought over from the Toho franchises and rolled into one, with whom Godzilla has a more visibly-personal enmity). For Kong on Skull Island, the Skullcrawlers are to him as the Daleks are to the Doctor, that being his most recurring enemies who contributed to him being the last of his kind. A Malignant Plot Tumor in the MonsterVerse's later instalments is that Godzilla and Kong's species apparently have an old blood feud, but it turns out Kong actually cares very little for the feud and Godzilla doesn't even see Kong as that big of a deal.
• Artistic License – Paleontology: In Godzilla: Aftershock, Emma Russell when expositing on the MUTOs' history and life cycle describes the Late Bronze Age collapse circa 1100 BCE^note A widespread societal collapse across most of ancient human civilization, which a past MUTO generation likely caused, as a mass extinction. Although the exact parameters of a mass extinction are subjective, it's universally defined as an increase in the rate of multiple-species extinction which leaves a dent in the planet's overall biodiversity^note The standardized definition states that at least 75% of all multicellular species on Earth at the time has to go extinct for the event to constitute a mass extinction. In Real Life, the last recorded mass extinction was the one which killed the dinosaurs, at least 62 million years before humans even evolved much less before the Bronze Age, and the last recognized minor global extinction event ended in around 8000 BCE. The Late Bronze Age collapse was just a societal collapse which saw no decline in the planet's biodiversity.
• Ascended Fridge Horror:
  • In Godzilla, the male and female MUTO originate from spores implanted into the same dead Titan (implying that they may have been laid in there by the same parent, depending on how the MUTOs' early life cycle works)... and upon maturing, they seek each-other out to mate, laying a nest of eggs. Godzilla: Aftershock reveals that these eggs were laid by a single MUTO Prime which subdued the spores' host, posthumously confirming that the MUTO couple were brother and sister.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong both canonize Fridge Horror from preceding films respectively. See those films' trope pages for details.
• Asian and Nerdy: Though an American franchise, the MonsterVerse has seen several egghead characters who happen to be of Asian nationality and exceptionally smart. Monarch's monster experts and field specialists include the MonsterVerse's resident Dr. Serizawa, the Chen family and San Lin, whilst Serizawa's son Ren is a technically-gifted engineer, and Hiro in Skull Island is an expert cryptozoologist. There's also Bill Randa's Japanese wife, a pioneering Monarch scientist named Keiko, and their descendants whom all visibly have predominantly Japanese blood at the least: their Titan-researching and -tracking son Hiroshi, and Hiroshi's children born of different mothers, Cate (an ex-schoolteacher) and Kentaro (a former aspiring professional artist).
• As You Know: Joe Brody in the 2014 film tells his wife whose job is looking at the nuclear reactor even more directly than him what'll happen if she gets caught in the radiation leakage, and Mark Russell in King of the Monsters snaps at Coleman for talking as if he doesn't know what the ORCA is even though he worked on the prototype.
• Attack of the 50-Foot Whatever: This universe's entire premise is that the world is filled with these, and while they've been mostly dormant, they're making a comeback.
• Attack the Mouth: This occurs with the Titans in some form in nearly every film. From Godzilla's Kiss of Death which gets past a MUTO's natural armor to Kong ripping out Ramarak's innards to Mechagodzilla's attempt to end Godzilla's life via a Kiss of Death.
• Ax-Crazy: Some of the Titans are good, some neutral, some bad, and after that some of them are, well... this.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters; Ghidorah, upon waking up, takes a good look at the humans around his former resting site, then with a smile on his middle head's face, proceeds to atomize them with all three heads' worth of Gravity Beams, and he continues to consistently give any and all humans he encounters the same treatment throughout the movie. Upon taking over as the reigning global King of the Monsters, Ghidorah galvanizes the other Titans into attacking cities and engulfing the globe in a Natural Disaster Cascade, threatening to cause a global extinction event, ostensibly because he's violently xenoforming the Earth to his own liking — and the novelization briefly notes that he might not even be doing the latter.
  • This trait carries over to Mechagodzilla once whatever's left of Ghidorah's consciousness reincarnates into it and makes it autonomous, in Godzilla vs. Kong. The very first thing the Mecha does with its newfound sentience is murder its own creators, and upon breaking out of their base and seeing the Hong Kong skyline, it immediately turns its all-destroying Breath Weapon on the fleeing people and city blocks below, then it hyper-focuses on beating down and killing Godzilla at all costs, seemingly having the time of its life while it beats an exhausted Godzilla senseless.
  • The Kraken in Skull Island attacks and tears apart the Once Upon a Maritime upon detecting it in the ocean, though not before it uses its body-detecting tentacles to toy with the humans onboard and violently throw them around, and it continues to attack and tear apart any manmade craft that attempts to pass over Skull Island's waters. The Kraken later rips an innocent whale out of the ocean and violently throws its body at Kong's home in an effort to goad Kong into fighting it in the sea, and the Whole Episode Flashback shows it almost gleefully slaughtering the human village the day after it awoke from hibernation, then leaving the villagers' corpses behind for Kong to find as a taunt.
  • Raymond Martin in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted is a madman consumed by his hatred of Titans, who commits his entire life to nothing better than sadistically hunting and slaughtering megafauna. He uses his Humongous Mecha to butcher a Sker Buffalo, much to the disgust of even his men, then he goes out of his way to hunt and try to kill a pair of Spineprowler cubs that he wasn't even looking for before Kong intervenes, at which point Raymond maniacally throws all pragmatism to the wind as he attempts to kill Kong.
  • The Skar King in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is an intelligent Great Ape like Kong is — but unlike Kong, the Skar King is a sadistic, psychopathic bully who will kill anyone including his own subordinates for minor slights. It says a lot that he moves to attack Suko — who is further hinted to be his own offspring — just because Suko failed to laugh loudly enough along with the Skar King and the rest of his gang at Kong, and when Suko's caretaker submissively intervenes to plead for mercy on Suko's behalf, the Skar King pretends to relent for a moment, before he kicks the off-guard caretaker to a molten death in front of Suko.

