Discussion DethroningMoment / ComicBooks

N Troper: The Donald Duck Brazilian comic story known as "Na Marca do Pênalti", which roughly translates itself to "On Penalty's Edge", AKA The Boys of Bummer taken to the most ridiculous extreme possible. To elaborate, a soccer team sponsored by Scrooge is facing a team sponsored by Rockerduck. Winner earns the respective sponsors the rights to business during the next World Cup in Germany and the transmission rights. Donald is playing for Scrooge's team and has to shoot a penalty as everyone else is injured in one way or another, no matter how ridiculous the injury is (headache and calluses, for one). Donald has to shoot, despite telling he's a terrible shooter. The Drill Sergeant Nasty coach tells Donald to stop wussing out and score, and that if they lose, it's Donald's fault. Then, Donald trips and loses the penalty, and what follows is one of the most disgusting Kick the Dog moments Duckburg could offer. Everyone in the team starts blaming Donald and insulting him, telling he should have let someone else shoot, despite everyone cowardly backing out earlier in the game, not letting Donald ride the Team Bus back home, Scrooge calling Donald ingrate and telling him he'll work to repay all the money he'd have earned in Germany, taxists refusing to let Donald in, passerbys saying they want Donald's head. Then, when Donald tries seeking Daisy for comfort, Daisy cusses him out for having the nerve to visit her after his defeat ruined her party and then ditches him for Gladstone again, and for extra measure, Gladstone tells Donald "You're here too? Why don't you go home?". And finally, when Donald makes it home, the Beagle Boys empty Donald's house as compensation for them losing a bet they made on his team. Not even the reveal it was just Donald's daydream and the following daydream of how nice things would go for him if he scores, ending with Donald not being afraid of anything and just going for the shoot is enough to make up for this utterly ridiculous first act.

It's not Brazilian, it's Italian.

• GarudaOne: In Mc Farlane's defense however, he didn't have much choice in the matter, since those same legal issues with Rob Liefeld forced the retcon into the comics as well.

I believe it says not to make an entry to defend a moment of suck on the top of the page.

Cut this one entry because there's no real explanation for why it belongs here.

• Salkafar: For some people, Matt Fraction's work on Iron Man, is highly enjoyable. Others consider it a slow, unstoppable slide into a morass of horribleness. A DMOS was reached at the end of the "Unfixable" arc in #501-503, where Tony Stark is abducted and forced by Doctor Octopus - who is crippled by profound nerve damage as a result of years of injuries - to try to find a way to 'repair' him. Either he does so, or admit he cannot (Dr.Octopus has a personal grudge against Stark because of some previously-unmentioned meetings early in their respective, pre-superpower careers), or Octopus will detonate a nuclear device in the middle of New York. Well... As it turns out, Tony Stark can't fix dr.Octopus. So he admits that he sucks, and literally begs him not to set off the bomb. The scene would be disturbing even if it did not feature a crippled, second-tier supervillain and one of the most powerful and intelligent super heroes in the world. There is no way I can see that the story could possibly have sucked more.

Debating as to whether or not I should delete this one:

And then there's "House of Cards", probably the single most Dethroning Story of Suck in any comic book EVER (except maybe One More Day). The plot? Sonic criticizes Tails' parents, Merlin and Rosemary, for assembling a protest to turn Knothole into a democracy, because, as we all know, Princess Sally's done SUCH a good job! Eventually, Tails' folks gets thrown in jail, and Sonic just decides to let things handle themselves instead of, you know, HELPING HIS BEST FRIEND AND ADOPTIVE LITTLE BROTHER. Oh, wait. This isn't the superior game series. I forgot. Oh, but it gets worse. After Tails tries to break his parents out, Sonic rushes over to stop him. This leads to a padded-out battle where Tails basically speaks for the entire fanbase while whooping on Sonic's ass. Unfortunately, it's revealed that Tails was motivated to lay the smack-down on Sonic because he stole his love interest from him, even though it was revealed that she was a bad guy! Not only was that one heck of a Wall Banger, but it has nothing to do with anything! God, I hate this series.

