Monster Verse / Tropes Q to Z

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:

R

• Rank Up:
  • In his Kong: Skull Island debut, Brooks is basically just an assistant to Bill Randa. Come Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and he's a prominent enough figure in Monarch to be part of the team sent to the site of Mothra's pupa in order to monitor her, and he's known and respected by Dr. Ling and multiple other Monarch figures in the novelization. Then in Kingdom Kong, Brooks is the managerial chief officer of Monarch's operations on Skull Island, until he decides to leave Monarch and transfer his responsibilities to Dr. Andrews.
  • It's subtle, but Stenz was apparently promoted by two stars in the U.S. Navy in-between his two movie appearances: in the 2014 film, Stenz' uniform sports a two-star Rear Admiral insignia, whereas both the military uniforms he wears in King of the Monsters sport a four-star Rear Admiral insignia.
  • Lee Shaw in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was a lieutenant during the 1950s, and a colonel by the time that he'd retired years later.
• Rasputinian Death:
  • The Big One in Kong: Skull Island gets choked with an anchor chain, stabbed with the blades of a rusted propeller, shot in the eye with a flare gun, and gets its throat and chin vertically sliced, and it still gets back up each time; only going down for good once Kong puts his fist down its gullet and rips his hand back out with the Big One's entrails in his grasp.
  • In King of the Monsters, Ghidorah gets blasted thrice over by city-leveling Nuclear Pulses from Godzilla's Super Mode, disintegrating his wings, his right and left heads, and the majority of his body, in that order... and after the last pulse, Ghidorah is still alive as a thrashing, bodiless middle head which shrieks and tries desperately to escape Godzilla's wrath. Godzilla activates his atomic breath while still holding the neck stump's incision in his jaws, cooking the head from the inside out and then blowing it to confetti, and only then is Ghidorah (mostly) dead.
  • The Kraken in Skull Island has its long-range tentacles ripped in half, two of its four eyes are gouged out when Kong stabs it in the head with a shipwreck, and it receives a merciless No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from Kong while it's propped on a rock above water — and after all that, it's still alive and tries to kill Kong. The thing only dies for good when Kong hoists it above his head with two hands and rips it in half at the mid-section.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: Dr. Serizawa listens to others' advice on how to best handle a Titan situation Serizawa is overseeing at Monarch, as does the military's commander Admiral Stenz (mostly). In the 2014 film, Joe Brody used to be a reasonable nuclear power plant engineer when keeping an eye on approaching tremors — in the present, the master sergeant in charge of transporting the nukes lets Ford hitch a ride only once Ford makes a decent case. Shaw in the (now Canon Discontinuity) Godzilla: Awakening gives Eiji Serizawa the time of day regarding his concerns about Godzilla. Senator Willis in Kong: Skull Island is reluctant to save Monarch from being shut down amid the fallout of the Vietnam War's end because he doesn't believe any of the creatures Monarch studies are real, but he agrees reluctantly to help Monarch out with investigating Skull Island on the grounds that the alternative is the Soviet Union getting dibs on whatever's there. Miles Atherton in Godzilla: Aftershock is concerned about Monarch's jurisdiction but does everything in his political power to help them combat the apocalyptic threat posed by Jinshin-Mushi. Admiral Wilcox in Godzilla vs. Kong listens to Team Kong on how best to combat the threat. General Puckett in the 1950s storyline of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, despite trying to nuke Godzilla first and ask questions later, is in complete agreement with Monarch that the Titans could be a threat to all of civilization and so gives Monarch whatever they need to be prepared to deal with other Titans.
• Reclaimed by Nature: In Godzilla (2014), the abandoned city of Janjira is overgrown with vegetation, and wild dogs are roaming the streets. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) reveals that after the first film's events, rich vegetation overgrew the ruins of the trashed cities (one of which is located in the middle of Nevada) at a rapid and anomalous rate, cluing Emma Russell in that Titans like Godzilla and the MUTOs have Fertile Feet which cause life to flourish once the dust has settled after their calamitous passages.
• Red Baron: Quite a few Titans have a bunch of names and titles to themselves from ancient myths and legends. Besides Godzilla being the literal King of the Monsters here, there's Rodan the Fire Demon and the One Born From Fire, Ghidorah the One Who Is Many and the Death Song of Three Storms, Camazotz the King of the Deep and Eternal Enemy of the Sun, Jinshin-Mushi the progeny of the Unclean Thing That Lurks in the Shadows Beyond the Light of Creation, etc..
• Red Eyes, Take Warning: The MUTOs, Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla all have red eyes (or, red eye-like sensor-thingies in the MUTOs' case), and all of them are the main antagonists of their respective debut films, posing an existential threat to humanity. To a lesser extent; Kong has reddish eyes, and Godzilla's eyes have an orange hue from Godzilla: King of the Monsters onwards, and neither Titan is someone you want to mess with. Scylla has red eyes, and she's one of the more malevolent Titans despite initially bowing to Godzilla, to the point where she defies him twice more and to the point where Godzilla eventually sees fit to put her down.
• Red Is Violent: Rodan has a red coloration and is a particularly destructive and Hot-Blooded Titan, Mothra's Living Mood Ring turns a red color when she's angry, and Godzilla displays this during his literally city-leveling Super Mode which coincides with an Unstoppable Rage, in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla's body produces a crimson light, and it's as psychotically malevolent as Ghidorah ever was once it becomes sentient, plus the Skullcrawler sicced on the Mecha has a red coloration. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Skar King, an Ax-Crazy Caligula Great Ape, has bright-red furs, and his mooks in his social Darwinistic kingdom apply red dyes to themselves.
• Redshirt Army: The U.S. military's soldiers from any of the four branches try to defend their charges against Titan attacks, but in all of the first three movies, they drop like flies due to how outmatched or arrogant they are (depending on the film).
• Reptiles Are Abhorrent: Downplayed. While most of the antagonistic Kaiju are reptiles, so is Godzilla. That being said, it could be more accurately stated that some kinds of reptiles are abhorrent - most antagonistic reptilian Kaiju introduced so far, especially the ones on Skull Island, have a snake theme, while the heroic Godzilla has a crocodile theme.
• Retcon:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters places considerable emphasis – the novelization even more so – on the awakening Titans reclaiming the Earth, and the ending makes it clear that Nothing Is the Same Anymore and a whole new world has begun with humans and Titans now forced to cohabit the planet; plus the Hollow Earth is discovered by Monarch and the public to be real. Godzilla vs. Kong and its spin-offs ignore or rewrite all these things, making the events of King of the Monsters out to be little more than a dramatic global hiccup instead of a bittersweet permanent turning point in history: the Titans have gone back into hibernation, things in the world have gone back to the way they were before, and the Hollow Earth for some reason is once more treated by the public as an unproven quack theory. It's almost as if Godzilla vs. Kong takes place in an alternate continuity from its predecessor entirely.
  • The Godzilla: Awakening prequel graphic novel was published in 2014 to tie into the Godzilla movie's release before Kong: Skull Island officially established a MonsterVerse, and the graphic novel's events and characters were subsequently referenced in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong official novelizations, though not in the canonical live-action versions of those stories. In 2023, the live-action series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters officially rendered Godzilla: Awakening non-canon to the main MonsterVerse timeline, as although the series canonically introduces Awakening character Lee Shaw, the series' depictions of Lee's history with Monarch and the 1954 Castle Bravo nuking of Godzilla are completely different from the Godzilla: Awakening versions.
• Revenge Myopia: There are quite a few examples of human characters hating a good-aligned Titan due to blaming them in an irrational manner for a loved one's death; from Packard's refusal to see reason after Kong kills his men in provocation and in defence of his territory, to Mark Russell's hatred of Godzilla for his son being a casualty of a past battle in King of the Monsters, to Ren Serizawa's similar hatred of Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong due to his father's Heroic Sacrifice to save Godzilla robbing Ren of reconciliation with the man.
• Reverse Cerebus Syndrome: Mirroring the trajectory of most other Godzilla series, the Monsterverse has gotten lighter and jokier as it's gone on. Godzilla (2014) is a very dour, serious film with only the occasional moments of levity with the colour palette to match, Kong: Skull Island and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) are more comedic and fantastical than the first film but are still relatively grounded and then Godzilla vs. Kong and Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire are bright, colourful and light hearted affairs, almost like $100 million plus instalments in a saturday morning cartoon show.
• Right for the Wrong Reasons:
  • In the backstory of Godzilla (2014), Joe Brody correctly concluded that there was a massive cover-up occurring in the ruins of Janjira surrounding the meltdown which got the city evacuated and abandoned, but he incorrectly believed for years that they were covering up a design flaw or a military screw-up, until he heard Hokmuto's pupa communicating.
  • In King of the Monsters, Mark Russell is technically right that rebuilding the ORCA will cause the Titans to wreck humanity instead of minimizing the future collateral, but the bad scenario doesn't happen for the reasons that he originally believed it would. Rather than Monarch using the ORCA to try and pacify the Titans having the complete opposite effect, the ORCA is stolen by eco-terrorists who start using it to awaken as many dormant Titans as possible and let them decimate their human-populated surroundings with the aim of culling humanity — and to make things worse, one of the first Titans the eco-terrorists unleash is Ghidorah, who later awakens all the other Kaiju at once and bends them to his will so that he can thoroughly wipe out all multicellular life on the planet.
• Roar Before Beating: Per the genre norm. At least once in every film, a Titan (often Godzilla or Kong) roars at another Titan before they fight each-other.
• Royals Who Actually Do Something: Justified. Practically all of the Alpha Titans have a Red Baron calling them a King/Queen (King of the Monsters, Queen of the Monsters, King of the Primates, etc.), and they at times have to fight other Titans to maintain their positions of dominance due to the creatures' Asskicking Leads to Leadership.
• Running Gag:
  • Listen closely, and in every movie, a character says "Oh, shit!" or otherwise tries to right before being killed by the Kaiju Big Bad of the movie they're in. A soldier who's killed by the female MUTO in the 2014 film, Bill Randa before he's eaten alive by a Skullcrawler in Kong: Skull Island, Hendricks before he's atomized by Ghidorah firing his Gravity Beams in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Walter Simmons before he's killed by Mechagodzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong.
  • The director of Godzilla: King of the Monsters thinks that Ghidorah's left head, San/Kevin who displays a rather eccentric personality compared to the other two heads, has been decapitated a lot more frequently than his brother heads in Ghidorah's life. In the movie proper, Kevin is the only head to get decapitated twice (he regrows from the first decapitation, whilst the second is part of Ghidorah's Rasputinian Death), and then in Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla (which has gained sentience as a Robotic Psychopath as a direct result of Ghidorah's Soul Fragment in Kevin's severed skull merging with its AI) is killed for good when its head is ripped off.

