Tropes I to P / Monster Verse

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Tropes appearing in multiple installments of the MonsterVerse include:

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An Ice Person: The Titan Scylla can emit massive quantities of liquid nitrogen into the environment, to the point where she can halt and reverse the melting of polar ice caps when directed to do so by Godzilla. The Frost Vark in Alaska can suck the ambient heat out of the area in front of its mouth in seconds, causing everything in the affected range to near-instantaneously freeze solid. Shimo has a "Frost Bite" Breath Weapon, and is capable of freezing stretches of ocean solid.
Idiot Ball: Several times in the 2014 movie — from Monarch and the Americans disposing of a dormant radiation-eating giant monster egg by dumping it in a bunker stacked with barrels of nuclear waste and not regularly monitoring it, to the military initiating a plan to try and kill the rampaging radiation-eating monsters by dropping a nuke on them and hoping it doesn't just make them even stronger (even though one of those monsters already survived a nuclear strike point-blank in the past), to the military train team heading towards the sounds of screaming and gunfire to "check it out." In King of the Monsters, the cast take quite a long time to work out that the "tropical storm" which they lost track of the electrical typhoon-generating flying hydra in is not just a mundane meteorological storm which the monster happened to fly by.
Ignored Expert: Naturally, there's at least one instance per film. Monarch's advice against the military's Nuke 'em measures get ignored in both Godzilla (2014) and Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019) with catastrophic consequences, and Packard in Kong: Skull Island could've avoided a lot of casualties had he listened to Marlow. Emma Russell in King of the Monsters and Ren Serizawa in Godzilla vs. Kong both end up being villainous Ignored Experts to their co-conspirators toward the climax. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Monarch ironically become the ones doing the ignoring; having ignored Lee Shaw's first-hand accounts of the Hollow Earth and his warnings about Monarch's passiveness for decades, and continuing to ignore the warning signs that a second G-Day is coming.
I Let Gwen Stacy Die: In the 2014 movie, Joe Brody feels responsible for his wife Sandra's death many years later, since she was only at the heart of the disaster because he told her to go down to the nuclear reactor before things got serious. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Nathan Lind has been in a Heroic BSoD since his brother died a couple years prior, blaming himself because it was partly his tunnel vision that got his brother and several other people killed. In the Skull Island animated series, Kong is haunted by the death of the Island Girl years after the Whole Episode Flashback, and it's implied that he feels responsible because he was too late to save her and her village (whom were all under his protection) from being exterminated by the newly-emerged Kraken, to say nothing of the possibility he might have eventually worked out that he unwittingly caused the Kraken's awakening to begin with after his moment of arrogance when dealing with the Killer Chameleons.
Impaled with Extreme Prejudice: How Godzilla kills the male MUTO in the 2014 film. This is also how the Mother Longlegs on Skull Island kill their prey. Mothra inflicts a non-fatal form of this on Rodan to take him out of the fight in King of the Monsters.
Impossibly Graceful Giant: Largely avoided with Godzilla and the MUTOs in Godzilla (2014) — their massive size and weight really shows in their slow and weighty movements on-camera. In the next movie, Kong: Skull Island, Kong and the Skullcrawlers are significantly more agile and acrobatic, leaping great distances through the air despite their sheer size and gravity, but they still have an appropriately slow and weighty quality to their movements here. Godzilla and other giant monsters' movements become a little more fluid and faster-paced in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), but Godzilla vs. Kong ditches the early movies' realistically slow Kaiju movements even further to make the monsters ridiculously agile and fast, a la the change in giant portrayal that Pacific Rim: Uprising was widely criticized for.
Insecure Protagonist, Arrogant Antagonist:
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the humans heroes consist of scientists who are ambivalent (to the point of inaction) about whether or not the Titans they study are the key to humanity's salvation or the gateway to its destruction, and a Tragic Bigot with multiple Fatal Flaws under his belt. The human antagonists are eco-terrorists who believe they can set the Titans loose on the world and then try to control them using an experimental device, without expecting it to spiral out of their control (which it does).
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, there are ambivalent human heroes on both Team Godzilla and Team Kong: Madison Russell is struggling with a shell of a father who neither believes in nor listens to her, and she's trying to convince people that Godzilla has been Easily Condemned at a time when almost no-one is willing to listen to her; while Nathan Lind is a Scrap Heap Hero trying to achieve Team Kong's mission via completing and perfecting the same failed venture which previously claimed his brother's life and destroyed his career. The human villains are a Corporate Conspiracy whose members are so arrogant; they genuinely don't anticipate their plan to conquer the Titans and prove humans' superiority will run into problems because they hinged it all on hooking Ghidorah's lingering neurology up to a Humongous Mecha (before they added some untested Green Rocks in for good measure), nor do they anticipate that threatening Kong's charges while Kong is standing several feet (meters) away will lead to Kong attacking them.
Intimidation Demonstration: Several of the Titans use pre-conflict actions and body language as a show of strength to intimidate their would-be opponent.
- Godzilla flashes bioluminescent light from his dorsal spines without using his atomic breath when he really wants to intimidate someone who he feels is in his weight class. The sight of Godzilla physically annihilating King Ghidorah in Boston also cows Dr. Stanton, implicitly humanity at large, and all of the Titans that followed Ghidorah's orders into backing down to him for the time being.
- Ghidorah's intimidation display involves rattling his spiked tails like a rattlesnake, rearing his body up to stand on his legs at his full height, and spreading his wings wide like a cobra's hood to make himself appear larger. It makes him look twice the size of Godzilla.
- Mothra whenever she's aggravated to wrath flashes aggressive red colors with her multi-colored bioluminescence.
- More than one of Jinshin-Mushi's emergences when it's wearing Godzilla down involve it attacking and destroying a manmade nuclear energy source, including a submarine and a nuclear power plant.
- When Mechagodzilla possessed by Ghidorah's subconsciousness emerges from Victoria Peak, it uses its Proton Scream to raze down several blocks of Hong Kong in full view of Godzilla before it turns its attention to battling him.
Introduced Species Calamity: Whereas Godzilla and Kong are compared to keystone species and guardians of nature which act to restore the ecosystem's equilibrium if it's been disrupted, their rivals and foes are compared to invasive species. The MUTOs are ancient parasites which lethally fed on Godzilla's kind and caused mass extinctions just by reproducing, the Skullcrawlers are invaders which crawl up to Skull Island from the Hollow Earth and will overrun the entire ecosystem without Kong to keep them in check, and Ghidorah is a literal alien whose plans threaten to sterilize the entire Earth. Ironically, despite his beneficial role in Skull Island's ecosystem, Kingdom Kong reveals that Kong and his forebears are themselves a non-indigenous species, and Dr. Brooks speculates that the island's ecosystem won't support Kong anymore once he's fully grown.
In a Single Bound: Kong can leap vast distances, and Godzilla manages to do this when leaping out of the ocean at Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters.
In Your Nature to Destroy Yourselves: The self-destructiveness of modern humanity is on full display in the first four movies, where it's in fact human beings who set off the conflicts and enable Titan threats to jeopardize humanity in the first place.
- In Godzilla (2014), the MUTOs originally hatch from their spores, burrow to the surface and threaten humanity at large because an environmentally-harmful mining operation accidentally disturbed their tomb, ending their dormancy after tens of thousands of years.
- In Kong: Skull Island, Skull Island's monsters were in check until the human expedition's arrival awakens the hostile, ecosystem-destroying and man-eating Skullcrawlers, including the Alpha Skullcrawler who stands a serious chance of besting Kong.
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the onset of the conflict goes back to humans abusing the environment and debating what to do about the Titans emerging: the government wants to wipe the Titans out because they see the Titans as the cause of rather than a byproduct of the world becoming a more dangerous place for humans, and this in turn drives a group of eco-terrorists to deliberately accelerate the Titans' awakenings, unaware that some of the Titans they're awakening will destroy the world instead of healing it if they're unchecked. Furthermore, the government detonating a Fantastic Nuke in an effort to neutralize the awakened Titans only stops Godzilla from killing the most dangerous Titan of all (Monster Zero a.k.a. Ghidorah) there and then, and instead it enables Ghidorah to reign over the world unopposed, wreaking global destruction and almost succeeding in destroying humanity.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, the entire conflict, from Godzilla rampaging on cities unprovoked and attacking Kong, to Mechagodzilla rampaging and threatening humanity, is a result of the Apex Cybernetics corporation's machinations and self-destructive hubris. They've been instigating Godzilla's attacks because they've been building Mechagodzilla in a selfish attempt to usurp him and have furthermore been playing at Engineered Heroics, they've encouraged Kong's removal from Skull Island which puts him in Godzilla's cross-eye, and their own creation rampages because Apex idiotically incorporated Ghidorah's undead skull as a controller, which enables the alien monster's malevolent subconsciousness to posthumously take control of the Mecha from Apex.
- Likewise, in the 2015 storyline of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Monarch and the Randas are constantly at each-other's throats. but more than that; the well-meaning Lee Shaw's plan to help Godzilla keep the Earth in check is the entire reason why the Earth becomes endangered again. The Earth and the Titans at large are in check and balanced, until Shaw's efforts to make that equilibrium permanent by forcibly closing all the entrances to the Hollow Earth end up instead increasing pressure on the remaining portals, threatening to drive Titans to the surface anyway or at worst cause an Earth-Shattering Kaboom. Even when Shaw's warned of this, he ignores it anyway.
Ironic Echo: In Godzilla: Aftershock, the U.N. Security Council throw Serizawa's "let them fight" line from the 2014 movie^note back in his face when they commit to an absolutely insane plan to stand by and let Jinshin-Mushi kill Godzilla. In King of the Monsters, Alan Jonah quips "Long live the king" when Ghidorah usurps Godzilla as King of the Monsters, and later, Emma defiantly reiterates the same line as a pledge of allegiance to Godzilla taking back his kingship from Ghidorah. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, General Puckett in 1954 throws Lee Shaw's line about Godzilla being "an existential threat to global security" back in Shaw's face when justifying using the uranium Monarch requested as bait to instead build an atom bomb intended to kill Godzilla.
