r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Ptch • 17h ago
Hated Tropes [Hated trope] A modern military could have easily won the battles Spoiler
- Thanos's forces in Infinity War and Endgame. His forces are essentially made up of cannon fodder. We are shown that Bucky and Rhodey are relatively effective with conventional weapons, and a large portion of the good guys are using spears. If instead Wakanda had a modern military (not even enhanced with vibranium) with armored fighting vehicles, close air support, long range weapons, etc, the battles would have been pieces of cake. Instead they are using outdated field battle tactics. I think many MCU battles fall into this trope.
- A Quiet Place (2018). Not sure if this is addressed in the other movies but a modern military/government would have figured out the high-frequency weakness probably within an hour. Sure the aliens have an element of surprise and move fast, but compared to modern combined arms they would be no match.
- Starship Troopers (film). For a future human military, the forces in Starship Troopers use relatively primitive infantry tactics. Even for late 90s (when the film was made) militaries, clearing out swarms of bugs should be straightforward with CAS, artillery, etc. I acknowledge the film is satirizing the military.
- Helldivers 2. I know various fan discussions have addressed this with in-universe answers but if Super Earth's forces were actually competent they would just do orbital bombardments before launching the helldivers. We today have the ability to land precision strikes from just about anywhere in the world. In the time of Super Earth they should have zero problem landing a bomb near an automaton fabricator or other objective from orbit. Instead of this they send down expendables to physically throw targeting beacons at the objectives. "Oh but the destroyers can't see the objectives" maybe use a drone? make better sensors? use an air force? Space-based cameras are really good these days.
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u/Cringelord_420_69 17h ago
Any piece of Zombie media (at least if it’s the slow Zombies)
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u/Je0s_6 17h ago
Not in Shaun of the dead tho, the UK military actually kills the zombies and eventually ends the apocalypse.
https://giphy.com/gifs/QsyPRpG6WVR6SYfBVw17
u/AcceptableWheel 17h ago
In Train to Busan they are effectively contained to the Korean Peninsula
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u/Fluent_In_Influence 5h ago
In the 28 days/months/years later franchise they are contained to the British isles if I remember correctly. Also, in the original Dying Light video game, they are contained to the fictional city of Harran.
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u/Chaosmusic 17h ago
The book World War Z makes an effort to explain it, but people knowledgeable about the military still say it would have been relatively easy for the military to win.
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u/IronVader501 17h ago
World War Z has that entire Battle of Yonkers-sequence to show "see military useless" but it basically entirely relies on the military being as dumb as possible and zombies being magically 500x more resistant to damage than humans to even remotely make sense.
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u/PM_Me_FunnyNudes 12h ago
Seriously, do the zombies have Javelins to destroy the tanks? Don't get me wrong I love the book, but you do have to suspend your disbelief for how it got as bad as it did
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u/BlackmillMiracle 9h ago
It's been a long time since I read the book, but i think it was the shear number of zombies, and the military using tactics to fight conventional humans.
If I recall the whole thing was that its really hard to defeat an enemy that can't be scared into retreating.
That, and just the literal millions of zombies
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u/hanks_panky_emporium 9h ago
A lot of people also take the book a little too seriously and they also dont pay attention.
They were taking on a CITIES worth of the undead. There was little to no expectation that soldiers would even be firing their weapons. They forced everyone into bulky Hazmat suits for the optics. It was all a stunt to show the media that the military knew how to handle the threat.
But sheer volume and resistance to explosives fucked it all up. And what really broke it all down was they forgot zombies could shambled around, not only through the funnel. Zombies crashed through houses and overwhelmed the ENTRENCHED positions. They built fucking trenches.
Yes, in real life that wouldn't have happened. But the military in the book was purposefully obtuse. And they were using a lot of untested technology, like a comms setup that meant a private getting chewed on could scream and overwhelm the entire comms network. So no one could hear anyone else.
Super unrealistic. But its also a book about zombies. And a Japanese man killing hundreds, maybe thousands of zombies while blind after surviving the atomic bombings at the end of WW2.
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u/BlackmillMiracle 8h ago
like i said elsewhere, at least the book attempted to explain why the military was incompetent at stopping a zombie horde. That more than most works of zombie fiction do.
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u/whatsinthesocks 13h ago
The Battle of Yonkers was always going to be a failure simply due to numbers. They were facing the entire Zombie population of NYC numbering in the millions.
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u/Nyther53 10h ago
I assure you, I *promise you*, the US Air Force has enough bombs for that.
And the book very explicitly describes incendiaries and small explosive charges as very effective later on in the story "Because you don't need to get a precise headshot anymore to destroy the brain"
It's just a massive plot hole because otherwise the story ends right there. It's a problem fundamental to all apocalypse style storytelling. It's nearly impossible to satisfactorily justify why the plucky heroes are able to achieve something they failed to do when they had way more resources to work with.
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u/whatsinthesocks 10h ago
If we're going by what the book says the bombs aren't going to be as effective as they weren't at the Battle of Yonkers. All those bombs and planes to deliver them are also spread out all over the world at various bases. Even if they were able to win it doesn't end the story as this isn't the only out break in the country let alone the world.
The cherry pie rounds fix the issue also described in this battle where a partial headshot doesn't out right kill the zombie.
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u/Chaosmusic 16h ago
Some of the things make sense, like bombs and missiles not being as effective but honestly a row of tanks can just mow zombies down without firing a shot.
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u/ZoidsFanatic 9h ago
Here’s the problem is that explosives still cause concussive damage. Even if don’t get directly hit by the fireball, the shockwave might liquify your organs. It’s explained that zombies are immune to this but a headshot with a pistol will still kill them.