S

• Sadist: Ghidorah is different from most of the other Titans in that he'll kill any humans he sees not because they're an inconvenience or are in his way, but just because he enjoys it; flashing slasher smiles as he attacks, and often disengaging with the big atomic lizard who does pose a threat to him when an opportunity to slaughter humans for his own amusement presents itself. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Ren Serizawa grins in ecstasy when Mechagodzilla is violently sawing a Skullcrawler in half under his control. In Skull Island, the Kraken kills anyone or anything that passes by its aquatic territory, and it furthermore has a nasty habit of taunting Kong with the remains of its kills (some of whom were Kong's own beloved charges). In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Skar King is a hegemonic psychopath who clearly enjoys seeing his enemies Godzilla and Kong physically tortured whenever he gains the upper-hand, and he likewise happily tortures his own minions based on the smallest of excuses for his own amusement.
• Sanity Slippage: In Kong: Skull Island, the titular Isle of Giant Horrors and all the nasties it throws at the cast gradually bring out Packard's inner Colonel Kilgore — by the time Packard dies, he doesn't care if he gets everyone including his own beloved men and even himself killed in the name of taking down Kong. Walter R. Riccio in the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong similarly loses his marbles amid his visions which might or might not be real, although he ironically goes down the opposite path to Packard while being even more of an active danger to the humans. Emma Russell in King of the Monsters evidently isn't all up there after the death of her son (even if she's the only one who won't acknowledge that fact), what with her plan to honor his memory involving the creation of millions more dead kids and grieving mothers on a global scale.
• Satanic Archetype:
  • King Ghidorah is the biggest and clearest case of this as well as the biggest threat, arguably the true Satan of the MonsterVerse. A supremely malevolent and cruel polar opposite to the far more benevolent Godzilla amongst the Titans, Ghidorah originally fell to Earth from the heavens (indicating to Monarch that he's an extraterrestrial creature in origin), he's been safely sealed in a can by Godzilla's hand for thousands of years before he's freed and symbolically emerges from a fiery pit in the present day; his presence and actions threaten to sow apocalyptic chaos and destruction across the Earth where Godzilla's would bring destructive renewal and natural harmony; and he seeks nothing more than to murderously usurp Godzilla's dominion over the entire Earth for himself, swaying Earth's other Titans including the Fire Demon (many of which themselves normally safeguard the Earth's natural order under Godzilla's rule) to his will to that end. In his modern appearance, King Ghidorah successfully instigates a brief worldwide reign of terror and apocalyptic destruction, before Godzilla returns for a final battle and ultimately stops him before seemingly ushering in a new, harmonious natural order for the world.
  • There's also a couple other Titans besides Ghidorah who have Satanic symbolism attached to them; namely the Alpha Skullcrawler, Camazotz and the Skar King, all of whom have emphasis placed on them literally coming from deep "beneath the earth" and seeking to kill and usurp one or both of the setting's benevolent "gods" (Godzilla and Kong).
• "Save the World" Climax: In both the first two films, the Kaiju crisis isn't revealed to be truly world-threatening until around the midway point. The MUTOs in Godzilla (2014) are Explosive Breeders that are seeking one-another out so they can flood the world with a tidal wave of technology-disabling, city-terraforming creatures like themselves. And the Skullcrawlers in Kong: Skull Island are an invasive species that could wipe out all animal life on Skull Island and then threaten the civilized world if Kong isn't around to keep their population checked.
• Say My Name: There's a lot of characters dramatically screaming their compatriots' or loved ones' names at the tops of their lungs in (often Titan-related) times of distress and mortal peril; in the 2014 Godzilla movie (Joe Brody), Skull Island: The Birth of Kong (Aaron Brooks), Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the 2023 Skull Island series, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
• Scientist vs. Soldier: This trope seems to be absent in Godzilla vs. Kong, perhaps due to the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), but it's otherwise a recurring theme across the previous movies, and in the 50s-set plot of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. The Scientist side of the conflict are always ultimately proven to be the ones in the right (although the military often get portrayed with at least a little more sympathy than the usual Disaster Movie standard regardless), whereas the military leaders — from the reason-minded Admiral Stenz to the prideful but reasonable General Puckett to the Ax-Crazy Preston Packard — seek to use increasingly-ludicrous methods to attempt destroying the Kaiju, and they often don't care to discriminate between the bad and good Kaiju nor do they realize that humanity needs the good kaiju around in order to stand a chance at survival. The Monarch scientists, meanwhile, are sooner or later made Ignored Experts by the military, and it can be argued that all the Monsterverse's first three films, the military can be rightfully blamed for causing things to go From Bad to Worse and for unwittingly assisting the hostile Kaiju.
• Scrap Heap Hero:
  • Mark Russell starts Godzilla: King of the Monsters as a bitter recluse at a cabin, having quit his job at Monarch, fallen into depression and abandoned his family after his son died amid Godzilla and the MUTOs' battle. Over the course of the film, he lets his hatred of Godzilla over his son's death go, and he makes the first steps to reconciling with his remaining child who ends the film sure to go into his custody after her mother has been killed by Ghidorah. Godzilla vs. Kong shows that Mark has taken up active work at Monarch again, but the trope is somewhat deconstructed, as he accomplishes nothing across the entire film except for unwittingly aiding the human villains' plot which leads to Mechagodzilla devastating Hong Kong.
  • Dr. Nathan Lind in Godzilla vs. Kong has quit Monarch after several people including his brother died due to miscalculations when he attempted to launch them into the Hollow Earth, and he's been furthermore laughed out of the scientific community and left him languishing in a dead-end job in a university basement when the film starts. He's convinced to rejoin Monarch, and he succeeds at accessing the Hollow Earth while helping Kong where he failed before, giving him closure and enabling him to take up his old work again.
• Sealed Cast in a Multipack: Many kaiju are slumbering or trapped somewhere on Earth waiting to be awakened in some way. The MUTOs were in a sealed undergrown cavern until a mining organization Dug Too Deep and according to the Monarch Timeline, Mothra is dormant in a cocoon in a temple in China, Rodan is sleeping in a volcano, an unknown kaiju is dormant and contained in Siberia, Kong is keeping things under control on Skull Island, and Ghidorah is sealed away in the Antarctic ice. King Ghidorah awakens a large number of them and Mothra awakens to help Godzilla, but the end credits montage reveals many of them are still out there slumbering.
• Sealed Evil in a Can: The original MUTO pair's eggs were sealed away in Adam/Dagon's subterranean grave for thousands of years before a mining company breached the underground pocket, accidentally setting off the eggs' awakening. Ghidorah was dormant within the Antarctic ice since ancient times, until eco-terrorists forcibly broke him free and awakened him without knowing what he really was. The Skar King and his Great Ape followers were imprisoned by Godzilla and possibly Mothra in a deeper layer of the Hollow Earth in ancient times, where they've inhabited a volcanic wasteland, until Kong's Hollow Earth traps accidentally breach the rest of the way into their domain, leading the Skar King to re-launch his original campaign of conquering every territory he can reach.
• Seers: Inverted twice. In Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, Riccio believes he's seeing Skull Island's past when he starts having visions; which might be real or might just be hallucinations from overusing the Iwi's exotic medicine. Godzilla Dominion and Godzilla vs. Kong reveals that Mothra (and Godzilla as a lasting consequence of absorbing her ashes) has an instinctive and almost scientifically-inexplicable awareness of Earth's entire geological and ecological history right back to when it was a molten rock billions of years ago.
• Senseless Sacrifice: One of the cast tries to make a Heroic Sacrifice at the climax of Kong: Skull Island, but it's for naught: Cole stays behind with a grenade in hand, trying to get the Alpha Skullcrawler to eat him and the grenade, but the creature sees through his trick and lethally swats Cole away, making no difference. In King of the Monsters, Hendricks and several soldiers fire their machine guns at Ghidorah instead of fleeing, in an effort to keep Ghidorah's heads focused on them while the main cast flee — but once Ghidorah activates his gravity beams to vaporize the soldiers, the resultant static surge disables the main cast's escape vehicle, and then Ghidorah quickly turns his attention to attacking the main cast anyway.
• Sequel Escalation:
  • Godzilla (2014) has only one full onscreen battle between the Kaiju as the Final Battle, with two earlier battles which are mostly offscreen, preferring to focus on the human characters' perspective of the Kaiju's destruction. Kong: Skull Island doesn't shy away from depicting the action onscreen in such a way. Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) has lengthier Kaiju battles (particularly the Final Battle), though it tends to show them from both the Kaiju's and the humans' perspective almost equally. Godzilla vs. Kong focuses primarily on the monster aspect, though two human teams, one for Godzilla and one for Kong, have some significant impact.
  • Whereas the 2014 film only has two types of Kaiju in total (Godzilla and the Canon Foreigner MUTOs); Skull Island has a variety of monsters but they're again mostly Canon Foreigners; and then King of the Monsters features the Big Four kaiju who originally featured in Ghidorah, the Three-Headed Monster, in addition to a small handful of new kaiju and ten others who are The Ghost.
  • Furthermore, in King of the Monsters, the Apocalypse How occurring in the second half of the film is immediately global in scope, rather than a regional Apocalypse Wow which threatens to go widespread if The Bad Guy Wins like in the previous two films; and the stakes are presented as higher, with the human forces and benevolent kaiju all allying together more directly than in the 2014 film, and with Ghidorah's unnatural true nature as an invasive alien Omnicidal Maniac and a rival alpha to Godzilla establishing it as a greater threat than the predatory Skullcrawlers and Non-Malicious MUTOs respectively.
  • Averted and inverted by Godzilla vs. Kong, which is overall Lighter and Softer than King of the Monsters. There are only three Titans which are part of the major conflict; while Ghidorah does effectively return as the Big Bad when he becomes reborn in Mechagodzilla, his new body lacks his past life's world-ending Weather Manipulation and Healing Factor and is implicitly weaker; and there's a lot less death and destruction both among the main cast and for the world in the fictional setting overall.
• Sequel Non-Entity: When a new film is released, chances are that most of the characters from the preceding film won't reappear nor get a mention, regardless of their importance to the setting or any appearance they had in the movie's Stinger. James Conrad and Mason Weaver didn't reappear for six years, two movies, four graphic novels and one TV series after Kong: Skull Island set them up to join Monarch: the sequel storyline of the tabletop game Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure finally brought them back in. And almost all of the characters from Godzilla: King of the Monsters, including most of Monarch's top scientists, are completely absent from Godzilla vs. Kong during Monarch's investigation into Godzilla's rampage.
• Series Continuity Error:
  • Although a lot more excusable comparative to some of the below; in Godzilla: Aftershock, a shot of the glacier holding Ghidorah with his distinctive silhouette visible is recycled on a computer monitor that Emma is looking at in one panel, giving Ghidorah an Early-Bird Cameo in the graphic novel. The thing is, Aftershock explicitly takes place in 2014, two years before the time when the Monarch official timeline says Ghidorah's Antarctic tomb was found by Monarch.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong presented several relative to earlier MonsterVerse instalments. It portrays the Hollow Earth's confirmed existence as still being Monarch-privileged knowledge which is unknown to the public, but this directly contradicts a news article in the Creative Closing Credits of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019). Likewise, Nathan Lind says at the movie's start that manned travel between Hollow Earth and the surface is impossible, even though Monarch successfully performed a two-way journey in the previous movie. Skullcrawler Number 10 is also portrayed as having light-green blood and innards, whereas the previous Kong: Skull Island movie and the later Skull Island (2023) TV series both portray the Skullcrawlers bleeding red.
  • The fates of the Iwi sans Jia after Skull Island was destroyed by Perpetual Storm are contested between MonsterVerse instalments. The aforementioned Godzilla vs. Kong briefly states that they were wiped out, and the novelization more explicitly confirms this and that Jia is the Last of Her Kind as far as anyone knows. Kingdom Kong and the Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure guidebook directly contradict this, stating that most of the Iwis besides Jia were evacuated and survived the island's doom.
  • Coming back to Skull Island, its portrayal in the titular animated series completely lacks any trace of the surrounding perpetual storm which is so key to its mythos and history in the other MonsterVerse instalments, and the prominent nighttime aurora is also completely absent in the night scenes.