Having read that same storyline, much of the info provided is either out of context or flat out innaccurate. That storyline does indeed have a great deal of flaws with regards to pacing, characterization and logic, but its hardly the grand defilement of canon that this poster makes it out to be, and judging by more then a few statements the poster might just hate the Archie Sonic series in general. So, would I be in the right to delte this, or do I need to elaborate further in order to justify said deletion?

Removed this from the page:

• SynjoDeonecros: I know only one D Mo S per troper is allowed, but this has to be said; if issues 215 and 216 forced my boyfriend and I to drop the comic, issue 221 ensured we would never, ever pick it up again until Ian Flynn is ousted as head writer and his legacy of crap is wiped from canon. To understand the level of suck this issue reaches, I have to explain Ian's fan project before he became head writer, Other M; the thing is an atrocious mess of Canon Defilement fueled by a never-ending cycle of bigotry, hate, and prejudice (seriously, he made Knuckles into a Hitler-level echidna-supremacist, for god's sake!). Why is this relevant? Because ever since issue 211, Ian seems to be doing his damnedest to inject as much of that atmosphere into the comic, and issue 221 is the culmination of that effort; the entire plot of the first story involves an otherwise sweet and innocent character rallying the population against Sally's computer Nicole using disgustingly technophobic and prejudiced propaganda, over a Face–Heel Turn that Nicole couldn't help, had no control over, tried to save her friends from, and used after she was freed to work as a Reverse Mole against the villains who turned her - all points the mob are told point-blank to their face and outright ignore, for the sake of ganging up on the poor computer program. The second story? Has Nicole join up wit two other characters who were in the exact same position as her during the exact same event, and mope about how they suck, no one would trust the again, and how they're now a danger to themselves and others. Again, because of things we outright see are not their fault, had no control over, and ultimately tried to turn against the bad guys. Even the above examples of Sonic stupidity can be written off as Ian playing Conflict Ball with his favorite bad guys, but this...this is a deliberate malicious attempt to tear apart the group, turn them against each other, and make us hate each and every one of them and cry out for their blood. Saying that They Just Didn't Care is too forgiving of an excuse for this level of drivel, and I dare anyone in Sonic's Broken Base to try and defend it.

As stated in the guidelines/rules listed right at the top of the page, only one moment of a given series is allowed per troper. Pick a moment and stick with it. Also, try to be less whiny about it.

Deleted these for not being moments.

• Lord TNK: Spider-Man's moment used to be the Clone Saga, but then came One More Day, basically because it's one man forcing his Fan Fiction on readers as something official. Executive Meddling and Running the Asylum covers more specifically why it's crap.
  • LLSmoothJ: Just when you thought it couldn't get any worse! Enter "One Moment In Time," in which the reason why Spider-Man missed his wedding was revealed. A fat thug fell on him. Seriously, Quesada? You couldn't think of a better reason why? Talk about anti-climatic!
• Crazyrabbits: In a series that has seen some of the best comic book plots in history, Uncanny X-Men featured an arc called "Holy War", written by (you guessed it) Chuck Austen, infamously known for another arc called "The Draco". "Holy War" mixes together confusing biblical quotes that have little relevance to the panels, character regression and one of the most ludicrous villain plots ever for a perfect storm of ineptitude. It also features a number of notable tropes within its pages. After finding a number of X-Men, including Jubilee, dead and crucified (don't worry, they got better), the team exposes a sinister plot within an organization called the Church of Humanity. That plan involves installing Nightcrawler, a mid-twenties mutant with demonic looks, as the Pope. Then, they would force a Rapture by feeding people exploding Communion wafers. Truly one of the worst comic books made in the past decade, if not the past century.
  • Pumbelo: These biblical quotes are not only irrelevant, but the sources given don't even match. Even the names of biblical books are wrong, like the book of "Revelations". The entire comic is epic case of Did Not Do The Research (not just with religion, it refers to Wolverine's claws as being HUNDRED INCHES LONG!)
• Crazyrabbits: Ultimate Requiem: X-Men: After the events of the universally-loathed Ultimatum series, the surviving X-Men bury their fallen comrades and destroy the X-Mansion using Iceman's power. So...how do you think Marvel memorialized the deaths of half the X-Men? Did they do it respectfully? Did they have the mutants' families show up to grieve with them? Did they openly cry and console each other after the weight of what happened finally hit them? (If you thought so, you're not Jeph Loeb.) Simple: have Sabretooth, Mystique and a minor mutant named Assemble show up, claiming to pay their respects, then have Jean Grey go crazy and start a fight right next to the corpses, then have Captain America show up and decapitate Assemble, while explaining that he also came to pay his respects - ON THE VERY NEXT PAGE. That's how Ultimate X-Men ends: not with a bang (or anything resembling closure), but with a whimper. It doesn't even read like a finale, but as another issue of the series.
• Samadhir: Due to the rather polarizing nature of Garth Ennis' magnum opus Preacher, most readers seem to have at least one moment or issue in it that they consider the dethroning one. For me, its the spin-off story Tall in the Saddle, about Custer and Tulip's early days as carjackers, and their attempt to stop a ring of horse thiefs from kidnapping young horses and selling their meat to restaurants in Europe. The story isn't interesting, tells us nothing new or meaningful about the characters, and towards the end simply feels like an excuse for Ennis to indulge in his taste for shock value, with 2 consecutive pages devoted to images of horses being graphically slaughtered and cut up, a guy's eyeball popping out of his head after a kick to the jaw and someone's head bursting apart when being kicked by a horse. It ends with Custer taking the leader of the ring, a ridiculously over-the-top stereotypical frenchman named Napoleon Vichy, out into the desert and hanging him from a tree, where we get a loving close-up of him pissing and shitting himself after having asphyxiated. I consider the story to be Dis Continuity from the rest of Preacher.