B

• Bad People Abuse Animals: In Kong: Skull Island, Packard shooting a Leafwing that hadn't detected his men and was just minding its own business before Packard even knew how dangerous the creatures were is a warning sign of his Sanity Slippage into becoming the villain. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters reveals that Apex Cybernetics cruelly experimented on monkeys with crude hardware for a Brain/Computer Interface, and it's implied in Godzilla vs. Kong that Apex's plans for any Titans they didn't kill if they usurped Godzilla would involve caging and abusing them.
• Bald of Evil: Packard, the Ax-Crazy Big Bad Wannabe who is obsessed with killing Kong in Kong: Skull Island. This trope is also downplayed and Played Straight in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), with that film's Big Bad Wannabe Alan Jonah and a couple of his Mooks respectively. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Skar King — a wicked simian Titan like Kong — has a balding scalp atop his head.
• Battle Amongst the Flames: Both the Final Battles in the 2014 film and King of the Monsters see the city smouldering and set aflame beneath the cloud-darkened sky.
• Battle in the Rain: One of the Kaiju battles in Godzilla (2014) (although we only see that battle's beginning). Also nearly every battle against Ghidorah after he departs Antarctica in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), which is justified in his case because his Weather Manipulation forms a rainy Perpetual Storm wherever he goes. There's also Kong's battle against Camazotz in Godzilla vs. Kong, again justified by Camazotz causing a Perpetual Storm to close in over Skull Island.
• Be Careful What You Wish For:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mark Russell starts the movie wanting Godzilla dead due to a bitter grudge over the past death of his son — the Oxygen Destroyer seemingly grants Mark his wish, but he can't take any joy in it as Godzilla's apparent death directly enables King Ghidorah to begin wreaking global destruction unopposed.
  • Madison has apparently gotten this between Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, as in the latter movie she's no longer as interested as she once was in having a normal life, but her biased father won't let her return to being homeschooled and she finds she's miserable in a public school.
  • In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Ren Serizawa gets this during his death — he wanted to be able to feel like a god indefinitely by finding a permanent power source for his psionically-controlled Mechagodzilla, and once Ghidorah's remains take over the Mecha, Ren's consciousness is absorbed in a Mind-Reformat Death.
• Been There, Shaped History: In addition to the Titans' One Myth to Explain Them All; the 2014 film and its supplementary materials reveal that the nuclear bomb tests of The '50s in the Pacific Proving Grounds were actually attempts to kill Godzilla and that Monarch believe the Great Smog of London was caused by another creature; whilst the Godzilla Aftershock graphic novel reveals that the MUTOs likely caused one or two of Earth's past mass extinctions and also the Greek Dark Ages; and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire states that Shimo was most likely responsible for the previous major Ice Age.
• Behemoth Battle: Being a Kaiju franchise, giant monsters fighting, often to the death, is the MonsterVerse's crux; featuring at least one of these battles in every instalment, either in an urban area (Godzilla instalments) or on Skull Island (Kong instalments).
• Benevolent Conspiracy: Monarch serves as an institution to make sure the monsters are kept in check, and are instrumental in helping the governments of the world prepare and deal with these threats accordingly. That being said, they do far more harm than good in Kong: Skull Island, to the point where none of their people would have died if they hadn't agreed to bomb the place to try and map it.
• Berserk Button: For quite a few of the Titans, the sight of their respective rivals is a Button that'll drive them into a state of aggravation. In the case of protector Titans such as Kong and Mothra, seeing smaller creatures that they consider to be their own threatened is a sure way to get them on the defensive against you. Ghidorah also tends to go berserk with murderous intent when he hears the ORCA's signal transmitting. Among the humans, Emma Russell tends to lose her faux cool when someone brings up one of her children and questions her sanity in tandem.
• Beware My Stinger Tail: Several of the monsters have jagged weapons on the ends of their tails — these include the Ion Dragon in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Shinomura in the (Canon Discontinuity) graphic novel Godzilla: Awakening, and Shimo and Evolved Godzilla in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire. King Ghidorah's tails as usual end in spike-covered clubs.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Mothra and Kong are two of the gentlest and kindest Titans around when it comes to humans, but even they are forces of nature if you cross them, and they won't show any mercy to hostile and invasive species which threaten their domains.
• Big Bad:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): King Ghidorah; the rival Alpha Titan who uniquely equals Godzilla in terms of power, and who, upon Godzilla's temporary downfall, takes control of the other Titans for himself and attempts to wipe out all life as we know it. The threat that he poses forces the humans to band together with Godzilla and Mothra in order to take their planet back from Ghidorah.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Mechagodzilla, a Humongous Mecha created from Ghidorah's undead remains, whose existence sets off the entire plot and continues to instigate Godzilla's rampage. Upon becoming sentient, the Mecha kills its own creators, and it threatens to kill both Godzilla and Kong while exterminating any humans it lays eyes upon.
  • Skull Island (2023): The Kraken which terrorizes Skull Island's waters is responsible for shipwrecking the human cast on the island, killing Mike's father Hiro in the process, and it presents the biggest and toughest obstacle to the human cast escaping the island with their lives. It's also revealed to be responsible for killing several of Kong's beloved charges in the past and going out of its way to antagonize him, giving Kong a personal motivation for opposing the monster.
  • Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted: Raymond Martin, the Ax-Crazy Titan-hunter who uses a Humongous Mecha straight out of a comic book to terrorize Kong's peaceful Titan charges in the Hollow Earth, including a pair of defenceless Spineprowler cubs.
  • Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire: The Skar King looks set to be the main antagonist and main enemy of the movie.
• Big Bad Duumvirate: In the 2014 Godzilla movie, the main antagonists are a MUTO Battle Couple. In King of the Monsters, Emma Russell and Alan Jonah work together to set the Titans loose on the world and let them devastate humanity.
• Big Bad Ensemble: In Kong: Skull Island, the General Ripper Packard poses just as much of a danger to the remaining human cast as Kong's giant Skullcrawler arch-enemy does: whereas Packard is obsessed with killing Kong for revenge regardless of how much he endangers everyone else, the Skullcrawler seeks to kill and eat Kong, and then everything and everyone else on the island. In King of the Monsters, eco-terrorists Alan Jonah and Emma Russell (shakily) work together to unleash Ghidorah in the belief that they can manipulate the latter into healing the world's ecosystems at the cost of killing billions of people, only for Ghidorah to fly off and do his own thing (attempting to wipe out humanity and bring even worse calamity to the global ecosphere than we would have), whilst the eco-terrorists initially try to resume their own plans by awakening Rodan.
• Big Bad Wannabe: The human antagonists in every film. They could all pose a genuine threat in a setting which didn't hold borderline-Eldritch Abomination ancient Kaiju who represent forces of nature. As it stands, these human antagonists often at best end up on the losing end of an Eviler than Thou or at worst get squashed by a Titan like the bugs they are, often as a direct result of thinking they can control the Titans.
• Big Creepy-Crawlies: Most of the creatures on Skull Island are this combined with Planimal. Other insectoid-looking monsters include Mothra, Scylla, the MUTOs, the Endoswarmers, and several giant species on Skull Island.
• Big Damn Heroes: Godzilla and Kong both respectively pull off a lot of impressive rescues of people and their allies throughout the franchise. Several of their human allies end up returning the favor, like Ford Brody blowing up the MUTOs' nest just in time to distract them from killing Godzilla, or Dr. Brooks firing on the Skull Devil with a pair of mounted machine guns in time to save Kong.
• Big Entrance: Godzilla in his first two film appearances, and all the other big hitters in King of the Monsters, make dramatic entrances which would make the cast of Kung Fu Panda 3 clap with glee.
• Big Good: Godzilla is the known world's main line of defence against hostile Titans by circumstance, due to him considering the world his global territory and maintaining its ecological balance. Kong serves the same role within Skull Island's borders until the island is destroyed by Camazotz' Hostile Terraforming.
• Big "NO!":
  • Aaron Brooks when Matemavi is shot in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong.
  • Madison Russell, several times, when she realizes her mother is going to sacrifice herself to stop King Ghidorah, in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
  • A stock Big "No!" plays at the moment when Walter Simmons is crushed by Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong.
  • Cate Randa when a Bus Full of Innocents fell to its doom on G-Day, and when her father approached her in the aftermath only to tell her that he wasn't staying at all and wasn't even going to see her mother despite everything they'd been through, in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
• Big Red Button: Monarch's Titan containment sites in the 2014 film and King of the Monsters have Big Red Buttons which activate emergency procedures designed to kill the captive Titans (or rather try to kill them). Ultimately, they only serve a very minor role in the plot of either film, as they either don't get pressed, or they dramatically fail to so much as make the Titans bleed.
• Bioluminescence Is Cool: Several of the monsters have bioluminescent body parts, particularly when they're displaying their powers; including the MUTOs, Godzilla, Mothra, the Kraken, the Frost Vark, the Endoswarmers' eggs, the Snarehunters and Shimo.
• Black and Nerdy: Dr. Brooks, Matemavi and Ben are all highly-intellectual (and in at least two cases, physically capable if unassuming), dark-skinned Monarch operatives. Bernie Hayes is a wily, African-American Bunny-Ears Lawyer.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: The Mother Longlegs on Skull Island use their bladed legs for immobilizing and killing smaller prey, whilst Mothra has raptorial bladed forelimbs.
• Bloodier and Gorier: While the classic films could have some blood, things are a lot more bloody and brutal here. This is especially clear when it comes to monster deaths, which have thus far included decapitations, disembowelments, and visceral incinerations.
• Blood Knight: Several of the Kaiju clearly enjoy themselves when fighting to the death. King Ghidorah's right head (Ni) is described by the Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) director as the head that's constantly itching for a fight. Godzilla shows ambiguous signs of smiling when he's brawling with other monsters (not so ambiguous in Godzilla vs. Kong). And Mechagodzilla, once it's possessed by Ghidorah's subconsciousness, looks like it's enjoying literally and figuratively throwing Godzilla around much more than it needs to. This isn't just limited to the Kaiju: Lieutenant Colonel Packard in Kong: Skull Island is a Colonel Kilgore who is well and truly at home in a God-forsaken war zone away from civilization.
• Blue Is Heroic: Godzilla's atomic breath and dorsal spines glow blue, as per usual, and the MonsterVerse version is one of the more exclusively heroic iterations, acting to protect the world and generally not antagonizing humanity. Likewise, although Mothra's bioluminescence flashes with a variety of different colors, blue and teal are the most prominent colors, and she's possibly the nicest Kaiju in the whole MonsterVerse. In Kong: Skull Island, the heroic freelance mercenary James Conrad and the Monarch operative Houston Brooks both wear blue tops.
• Blue Means Cold: Mysterious Antarctica in King of the Monsters, the heat-absorbing Frost Vark's bioluminescence and its Alaskan territory in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and Shimo's crystals and cryokinetic power in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire all have blue tinges to them to reflect their icy elemental motif.
• Bookends:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: If we include the opening flashback to the time frame of Godzilla (2014), then the movie begins and ends with the Russell family caught up in a city-destroying apocalyptic Behemoth Battle which includes Godzilla fighting to save the world; a battle where one of the family dies.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: It both begins and ends with Kong going on his "morning stroll" in a jungle with Jia nearby.
  • Skull Island: Several.
    • The beach where Mike and Charlie wash ashore on Skull Island at the end of the first episode is also where the Final Battle of the season takes place in the last episode, with the presence of a broken mug among the jetsam on the shore linking the two scenes together.
    • The show's first season both begins and ends with Annie being cast into seawater, losing consciousness, and waking up in an unfamiliar new environment.
• Brainy Brunette: There's lots of brown-haired, exceptionally smart people, particularly on the heroes' side. Joe Brody, Dr. Graham, Madison Russell, Sam Coleman, Nathan Lind, Ilene Andrews, Jia, most of Aaron Brooks' Skull Island expedition, and almost every non-dumb human in the Skull Island animated series.
• Breath Weapon: Godzilla, as per usual, can fire a flaming ray of Atomic Breath from his jaws. Ghidorah, also per usual, can fire yellow rays of lightning from his heads' mouths, and Mothra can spit tough projectile webbing out of her mandibles. Mechagodzilla has an artificial imitation of Godzilla's Atomic Breath called the Proton Scream. Shimo can spit a "Frost Bite" breath.
• Broad Strokes: Overall, the continuity between the MonsterVerse's canon instalments is quite loose when it comes to the details.
  • After the first movie Godzilla (2014) portrayed the MUTOs as an Explosive Breeder threat and Godzilla as a primeval keystone species which could check them via fighting and killing them on account of his species and theirs being natural enemies (with the Godzilla: King of the Monsters tie-in graphic novel Godzilla: Aftershock continuing this portrayal with the MUTO Prime/Jinshin-Mushi); Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) made the Titans generally, even those classed as Destroyers such as Rodan and the MUTOs, out to be ecologically-beneficial creatures whose unusual radiation emissions and other biological byproducts could cause other life to flourish and replenish damaged global ecosystems, making Monarch in this movie a lot more concerned with keeping as many of the Titans as affordable alive than they were with the previous MUTOs — the only exception was Ghidorah due to his alien origins making him existentially incompatible with the Earth's natural order. Godzilla can also command the baseline Titans (that is, Titans which aren't alphas like he and Ghidorah are) to bow to him without a fight once he's taken leadership of them from King Ghidorah, including a MUTO that's among those Titans' ranks. Notably, whilst the "Alpha Titan" concept stuck in subsequent MonsterVerse instalments, the Titans' ecosystem-healing effects haven't been referenced since outside of the official novelizations and one of the graphic novels.
  • The (now-Canon Discontinuity) graphic novel Godzilla: Awakening, but also the supplementary materials for the 2014 movie and Godzilla: King of the Monsters; all describe Dr. Serizawa's father Eiji as a Monarch "founding father", which seems to contradict the live-action MonsterVerse TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters' portrayal of Monarch's origin, where Monarch seemed to have been a very small outfit in 1954 with three primary members who joined in '52, none of whom are Eiji.
  • Post-Godzilla: King of the Monsters instalments can't agree on the fate of the Iwi after Skull Island was destroyed by its own perpetual storm barrier inbetween movies, with just as many MonsterVerse materials saying that all of them sans Jia were wiped out in the storm as the number of materials which say the other Iwi actually survived and relocated off-island with Monarch's aid.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong ignores or warps many of the events and aspects of the preceding movie, Godzilla: King of the Monsters. There's barely any reference to the fallout of the global Titan attacks in the previous movie, and it's explained that the world's gone back to normal because the Titans resumed their hibernation, instead of respecting the previous film's portrayal of their rising as the Dawn of an Era. In stark contrast to how the consequences of the comparatively much-less-destructive events of G-Day in 2014 are constantly referenced in every post-2014 MonsterVerse story, the only consequences of Godzilla: King of the Monsters that seem to have stuck in Godzilla vs. Kong are Ghidorah leaving a severed head behind, and Madison's mother Emma Russell being dead. Mechagodzilla is being built in secret as the previous movie's ending hinted, but it's in Hong Kong instead of on Skull Island with no link to the latter. The Hollow Earth is a nigh-inaccessible Acid-Trip Dimension instead of a colossal underground network through the planet's mantle, and the Monarch top brass's previous accidental entry into the Hollow Earth in one piece is ignored and even contradicted. And one Titan (Camazotz) instead of several converged on Skull Island just before its destruction.
  • In the animated MonsterVerse TV series Skull Island, whilst the events of Kong: Skull Island are mentioned and referenced, the titular island in this appearance is markedly missing the auroral night sky and the surrounding perpetual storm altogether, although the island being hidden from the outside world is still pinned on atmospheric and magnetic anomalies. Furthermore, Skull Island now has a neighboring second Isle of Giant Horrors about twenty miles away, which was never hinted at anywhere else in the MonsterVerse despite full satellite maps of Skull Island and its surrounding storm existing. Additionally, with the exception of Kong, none of the Skull Island creatures from other instalments turn up in this series, except for in one-scene cameos at the very most, but some of them do have similar substitutes turning up in mmore prominent roles (like the Aloe Turtle for the Skull Island: The Birth of Kong Magma Turtle).
  • As per the 2014 movie's verbal account of Monarch and Godzilla's past, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters shows that Godzilla was discovered in 1954, albeit as the result of his footprint being found and casted on land instead of due to a nuclear submarine disturbing him; the Bikini Atoll military nuclear test in 1954 was a secret attempt to kill Godzilla with an atom bomb disguised as a test, albeit depicting it as the sole such attempt to kill Godzilla instead of just one of several attempts throughout the decade; and Monarch, rather than being founded in '54, had existed since the late 40s but it took off as a global coalition in '54 due to an increase in military funding, as a response to the discovery of Godzilla's existence in both accounts.
• Broken Tears: Joe in the 2014 film is reduced to tears when he's forced to seal his wife inside with a lethal radioactive cloud, which traumatizes him for the rest of his life. In King of the Monsters, Madison is tearing up once she realizes that her mother is a madwoman who's willing to commit global genocide by proxy and that Madison herself is complicit in crimes against humanity.
• Brutal Bird of Prey: Rodan and the Hellhawks are built like birds of prey, and they're generally portrayed as aggressive and vicious beasts who pose a very real threat to the humans who disturb them.
• Brutal Honesty: In Kong: Skull Island, Slivko, possibly due to the stressful situation, doesn't mince his words when telling Hank Marlow that his wife must think he's dead after three decades. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Jia is described as being blunt and literal. In the Skull Island animated series, Annie is extremely blunt when commenting on death.
• The Bus Came Back: James Conrad and Mason Weaver of Kong: Skull Island (2017) return in the storyline of the tabletop game Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure, released in 2023. Lee Shaw, a supporting character from the Godzilla (2014) supplementary prequel graphic novel Awakening, is finally set to return in the 2023 TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. Scylla from Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is completely absent from the following Godzilla vs. Kong before returning in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
• Butt-Monkey:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Ghidorah's left head in particular has the goofiest personality of the three heads, and it suffers the most misfortunes and indignities throughout the movie: being pushed around by the middle head for getting distracted, taking a barrage of missiles to the face, being decapitated in Godzilla's attacks twice, and being the only head who ends up ramming himself through a skyscraper in Boston.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, Maia Simmons is the karmic variety. Out of her depth and weak-willed to the point of idiocy, she ends up vomiting seawater, she vomits for real upon being one of the first humans to enter the Hollow Earth since prehistoric times, and finally; she dies a comically undignified death when her panic drives her to irrationally shoot at Kong, prompting him to grab the HEAV she's inside and crush it while she's shouting out a Rapid-Fire "No!" string.
  • In the Skull Island series, one of Irene and Sam's mercenaries — a bulky, blonde man — is goofier and more prone to misfortune than the others. He gets tossed aside like a ragdoll when the mercs are luring Dog into a trap, becoming the only merc to get injured in the clash. He also, in a much darker twist, is one of the mercs who don't make it off the island, getting murdered by the Kraken via its elastic tentacles when he's miles inland from its territory, with the Kraken tossing him around like a ragdoll before it lets him permanently disappear beneath the water.
  • In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Tim gets injured quite a lot and he's in more than one crashing vehicle. At one point, he's the sole survivor of a helicopter crash in the Algerian Desert, after which he has to hike across miles of desert without water, and the second he reaches a town, he's immediately accused of something that he's not guilty of this time.