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters presents a couple relative to Godzilla (2014) in "Secrets and Lies". The 2014 movie's account of Godzilla and Monarch's history in the 1950s is that Godzilla was discovered (and Monarch formed in direct response to this) in 1954, when the first nuclear submarine to reach the lower depths awakened him, and that various atomic bomb tests in the decade were secret attempts to kill Godzilla disguised as tests. The series' account instead implies that Monarch was active for at least a couple of years before discovering Godzilla, there's no mention of a nuclear submarine (with the evidence of Godzilla's existence that they discover instead being a giant footprint), and there's only one attempt to kill Godzilla, or any Titan, with an atomic bomb which is presumed to be a success.
• Serkis Folk: The giant monsters are animated through Motion Capture. The Trope Namer himself, Andy Serkis, assisted in the animation of Godzilla, albeit uncredited.
• Shared Universe: One of several conceived in the wake of the Marvel Cinematic Universe achieving success with The Avengers (2012), and one of several owned by Warner Bros. (the others being the DC Extended Universe, the Wizarding World, the LEGO Movie series, and The Conjuring universe).
• Shock and Awe: Several Titans have bio-electrical powers, including: the thunderstorm-generating and lightning-spewing Ghidorah, the stinging tentacled Kraken, the lightning-spitting Psychovultures, the Vertacines, and to a lesser extent the EMP-producing MUTOs. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kong's B.E.A.S.T. Glove has offensive electrical capabilities, in a nod to Kong's Toho portrayal where he possessed electrical powers.
• Shut Up, Kirk!: Packard has a simple and admittedly golden response in this category towards Weaver in Kong: Skull Island^note "BITCH, PLEASE!, and Emma Russell has a counter-argument for most of the Monarch's "moral highground" arguments against her plan in King of the Monsters.
• The Silent Bob: Many of the more prominent Kaiju, though bestial, have clearly-realized personalities which their actions, complex facial emoting and overall body language communicate clearly. Godzilla and Kong are among the more demonstrably expressive Kaiju, as are Femuto, Ghidorah and Rodan.
• Single Specimen Species: Averted for the most part. Most of the important kaiju discussed early on were stated to be the last of their respective kinds, being relics from ancient prehistoric days when creatures of that size were common, so it's generally assumed that this is true of the other kaiju as well. The exception is King Ghidorah, who is a malevolent extraterrestrial whose origins before he came to Earth are unknown.
• Skepticism Failure: Pretty much anytime that humans doubt Godzilla is really a protector rather than a destroyer. The Hollow World theory, which most of the Monarch brass apparently consider a load of hokum in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, is explicitly proven to be true. It's also worth noting that while the Titans are treated by more objective characters as super-animals, some of the creatures have gotten real Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane hinting at a truly supernatural nature as Physical Gods.
• Slasher Smile: Several of the villains both human and Titan (the intelligent Titans) grin sadistically when they're confronting and attacking the heroes, or are relishing in killing people or creatures: these include Preston Packard, Ghidorah, Ren Serizawa, and the Skar King and his subordinate One-Eye. Gunpei Ikari in Kong: Skull Island, and Godzilla in the Adam Wingard-directed later movies, also unambiguously sport bloodthirsty grins of their own when fighting others and gaining a nasty advantage.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: So far the franchise seems to lean towards the cynical end of the scale, particularly when compared to the MCU and similar franchises. 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 laying waste to the world. Though there are some monsters (Godzilla, Kong, etc.) willing to protect the humans, they can be just as destructive to their immediate surroundings as the ones causing said destruction, being preferable to their rivals mainly in that they aren't liable to take that destruction setting-wide or global. Comparing the MonsterVerse to its genre, however, it is surprisingly Idealistic. Godzilla himself is at his most heroic since the late Showa era, and as of King of the Monsters, the fallout from a worldwide rising of kaiju is... surprisingly positive. The environment is benefitted immensely, and humanity itself seems to be reaping rewards too - kaiju waste is even implied to work as a renewable resource! The day tends to be saved through faith, cooperation with each-other and nature, and proper application of science. This idealism probably stems from the influence that Pacific Rim has had on the kaiju genre, even if Pacific Rim is humanist and the MonsterVerse is anti-humanist — but not anti-human.
• Sliding Scale of Unavoidable vs. Unforgivable:
  • Godzilla: The film debates whether Admiral Stenz' decision to drop a nuclear warhead on Godzilla and the MUTOs — which he makes despite knowing full well that radiation makes the creatures even stronger and one of them already survived a weaker atomic bombing unscathed in the past — is a desperate gambit that just might work, or a classic "throw nukes at the monster without any forethought" mindset.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: Emma Russell's plan to forcibly awaken the Titans via global eco-terrorism, and then manipulate the Titans into repairing the world's ecosystems using the ORCA. On one hand, her plan involves committing global mass genocide by letting the Titans cause potentially billions of collateral deaths mid-awakening, and she's far too arrogant and sloppy in her methods and her assumptions that the Titans will play ball. On the other hand, the world is already seeing the first warning signs of a looming manmade mass extinction, and Monarch, despite knowing that the Titans are the key to restoring the balance of nature, can't stop the government from planning to shut them down and try exterminating the Titans in their sleep.
• Slouch of Villainy: In Godzilla: Aftershock, Alan Jonah slouches in his chair when he's being interrogated as a prisoner on Guam. The Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire teaser depicts a malevolent-looking, orangutan-like Titan slouching on a throne surrounded by Titan bones.
• Small Role, Big Impact:
  • Hokmuto and Femuto are the franchise's starter villains. Although they're killed off in their debut, their rampage devastates several cities and directly exposes the existence of Titans to the public, which has lasting ramifications across all the sequels. Without Hokmuto and Femuto, none of the events of later MonsterVerse stories would have likely come to pass.
  • The graphic novel Godzilla: Awakening states that the reason Monarch was founded was because of a Kaiju named Shinomura, which is killed at the end of the book — Monarch didn't learn of Godzilla's existence until after Shinomura's existence was verified. This has since been retconned out of continuity by the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters depiction of Monarch's early history and the '54 atomic bombing against Godzilla.
  • Although Camazotz is a one-off villain who's defeated in Kingdom Kong, he's directly responsible for the extinction of Skull Island, a key location in the setting.
  • General Puckett, who appears in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, is a fairly minor character, but it's revealed that he's the one who gave Monarch the budget and resources it needed to expand to its global and hi-tech state in the present day stories, while his decision to nuke Godzilla in 1954 was also what prompted Monarch to be secretive with the government about what they knew about the Titans, which instigated the plot of King of the Monsters.
• Smug Smiler: Two of them: Riccio in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, and Simmons in Godzilla vs. Kong, just ooze smarminess and self-assuredness when they smile their cocky little smirks. And despite their differing world views which would be very diametric if they'd ever met, they both share the same first name!
• Smug Snake: Packard in Kong: Skull Island greatly overestimates his ability to harm Kong. Alan Jonah crosses into this trope's territory in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters official novelization's expansion, which portrays him as having a genuine Original Position Fallacy in the face of the existential threat King Ghidorah poses to all life as we know it. Apex Cybernetics in Godzilla vs. Kong see themselves as visionaries but are Too Dumb to Live to an insane degree. Deputy Director Verdugo in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is an antagonistic Mean Boss who isn't as integrous or competent as she thinks she is when she tries to interrogate Shaw. Raymond Martin in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted confidently tries to kill Kong with a Humongous Mecha that he knows isn't ready for such a fight.
• Snakes Are Sinister: The Skullcrawlers, King Ghidorah, and the Warbats are all antagonistic Kaiju, and all of them are snake-themed. The closest to a heroic snake-themed Titan we've gotten so far is the crocodilian-looking Godzilla.
• Soft Reboot: Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) is a soft reset. Godzilla (2014) and Kong: Skull Island, though very different from each other in tone, both presented the universe as fairly realistic and grounded aside from the presence of giant monsters. Monarch is depicted as a fairly small outfit in both films, relying extensively on the U.S. military to get anything done. King of the Monsters ups the ante considerably with the addition of more monsters (one of whom is an extraterrestrial), and reimagines Monarch as a massive organization with incredibly advanced technology and seemingly endless resources. Godzilla vs. Kong follows the same direction but takes it even further, moving the setting into the near-future and adding even more advanced tech via Apex Cybernetics, and going much further into the pseudoscience of the "Hollow Earth" the previous films had only alluded to. The end result is a barely recognizable as the same universe that the 2014 film established.
• Sole Survivor: In Godzilla (2014), the infamously Unluckily Lucky Ford Brody is the sole survivor of no less than two military missions that get slaughtered by the female MUTO, in as many days. In early Monarch operative Bill Randa's backstory in Kong: Skull Island and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, he was the sole survivor of a WWII warship called the USS Lawton, which was destroyed at sea by a marine Titan. At the end of the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, protagonist Aaron Brooks is the sole member of the expedition cast who survives to the end of the story. In the aforementioned Legacy of Monsters, Tim is the sole survivor of a Godzilla-caused helicopter crash in the Sahara, and Lee Shaw is the sole survivor of Operation Hourglass, a failed pioneering expedition to Hollow Earth that went awry in the 1960s. The backstory of Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted Big Bad Raymond Martin is that he was the only survivor out of his entire family when Femuto destroyed the building they were inside.
• So Much for Stealth: In Kong: Skull Island, the cast attempt, unsuccessfully, to sneak their way through a fog-enshrouded monster graveyard where Skullcrawlers make their den. In Godzilla vs. Kong, the Team Kong cast attempt, unsuccessfully, to sneak their way across the oceans where a pissed off Godzilla is hunting.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Not in release order, but if the franchise's film and animation instalments are put in chronological order, this trope is in full effect until Godzilla vs. Kong.
  • The kaiju: In Kong: Skull Island, the Skullcrawlers are relatively small by Kaiju standards, and Kong who isn't even fully mature yet can beat back hordes of them. In Skull Island (2023), the Kraken can hold its own in a fight against a more mature Kong, coming close to killing him. In Godzilla (2014), the MUTOs are nearly the size of Godzilla, they create an EMP around themselves which does a lot to cripple the entire U.S. Navy's efforts to track and stop them, and the pair make Godzilla (whom Godzilla vs. Kong would later establish to be basically a lot more physically powerful than Kong) work quite a bit to kill them both, and it looks like the MUTOs nearly win the fight against him. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Ghidorah is roughly twice the size of Godzilla, he's powerful enough that Godzilla is considered the only force on Earth that can truly rival him (and even then, in a fair fight without Mothra's assistance or watery terrain, Godzilla despite himself does seem to be the underdog); Ghidorah generates an intensifying, electricity-filled hurricane around himself merely by being active, and he gains command of all the other Kaiju on the planet except Mothra when Godzilla is briefly incapacitated. Zig-Zagged by Godzilla vs. Kong, where the Big Bad Mechagodzilla is essentially Ghidorah's reincarnation, but is not as powerful as Ghidorah was: lacking Ghidorah's Healing Factor, Energy Absorption, flight, extra heads and apocalyptic Weather Manipulation, also being stated to have only curb-stomped Godzilla because the latter was already weakened, and never getting the chance to take control of other Titans before it's killed. The trope picks back up in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire — although the Skar King is physically weaker than Mechagodzilla on his own, he's very intelligent, and his reluctant Right-Hand Attack Dog Shimo is both larger than Godzilla, and close to King Ghidorah's power level based on the measures Godzilla took to counter her and her ability to plunge the world into a new ice age.
