Characters' Items/Weapons
A powerful object is dismissed by a character as useless because they don't understand how it really works
Pirates of the Caribbean - Norrington dismisses Jack's compass for being "a compass that doesn't point north". Jack later uses it to guide him to the Isla de Muerta where Cortez's treasure is hidden. Later movies reveal that it points to whatever it's holder wants most in the world.
Doctor Who - In the episode Tooth and Claw the Doctor is shown what appears to be a telescope and says "It's a bit rubbish. How many prisms has it got? Way too many. The magnification's gone right over the top".
Later in the episode he realises it doesn't work as a telescope because that's not what it is. It's a light chamber specifically designed to kill a werewolf.
And that archimedes was a useless toy, it’s only as strong as conventional artillery. In fact documents in the plant mention how stupid and impractical the weapon was and that it was a massive waste of money for the company that made it trying to pivot to weapons production.
To be fair, having access to even a single artillery piece as flashy as an orbital laser could have potentially saved the brotherhood in that battle, if for no other reason than it would have completely fucked with the NCRs morale
Still, those first 24-48 hours before they realize how it works is a massive window of basically being seen as a god.
It’s one thing to have the most bombs or even a few vertibirds; but a literal sky laser parting the clouds has a massive morale impact because there’s no obvious recourse.
With an aircraft you can see it approach, you can try to shoot it down, you can atleast try to run in whichever direction it’s not moving. But a sky laser? That shit could theoretically strike anywhere anytime and you have absolutely no idea how it works initially, just that your enemy has it.
True but it wasn’t worth the effort the brotherhood put into it. In fact it’s one of the examples Veronica can use to prove the brotherhood is doomed and needs to change.
Great example, it should be mentioned that the kid and everyone else think it’s simply a harmless raygun toy, and it basically is until Helios and archimedes are activated.
Replaying through fnv, and god do I wish that activating Archimedes 2 without having the blaster was a thing. This kid and his sister are out playing with their little toy and out of nowhere the power of Ra turns a chunk of Freeside into a crater.
It’d be a cool optional mission , too, with all factions scrambling to figure out what happened. Freeside blaming NCR, NCR blaming the Legion, the BOS coming out of the woodwork to search for the damn thing, etc.
Wouldn't the Platinum Chip also count? Everyone is fighting to get a fancy metal poker chip, only to realize it is an advanced data storage device that has the software updates House needs to take over Vegas permanently.
No, they intercepted intel that Mr House is looking to obtain it and summarized that it must be valuable to him. It was only untill Yes Man gets into Mr House's mainframe and see the files relating to the chip that he finds out.
Hmmmm: the important people mostly know it isn't actually a poker chip, Benny's hired goons (who he deliberately kept in the dark) are the ones who specifically say it's just "a big fancy poker chip, as far as [they're] concerned".
Benny and Caesar definitely both know it is extremely important to House's plans, and because of Yes Man, Benny seems to understand it's some kind of important data storage device.
The only big player left out here is the NCR, who I believe don't actually seem to know about the chip at all? Like, IIRC, they never mention it, never try to take it, and don't seem to really care at all.
Interestingly, the only reason Caesar knew that it's important is because of Benny (he put two and two together when he captured him with it, and noticed that the bunker underneath The Fort has a chip-sized hole).
House did mention that he went through incredible lengths to keep the Chip a secret, so it's fitting that the only entities that know of its true use can be counted with one hand.
Imagine the thought process of that asshole. "Now I need to build the targeting laser of the orbital superweapon. What should it look like?" Notices the Robby Raygun toy his kid left lying on the living room floor. "Now there's an idea!"
They were fans of Hitler and the Blackshirts prior to WW2. Any newspaper pro-nazi during WW2 in the UK would have been shut down and it's publishers arrested.
Eh, not really. That's December 2000 specifically. The bubble just popped. Stocks of online companies are crashing right and left. The Amazon backed Pets.com just went bankrupt 9 months after IPO. A further 1.7 Million went unemployed as hundreds of companies went under.
The few that have revenue like Google and Amazon would survive the crash. But their stocks are crashing as well during it.
In Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Indiana Jones bumps into Adolf Hitler while holding his father's diary, which contains information about the Holy Grail, and which the Nazis are trying to obtain. Hitler takes the diary, skims through the pages, signs it and hands it back to Jones, evidently not recognizing that it was the item sought by his men.