Island of Mystery: Skull Island, as always, is a remote Isle of Giant Horrors hidden away from the civilized world, home to various prehistoric and otherworldly monsters including King Kong. This incarnation of Skull Island, which is mostly a hot and humid tropical island, is cloaked from the outside world by a Perpetual Storm (which the island is usually within the eye of) and by magnetic anomalies which fool navigation instruments. The island is home to bizarre phenomena which include gigantic planimals and aurora-like atmospheric anomalies. The source of most of the island's phenomena is that it's a gateway to the Hollow Earth and the gravitational inversion inbetween the Hollow Earth and surface world. Skull Island is also home to the Iwi tribe, whom have survived under Kong's protection and are fortunately much friendlier than the natives of other Skull Island incarnations. The island hosts huge, ancient ruins from a time when the Iwis' original ancestors and Kong's ancestors were much more advanced and powerful. Many shipwrecks and WWII planes have disappeared from the outside world over centuries because they washed ashore on the storm-cloaked Skull Island, where their derelict wreckages are visible.
Isle of Giant Horrors:
- Skull Island is adapted from the King Kong franchise as Kong's domain, hidden from the outside world by a Perpetual Storm system encircling its waters, and populated by a host of man-eating Big Creepy-Crawlies and gigantic planimals and other beasts, with the gigantic gorilla himself being the least hostile of them all. The island's preternatural properties here are indicated to be a result of its direct connection to the Hollow Earth.
- The Skull Island animated series reveals that there's another uncharted island twenty miles away from Skull Island, which is also populated by monsters including Dog and giant bugs.
It Can Think: Despite their animalistic nature, most if not all of the Titans are not dumb; they're capable of complex problem-solving, tactical thinking in a fight, and emoting care, grief, malice, fear and wrath.
It's All About Me: This is a nigh universal trait of the antagonists, both human and Titan. The Titan antagonists threaten humanity and the natural balance of the world whilst seeking to benefit themselves or their species to the detriment of all other life; i.e., the Skullcrawlers with their Horror Hunger being left to conquer unchecked, the MUTOs and Ghidorah threatening to create an extinction event whilst ostensibly reshaping their territory to suit themselves. And the human antagonists tend to be Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremists who are ultimately putting the whole world at risk all because of their own sense of entitlement, their spite or their Excessive Mourning. Mark Russell himself can often be a very egocentric man beneath his veil of self-righteousness.
It's Personal: Quite a few examples occur over the franchise. Amid Godzilla and Ghidorah's feud for dominance, their interactions indicating they truly despise each-other because of their past history. Kong's hatred of the Skullcrawlers implicitly comes from them killing the rest of his kind including his parents until he was the last ape standing. Kong also has personal reasons to hate the Kraken in the Skull Island animated series, as the creature is responsible for killing several of his beloved charges and has been tossing the remains of its kills at him to taunt him for years. In the 2014 movie, Joe Brody has been obsessed with uncovering the truth about Monarch and the male MUTO for years, after his wife died amid the destruction of Janjira as an indirect consequence of his actions before the MUTO attacked. Packard's insane obsession with killing Kong in Kong: Skull Island starts with Kong killing several of his men, and Packard latches onto that as a justification for a vendetta. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization confirms the movie's vague hints that Ren Serizawa has a personal fixation on killing Godzilla because of his father's death while saving the Titan, and it furthermore reveals that Bernie Hayes is trying to expose Apex because they apparently silenced his wife to hide their dirty secrets.
I Will Find You: In King of the Monsters, Mark's initial main motivation for actively helping Monarch's efforts to save the world from rampant Titans instead of continuing to complain and wallow in self-pity at his mountain cabin is so that he can rescue his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter, although getting the former back justifiably goes out the window once he learns she was allied with the terrorists from the start, focusing solely on rescuing his daughter. In Skull Island (2023), this trope is revealed to be mercenary leader Irene's true motivation: she's after Annie because the latter is her daughter who was lost at sea and presumed dead years ago, and she just wants her daughter back.

Jagged Mouth: Rodan's beak is shaped like a jagged maw carved with a pumpkin knife, as are Mechagodzilla's lipless metal jaws.
Jerkass:
- In Kong: Skull Island, Packard doesn't act nice towards Weaver at all once he finds out she's part of the profession he blames for the Vietnam War's disappointing conclusion, threatening her after she's saved his and his men's asses, but the novelization furthermore reveals that Packard tends to be condescending to anyone who isn't in the military.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters features several. The Titan Rodan is a Wild Card who enjoys tearing through humans way more than he needs to, and who makes a blusterous show at Godzilla in the aftermath of his three-headed former master's downfall only to quickly back down once Godzilla gives him a Death Glare. Among the humans, aside from Mark Russell; the sardonic Senator Williams has nothing but disgust for the Titans, which she wants the military to wipe out, and she conveniently forgets or just ignores any counter-arguments that she's faced with onscreen during a hearing.
- Mark Russell is happy to use his grief to throw pity parties in both his film appearances while acting spiteful, and he's extremely rude to his allies in Godzilla: King of the Monsters before his character development reaches its turning point (even when his allies are the people charged with rescuing his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter). Not even his family is safe from him using his grief to indirectly hurt them while he wallows in his own self-centeredness: he abandoned his wife and daughter so that he could mope alone after Andrew's death, leaving them to deal with their own grief without him when they needed him more than ever before; and in his second appearance, Mark doesn't hesitate to guilt-trip Madison to make her shut up and do what he wants instead of arguing.
- Maia Simmons in Godzilla vs. Kong is a Jerk with a Heart of Jerk: she's a sarcastic Rich Bitch who sees Kong as little more than an overgrown dumb animal, and she acts demeaning towards the rest of Team Kong, but she briefly rushes to Jia's aid in a life-threatening situation. She seems to tone down her jerkassery as the movie goes on and it becomes clear that she's out of her depth, but it doesn't stop her from betraying Team Kong, threatening their lives (Jia included), and leaving them all to die once she has what she accompanied them for and they start protesting to her actions.
- The Kraken in Skull Island is an extremely Ax-Crazy Titan that kills any human presence that it encounters in a disturbingly playful rather than predatory manner, and it's been throwing innocent whales to their deaths in an effort to enrage Kong to the point where he'll be goaded into fighting the Kraken to the death in a setting where the Kraken has Homefield Advantage. The humans briefly wonder why the Kraken acts so sadistic, and Sam's leading theory is that the creature is, to put it mildly, "a dick."
- The Skar King in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is a tyrannical conqueror and a dick. When meeting Kong face-to-face, he notices Kong's manmade prosthetic tooth, then proceeds to jeer and laugh at Kong out loud to humiliate him, joined by his followers. And then he proceeds to menace a child among his followers' ranks just because the kid didn't laugh loudly enough, and when the boy's caretakers pleads for mercy, the Skar King feigns relenting for a moment... just so that he can surprise-kick the caretaker to their death in front of the boy.
Jerkass Has a Point:
- A couple in King of the Monsters. Despite how much of an ass he is, and despite the movie showing that he's ultimately in the wrong for believing that all the Titans including Godzilla should be indiscriminately exterminated, Mark Russell is proven correct about (A) misusing the new ORCA and trying to manipulate the Titans without understanding them creating an existential threat to civilization, and (B) Monarch not doing nearly enough to prepare for the Titans' awakening. Alan Jonah does a lot of kicking the son of a bitch when he rips into Emma Russell for needlessly dragging her unwilling daughter into their eco-terrorist plan (compromising their security), and into Madison for blindly buying into her mother's sales-pitch that releasing over a dozen MUTO- and Godzilla-adjacent creatures to heal the Earth, without realizing just how bloody and hard the process would really have to be.
- In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Monarch operative Tim gets a harsh but justified dressing-down from his superior after she discovers that he went after Bill Randa's files on his and Duvall's own without so much as alerting her, Serizawa or another superior as he should have done, because he wanted to play secret agents.
Jerk with a Heart of Gold: Godzilla comes across as the Prehistoric Monster equivalent of a Grumpy Old Man overall but has a genuine fondness for humans. Mark Russell is a deeply flawed, hard-headed and obnoxious man with an egocentric streak, but he abhors the loss of human life, and he loves his family (even if that love tends to be on his terms when their lives aren't endangered, as shown in Godzilla vs. Kong). Emma Russell used to be a highly arrogant and confrontational but truly committed member of Monarch trying to save the world from the MUTOs in Godzilla: Aftershock, but she became a particularly vile Fallen Hero inbetween the graphic novel and Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Lee Shaw in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is shown in his youth in the 1950s to have been aggressive and surly, with some normal hang-ups for his time upon meeting a qualified female Japanese doctor, but he was also protective of his friends and despised sexual harassment as "bullying".
Jumped at the Call: The Godzilla: King of the Monsters website expands on the backgrounds of several members of Monarch, stating many of them were all too happy to join a secret monster-hunting organization. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Madison Russell has grown to hate the normal life her father is trying to give them and is all too happy to investigate Godzilla's recent attack, but unfortunately, her father blocks her from having anything to do with Monarch which forces her to strike out on her own.

Kaiju: The series is about gigantic monsters rampaging through human cities; what else would you expect from a franchise built upon the two most well-known Trope Codifiers of the kaiju genre (Kong and Godzilla respectively)?
Karmic Death: Packard and Ghidorah both respectively are killed by the very heroic Titans (Godzilla and Kong respectively) that they were attempting to murder; in Ghidorah's case, whilst Godzilla was the chief cause of his downfall, Mothra (who Ghidorah earlier killed) and humans (whom Ghidorah actively wants wiped off the face of the Earth and has been actively slaughtering with sadistic glee) also played a part, all working together to see the three-headed Living Extinction Event defeated. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Walter Simmons and Ren Serizawa are both killed as a direct result of their hubris in exploiting Ghidorah's remains as the control mechanism for Mechagodzilla and also taking advantage of the Ghidorah remains' effects on Godzilla for immoral Engineered Heroics, leading to Ghidorah's subconsciousness hijacking control of the Mecha and killing them both. In Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted, Raymond Martin is apparently eaten offscreen by the very same Spineprowler cubs whose mother he murdered and who he tried to murder himself out of Van Helsing Hate Crimes. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Skar King is excruciatingly frozen solid by Shimo, whom he tortured and Forced into Evil for eons, and then he's shattered to pieces by Kong, the ape he abused and tried to murder.