C

• The Cameo:
  • Godzilla makes a cameo, and Rodan, Mothra and Ghidorah all make Early-Bird Cameos, in the form of cave paintings at the end of Kong: Skull Island.
  • Several creatures from the first two films make cameos in Godzilla: King of the Monsters: we see the female MUTO's remains, we see Leafwings at the film's end, there's a skeleton modeled after Anguirus, and Kong has a single scene in the movie's novelization. Dr. Brooks from Kong: Skull Island also returns for a single scene.
• Canon Foreigner: Instead of reusing previous monsters that Godzilla and King Kong faced in their respective franchises' previous continuities, more often than not, the MonsterVerse creates original monsters from them to face, albeit oftentimes referencing or based off of past continuities' antagonists; including the MUTOs and the Skullcrawlers. The exceptions are the rest of the iconic Toho "Big Five" besides Godzilla (Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla), whom feature very prominently in Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong respectively. In the case of Godzilla antagonists, this trope is invoked at least in part to avoid the legal hassle that buying the rights to each and any one of Toho's licensed kaiju involves.
• Captain Ersatz: The Skullcrawlers that Kong regularly fights on Skull Island are based on the Deathrunners from Kong: King of Skull Island which is based on the original King Kong continuity as reptilian predators who wiped out Kong's family and the rest of his species. Dr. Rick Stanton who debuted in King of the Monsters is based on another, animated Rick on Adult Swim as a cynical, alcoholic, white-haired scientist who deals in the fantastical in a sci-fi setting.
• Central Theme: Both Godzilla films share the theme of a fractured family getting caught in the middle of the kaiju chaos and trying to survive and reunite.
  • "Sometimes the only way to heal our wounds is to make peace with the demons who created them".
• Chuck Cunningham Syndrome: All the surviving humans of Kong: Skull Island sans Dr. Brooks (and a post-movie cameo by his wife Dr. San Lin) are completely absent without explanation from all the subsequent MonsterVerse stories, even stories which bring back the Monarch presence on Skull Island with Dr. Brooks involved; despite the movie's post-credits scene setting up James Conrad and Mason Weaver to join Monarch after their island experiences. Weaver and Conrad's syndrome finally ended after two subsequent movies, four graphic novels and an animated series; six years after their original movie was released, when the characters were brought back for the post-movie storyline of the tabletop game Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure.
• Civilization Destroyer: Later entries heavily imply that various Titans were responsible for the downfall of several ancient and even prehistoric civilizations when they rampaged. Godzilla: Aftershock reveals that an exceptionally powerful MUTO caste called MUTO Prime or Jinshin-Mushi caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse. Godzilla: King of the Monsters confirms via Easter Egg that Advanced Ancient Humans' civilization was wiped out by a war against the Titans. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization reveals that Godzilla himself caused the downfall of Titanus Kong's ancient Hollow Earth-based civilization amid a war between the two Titan species, driving the surviving T. Kong to migrate to Skull Island on the surface and slowly devolve into a primitive lifestyle.
• Climactic Volcano Backdrop: In Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, Riccio's visions of Kong's parents — which might or might not have been hallucinogenic — depict their fatal last stand against the Skullcrawlers as occurring amidst a volcanic eruption, with lava oozing and exploding all around them. When the parents are dead and the Skullcrawlers gone at the vision's end, the volcanism is gone.
• Cloudcuckoolander: Humans who've stood out for their quirky personalities include Zamalek in the Godzilla Awakening graphic novel, Lieutenant Marlow and Captain Cole in Kong: Skull Island, and Bernie Hayes in Godzilla vs. Kong. And there's Ghidorah's quirky, childish left head in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
• Colonel Badass: Packard in Kong: Skull Island is a Vietnam vet, but he also turns into a General Ripper thanks to his Colonel Kilgore. Colonel Foster in King of the Monsters is the G-Team's Frontline General.
• Combat Pragmatist: Several of the Titans, being giant, prehistoric animals, are not afraid to fight dirty; including the MUTOs, Godzilla, Ghidorah, Tiamat and the Skar King.
• Combat Tentacles: Shinomura is capable of growing tentacles for combat due to its unusual composition. Kraken/Na Kika uses its tentacles to kill the Monarch scientists near its resting site when it falls under King Ghidorah's thrall in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters novelization. On Skull Island, the Mire Squid uses its tentacles as arms to fight Kong in Kong: Skull Island, and the far-more powerful and vicious Kraken of Skull Island in the animated series (not to be confused with Na Kika) has sets of tentacles which it uses for grappling and attacking prey or foes, and for stinging them with bio-electricity and venom. The Mother Longlegs of Skull Island, and the Titan Scylla, both have tendrils around their orifices which they can use as grasping appendages. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the Frost Vark has flexible tendrils around its mouth and nose area, in the image of a star-nosed mole.
• Commander Contrarian: Admiral Stenz, though far from the stubbornest example of this trope, has a track record of initially turning down Monarch's cautions and attempting to kill the Titans using military weaponry, causing things to go horribly awry before he takes Monarch's advice on how to clean up the mess. Packard in Kong: Skull Island ignores every rational-minded person who disagrees with his plan to kill Kong as his Sanity Slippage turns him into a General Ripper. Riccio in The Birth of Kong opposes the expedition leader Aaron putting the group's safety first every time it compromises Riccio's own obsessions with studying the Iwi and Kong. Mark Russell tends to disagree with anything that doesn't adhere to "Titans are bad, Godzilla is the bad guy, and the whole world revolves around me feeling sorry for myself", at least until it blows up in everybody's faces.
• Conceive and Kill: Discussed a couple times in supplementary materials. In the Godzilla Aftershock graphic novel, Emma Russell theorizes that had the MUTO pair that featured in Godzilla (2014) succeeded in reproducing, the female MUTO probably would've killed the male, although Emma seems doubtful in this theory in light of Monarch's analysis of the MUTO Prime. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization reveals that studies of the Skullcrawlers (who are driven by pure Horror Hunger due to their hyper-metabolism constantly keeping them on the brink of starvation) have indicated that copulations among the creatures tend to end this way.
• Conflict Killer:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Monarch and the U.S. government are butting heads over whether to preserve and try to cohabit the world with the more benign Titans, or to adopt an active policy of indiscriminate Titan extermination; whilst a Monarch traitor named Emma Russell wants to accelerate the dormant Titans' awakening and have them reclaim the planet from humanity. The schism continues until King Ghidorah takes control of the other Titans for himself, and initiates a global apocalypse with the Titans at his beck and call which threatens to wipe out all life on Earth. At that point, Monarch, the military and the traitor all put aside their differences, and they do all they can to aid Mothra and Godzilla in killing Ghidorah at all costs.
  • According to the MonsterVerse timeline in Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure, before the above events, the mere knowledge of Titans' existence caused worldwide governments and nations to put aside their differences and divisions in the face of a common potential existential threat to humanity.
• Conspiracy Theorist: Joe Brody in the 2014 movie became firmly convinced that a government organization has been covering up the truth about what happened the day Janjira became Japan's very own Chernobyl and he's obsessed with getting to the truth. Bernie Hayes in Godzilla vs. Kong is a much broader conspiracy theory, who espouses about everything from an evil corporation meddling with Titans to lizard-people running the world.
• Continuity Reboot: The franchise represents the third reboot of the King Kong film series^note not counting Toho's version and the first American reboot of the Godzilla franchise following the 1998 movie.
• Contrasting Sequel Antagonist:
  • Both the MUTOs and the Skullcrawlers are merely animals acting on instinct, but while the MUTOs are bulky, insectoid and they're portrayed as somewhat sympathetic and tragic, the Skullcrawlers are reptilian, slender, and played for full-on horror. Then they're followed by the draconic King Ghidorah, and later his mechanical reincarnation Mechagodzilla, and the marine, crustacean-cephalopodic sea monster the Kraken; all of whom are genuinely evil, sadistic and malicious creatures whose violent streaks go well beyond any normal animal instinct. It's also worth noting, whereas the MUTOs and Skullcrawlers are primordial, natural creatures, Ghidorah is an ancient extraterrestrial of unknown origin who's considered an invasive species to Earth's biosphere and Mechagodzilla is a newly-manmade cybernetic beast, then after the two of them, we get a prehistoric beast in the Kraken again.
  • When it comes to the human antagonists, the film and TV instalments do this more than once and ultimately go slightly back and forth. The first human antagonist in Kong: Skull Island is an insane General Ripper who wants to kill the Titans allegedly to keep humanity safe, but is only really concerned with killing the Alpha Titan in particular. Then in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the human villains are pro-Titan, misanthropic Eco-Terrorists who want the Titans in general to reclaim the world from humanity and they have little interest in the Alpha Titan. Then in Godzilla vs. Kong, we're back to anti-Titan villains with delusions of taking the planet back for humanity and a beef against the Alpha Titan — except that whereas the Kong: Skull Island and King of the Monsters human antagonists were underground, military and somewhat ragtag organizations in their own respective ways, the Godzilla vs. Kong human fiends are wealthy, techy and well-dressed Evil, Inc. operatives who have at least a moderate public image. Come Skull Island (2023) and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, we're back to humans who lead small groups of people with limited resources whom are willing to get their hands dirty, in Irene and Lee Shaw's respective groups, but these are significantly more anti-villainous than any of the previous villainous groups — Irene is a botanist whose only goal is to get her daughter back, while Shaw is a retired military vet who's trying to make Godzilla's job of safeguarding the world's survival easier for him. After the two of them, we have a much more Ax-Crazy, irredeemable and resourceful human villain again in Raymond Martin.
• Contrasting Sequel Main Character: See here.
• Contrasting Sequel Setting: Generally speaking, a Godzilla-centric film is immediately followed by a Kong-centric film, then a Godzilla-centric film again etc., barring the Godzilla/Kong crossover films — this is a rule which also applies to the TV series released after Godzilla vs. Kong. The Godzilla instalments tend to be set in primarily metropolitan areas with the plot shifting around the world and across continents; while the Kong instalments tend to be limited to the isolated, monster-ruled wilderness on Skull Island.
• Cool Old Guy: In Kong: Skull Island, Hank Marlow is a middle-aged, kooky cloudcuckoolander who's been stranded on Skull Island for decades since his plane crashed in WWII, and he's survived the island's horrors for all that time, wounding a Skullcrawler in battle. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Lee Shaw in the 2015 storyline is chronologically in his 90s, yet he's still very spritely, sharp and clear.
• Cosmic Horror Story: Earth is a hellish world in which humanity is surrounded by gigantic monsters that have existed long before everyone was even born, and they are basically powerless against them once they awaken and begin reclaiming the world for themselves. Unlike the aliens and gods in the Marvel Cinematic Universe or DC Extended Universe, the heroic monsters are rather indifferent towards humanity and can be every bit as destructive as the villainous monsters. However, that does not preclude the monster being friendly and benevolent, as evidenced by Mothra and Kong, or by Godzilla organizing his fellow monsters to leave humanity unharmed whilst replenishing the world's ecosphere. Oh, and Ghidorah is living proof that alien life on par with the Titans exists, and the hydra in question is every bit as malicious and hellbent on razing the Earth clean of life here as he ever was.
• "Could Have Avoided This!" Plot:
  • Discussed in the 2014 movie: Ford believes that the entire plot after the Distant Prologue would never have happened if Monarch had tried to kill the metamorphosing male MUTO while they were monitoring it before it hatched.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, Madison spells out to the Big Bad Wannabe's face that the only reason why the entire plot — from Godzilla acting aggressive to his clash with Kong — happened is because the Wannabe provoked Godzilla by creating Mechagodzilla for the sake of his own delusions, disrupting the entirely-beneficial truce which humanity and Godzilla had been at since the previous movie's ending.
• Crapsack World: Whenever two or more Titans fight each other, chances are a city will be destroyed and thousands or even millions of people will die.
• Creature-Hunter Organization: Subverted with Monarch. The organization was originally formed by the government and military with the explicit end-task of finding ways to exterminate any Titans they discovered, but Monarch's own operatives tend to grow to admire and even revere the creatures after studying them up close, and they recognize both Godzilla and Kong as protectors of humanity against the more hostile Titans as well as the human race's only liable line of defence. Combine that with Monarch's findings that the Titans are essentially crucial antibodies to the Earth's ecosphere which human life can't survive without; and by the start of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Monarch's top brass are actively in a legal battle opposing the government's mounting pressure to see all the Titans indiscriminately exterminated. Apex Cybernetics in Godzilla vs. Kong see themselves as this trope or at least make themselves out to be so with their anti-Titan Muggle Power plan, but in reality they're nothing more than obscenely hubristic and amoral bastards using Muggle Power as an excuse for their own selfish and thoroughly villainous end-goals.
• Crossover: With DCU in Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong.
• Crowd Panic: As would be expected from a kaiju franchise, there's at least four instances of people running and screaming in the streets when the monsters are expected, across at least four live-action instalments (the 2014 movie, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla vs. Kong and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters).
• Cryptic Background Reference: There are references to past Titan events, and previously-undocumented and long-gone ancient civilizations, peppered in every movie, though one shouldn't hold out hope of them ever getting properly explained and expanded upon. From the elaborate ruins dotted on the wilderness-claimed Skull Island, to the hieroglyphs and mythology documenting Godzilla and Mothra's original ancient conflict with Ghidorah, to the Titanus Kong species' ruined temple and Great Offscreen War with Godzilla in the Hollow Earth.
• The Cuckoolander Was Right: More often than not. The biggest instance is in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, when Dr. Serizawa's open beliefs that Godzilla is ultimately the world's protector rather than its destroyer, dating back in the 2014 movie, are finally vindicated. Joe Brody in the 2014 movie is seen by his son as a wackjob who lost his mind with grief, but he's proven completely right that the government are covering up a living creature. Dr. Brooks and Bill Randa in Kong: Skull Island have been dismissed as loonies by the government and even by other Monarch operatives in the past for believing in Skull Island and Hollow Earth theory (both of which are proven to be 100% real, much to the delight of Brooks' cynical, alcoholic token advocate Dr. Stanton). Bernie Hayes in Godzilla vs. Kong is a very wacky Conspiracy Theorist who's 100% right that Godzilla is Good All Along and that Apex Cybernetics are up to something sinister. Lee Shaw in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is revealed to have been deemed crazy by Monarch for verifying and trying to tell them of the Hollow Earth's (specifically Axis Mundi's) existence decades earlier.
• Curb-Stomp Battle:
  • Pretty much all of Kong's fights except those against the Skull Devil, Godzilla, Mechagodzilla, the Killer Chameleons and the Kraken are swift, and his opponents — whether they be military men or Skull Island's other creatures — barely stand anything resembling a chance against the King of the Primates up to the point where he takes them out.
  • Speaking of Skull Island; Helen Karsten in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, despite being a trained ex-Navy survivalist armed with a machete, gets torn apart by Death Jackals within seconds and doesn't manage to get a single hit in.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters features several curb-stomp battles. The paramilitary eco-terrorists pulverize Monarch's outposts without difficulty, Rodan pulverizes Monarch's aerial forces without difficulty, Ghidorah overwhelms and defeats Rodan without difficulty, and Burning Godzilla finally pulverizes Ghidorah without any further difficulty.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, a Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla literally and figuratively wipes the floor with Godzilla (albeit after Godzilla had expended much of his strength cutting halfway through the planet and fighting Kong), and it takes Kong's intervention on Godzilla's behalf to even out the fight.
  • In the season finale of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the Ion Dragon takes on the much larger and stronger Godzilla, and it gets decimated by the King of the Monsters before it tucks tail and retreats.
• Curb Stomp Cushion: Rodan lasts a full minute or two during his aerial battle with Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters before being taken down, whilst both of Kong's fights against Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong are this with Kong being the cushion.
• Curiosity Killed the Cast: Played With. Kong: Skull Island is so far the biggest offender, but despite Monarch's heroism, one can also partly blame the plot of King of the Monsters on them actively seeking and containing the seventeen new Kaiju as part of doing their job (which is what gave the Eco-Terrorists something to work with, including freeing Ghidorah).
• Cynicism Catalyst: In Kong: Skull Island, James Conrad lost faith in his government and country as a result of being on an SAS mission to rescue a kidnapped seven-year-old girl, which ended with the girl and a third of Conrad's team dead and which he suspects was set up to fail. In King of the Monsters, Mark Russell (and also Lauren Griffin according to her profile) became convinced that there was little to no chance of humans and Titans coexisting after they witnessed the destruction Godzilla and the MUTOs' clash caused on G-Day, which claimed the life of Mark's son. Cate Randa in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was likewise rendered jaded and cynical after her own firsthand experience of G-Day, which included schoolchildren under her care dying in front of her and her own father abandoning her shortly before he was presumed dead.