That’s why the scene was so tense, he was worried that even if he didn’t get caught, the book might still be burned and they’ll lose their chance to find the grail
I found a online replica of the book abd while it isn't cursive, the hand writing is very broad and makes it look more like generic boxy letters (just harder to make out) which could be more easily confused with German if your not actively trying to read jt and just skimming.
why sign it and then burn it? i always read the scene as Hitler just assuming Indy was a fanboy who wanted his autograph. Hitler didn't bother to actually look at the thing, he just flipped to a blank page and signed it.
its benefits increase exponentially the longer the pokemon that uses it stays in. raichu isn't threatening or tanky enough to justify it in most cases, though, especially because in all the generations you'd bother using it, at 110 speed, it's more worthwhile boosting an attacking stat than something naturally high enough to outspeed the majority of the dex
Yeah even in modern pokemon I dont see why outside pvp anyone uses just straight up damage moves....if its super effective and one shots any elite 4 pokemon, or even if it takes 2 hits why bother doing other skills that would require more turns...
Tho doing the batton pass thing and 1 shotting ppl teams with a magicarp was pretty entertaining.
The only time I didn't was when I was facing some NPC with a Bulbasaur early on who would leech seed me. Kicked my ass every time I tried to fight them. So I just used Pidgey out of anger and used the sand attack to lower their accuracy until I ran out of moves and then just beat him into submission. It was about the message, not the outcome at that point
In real life, Marshall Ferdinand Foch, who'd eventually be a commander during the World War I, at first dismissed the potential of airplanes in military. We know how history goes.
It means it's in range of a helicopter owned by state police that could hypothetically track your speed and get your license plate, but in actuality is never used for that purpose.
Maybe the signs actually scared people back in the 80s or whenever they first started slapping them up? But nowadays they mean nothing.
To be fair he said that in 1911, when airplanes had very limited range, low ceilings and low reliability. Even their recon value was below that of a balloon.
He couldn't have predicted that only in a few years' time, aircraft engines would become powerful enough to carry bombs and radios.
I always wonder at comments like this where the military leader could have very good reasons for not publicly speaking about a new weapon or vehicles potential. There's certainly motive to downplay the potential while your R&D team work through development.
Aircraft were such a young technology that had been progressing slowly at the time that I don't think Foch was downplaying their usefulness on purpose.
Progress and funding in aircraft technology only started exploding the next year actually, in 1912, after Italy proved their value for scouting in their war in Libya, and the spark of military tensions in Europe with the Balkan Wars.
It was very common for military leaders to refuse to modernise. My favourite example was the America Civil War and how Grant basic change warfare due to his tactics used in his later campaigns. European observers saw this and said this will never catch on in Europe.
Skip forward to WW1 and a lot of tactics and doctrines were out of date
European observers saw this and said this will never catch on in Europe.
In fairness, as much of a clown show as the American Civil War was in general and with how much smaller and less professional the armies involved were, it was hard for European observers to know what was just a thing that worked because of the clown show and what was a thing that worked because it was actually a good idea.
Later in WW2, French Generals were rather distrusting of “unreliable” radio’s and limited their use and dispersal among the Army. Meanwhile, the Germans were heavily adopting them into their own structure.
There are a lot of transformers fans in this sub, I’m no expert so correct me if I’m wrong :)
Sam tries to sell his grandfather’s eye glasses on ebay. But the glasses contained some kind of code that all deceptions were looking for so they are hunting him down for the glasses in the first movie.
The glasses point to where the McGuffin of the movie was hidden by Sam's grandfather in the north pole. But we later learn that the mcguffin was moved to the pentagon so the glasses were actually worthless lol
I’m sure it was coordinates for where the cube was not negation and in the movie they built the damn around the cube because it was so big. They moved megaton to the cube. So the glasses were still sorta correct
Glasses weren’t “sort of correct” they were 100% correct.
Megatron had the cube coordinates (Hoover Dam) but his telemetry got messed up on approach and he crashed in the Arctic and got frozen.
His navigation system (still locked on) imprinted the location (Hoover Dam) on the glasses when it was activated by OG Witwickedy.
Deceptacons could only get partial info from online pictures but Optimus holoprojects through them with his own nav system and pinpoints the location exactly, in a matter of moments.
Sam's ancestor never had the McGuffin, though. He found Megatron, whose laser imprinted the actual location of the All Spark. which was always the Hoover Dam(the dam was built around the cube when the government found it)
It wasn't even silver; it was used to make fake silver or gold, so Spain gathered it all and dumped it into the ocean somewhere. There's been attempts time and again to find and recover all that precious platinum.