Killed Mid-Sentence:
- Packard's last words in Kong: Skull Island just before Kong crushes him:
  "Die, you motherfu-!"
- Riccio's last words in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong before Kong also crushes him:
  "Great god Kong, savior of humankind, we give you thanks! We are worthy! We are-"
- Master Sergeant Hendricks' last words in King of the Monsters just before Ghidorah's gravity beams turn him to ash:
  "Oh, shi-"
Killed Offscreen: Gunpei Ikari during the 28-year Time Skip in Kong: Skull Island, and the Sirenjaw that's killed by Kong before the cast find its carcass in the sequel graphic novel The Birth of Kong. In Godzilla vs Kong, the Iwi except for Jia have suffered Bus Crash. In the backstory of Skull Island, Annie's and Dog's respective fathers died in a Mutual Kill, although we only see the leadup to and the fallout of that event in flashbacks. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, the Drownviper that attacks Kong is killed offscreen in a scene transition.
Killer Gorilla: Although the MonsterVerse King Kong is one of the more heroic iterations, if you cross him, he'll go straight for the kill whether you're a human or a rival Kaiju. The main antagonist of Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire is set to be an orangutan-like Titan, who is seen in the teaser glaring murderously at the camera, while sitting on a primeval throne surrounded by the bones of dead Titans.
Kill It with Fire: How Ford Brody destroys the MUTOs' nest of eggs in the 2014 film. This is also one of the more effective methods of killing or weakening creatures on Skull Island in Kong: Skull Island. And it's exaggerated by Burning Godzilla using skyscraper-melting heat and thermonuclear pulses to vaporize King Ghidorah once and for all in King of the Monsters.
Knight Templar: The human antagonists in every film. Preston Packard in Kong: Skull Island is an Ax-Crazy General Ripper who thinks he's doing his duty by picking a fight with Kong and risking the Skullcrawlers becoming a threat to the rest of the world. Alan Jonah and Emma Russell in Godzilla: King of the Monsters think they're being Gaia's Avenger by actively releasing all the Titans to decimate humanity, unaware that one of the Titans they've unleashed is an invasive alien Omnicidal Maniac who will create an even worse extinction event than humanity. Apex Cybernetics in Godzilla vs. Kong and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters use a Muggle Power agenda to justify their plan to endanger millions of people, kill and usurp Godzilla, and usher in a global corporate hegemony. Raymond Martin in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted similarly uses the delusion that he's protecting humanity from monsters to justify his self-indulgent dedication to routinely hunting and slaughtering Titan adults, gentle giants and Titan infants.
Know When to Fold 'Em: Several of the monsters, when opposing a benevolent Alpha Titan, will submit and tuck tail instead of fighting all the way to the death; including Rodan, Amhuluk, Tiamat and the Wart Dogs.
Kraken and Leviathan: Several. Aside from the crocodilian, semi-aquatic Godzilla himself, the franchise has featured two cephalopodic, tentacled marine Titans that are capable of inflicting mass destruction on the settings, and both of them shared the name "Kraken" at some point. The first Kraken, Na Kika, is among the monsters enthralled by King Ghidorah to attack the world during the global Titan rampage in King of the Monsters, having been hibernating on the Indian Ocean floor beforehand; while the second Kraken in the Skull Island series (named by the series' executive producer and writer, who admitted on Twitter that he hadn't been aware of Na Kika before the show's release); is a highly-aggressive and malicious beast which attacks anyone or anything that approaches Skull Island's waters from either direction.

Labcoat of Science and Medicine: Several people wear white labcoats, even in settings which normally wouldn't require such garments: the MUTO-monitoring scientist Jainway in the 2014 film, the scientists at the China outpost monitoring Mothra's egg in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and several Apex scientists involved in Mechagodzilla's development at the Pensacola facility in Godzilla vs. Kong.
Lack of Empathy: Among the human Big Bad Wannabes, Jonah in King of the Monsters, and Simmons and Ren in Godzilla vs. Kong display zero signs of concern or empathy for the millions or billions people whom are hurt or killed by their Evil Plans.
Last of His Kind: The vast majority of Titans are this, and Jia is this to the Iwi after the tribe's Bus Crash in Godzilla vs. Kong.
Last Request: In the 2014 movie, Sandra Brody's last request to her husband is for him to take care of their son, and his last request to their son is that he do whatever it takes to protect his family. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Serizawa's last request is telling Mark Russell to take care of the former's colleagues. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Old Shaw's last request is for Keiko to live her life.
Lean and Mean: Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla and the Skar King, despite the former two being among the larger Titans, all have very lean and lithe physiques. They're also a lot eviler than most other Titans, being actively genocidal creatures who torture and murder for glee at any chance they get instead of acting on instincts.
Lethally Stupid: In the 2014 film, the military fire at Godzilla in the San Francisco Bay when there's still civilian evacuees on the Golden Gate Bridge trying to escape, plus their firing on Godzilla not only fails to harm him, it provokes him into destroying the bridge while acting in self-defence. In Kong: Skull Island, Packard's obsessive pursuit of revenge against Kong is endangering the rest of the cast, and if he succeeds then he'll run the risk of endangering all the island's inhabitants and potentially the rest of humanity without Kong around to check the Skullcrawlers. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Emma Russell releases Ghidorah on the world in the belief that he's ultimately beneficial for the world's renewal, not knowing he's actually an Omnicidal Maniac who proceeds to slaughter any humans he sees for his amusement; meanwhile, the military attempt to kill both Ghidorah and Rodan on their own terms by firing their untested Fantastic Nuke at the creatures, but the bomb instead cripples Godzilla whilst failing to affect Ghidorah at all, enabling Ghidorah to initiate a global apocalypse which destroys numerous cities and claims countless lives. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex Cybernetics end up unwittingly bringing Ghidorah back into the world and giving it a chance to pick up where its previous identity left off with razing the entire planet, because Apex were stupid and arrogant enough to think they could incorporate Ghidorah's Not Quite Dead remains and a practically-unknown energy source into Mechagodzilla and not expect it to liably backfire on them.
Light Feminine and Dark Feminine:
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Madison Russell is a young but kind girl and is the most well-balanced member of her grieving family. On the other hand, her mother Emma Russell, who kept custody of her after Madison's parents' divorce, is an extremist Eco-Terrorist who wants to instigate the Kaiju in a way which will kill millions of people, and she proves to be extremely arrogant and unbalanced.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, Dr. Ilene Andrews is the most maternal character in the cast, whilst her and her team's benefactor Maia Simmons is an unfriendly Rich Bitch who's using them and plans to betray them.
- In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Cate Randa is a jaded but traumatized soul, and a former schoolteacher whose Cynicism Catalyst involved the tragic deaths of most of her students. Monarch operative Duvall, on the other hand, is a calm, cold, professional and brooding figure who acts like a spy.
Light Is Not Good: Ghidorah emits yellow lightning from his body, he causes superstorms filled with lightning wherever he goes, and he's an Omnicidal Maniac seeking to globally wipe out all life as we know it, and taking pleasure in murdering humans wherever and whenever he can along the way. Ghidorah's reincarnation Mechagodzilla, who emits red light, is just as bad in personality, on account of Ghidorah's subconsciousness controlling him. The Spirit Tiger has a bright-silver coloration and emits ghostly light from its antlers, but it's a violent creature to humans and it opposes Kong. Shimo has a bright blue-and-white coloration and emits pale light — she's also the Skar King's attack-dog which he uses to kill anyone in his way and with which he intends to plunge the Earth's surface into a deadly new ice age, although she's very much being Forced into Evil and actually has a benevolent personality.
Lightning Bruiser: A lot of the Titans including Godzilla, Kong, Rodan, Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla, the Skullcrawlers and the Skar King are far from being the Mighty Glacier when it comes to max speed and reflexes.
Like Father, Unlike Son:
- The franchise's starkest case is Dr. Ishirō Serizawa (who died in Godzilla: King of the Monsters), and his son Ren (who debuted in Godzilla vs. Kong), who are complete polar opposites. Whereas Ishirō is a compassionate, wise, cautious and mindful man who loves nature and is critical of humanity's arrogance, reveres the Titans and all but worships Godzilla; Ren is a callous, twisted, ruthless and arrogant Gadgeteer Genius who has absolutely no empathy for the millions of innocent people that he endangers, he exhibits the very arrogance which his father criticized man for to an exaggerated degree, he chauvinistically believes that mankind is destined to surpass the Titans, and he's personally gunning to kill Godzilla himself.
- King of the Monsters character Sam Coleman's Monarch Sciences bio establishes that he and his father Michael were the Jock Dad, Nerd Son type. Michael was a loud sports fan, in contrast to how Sam is a stuttering, soft-spoken (and skinny) Gadgeteer Genius.
- Mark and Madison Russell. Mark is Hot-Blooded, self-centered, blinded by his emotions, prone to self-pity, cynical about the Titans, and wants to have a normal life without the creatures in it; whereas Madison is a lot more rational-headed, compassionate, and considerate of the greater good whilst exhibiting good gut instincts, she has a much more positive outlook on the Titans, and she eventually finds that she'd prefer being a part of Monarch over pretending to be normal.
- Cap and Charlie in Skull Island (2023). Cap is an enthusiastic and eccentric marine cryptozoologist who loves what he does, and he notably maintains a cool and rational head as much as possible on the Isle of Giant Horrors. His son Charlie hates his father's work, wants to leave for college for the sake of tasting normalcy, and he loses his temper when his nerves are frazzled by the situation.
Lineage Comes from the Father:
- Gender-Inverted by the Chen family. Introduced in King of the Monsters, they're a family with a history of worshipping Mothra and an apparently preternatural disposition to always birthing sets of identical twin girls. Their family photo in the movie, which features at least three generations, consists exclusively of female sets of twins, and there isn't a single male member in the photo who could have fathered any of the younger women and girls.
- Played Straight in the backstory of Skull Island. Dog and his father are the only two known members of their kind on Annie's Island, and the latter's death in a Mutual Kill against Annie's father was the catalyst for Dog and Annie banding together.