  • The humans: The human antagonists of Kong: Skull Island are a stranded band of soldiers with limited supplies and ammunition, whom have already been decimated by the time they become antagonistic. In the Skull Island series, Irene and her band of private military contractors are a little better-equipped, but they're clearly still out of their depth on Skull Island. In the 2015 plot of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Lee Shaw forms a renegade splinter faction out of ex-Monarch operatives whom are more resourceful and well-equipped to accomplish their anti-Monarch goals, but they're still international criminals on the run whose best ammunition are explosives. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Alan Jonah and his eco-terrorist paramilitary are only marginally better-equipped than the Legacy of Monsters antagonists, except they possess Monarch resources including access to their secret bunkers, and the ORCA with which they can awaken Titans; and they consequently manage to do much, much more damage in a comparatively shorter time. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex Cybernetics are a multi-billion, international hi-tech corporation with a law-abiding public image, making them much more powerful with more resources. The trope starts to invert with Raymond Martin in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted — although he still has far more money and power than the pre-Apex antagonists, his technology and bases also appear to be more limited than Apex's.
• Space Whale Aesop: It varies slightly from film to film, but the overall messages that permeate every film are:
  • "The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way round." The demonstration: the world is actually populated by giant, prehistoric Kaiju endlings from prehistoric ecosystems, whom mankind are ants in comparison to.
  • Don't bother trying to forcibly control or destroy a natural species or aspect of nature just because it conflicts with human interests or is an "inconvenience". If you take the wrong Kaiju out of the ecology, there'll be nothing to keep its more malevolent opponents in check and they'll start wreaking havoc.
• Spared by the Adaptation: Kong and Godzilla both survive their movie appearances, with Godzilla in particular surviving an encounter with a Mythology Gag that outright killed him in past continuities, whilst Dr. Serizawa is ultimately the "dies later than in the source material" form of this trope.
• Speculative Biology: This continuity takes a surprisingly scientific approach on its Kaiju, featuring the likes of Godzilla and King Kong in a more scientific light and portraying them as ancient superspecies who are (initially) portrayed as coming from a more-radioactive Permian period. Granted, there is a lot of Artistic License – Biology regarding how such big creatures can live in Earth's gravity or how they can sustain nutrition from radioactive material, but nonetheless the series explores the behavior, ecology and biology of the creatures of Skull Island and the Hollow Earth in a way that portrays them like an actual ecosystem that once existed in nature.
• Spell My Name With An S:
  • Vivienne Graham's first name is mispelled "Vivian" in the graphic novel Godzilla: Aftershock.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: "Mechagodzilla" (as the movie's subtitles and novelization spell it), or "MechaGodzilla" (as a screen in Apex's HQ and the film's toy merchandise spell it)? Also, in the novelization, Ishirō Serizawa's first name is mispelled "Ichiro".
• Spikes of Villainy: Several outright antagonistic, hostile and/or malicious monsters have spiky designs. In Kong: Skull Island, the Alpha Skullcrawler which poses a bigger threat to Kong on its own than its smaller brethren has bone spikes jutting from its elbows. In Godzilla: Aftershock, Jinshin-Mushi — the MUTO which killed the Philippines Titanus Gojira specimen and seeks to do the same to Godzilla in the present — has spiky spines along her back. In King of the Monsters, Godzilla's Arch-Enemy Ghidorah, who is arguably the most powerful and malevolent Destroyer Titan of all; has pointed horns, bat-like wings from which bone spikes emerge at the wings' fingertips, and two clubbed tails covered in flexible spikes. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the aggressive, heat-seeking Frost Vark which terrorizes the cast in Alaska has a heavily naturally-armoured body with many spiky plates.
• Spreading Disaster Map Graphic: In the 2014 film, the US Navy's digital map depicts what area the nuclear warhead's fallout will cover if it goes off near the coast, whilst in King of the Monsters, Monarch's digital world maps are used to depict first Ghidorah's moving hurricane, and then to depict the Titan crisis and Ghidorah's Weather Manipulation going global after Ghidorah becomes the new King of the Monsters.
• Squashed Flat: Packard is crushed into the ground by Kong's fist in Kong: Skull Island (2017). At least one or two soldiers are crushed by falling ice boulders during Ghidorah's awakening in King of the Monsters. In Skull Island (2023), Hiro is flattened by the Kraken's Combat Tentacles, and Kong kills a Killer Chameleon by rolling a much-larger boulder over its body.
• Stargazing Scene: Kong and his human allies have had a couple such scenes on Skull Island. First, Conrad and Weaver admire the island night sky's aurora effect, while Kong is shown to be doing likewise on another side of the island. In the Skull Island series' Whole Episode Flashback, Kong and the Island Girl take time to watch the stars together on a mountain.
• Start X to Stop X: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Emma's way of honoring her son's memory and ensuring his tragic death as a casualty of a Titan battle wasn't for nothing is by essentially engineering a dozen repeats of the disaster that killed him on a global scale, and probably the most stunning thing about her is how ignorant she is of the contradiction. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex Cybernetics claim they built Mechagodzilla so that humanity can fight off any Titan that might otherwise attack them, but as Madison points out, they're directly responsible for all but deliberately provoking Godzilla's rampage on population centers and disrupting a peaceful human-Titan coexistence.
• Stealthy Colossus: Various Titans including Godzilla, Kong and the other creatures of Skull Island are remarkably good at pulling this off despite their gigantic size.
• The Stoic: Dr. Ishirō Serizawa, Lieutenant Ford Brody, Admiral William Stenz, the Iwi tribe and the villainous Alan Jonah are all calm, reserved and intelligent people whom keep their emotions in check, even when faced with closely personal or public losses of human life (although it should be noted that Jonah has an extremely unstable mentality unlike the others, and furthermore, any notion that he remains genuinely stoic in the face of Asher's death is negated by the King of the Monsters novelization's account and expansion).
• Stoic Spectacles:
  • Dr. Serizawa in Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) fits this trope with his stoic and intelligent personality and his narrow, thin-rimmed choice of spectacles, though he's a little bit older than most examples. It's even slightly lampshaded in King of the Monsters, when he has his glasses off while mourning Dr. Graham's death, but puts them back on once he recollects his resolve for the time.
  • Also in the 2014 film, the only Monarch operative who's calm and cold enough and/or doesn't have enough love for the kaiju to not avert his eyes when they're trying to kill one carries around a pair of narrow-rimmed spectacles.
  • In the non-canon prequel graphic novel Godzilla Awakening, Serizawa's wizened father Eiji has traded his youthful self's Nerd Glasses for a pair of thin-rimmed spectacles in his old age.
  • In the prequel graphic novel Godzilla: Aftershock, Miles Atherton is bespectacled, and he's the most calm-mannered and stern member of the main team.
• Straw Character: Admiral Stenz is quite a genial portrayal of the General Ripper: compassionate, reasonable, and genuinely committed to the protection of the public, he tries to listen to the experts on the monsters; but he primarily thinks in terms of strategy, logistics and what his superiors tell him to do, not in terms of the franchise's Green Aesop; which means that he only sees the Titans as monsters, and he ends up making a bad situation even worse while trying to destroy them. The U.S. government and military get even more reckless in King of the Monsters, ignoring all of the warnings that they're making a mistake, and dropping a deadly prototype Fantastic Nuke in extranational waters rather than broach the idea that this isn't necessary to neutralize several awakened Titans.
• Street Smart: Mason Weaver in Kong: Skull Island is savvy at working around the patriarchal societal norms of the decade that the film takes place in in pursuit of what she wants, and she has good intuition. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Josh Valentine, of all people, is the most people-savvy and danger-conscious member of Team Godzilla.
• Stuff Blowing Up: This is a Kaiju franchise, what did you expect. Surprisingly, the 2014 film is very light on the explodium, courtesy of the director of Monsters (2010). King of the Monsters is technically the most fireball-heavy MonsterVerse instalment.
• Super-Persistent Predator:
  • Godzilla hunts not for food, but to eliminate any rivals who pose a challenge to his dominance or disrupt his global territory's ecological balance, and once he has such a target in mind, he won't stop until either the threat is dead or he is. He's pursued rival Titans including the MUTOs, their sire, Ghidorah, and Mechagodzilla's signal all over the globe from one continent to another, and he goes out of his way to seek a fight with Kong once the latter has effectively intruded on Godzilla's territory as a perceived rival Alpha due to humans shipping him off Skull Island.
  • The Skullcrawlers on Skull Island are literally called the "persistent enemy" in the Iwis' language, never stopping once they've targeted prey due to their Horror Hunger.
  • In the Skull Island series, the Croc Monster, setting its sights on trying to eat Mike and Charlie (and immediately after it's already eaten a grown mercenary no less), pursues the boys along the rapids of a river that the Croc itself fears, and even over a waterfall which is the main reason the Croc fears the rapids. Dog's father in the backstory was so persistent in hunting humans that he spent some time tearing his way through a ship's hull, and he even died in a Mutual Kill against one of those humans acting defensively rather than keep himself alive for the sake of caring for his pup. The Killer Chameleons in the Whole Episode Flashback, once antagonized, don't stop trying to kill both Kong and the Island Girl until they're 100% dead, and not even being mortally impaled through the chest stops the chameleon that goes after the girl.
• Super-Scream: Jinshin-Mushi in Godzilla: Aftershock and Camazotz in Kingdom Kong both have weaponized screams which can cause immense physical pain and harm to their Titan opponents.
• Surprisingly Realistic Outcome: Can be found in spades throughout the franchise due to being a more "realistic" take on the Kaiju genre. One major example present in each film is how the Titans affect the world around them; Godzilla rising from the ocean too quickly can cause a tsunami, Rodan devastates a town simply by flying over it, etc.
• Suspiciously Similar Substitute: A couple characters like Lieutenant Preston Packard and Mark Russell have considerable similarities to characters from previous Godzilla and King Kong continuities. Within the MonsterVerse's own continuity, Dr. Ilene Chen seems like one to Dr. Graham, and Ren Serizawa has a lot in common with Aaron Brooks. General Ward in Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure sounds a lot like Packard, being an antagonistic, vengeful military commander with a grudge against Kong for the deaths of his men.
• Swallowed Whole: There are a few times where human characters meet their doom this way. The Skullcrawlers do this frequently due to their hyper-metabolic Horror Hunger, whilst Dr. Graham's Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome where she's killed by Ghidorah this way in Godzilla: King of the Monsters is an infamous example. There's also the female MUTO devouring most of the bomb squad in the 2014 film and Rodan doing this to a pilot in King of the Monsters.
• The Swarm: Shinomura in the graphic novel Godzilla: Awakening is technically The Worm That Walks, composed of many flying, smaller individual organisms. In the graphic novel Kingdom Kong, Camazotz has a horde of flying monsters resembling miniaturized versions of himself at his beck and call. In the TV series Monarch: Legacy of Monsters; Lee Shaw, Dr. Keiko and Bill Randa encounter a nest of insectoid Endoswarmers in the first episode, which proceed to relentlessly swarm after the trio the second that they hatch from their eggs.
• Swiss-Cheese Security: The human antagonists in the two most recent movies have lax and completely useless security in their evil lairs, enabling people that might be up to stuff diametric to the villains' goals to slip around and do what they want undetected. Madison Russell can attest to this in both cases.
• Sympathetic Villain, Despicable Villain:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters attempts to make Emma Russell out to be more sympathetic than Alan Jonah, because she has a Villainous Parental Instinct and is horrified by the notion that King Ghidorah will wipe out all multicellular life on Earth instead of healing the planet, whereas Jonah is a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist who is happy to let Ghidorah kill everything if it makes humanity die screaming.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, Godzilla is more antiheroic than Kong and goes out of his way to attack the latter, but he's still fighting to save the Earth from a far bigger threat: Mechagodzilla, which is possessed by Ghidorah's reanimated subconsciousness, causing the Mecha to attack every living human it sees and attempt to murder Godzilla for supremacy over the Titans once more.
  • In the Skull Island Netflix series, the mercenaries who captured Annie are just trying to get a particularly-aggressive and -capable feral child back to her grieving mother, by force if necessary, and they're happy to work with and support the human heroes when the latter aren't getting in their way any longer. The Kraken, however, is an extremely vicious Titan with a homicidal personality which has killed Kong's friends and charges as well as Mike's father.
  • In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Shimo is being Forced into Evil by the Skar King using a control crystals, and she's quite a benevolent creature once she's freed for good; whereas the Skar King is a despicable, tyrannical and depraved conqueror without any redeeming qualities.