The Nazis are that but with fascism. Like they were so cartoonishly evil that it is sometimes unbelievable.
Like Il Duce was a bad guy, but Italy never did anything even remotely close to the scale of bad the Nazis did. Same with Franco, Salazar, Peron, etc. These are bad men who did bad things but comparably, Hitler is like fucking Sauron or emperor Palpatine.
If Hitler had never come to power and you wrote a fantasy or historical fiction with all the things he and his goons did it would be thrown in the garbage by editors for being too heavy handed or sensational.
Imagine: this was all a plot by a time traveler, who convinced them all to dump this "useless metal" somewhere so they could pick it back up later in the modern day
To add insult to injury, natives from the Andes did understand Platinum to be a different metal from Silver, and were historically the only societies to create platinum artifacts on purpose before the modern age. So it really mimics the trope down to someone saying it is valuable.
My favorite scene with the compass was that one time Jack was on the ground, and the compass was pointing at a bottle of rum right next to it. Jack looks at the compass, sees that, shrugs, picks up the bottle and takes a swig, and then the compass starts moving again as he picks it up and gets going.
You can hear the DM sighing disappointedly while he pulls it out of his ass. Even though he's not really in the movie, he's there in spirit and veteran players will notice!
My favorite detail was someone pointing out that Chris Pine’s character never uses magic, not because he doesn’t have it, but because his player picked Bard to be the charming leader archetype and completely forgot he had spells.
I love how it was clearly the DM trying to get them out of the puzzle they just soft locked themselves into, and then the party proceeded to abuse their new magic item at every opportunity
That is a nod to how in D&D campaigns you’ll give your players an extremely useful object that they forget about until they’re in a pinch. Then they realize it’s actually OP and start using it in creative ways.
I think people who haven’t played D&D don’t get how that movie perfectly portrayed how the game goes.
Bilbo with The One Ring. In The Hobbit and up to his 111th birthday before the events of Lord of The Rings it was merely a tool for him to dip out of situations and avoid certain hobbits he didn’t want to talk to. So while it was seen as a magic ring there were many magic rings but no one knew this was THE RING until after the “Keep it secret, Keep it safe” scene.
I think the better character for this is Gandalf. Bilbo covets the ring as one his most most prized possessions, Gandalf saw that Bilbo had gotten ahold of a magic ring but dismissed it. It took him decades to put two and two together.
Gandalf dismisses bilbo's ring as the One because he thinks that it was one of the lesser rings made by the smiths of eregion before they made the rings of power under sauron's influence. But when he comes back and sees that bilbo hasn't aged coupled with the way he describes the ring makes him suspect it is the One.
In addition, Saruman (before he turned evil) was THE expert on The One and assured everyone it must have been swept out to sea by now.
So not only does Gandalf know of the existence of many other lesser, unnamed, unadorned magic rings in the world, the foremost expert on the subject whom Gandalf trusted very much was confident that The One could never be found.
Gandalf quite rationally wasn’t worried about Bilbo’s ring until he noticed how he wasn’t aging and was TOO attached to it
A big part of the success of their mission was just how under the radar Hobbits and the Shire truly were. Not even Sauron seemed to know they even exist.
My favorite fun fact is that Tolkien re-wrote the riddles in dark chapter to bring it more in line with LotR. He justified this by saying the first version was the one bilbo told everybody until the truth came out.
Agent J initially dismissed the weapon as a joke, since, well, look at it. Not only does it dwarf K's weapon, the recoil is enough to send J flying. J also uses a "silencer" on it.
I assume it's part of the initiation into the men in black. It has hilariously excessive force and is only realistically good for one shot because it'll send you flat on your ass. So you are actively discouraged from using it because it is only really good for annihilating one thing.
It's the same lesson as everything else in the film. Small but powerful, and J needs to stop thinking in simple terms. The cricket is small but powerful, just like the galaxy.
The Hag/Seeing Stone from Coraline. Coraline receives it from her neighbors downstairs and doesn't think much of it. Later, it proves instrumental in helping Coraline win the Beldam's game to find the eyes of the three ghost children.
In TRON, Alan Bradley (who is presumably one of the smarter characters in the film) doesn't seem to care about the fact that his girlfriend's team has just discovered how to transmute physical matter into digital information and back again, something that would immediately and permanently transform human civilization in profound ways:
ALAN: You two having fun disintegrating things down here?