Logical Weakness: Several of the Titans are presented with a realistic case of this. Godzilla's short arms have limited reach not unlike a Tyrannosaurus rex which makes a smaller opponent like the male MUTO going for his head quite effective, and he actually needs breath when exhaling his Atomic Breath which ultimately enables Mechagodzilla, as a Mechanical Abomination with no such bodily requirement, to win their Beam-O-War. Ghidorah is a massive powerhouse, but because his body is built for flight, he can't swim and is at a severe disadvantage when Godzilla drags him under the ocean. Mechagodzilla, though technically Ghidorah reincarnated, lacks any kind of Healing Factor to repair damage to its machine body. Camazotz, having developed super-sensitive hearing to navigate in darkness, is extremely sensitive to sonic booms too close to his head. The Skar King, though physically agile and intelligent, is vulnerable to physical hits from a brawny Titan like Kong if his enemy manages to get a hold of him; and although Shimo is his trump card, the Skar King needs to concentrate on directing and using his control crystal to make her obey him, which is difficult in the heat of a battle while he's actively being targeted.
The Lost Lenore: Over the course of the franchise, several human characters have been motivated by the tragic death of a spouse, often due to the kaiju's rampages. Joe Brody in the first film is traumatized by the death of his wife Sandra fifteen years prior, and he's led to the kaiju because he wants to know what caused her death. Bernie Hayes in Godzilla vs. Kong is a widower, with the novelization furthermore stating that his wife's suspicious death by a car accident is his real motivation for setting out to expose Apex Cybernetics. Monarch: Legacy of Monsters reveals that Kong: Skull Island Well-Intentioned Extremist Bill Randa lost his wife Keiko to the creatures a decade prior and implies that it was part of the reason why he lost his series younger self's idealism — the cruel and tragic irony being that Keiko wasn't really dead, and she survived inside Axis Mundi's time dilation to the 21st century, but Bill died on the 1973 Skull Island mission before he could ever find out. Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted Big Bad Raymond Martin lost his wife along with his entire family during G-Day in his backstory.
Lovecraft Lite: It has the classic conceit of The Call of Cthulhu of beings of unfathomable age and power waking up and showing humanity's smallness — Godzilla himself was at the Castle Bravo nuclear test, the largest nuclear explosion by the United States, and despite being point blank, he survived. This is softened because most of the monsters are much more interested in fighting each other than harming people, with some such as Kong being legitimately fond and protective of humanity, and Godzilla almost goes out of his way to avoid destruction. Furthermore, the only way humanity can survive against the genuinely dangerous Kaiju is via Always a Bigger Fish in the forms of such benevolent kaiju as Godzilla or Kong, and despite humanity's smallness, they can still contribute majorly to the outcomes of the kaiju's battles (i.e., distracting the malevolent kaiju long enough to give the benevolent ones an advantage).

Malignant Plot Tumor: The titular fight in Godzilla vs. Kong is made out to be a huge deal that the first three films have been leading up to, even though the mere notion that Kong and Godzilla have any relevant relationship with each-other wasn't introduced anywhere onscreen until the third film; and even then, it's only explicitly revealed that the two Titans' species were once rivals in the very last shot of that film's Creative Closing Credits.
Mama Bear: Amongst the monsters, Femuto and mother Spineprowlers are ferociously protective (and, in the former's case, avenging) when it comes to the welfare of their young. Amongst the humans; Emma Russell (ultimately), Dr. Ilene Andrews, and Irene all have protective instincts towards their respective daughters.
Mangst: Dr. Serizawa and Lieutenant Ford Brody both present themselves as The Stoic, but it's apparent that just under the surface, Serizawa is still haunted by the shadow that the Hiroshima bomb cast on his motherland's history, while Ford is still haunted by his mother's death which (supposedly) caused his dad to lose his marbles. Both men are also clearly devastated by the loss of a loved one: Dr. Vivienne Graham for Serizawa, Joe Brody for Ford.
Manipulative Bastard:
- In Kong: Skull Island, Bill Randa tricks more than a dozen returning war vets and civilians into unwittingly accompanying him to an Isle of Giant Horrors and unwittingly flushing out a Titan with aggression, all as part of his plan to get proof of the Titans' existence to save Monarch from being shut down.
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Alan Jonah uses manipulation to keep Emma under his thumb, encouraging her belief that sticking to their evil plan is the only way to save the world, until he doesn't need her anymore. Emma herself is an emotionally-manipulative mother who has dragged Madison into her and Jonah's radicalist plot by preying on Madison's desire to please her, but she's not as competent as Jonah, as she's nonplussed when her and Jonah's atrocities actually drive a traumatized Madison away from them because Emma hadn't done anything to condition Madison for the nastier parts of their plan.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, Apex Cybernetics, whom are fitting led by a high-functioning sociopath, are highly reliant on manipulation and subterfuge to get what they want. They deliberately paint Godzilla as a menace for attacking one of their facilities seemingly unprovoked, giving them an in to convince Monarch to help them obtain the unobtainium in the Hollow Earth to combat Godzilla; and then Apex plan to use Mechagodzilla's bio-acoustics to drive Godzilla into destroying another, even more densely-populated city, so that Apex will be hailed as heroes and won't fall under widespread scrutiny when they attempt to murder Godzilla using Mechagodzilla.
Masquerade: Upheld in Kong: Skull Island, since the island itself is hidden away and any information about what happened there is classified. Upheld for about half of Godzilla, at which point Godzilla and the two MUTO completely do away with it altogether.
Mass "Oh, Crap!": The human cast of Kong: Skull Island when they first see the titular ape about to attack them. Ghidorah causes a few of these amongst the whole of Monarch, Team Godzilla and even one of the bad guys across Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong.
Mauve Shirt: In both Kong: Skull Island and King of the Monsters, there are dozens of expendable, nameless red shirts, but several soldiers in either film get special characterization that makes them stand out, and some of them in either film survive to the ending whilst pretty much all the others are killed by the Titans.
Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Despite the much more realistic and grounded tone of the MonsterVerse, there are a number of elements that seem to toe the line between science and supernatural. For example:
- Skull Island has bizarre Planimal wildlife, strange atmospheric anomalies like auroras and a surrounding Perpetual Storm, and natives that Marlow comments don't seem to age. Randa even refers to it as "the land where God did not finish creation."
  - In the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong, Walter Riccio while on the island experiences several visions depicting Kong's parents and depicting Skullcrawlers killing them right after Kong's birth. Were these visions purely hallucinations brought on by Riccio's overconsumption of the Iwi's medicinal brew (which was implicitly fueling his Sanity Slippage), or were they "The devils of this island whisper[ing] into his ear" as Ato put it and he really is viewing Skull Island's past?
- Mothra has a strange connection to a family line of identical twins, Born-Again Immortality via Genetic Memory, and Madison reviving after having a vision of her that all seem to suggest she may be an actual Physical God. In the same vein as Mothra, there are some hints that Camazotz might have Psychic Powers which affect those humans who have come into contact with him.
- In the graphic novel Kingdom Kong, there are some hints with Camazotz that Mothra might not be the only supernatural Titan on Earth, the strongest being that Tam who was put into a coma by encountering Camazotz in 2019 just happens to come out of said coma around the same time that Camazotz resurges and is defeated two years later. One has to wonder, are Captain Burns' flashbacks and waking nightmares of Camazotz, and even her fear and despair almost crippling her during the battle, merely her PTSD or are they also signs she's sensitive to and being affected by Camazotz' Psychic Powers?
  - Speaking more of Camazotz, the aforementioned Kingdom Kong and the Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure guidebook both heavily imply that the Iwi outright prophesized both Camazotz' emergence and Skull Island's resulting destruction in 2021.
Meaningful Look:
- Godzilla (2014): Ford and Joe exchange a shocked look with each-other when they realize that the bridge Joe is standing on is about to collapse. Toward the climax, Godzilla half-collapses into the streets after he's killed Hokmuto, and he locks eyes with a mesmerized Ford for a moment.
- Kong: Skull Island (2017): Kong casts one last look back at Conrad and Weaver before they part ways, after he's saved Weaver's life.
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019): When Godzilla is near-dead in the Hollow Earth with Ghidorah free to rampage over the world unchecked, he sees Serizawa approaching his head. His neutral gaze seems to soften when the dying Serizawa reaches out a hand to touch Godzilla.
Meaningful Name: Quite a few. Besides the Kaiju carried over from Toho and the King Kong franchise directly, and besides Ghidorah's Red Baron as the One Who Is Many in Godzilla: King of the Monsters; there's also the MUTO Prime being named after a mythical "Earthquake Beetle" in Godzilla Aftershock, the Skullcrawlers' name describing their anatomy (and their Iwi name Halakrah translates to the accurate description "persistent enemy"), Shinomura being named after a phrase meaning "swarm of death" in Godzilla: Awakening, Apex Cybernetics' name referring to both their end goal and the means they intend to use to accomplish it in Godzilla vs. Kong, Annie naming her loyal megafauna companion on Skull Island Dog; and the cryokinetic, Hollow Earth-dwelling, Godzilla-like Titan Shimo's name means "frost", "pit" or "hole" in Japanese in Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire.
Militaries Are Useless: The series follows the trend set up in the original movies of the military standing no chance against the Kaiju. That being said, the exact degree of uselessness varies between movies.
- Downplayed in Godzilla, in that they're shown to be otherwise fully competent (being able to quickly and efficiently evacuate San Francisco, and help survivors), just completely out of their depth.
- Likewise downplayed in Kong: Skull Island. The military is not useless, so much as they're completely out of their element, which leads to them doing more harm than good.
- Played straight in King of the Monsters, where not only are they completely helpless against the Titans (beyond just irritating them), but they end up actually making the situation much worse than it otherwise would have been; when they deploy the Oxygen Destroyer, which cripples Godzilla, giving Ghidorah a chance to usurp his position as Alpha Titan and achieve a Near-Villain Victory which almost spelled global extinction.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, they quickly join the others in concluding that Godzilla's done a Face–Heel Turn, and fire on him whenever they see him. All this really serves to do is provoke him further.