T

• Tail Slap: Godzilla weaponizes his tail as a slapping tool against other Titans, as does his Evil Knockoff Mechagodzilla. The Skullcrawlers likewise use their tails as whips and clubbing weapons, as does Mokele-Mbembe when it rampages in the Sudan.
• Taught by Experience:
  • In the 2014 movie, Ford invokes this to convince the master sergeant handling the nuclear warhead to give him a ride on the freight train to San Francisco, bringing up his EOD experience: unlike the rest of the team, Ford has professional experience "put[ting his] fingers in a live bomb."
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the eco-terrorists start out directly invading Monarch's outposts in person, gunning down anyone they encounter, and setting Mothra and Ghidorah loose manually. But after the second mission almost goes south when Monarch catch up to the terrorists and get very close to thwarting them, they instead choose to remotely hack into the next Monarch outpost in order to free Rodan.
  • The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization states that after Monarch's kill switches failed to kill any of the contained Titans in the previous movie when Ghidorah awakened them, the organization looked into other methods of subduing captive Titans, leading to the development of the drug they use to tranquilize Kong.
• Technicolor Toxin: In Kong: Skull Island and The Birth of Kong, the boneyard where the Skullcrawlers live has a sickly yellowish-green hue in the air — the files in the Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure sourcebook confirm that this is because geothermal vents in the boneyard emit poison gases. The far more deadly military-grade gas released from the canisters in the movie also manifest as dark-green clouds.
• Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Emma's teamwork with Tarkan and especially Atherton in Godzilla: Aftershock is strained due to her insufferable and abrasive attitude, and her teamwork with Jonah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters is likewise strained due to their differing end-goals. The novelization of Godzilla vs. Kong confirms that Dragon with an Agenda Ren Serizawa has to clench his teeth while working with Walter Simmons. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Monarch founding operative Keiko Miura admits she can barely stand the military liaison General Puckett.
• Tentacled Terror: Na Kika (Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla: Dominion) and the Kraken of Skull Island (animated series) are both colossal marine monsters with Combat Tentacles who attack humans, although the former mainly does so under Ghidorah's control, whereas the latter is completely Ax-Crazy all on its own. Speaking of Skull Island, one of its resident species is the giant Mire Squid that lies in wait in rivers, and it tries to ambush Kong with its tentacles in Kong: Skull Island. And then there's Scylla, a Titan with a beard of tentacles, who debuted in Godzilla: King of the Monsters: she's classified by Monarch as a Destroyer Titan, was implicitly dreaded by the inhabitants of Easter Island, and has some really squicky biological traits.
• That's No Moon: Several of the Titans manage to hide in plain sight as part of the scenery in countryside terrains, especially when they're dormant and have burrowed into the ground. In the 2014 movie, Femuto is camoflaged among mountainous woodland at night. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Methuselah appears to be an ordinary hill in Germany while hibernating. Several of the creatures living on Skull Island can disguise themselves as ordinary plants and rocks among the scenery on account of most of them being planimals. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, a giant hill in the Algerian Desert turns out to be a hibernating Godzilla, having burrowed shallowly into the ground.
• Theory Tunnel Vision:
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, nothing stops Alan Jonah from believing that unleashing the Titans to cause mass destruction will save the Earth's other species from the horrors of humanity's worst individuals. When his faux hostage points out that King Ghidorah is wreaking just as much ecological destruction as humanity and then some, Jonah continues to justify letting Ghidorah and his Titan army supplant humanity as the Earth's sole rulers.
  • In Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex Cybernetics still cling to the mindset that all Titans, not least Godzilla, are universally monsters that pose an existential threat and need to be either corraled or destroyed; past the point where the previous movies already proved creatures like Godzilla, Kong and Mothra are on humanity's side so long as we don't cross them, and that humans and Titans can share the planet in beneficial balance. Instead, Apex and their egotistical CEO have implicitly just taken the events of the previous films as proof that humanity needs to build even bigger and more dangerous weapons in order to annihilate Godzilla and take over his kingship.
• There Can Be Only One: Emma theorizes in Godzilla: Aftershock that if the MUTOs ever successfully reproduce and overrun the environment, then they'll ultimately turn on each-other until only the strongest of their kind is left alive. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Dr. Ilene Andrews and Walter Simmons firmly believe (in their own very different ways) that there can only be one alpha predator at any given time: Andrews believes that Godzilla will stop tolerating Kong and will try to kill him for dominance if Kong ever leaves Skull Island, while Simmons uses this mentality as justification for his plan to murder Godzilla and conquer all the Titans in the name of Muggle Power.
• They Called Me Mad!: Dr. Brooks mentions that he joined Monarch as a scientist with a keen interest in Hollow Earth theory after he was laughed out of a college auditorium for proposing the Hollow Earth was real. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Dr. Nathan Lind is a Scrap Heap Hero who was laughed out of the scientific community for the same reasons, because everyone magically forgot that the Hollow Earth's existence was revealed at the end of the previous movie. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters reveals that after 1962, the late Keiko Randa and her husband Bill Randa were deemed lunatics by everyone in Monarch, leading to Bill's obsession with proving the existence of the Hollow Earth in Kong: Skull Island.
• This Cannot Be!:
  • In Godzilla (2014), Dr. Vivienne Graham is in vocal disbelief when she and Serizawa realize that the second MUTO spore which they thought to be completely inert has reactivated and hatched.
  • In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), Dr. Stanton says in disbelief that it's impossible for any storm to change direction and move as sharply as the typhoon which their scanners lost sight of Ghidorah in has done, at which point Dr. Chen realizes Ghidorah himself is moving the storm around his body. Commander Crane quotes the trope when informed that Monarch's submarine has suddenly been transported 600 miles in a matter of minutes due to slipping down a Vile Vortex into the Hollow Earth.
  • In Kingdom Kong, Audrey Burns cries out in disbelief when she hears Camazotz's scream and realizes that he's reappeared here on Skull Island.
• Throat Light: Several of the Titans produce shining light in their throats. Shinomura produces light from its composite forms' mouths constantly, whilst Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, Godzilla in his later film appearances, and Shimo all produce light in their necks when they're charging up their breath weapons.
• Time-Shifted Actor:
  • Dr. Houston Brooks. Portrayed by Corey Hawkins as a young man in the 1970s, Joe Morton as an old man in the 2010s-20s.
  • William "Bill" Randa. Portrayed by John Goodman as a late middle-aged man in the 1970s, Anders Holm as a young man in the 1950s.
  • Godzilla: Ford Brody — portrayed by Aaron Taylor-Johnson as an adult in the present, C.J. Adams as a child in the distant prologue.
  • Kong: Skull Island: Lieutenant Hank Marlow — portrayed by John C. Reilly as a middle-aged man in the present, Will Brittain as a young man in the distant prologue.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: Madison Russell — portrayed by Millie Bobby Brown as a teenager in the present, Alexandra Rabe as a child in the past.
  • Skull Island: Annie — voiced by Mae Whitman as a teenager in the present, Charlie Townsend as a child in the flashbacks.
  • Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: Leland Shaw — portrayed by Kurt Russell as an old man in the 2010s, Wyatt Russell as a young man in the 1950s.
• Time Skip: Godzilla begins in 1954, then skips to 1999, then once more to 2014, where most of the film takes place. Kong: Skull Island briefly opens during World War II, before jumping to 1973.
• Too Dumb to Live: Naturally there's a lot in this kind of franchise. Besides Militaries Are Useless, other major examples include: the G-Team standing and shooting at Ghidorah when it awakens (the novelization amends this into a Heroic Sacrifice via Adaptational Explanation); the military firing their untested Oxygen Destroyer prototype at Ghidorah, which unwittingly gives Ghidorah a direct opening to almost succeed at exterminating all complex life on Earth (leading to the military losing a lot of their own trying to fight Ghidorah and its Titan army off); but arguably taking this trope up to eleven is everyone who was directly involved with Apex Cybernetics' Mechagodzilla project, which involved using King Ghidorah's still-partly-alive telepathic skull as the brain for the machine (a machine which was designed to be the World's Strongest Man) and doing this after what happened in King of the Monsters with Ghidorah's Omnicidal Maniac rampage. For a Titan example, the Skar King, whenever his vindictiveness and his temper get the better of him, throws self-preservation to the wind, which ultimately gets him killed at the final battle after he loses control of his ace Shimo.
• Tragic Bigot: Human characters who have a chip on their shoulder against the Titans due to their loved ones being casualties of their rampages include: Mark Russell who lost his son, Raymond Martin who lost his entire family from his parents down to his son, and Master Sergeant Hendricks who lost his father according to the Godzilla: King of the Monsters novelization; all of them during G-Day.
• Tranquil Fury:
  • In the 2014 Godzilla movie, Femuto during her Unstoppable Rage over the deaths of her offspring has moments of subdued vindictiveness, like when she silently corners Ford Brody (the human who she saw at her nest's destruction) and leads down towards him with her jaws open with a deliberate slowness.
  • In Kong: Skull Island, after several of Packard's men are killed in Kong's attack due to Randa's manipulations, Packard calmly asks where Randa himself is. Packard calmly approaches Randa and makes a little pleasant small talk with him, before drawing a gun on Randa and calmly demanding that the latter tell him everything if he doesn't want a bullet through his head.
  • In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Emiko doesn't show it openly, but she's inwardly furious at her husband Hiroshi for his secret double life, tearing up old family pictures of him to an extent which perturbs Kentaro (who had originally been chastising her for not acting angry enough) when he pushes. Deputy Director Verdugo's default state of existence is being constantly soft-spoken yet simmering with anger and loathing at just about everyone around her.
• Two First Names: Vivienne Graham in the 2014 film and King of the Monsters, the Russell family in Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, James Conrad in Kong: Skull Island, and Alan Jonah in King of the Monsters.
• Two-Fisted Tales: The movies mix some of this flavour in with all the kaiju action, particularly in the films featuring Kong. Kong: Skull Island is a Lost World adventure set in The '70s, and in Godzilla vs. Kong, the big ape travels to an even lost-er world Beneath the Earth where he finds a gigantic axe that basically turns him into a 335-foot tall Barbarian Hero.