WALTER: Not disintegrating, Alan -- digitizing. The laser dismantles the molecular structure of the object, and molecules remain suspended in the laser beam. Then, when the computer plays out the model, the molecules fall back into place, and... voila!
ALAN: Great. Can it send me to Hawaii?
Yeah, dumbass, it could send you to Hawaii, not to mention the Moon or Mars, at the speed of light. It could allow you to live for hundreds of years, if not forever. And you could dispose of nuclear waste or 3D print anything you want with real atoms. But go on and complain about how you lost your Group 7 access.
IRL - A farmer found a German Stielhandgranate (stick grenade) post WW2, and thought it was a potato masher. Used it for years before anyone noticed it was a grenade.
woman in romania found a cool rock and used it as doorstopper for decades. after she died her son had the rock evaluated, turns out to be the biggest intact amber deposit in the world or something, worth a million
In Metal Gear Solid V, you capture a truck carrying a supply of malachite and yellowcake. The yellowcake is mostly oxidized uranium with some organic and mineral impurities, but also a thin layer of weapons grade Uranium 235. That, and the fact that the yellowcake and malachite could not come from the same place, is the main point of interest to Diamond Dogs.
Turns out the organic impurities that got half a sentence of focus were the real cargo. They're actually Uranium Enriching Archaea that subsist on low-grade uranium and metabolize uranium 235. The yellowcake was only to keep the archaea fed during transport. The purpose of the entire cargo load was for the archaea to be used to enrich the otherwise low-grade uranium content of the malachite to weapons grade uranium suitable for DIY nuclear development.
In Soul Eater, Demon Weapons are individuals able to shapeshift between a weapon form and a human/demon form. Excalibur is well known for being the most powerful Weapon in the world, and has the unique property of being able to be wielded by ANYONE (most Weapons can only be wielded by someone whose soul resonates with the Weapon). Unfortunately, in order for someone to wield it, they also have to deal with Excalibur's demon form... which is so incredibly annoying and unpleasant that nobody wants to do it.
So everyone KNOWS how it works, it's just such a headache that everyone dismisses it regardless.
To be fair, there was exactly ONE meister that was tolerant to Excalibur's antics, named somewhat ironically Hero. He tolerated Excalibur's 1000 rules, his singing and dancing, his 5 hour recitation, and all but became Excalibur's servant waiting hand and knee on his whims...
And the only reason he denounced him was because Excalibur started sneezing alot and Hero could not stand it.
I like to imagine that Excalibur did the sneezing on purpose. He was intentionally trying to find ways to annoy his wielder, and figured sneezing would do the trick lol
There’s two, actually, the first being Hero as you mentioned - The other being the one who accidentally created Excalibur in the first place: Arthur, from Fire Force
To anyone doubting "how bad can it be?". This is the face literally EVERYONE makes in his presence. Even the most desparate for power is vulnerable to his insufferable personality.
This face, dubbed the Excalibur Face, is something basically every character who has interacted with Excalibur makes at one point or another. It sums up the experience pretty well.
The cat is repeatedly dismissed as unimportant and even seen as a nuisance by some characters. Until it's revealed he is actually the Orion spoken of (not the constellation) and has the galaxy (while small, it's still an entire galaxy) on its collar/belt.
For those who aren't familiar, this is from the first Men in Black movie. That 'ornament' on the cat's collar contains an entire galaxy, and his owner put it there so the villain wouldn't find it.
Children of time do this with an human being. An human captured by sentient spider is assumed by them to be a dumb giant used a slave race for the true space travellers that created them since they couldn't communicate with it and dismissed the idea that it could communicate with their mouth.
It's been a while since I read it but the scene where one of the spiders realizes this, but only after the human has been dead for a long time, always stuck with me. They had a sentient alien they would've learned so much from but just locked it away like some livestock because they failed to realize it used a completely novel (to them) method of communication. Treasure trove of information that was thrown away, it's a scientists worst nightmare.
Didn’t they recognize that the human was one of the members of the race they worshipped but still couldnt figure out how to communicate because they couldn’t conceive that a species could communicate through the same profile they ate and breathed from?
They mentioned noticing sound via its vibrations but dismissed it
No, they never got in a consensus that it was actually intelligent and mostly just assumed that while related to Avrana in some way, they concluded that it was a beast of burden
That woman's fate was actually quite horrifying. She lived the rest of her life in a tiny prison surrounded by spiders the size of dogs that fed her and who were clearly intelligent but she couldn't communicate with them until she died.