A Million Is a Statistic: Generally, in the family-centered MonsterVerse movies thus far, the focus family's suffering is played for extra pathos. In Godzilla (2014), Joe Brody is driven to discover the truth about Monarch and the Titans because of the death of his wife, but he never mentions the several other co-workers who died alongside her (and were much less willing than she was to accept their fates at the end); not even when he's calling Monarch out and saying that his loss means he has a right to know the truth. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the Russell family's angst and conflict after they were among the thousands affected by the destruction of San Francisco is played for a lot of sympathy, despite the parents' self-centered attitude to it all (especially Emma's, who intentionally sacrifices millions of innocent people during the film so long as they aren't her daughter); whilst Monarch isn't shown dwelling lastingly on the deaths of dozens of their nameless and minor colleagues, but Serizawa is shown grieving the death of supporting character Vivienne Graham briefly.
A Minor Kidroduction: Ford Brody and Madison Russell are both introduced in their respective movies as children in the Distant Prologue, before we meet their present day selves. Their intros as kids also set up something about their present day selves' characterization: Ford's childhood bedroom is strewn with army toys, while the seven-year-old Madison reacts to Godzilla's thunderous arrival with open awe instead of fear or horror.
Misplaced Retribution: Mostly along the same or similar lines to Revenge Myopia. In King of the Monsters, Mark Russell hates Godzilla for his son's death in Godzilla's battle against the MUTOs even though the MUTOs were to blame, and Mark's son was just an accidental casualty, never mind that Mark is too blinded by emotion to remember that Godzilla is an animal who bore no ill will. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization's expansion, Ren Serizawa wants to kill Godzilla because he blames the Titan for the Parental Neglect Ren suffered while his father devoted his life and time to his work studying Godzilla, not caring that Godzilla as an animal likely has no idea of this or that he's trying to undo the very thing his father gave his life for.
Missing Mom: Sandra Brody, Ford's mother in Godzilla (2014), is killed by the Janjira reactor breach in the Distant Prologue. Meanwhile, practically nothing is known about Ishirō Serizawa's mother even after the release of Godzilla Awakening, but the prequel seems to hint she either died in the Hiroshima bombing or otherwise left/died before the event (the baby Ishirō was in a different part of town from his father when the bomb fell, and Eiji chose to leave Ishirō in the care of his grandparents after the bombing). Monarch: Legacy of Monsters reveals that Keiko Randa-Miura's son Hiroshi was only a boy at the time she died.
Missing Steps Plan: In King of the Monsters, Mark briefly gives up hope of helping the heroes stop King Ghidorah, and he attempts to go out and find his missing daughter on his own, even though she could be hidden in literally any Monarch bunker around the world, surrounded by misanthropic cold-blooded killers no less; although Mothra's timely emergence stops Mark from going through with this. In the Skull Island series, Irene hatches a plan to manipulate the Hawk Monster into getting rid of Dog so she can recapture Annie and then they can get off the titular island — only for Cap to remind her that they have no chance of leaving the island alive while the Kraken is in the waters offshore, and that they don't know how they can kill it.
Mission Briefing: There are a few of these which serve to infodump important plot details to the audience; in Kong: Skull Island and King of the Monsters.
Mr. Exposition: Recurring characters Drs. Ishirō Serizawa and Vivienne Graham devote a good chunk of their respective dialogue to expositing about the Titans and explaining immediately-relevant things about them for the audience's convenience. This role in also taken up by Joe Brody in the 2014 movie, Hank Marlow in Kong: Skull Island, and Dr. Chen in King of the Monsters.
Monster Delay: In Godzilla's movie debut, we don't see his full body until at least 1/4 through the movie. Like husband like moth, since in King of the Monsters, Mothra's imago form's face and full body aren't seen by the audience until at least 30 minutes after the scene where she hatched. In both Kong's cinematic debut and his animated debut, his full appearance including his face is obscured in his first scene, and we don't see his full likeness until later on. A much more villainous case of this trope coming into effect is the extremely violent Kraken in the Skull Island series, which is only seen by its Combat Tentacles (and a few glimpses of parts of its body in the first episode), before its full appearance is revealed in the season finale. On a meta level, the Ion Dragon in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters was hinted at in the first trailer, but only a very vague glimpse of it was shown, and with each successive trailer released in the leadup to the series' premiere, more of the Ion Dragon's appearance was revealed.
Monumental Damage: In the 2014 film, Las Vegas' Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty replicas are trashed by the MUTOs, and the Golden Gate Bridge is torn in two by Godzilla. In King of the Monsters, King Ghidorah's conversion of Washington D.C. into his Mordor scorches the Capitol's iconic dome, while Godzilla and Ghidorah's Final Battle in Boston disintegrates the former John Hancock Tower.
Moral Disambiguation:
- In the first couple of movies, Godzilla and Kong are on humanity's side more due to circumstance than anything else. Godzilla causes mass destruction in his own right, and it's ambiguous how much he is out to destroy the more hostile MUTOs because they're disrupting the balance of nature at large, and how much he's just out to kill his natural enemy. In his debut in Kong: Skull Island, Kong is an Anti-Hero and not above massacring U.S. military forces when they unwittingly disturb and threaten his kingdom. Meanwhile, Godzilla and Kong's kaiju foes in early installments are simply doing what nature built them to do rather than being deliberately malicious. In subsequent movies; Godzilla, and especially Kong, become more heroic and pathic to humans, whilst the antagonistic kaiju get more petty, sadistic and/or genuinely Ax-Crazy.
- This also largely applies to the humans if the instalments are ordered chronologically instead of by release date. In Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla (2014) and the Monarch: Legacy of Monsters 2015 storyline; Monarch are portrayed in a gray light, and they do some cold, insensitive or outright shady things for their own ends, whereas chronologically later instalments from Godzilla: King of the Monsters onwards portray them in a brighter light as a simple Research, Inc.-esque organization who help the benevolent Titans to save the world. Meanwhile, the human antagonists transition over the timeline from heinous but tragic villains (Colonel Packard in Kong), and sympathetic anti-villains with noble end-goals whom have moral limits to how far they'll go (Irene and Sam in the 1990s-set Skull Island, Lee Shaw in Legacy of Monsters); into downright evil, amoral and genocidal not-so-well-intentioned extremists whom never stop sinking to lower depths (Alan Jonah in King of the Monsters, Apex Cybernetics in Godzilla vs. Kong, and Raymond Martin in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted).
Mordor: On Skull Island, the vicious and invasive Skullcrawlers who serve as Kong's primary foes and the main threat to the island make their home in a barren, noxious graveyard of Titan bones which stands in contrast to the rest of the island's lush and tropical terrain. In King of the Monsters, King Ghidorah, an actively-malicious alien Titan who wants to reshape the entire Earth with endless storms and numerous Titans rampaging at once until all other multicellular life is dead; is accompanied by a dark-clouded, lightning-filled hypercane^notebasically a hurricane on overdrive wherever he goes — he transforms Washington D.C. into a blasted, inundated, apocalyptic hellscape of scorched and half-submerged buildings with not a trace of non-monster life in sight when he makes the city his roost.
More Teeth than the Osmond Family: Many of the monsters have more teeth inside their mouths than a person would feel comfortable seeing. Skullcrawlers, Swamp Locusts and the Kraken on Skull Island, Mokele-Mbembe in the wider world. Even Ghidorah has a couple extra teeth in his heads' gums.
Muggle Power: Villains like Apex Cybernetics and Raymond Martin use "protecting humanity from monsters" as justification for their own respective plans to kill or enslave all Titans, using their own respective humongous mechas to challenge and fight the Titans on their terms.
Multipurpose Tongue: The recurring Skullcrawlers, and the chameleon monsters from the animated series, both of which are residents on Skull Island; have elongated tongues which they fire out of their mouths to grab prey as large as people and drag them into their waiting jaws.
Must Make Amends: The movie novelizations have a couple cases. In the Godzilla: King of the Monsters novelization, Madison wants to make up for her own part in helping the eco-terrorists to unleash a King Ghidorah-led army of Kaiju on the world when she takes matters into her own hands by stealing the ORCA and risking her life to help the heroes put an extra dent in Ghidorah's plans. In the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, Dr. Ilene Andrews admits during the mission to find Kong a new home that she feels guilty about Monarch's role in Skull Island's destruction by Camazotz.
My Greatest Failure: Dr. Nathan Lind's greatest failure which he tries to fix is getting his brother and several other people killed during his failed first attempt to pioneer manned travel into the Hollow Earth. Mark Russell's greatest failure which he feels the need to amend for is being absent from Madison's life for years while she was growing up and while her mother went insane. In the Kong: Skull Island novelization, Conrad is ashamed and disillusioned because of a disastrous clandestine rescue mission which ended with the young rescuee and Conrad's own men dead.
Mysterious Antarctica: Antarctica is where Ghidorah was found by Monarch before King of the Monsters, the ancient evil creature having been frozen in a glacier millennia ago, and Ghidorah was notably at the time considered a particularly mysterious Titan by Monarch. It's also revealed in Godzilla vs. Kong that Antarctica is home to a gigantic Vile Vortex leading into the Hollow Earth, and the film's novelization notes that the vortex is much too close to Ghidorah's former prison for it to be a coincidence.

Narrow Annihilation Escape: In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the cast have several narrow escapes from story-relevant locations as they're physically destroyed; from Ghidorah and Rodan's respective resting sites when the Titans awaken, to the protagonists' original home city, to the newly-discovered Advanced Ancient Acropolis in the Hollow Earth. The latter happens again in Godzilla vs. Kong: Team Kong barely escape with their lives as the mysterious temple built by Kong's ancestors' civilization is destroyed minutes after they've discovered it.
Nature Is Not Nice: Everything humans thought they knew about the creatures they share the Earth with is really just the insect kingdom, humanity included. There was once an entire world of gigantic, radioactive, borderline-supernatural beasts who will fight and kill each-other for dominance and survival, but fortunately, most of these creatures are indifferent to humans the same way we're indifferent to the ants we see in our garden. Somewhat Zig-Zagged, as some of the Kaiju such as Godzilla, Mothra and Kong are capable of higher intelligence and even displaying benevolence towards humans, and King of the Monsters establishes the Kaiju have a cross-species hierarchy amongst themselves which enables them to coexist with each-other.
Nature Lover: Several of the heroes have a love of and respect for nature, befitting the franchise's themes of the relationship between man and nature. These heroes include Mason Weaver, Madison and Mark Russell, and Trapper.