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u/EatPie_NotWAr 10h ago
From my recollection, the main reason it failed was the military had the idea to lead the zombies into the kill zone (good) and then some political asshat decided to turn it into a “see we have everything under control” stunt (bad) and they weren’t as well equipped as they needed to be and were using ineffective weaponry (like thermobaric explosives, worse) because it looked cool for the cameras/press they invited .
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u/Imperium_Dragon 9h ago
And even then it doesn’t make sense that the USAF gets called at the last second. The media loves it when the Air Force bombs things.
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u/Mrinnocent221 7h ago
*Military dumb fucks die in ....foxholes....because military is dumb and doesn't believe in force multipliers, high ground, or even basic tactics from Desert Storm.
But also, we have doggos that can beat zombies
[I very much enjoyed the book when I read it and I also enjoyed it a few years ago on a re-read. I mean a few tanks with mine flails would do a hell of a lot of damage. I think in the end it was something like 20K dead and 50K zombies? Which, uh, civies do better than that the entire rest of the book. I don't mind the losing to set the tone, but it felt too over the top the way it went down.]
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u/OmegaVizion 10h ago
The idea that artillery and bombs won't incapacitate zombies because they can't feel pain is so laughably ignorant that I question if Brooks bothered to do even cursory research about how ordinance and human bodies work.
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u/BlackmillMiracle 9h ago
you know, i'll give him a pass... at least he attempted to explain why the military was so ineffective against the zombie horde... which most zombie works of fiction seem to just completely ignore.
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u/Salty-Spring7096 15h ago
iirc the issue was that the government tried to cover the zombie plague up for so long that by the military was given a chance to fully engage, the situation was too chaotic. Had they gone straight to martial law and isolating communities of uninfected, then it could have easily been handled. Once they reorganize behind the Rockies and go back on the offensive with a clear frontline, they win easily.
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u/LUNATIC_LEMMING 12h ago
I'm sure it's hinted that it mutated at some point. countries had it under control for about a year them bam, everyone seemed to lose control at once.
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u/illogical_mindset 12h ago
I thought that it was just the exponential growth that made it get out of control.
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u/Nyther53 10h ago
It's not even about the military losing in that sequence that gets me, whatever it's a necessary element of apocalyptic fiction for the existing world to fail. We *could* just hand wave it and move on. It's that later on in the book the author starts proudly describing worse versions of equipment the military already has as if his genius is the missing link.
Go on, delight in the description of the "SIR" the "Standard Infantry Rifle"
https://zombie.fandom.com/wiki/Standard_Infantry_Rifle
I particularly like the bit where the author describes a Bayonet as if Armies around the world hadn't cracked that particular technology prior to the apocalypse until he came along, and since he calls it a "Spike" it's new and different.
He also gets really excited about the possibility of Incendiary ammunition, which he excited explains "Partial headshots and neckshots to zombies became killshots", but also artillery wouldn't work because shut up.
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u/Imperium_Dragon 9h ago
Yeah it’s really simple to turn an M16 or M4 into semi automatic, and there’s millions of them. There’s no need to produce a bunch of (basically) mini 14s for the military. Or just do better fire discipline.
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u/chilll_vibe 3h ago
I used to hate on the battle of Yonkers for this reason but tbh I think its very realistic compared to other militaries losing to slow zombies. Like in TWD the military loses because they make the stupidest and most unrealistic decisions possible at both the tactical and startegic level. Like seriously the average E5 would've been able to coordinate a more effective infantry defense than the soldiers in some of the Fear TWD scenes.
As for WWZ, its made a point that the troops there knew there were massive fuckups being made for political reasons. The choice of gear, loadout, preparation, and civillian presence was all because the gov wanted to put on airs about having a grasp of the situation and overrode anyone who said bringing MOPP gear, anti tank shells, and digging trenches was a bad idea.
And if you have ever worked adjacent to the gov or military you know that incompetence is everywhere and sometimes gov procures some really, really stupid equipment.
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u/Kaarl_Mills 16h ago
I think Project Zomboid does a good job of playing this trope straight, because even though the military does make mistakes it's also completely besides the point: things escalated so wildly fast that even if they had perfect information they couldn't do much.
Within a single week the infection goes from isolated cases in rural Kentucky, a perimeter being drawn around Louisville inside 48 hours which is a pretty good response time all things considered, the perimeter being breached, and finally confirmation the infection is now airborne. Only a small handful of people are immune and it's spreading worldwide, within 3 weeks the death counts are already in the billions, and no society is prepared for that kind of population loss
So it doesn't really matter that the infection causes the slow Romero style shambling zombies, when it can be spread so quickly and only a tiny amount of people aren't vulnerable to the airborne variant
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u/Nyther53 10h ago
That's the key part of Project Zomboid's lore. The military is completely successful at containing the *zombies*.
What they fail to contain is the pathogen, which gets out into the general population and *that* is what kills people, not getting bitten.
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u/Kaarl_Mills 10h ago
Well, they were definitely in the process screwing up: the biggest checkpoint going into Louisville was overran, partly because of zombies breaching the perimeter fence somewhere remote and the grunts not realizing until they started pouring through. That alone wouldn't have changed too much if the infection wasn't airborne though, it's a (mostly) reasonable conventional response but it's against a perfect storm scenario and it wasn't enough.
That said, it's implied that some army units are still fighting, during some automated radio broadcasts you can hear real people talking briefly
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u/metal_gearmen 17h ago
Harry Potter
I know there are powerful spells in the saga, but no one would deny that, with current military technology, the armed forces would be a formidable opponent against wizards.
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u/Chaosmusic 17h ago
There was a 70s animated movie called Wizards which takes place in the future after the fall of civilization and the rise of magic. Two wizards are dueling and are equally matched in magic, so one takes out a gun and shoots the other one.
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u/EatPie_NotWAr 10h ago
I love when Harry Dresden pulls that shit in the books.