D

• Dark Is Evil: Among the Titans, the MUTOs and Camazotz have a primarily black and dark-gray color scheme (and in the latter case go so far as to bring The Night That Never Ends with their presence), and they're mainly portrayed as hostile creatures which threaten man and nature on a regional (Camazotz) to global (MUTOs) scale if Godzilla or Kong can't defeat them.
• David vs. Goliath: Oftentimes, the heroic Titans end up facing off against villainous Titans that are much larger than them and coming out on top, albeit with human help at times.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: Godzilla renews his ancient rivalry with Ghidorah, who is roughly twice the size of Godzilla with his wings spread, has Gravity Beams so powerful that he can literally throw Godzilla off his feet, and can generate world-ending hypercanes just by existing in Earth's atmosphere.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Godzilla is now the Goliath to Kong's David, and Godzilla is decidedly the more antagonistic and less empathetic of the two heroic Titans, as well as the more superpowerful whereas Kong relies on his wits to match him. In this instance, Goliath defeats David.
  • Skull Island (2023): The Kraken which functions as the Big Bad of the first season, vying against Kong to the death and threatening the humans, is roughly twice Kong's size once its full appearance is revealed, and it has an array of abilities including combat tentacles, and a bio-electric sting which also delivers venom.
• Deadpan Snarker: Quite a lot of human characters. There's Elle Brody in the 2014 film, Captain Cole in Kong: Skull Island, and there's Tarkan in Godzilla Aftershock, and Lee Shaw, Keiko Randa-Miura and Michelle Duvall in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. King of the Monsters and the Skull Island 2023 series in particular have pretty much the whole cast acting snarky and quippy at least once.
• Death by Irony:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the Titans are portrayed most emphatically as having the potential to change humanity's world for the better instead of the worse, and Monarch are shown to have a very reverent attitude to the Titans they study — which makes it all the more tragic when hundreds to thousands of Monarch's containment staff around the world are slaughtered by the very Titans they hold in awe once King Ghidorah spontaneously brings them under his thrall. Dr. Serizawa, who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a baby and is very mindful of nuclear power as a result, ultimately gives his life by willingly and manually detonating a nuclear warhead to heal Godzilla so the latter can stop Ghidorah, representing Japan coming to terms with nuclear power after their trauma as a nation at the dawn of the atomic age.
  • In Skull Island, the Croc Monster is introduced ambushing and eating a mercenary alive, and then a few minutes later, Kong is introduced ambushing and eating the Croc Monster alive.
• Death by Origin Story: Quite a few of the human characters are directly influenced by the loss of loved ones in their backstories. Joe Brody's wife Sandra, Andrew Russell, Dr. Lind's brother David and Bernie's wife Sara.
• Death from Above: The male MUTO in Godzilla (2014) employs a hit and run strategy using its wings, and dive-bombs the boat carrying the nuclear bomb the military intended to use to kill him, the female and Godzilla. The spin-off graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong recycles the Vinestrangler — a creature that was cut from Kong: Skull Island, hanging from trees and using its Combat Tentacles to ambush and devour unsuspecting prey that wanders below it — as a Monarch creature profile.
• Death Glare: Quite a few over the course of the franchise. The most notable examples include Packard frequently dishing these out to anyone who pisses him off, Ichi (Ghidorah's middle head) giving Madison one when the heads spot her and he realizes she's responsible for broadcasting the ORCA signal, Godzilla and Kong exchanging such looks mutually at the end of their first battle, and Emiko Randa briefly giving Cate a pretty scary glare when Hiroshi Randa's Secret Other Family becomes known to the two of them.
• Death World / Eldritch Location: Skull Island is not that far off from being an Acid-Trip Dimension, and it's inhabited by various giant monsters who could easily hunt any humans on the island until there's none left if they weren't being kept in check by Kong. The same applies to the Hollow Earth, which is speculated to be directly connected to Skull Island's origin.
• Deep Breath Reveals Tension: Invoked in Godzilla: King of the Monsters when Emma and Madison are walking past piles of fresh corpses, and Emma is telling Madison to regulate her breathing just like they practiced. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Nathan Lind has to take a breath to steady himself after Walter Simmons gives him condolences for his brother's death.
• Defiant to the End:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Madison, cornered by a peeved Ghidorah with no way out as the dragon is charging up his Gravity Beams to personally atomize her, decides to go out screaming in defiance at the three-headed False King, before a timely arrival by Godzilla saves her bacon. At the movie's end, at least two of Ghidorah's heads go out fighting against Burning Godzilla (one more reluctantly than the other), and after they're gone, the remaining head dies shrieking like a little girl.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, a severely-beaten Kong roars defiantly in Godzilla's face rather than submit to him, even when Godzilla has decisively won their last battle and inflicted near-lethal injuries on Kong. At the movie's end, the Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla dies trying to fire its Breath Weapon at Kong, even after Kong has hacked off all but one of its limbs and is readying the killing blow.
• Demoted to Extra: Whilst the franchise does bring some characters from previous entries back in future instalments, if they're not Kaiju then they're pretty much guaranteed to experience this trope. Admiral Stenz, Mark Russell, Dr. Brooks, and also the Skullcrawlers and Warbats, all have a lot less screentime and a more minor part in their second movie appearances that they did in their debuts respectively.
• Denser and Wackier: The franchise has been getting increasingly zany and further from its grim, semi-realistic roots which each new film: the further a movie is from Godzilla (2014), the less recognizable it is as part of the same universe.
  • Godzilla was grim and dead-serious, it was fine with suddenly killing off a Decoy Protagonist and hosts of minor characters, and it tried to be as grounded in reality as a movie which features daikaiju big enough to break the square cube law could hope to be.
  • Kong: Skull Island introduced more exotic monsters and an outright Eldritch Location as the main setting, and some of the new characters upped the hamminess, quips and black comedy; but it was still a fairly dark and serious film, and it maintained the 2014 film's choice to give the kaiju slow and weighty movements befitting their size.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) retained the previous films' dark and apocalyptic tone and the killing off of significant characters, but it also widened the Willing Suspension of Disbelief. Monarch was changed from the moderately-funded and somewhat dusty organization of the previous movies to the MonsterVerse version of S.H.I.E.L.D., complete with tens of billions of dollars' worth of hi-tech and its very own institutionalized military division, despite the fact the organization is on trial in this film; the human characters spout considerably more jokes and humor; the kaiju start to get more agile for their size (though still mostly maintaining a weighty pace); and kaiju which are much less close-to-human than Kong get more anthropomorphically expressive and emotive than the creatures in previous films. One of these monsters even includes an actual extraterrestrial that's supposed to be even more otherworldly than the other kaiju.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong takes the wackiness further. It all but ditches the weighty pace and makes the kaiju move like seven-foot people, and it all but removes the apocalyptic atmosphere of the previous films in favor of a Lighter and Softer treatment where nobody who's both good-aligned and a significant character EVER dies. More of the new human cast including the antagonists are goofy and hammy, the newer hi-tech gadgets and the featured Eldritch Location are now on the verge of reaching Star Trek levels of fantastical, and both Kong and (to a much lesser extent) Godzilla are further anthropomorphized.
  • Skull Island (2023), a prequel set inbetween Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is somewhere in the middle between the Kong movie and Godzilla vs. Kong in terms of dense and wackiness, harkening back more to Kong: Skull Island's exotic but gritty and bloody tone. On one hand, the cast is in a World of Snark, the monsters (particularly Kong, Dog and a giant hawk) are The Silent Bob levels of expressive like the monsters in the later two MonsterVerse movies were, and one of the new creatures is basically a giant, mutant werewolf-pitbull creature who behaves much like a dog even in the wild. On the other hand, the series features none of the later two movies' fantastical hi-tech (the closest approximation being a Tracking Device small enough to conceal inside handcuffs being available to high-paying mercenaries in the early 1990s), and characters who don't deserve it die horrible and often bloody deaths at the creatures' hands. The kaiju themselves in the animation vary in the speed and weight of their movements, from semi-realistically slow and weighty like in the earlier movies to speedy enough to match Woody Woodpecker despite the laws of physics, depending on the scene.
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which is half a prequel to Kong: Skull Island, and half a sequel to Godzilla (2014) which also ties into Godzilla vs. Kong; starts off with a fairly gritty tone, it at first it re-uses the slow and weighty kaiju movements and mostly human POVs of the first couple movies (particularly in the flashbacks to the 2014 movie's time frame). Although a couple of the characters in the minority are saturated in the comedy and quips of later instalments, the majority are as serious as the early instalments' characters. By the first season's final episode, however, the show has completely outdone Godzilla vs. Kong in the science fiction's wackiness department, with the introduction of teleportation-inducing wormholes and a black hole-like Year Outside, Hour Inside effect inside the Earth — the show's ending furthermore does away with the weighty, realistic take and mostly human POVs on the kaiju's speed and movement all over again, to make them unrealistically fast and light-weighted again.

• Detrimental Determination:
  • Kong: Skull Island: Disgruntled and inwardly-bloodthirsty war vet Packard singles Kong out as his new "enemy" after the latter slaughters half his men and strands the cast on Skull Island, setting himself on killing the ape at all costs before he even seriously considers getting the people he still has to protect off the island. He refuses beyond reason to give up his vendetta against Kong after the cast learn that Kong acted in defence of his territory and that he's the only thing keeping the island's Skullcrawler horde from becoming an unchecked threat to the world, and he makes calls which place his remaining men needlessly in harm's way and get more of them killed. In the end, all his remaining men, who would've once followed him into hell itself if he ordered them to, desert him once they realize Packard has gone completely insane, and he dies alone trying to kill Kong before he perishes.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: The eco-terrorists Alan Jonah and Emma Russell stick doggedly to their plan to set as many Titans loose as possible and let them rampage to change the world to their liking. Jonah doesn't appear to realize that King Ghidorah's actions will ultimately kill him, his men, and all multicellular life on Earth, while Emma not listening to her daughter's pleas to have a Heel–Face Turn sooner ends up alienating her from the only person who she cared about more than her plan.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: Godzilla is so focused on destroying or beating any threat to his dominance into submission that his sheer aggression turns an oblivious human race against him, and he ends up wasting his own precious energy on brutalizing and crippling a Protector Alpha Titan who could've helped him neutralize the real threat (Mechagodzilla) earlier. Walter Simmons is so overconfident and so obsessed with proving humanity superior to Godzilla and conquering the Titans, he's more or less ignored all the apocalyptically-enforced aesops of the previous films in favor of pursuing his warped dream, and his sheer recklessness in harnessing Ghidorah's telepathic skull to that end and in ignoring his subordinate's cautions out of impulse leads to a Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla killing him, and destroying everything he worked for. Mark Russell, having learned next to nothing from the previous film, is too dogmatic and close-minded in his insistence that he knows what's right (which he blatantly doesn't): he jumps to a conclusion and easily condemns Godzilla without more reliable proof, which helps Simmons to endanger millions, and Mark can't see that his own controlling effort to keep Madison safe while reconnecting with her is only driving her away from him all over again.
• Devoured by the Horde: The Leafwings and their relative the Psychovultures on Skull Island, being as small and swarming as they are, tend to do this, as do the Death Jackals also on Skull Island; in Kong: Skull Island and The Birth of Kong.
• Didn't Think This Through:
  • Several-fold in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
    • The eco-terrorists want to release the Titans to restore balance to nature before a manmade mass extinction ensues, but they're so indiscriminate in which Titans they set loose (not considering that only some of them are capable of coexisting with humanity and the current natural order), they unwittingly awaken an even worse threat to man and nature alike in the form of Ghidorah. Not that their misanthropic leader minds.
    • The eco-terrorists' accomplice Emma needlessly dragged her own daughter Madison into the plan without properly indoctrinating her, and she's completely clueless when Madison is justifiably traumatized by their atrocities, permanently alienated from Emma, and becomes more trouble than she's worth to their plan's success.
    • The U.S. military panic and fire their Oxygen Destroyer in an effort to kill the newly-rampant Rodan and Ghidorah without first consulting the on-site Monarch presence, leading to an Epic Fail when the weapon cripples Godzilla instead and leaves Ghidorah free to galvanize the other Titans into completely destroying mankind.
    • Madison, using the ORCA to disrupt Ghidorah's global Titan control and lure Ghidorah himself to a Final Battle against Godzilla in Boston, handles the Distress Ball by staying put and waiting for a pissed-off Ghidorah to arrive at hers and the ORCA's location. And then she unwittingly gives away her exact location to the human-killing monster when she unplugs the ORCA from the PA system so that its Titan-attracting signal is solely emitting from the device in her hands.
  • The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization notes that Dr. Nathan Lind has a bad habit of tunnel vision when he sets his eye on an end-goal, and that he's also the only one on Team Kong who doesn't (however half-heartedly) suspect Apex are up to no good nor think they should be asking why a Protector Titan like Godzilla is behaving the way that he is before they try to kill him. The former trait contributed to Nathan's brother's death in the backstory, while the latter trait makes him a perfect Unwitting Pawn for Apex who doesn't realize he's furthering an evil plan until Apex have gotten what they need out of him.
  • In the Skull Island animated series, Irene, as part of her plan to get Annie back without the latter's loyal monster companion Dog obstructing her efforts and killing her men, tries to kill Dog by luring him into the Hawk Monster's talons. After Irene is revealed to be Annie's long-lost mother who just wants her daughter back, Annie calls Irene out for thinking the former would ever want anything to do with a woman she barely remembers if she'd succeeded in killing the only companion that Annie had for most of her life while she was fending for herself on an Isle of Giant Horrors, making it clear that Irene is very lucky that Annie knows Dog survived her attempt to get rid of him.
  • In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire:
    • Kong after obtaining his B.E.A.S.T. Glove seeks out Godzilla on the surface for help combating the Skar King and his army. However, Kong doesn't account for Godzilla's fiercer territorialism and view of the Earth's entire surface as his territory driving the great lizard to attack and attempt to kill Kong without hearing him out the second that he senses Kong effectively intruding on his territory.
    • The Skar King himself becomes so blindingly livid at Kong for knocking his tooth out in the final battle, he redirects Shimo's attentions off of fighting Godzilla to attack Kong instead... which leaves Godzilla freed up to go all-out against the Skar King himself.
• Disappeared Dad: Supplementary materials reveal that Dr. Vivienne Graham and James Conrad's respective fathers both died in their backstories when they were young — in Vivienne's case, before she was born. In the backstory of the Skull Island animated series, Annie and Dog's respective fathers killed each-other on Annie's Island when Annie and Dog were very young. The main plot of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is kicked off by and centers around the protagonist Cate Randa and her half-brother Kentaro's father Hiroshi, who disappeared shortly after G-Day and is presumed dead.
• Distant Prologue:
  • Godzilla: The first fifteen minutes of the movie are a Downer Beginning set in 1999, fifteen years before the main time frame begins.
  • Kong: Skull Island: The opening is Lieutenant Hank Marlow and Gunpei Ikari getting stranded on Skull Island during World War II, before it skips to the movie's main time frame in 1973.
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: The first scene in the series is essentially a mini-midquel to the aforementioned Kong: Skull Island taking place in 1973, before the show skips ahead to the 2010s.
• Doublethink:
  • Walter R. Riccio in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong once he loses his mind. He rants that they need to prove whether or not Kong is the protector the Iwi and Houston Brooks believe him to be... by endangering Kong's charges via exposing them to Skull Island's hostile wildlife, comparing it to something as inevitable and necessary as childbirth. Oh, and if Kong doesn't intervene to protect the Iwi, then it's a sign that the whole world deserves to burn in Riccio's book.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Alan Jonah believes that saving the rest of the world's biosphere from a manmade extinction event is worth anything... up to and including letting an Omnicidal Maniac of a Titan wreak even worse destruction on the Earth's global biosphere than our species would have, so long as said Titan makes sure humanity is one of the species that perishes completely. His partner-in-crime Emma Russell isn't any better: after losing her son in a Titan attack five years prior, she wants to ensure nothing like that happens to anyone ever again... by setting all the remaining Titans loose on humanity ahead of schedule so that they'll surely decimate civilization and create millions more broken families, taking out her rage on the world and refusing to acknowledge it.
  • In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Ren Serizawa's POV shows that he believes the Titans he's helping Apex to try and conquer are nothing more than a new kind of rival animal for humanity to domesticate or kill off, and he scorns the notion that individual humans matter in the bigger picture of the overall human race's advancement... while believing that he alone is going to ascend to godhood when he gains full control of his cybernetic Humongous Mecha that is based directly on a Titan.
• Downer Beginning: The movies don't exactly open up with sunshine and rainbows.
  • Godzilla (2014): A husband and father is forced to lock his own wife and several co-workers inside an irradiated chamber to die whilst his former home city becomes the Japanese Chernobyl, because of a prehistoric monster that mankind knows almost nothing about escaping into the world.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: The opening reveals that the ocean is suffering mass die-offs, humanity is still reeling from the devastation that occurred in the first movie five years on, and everyone is anxious or fearful about the presence of even more Titans in the world.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: The opening establishes that Kong's island home and all but one of his charges have been wiped out, whilst the normally-heroic Godzilla, King of the Monsters seemingly launches an attack on a coastal city for no reason.
  • Skull Island (2023): Several. The overall series storyline begins with a hyper-aggressive kraken monster destroying the human cast's boat, and one of their own being murdered in front of his son's eyes, leading them to be shipwrecked on Skull Island and separated from each-other. Episode 5 opens with Annie and an ailing Mike getting effectively captured by the Private Military Contractors, Dog getting carried off by the Hawk Monster, and Charlie being left all alone. Episode 6 opens with a flashback to the night Annie's father died, just before he went to his death.
• The Dragon: In this continuity, this trope is notably retconned from Ghidorah, as it's a one-dragon Alien Invasion by himself, and in both his film appearances, the human antagonists attempting to control him ends up being a total Evil Is Not a Toy, truly making him King Ghidorah. In a bit of Adaptational Villainy, Rodan becomes King Ghidorah's Dragon in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) after Ghidorah defeats him, staying close by Ghidorah as his vanguard while the rest of Ghidorah's Titan army is spread out across the globe. Among the human antagonists, Alan Jonah is a big Dragon-in-Chief to Emma Russell in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Ren Serizawa is Walter Simmons' close right-hand man in Godzilla vs. Kong (revealed to be a Dragon with an Agenda in the novelization).
• Dramatically Missing the Point:
  • In Godzilla (2014), it's hinted that Admiral Stenz misconstrues Serizawa's effort to make him understand that man isn't nearly as powerful in the face of nature as we think we are as Serizawa being personally afraid of another Hiroshima bombing due to his own past, when Serizawa shows Stenz his father's stopped pocket watch to try and dissuade Stenz from an extremely risky nuclear strike against the Titans. Stenz hasn't learn his lessons by the time of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) either.
  • In Kong: Skull Island, Marlow and Dr. Brooks try to impress on Packard that Kong is necessary for mankind's survival because without him, the Skullcrawlers that he's been working to keep in check will reproduce out of control and devour everything. The only message that Packard in his Sanity Slippage takes away is that he should wipe out the Skullcrawlers too after he's killed Kong, assuming that he's capable of doing such a thing on his own when Kong hasn't been able to do more than keep the creatures underground and limit their numbers while they were small with youth.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong shows that after the events of the previous movie, Mark Russell realized he was wrong to cut himself out of his daughter's life... so instead, he's overcompensating in the other direction by being a demanding, patronizing, obstinate helicopter parent who insists he knows what's best for Madison better than she does, and no matter how many arguments Madison has with him, he refuses to realize that he's liable to start driving her away from him all over again, which is the very outcome he's desperately trying to avoid.