Near-Villain Victory:
- In Godzilla: Aftershock, Jinshin-Mushi wears Godzilla down and it comes within seconds of laying its parasitic MUTO eggs in Godzilla's body (at which point it would've been game over for Godzilla), before Emma's intervention distracts Jinshin-Mushi and enables Godzilla to regain the advantage.
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Ghidorah has more than one. From usurping Godzilla's position as the King of the Monsters and using his new authority to instigate a global Titan apocalypse unstopped, to weakening a returned Godzilla and almost Vampiric Draining him to death, take your pick.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, the Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla brutally wears an already-weakened Godzilla down, and it's a split-second away from finishing Godzilla off with its very own Kiss of Death when Kong intervenes to help Godzilla defeat the Mecha.
Nerd Glasses: In the movies, Dr. Brooks, Dr. Stanton and Ben are all Monarch scientists with big-rimmed glasses, plus there's Madison's "hacker" friend Josh Valentine in Godzilla vs. Kong. Godzilla Aftershock depicts Vivienne Graham with a pair of such glasses in one scene.
Nerves of Steel: There are several examples amongst the humans. Mason Weaver and Alan Jonah both respond very much this way when they find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun respectively, whilst Lieutenant Brody and Lieutenant Colonel Packard respectively handle themselves very calmly in intense situations, and Director Guillerman doesn't panic when in the radius of Godzilla's rampage.
Nice Guy: Ford in Godzilla (2014) goes out of his way to help a stranger boy who's been separated from his parents on a train before the monsters show up, and he takes all the grief and suffering around him quite well, all things considered. In King of the Monsters, Drs. Graham and Coleman act kind and sympathetic, and the former doctor is described in the film's novelization as the most compassionate person Serizawa ever knew. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Bill Randa is shown to have been a much friendlier and more amicable person in the 1950s than he was in Kong: Skull Island. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire, Trapper is a very jovial and all-round kind-hearted Awesome Aussie who works as a veterinarian for Kong.
Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: There are quite a few cases. The biggest offenders are Admiral Stenz, whose support of the Oxygen Destroyer in Godzilla: King of the Monsters directly causes Ghidorah's Near-Villain Victory that takes up the second half of the film — God knows how many of the people Stenz was trying to protect died horribly around the world as a result of this, to say nothing of how Ghidorah's victory would have spelled the extinction of humanity and all other complex life on Earth. Dr. Brooks, whose seismic operations on Skull Island in Kingdom Kong (a mistake of his which previously unleashed the Skullcrawlers in Kong: Skull Island) debatably secures the destruction of Skull Island's entire unique ecosystem by Perpetual Storm, much to his horror. In the Whole Episode Flashback of the Skull Island series, Kong being cocky when he takes on the Killer Chameleons gets him injured, and unfortunately when he treats the wound afterwards he accidentally awakens the Kraken which causes Kong and the human cast a lot of death and grief throughout the series. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Monarch felt this way about them telling the military about Godzilla, which drove the military to nuke and seemingly kill him in 1954, although Godzilla actually survived, and with that in mind Monarch's actions also came with the net positive of getting them the government-backed money and resources that they needed to expand globally.
Nigh-Invulnerability: Nearly all the Titans are immune to manmade weapons, and whenever humans build a new weapon specifically so they can kill Titans, it always makes things much worse for humanity instead of making things better. A recurring core theme of the MonsterVerse is that it Takes One to Kill One, and humans who fail to realize that often make things worse with their hubris.
The Night That Never Ends: Camazotz actively seeks to inflict this on Skull Island via Perpetual Storm (and actually succeeds), whilst before him it was implied that Ghidorah would've blanketed the entire Earth in endless storms if he won.
Noble Male, Roguish Male:
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Godzilla is the rightful King of the Monsters who fights for the natural order, while one of his opponents, Rodan, is a Hot-Blooded Wild Card with shifting allegiances. On the human side, Dr. Serizawa is a stoic and professional scientist, while Mark is a rugged and experienced field zoologist.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, Kong is portrayed as the more compassionate, kind and restrained of the titular Titans, while Godzilla is portrayed as a lot more aggressive and forceful than he was previously.
No One Gets Left Behind: In Kong: Skull Island, Packard uses this mentality to justify risking all his remaining men's lives by traveling to the crash site ostensibly to rescue Chapman. In King of the Monsters, Dr. Graham stays behind in a downed tiltrotor to save a pinned Mark Russell while everyone else evacuates; an act which indirectly costs her her own life.
No Range Like Point-Blank Range: Godzilla's "Kiss of Death", shown in the 2014 movie, involves forcing his opponent's jaws open with his bare hands, leaning in close, and firing his Atomic Breath directly down their open gullet. Godzilla performs the same move apart from the jaw-prying part on the Ion Dragon in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Alan Jonah kills a Monarch scientist named Dr. Mancini with a headshot from six feet away, and Ghidorah defeats Rodan by having his side heads grab Rodan's wings while his middle head fires a Gravity Beam into the bird's chest at range. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla attempts to kill Godzilla by using his very own "Kiss of Death" move itself.
Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond: On average, the creatures on Skull Island are in a lighter weight class than the Titans distributed around the world, but still a mortal threat to any humans that run afoul of them. Kong, the Skullcrawlers and the Kraken are the island's top dogs who vie against each-other to be the island's apex predators (a position which Kong holds and maintains), but Godzilla and the worldwide Titans are in another league altogether, as Kong himself learns the hard way in Godzilla vs. Kong once the global King of the Monsters stops holding back on the King of Skull Island altogether.
Nothing Is the Same Anymore:
- Godzilla: King of the Monsters initially set this up with the dormant Titans having been awakened around the world and Godzilla enforcing a human-Titan coexistence leading to the Dawn of an Era, but subsequent installments unfortunately subverted it and mostly turned it into an Aborted Arc by having Godzilla command all the Titans to return to hibernation.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, Skull Island has been engulfed in an ecosystem-destroying Perpetual Storm due to Camazotz's actions in the graphic novel Kingdom Kong, forcing Monarch to remove Kong from the island while all but one of the natives and everything else on the island perishes. Kong ultimately finds a new home reigning in the Hollow Earth.
Not Quite Dead:
- Godzilla multiple times appears to be dead, only to then stir and get back up: first when he has a Post-Victory Collapse in the first movie, then when he seemingly flatlines and disappears from the plot for a short while after being hit by the Oxygen Destroyer (a device which really did kill some of his previous iterations including the original) in King of the Monsters.
- Speaking of the first movie, the male MUTO seemingly dies when its chrysalis is electrocuted by Monarch, with all visible activity and life readings from the chrysalis ceasing, only for the MUTO's adult form to explode out after a minute, none worse for wear. And the MUTO's female counterpart's spore was assumed by Monarch to be safely inert for years, until they realize it's been communicating with the male as of late and has likely hatched by now.
- Rodan is taken out of the Final Battle in Godzilla: King of the Monsters when Mothra impales him through the shoulder with her stinger, collapsing to the ground. He only turns up again at the battle's end, after Ghidorah's death.
- Downplayed by Ghidorah. At the end of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, all that's left of him after Burning Godzilla completely vaporized him — which was heavily implied to be a necessity to ensure Ghidorah couldn't regenerate his body from any pieces^note — is the severed version of the head that Ghidorah lost and regrew much earlier in the movie, hinting that Ghidorah might not be completely dead yet. In Godzilla vs. Kong, that head has decayed to a skull, but it's revealed that it still retains at least enough of Ghidorah's telepathic consciousness to hijack Mechagodzilla's A.I., driving the machine to kill all humans and pull out almost all stops trying to kill Godzilla.
Not So Stoic: Dr. Serizawa and Ford Brody are both presented as The Stoic, while Emma Russell tries (and fails) to be The Unfettered, May Olowe-Hewitt tries to appear cold, detached and apathetic, and Michelle Duvall appears to be a cold, logical Monarch operative who's in complete control of herself. Across the 2014 film, King of the Monsters and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, all of them have moments where they're just pushed too far to not show emotion, due to a loved one dying or being threatened.
Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist: Just about every human Big Bad Wannabe in the movies presents themselves as going to extreme lengths in the name of a just cause, yet it becomes clear as things go on that their evil acts' true motivations are entirely selfish and that their superficial "well intentions" are just an excuse.
- Packard in Kong: Skull Island presents his vendetta against Kong for killing several of his men as being entirely justified, and he rants about how he's a soldier getting his hands dirty so that his country won't have to live in fear of the knowledge that such things as Kong exist, but he refuses to take responsibility for leading his remaining men to their deaths all to satiate his own insane love-hate obsession with defeating Kong.
- Alan Jonah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters says he's awakening the Titans and slaughtering everyone in his way because his plan is the only way to prevent the human race from irreversibly wrecking all life on Earth, but once King Ghidorah begins engineering an even worse extinction event than the one humanity was in the process of causing, Jonah uses increasing Insane Troll Logic and a rant about the true evils of human nature to justify letting Ghidorah do what it wants, showing that eco-terrorism was nothing more than an excuse and Jonah is willing to let potentially all life on Earth die so long as it'll satiate his all-consuming hatred for humanity.
- Walter Simmons in Godzilla vs. Kong paints his and his company Apex's machinations with Mechagodzilla as them giving humanity a secure line of defence against the Titans and a way to retake dominance of the planet, but they fired the first shot which disrupted a peaceful human-Titan coexistence by creating Mechagodzilla, they have been knowingly putting millions of people in Godzilla's warpath on purpose as part of Engineered Heroics, and the art book states that they would've turned the world into a corporate police state if they'd succeeded in conquering the Titans. It becomes clear during Team Godzilla's confrontation with Simmons that he's just using Muggle Power as an excuse, having committed his evil actions because, in truth, he wants to be able to call himself the top dog over everything on the planet for the sake of his own ego.
Nuclear Option: Although the franchise for the most part has a Nuclear Weapons Taboo (not solely because of the nuke's destructive power but mainly also because the Titans feed on radiation), there have been a couple times where using a nuke actually worked out for the best: namely against Shinomura in Godzilla Awakening, and when a nuke was used to speed up Godzilla's recuperation in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019).