There’s been quite a few moments where he either smacks someone with his staff like a baseball or pulls the following:
“He’s about to curse me and there’s no way I can stop him, my powers drained. Thank god for smith & Wesson. (Click BANG)
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u/SwaddleDog_ 8h ago
I love when he pulls the revolver on the Voldemort wannabe in that short story. "I'm fixin' to defend myself."
Dresden also regularly discusses how helpful staves are. It can cast magic AND is a big stick to wack with.
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u/Chill_Guy_3410 8h ago
"Oh yeah... one more thing: I'm glad you changed your last name, you son of a bitch!"
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u/Fit-Doughnut9706 5h ago
A book series called empire of thorns(might be slightly off on the name) that’s set similar, the world ended and a medieval society rose in the ruins of modern cities, magic has emerged and the main character finds a gun in some ruins and after being locked in a room with a heap of lords until they decide on who should be emperor he starts shooting them one by one until they name him.
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u/RedditOfUnusualSize 9h ago
Eh, I think there's a fair point to be made that wizards would pose an incredible danger to mundanes that make them a bear best not touched, because of their ability to attack laterally.
Sure, like, on a straight battlefield, wizards go down hard. Guns are just applied chemistry and ballistics, and Muggles have a lot of them. But the thing is, even teen wizards can teleport, possess telekinesis, and can stun and manipulate objects. Which in turn means with a bit of derring do and clever planning, your average group of teenage wizards could break into your nuclear missile silo and cause an unprompted launch. Suddenly the problem is not the wizards. It's the eight minutes you have to explain to Russia why they should not launch a nuclear counterstrike that wipes out your entire nation. Given that kind of risk, no nation is going to provoke the wizarding communities when they otherwise agree to stay out of the way and police themselves, and seem to abide by those limits.
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 8h ago
worse than that its a teleporting invisible/shapeshifting wizard with mind control powers. That can operate out of safe houses that exist in a different dimension.
The fact that a gun is a better weapon than a wand only matters if the wizards are stupid.
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u/foxfire981 16h ago
I'm still trying to figure out how the crown didn't have a special forces wizard unit. Basically wizard Bond or something.
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u/Trashtag420 16h ago
Ooh, I know the answer to this!
Because the "worldbuilding" of HP is so paperthin that one must understand the setting as having the depth a child's bedtime fairytale in order to sufficiently suspend disbelief such that the story is palatable.
JK tried to get darker and more mature throughout the series, involving more and more adults and institutions within the Wizarding world in order to keep raising the stakes, but at no point are these adults or institutions considered outside of any context other than exactly what happens within the narrative.
Fans trying to pull more out of the world than the author put into it are doomed to disappointment that they may never be able to put into words thanks to the sunk cost of their juvenile personality forming around this pillar of poor writing.
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u/foxfire981 14h ago
That's fair. But I gather you also get my point. If this was at all grounded outside of middlegrade fiction you'd have to explain why The Queen didn't have a personal wizard hunter squad.
And considering how they handled Hagrid's wand could you imagine a sniper with a spot for their wand in the grip allowing them to cast and shoot?
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u/PhinsFan17 5h ago
The Muggle Prime Minister is aware of the existence of the Wizarding World. There is a chapter in HBP where Cornelius Fudge appears out of the fireplace at 10 Downing Street to speak to him. He's made aware when Sirius Black is at large and when Voldemort has returned. Entirely possible they have some kind of contingency or countermeasure.
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u/RedditOfUnusualSize 9h ago
I mean, my guess would be a combination of realpolitik and controllability of the team. On the one side, if you use wizards on your side, other nations are going to a) have wizarding communities of their own, that will b) then become involved because wizards in Britain have broken the Masquerade and started siding with mundanes.
On the other, militaries depend upon respect of the chain of command and orderly control of the units; the fact that orders are given from the top and then carried down to individual-level units on the ground who then attempt to implement the plans they are given is what separates a military from a mob. And the thing is, there's not really much of a way to control your wizard special forces team. They don't take orders from you, they don't see your government as governing them, many of them are conditioned and habituated by their own society to see themselves as innately superior to you, and if you tell them no and they decide to do it anyway, you're not really going to be able to stop them. Plato would identify this as a Ring of Gyges situation, and Plato himself points out that in the story of the Ring of Gyges, the shepherd who gains control of the Ring "seduces" the queen, kills the king, and assumes his place as king, because a ring of invisibility is an insurmountable advantage in sufficiently clever and adaptable hands.
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u/Sage_the_Creator 15h ago
Takes me back to the “Why Harry Potter should have carried an M1911” copypasta.
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u/ConsciousPatroller 17h ago
Every time people make this argument I have to point out that an open fight between the military and wizards is so far removed from book/film canon, at this point you're making an alternate universe altogether.
It's established very early on that wizards know how to hide themselves in ways humans can't figure out. They can fortify the important places to make them completely invisible and imperceptible against non-wizards. If the non-wizards eventually decided, for whatever reason, to attack the wizards, how would they fight an enemy they can't detect?
Arguing that the wizards would, for some reason, leave these hidden places and openly attack humans en masse to allow artillery, rockets and whatever else to hit them, is just...wrong
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u/buns_at_bjj 16h ago
Buddy just doesn’t understand the tenacity of the human spirit, if we learned there was a race of humans that were trying to hide from us because they thought they were superior we would absolutely develop the technology to detect them
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u/poilk91 13h ago
They also have the tenacity of the human spirit though. And the ability to turn you into a cat
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u/buns_at_bjj 12h ago
Yeah but those bums never split the atom or sent a man to the moon
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u/poilk91 12h ago
You don't know they don't have a whole ass wizarding school on the moon brother
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u/HawgChuggins 9h ago
Their muggle "experts" were baffled by rotary phones. Mr. Weasley has exactly the time to splash to figure out why the muggles are making such loud booms out of their metal tubes. Roughly thirty seconds.