• Draw Aggro: The human cast diverting the Alpha Skullcrawler's attention and distracting it to help Kong beat it in Kong: Skull Island, and Emma Russell preventing King Ghidorah's Near-Villain Victory by distracting him from sucking an exhausted and empowered Godzilla dry of energy long enough for Godzilla to use the energy to reach his Super Mode.
• The Dreaded: A lot of the Titans, particularly the more hostile ones, naturally have reputations of dread among those who know of them.
  • The Iwi on Skull Island rightly fear the omnivorous and hypervorous Skullcrawlers which decimated Kong's kind and can wipe out even armed modern human soldiers with ease, to the point where they won't even speak the name they know the creatures by (Halakrah).
  • Possibly the standout example is Ghidorah. This particular Titan was feared by ancient humans who witnessed the Titans so much so that there's scarcely any direct record about him, as if ancient humanity was trying to deliberately wipe him from their memories out of sheer fear. In the present day, the possibility that Ghidorah is about to awaken again makes Godzilla himself become agitated and erratic.
  • Camazotz was feared by the Iwi, whom apparently prophesized that he would end Skull Island, and Captain Audrey Burns is traumatized by her encounter with the Dark Titan in 2019.
  • Godzilla himself, though he's a Protector Titan, has apparently been feared by the Iwi as a demon for generations, because of his and/or his kind's role in destroying their venerated gods the Titanus Kong species' members and civilization long ago. Dr. Andrews in the present dreads the thought of Godzilla crossing paths with Kong, calculating (correctly) that a clash between the two would end in Kong's defeat.
  • The Skar King rules over an entire tribe of other Great Apes via pure terror and tyranny, reducing them all to cowering away from his presence in fear. The Iwi in the Hollow Earth consider him a major threat to the world, and sensing that he's about to return is enough to drive Godzilla to force-metamorphose himself into a stronger and more evolved form.
• Dropped a Bridge on Him: This happens to a few human characters. Joe Brody in the 2014 film and Bill Randa in Kong: Skull Island are made out to be major characters during the early part of either film and are then abruptly killed off no more than halfway through either film, whilst Dr. Graham from the 2014 film reappears in King of the Monsters only to be killed by Ghidorah roughly 1/3 into the movie's run time.
• Drowning My Sorrows: It's not seen, but mentioned a few times. Mark Russell turned to drinking in the initial aftermath of his son's death, and the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization mentions Bernie briefly did this after his wife died.
• Due to the Dead:
  • In Kong: Skull Island, Packard and his surviving men hold a funerary service for those of the soldiers whom were slaughtered. Gunpei Ikari after his offscreen death has a weapon tombstone in the Iwi's village, which Hank Marlow pays his respects to.
  • In the 2023 Skull Island series, Kong personally buries the Island Girl on a mountaintop after her death.
  • In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Young Lee Shaw buries one of his colleagues who dies on Operation Hourglass in the Hollow Earth, and Old Shaw gives his old friend Du-Ho a makeshift funeral pyre while reminiscing about their history.
• Dug Too Deep: This is one of the main causes of the Titans' emergences and is recurring throughout the franchise; with prominent examples including the MUTOs in the 2014 film and the Skullcrawlers in Skull Island.
• Dynamic Entry: Godzilla pops up via surprise-attacking his opponent a good few times in his first two film appearances, whilst Mothra and Rodan both enter the Final Battle in a flying ambush against their respective enemies in King of the Monsters, and the Frost Vark makes its debut bursting out of the ice to attack a plane in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