Nuke 'em: At least thrice. In 1954, the military reacted to Godzilla's existence by blasting him with an atom bomb in an effort to kill him, over Monarch's objections that they needed to understand if he was really a threat first. The military in Godzilla (2014) think it's a brilliant idea to retry killing Godzilla and his enemies via throwing an even stronger nuke at all of them at once, and just hope it kills all of them instead of making even one of them stronger and angrier than before. Then in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), the military have been working on an even more destructive weapon so they can kill Titans, and they throw it at Ghidorah and (somewhat unwittingly) Godzilla in a seeming panic without bothering to work out what precisely is going on, and the result is... well, the consequences that ensued made it an Epic Fail on the military's part, with dozens of cities around the globe destroyed and the world coming within a hair's breadth of near-total extinction.

Oblivious to Their Own Description: Several characters comment on character flaws which they show no signs of being self-aware that they possess themselves in the moment. In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the anti-Titan, Grief-Induced Split-enacting Mark Russell scorns Monarch for having a biased outlook on the Titans, and his estranged ex-wife for putting Titan matters before herself and her family. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, slimy corporate conspirator and true believer in the arrogant plan to kill and usurp Godzilla with a machine, Brenda Holland, calls May prideful. And in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, hardcore conspiracy theorist Bernie Hayes thinks at one point that it's a good thing he's not paranoid.
Obstructive Bureaucrat: The United Nations Security Council in Godzilla Aftershock. They've made up their minds about what not to do about the MUTO Prime crisis as soon as they heard the part where the MUTO Prime succeeding in its goal of wearing down and fatally impregnating Godzilla with its parasitic spawn will cause the MUTO Prime to go back into dormancy. They're convinced this will solve both their problems with Godzilla dead and the MUTO Prime inactive, in blatant and frankly obscene disregard of the bit where allowing the MUTO Prime to do that will result in its spawn being unleashed on the world to at best trigger a repeat of the 2014 incident or at worst succeed in causing worldwide extinction including the destruction of civilization, with no Godzilla to fight them (or any other hostile Titans) off this time.
Offscreen Moment of Awesome: In the 2014 film, King of the Monsters, and the graphic novel Skull Island: The Birth of Kong; several monster fights occur entirely offscreen. These include the entirety of Godzilla's first ever brawl in this incarnation, which is also the first time that the MonsterVerse's Starter Villain gets seriously pushed on the backfoot; and a good chunk of the global destruction King Ghidorah causes after he rises to supremacy over the monsters.
Off with His Head!: There seems to be a pattern when Godzilla and Kong dispatch their enemies. Godzilla kills Femuto via a Kiss of Death which literally causes her neck to melt until her head and shoulders are severed from each-other, and he rips one of Ghidorah's heads off when overpowering the three-headed dragon in the ocean. Kong tears off a Warbat's head (albeit post-mortem) so that he can drink its innards after killing it, and he finishes the fight against Mechagodzilla by wrenching its head off.
Old Hero, New Pals: Godzilla and Kong, whom are basically the poster boys and the two main heroes of this franchise, are the only two consistent characters across all four movies and their spin-offs thus far. With each new movie that features either kaiju, they take on a new set of human allies, whilst the previous set disappears except for one or two (if any) members.
Ominous Fog: The expedition in Kong: Skull Island ends up amidst one whilst being attacked by a Skullcrawler. In King of the Monsters, it's justified by Ghidorah's otherworldly Weather Manipulation powers.
Once per Episode:
- Every movie has the main antagonist dying due to circumstances related to the head:
  - In Godzilla 2014, the female MUTO dies when Godzilla forces her jaws open and fires a torrent of atomic breath down her throat, completely disintegrating from the inside out.
  - In Kong: Skull Island, Kong rips out the Skullcrawler's guts by shoving his hand down the kaiju's throat, finally killing the beast.
  - In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Ghidorah finally dies when Godzilla grabs the only surviving head in his mouth and vaporizes it entirely with his Atomic Breath.
  - In Godzilla vs. Kong, Mechagodzilla is defeated the moment Kong rips his head out of his body.
- Every film featuring Kong has a scene where he takes a break to sit down and eat something.
  - In Kong: Skull Island, he kills and eats a Mire Squid when he was tending to his wounds in the water.
  - In Godzilla vs. Kong, he happily eats a pile of fish while being transported across the ocean. He also takes a bite out of one of the Warbats he kills in Hollow Earth.
  - In Godzilla x Kong, He tries to eat a Wart Dog, but his infected tooth stops him. He later gets to sit down and eat the Drownviper after dealing with it, even sharing a piece of it with Suko.
One Myth to Explain Them All: The various Titans are implied to have been the source of many mythological creatures (such as the Hydra, Scylla, Dragons, and the like) as well as being treated as Gods and Demons in many different cultures. For examples; Ghidorah inspired many civilizations' ideas of devils and dragons, Mothra inspired angels of all things, and the dead Titanus Gojira and MUTO Prime inspired the myths of Dagon and Jinshin-Mushi respectively. Riccio believes in Skull Island: The Birth of Kong that the titular island was the source of mythic islands such as Atlantis, Lemuria and Thule.
One-Steve Limit: Names in the franchise which have respectively belonged to two or more different characters include Martinez, Sam, Walter, Rick (in the King of the Monsters novelization), Ilene, Michael (in the Monarch Sciences website), Kraken, Tim and Barnes.
Only Sane by Comparison: There have been a few examples of this in the franchise. Admiral Stenz comes off as this compared to the rest of the U.S. government in King of the Monsters, Madison and Josh both have differing shades of comparative sanity among the three-man Team Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong, Ren Serizawa is one point less obscenely Too Dumb to Live than the rest of Apex's Mechagodzilla team, and even one of King Ghidorah's three heads gets this comparative to the other two heads.
Our Dragons Are Different: Several different kinds of draconic Titans who might have influenced the actual myth appear.
- Ghidorah, as per usual, is a three-headed, two-tailed, murderously sadistic golden dragon from space, who lives to kill and destroy, and can spit golden lightning-bolts from all three heads. In this specific incarnation, Ghidorah is operating on his own power, his three heads have independent personalities, he generates an otherworldly hypercane which grows stronger the longer he's active, and he can regenerate grievous wounds and lost appendages in seconds via feeding on energy. His severed left head also retains his telepathy and some of his consciousness, possessing Mechagodzilla via the psionic uplink and causing the Mecha to exhibit Ghidorah's violent traits.
- The Warbats that live in the Hollow Earth are essentially gigantic cobras whose spine-lined "hoods" double as sail-like wings which enable flight. They're hostile, attacking humans and Kong until Kong slays them.
- The Ion Dragon looks even more like a medieval wyvern, possessing horns, bat-like wings with hands, a barbed tail, and a largely black coloration with red highlights. It roosts in a Saharan Shipwreck, secretes a bluish ooze to preserve the humans it kills, causes trails of glowing radiation in the sky as it flies, and is a territorial creature.
Our Gods Are Different: The Kaiju are Physical Gods and are often described and considered In-Universe to be The Old Gods. Specifically, they consist of various ancient primeval "super-species" and/or the endlings of such species which evolved when the Earth was much more radioactive than it is in modern times (Ghidorah is the exception as an extraterrestrial invader). Traits, powers and weaknesses vary, but they have some things in common. They're in the "Scarily powerful" spectrum, they have Near Immortality if not Advanced Immortality, they're Anthropomorphically Subhuman (being literal super-evolved animals), and their needs are in the "Sustenance and Sleep" category (specifically, they tend to cycle between being active and entering long periods of dormancy). Unlike most gods, being naturalistic, the Kaiju don't need prayers to function, although sources of radiation (which can be considered a sort of offering to them in later films) do feed and strengthen them. Morally, they're generally Exemplars; their temperaments vary from being Destructive Saviours to Destroyer Deities, with Mothra and Ghidorah being the most extreme Kaiju at either end of the scale respectively. Generally, the MonsterVerse follows Henotheism (modern humans generally favor worship of Godzilla as their main Destructive Saviour, but they also worshipped other Titans in forgotten ancient times, and Mothra is still revered) and Polytheism (the Kaiju as it turns out have an Alpha-led hierarchy currently headed by Godzilla, but a rival Alpha can potentially overthrow him). The Kaiju did not create the universe or even the Earth as far as we know, but with the exception of Ghidorah, they're considered essential to the maintenance and defense of the Earth's biosphere.
Outliving One's Offspring:
- In the 2014 movie, the MUTOs' near-repopulation of their species fails when their nest of fertilized eggs is blown up, bereaving the mother MUTO and sending her on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
- In the backstory of Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the Plot-Triggering Death of the elder Russell child Andrew tore his surviving parents apart and caused a lot of their respective present day issues; from his father Mark becoming a bitter, solitary Titan-hater who turned to alcoholism and later abandoned his family, to his mother Emma worse yet turning into a misanthropic Eco-Terrorist with designs on committing global genocide.
- It's also stated in the Godzilla: King of the Monsters novelization that Alan Jonah's young daughter was kidnapped and murdered in his backstory, which marked the turning point of his complete disillusionment with and omnicidal hatred of the human race.
- In the backstory of Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted, Raymond Martin's son died with the rest of his family during Femuto's rampage in 2014, turning him into the vicious, sadistic monster-hunter that he is in the present.
O.O.C. Is Serious Business: You can tell in both Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong that Godzilla takes Ghidorah posing a threat deadly seriously with his sheer agitation and fury. In either film, it's a sign things are serious when Dr. Stanton loses his snark and becomes soft-spoken, and Jia cries for the first time since Dr. Andrews met her when the last surviving vestige of Skull Island's ecosystem is destroyed, respectively.

Papa Wolf: A common and recurring theme. Joe Brody in the 2014 film, Eiji Serizawa in Godzilla Awakening and Mark Russell in King of the Monsters, despite the latter character's many faults and despite all three characters' shortcomings as fathers, turn into this when they're fearing for their child's life. This trope also occurs among the Titans, with the male MUTO's diligence defending his nest from Godzilla and with Kong's ferocious reaction to Team Kong (implicitly Jia especially) being threatened in Godzilla vs. Kong.