U

• Unblockable Attack: In Godzilla, Hokmuto's EMP blasts are practically a One-Hit Kill for all U.S. military hardware. In King of the Monsters, Burning Godzilla's fiery Nuclear Pulses are able to power through Ghidorah's wings and cripple him as if the dragon is made of nothing. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Shimo's Frostbite Breath can power through Kong's Axe, seriously damaging his arm.
• Uncertain Doom: Admiral Stenz' status is unknown after his latest appearance in King of the Monsters, with the novelization and a deleted scene both heavily implying that he died at the Washington D.C. battle against Ghidorah and Rodan due to his submarine sinking, but the former account doesn't confirm anything explicitly. In the first season finale of Skull Island, it's unknown if the Rock Bug which Kong throws at the Kraken survives getting violently swatted out of the air into the ocean. In the opening of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, it's uncertain if either Mantleclaw or the Mother Longlegs survived after they fell into the ocean while fighting each-other and weren't seen resurfacing, it's uncertain if the Frost Vark survives being pulled into a closing Vile Vortex violently; and in the first season finale, it's uncertain if the Ion Dragon survives having its arm ripped off before being thrown by Godzilla into an Axis Mundi portal, and it's also uncertain if Shaw dies after disappearing into a dust cloud kicked up by a black hole-like suction in Axis Mundi. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, several of the Great Apes serving the Skar King are last seen bound in webbing in the gravity-neutral zone of the Hollow Earth... at a height which the same movie demonstrates elsewhere is more than enough to kill a Great Ape if they fall.
• Underestimating Badassery: Almost once in every film. Admiral Stenz in both his appearances (along with the military and the government in King of the Monsters) underestimates the Titans' resilience to manmade weaponry and he even doubts Godzilla will be able to fight off the MUTOs despite him having already done so once. Madison Russell is frequently on the receiving end of this, in the form of Just a Kid regardless of her commendable accomplishments and bravery even after King of the Monsters.
• Undignified Death: The final death of King Ghidorah's middle head in Godzilla: King of the Monsters is darkly comical: being reduced to a severed, frantic head, which Godzilla flails around like a chew toy and then burns from the inside-out with his Atomic Breath like he's smoking a cigar. This trait carries over to Ghidorah's reincarnation in Godzilla vs. Kong, when the possessed Mechagodzilla's limbs are hacked off one at a time by Kong until it falls over, before Kong decapitates the Mecha (for bonus points, this is how the Ghidorah head whose skull gave the Mecha consciousness previously died, and Word of God says decapitation was a Running Gag for that particular head throughout Ghidorah's life). Ren Serizawa's death in Godzilla vs. Kong is also quite humiliating, especially when contrasted against his father's Heroic Sacrifice, as he's electrocuted to death by his own weapon gone rogue before he even gets a chance to square off against Godzilla.
• Ungrateful Bastard: Packard in Kong: Skull Island goes as far as pointing a gun at the face of the same journalist who earlier saved his and his men's lives for trying to talk him down. The Russell parents really are a match made in an un-heavenly realm: Emma treats Tarkan like dirt after he saves her from getting herself killed rather than acknowledge any of her own wrongdoing in Godzilla: Aftershock, while Mark in Godzilla: King of the Monsters takes his misdirected outbursts out on the people whom are currently trying to track down and save his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter. Apex Cybernetics in Godzilla vs. Kong want to Kill and Replace Godzilla even after everything he did to save the world previously, not giving a damn that all of humanity would have been wiped out by King Ghidorah if not for him. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Kong tries to help up one of the Great Apes in service to the Skar King when the ape is about to fall to their death from a cliff, but the ape doesn't reciprocate this kind act and tries to take Kong down anyway.
• Unluckily Lucky: The human characters and humanity as a whole seem to have this going for them in this universe. As while Godzilla and Kong do cause them a good amount of grief, they also end up taking out the threats that would have done so much worse.
• The Unmasqued World: After Godzilla and the MUTOs rampage over Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, nearly seven decades of Monarch and the government maintaining the Masquerade come to an end and the whole world officially know that giant prehistoric monsters exist. Although not all of the Titans are hostile and some can coexist with humans or (in Godzilla and Kong's cases) are straight-up protectors of the world, at first the government and the vast majority of the public in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) think that all the Titans should just be indiscriminately exterminated, not least due to having seen the massive loss of human life Godzilla and the MUTOs caused, and few besides Monarch care for the fact that humanity would probably only succeed in waking and provoking the Titans if they tried exterminating them nor for the fact the Titans are essential to the planet's ecosphere and can reverse manmade damage. After the events of that film which saw Godzilla actively save humanity and the world from Ghidorah and successfully get the other Titans in-line (and also saw humanity's attempt to kill the Titans themselves end up being an Epic Fail which almost doomed the world to an extinction event), most of the former anti-Titan sentiment has seemingly gone away or quietened down, but Godzilla vs. Kong and its novelization indicates there's still some people in power like Walter Simmons who still think humanity should be trying to kill the Titans and become the planet's dominant species again.
• Unskilled, but Strong: A few Titans are lacking in refined combat technique and make up for it in raw power relative to other Titans. Rodan is powerful enough to annihilate an entire town and a Monarch aerial fighter squadron, and to severely weaken Mothra, though his fighting style is akin to drunken boxing and leaves him open. Mechagodzilla's fighting style in close quarters is equally crude, and he relies on his inbuilt manmade weaponry and ammunition when not in close quarters, but he's able to utterly curb-stomp a tired-out Godzilla. Shimo, being a gentle giant, has little fighting skill or technique, but she's a walking wasteland with the power to plunge the Earth into a new ice age and is one of the most powerful Titans even among the Alphas.
• Unstoppable Rage: Godzilla and Kong are both utterly merciless foes when they're sufficiently enraged by a foe, such as when Godzilla is fighting King Ghidorah to the death or is later fighting Kong, or when Kong inflicts Extreme Mêlée Revenge upon the Kraken. In the 2014 movie, the female MUTO, in response to humans destroying her nest, flies into a complete berserker rage for the last several minutes of her life, deliberately slaughtering the soldiers responsible before Godzilla kills her.
• Unwitting Pawn: In Kong: Skull Island, most of the Skull Island expedition are this to Monarch operatives Randa and Brooks at first. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Monarch (Nathan Lind in particular) are this to Apex Cybernetics, and it's hinted Apex in turn might have been this to Ghidorah's Undead Abomination skull the entire time before it hijacked control of Mechagodzilla, whilst the novelization suggests Apex's Corrupt Corporate Executive Walter Simmons is this to Ren Serizawa.