E

• Early-Bird Cameo: The Stinger of Kong: Skull Island features cave paintings of Mothra, Rodan and Ghidorah, teasing their debuts in the flesh as major characters in the next movie. In Skull Island, Sam first appears without a name or any lines of dialogue among a crowd of mercenaries chasing Annie in the series opening, before he reappears later as Irene's sociable and competent right-hand man.
• Ear Notch: A horn variation. Ghidorah's Perpetual Frowner right head (Ni) has a broken horn in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, as does Camazotz the Dark Titan in Kingdom Kong.
• Earn Your Happy Ending: The 2014 film ends with Godzilla saving the world from the MUTOs, and the human lead making it home to his family after all the hell he's been through. Godzilla vs. Kong likewise ends on a surprisingly happy note with Godzilla and Kong burying the hatchet after all the villains have been defeated.
• Eaten Alive: Naturally, getting literally eaten is a very common way to die among the monsters, especially for characters in Kong-centric stories which take place in the monsters' natural refuges on Skull Island or the Hollow Earth.
• Eldritch Location: Skull Island, which Bill Randa describes as "the land where God did not finish creation", is a truly otherworldly Isle of Giant Horrors that's populated by gigantic planimals, closed off from the world by a perpetual storm encircling the surrounding waters, and host to atmospheric and geological anomalies. It's speculated in Godzilla vs. Kong that Skull Island is basically a piece of the Hollow Earth (which is itself an Eldritch Location in that movie), which bled onto the surface world. The monster-populated inner Hollow Earth in Godzilla vs. Kong is separated from the Earth's crust by a gravity-inverting membrane, which makes it difficult to access while also speeding up the 3000km travel time from the planet's outside to its inside, and the Hollow Earth's floor and ceiling have their own gravity fields with a kind of gravity-free neutral zone in the altitudinous center.
• Elemental Personalities: The various Kaiju (Titans), especially the Godzilla: King of the Monsters ensemble, tend to have elemental power alignments and personality traits to match them.
  • Water:
    • Godzilla is a giant semi-aquatic creature, and despite the fear he inspires, he's ultimately committed to defending the world's natural balance against those who would disrupt it, even displaying a distinct tolerance of humans so long as they don't make themselves a major threat to that balance. He's survived being nuked point-blank multiple times and grown stronger for it.
    • Na Kika/Kraken is a gigantic, vaguely cuttlefish-like, ocean-dwelling cephalopod, whose abilities to camouflage and mimic organ failure make them one of the single most biologically-adaptive Titans around.
    • The Kraken on Skull Island (no relation to Na Kika) is a chimera of piscine, cephalopodic and crustacean traits with multi-purpose and far-reaching tentacles (adaptable), and it's calculating but murderously deranged in its actions.
  • Light: Mothra is physically characterized by her Beta-Wave Bioluminescence and blinding God-Rays. Shown to be one of the most benevolent Titans toward humans by far, she directly refuses to obey nor tolerate King Ghidorah's reign of terror.
  • Fire: Rodan is portrayed in this continuity as a bio-volcanic creature that hibernated inside a volcano and has lava-leaking wings. He's trigger-happy when provoked to defending his territory and when serving Ghidorah, displaying an excessively violent streak towards humans.
  • Electricity: Ghidorah has bio-electric powers which basically make him a living superstorm. He's completely Ax-Crazy to a point far beyond the instincts of other hostile Titans, actively slaughtering any humans he sees for the fun of it, and actively seeking to usurp Godzilla's global domination and radically change the planet's entire environment per his own wants.
  • Earth: Kong (a.k.a. the Mountain Who Thunders Death), and Methuselah (a giant rocky Planimal) are described as Protector Titans; relatively peaceful, and environmentally and symbiotically beneficial. Kong is even more expressively protective of the humans he considers under his charge than Godzilla is, but he's willing to put emotion aside in favor of reason when he aids Godzilla against the greater threat posed by Mechagodzilla, and when he decides it's better to just bury the hatchet with Godzilla. Methuselah is described in its Monrch profile as a Mighty Glacier who is very resistant to attacks and even allows humans to shelter on its mountainous back.
  • Metal: Mechagodzilla is a chrome, metal Humongous Mecha, created by an evil corporation who have remained stubbornly set in their views that Godzilla is an enemy even after Godzilla was vindicated. Soulless in origin and intended to be an unfeeling Remote Body for a human pilot, Mechagodzilla becomes possessed by the lingering consciousness in Ghidorah's undead skull, and despite only being "alive" for less than an hour, the Mecha makes ruthless, knowledgeable and efficient use of its arsenal to wear Godzilla down.
  • Darkness: Camazotz, "the Dark Titan", is a giant black bat which lives in darkness and cannot stand light. In the graphic novel Kingdom Kong, he's revealed to be the force responsible for enshrouding Skull Island in a closed Perpetual Storm, which was part of his gambit to emerge in the resulting darkness and take the island from Kong in a deadly fight, indifferent to how his actions would spell the extinction of the island's native life.
  • Air:
    • The male MUTO in Godzilla (2014) is a Metamorphosis Monster who becomes airborne in his adult form, characterized as caring about very little except plundering nuclear food and making babies with the only other available female of his kind. Like his sister-girlfriend, he couldn't care less about how their species repopulating spells an extinction-level disaster for the rest of the world.
    • The Ion Dragon in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a territorial Giant Flyer, but it quickly loses interest in the humans whose presence aggravated it once they're no longer inside its den.
  • Wood: Behemoth is a moss-covered, part-rock creature, who has an extra deal of emphasis placed on his ability to replenish the environment and cause whole new ecosystems to sprout. His normal behaviour is gentle and protective, although he's not strong enough to resist King Ghidorah's command to destroy.
• Elites Are More Glamorous: Ford Brody in the first movie is an elite military EOD expert, and he's the Sole Survivor of more than one military scrape with the MUTOs during the movie. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, almost the entire U.S. military gets wiped out by King Ghidorah, Rodan, and the Titans distributed around the world, except for the (developed) members of Monarch's elite military G-Team detachment.
• Enemy Mine:
  • The least generous interpretation of Godzilla and humans repeatedly working together against another Titan which threatens them both (the MUTOs, Jinshin-Mushi and Ghidorah) — we say "least generous" because compared to most Godzilla iterations, the MonsterVerse incarnation of the Big G is remarkably less antagonistic and more benign towards humanity even in the absence of a common enemy, and Godzilla: King of the Monsters explores the concept of cohabiting the world with him in mutually-beneficial symbiosis.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, the titular monsters go from being at each-other's throats to working together once Mechagodzilla emerges as an even greater threat than either of them.
  • In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the Randa half-siblings put their animosity with Tim aside to get his help after May is kidnapped.
• Enfant Terrible: The Endoswarmers in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters immediately attack the very first humans that they see upon hatching from their eggs. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization states that newborn Skullcrawlers are just as aggressive and dangerous as their adult counterparts. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the juvenile Suko is at first very aggressive and scrappy to Kong's kindness due to his extremely rough upbringing.
• Et Tu, Brute?: In Kong: Skull Island, Packard looks shocked and heartbroken for a split-second when one of his own men turns his gun on him. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Emma Russell's colleagues and her ex-husband are so shocked by the revelation of her betrayal in Antarctica, one of them at first can't believe it and another almost can't bring himself to speak of it. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, neither of the late Hiroshi Randa's two families are particularly happy to learn of his deep double life.
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Godzilla's Arch-Enemy who contrasts him the most directly is Ghidorah, a rival Alpha Titan who vies against Godzilla for supremacy over the Earth. They're both more or less at the top of the MonsterVerse's Super Weight class with each-other, and both possess the ability to command the lesser Titans to their will; but Ghidorah is a Satanic Archetype and The Anti-God opposite Godzilla's God and Messianic Archetype. Whereas Godzilla is a primeval enforcer and protector of Earth's natural order who is at worst apathetic to the humans around him, Ghidorah is a completely malevolent and sadistic, invasive alien lifeform who seeks to kill all humans, and he disrupts and overturns Earth's natural order with his mere existence, aiming to lead the lesser Titans towards inflicting global destruction.
    • Godzilla and Ghidorah also both have a respective sidekick in their shared movie, who fight each-other on their own. For Godzilla it's Mothra, a light-giving, angelic lepidopterran Titan who is Godzilla's natural symbiotic partner with Undying Loyalty. For Ghidorah it's Rodan, a magmatic, demonic pterodactyloid Titan, who serves Ghidorah after the latter defeats and dominates him and who has fluid loyalties.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong introduces an evil counterpart to the quasi-governmental organization Monarch in the secretive corporation Apex Cybernetics. Both are extremely wealthy and hi-tech multinational organizations with an active interest in the Titans and Hollow Earth, and they both ostensibly aim to defend humanity's world against hostile Titan threats as much as possible. However, Monarch are mainly naturalists whom recognize the vast benefits and the outright existential necessity of finding ways to coexist with Protector Titans like Godzilla in particular, they genuinely value human life, and they mostly understand that the Titans are far beyond humanity's ability to control or destroy by ourselves. Apex are technophile industrialists whom are uncompromisingly fixated on dominating, enslaving or destroying all the Titans both bad and good, not least of all Godzilla, for the sakes of the organization's own power and humanocentristic pride; and they don't think twice about endangering millions of civilians for their plan, nor do they think twice about meddling with Green Rocks and Ghidorah's semi-conscious undead skull in the beliefs that they can combine both with their technology to create an anti-Titan weapon, without expecting to lose control of it. Having grossly ignored every lesson in humility, harmony with nature, and the dangers of meddling with things man doesn't understand that were enforced by literal city-destroying disasters and a global apocalypse in the preceding movies.
  • Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire:
    • Kong gains an evil counterpart from himself in the form of the Skar King. Both are intelligent, simian Alpha Titans who rule over a monster kingdom of their own, are connected to the Hollow Earth, and make use of tools to win. However, the Skar King is a far more aggressive and sinister character than Kong, lacking the King of the Primates' philanthropy.
    • Shimo serves as an evil counterpart to Godzilla — they're both ancient, reptilian and extremely powerful and revered Titans, and they're both ultimately benevolent in character. However, Shimo is a dark representation of what Godzilla could have become if Kong or Apex had enslaved him: Forced into Evil, and forced to commit evil mass destruction against their will.
• Evil Genius: Emma Russell in Godzilla: King of the Monsters uses her technical prowess to build a device that can manipulate the Titans via bio-acoustics, so that she can set them all loose on the world. Ren Serizawa in Godzilla vs. Kong uses his engineering and electronic skills to build a Humongous Mecha so that he can frame Godzilla for killing millions of people and then kill Godzilla himself.
• Evil Is Angular: Whereas Godzilla in this incarnation has fairly rounded and curvy edges to his design and he's one of the more benevolent incarnations of the character; his arch-enemies King Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) and Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong both have more edges and angles, in the forms of spiky protrusions, bat-like wings (Ghidorah), and a more cuboid and sharp-edged anatomy with an industrial theme (Mechagodzilla). Likewise, Ghidorah's dragon Rodan has a very triangular head with pointed horns and a hooked beak, clawed fingers, and avian feet with talons.
• Evil Is Bigger: Ghidorah, introduced in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is the largest Titan in the franchise at a whopping 521 feet as well as the evilest, serving as the Big Bad of that movie. Ghidorah's reincarnation Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong, though not as big, still stands taller than both of the other two Titans in that movie, and he's just as murderous as Ghidorah was. The Kraken in Skull Island supersedes Kong himself in total body size, and it's a thoroughly nasty piece of work. Shimo in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, although she's very much being Forced into Evil by the Skar King, is his reluctant attack-dog for use against Godzilla and the surface world, and she's as tall as Godzilla when she's standing on all fours.
• Evil Old Folks: Several of the more anthropomorphic if not outright human villains are visibly elderly, and they're all among the eviler villains in the MonsterVerse. Alan Jonah is a murderous and genocidal misanthrope supreme who wants the human race dead at all costs, even if it means letting King Ghidorah destroy the Earth; Walter Simmons is a sociopathic corrupt corporate executive who engineers a plot to endanger and kill millions of people and to usurp Godzilla in order to pettily satisfy his own egotism; and the Skar King is a visibly-aged, balding Great Ape who sadistically enslaves and terrorizes the rest of his kind, who wants nothing more than to conquer any and all new territories that he can, and implicitly crosses a line that no other character in the MonsterVerse has been shown crossing before him via him keeping a harem of abused, terrified breeding slaves.
• Evil Takes a Nap: Many of the bad Titans as well as the good ones, if not outright canned, are usually found by humans in deep hibernation somewhere in the world. And then the humans, or something stupid that humans did, wakes them up.
• Evil Wears Black: Alan Jonah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and all three of the major human antagonists in Godzilla vs. Kong; all of them favor darker-colored clothing including pitch-black garments. Downplayed in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, but Monarch operative Duvall's all-black sense of fashion together with her spy-like personality certainly don't help to convince the main characters that she and Tim are the good guys.
• Excessive Mourning: The franchise seems to have a habit of doing this with grieving parents. Joe Brody in the 2014 film went from a respected power plant engineer to living in an apartment teaching English as a second language after his wife's death, and he remains obsessed with finding out the truth and very haunted after an entire decade and a half has passed since the event. Both Mark and Emma Russell are in their own ways reacting this way to the Plot-Triggering Death of their son Andrew five years ago at the start of King of the Monsters.
• Eye Awaken: Kong does this a few times, whilst with Godzilla it's more downplayed as the latter does it in a more tired, slow and world-weary way. Mechagodzilla pulls off a Glowing Mechanical Eyes variation when it activates.
• Eye Scream: In Kong: Skull Island, one of the giant Skullcrawler's eyes (its real eye, not the eye sockets in the skull jaws) gets shot out with a flare gun. In the 2023 Skull Island series, Kong gouges two of the Kraken's eyes out in the Final Battle, and the Kraken in turn injures one of his eyes. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a Brambleboar in the Axis Mundi area of the Hollow Earth is warded off when it's shot in the eye with an arrow.

F

• Face–Heel Turn: Emma Russell in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). It also looks like Godzilla has turned against humanity in Godzilla vs. Kong, but it turns out he was Good All Along. Both those films' novelizations have also featured a couple of Monarch's operatives making these (one due to agreeing with Emma Russell that the Titans should be free, the other for money) respectively.
• Facepalm: Chapman in Kong: Skull Island facepalms when he realizes he's stranded, cut off from the rest of the cast, on an island filled with giant monsters, commenting that life sometimes just "kicks you in the balls". Dr. Brooks facepalms in dismay when he realizes his son disappeared because he went to Skull Island after their last argument over their differing views on the Titans, in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong. Dr. Serizawa facepalms in King of the Monsters when he realizes that the eco-terrorists are planning to forcibly awaken all the dormant Titans because Emma has taken Serizawa's Xenophilic views on the creatures to the extreme.
• Failure Hero:
  • Admiral Stenz, for all his reasonability and well intentions, doesn't manage to do anything meaningful except for making a bad monster situation so much worse and thereby endangering more of the people he's trying to protect. His plan to nuke the kaiju in the 2014 movie gives the MUTOs the means to reproduce and it nearly causes a nuclear fireball to consume 100,000 people, leaving the military's hands tied. And his ambiguous support of the Oxygen Destroyer's usage in King of the Monsters not only fails to kill either of the Titans it hits, it enables King Ghidorah to galvanize a global Titan army unopposed, leading to the destruction of multiple cities and almost enabling Ghidorah to strip away all life as we know it.
  • Aaron Brooks in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, though not nearly as bad as Stenz, fails to save any of his comrades despite his efforts and he ends the graphic novel as the sole survivor. Even stopping the massacre that the humans unwittingly unleashed was all Kong's doing rather than Aaron's.
  • Deputy Director Verdugo in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters doesn't accomplish much of anything meaningful except for cutting a deal with Apex Cybernetics which might have aided the corporate conspiracy to create Mechagodzilla, and eventually driving the heroes away from Monarch and into Apex's claws with her questionable leadership.
• Family-Unfriendly Death: The majority of kaiju are killed in this fashion, such as the female MUTO having her insides roasted with the Kiss of Death before Godzilla rips her head off.
• Fatal Flaw:
  • Amongst the heroes (or at least non-villains):
    • Admiral Stenz's narrow-mindedness makes him unable to wrap his head around the idea of the Titans being anything more than a threat to civilians, hindering his recognition of the Green Aesop which the franchise runs on. This has led to him being directly complicit in unwittingly making the situation even worse than it needed to be in both his movie appearances.
    • With Mark Russell, it would probably be easier to say that he has several crippling fatal flaws: he's hot-headed and impulsive, he can't separate his emotions from doing his job unless his life is immediately on the line, he thinks so much about the (worst parts of the) past that he occasionally neglects to focus on what's happening the present, he's prone to self-centeredness and pity parties, and he refuses to confront his own personal baggage head-on. All of this limits his competence and potential when it comes to using his Titan-predicting skills for good, and leads him to tarnish and sabotage his relationships with his beloved family (twice with his daughter as of Godzilla vs. Kong).
    • Dr. Nathan Lind is implied in the movie, and confirmed in the novelization, to have a tendency towards tunnel vision when he becomes fixated on an end-goal, neglecting to make adequate intellectual and organizational preparations to ensure the journey can go smoothly. This trait contributed to the spectacular failure of his and his brother's first attempt to enter the Hollow Earth, and it shows again when he becomes focused on helping Apex to get Kong to the Hollow Earth, making him the perfect Unwitting Pawn for Apex.
  • Amongst the villains:
    • Lieutenant Colonel Packard's obsessive thirst for revenge on Kong leads him to put his own beloved men at unnecessary risk, and it gets him killed in the end... though not before it's driven everyone else who was once loyal to him to desert and abandon him.
    • Ghidorah is possibly the most powerful Titan introduced in the entire setting, rivaled only by Godzilla, as well as one of the more intelligent; but his sadism is so great that he ends up drawing out his targets' and enemies' deaths for too long just to indulge himself, giving Godzilla multiple openings to catch him off-guard while he's distracted.
    • As competent and intelligent as Alan Jonah is, especially comparative to the other villains, his hatred of humanity is so great that it overrides his intelligence when he realizes King Ghidorah can exterminate humanity completely. He overlooks the certainty that he and his men will also sooner or later die in that scenario, and the Godzilla: King of the Monsters novelization states more explicitly than the film does that Jonah genuinely thinks against all logic that he and his troops will be able to eke out a worthwhile living after Ghidorah has been allowed to turn the entire Earth into a dead wasteland.
    • Emma Russell's pride and arrogance means that once she's set her mind on solving a problem in a certain way, she'll keep pursuing the end through that specific means, no matter how many people get hurt by her actions as collateral. She thinks she's ultimately helping the world and giving her daughter a better tomorrow with her plan to manipulate the Titans, but her amoral methodology and sloppy execution traumatizes and alienates her child instead, and it leads to her unwittingly unleashing a certain three-headed Omnicidal Maniac that tries to destroy the world entirely.
    • Walter Simmons is basically a walking meat-sack of hubris. He seeks to glorify himself and realize his ideals of solely-human planetary domination; but he's so convinced that fortune always favors the bold that he doesn't bat an eye at using Ghidorah's not-entirely-dormant alien neurology as the core of the control system that he's betting his entire plan on, and he's even stubborner about throwing Green Rocks into the mix without first even trying to examine them. This leads to a homicidal space dragon Titan's consciousness being reborn within Simmons' anti-Titan superweapon, which in turn leads to Simmons' death and his weapon doing exactly what he claimed it would stop the Titans from doing first.
  • Lee Shaw's impulsive and passionate personality leads him to engage in and stick to his own plan to save the world and atone for his lost loved ones' deaths while being blind to the signs that he's causing even more harm than he solves, ultimately leading him to his entrapment in Axis Mundi and possible death.
• Faux Affably Evil: All three of the human Big Bad Wannabes in the movies — Colonel Packard, Alan Jonah and Walter Simmons — at some point each present themselves as A Father to His Men, polite and slightly cultured, and/or charismatically chummy, but it scarcely veils their true colors as self-absorbed assholes whom are willing to get anyone killed if it'll get them closer to what they want.
• Fearless Fool: The Skullcrawlers due to their Horror Hunger, and this is a big part of Emma Russell's arrogance, and Ghidorah's right head shows definite signs of this.
• Finishing Stomp: Godzilla likes to stomp on a lot of his opponents at the ends of fights, from Jinshin-Mushi to King Ghidorah to Kong. Kong himself stomps a couple of his own enemies in, like when he stomps a pair of juvenile Skullcrawlers underfoot.
• Fisher King:
  • Most of Skull Island is lush and tropical if extremely hostile forestry, but the Skullcrawlers, which stand out from Skull Island's other creatures for being a subterranean invasive species that would wipe out the entire ecosystem if allowed to run amuck, make their home in a barren boneyard wreathed in toxic fumes where almost nothing else lives.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, several of the Titans' domains reflect their temperaments as they shape the world around them according to their nature. The egg that hatches Mothra, the most benevolent and life-friendly Titan of all (who literally gets pissed off at a containment field bug-zapping her domain's flies), is found deep in a rainforest in an overgrown temple that's teeming with life. During the third and fourth acts of the film where the violent, psychotic and omnicidal Ghidorah has usurped Godzilla as the reigning King of the Monsters and is engineering world-threatening global chaos, every location the main human cast visits is being pelted by torrential storms of thunder and rain, reflecting how King Ghidorah's global dominion is upturning and threatening to ultimately annihilate the global natural order including humanity.
• Flat Character:
  • Dr. Vivienne Graham, who appears in two movies alongside Dr. Serizawa before being killed off, is (at least on the silver screen, less so in the graphic novels and novelizations) a Satellite Character of her mentor except without the compelling Hiroshima backstory.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters: Dr. Ling Chen is basically just a copy of her more developed sister Ilene who exists solely to complete the Shobijin set for the MonsterVerse. Ghidorah's right head is a Blood Knight who has a fairly simple personality, compared to the intelligent, domineering but sadistic middle head and the submissive, childlike but perceptive left head.
  • For the most part, the MonsterVerse's human antagonists are written as nuanced individuals who have at least some humanizing qualities or otherwise a Freudian Excuse that explains their crimes and pathology. Walter Simmons in Godzilla vs. Kong, however, is just a narcissistic Corrupt Corporate Executive with a sociopathic mindset and no backstory, who shows up one day looking to start a war against the Titans.
• For the Evulz:
  • Ghidorah kills any and all human life that he encounters because he can, not because he considers us a threat or in his way, and this trait carries over to his reincarnation in Mechagodzilla. It's even speculated in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters novelization that Ghidorah isn't really motivated by turning Earth into a more suitable environment for himself so much as by hatefully murdering all life that isn't him.
  • In the Skull Island animated series, the Kraken goes out of its way to kill anyone or anything that passes over its territory, and it tosses the remains of its kills at Kong to taunt him, with the cast deciding that it acts this way just because it's an asshole.
• Freudian Excuse: Most of the major human antagonists except for Walter Simmons have one. Emma Russell bemusingly decides the way to honor their son's tragic death as the casualty of a Kaiju battle is by conducting a Utopia Justifies the Means which technically involves engineering repeats of the same incident on millions of families around the world, whilst Jonah became the Put Them All Out of My Misery Misanthrope Supreme he now is due to decades of war experience causing Madden Into Misanthropy and because of (according to the King of the Monsters novelization) the gruesome murder of his daughter while he was away on a tour of duty. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization reveals Ren Serizawa's personal motivations for wanting Godzilla dead are because he feels the Titan robbed him of his highly-absent father's love and attention his entire life.