Parental Abandonment: Kong's parents and Jia's biological parents both died in their backstories. Kong's parents were killed by the Skullcrawlers, fueling his present day hatred of them, while Jia's parents implicitly died due to Camazotz's Hostile Terraforming of Skull Island with the perpetual storm system.
Parental Neglect: In the (now Canon Discontinuity) backstory of Godzilla: Awakening, Dr. Serizawa was on the receiving end of When You Coming Home, Dad?, which led to a reconciliation in his adulthood when his father revealed the truth of his work for Monarch. The Godzilla vs. Kong novelization reveals that Serizawa repeated this parenting style with his son Ren, but unfortunately in Ren's case it led to him deeply resenting his father and finally turning into an Antagonistic Offspring upon his father's death. Joe Brody was implicitly neglectful towards his son Ford after the death of his wife Sandra, whilst both of Madison's parents (her father physically and her mother emotionally) repeated that pattern after her brother's death. In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Bill Randa was tragically an absent, distant father to Hiroshi who prioritized his work up until his death, and Hiroshi ended up repeating the pattern with his own children Cate and Kentaro which fostered significant resentment on their end.
Parental Substitute: Dr. Vivienne Graham views her mentor Serizawa as a father figure in the absence of her birth-father. Dr. Ilene Andrews is Jia's adoptive mother since Skull Island's destruction. Lee Shaw seems to act as a substitute father to his honorary nephew Hiroshi Randa in the latter's early childhood while Hiroshi's father Bill is withdrawing from grief. Kong becomes a surrogate father to Suko, the abused child of the Skar King's court.
Parents as People: Joe Brody in the 2014 film genuinely loves his son but has been quite inattentive, first due to being the Workaholic and then due to becoming the Conspiracy Theory with an obsession with finding out what really caused his wife's death. Mark Russell was arguably too much of a prick to everyone around him who wasn't family to qualify for this trope in King of the Monsters; but in the Godzilla vs. Kong novelization, he's become a lot more sociable since his Moving Beyond Bereavement, yet he's essentially swung from one parental extreme to the other in an attempt to make up for five years of being an absent parent, and his egocentrism spills into his parenting style with Madison with how he projects his own idea of what would be ideal onto her and dismisses her complaints to the contrary. In Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire Dr. Ilene Andrews worries that she might not be the kind of mother that her adopted daughter Jia needs.
Perpetual Frowner: A hard scowl is the default expression of Kong and most of the Iwi, whilst Ghidorah's right-handed head has a constant murderous grimace in contrast to the other two heads' slasher smiles and bland-faced curiosity respectively.
Perpetual Storm: Skull Island is surrounded by a perpetual typhoon which acts like a barrier, shielding it from the rest of the world while the island usually sits in the storm's clear-skied eye except for episodes where the storm overlaps with the island's shores to bring wind and rain — according to Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure, the main theory about the storm's origin and true nature is that it's a byproduct of the Hollow Earth's gravity inversion barrier interacting with the surface's atmosphere via Skull Island's Vile Vortex. Ghidorah, once he's awakened, begins generating a perpetual lightning-filled hypercane around himself which gets more powerful the longer he's active, and it's implied he would've ultimately covered the entire Earth in perpetual storms if he was allowed to reign unchecked. As of the Kingdom Kong graphic novel, Skull Island's perpetual storm has permanently closed in and enveloped the whole island after Camazotz merged a perpetual storm leftover by Ghidorah's rampage with the storm barrier, leading to the island's destruction as an ecosystem.
Pet the Dog:
- In the 2014 film, the MUTOs, despite all the chaos and destruction that they've callously caused to humanity, have a surprisingly sweet Headbutt of Love when they meet up with each-other to mate.
- In Kong: Skull Island, Packard, despite being a Colonel Kilgore who becomes obsessed with killing Kong, has multiple dog-petting moments with his men due to his strong comradery with them, even midway into his Sanity Slippage, although they disappear once he's too far gone.
- In Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the eco-terrorists that are out to awaken the Titans and let them decimate humanity have dog-petting moments. Jonah at one point attempts to assuage Madison's understandable terror with a hand trick, although this doesn't mean he's above threatening Madison or giving her a savage verbal dressing-down later on. In a Rewatch Bonus, Emma tries to invoke Serendipitous Survival on one of her Monarch colleagues before Jonah's forces launch their massacre, innocently encouraging him to take a break.
- In Godzilla vs. Kong, Daddy's Little Villain Maia Simmons is the first person to run to Dr. Andrews and Jia's aid after the two girls almost drown.
- In Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the one time where Verdugo shows compassion and doesn't act acidic is when she's comforting Kentaro over the supposed deaths of all his friends, even taking time out of her busy schedule so she can break the news to him herself.
Planimal: Many of the "megafauna" creatures which live on Skull Island are "florafauna", which combine animal and plant traits in their biology, and, according to extra materials, even their genetics. These include the part-moss Sker Buffalos, the part-bamboo Mother Longlegs giant spiders, the part-wood Spore Mantis and Swamp Locust, the part-cactus and pterosaur-like Leafwings, the part-tree Sker Buffalos, and the Aloe Turtle and Grass Hedgehogs (which are both Exactly What It Says on the Tin). Monarch: Legacy of Monsters features a non-Skull Island florafauna living in Hollow Earth, the Brambleboar — appropriately, the MonsterVerse posits that the Hollow Earth is actually the direct or indirect origin of all of Skull Island's florafauna and other abnormal lifeforms.
Plot Parallel: The 2014 Godzilla film, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong all respectively tie at least two character storylines that seldom intersect to each-other, and the protagonist Titans' plotlines mirror the humans' at least once in each film.
Plucky Comic Relief: Dr. Stanton of Monarch's key brass and Jackson Barnes of Monarch's G-Team in Godzilla: King of the Monsters. Inverted in Godzilla vs. Kong, where Madison has shades of Only Sane Woman among the three-man Team Godzilla.
Poisonous Person: A bio-electrical sting inflicted by the Kraken's tentacle in Skull Island can leave a struck human with dark lesions, which progress to Tainted Veins and increasing fever and sickness if the person lives for long enough beyond that. Supplementary materials reveal that the Titan Scylla produces water-poisoning bacteria, and the Mother Longlegs on Skull Island use a neurotoxin to paralyze their prey.
Posthumous Character: Dagon is a specimen of Godzilla's species who died thousands of years ago, killed by MUTO eggs which a MUTO Prime implanted in him during a battle. Andrew Russell died offscreen five years before the events of King of the Monsters, but his death set almost the entire plot of the film into motion by turning Mark Russell into a wreck and turning Emma into an unstable Eco-Terrorist.
Precious Photo: The Russells in Godzilla: King of the Monsters have copies of a family photo which includes Andrew. In Godzilla vs. Kong, Nathan Lind has a photo of himself and his late brother David, and Bernie Hayes carries a photo of his late wife Sara.
Prehistoric Monster: Godzilla, the MUTOs, and many more existed well before the dawn of mankind.
Prehensile Tail: Several Titans are shown using their tails like extra arms for grasping in a fight; namely Skullcrawlers, King Ghidorah, Camazotz, Godzilla himself and the Ion Dragon.
Pride: The pride and hubris of human beings in relation to the Titans (who represent nature) is a recurring theme throughout the franchise. Namely, contrary to humans' belief that they are the dominant species of Earth (or that they should be the dominant species after the Titans become public knowledge), mankind are just a technologically-ingenious race of insects compared to the Titans. True to Dr. Serizawa's words below, in every MonsterVerse movie, it's human beings and organizations attempting to harness or conquer these eldritch forces of nature, failing to realize that some forces of nature are completely beyond human ability to control, that always makes things worse instead of better. Whether it be the military thinking they can kill the Titans the moment they become inconvenient yet being short-sighted to their efforts making things even worse for humans, or eco-terrorists who want the Titans to restore Earth's ecology thinking that attempting to manipulate them won't go awry, or a Nebulous Evil Organization being Too Dumb to Live when thinking they can create something more powerful than the Titans in the Titans' image. It's also a recurring theme that only some of the human cast realize and wholeheartedly accept that Humans Need Aliens (namely the benevolent Titans) to survive against the hostile ones, whilst others just refuse to accept that.
Dr. Serizawa: The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way round.
Primate Versus Reptile: The majority of Kong's Behemoth Battles are against reptilian-looking opponents: his primary enemies on Skull Island are the Skullcrawlers, and he comes into conflict with Godzilla in Godzilla vs. Kong.
Private Military Contractors:
- The human initial antagonists of Skull Island (2023) are a team of guns hired by Irene, looking to capture Annie and bring her back to the U.S. with them.
- According to the Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure sourcebook; Monarch, Apex Cybernetics, government agencies and General Ward all hire contractors and mercenaries among their respective staffs stationed on Skull Island.
Profane Last Words: A Running Gag in every film. See below for details.
Prophet Eyes: Methuselah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, the Spirit Tiger and the one-eyed Camazotz in Kingdom Kong, the Frost Vark in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, and the Spineprowlers in Godzilla x Kong: The Hunted; all have blank, milky eyeballs.
Psycho Electro: Every creature in the MonsterVerse with bio-electrical powers thus far — Ghidorah, the Kraken and the Psychovultures — has been sadistic and murderous at best, a straight-up Omnicidal Maniac at worst, with all of them exhibiting murderous hatred for all other life that goes well beyond normal predation instincts.
Psychopathic Manchild: Ghidorah's left head, San/Kevin, displays a notably more childlike personality than the other two heads whilst having no compunctions against the atrocities that the middle head (Ichi) leads them in committing. This also applies to the guy who, appropriately, got his hands on a piece of Kevin's severed head: Walter Simmons, who displays all the giddiness and impulse control of an eight-year-old on Christmas morning when it comes to endangering millions of people for his self-serving ambitions to murder and overthrow Godzilla. The Frost Vark in Alaska acts like a petulant child upset with a broken toy when it stomps on Du-Ho's plane after it's just frozen the plane and the occupant to death on sight.
Pupating Peril: The male MUTO's long metamorphosis in the 2014 film, and Mothra's far shorter one in King of the Monsters.

Monster Verse / Tropes I to P

Tropes appearing in multiple installments of the MonsterVerse include:

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Tropes appearing in multiple installments of the MonsterVerse include:

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