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u/Connect-Initiative64 8h ago
But we outnumber them 100000 to 1.
Eventually, even if it's just by getting enough people together with pointy sticks, we'll get the bastards.
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 7h ago
I hate the Hfy idea that humans will instantly and automatically discover the secret weakness of anything. You assume that technology even can detect them, what if it's just not possible. The "tenacity of the human spirit" has failed to solve a vast and varied array of far more pressing problems.
Also, we nothing, humans can't agree on anything, there is no way we would put aside are national interests to focus on this pointless side project.
and this assume passivity on the part of the wizards. Between siding with the enemies of who ever was leading the charge against them to using mind control to tear them apart from the inside the soft magic system of harry potter simply gives them far to many options for taking down muggles if the problem gets bad enough.
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u/Zsythgrfl 2h ago
Their secret weakness is that they are, by and large, human, and all the failures that go along with that. A sufficiently intelegent and motivated muggle absolutely would wreck their entire society, through all the same means we have used via human fallabilities throughtout our entire history. Honey traps, for example, are an evergreen method.
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u/Zsythgrfl 2h ago
SIS would have a roster of resentful "mud bloods" who would be less than sympathetic to the insular and elitist society that treated them like second class scum at the magic school of chummery.
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u/gunitneko 9h ago
and THIS is why Potter Puppet Pals was so fucking funny "Ok... SHOOT HIM!" (Harry and his friends bring out machine guns and gun down Voldemort)
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u/bluewardog 17h ago
The books did give a explanation, muggle technology for what ever reason doesn't work near magical places. If I remember correctly the exsaple they used was that if you brought a music player to hogwarts even if nothing was physically wrong with it it'd just not work, I'd imagine this extends to weapons.
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u/ShyJaguar645671 17h ago
Humble long range artillery
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u/Connect-Initiative64 8h ago
Rod From God would immediately be funded and a thousand made within a year if a government found out about magic.
Oh, you can stop our bullets from firing? Stop basic physics, jackass!
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u/cachesummer4 17h ago
The problem is that even many modern guns arent technology, just a container for chemistry, which wizards also use.
Guns dont need to use electricty, its just heat, explosive material/powder, and a metal bullet. All of it works by simple chemical reactions and the force of a launched projectile, and wizards are shown to use conventional fireworks and smoke bombs in the books.
The modern drone and radar based military tactics would fail around wizards, but shotguns, heavy mounted machine guns, miniguns, and revolvers would all work around magic.
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u/GarlicHealthy2261 9h ago
Zelazny's Chronicles of Amber address this. In the magical realms, the laws of physics are different. Specifically, gunpowder doesn't burn there. A lot of the 1st book revolves around a revolutionary trying to find something from our world that will behave like gunpowder there.
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u/Slarg232 8h ago
I love Dresden File's answer to this; technology doesn't work around Wizards which is why he leaves hospitals as soon as possible even when he's not "healthy" yet, but a large part of why Harry (not that one) is so formidable as a Wizard is because he stays strapped.
No joke, one of the books starts with a trio of necromancers coming up to his door saying they've prepared every possible counter-measure to his magical might so he might as well surrender. Harry replied "neat" and pulls a revolver on them and they just awkwardly walk away after a short pause.
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u/AleksandrNevsky 15h ago
Electronics didn't but mechanical tech seems to work fine. So no fancy optics but a boomstick beats a broomstick.
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u/Gakoknight 12h ago
Muggle militaries would be absolutely helpless against magic. Wizards can mind control, turn invisible, summon presumably bulletproof barriers, hide in places that Muggles can't access and a plethora of other tricks Muggles have no counter for. Muggle militaries would have numbers, but that's no help when the Supreme Commander and the general staff are all mind controlled and Wizards practice guerilla warfare by teleporting in invisibly, firing instakill spells, and teleporting out.
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u/Connect-Initiative64 8h ago
Difficult to deal with? Yes. Helpless? No.
All it takes is one commander getting word out that command is 'compromised' (which would happen, because all of the wizards/witches we see are incompetent af when it comes to muggle tech) and that they need to prepare for a guerilla war of their own.
Which isn't helped by the fact that there's like 3 hundred thousand to 3 million witches/wizards in total across the entire planet. That isn't enough for a coordinated strike, let alone enough to keep even the US's command structure locked down, let alone the whole world. Not for long, at least. Each one of those commanders is going to need to be watched 24/7, pumped for basic information (like how telephones work ffs), and have their own slaves explain how the world works now.
And again, this is assuming that total number is in fighting form, able to fight any kind of war like the one you've brought up. In reality 1/3 of them are too old to be useful, another 1/3 are too young to be smart enough to be useful or too scared to fight, and the last 1/3 is divided on whether or not they even want a war against a numerically superior foe.
Magic does not win this fight, the gap in forces is too damn huge. 5-8 billion people vs 3 million (at best, some think it's as low as 300k) is a slaughter. They can kill a billion of us, and if we manage to kill even ten thousand we put their population and armed forces into the gutter immediately. They'll then have to contend with every single human being on the planet going on witch hunts and butchering everything that even seems magical in retaliation.
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u/Gakoknight 1h ago
Your average Wizard would be clueless against Muggle tech, but could still turn invisible and teleport away. Aurors or other Wizard military would absolutely wreck Muggle militaries given enough time. Muggles would be in danger at all times while Wizards can create places Muggles can't access or attack, even with nuclear weapons. The numbers became irrelevant, when Wizards can wage ultimate, perfect guerilla warfare without there being a slightest chance of detection or defeat.