V

• Victorious Roar: Both of the franchise's main Titan heroes tend to roar to the heavens in victory after killing the serial's resident Big Bad. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters; in a much darker twist on the trope, the now-King Ghidorah lets out a triumphant screech after he's seized Godzilla's office as King of the Monsters, with the sound awakening other Titans around the world and bending them to his will. Shimo joins Godzilla and Kong's roar of victory with her own after the Skar King is killed.
• Viler New Villain:
  • The MUTOs in Godzilla (2014) are overall Non-Malicious Monsters if highly callous, they just want to survive and reproduce regardless of how their life cycle threatens other life, and they get some poignant treatment for those circumstances. In the subsequent prequel film Kong: Skull Island, the Skullcrawlers are voracious and relentless man-eating predators who are driven by an extreme, biologically-ingrained Horror Hunger: though they're ultimately just doing what they're programmed to do the same as the MUTOs, the Skullcrawlers are played for a lot more horror. Then in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the Big Bad is King Ghidorah, who compared to the previous films' kaiju is intelligent but sadistic to an unnatural degree; deliberately killing humans with unmistakably malicious amusement and relish, and threatening all life on Earth as it tries to engulf the entire planet in storms and Titan-made mass destruction. Godzilla vs. Kong has Ghidorah's reincarnation Mechagodzilla, who is just as sadistic and genocidal as its predecessor, yet it seems to lack Ghidorah's theorized end goal of xenoforming Earth into a suitable home for itself, and instead it only seems to have morally myopic revenge and murder on its mind (although to be fair, Mechagodzilla's mentality is hinted in the movie and stated in the novelization to be a borderline Almighty Idiot). In the prequel animated series Skull Island, set in-between Kong: Skull Island and King of the Monsters, the Kraken is extremely sadistic and mass murderous to all human and animal life that it comes across, and it's only less vile than Ghidorah in that it's solely focused on conquering Skull Island instead of conquering and destroying the world at large. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Skar King is just as malicious as Ghidorah/Mechagodzilla and the Kraken while also having genocidal plans of his own for the Earth, plus it's implied that he's built up a harem of abused female sex slaves and has sired children whom he abuses and murders on a dime; the latter are lines that no villain human or Titan has ever been shown crossing before him.
  • This is also present among the main human antagonists, in the movies. Preston Packard in Kong: Skull Island is an Ax-Crazy Colonel Kilgore who becomes more and more willing to sacrifice the lives of everyone around him in pursuit of his personal vendetta against Kong, but he starts out as a relatively good man and his fall into darkness over the course of the movie is framed in a tragic light, while his endangerment of everyone else was more by negligence and inaction than direct malice. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the From Camouflage to Criminal Misanthrope Supreme Alan Jonah, though he has very tragic reasons for being so disillusioned with humanity, is a nasty piece of work who not only slaughters people left and right by himself in pursuit of his goals, but he's willing to let the three-headed monster that he helped release condemn all of humanity and potentially all life on Earth to certain extinction, so long as he gets to see the human race that he so despises wiped off the board. Godzilla vs. Kong has Walter Simmons, a high-functioning sociopathic narcissist who has no tragic backstory to explain his actions, and whose justifications are presented in the story as even more hollow than the eco-terrorists': he's simply a self-spoiled industrialist who puts millions of people's lives in mortal danger by instigating and knowingly continuing to instigate Godzilla's rampage in order to to satisfy his own ego. After Godzilla vs. Kong, the prequel instalments that are chronologically set before King of the Monsters feature villains much nicer than Jonah and Simmons — Irene and her private military contractors in the Skull Island series are just trying to bring Irene's long-lost daughter back to her, and they don't intend to hurt anyone, while Lee Shaw in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is an Anti-Villain who's trying to help Godzilla safeguard the Earth, and he never deliberately sacrifices innocent lives.
• Villain: Exit, Stage Left: There are a couple times where Godzilla's Titan enemies pull this on him, namely Ghidorah in King of the Monsters, and the MUTO Prime in Godzilla Aftershock exploits this trope in order to wear Godzilla down so it'll have an advantage.
• Villain Has a Point: In Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, Aaron acknowledges at the end that despite Riccio's homicidal insanity and the harm he caused, in the end he did definitively prove whether Kong was a protector or a monster as they'd originally intended to. In King of the Monsters, the eco-terrorist Emma Russell makes some legitimate arguments about the Titans' potential to restore balance to the world without destroying humanity, and also about Monarch's inefficiency and the government's looming intent to try exterminating the Titans in their sleep: the novelization even notes that the heroes can't refute several of the points she makes.
• Villainous Breakdown: In Kong: Skull Island, Colonel Packard in his final minutes starts ranting that he's a soldier protecting his country, and he shouts at the youngest of his men as if it's the latter's fault that he isn't doing anything about having a gun pointed at his head, before going catatonic at the sight of the Alpha Skullcrawler rising. In King of the Monsters, King Ghidorah has an epic breakdown into utter terror and naked panic for his life when Burning Godzilla starts atomizing him piece by piece, destroying his still-thrashing central head last. In Skull Island, the Kraken loses all composure in the tail-end of the season's Final Battle, after Kong has grievously wounded it by stabbing out half of its face. In Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted, Raymond Martin rants and raves in indignation when Kong defeats his Titan Hunter. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Skar King explodes with rage and tries to strangle Suko after the latter destroys his Shimo-controlling crystal.
• Villainous Legacy: Some surprisingly positive in the long run, others negative.
  • The MUTO pair who rampaged in the 2014 film before being killed by Godzilla are directly responsible for The Unmasqued World in all instalments chronologically set afterwards.
    • It's also revealed in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted that the female MUTO's rampage set off the comic Big Bad Raymond Martin's turn to villainy and all his crimes throughout the comic, because he was maimed and his family killed during her attacks.
  • The global Titan-rampage that was caused by King Ghidorah and indirectly caused by Emma Russell in King of the Monsters, after both characters' respective deaths, has made the world at large much more aware of the power discrepancy between human and Titan and the Titans' positive effects on the ecosystems mankind relies on — beforehand, the population's main sentiment was that the military should try to kill every Titan indiscriminately, and there was little regard for the probability that would only piss the Titans into attacking. On the negative side, Ghidorah left a Perpetual Storm behind after his death which, together with the Dark Titan Camazotz's actions, is responsible for the destruction of Skull Island in Godzilla vs. Kong even after Camazotz was defeated.
  • It's revealed in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization that Packard's attack on Kong in Kong: Skull Island taught later generations of Monarch a thing or two about how to effectively tranquilize Kong.
  • Although Apex Cybernetics are destroyed in Godzilla vs. Kong, Monarch retains a hold of and continues to visibly use their advanced technology in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
• Villainous Rescue: The Death Jackals in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong unwittingly enable Aaron and the Iwi to escape Riccio when they ambush the group, whilst in Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla when it's still under Ren Serizawa's direct control unknowingly saves Madison from the Skullcrawler that's been sicced on the Mecha when said Crawler was a millisecond away from killing Madison Russell.
• Villainous Underdog:
  • Given that this is a franchise where Kaiju which are literally beyond humanity's ability to control or effectively destroy exist, the human Big Bad Wannabes are this to the heroic Titans such as Godzilla or Kong when they seek a direct confrontation with them, and the main threat these human antagonists present comes not so much from the threat they pose to the heroic Titans' lives but from their ability to put them at a disadvantage or exacerbate their situation with the villainous Titans who do pose a threat. Notable examples include Colonel Packard in Kong: Skull Island attempting to kill Kong with manpower (and releasing Ramarak in the process), for which Kong squashes him like a bug; and Apex Cybernetics in Godzilla vs. Kong plotting to use Mechagodzilla to kill and usurp Godzilla and also being responsible for provoking Godzilla's rampages on population centers due to their creation's Ghidorah-derived organic parts emitting a signal, only for Apex to suffer Hoist by Their Own Petard when Ghidorah's leftover subconsciousness hijacks Mechagodzilla for itself and makes it destroy them.
  • In the first season finale of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the aggressive but small Ion Dragon fights Godzilla himself.
• Visionary Villain:
  • The eco-terrorists in Godzilla: King of the Monsters have visions for giving the Earth's environment a clean slate free of humanity's modern shortcomings and abuse, via actively awakening the Titans so that they might decimate humanity while renewing the ecosphere or just wipe out all non-Titan life altogether.
  • The recurring evil corporation Apex Cybernetics, led by the egomaniacal Walter Simmons, want to kill and usurp Godzilla's kingship over the Titans for themselves, restore total control of the planet to humanity, and usher in a new era of mega-corporate hegemony, and they construct their own artificial Titan in Godzilla's image to challenge him.
• Voice Changeling: The Parrot Frog in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire and the recurring Titan Tiamat are both capable of mimicking other Titans' and potentially humans' vocalizations pretty well. The Kong: Skull Island novelization states that the Skullcrawlers also have this ability, and one of them used it to lure Gunpei Ikari to his death.