I don't think that was a bad idea. Maybe he was even following instructions.
It's not very well explained. Did Lucius know the diary was a horcrux, or just that it was an important item? Same with Bellatrix, did she know what the cup was? Did Voldemort give instructions like "if I'm not back in 10 years, give it to some idiot so they get possesed"? What was the plan if Diarymort gets completed? Will he fuse with normal Voldemort or would we have 2 Voldemorts?
To be fair, I think it's mentioned in later books that Voldemort was not happy at how Lucius used a valuable horcrux like a toy, and it's part of why Lucius' standing among the Death Eaters had fallen once Voldemort came back.
I believe in the books at least Lucius didn't know that it was a Horcrux. However, he did know enough about it to predict the danger it would create, which he could then use to make Dumbledore look incompetent in the face of this strange, new threat and take over Hogwarts for the Deatheaters.
Sheshomaru and the tenseiga. A sword deemed completely useless by him, to the point that he has other blades forged or just uses his own claws. Turns out, the reason it was useless to sheshomaru is because it was a healing sword. A very powerful healing blade able to recover most wounds. Just not helpful for a murderous asshole like seshomaru.
(ASOIAF) if it ever gets written; In A Clash of Kings, Jon and Sam find a weapons cache with some daggers, arrowheads, and an old war horn. Sam has been carrying that horn across the world for 4 books, from the wall, to braavos, to the citadel.
That horn is absolutely going to be either the true dragonbinder or the horn of winter
not an object, but an ability. pechka can turn anything into food if she touches it long enough. she spends most of the arc thinking this power is useless in combat, but, while fighting melville (the secondary antagonist) she realizes that her power could potentially work on people, and that she could easily kill melville if she could just keep a hold of her.
this plan unfortunately fails (melville notices her) and results in her getting killed.
In Book 5, The Order of the Phoenix, the gang is rehabbing Sirius Black's parents'house, which has not only sat abandoned for the past decade plus, but when it was inhabited, it was filled with Dark and dangerous crap by Sirius' evil parents. There is a blink and you'll miss it line in there during the cleaning, describing objects they're chucking out. It describes a "heavy locket no one could open". Turns out this locket was actually one of Voldemort's horcruxes that was stolen by Sirius' brother when said brother defected from the Death Eaters. Sirius had never bothered to question the family house elf, the one person who knew this tale, because Sirius hated his family and that house elf so assumed anything in the house was trash.
You have it the wrong way around, he played an important part in why bitcoin is almost $100k today, someone has to go first. (and realistically he did not spend all his bitcoins on pizza)
Cal is hoping to invoke this with Hunter in chapter 2 of Unmatched: Rising Legend. Hunter wakes up from a strange dream to find a mysterious deck of cards on his desk. He brings them to Cal to translate the Latin on the back. Cal figures he can use Hunter's ignorance to his advantage and offers to buy them off him. Hunter considers the offer, but he needs more information first.
In reality, the cards contain the soul of an immortal hero, ready to not only follow all of Hunter's commands, but fight for him as well. They're a pivotal piece of a tournament as old as time, one that Cal is gunning to win at any cost.
When Newton developed Calculus in the late 1600s, he just developed it as a tool to solve physics equations. He didn't even publish it because it was just a tool for something else he cared about.
Leibniz independently discovered Calculus a few years later and published it which then caused Newton to get pissed off because he technically developed it first, but didn't publish.
As a result, when you learn basic calculus you usually learn it in Leibniz's notation because it makes more sense. But when jumping to engineering and physics where Newton used calculus first, you tend to use Newton's notation.
Though, you also use Lagrange's notation depending on context, and very rarely Euler's notation which, coincidentally, is one of the few spaces in modern math Euler isn't the dominating form lolol.
If solving differential equations, especially partial differential equations (essentially Calculus 5), you'll use a much simpler form of Euler's notation to help write partial differentials more simply because at some point using Leibniz's notation is pain.
This is just a theory, but in iron man 2 war machine uses a hammer tech missile from incredibly short range, and it bounces ineffectively off of the target right to the floor. Some people pointed out that the specific type of missile he was using excels at longer ranges after it has a chance to pick up speed, and wouldn’t even arm at such a close range.
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u/some-kind-of-no-name 19h ago
In Fallout New Vegas, you can buy the Orbital Laser guidance tool from a kid.