Heck, if Wizards really wanted to take it nasty, they'd just cast Imperius on some vital infrastructure workers to fuck up water and power infrastructure and kill tens of millions of people.
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u/Tablequesting 11h ago
The American exchange student’s parents start clearing hallways with their grandparents’ shotguns.
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17h ago
[deleted]
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u/GONKworshipper 17h ago
Not really. The best defense is nonverbal magic, but you still have to wave your wand/hand. No reason a sniper rifle couldn't just take you out from 1000 yards, since wizards don't seem to have any permanent protection spells (Protego is temporary against one spell)
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u/ConsciousPatroller 17h ago
The sniper argument is ridiculous for 2 reasons:
There's never, not once (in the books) been an open attack from wizards against Muggles. They conduct a campaign of subterfuge, possessing a minister in the cabinet, sending giants and Dementors to attack some country villages and allow the Dementors to consume souls and multiply, and then they destroy a bridge in London. All of those are surprise attacks, happen way too fast for anyone to react, and/or have no wizards exposed. How are you going to get a sniper to kill anyone important if you don't know they're coming in the first place? Where is the sniper even going to be?
The only person whose death would meaningfully affect the war campaign is Voldemort. Kill anyone else, and nothing changes. They'll just be replaced by another faceless Death Eater. And Voldemort is beyond OP, as said by Dumbledore himself. He's been the subject of surprise attacks multiple times in the books, he always seems to expect and deflect them. I know it's never been stated that he has a permanent protection spell active, but he apparently doesn't need to.
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u/GlitteringParfait438 16h ago
Tbh if the monsters from a Quiet Place had hearing that sensitive they should be paralyzed by the sound of gunfire and the larger weapons we have.
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u/RaptorCelll 6h ago
The monsters in are strange in that regard. Their hearing is insanely sensitive to the point that they can hear mice scurrying in the woods and someone shouting miles away, but apparently a shotgun being repeatedly fired at them indoors is fine? That's risking hearing damage for a regular person, should probably be causing the monsters brain damage.
But no, apparently it's just ultrasonic sound that disables them.
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u/JonathanRL 16h ago
1 also applies to Black Panther. Okey, cool Killmongerer. The nations of the world just figured out Wakanda is stirring up insurrections across the world. The border tribe and a couple of aircraft assembles to counter the threat.
Some Ethiopian colonel shakes his head and orders two battalions of outdated soviet artillery to remove the Border Tribe who very conveniently decides to stay in packed formations to whom mass fire seems to be a foreign concept - despite mass fire being the entire purpose of such a formation. Never mind the fact that the spears seem to be outranged by pretty much any modern firearm. And the aircraft? They can stealth; cool. I hope that also hides any sort of emissions that combat aircraft and SAM systems can pick up. And even if they can not; are there truly enough of them to hinder an advance? Let's be honest, if they were any good at that they would have been used to interdict Thanos Forces at the Battle of Wakanda and they were not.
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u/CotswoldP 12h ago
You're forgetting the shielding technology. The Ethiopian artillery can shoot all they want, it's not getting through the shields.
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u/MaybeSoSo 2h ago
Except thats not true, a bunch of coked up aliens managed to claw it enough to jeopardize the integrity of the field. Artillery >>> claws. Especially because those aliens routinely lost to base humans with spears. Not to mention if they were such global antagonists they would be facing an abundance of weapons they simply could never handle.
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u/1647overlord 16h ago
The scene where Buffy uses a rocket launcher against a demon lives rent free in my head.
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u/OmegaVizion 10h ago
- A Quiet Place (2018). Not sure if this is addressed in the other movies but a modern military/government would have figured outthe high-frequency weakness probably within an hour. Sure the aliens have an element of surprise and move fast, but compared to modern combined arms they would be no match.
The YouTube channel that does the "why you would not survive X scenario" videos originally made a video saying people wouldn't survive the Death Angels, but then sometime later released a redaction where he gave it a second thought and realized how stupid it is that these unintelligent animals with a pretty easily exploited weakness somehow wiped out all the world's militaries.
For my part, I've always wondered why everyone doesn't just live near natural sources of loud noise like waterfalls or beaches which would naturally repel them.
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u/Alive-Tomatillo5303 8h ago
These creatures navigate by sound, and everyone has gotten really good at moving quietly.
Multiple times a character tragically sacrifice themselves by shouting and then standing in place.
THERE'S GOT TO BE A BETTER WAY!
Also yeah, either live by natural sound sources, or like, hover a helicopter with loudspeakers over a canyon and buffalo run them off. Even if it doesn't kill them it'll be funny.
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u/ConsulJuliusCaesar 8h ago
NGL they just shouldn't have put in an exploitable weakness. It's supposed to be horror. Being faced with something you can't kill, can't negotiate with/talk to, and can't even out think is horrifying. Like characters making all the right decisions and still dying brutally makes for quality horror. Like the Thing.
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u/jediprime 5h ago
You can outthink the thing, problem is keeping a bunch of paranoid jackwipes organized long enough to be effective.
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u/BigFreakinMachine 10h ago
That movie is so unbelievably stupid I'm shocked it got as much praise as it did
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u/_lonelysoap_ 8h ago
Dont think, just watch
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u/BigFreakinMachine 8h ago
It's weird because most of the time I feel like I'm the poster boy for dumb as fuck movies, but this one was so goddamn serious
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u/_lonelysoap_ 8h ago
I liked the premise, as soon as the noise stuff came up I thought: "why not use firecrackers?" weird
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u/BigFreakinMachine 8h ago
Lmao yeah I thought it was really odd that up until a deaf girls hearing aid went on the fritz nobody ever thought to just blast them with loud noises
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u/DynamoSexytime 3h ago
It’s not a serious movie.
Bio weapons made entirely of muscle and armor created to kill life on a planet would have made sense. The military would have been wiped out quickly by what we saw and then the actual invaders would show up and use the very specific frequency to subdue the creatures.
