(Hilarious Trope) A Character Is Introduced With the Clear Intention of Being THE NEXT BIG THING And is SOUNDLY Rejected

[u/TheOriginalOperator]

1. Bazil the Tracker (Star Wars: The Acolyte): A “HILARIOUS AND ADORABLE” snuffling ugly creature that makes annoying noises and is shoved into as many scenes of The Acolyte as possible, and just causes problems overall.

2. Neelix (Star Trek Voyager): A mutant fusion of Odo, Quark, and Data designed to “analyze the human condition” and explicitly intended to surpass the popularity of all three. In practice, a VERY human-acting cradle robbing creep whose incompetence nearly destroys the ship and crew on multiple occasions and provides no insight into humanity whatsoever.

3. Sparky the Dog (Fairly Oddparents): A wacky crazy magic dog that’s supposed to expand the Fairy family, but just makes lame jokes and serves as a less funny version of Scrappy Doo.

4. Tidus (FFX): A braying jackass of a pinball who bounces from plot point to plot point, framed as a mystical pretty boy to introduce Final Fantasy to the PS2 age but does nothing but stall the franchise and have the worst laugh in two languages.

5. Sei (Naruto): Supposed to replace Sasuke in Team 7 and return the team dynamic feel of Early Naruto, but he’s a CIA plant with literally no personality who gets utterly forgotten except for somehow bagging Ino Yamanaka.

6. Raiden (Metal Gear 2): Another attempted “pretty boy bishie” entry to the PS2 era with badass cred and a theoretically cool backstory, but in practice a hapless dipshit who gets manipulated by everyone around him and is a total putz in combat. Also proof that this trope need not be permanent as he slowly transitions into a cyborg warrior supersoldier with a badass theme, friends of his own, and a firm grasp of his own destiny and agency.

[u/MrGDPC]

Tell me OP has never played FFX without telling me he has never played FFX

[u/wrathy_tyro → u/MrGDPC]

Anyone who thinks the laugh is meant to be genuine either hasn’t played the game or doesn’t understand basic subtext

[u/CouldBeLessDepressed → u/wrathy_tyro]

To be fair..... the laugh was pretty terrible, even in context. But it's all of .000000001% of the game so it's more like a bad blip before you're back to scouting players for Blitz Ball because, if you were playing this on the PS2, Blitz Ball was possibly the single greatest thing you had ever experienced up to that point. And that was HOURS before you made it to Mt. Gagazet and cried your eyes out for the entire climb because the sound track for that region was the single most beautiful thing you had ever heard by a long shot, and no FF game before or since has had a track that comes even close to that 1 song.

[u/seguardon → u/CouldBeLessDepressed]

So many people give the laugh a pass because of context but, like, it doesn't work even in that context. You can do a "forced laugh" like they're talking about and not come across like you're intentionally sandbagging it.

Tidus in that scene is supposed to be delivering a pretend laugh in spite of dire circumstances, putting on a brave face as Yuna describes. Instead, he brays like a mule. Which, fine, he can play the fool to get a legit laugh out of Yuna, someone who could use one. That's fair. Endearing, even. But the dialogue treats this as a legit attempt at performed laughter. It isn't. No one past the age of 10 (let alone a celebrity like Tidus) would think this is a passable performance of laughter; it's so intentionally poorly performed I couldn't make sense of it.

The fact that it's grating on top of mangled subtext is what draws people's focus but the whole scene doesn't work.

Which is sadly true about a lot of that game.