G

• Gadgeteer Genius: Monarch's chiefs of staff introduced in Godzilla: King of the Monsters include a director of technology who made a self-learning computer program when he was just 15, and a crypto-sonographer with an engineering history. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla's designing is led by the chief technology officer of an ultra hi-tech Research, Inc..
• Gaia's Vengeance: One of the core themes of the franchise, with the Kaiju generally being depicted not as Nuclear Mutants, but as powerful and ancient beasts who embody aspects of nature or act as invasive species, and whom humanity is almost powerless against once antagonized. Adding to the Green Aesop is that human activity such as strip mining, seismic charges and atomic testing are directly responsible for the Kaiju's emergences from long dormancy.
• General Ripper:
  • Colonel Packard in Kong Skull Island, who starts the film off as somewhat unstable and then goes completely overboard in his mad obsession with killing Kong.
  • Downplayed with Admiral Stenz, who is persistently distrustful of the Titans and prone to thinking Nuke 'em moves on them will do anything other than cause an Epic Fail, but does try to be reasonable.
  • Inverted with the U.S. government in Godzilla Aftershock and King of the Monsters, who are shown to be at least as short-sighted as Stenz and even more obstinate than him about the matter of seizing any excuse that might see Godzilla killed and being blatantly blind to the long-term consequences biting them in the ass.
  • The Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure role-playing game campaign features a Suspiciously Similar Substitute of the aforementioned Packard, his old friend General Ward who leads a band of mercenaries and seeks revenge on Kong.
  • In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, General Puckett reacts to the discovery of Godzilla's existence in 1954 with (justifiable if misguided) fear and horror, and though he does draw the uranium which Monarch requested of him; instead of using it as bait to lure Godzilla out for study, he pours the uranium into building an atomic bomb with the aim of attempting to kill Godzilla first and asking questions later, and he proudly boasts with a grin when he believes the blast has killed Godzilla.
• Genre Shift: The series goes from a deadly serious meditation on man vs. nature and human meddling on the environment that's played mostly straight, save the giant monsters. Starting with King of the Monsters and increasing over the following instalments, the series added in giant aircraft carriers, ancient civilizations, telepathic humans, genocidal aliens from outer space, and augmented cyber-gorillas as it took on a far more action-adventure tone, with a generally idealistic theme of protecting humanity and the environment. This isn't far off from the original Godzilla series, where King Kong vs. Godzilla was a comedic romp compared to the horrific destruction Godzilla visits in the original film.
• Gentle Giant: Both Kong and Godzilla are relatively placid (or as much as their size allows them to be) unless they're attacked (although Godzilla doesn't fight back against humans when they attack him and only seeks to destroy the MUTOs). Shimo turns out to be much the same once she's freed from the Skar King's painful control over her.
• Giant Equals Invincible: There's very little that humans' general arsenal can do against the Kaiju except maybe piss them off. Subverted in Kong: Skull Island where humans are able to easily kill some of the lesser monsters of Skull Island.
• Giant Eye of Doom: In the 2014 film, Femuto's eye... slit-thingy passes eerily over Ford Brody and Tre Morales in one shot, when the two are trying to avoid being noticed by her. In Kong: Skull Island, Kong's eye glares into a chopper that he's destroying before he seemingly eats the soldier inside. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Ghidorah's heads glare into Fenway Park's press box when they locate Madison and the ORCA there, prompting an Oh, Crap! from Madison. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Maia Simmons shits bricks when Kong grabs the HEAV she's inside, after she pissed him off by having the HEAV shoot at him, and he peers directly inside at her with one eye.
• Giant Flyer: Unsurprisingly for a Kaiju franchise, there are lots of monsters that are capable of flight: including Hokmuto, Shinomura, Ghidorah, Rodan, Mothra, Camazotz, Hellhawks, the Hawk Monster, the Ion Dragon and Verticines.
• Giant Squid: Skull Island has Mire Squids, gigantic predatory squids that live in the waters, one of which appears in Kong: Skull Island. Subverted by the sequel animated series: the Kraken seems like it's going to be a classical version of its namesake when we see it solely by its octopoid Combat Tentacles dragging ships, helicopters and people into the ocean, but its full appearance is actually more of a fish/lobster/octopus chimera.
• Glass Cannon: The male MUTO, Mother Longlegs, Warbats and Spineprowlers can deal a lot of damage to their opponents, ranging from armed humans to Godzilla depending, but all of them also go down quite quickly if their enemy gets just a few good licks in.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: A few Titans display this, including the MUTOs' eye-like slits, Ghidorah's eyes tending to glint brightly, Godzilla's eyes lighting up with blue light when charging his Atomic Breath from King of the Monsters onward, and Shimo's eyes glowing before she emerges from the pit where the Skar King keeps her locked away.
• Godzilla Threshold:
  • Godzilla seems to only use his Atomic Breath as a last resort in his earlier appearances, allegedly because activating it massively drains his radiation stores. This completely goes away in later instalments, where he practically spams his Atomic Breath.
  • In the 2014 film, Serizawa clearly only resorts to attempting to have the incubating MUTO killed once he realizes the threat it poses. Admiral Stenz, unlike the usual General Ripper, is hinted to be reluctant to resort to using nukes but believes there's no better way, and when that plan fails spectacularly, Stenz hesitantly concedes to holding out hope that Serizawa is right about Godzilla being our ally.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the threat posed by King Ghidorah is so great and the circumstances so dire, Serizawa defies his own preaching against human intervention and against the use of nukes by intervening to manually detonate a nuclear warhead that will give Godzilla the strength he needs to stop Ghidorah.
• Gone Horribly Right: Attempting to lure out Kong by dropping bombs on his home in Kong: Skull Island, and charging Godzilla's atomic-powered body up with the full power of an exploding nuclear warhead in Godzilla: King of the Monsters; both respectively "work a little too well", with Kong slaughtering the people who dropped the bombs on his home, while Godzilla almost ends up exploding like a hydrogen bomb during the Final Battle. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex Cybernetics designing Mechagodzilla to be able to compete with Titans as powerful as Godzilla so that Apex could conquer the Titans and Take Over the World means that once Ghidorah's consciousness remnants take control of the Mecha, in essence, Ghidorah has a new body that stands a serious chance at defeating Godzilla before it resumes Ghidorah's end goals of wiping out humanity.
• Good All Along: Kong at first appears to be a bloodthirsty monster in his debut, but it's revealed later that he's quite passive and protective when not provoked, and he only attacked the cast earlier because from his point of view, a bunch of tiny alien jerks popped up on his land out of the blue and started carpet-bombing everything. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla is Easily Condemned as a rabid monster after he suddenly attacks an Apex Cybernetics factory, and he continues to act aggressive toward humans, but the reason he's acting this way is because he can sense that humans' meddling with King Ghidorah's remains is reanimating the evil hydra's consciousness.
• Good Colors, Evil Colors: Godzilla's Atomic Breath produces blue light, whereas a couple of his enemies — the MUTOs in Godzilla (2014) and Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong — instead produce red light with their powers. Even the fire-themed Rodan functions as an antagonist in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Zig-Zagged, as Godzilla himself briefly turns red via his Burning mode in the aforementioned movie. Taking this association further, Monarch's bases tend to be lit with blue and green light. Yellow is also mainly an evil color, associated with Ghidorah and with the base of the eco-terrorists whom are letting Ghidorah destroy the world.
• Good Lips, Evil Jaws: Played Straight in Godzilla (2014), Godzilla vs. Kong and the graphic novel Kingdom Kong; with Godzilla and Kong being the Good Lips and the MUTOs, Warbats, Mechagodzilla and Camazotz being the Evil Jaws. Averted in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) with Ghidorah, whilst the Skullcrawlers have bone "lips" on their skulls. Subverted with the Spineprowlers in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted, as they become quite sympathetic after an initial clash between one of their numbers and Kong.
• Good Scars, Evil Scars: Mostly Good Scars. Godzilla is Covered with Scars and is ultimately the Big Good of Earth, as is the MUTO Queen who initially serves King Ghidorah but later submits to Godzilla without a fight. Kong, the compassionate guardian of Skull Island, has scars of his own across his chest.
• Gray Rain of Depression: In King of the Monsters, it's raining wherever most of the human heroes go around the world when King Ghidorah reigns supreme over the Titans and is in the process of destroying the world, due to Ghidorah's growing hypercane disrupting and changing worldwide weather patterns. In the Skull Island series, rain starts falling on Charlie as soon as the latter's separated from his friends and stuck on his own in the middle of Skull Island.

• Greater-Scope Villain:
  • The MUTO Prime which features as the main Kaiju antagonist of the Godzilla Aftershock graphic novel. It, or at least a specimen of the same subspecies, sired both of the MUTOs which served as the Big Bad Duumvirate of the 2014 film. This also makes the MUTO Prime indirectly responsible for The Unmasqued World that the MUTO pair's rampage caused.
  • Ghidorah, the Big Bad of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), as he's the source of many of humanity's draconian myths and legends, and in Godzilla vs. Kong his partly-alive remains are what set off Godzilla's rampage and by extension the events of the whole film, before Ghidorah briefly returns as the Big Bad by becoming reborn in Mechagodzilla.
  • In King of the Monsters, Eco-Terrorist Alan Jonah is the film's resident Big Bad Wannabe who is responsible for freeing Ghidorah from his icy prison. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Jonah is indirectly responsible for the events of the entire film due to the severed Ghidorah head he obtained ending up in Apex Cybernetics' hands, with the novelization confirming that Jonah willingly sold the skull to them.
  • The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization reveals that Apex Cybernetics, the film's human antagonists, were the ones the government contracted to build the prototype Oxygen Destroyer before the events of King of the Monsters, making them indirectly and unwittingly responsible for Ghidorah's entire apocalyptic Near-Villain Victory in the second half of King of the Monsters.
  • It's hinted that the Skar King, the Big Bad of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, might be responsible for starting the entire primeval feud between Godzilla and Kong's species to begin with, making him indirectly responsible for the events of Godzilla vs. Kong, and also for Kong's and his ancestors' entire presence on Skull Island and their near-extinction in the war against Titanus Gojira.
• Green Aesop: Humans are not the masters of the Earth, and we should live in harmony with the ecosystem rather than trying to rebuild the world to our needs, or we'll wake up the Earth's real rulers and they'll wreck our civilization.