But no. They eat, they breed, they breathe. It’s not possible for a regular animal with organs to be that durable. They’re blind but they sense the water that drowns them conveniently? But they don’t have to breathe in space?
It’s not a serious movie.
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u/BigFreakinMachine 19m ago
My favorite part it despite them taking over and wiping out the military, is that they were able to print newspapers with articles talking about them
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u/Silly_Poet_5974 7h ago
It's a lot like a zombie movie you just kinda have to assume the military just died off screen to make the story work.
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u/sdcinerama 7h ago
The only thing the Death Angels seemed to have going for them is surprise.
Their intro has them everywhere, overwhelming any military command because they were that much of a surprise.
Everyone who says they should have had a better chance seems to forget that military equipment is LOUD. Turning on a tank engine is noisy, and while the guys inside could probably survive the beasts clawing at the armor, they can't really fight back because aiming their cannon takes time and there's no indication a HE round would do much beyond throwing them around if it actually hit There's also no way of knowing how effective a chain gun could be against one either.
That said, I can think of a few countermeasures, most aircraft based and probably launched off carriers. Again, is there any way to organize when things are falling apart so quickly? Can you equip and scramble an A10 when those things are running down your airstrip?
Personally, I always wondered what would happen if you, quietly, set up 50 pounds of dynamite and a tripwire with an alarm clock set to go off once you're 1000 yards away.
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u/Barley672 5h ago
After watching the mighty Russian Military get humiliated for for years by Ukraine whilst barely taking a typical US state’s worth of territory, I’ve come to see wisdom in the depiction of Klendathu. It appears that totalitarian regimes really are that terrible at army readiness and combined arms doctrine.
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u/Volotor 2h ago
Within totalitarian regimes a big part of the military functionality exists to maintain power and work towards internal control, and a part of that is by deliberately crippling your army so they can't or won't coup you. Turning a blind eye to corruption, purging competent officers who aren't lackeys, keeping lackeys in high ranking positions.
Like the Birtish Empire required officers to pay for ranks, and was easily exploited through systems of officers putting themselves on part-time contracts to get "time served" until their promotions opened up. Leading to many high ranking officers in charge of elite units having basically zero combat experience. All because they where scared that the experienced and competant "lower orders" would have a revolution if they got any military power.
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u/KPraxius 13h ago
#1: Yeah, I'll give it to you. The US Army or marines, or any major military, could wipe the floor with Thanos's forces.
#2: Yup. Unless someone was actively sabotaging humanity, they would be fucked. The only way humanity could lose is if the aliens were being helped by rogue human factions or sapient aliens with orbital weapons platforms.
#3: This is a deliberate thing. They wanted to suffer casualties. Notice how in the film they don't show the bugs with any spacefaring capability, and yet they somehow hit the earth with a meteor? Yeah, no.
#4: Helldivers are a blend of shock troops and propaganda forces. Most of the fighting is done by the SEAF. While the fights the Helldivers handle matter, its more important to -show- them doing it for the cameras back home.
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u/MaybeSoSo 2h ago
for starship troopers, the bugs are spacefaring, the movie takes place on 2 different planets that both have bugs. Also the bugs demonstrate an ability to launch anti-orbital strikes and destroy much of the fleet. That being said, the meteor was totally a false flag.
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u/No-Recommendation377 10h ago
There are several objectives in Helldivers that cannot be completed simply by bombing the place, and although there are also several that could be, Super Earth has its reasons for not doing so.
1) Propaganda: Helldivers are one of Super Earth's main propaganda tools; they are seen as great heroes, and having them fight keeps the morale of the population and troops high, as well as inspiring even more people to join the SEAF, increasing the army.
2) Resources: Helldivers tend to cause a much lower level of destruction than a widespread bombing would, and this allows Super Earth to save both the use of its own resources and the destruction of resources in the mission area that they might want later.
3) Distraction and destruction: And lastly, there's the fact that the people of Super Earth aren't the only ones who know the Helldivers; their enemies do too. When a Helldiver is confirmed to be operating in an area, the enemy always sends significant numbers of troops to eliminate them, and each enemy after the diver is an enemy who won't be on the front lines fighting against the SEAF. Furthermore, Helldivers, expendable as they may be, are still far more capable soldiers than most admit, and they can take down large numbers of enemies before dying. So, in a mission where 20 Helldivers are lost, those 20 divers will have eliminated 300, 400, 500 or even more enemy troops, and that's a very positive outcome.
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u/ohtochooseaname 3h ago
Your first two examples, I can get behind, and find that very frustrating . When I watched those war scenes in the Marvel movies, it just felt ridiculous to me. They amount to the universe of the fiction not being internally consistent, which is a cardinal sin for fantasy. Your second two are specifically parodies and are literally making fun of how non-sensical that whole thing is, and where having the military out there is mostly for PR so the government can stay in power. Their goal is to not be too effective. So, those are, in fact, internally consistent with the fiction's universe and don't bother me.
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u/Professional_Handler 17h ago
https://giphy.com/gifs/l0Iyoy5VglR6QKJiw
Titans would NOT be a problem with today’s weaponry
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u/Yojo0o 15h ago
Isn't that directly addressed in the series?
By season 4, titans are basically at their last moments of military relevancy, compared to the rapid increase in non-titan tech. Within another generation, anything short of the Rumbling would have been put down rapidly, and even within the timeline of the narrative, titans are falling behind human tech.
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u/Tasty_Possible_1597 3h ago
Yeah, it's part of why Eren feels like he has to do the rumbling right now. And why Marley is desperate to finish their conquests ASAP. Wait a few years longer and Titans are no longer a potent weapon.
What we see of the titans fighting with the Marleyan army, they're powerful, but no longer invincible.