Some things that were cut from the page when it was being brought into line with the new guidelines:

• For me, the Dethroning Moment for the 616 Spider-Man came nearly ten years earlier, with The Gathering of Five and The Final Chapter in 1998. In some ways, it paved the way for One More Day. The Green Goblin comes up with a scheme that's ludicrously out of character for him (since WHEN has Norman Osborn wanted to de-evolve humanity into primal clay to reshape in his image?), Spider-Man comes across as a total idiot, and Mary Jane does nothing but act stupid. Oh, and Aunt May, who three years earlier passed away in a beautifully-written Tear Jerker, is brought Back from the Dead with a truly outrageous Voodoo Shark explanation. It was basically the writers and editors screaming at the fans "We don't care if our stories make ANY sense, or if the characters are in character or not, as long as we get what we want.". One More Day more or less had the same mindset.

• As if totally redoing her personality, motivations, and emotional issues for the worse was not bad enough, one Mr. Beechen had to portray Cassandra Cain (previously the poster child for Charles Atlas Superpower) getting beaten down by Robin... in single combat... using expedient of throwing all style out the window.
• In Hothead Paisan (by Diane DiMassa), there was a character named Daphne who was a lesbian-identified transsexual character. Daphne's status was left undisclosed but due to her feminine name and appearance was assumed by many to be a transsexual woman. In 2003 a musical based on the comic was performed at the Michigan Womyns Music Festival, which had developed in the early 1990s a policy of excluding transsexual women. DiMassa's response to her transsexual lesbian fans who expected her to stand up for them? "It's just fucking typical that a man-born woman can't get the concept of not being allowed somewhere." Author Julia Serano points out that DiMassa's casual dismissal indicated that she appeared to have felt that while lesbians' anger at being stereotyped and fetishized by straight men was perfectly acceptable and reasonable, she also appeared to have felt that transsexual women's equal anger at being marginalized and excluded by cissexual (non-transsexual) women was unjustified.
• In Frank Miller's All-Star Batman and Robin #4 Batman, having previously kidnapped the just-orphaned Dick Grayson and abused him physically and verbally for crying, takes Dick to the Batcave and makes him hunt and eat bats for sustenance. When he catches Alfred feeding the boy some proper food, Batman shoves him against the wall. Any further comment would be superfluous.
  • For me, it was in the second issue: "I'm the goddamned Batman".
• Civil fucking War. I decided to spend a while during the summer catching up on all of the major Marvel canon I'd missed out on for several years. Avengers Disassembled was pretty bad, House of M was worse. Then came this clusterfuck. The sheer amount of Character Derailment and massive amounts of other Idiot Plot and Characterization Stupidity-in-the-name-of-Anvil-Dropping on the part of all the writers involved in Civil War makes her want to go back to her cave.
  • I agree, and view it as the DMOS for Marvel comics in their entirety. Screwed up Spider-Man (see One More Day for the eventual fallout), made Iron Man a villain (but tried to convince us otherwise), and killed Captain America after having him surrender. Gee, thanks, Marvel. Do you remember what the term "hero" even means?
  • The coup de grace was definitely Sally Floyd's "speech" about being a "Real" American to Captain America — the man who punched Adolf Hitler in the face!
    • Agreed. Since when is being a pop culture junkie required to be a real American or a hero? I think the author intended Floyd to be the character people identified, but in the end she was portrayed as a clueless idiot.