H

• Halfway Plot Switch:
  • In terms of the human element (which it should be said is consistently more foregrounded in this movie): roughly the first third of Godzilla (2014) is about a strained father-son relationship between Joe and Ford, with Joe coming across as the deuteragonist. Then shortly before the midway point, Joe gets a bridge dropped on him, and the plot switches to Ford embarking on a cross-country journey to get back to his wife and son amid a classic Kaiju catastrophe.
  • Roughly the first 60 minutes of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) are a cross-continental chase around the world, with Monarch trying (and failing) to stop eco-terrorists from loosing each of the other Kaiju "Big Four" of Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster one-by-one, whilst Godzilla is trying to fight off the reawakened Ghidorah. At the film's midway point, Ghidorah takes spontaneous control of the other Titans around the world and commands them to attack the planet as his army, causing the eco-terrorists to all but stop mattering as the plot shifts from a Gotta Catch Them All-esque global hunt to an all-out apocalyptic war between good and evil.
• Harmful to Minors: Pretty much a given for any child raised on Skull Island, where anything including you or your loved ones can die horribly to the local beasties eating you alive or tearing you to shreds at any moment, if Kong doesn't save you by mauling them to death first. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, watching dozens of people including her personal mentors get slaughtered by armed mercenaries in a hail of gunfire, on the orders of Madison's own mother no less, is just the beginning of twelve-year-old Madison Russell's trauma.
• Helicopter Flyswatter: What did you expect from a Kaiju franchise? Kong in his debut movie invokes a very deliberately excessive instance of this trope when he massacres a fleet of helicopters in retaliation for them carpet-bombing his home and firing on him. Godzilla himself takes down a few aircraft in Godzilla vs. Kong and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. Various Titans in King of the Monsters take down lots of military aircraft including choppers and tiltrotors with their sheer size and weight, and the only airborne rotor vehicle to show up in the first season of Skull Island gets torn apart by the Kraken like paper.
• Hellish Copter: Never, ever assume that a helicopter, tiltrotor or similar vehicle is a safe mode of transport in this universe. They get it the worst in Kong: Skull Island (where Kong wipes out an entire fleet of military choppers single-handedly), King of the Monsters (where Ghidorah and the Titans seemingly annihilate the majority of the U.S. military), and Skull Island (where, though only one chopper shows up in the first season, its sole purpose is to be effortlessly ripped in two by the Kraken and establish that the monster isn't letting anyone get off Skull Island so long as it's around).
• Hero Antagonist: In the 2014 film and Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Stenz is genuinely just trying to keep as many people as he can safe, but his later decisions put him at odds with the heroes that know Godzilla is our ally, and ultimately make things even worse for everyone. Godzilla himself slips into this territory in Godzilla vs. Kong, serving as an antagonist who threatens Kong and acts more destructive than he previously did but is ultimately out to stop Ghidorah's ungodly new reincarnation from awakening. In the 2015 storyline of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Monarch are just trying to do good and plug a data leak, but their methods cause the main cast to doubt their benevolence and actively flee them.
• Heroic Lineage: The Serizawas consist of wise naturalists with a profound respect for Godzilla (the exception is Ren who's the latest in the lineage). Kong's duty of fighting back the Skullcrawler hordes on Skull Island started with his parents before him. The adult Chen twins are the third generation of their family to work for Monarch, and their family has an even older, maybe not-so-earthly connection to Mothra. Ford Brody follows in his father's footsteps of combatting the MUTO threat and of being a military man according to the novelization, while Ford's aunt Michelle Duvall is a Monarch agent. Pioneering Monarch operatives Bill and Keiko Randa are survived to the present day by their son (actually Bill's stepson) Hiroshi Randa and the latter's children Cate and Kentaro, who end up following in their footsteps as allies of Godzilla.
• Heroic Sacrifice:
  • In the 2014 movie's opening, Sandra Brody encourages her husband to seal her inside a radioactive hallway to die because she's already been lethally exposed, and the radiation cloud could kill thousands more if it gets out.
  • In the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, Helen Karsten gives her life occupying a Death Jackal horde — who promptly rip her to shreds — to buy the rest of the new Skull Island expedition time to reach safety.
  • Several in King of the Monsters. Dr. Graham loses her life to Ghidorah while saving Mark Russell in Antarctica, Serizawa gives his own life to manually detonate a nuke that will revive Godzilla so the latter can save the world from King Ghidorah's rampage, and Emma Russell gives her life ensuring that all the heroes' efforts to help Godzilla stop Ghidorah weren't for nothing at the end. The novelization of the movie also confirms that the soldiers who stood and shot at Ghidorah in Antarctica were actually trying to keep Ghidorah focused on them to save their comrades rather than expecting their firepower would have any effect on the dragon.
• Hero Killer: Members of the MUTO species including the MUTO Prime have previously killed others of Godzilla's species, including a benign Titanus Gojira who ancient Phoenicians knew as Dagon. The Skullcrawlers are the reason why Kong is the Last of His Kind; Kong's ancestors were protectors and deities to the Iwi like Kong himself is in the present, but the Skullcrawlers killed the rest of Kong's brethren off, including his parents. Ghidorah kills a lot of heroes during his single cinematic showing: Mothra, and on the human side he kills Vivienne Graham, Admiral Stenz (implicitly), and he gets more than half of Monarch's global staff killed via galvanizing the other Titans to rampage in his name.
• Hero with Bad Publicity:
  • Godzilla, though he's definitively an Anti-Hero in this continuity, is initially just seen by most of humanity as a monster and a threat to their peace, until the events of King of the Monsters make humanity see him as their savior. Even then, when Godzilla begins rampaging seemingly unprovoked in Godzilla vs. Kong, the human race are surprisingly quick to assume he's gone bad. Godzilla continues to cause grief and draw ire from European governments during his activity in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
  • Monarch also get shtick in The Unmasqued World and are often blamed by the public and government for whatever damage the Titans cause.
• His Own Worst Enemy: Emma Russell in Godzilla: King of the Monsters wants to save the world and make her daughter proud of her, but her methods and her insanity completely traumatize and alienate her child whilst unleashing an even worse threat to the world than what Emma was trying to avert. Walter Simmons in Godzilla vs. Kong should be a frigging poster boy for the Self-Disposing Villain, wanting to conquer the Titans and be hailed as a hero, and shooting himself in the foot multiple-fold with his Titanic levels of arrogance.
• His Story Repeats Itself: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mark and Emma's character development following the Plot-Triggering Death of their elder child amid the Titans' past battle in San Francisco culminates in them trying to save their remaining child's life amid this movie's Final Battle in Boston. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Nathan Lind's character journey orients around him successfully launching the first manned mission to the Hollow Earth, a task at which he previously and traumatically failed with his brother dying. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Old Shaw, haunted by his failure to take Keiko's hand in time to save her from falling to her seeming death, ends up successfully grabbing Cate's hand in the exact same spot years later.
• Hit-and-Run Tactics: Both Mothra and the male MUTO respectively use this strategy to dealing with their larger Titan foes respectively.
• Hollow World: Introduced to the series in Kong: Skull Island, and expanded on in King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong. Exists in two forms: massive caves and tunnels extremely deep in the Earth's crust (and possibly mantle); Godzilla uses these tunnels for rapid travel in KotM and rests in a massive radioactive underwater cave. Even deeper, there's an empty space at the Earth's core containing a full ecosystem. It is from here, it is theorized, where all terrestrial Titans originate.
• Homefield Advantage: For Godzilla as an aquatic saurian, it's dragging foes who are poorly suited to water (Ghidorah and Kong) into the ocean. For Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong, as a giant ape, being in the middle of Hong Kong enables him to use the skyscrapers to swing around and dodge Godzilla's Atomic Breath. For Camazotz, it's being in the air as a Giant Flyer whilst Kong is more or less land-bound. For the Kraken in Skull Island, as a semi-aquatic Titan, it has the advantage over Kong when they fight in the ocean.
• Home of Monsters: Besides Skull Island being carried over from the King Kong franchise, there's also the Hollow Earth, which is believed In-Universe to be the true point of origin of most if not all the Titans including the creatures on Skull Island. The idea is first addressed In-Universe in Kong: Skull Island, and its existence is effectively confirmed in King of the Monsters, before it's physically further explored in Godzilla vs. Kong.
• Horrible Judge of Character:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Emma Russell's Aggressive Categorism drives her to believe that all the Titans are good for the Earth's ecology in one way or another, despite her having had a hand in releasing Ghidorah. Plus she works with Alan Jonah in the mistaken belief that him being a Misanthrope Supreme means his goals align with her more well-intentioned brand of eco-terrorism.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mark easily condemns Godzilla for attacking an Apex factory despite being a so-called top Godzilla expert who should know better, and he regards Madison as a naive kid in need of a firm hand and sheltering, to the point of being delusional. The movie's novelization also explicitly shows that Nathan Lind, who works with Apex Cybernetics while being none the wiser to their evil plan and their role in the disaster, is the only person who doesn't see through Apex's benevolent facade nor at least have some suspicions about them.
• Horror Hunger: A couple of the more voracious predators on Skull Island show signs of this. The most notable is the invasive Skullcrawlers in the movies, whose hyper-metabolism keeps them constantly on the brink of starvation and therefore driven to hunt and eat endlessly. There's also the Death Jackals in the spin-off graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong; according to their Monarch profile, they're prone to Monstrous Cannibalism and even Auto Cannibalism if other prey is hard to come by.
• The Horseshoe Effect: If there's just two things that all the Misanthrope Supreme and anti-Kaiju human Contrasting Sequel Antagonists have in common besides being Knight Templars, it's these: they don't care how many people have to die to see their plans through, and they're too prideful and reckless to care that their plans are liable to spiral out of their control and risk causing The End of the World as We Know It.
• Hostile Terraforming: It's theorized by Monarch that several of the hostile Titans — namely the MUTO species, Ghidorah, Camazotz — respectively seek to alter the regional or planetary environment to suit themselves, ecosystem-destroying effects on other species be damned. This makes an interesting parallel to humans, who are themselves doing this to the world already both In-Universe and in Real Life — in the Titans' case, Godzilla and Kong are the embodiments of natural balance working to stop these hostile Titans when they threaten the natural equilibrium of either Titan's respective territories.
  • In Godzilla: Aftershock, Emma Russell theorizes that if the MUTOs repopulate, they will cause extinction-level tectonic upheaval and ecological destruction while destroying or reshaping entire ecosystems to suit their own needs.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, King Ghidorah commands the other Titans to join him in tearing down humanity's cities and causing a Natural Disaster Cascade on top of Ghidorah himself covering the Earth's atmosphere in massive storm systems; all on a global scale, which threatens all multicellular life on the planet down to Earth's bedrock. Dr. Stanton theorizes this is Ghidorah's way of xenoforming the planet to his own liking.
  • In Kingdom Kong, Camazotz causes a perpetual superstorm to permanently close over and envelop Skull Island (as Camazotz can't stand daylight and the storm will block it out for good). Although Camazotz is stopped, the drastic change he made to the island's climate is permanent, and over the following three years, the ecosystem and terrain all break down as the storm blocks out all sunlight and batters everything with downpours and gales 24/7.
• Hot-Blooded: Mark Russell is practically a simmering tea kettle of bitterness and spite, mixed with enough bull-headedness to give any even-tempered person a headache. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Rodan is a Magma Man who responds to jets firing missiles at his home by relentlessly flying after and systematically exterminating every last one of them, before he charges at an Alpha Titan that severely outclasses him; Ghidorah's right head is a Perpetual Frowner that tries to take on Godzilla with nothing but its jaws whilst the other two heads and their entire body are incapacitated; and a soldier named Hendricks screams like a maniac while shooting his gun at Ghidorah's heads.
• Howl of Sorrow: In the original movie, the female MUTO screeches in anguish when her eggs are blown up in a fireball with none surviving, before she goes into an Unstoppable Rage. In the Skull Island animated series, after Kong has buried his human friend and noticed that the Kraken which killed her is still on his kingdom's border, he roars at the top of his lungs from a peak, before his silhouette can be seen crumpling to his knees.
• Humans Are Insects: How humans are usually viewed by the Kaiju, which is very fortunate because when a Kaiju such as the malevolent Ghidorah or a provoked MUTO actively wants humans dead...
• Humans Are Morons: Speaking broadly, humans are so prideful that not all of them can ever learn the lesson from each movie's events and just leave well enough alone, often putting themselves as much as the entire planet in mortal peril that could have otherwise been avoided. In all of the first three movies, it's the military trying to contain the bad and good Titans their way that threatens to put the world at large in even greater mortal peril (from the MUTOs, Skullcrawlers and Ghidorah) than before; and immediately after Godzilla barely saves the whole world including humanity from extinction by Ghidorah in King of the Monsters, a Nebulous Evil Organization has the genius idea to use Ghidorah's Bizarre Alien Biology to create the World's Strongest Man for themselves with zero regard for the threat that Ghidorah posed to humanity last time.
• Humans Need Aliens: One of the core themes of the franchise, often to the ire of the military leaders and Apex Cybernetics. Regardless of humans' attempts to create superior technology and other means that'll enable them to kill Titans themselves, they're simply outmatched by the Titans who are for all intents and purposes Physical Gods, and their attempts to prove they can bend these forces of nature to their will are liable to only make things even worse for mankind. Humans need benevolent Titans such as Godzilla, Kong and Mothra around to defend them against the more malevolent Titans because it Takes One to Kill One. Downplayed in Godzilla: Dominion and Godzilla vs. Kong, where Muggles Do It Better starts to come in.
• Hypocrite: Quite a few of the human villains implement a lot of hypocrisy into their agendas.
  • Kong: Skull Island: Packard puts all his remaining men at risk in pursuit of his vendetta against Kong for killing his men, and he refuses to take responsibility or understand why Kong committed the actions he did.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: Jonah pretty much uses any excuse to justify letting King Ghidorah destroy the world completely, even when it directly contradicts his earlier attempts to meddle with nature and claims to be preventing the world's ecological destruction; never mind Emma's utterly twisted idea of the best way to honor their dead son's memory being to create over a dozen more repeats of the incident that killed him. Mark Russell, being the piece of work he was at the start of King of the Monsters, is quite Oblivious to His Own Description, when he's scorning Serizawa for allegedly "kid[ding] himself" and when he's scorning Emma for putting her grief before her health and her family, in a Holier Than Thou tone of voice. Dr. Serizawa himself gets called out on how he's willing to be proactive when the eco-terrorists' plan to unleash the Titans threatens the world, yet he wasn't taking the senators' misguided plan to attempt exterminating the Titans in their sleep seriously at all despite the fact he should have known it was equally dangerous.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: The Official Movie Novelization: Mark Russell constantly demands that Madison trust and have faith in him while giving her absolutely none in turn. Ren Serizawa doesn't see any of the contradictions in him: (a) hating Godzilla and disparaging his Godzilla-worshipping father for the collateral damage of Godzilla's fights to save the world, while Ren himself is shamelessly helping Apex to endanger millions of civilians for Walter Simmons' Engineered Heroics, (b) equating himself and his Mecha to a god when he disparages the notion that the real Titans are gods or anything more than a new kind of animal, and (c) being derisive of Walter Simmons' egotism despite his own arrogance.
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: Tim is appalled that Verdugo is locking up Bill Randa's grandkids like they're criminals when Monarch finds them, even though as Verdugo points out, Tim's earlier attempt to bring one of the grandkids into Monarch involved kidnapping her off the street like a creep.

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