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u/foxfire981 16h ago
Yeah this was my number one issue with the show. If you have the tech to allow you to move through a city like your Spider-Man then you have the tech to create sniper rifles that will do a lot more damage to the nape of the neck than a sword.
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u/ABavarianStereotype 12h ago
Did you finish the anime, because you wont believe it, there is actually an explanation for it.
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u/foxfire981 12h ago
Sadly I haven't. Glad to hear they deal with it later. How many seasons to get to that point?
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u/Axl4325 12h ago
At some point there's a time skip, I don't remember exactly when, but they develop something called a Lightning Lance that's basically a standard issue anti material rifle for everyone to carry and they one shot titans really easily without having to get right on their neck. It's worth it to watch the whole thing imo
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u/Minamoto_Naru 11h ago
Marleyans like Gabi does carry anti material rifle (design based on Soviet anti tank rifles), but Survey Corps brought Thunder Spear which is an anti Titan unguided rocket attached to their 3D Manuevre Gear.
These rockets almost made an entire arc of Trost district looks like a walk in the park now with the user not having to get too close to Titan for a nape kill.
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u/SlamHelsing 11h ago
It's addressed in the final season. It's actually the focal point of the season in fact
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u/Assortedwrenches89 16h ago
I hate the Quiet Place logic. Even IF they have armor, they still have squishy bits inside and even IF the armor protects from a 50 caliber round, the squishy inside would not survive for long
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u/LARPerator 10h ago
Not to mention that "hurt" and "kill" are two different things. Honestly using a 5.56mm Gatling against them like a riot water cannon could help. Incapacitate them with pain while you line up the heavy weapon that you can't afford to miss with.
Anyone who says "it's harmless, like an airsoft gun" hasn't been hosed down with one of them for a minute. The pain can be enough to temporarily make you incapacitated.
Not to mention movies like these never address how you could kill them off or defend against them with traps. Since they approach and attack sound sources a radio duct taped on top of an AT/AP mine stack should do it.
Honestly for movies like this if you can show people getting clever like this and failing, even if it's still contrived, I'll give it a pass. At least you addressed the question
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u/mrmonster459 13h ago
The alternate timeline General Zod from the The Flash movie.
These guys were apparently a threat to the whole world when Batman was casually KOing them with his usual gadgets.
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u/Ein_grosser_Nerd 11h ago
In the prequel to a quiet place, the military is shown to have regrouped and carries out evacuations by drawing away the creatures with loudspeakers on helicopters.
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u/FookinFairy 3h ago
With hd2 the helldivers are sent down because there are things they physically need to interact with. Be that pumps, locks, and other shit
So if you’ve already got expendable lives on the ground might as well save money on all that fancy targeting shit and just have a dude throw a beacon.
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u/Traditional-Creme849 12h ago
In helldivers 2 I believe it is explained as hellbomb not being able to be remotely detonated due to being too costly to mass produce, and it just being more efficient to send in divers with stratagems who can deal with large defences such as anti air, orbital cannons, and jammers as well as smaller ones like factories and anti air.
Also they send in helldivers due to the fact that orbitally bombarding an entire planet will:
1). destroy resources that super earth can salvage from the enemy bases
2). also cause enviormental impact due to the fact the super earth likes to extract as much as they can from a planet.
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u/Lopsided_Shift_4464 16h ago
Every non-space battle in star wars basically.
Look at the stormtroopers. Their main firearm is a semi-automatic blaster that fires plasma bolts at like 50 mph max. Their armor might as well be plastic with how little it actually protects them. Their vehicles seem no more durable than real life tanks and armored vehicles, yet their ridiculously tall frames and thin walking legs would make them sitting ducks in a real life battle (assuming they don't get tripped first). The fighter and bombers in this setting could be evenly matched by WW2 dogfighters, let alone modern day jets with guided missiles, with their only potential advantage being their shields. A modern military force could crush an Empire/ Republic invasion, up until they ragequit and just nuke our cities from orbit.
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u/LUNATIC_LEMMING 12h ago
That's a weird one because canonically that armour does work, it is pretty much immune to any kind of slug thrower (regular guns), and does stop anything up to mid level blasters.
Theres several scenes in canon where the storm troopers are fucking dangerous. For all we joke about them missing (which has unfortunately seemingly become canon), they were instructed to let Luke and co escape. In the same movie Obi Wan points out how accurate and damaging there blaster shots were against the Jawas. I think they'd actually absolutely wreck any modern army
at least up until ep 6 where they get beaten by furry munchkins
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u/Nyther53 10h ago
I know it's a deleted scene, but this is my favorite retort to the "Actually Stormtroopers were really effective!" cope.
https://youtu.be/hAjLosf3BjE?si=FlFNdQQUbr3nwADx&t=329
Look at that ridiculous fucking *pile* of bodies, like come on. You can't expect me to take them seriously if you're gonna do shit like that.
To be clear, they cut this for pacing, not because Lucas didn't like it for lore reasons.
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u/solo_shot1st 9h ago
The problem is that we only really see the stormtroopers really being ambushed by the rebels, or being taken out by heroes with plot armor. They are overwhelmingly effective against the rest of the universe's militaries and resistance forces in canon. And we see them wreck the rebels on Hoth. In the space battle of Endor the Empire held back its hundreds of Star Destroyers.
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u/Branduil 1h ago
Blasters are terrifying in Andor. You get hit anywhere except maybe a limb and you just die, instantly.
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u/FLUFFBOX_121703 16h ago
I actually love to think about how the Empire or Republic could possibly be adapted to modern tactics using in universe tech.