• Grant Morrison's New X-Men story arc, Planet X, features some of the most undignified Character Derailment I have ever seen. Big Bad Magneto's Catchphrase up till then had been "Never Again," referring to his vow to prevent the trauma he suffered in a Nazi Germany concentration camp from ever coming to anyone again. Going from that to herding the people of New York into crematoriums and threatening to literally turn the world upside down for no reason whatsoever is, to this troper, the X-Franchise's DMOS. And let's not get started on the writer's off-handed Die for Our Ship...>.<
  • The whole "Scott and Emma make out on Jean's grave (literally)" was forced on Morrison. And the reason Magneto was evil was because he was on a power-enhancing drug that was really a sentient mold, not just he's evil. The numerous contradictions made by the following writers who didn't get this are this trope. Seriously, Xorn's brother who was crazy, thought he was Xorn, who thought he was Magneto on a drug high?
• The Dead End Kids arc of The Runaways, that's just it. Not only did it involve time travel for pointless reasons and characters who are just there to look interesting it completely derailed my favorite character Victor. He just became part of a superhero team with decent powers, he just stopped being the new guy on the team and is now trusted by his teammates, and after several embarassing scenes with his team's leader he finally becomes her boyfriend after saving her from biblical giants. So lets forget all that and the fact that he's one of the few naturally good people in the series that has a set of morals, and make him cheat on his girlfriend with a random girl from the past. This would be more acceptable if his then girlfriend wasn't not only the team leader, but a really hot pseudogoth witch who has been shown to be pretty cool with her trust of him and if he didn't only know the other girl (who can only fly when music is being played) for about a day.
  • Joss Whedon's run may have derailed one character, but many fans consider Terry Moore's nine-issue run to be a derailment of the entire series. Whole issues went by with nothing of any importance happening, the plot lines were dull, new characters were introduced that turned out to be incredibly bland and uninteresting, potential moments for character development were introduced and then promptly dropped, the "surprise twists" could be seen coming for miles, and worst of all, what used to be some of the most interesting and developed characters in recent comics history were turned into shallow caricatures of their former selves. Moore's run was the first time that this troper was actually bored by what used to be his favorite series. New writer Kathryn Immonen has done her best to repair the damage to this once great series, and although it's too soon to tell for sure, there has been a noticeable improvement.

Regarding the Rise of Arsenal 2 edit's removal.

"You might as well have asked why they didn't change out of their outfits at Sue Dibney's funeral."

Okay, why the hell DIDN'T they change their outfits at Sue's funeral?

"And How the hell can Congorilla help the fact he's a freaking gorilla?"

Why is Congorilla even at the funeral in the first place? in fact, why are half of the people at Lian's funeral there when they barely even knew Roy or Lian? why aren't there any children at the funeral, did Lian have absolutely no friends?

I'm putting the entry back up until these issues are addressed

I have to wonder how much The Sandman example counts. I remember there being a Justifying Edit earlier that was apparently removed, but my bigger problem is that this takes place in the 4th issue. Doesn't Dethroning have more to do with jumping the shark than something being disliked before the series even really starts?

But I could just have things wrong.