W

• Weak, but Skilled: The Great Apes aren't nearly as physically powerful as their ancestral adversary Godzilla, or most of the other top Titans for that matter, but they make up for that with superior versatility, intelligence, and an anthropomorphic degree of ingenuity, as shown when Kong in Godzilla vs. Kong and the Skar King in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire are respectively forced to duel against Godzilla. Likewise, the Ion Dragon in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is at most a Curb Stomp Cushion to Godzilla, but it still manages to impressively and acrobatically manoeuver around and strike at him before he defeats it.
• Weather Manipulation: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Ghidorah causes a massive, alien hypercane of thunderheads, tornadoes and waterspouts to form around him and disrupt the Earth's climate seemingly just by his existing, and it's hinted in the movie (outright confirmed by the novelization) that the effects of Ghidorah's hypercane will ultimately convert the atmosphere into perpetual storms covering the entire planet if he's left unstopped. Conversely, Mothra, even when she's still inside her pupa, can cause Ghidorah's stormclouds to near-magically disperse away from her and clear the sky. In Kingdom Kong, Camazotz causes a perpetual storm leftover from the late Ghidorah's rampage to shift out of its original fixed position and merge with Skull Island's storm barrier just before he emerges to claim the island for himself, negatively terraforming the island to covered by the stormclouds in permanent darkness which benefits him. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Shimo, who caused previous ice ages in Earth's geological history, demonstrates that she can cause snowclouds to form and darken the sky even in tropical climates by firing her Frostbite Blast into the sky; and it's hinted that the snowclouds would've lasted for a very long time without intervention, if Godzilla intervening to disperse them with his atomic breath is any indication.
• We Hardly Knew Ye: Dr. Graham is infamously a victim of this, getting the bare minimal characterization in the movies as anything other than Serizawa's Satellite Character before she suffers Sudden Sequel Death Syndrome. There's also Sandra Brody plus Serizawa and Graham's colleagues at the Janjira containment site in the 2014 film, Victor Nieves in Kong: Skull Island, Alan Jonah's close Mook Lieutenant Asher in King of the Monsters, Karsten (the first one to die) in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, and Gnarled Finger in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
• What Is Going On?: This stock phrase is used several times in Godzilla: King of the Monsters by both Emma and Mark Russell, and once by Nathan Lind in Godzilla vs. Kong.
• What the Hell, Hero?: Mark Russell receives a few for his biased behavior and shoddy judgment (particularly in regards to Godzilla); first from Dr. Serizawa for holding a toxic and fallacious Animal Nemesis grudge against Godzilla, then from Madison for jumping to an unbelievably-contrived conclusion about Godzilla's rampage. Emma also calls out Serizawa in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, for lecturing her on gambling with billions of people's lives after he hasn't done enough to stop the government from unwittingly causing an impending apocalypse without her. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Jia calls out Dr. Andrews and Monarch for saying they're drugging and restraining Kong for his own good when their actions only feed Kong's distrust of them. Tim gets one in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for joyriding on plugging the data leak with Bill Randa's files by himself without telling any of Monarch's higher-ups about it as he should have.
• When It All Began:
  • Although the details have been massively overhauled via Canon Discontinuity in the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters series; the aftermath of the atomic bombings of Japan led to the founding of the franchise-central, monster-hunting, quasi-governmental agency Monarch.
  • The events of the original 2014 movie wherein Godzilla's and Kaiju's existence was exposed to the world amid the destructions of Honolulu (called "G-Day Minus Two" through to "G-Day") have lasting ramifications across every MonsterVerse instalment that chronologically takes place afterwards, directly or indirectly catalyzing the entire conflicts of Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, and to a lesser extent the conflict of the 2015 storyline in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.
• When You Coming Home, Dad?: Supplementary materials state that Eiji Serizawa didn't have much time to be with his son due to the demands of his job in Monarch and his passionate focus on Godzilla. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization states that Ishirō Serizawa repeated that parenting pattern with his own son Ren, but unlike with his own father, it crossed into emotional parental neglect when he barely saw or comforted a teenaged Ren upon his mother's death, and the boiling resentment it fostered in Ren turned the latter into a vindictive evil genius instead of a successor to the Heroic Lineage. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Hiroshi Randa before his disappearance often put his enigmatic work (which is implied to involve Monarch and Titans) before spending much time with his children, and this left his daughter Cate consideraly traumatized after he did it in the wake of G-Day.
• Why We Can't Have Nice Things: Dr. Brooks' and Monarch's recurring visits to/harassment of Skull Island eventually lead to (or at least assist) the island's terminal extinction in the graphic novel Kingdom Kong, when Camazotz reaches the island's surface due to Monarch's seismic surveys and he permanently enshrouds it in a Perpetual Storm; formed from a perpetual superstorm leftover by Ghidorah merging with the island's perpetual storm barrier. Skull Island is the single most unique and alien ecosystem ever discovered outside of the Hollow Earth, populated by planimals and other bizarre creatures found nowhere else on Earth, but ignorant and cocky if well-meaning scientists harassing, meddling with and trampling over things they could barely comprehend one time too many has drastically accelerated a precious, alien pocket world's erasure from the planet.
• Wide-Eyed Idealist: Monarch are seen In-Universe by the military, the government, and the public in The Unmasqued World as this (at least initially) for their reverence of the Titans and their protests against human intervention attempting to kill the creatures on their terms, but Monarch are actually very much a case of Good Is Not Dumb since they're quite aware of how the Titans tie into the Green Aesop. Madison Russell starts as this in King of the Monsters, due to her mother's influence and having only been exposed to the benevolent Mothra before she gets to witness the consequences of Ghidorah awakening.
• Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds:
  • Alan Jonah despises humanity and seeks our total destruction, because decades of fighting for his country in the world's worst war zones, where he repetitively saw with his own eyes just how monstrous human beings could become, have broken his mind. The novelization also reveals that his daughter being abducted and her corpse found stuffed in a storm drain days later while he was away on military service contributed to Jonah's fall into darkness.
  • Jonah's co-terrorist in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Emma Russell, is filled with rage towards humanity, wanting the Titans to decimate us as punishment for our hubris; because she blames humanity's environment-damaging mistakes, which instigated the MUTOs' rising, for the death of her child during the MUTOs' rampage and the subsequent disintegration of her marriage.
  • It's implied in Godzilla vs. Kong that Ren Serizawa has joined Apex's corporate conspiracy to endanger millions of people and to Kill and Replace Godzilla due to a personal motivation. The novelization confirms this: Ren's father Ishirō barely showed him any acknowledgement, and Ren was left all alone to organize his mother's funeral as a teenager while his father was almost always away from home chasing the Titans, until finally, Ishirō's untimely death via a heroic sacrifice to save Godzilla irreversibly put Ren's hopes of reconciling with his father in life beyond his reach. As a result, Ren feels on a deeply personal level that Godzilla has robbed him of his father's love for his entire life.
  • Raymond Martin is a sadistic Titan-hunter with absolutely no standards against hurting peaceful and infant creatures that were staying clear of humanity, because he was physically maimed and he lost his entire family from his parents down to his son when Femuto attacked in 2014.
• The Worf Effect:
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: A MUTO, which was the main antagonistic species of the 2014 Godzilla movie, turns up here as a mere thrall to the apex Alpha Titans, first serving King Ghidorah and then submitting to Godzilla at the end. Rodan is an inversion: he's awakened shortly after Ghidorah, and he immediately performs impressively in massacring Monarch's military jet squadron, but when he faces off against the three-headed dragon, Ghidorah curb-stomps him inside of a couple minutes and then makes Rodan his vanguard.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: The Skullcrawlers, the main antagonists of Kong: Skull Island who threatened all the island's other inhabitants and wiped out the rest of Kong's kind, are reduced by Apex Cybernetics to mere target practice for Mechagodzilla, who mercilessly cuts through a Big One-sized Skullcrawler like a wolf through a crippled rooster.
• Workaholic: Joe Brody in the 2014 movie forgot his own birthday while he was on the phone talking about work first thing in the morning, and he immersed himself in his decade-spanning investigation into the cause of his wife's death after the Janjira meltdown. According to Mark Russell in King of the Monsters, Emma Russell drowned herself in her work on trying to understand the Titans after their son's death.
• World of Snark: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters and the Skull Island animated series, pretty much everybody in the cast is quippy and snarky to some degree. It sometimes gets to the point where you'd think it was an epidemic.
• Would Hurt a Child: In Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, Riccio, upon losing his marbles, has no compunctions against hitting a child across the face, nor against exposing an entire village including children to being decimated by Skull Island's man-eating predators. In King of the Monsters, Ghidorah, in reference to his Rebirth of Mothra iteration, is all too happy to murder a child using all three heads' gravity beams, to say nothing of how his global plans call for all life on Earth being slaughtered by rampant Titans, storms and natural disasters under his command. Ghidorah isn't the only one in King of the Monsters either: Alan Jonah in the novelization threatens the twelve-year-old Madison's life, ordering one of his men to slit her throat if her mother defies them (to say nothing of how in both versions of the story, Jonah and his organization were willing to set over a dozen Titans loose on the world and cause potentially billions of deaths before Ghidorah took over). The Kraken in the Netflix Skull Island series is no better than Ghidorah, slaughtering a whole village including children in the Whole Episode Flashback, and toying with and attempting to kill human teenagers during the first episode. Raymond Martin in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted goes out of his way to hunt down and try to murder a pair of Spineprowler cubs using his Titan Hunter. The Skar King in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire has zero compunctions against hurting a child of his own tribe, who's heavily implied to be his child to boot, for the slightest and most arbitrary of "offences", and later he tries to kill that same child. Kong is a much tamer example — whilst he never kills a child without provocation, he isn't above using Suko as a flail (to an extent which doesn't seriously injure Suko himself) when Suko is deliberately trying to get him killed.
• Wrong Assumption:
  • Admiral Stenz thinks that things work like in the more classic kaiju movies, where the monsters will overthrow humanity if the military don't put them down ASAP, and gambling the fate of humanity on trying to keep them alive for ends aimed at benefiting humanity is not worth the risks. Unfortunately, where Stenz could be a near-perfect military leader in any of the older and more cynical kaiju movies' settings, in the MonsterVerse, his skepticism of Monarch's pro-Titan attitude and limited thinking end up making a bad situation even worse in both his appearances; where his efforts to kill the Titans instead make the bad ones even stronger and place even more people in immediate mortal peril.
  • Stenz' above assumptions also apply to most of humanity initially in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, after the world discovered that monsters were real five years prior, massively fueling the movie's entire plot from behind the scenes.
  • In the animated Skull Island series, Charlie assumes that the firearm-wielding shady human bad guys who are on the same titular Isle of Giant Horrors as him and his friends must be poachers of exotic creatures... which would have been on the mark in some of the earlier King Kong cartoons and continuities, but isn't so here.
• Wrong Genre Savvy: A lot of people In-Universe (particularly before the events of Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019)) such as Admiral Stenz believe that humanity needs to attempt to kill the Titans using manmade super-weaponry in defence of their right to rule the Earth uncontested and to prevent future destruction and casualties; and Monarch's arguments against that and tendency towards admiring the creatures make most people see them as that one guy in a monster movie who insists on keeping the monster alive For Science at the risk of causing the end of the world. As it stands, many of the Titans in this setting are capable of coexisting with humans peacefully if a benevolent Alpha like Godzilla or Kong keeps them in line, and they're furthermore allegories for forces of nature — attempts to up technology to a level which can deal serious damage to Titans always goes awry, doing nothing but leaving the world in an even worse situation with the Titans than it was in before, and humanity is simply reliant on the Titans to survive in the long-term since many of them act as antibodies maintaining the world's ecosphere. Monarch are in actuality every bit the Titan experts that they're supposed to be per their job because of their pro-Titan arguments. This Wrong Genre Savvy is quite central to the ridiculously-arrogant Apex Cybernetics' Evil Plan to control or exterminate all the Titans in Godzilla vs. Kong, and to Apex's downfall.

X-Y

• The Xenophile: Most people in Monarch are positively fascinated by the Titans they study, and in some cases are outright reverent towards Godzilla, Kong and Mothra. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Mark Russell, even at his worst, seems to feel an almost unconscious connection to Godzilla and really knows his stuff when it comes to predicting Titan behavior.
• Yellow/Purple Contrast: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Ghidorah is covered in golden scales and his powers produce yellow-tinted lightning. In Godzilla vs. Kong, the room where Apex Cybernetics are harnessing Ghidorah's undead skull's telepathy is saturated in purple light.
• You Can't Thwart Stage One: All four films have the cast being warned that "this monster-related thing" mustn't happen, and before the movie's climax, it happens and the stakes elevate.
  • Godzilla: Despite Monarch's warnings and the U.S. military's (crazed) effort to counter it, the MUTOs succeed in meeting up, mating, and building a nest of hundreds of MUTO eggs, wrecking San Francisco in the process.
  • Kong: Skull Island: The "Big One" Skullcrawler that Marlow warned the cast must never wake up because it stands a serious chance at killing Kong? It wakes up, and it challenges Kong, looking for a fight to the death.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters: The first half of the film is the cast trying to stop the eco-terrorists from awakening all the dormant Titans that are being monitored around the world. King Ghidorah proceeds to do the job spontaneously, and Armageddon begins.
  • Godzilla vs. Kong: The human villains succeed in their efforts to power up Mechagodzilla, leading to the Final Battle.
• You Killed My Father: Kong hates the Skullcrawlers because the species were directly responsible for killing his parents in the backstory. It's hinted in Godzilla vs. Kong, and confirmed in the novelization, that Ren Serizawa wants to use Mechagodzilla to kill Godzilla because he blames Godzilla for his father's death by Heroic Sacrifice. In Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted, Raymond Martin hates all Titans with a passion because one of them killed his parents along with the rest of his family — he himself, poetically, ends up on the other end of this trope after he murders a Spineprowler mother while attacking her cubs, and the cubs kill him offscreen in turn when his Titan Hunter is destroyed.
• You Kill It, You Bought It: Titans can claim territory and positions of leadership from other Titans via killing them. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla loses his kingship to Ghidorah when crippled and seemingly killed by the Oxygen Destroyer, then he takes his rightful kingship back by vaporizing Ghidorah. In Kingdom Kong, Dr. Brooks believes that if Camazotz succeeded in killing Kong, he would've become an Alpha-level Titan in Kong's stead on top of gaining Skull Island as his own. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex Cybernetics plan to usurp Godzilla as the King of the Monsters by building Mechagodzilla to fight him to the death.

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