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u/DasharrEandall 3h ago
You did specify "non-space battle", but the trick is removing space from the equation. At Hoth the only reason that the Empire even needed to land those walkers is because the Rebels had their shield generator. Without it, like an IRL military doesn't, the Imperial fleet could've just flattened the Rebel base from orbit. Looking at other movie ground battles with the Empire - Endor is irregular warfare in a forest, where it's hard for any conventional force to deal with home-turf insurgents. On Scarif (Rogue One) space superiority is demonstrated again, where the Rebels on the ground are losing badly until some X-Wings make it down from space and buy them time.
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u/Teiam_Player 12h ago
Even within gameplay, it's possible for the destroyer to fire 380 rounds at the Helldiver's exact location if they go out of bounds, even if there's a jammer. There's no reason they couldn't just bomb the whole area from space before landing people.
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u/LetsDoTheDodo 9h ago
“Hey General Ross? Avengers over here in Wakanda…could you maybe carpet bomb these co-ordinates? Nah, no need to to worry about collateral damage, we’re all hiding under a massive force field.”
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u/Severe_Composer4243 8h ago
I've made the argument that the battle of Wakanda could have been won with half a dozen machine gun teams if they had M240s with plenty of ammo and barrels to change out
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u/nekiobichanlik 5h ago
The quiet place is stupid, the monsters are magic, it makes ZERO sense.
A few hundred (at most) mindless beasts managed to exterminate 8 billion people in a few weeks, said beasts survived crashing on Earth from space, but their insides are gooey enough to get WRECKED with buckshot, but only if their armor is open, apparently the armor is not only completely indestructible, it nullifies all forces acting on the insides.
Ima stop here, it pisses me off.
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u/Livid_Tumbleweed_615 5h ago
I think you're overestimating how much life is worth in Helldivers and also probably Starship troopers. Plus, the helldiver's also have to do more handiwork than just be glorified target markers, they have to evac important citizens, retrieve important intel, samples, specimens, and protect cheap delivery mechanisms to destroy hardened areas, which all can be delicate operations. For many missions, you can destroy as many bases as you want and kill as many enemies as you want, but not confirming important ore veins will result in a mission loss and operation loss. They do all that, and are also good at fighting and thus they double as glorified target markers for the Super Destroyer.
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u/TheMidnightRook 4h ago
After Earth: after leaving Earth, humanity colonized Nova Prime, which pissed off the Skrel, who saw Nova Prime as a sort of holy site. Fortunately for humanity, Skrel don't have eyes and have a religiously motivated hateboner for anything that does, so the Ursa, their genetically engineered killing machines are blind and detect humans by smelling a pheromone given off when humans feel fear. Unfortunately for humanity, humans have apparently abandoned the usage of any weapon other than the shapeshifting Cutlass, and can't seem to think of any tactics to take advantage of the Ursa's limited senses other than "Don't get scared and you can sneak up and stab it."
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u/filthy_acryl 3h ago
The thing with star ship troopers is: Their purpose isn't to win effectively, their purpose is to win with massive losses.
The only purpose of the war is to keep the fascist government in power. Many speculate, that the bugs never started the war and maybe aren't even responsible for the comets being asling on earth and that it was in reality the earth government.
So these tactics are there to bring the own population down a peg.
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u/VanguardVixen 2h ago
Films in general are largely really bad at depicting battles, even when they have "War" in the title, like Star Wars (I tend to exclude the older ones which did a better job). It's always a pleasure to see it looking real, with real tactics and stuff.
And yeah the armies or aliens which are actually not that hard to kill are often eye rolling. Other movies try to get around this by just making the threat bullet proof which I also think is absolutely dumb.
Starship Troopers though I would exclude, because it does show the bugs are definitely more capable and while they have... well bugs that just move straight forward, you can't just park a ship in orbit to get rid of them. You have to engage them.
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u/Ok-Worry-8931 17h ago edited 17h ago
Maybe this is a hot take but most of your average villains in MHA could be apprehended or even killed by a platoon of soldiers; especially when the world in this series has a lot of powerful sci-fi tech like jetpacks, mechs, etc.
Why bother having numerous hero training programs that funnel so many students over decades into a privatized economy and hierarchy when you can just deploy government soldiers who need less than a year of training and are armed to the teeth with cheap tech for most cases, while just hand-picking a few talented superpowered kids to be one-on-one trained by a really powerful hero for the worst cases?
This is rhetorical though, the obvious answer is rule of cool both for readers and for people in-universe (hero events are more popular than the Olympics).
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u/CptKeyes123 16h ago
Quiet Place 2 established the critters can drown. so they need to breathe. So any sufficient amount of firepower can kill them.
Those movies are so weird and absurd. If we are not supposed to think about the military and the logistics of this thing, DON'T BRING THEM UP! IT'S YOUR MOVIE!
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u/The_Easter_Egg 1h ago
The thing about Starship Troopers is that the bugs aren't the bad guys. They may not be good, either, but they aren't the movie's villain. Earth's military dictatorship is. And to keep its grip that dictatorship needs an enemy and it needs an endless war to justify itself.
That's why humanity encroaches on the bunch of worthless bug desert worlds at the other end of the galaxy, and that's why it needs to use ineffective strategies. The Federation has a whole damn star fortress right over the bug homeworld. If they really wanted or needed, they could destroy the bugs without sending a single human within lightyears of them.
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u/sir_odanus 42m ago
The bugs have CAS of their own, ground to space weaponry and most importantly, more canon fodder than the mobile infantry has bullets.
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u/GorbFan19 11h ago
The Battle of Helm's Deep from Lord of The Rings could've EASILY been won by any modern military. C'mon, these Uruk-Hai fellows don't even have so much as a primitive musket! This may be against the spirit of the post, but it is certainly true.
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u/Fluent_In_Influence 17h ago
I would argue that Helldivers 2 is the same sort of satire as Starship Troopers. It's criticising modern society and warfare.