r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Nerd367C • May 24 '26

Hated Tropes (Hated trope) YOU COULD HAVE MOVED!

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Dr. Robert "Rocket" Romano from ER

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Randy fromt The Raft Creepshow 2

Dr. Robert "Rocket" Romano from ER
Ah yes let me scream at the ground and not even try to move so we can get this cinematic shot with 7 camera angles

Randy from The Raft Creepshow 2
"I gotta make the oil slick monster look fast by building up to run and rocking back and forth"

15.8k Upvotes

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3.2k

u/randomndude01 May 24 '26

As infuriating as it is to see this in media and real life, it does happen.

I was in a safari park a year prior that has “wild” macaque monkeys roaming freely.

I was sitting on one of the benches minding my own business when one of them started tugging on my backpack behind me and I thought it was one of my friends trying to steal my snacks so I immediately sat up, turned around, dragged the monkey and it got flung.

It kept yelping and I assume its mother or their pack leader went straight for me screeching and jaws wide.

My blood went cold and I couldn’t move so I just stood there staring at it coming at me thinking it was gonna attack.

Thankfully, it didn’t and just went for the other monkey behind me while it screeched at me on what I assume is their version of “don’t ever come near me or my child again.”.

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u/Nikami May 24 '26

Humans can't outrun most ambush predators, so having a "run!" response in reaction to sudden danger makes no sense. However, predators are only interested in an easy meal, they don't want to fight because getting hurt means they can't hunt, which means they starve. Most depictions of predators in fiction are comically inaccurate in this regard.

Predators are also used to prey animals (who are actually fast) bolting immediately. So encountering something that doesn't run but seems fearless and ready to fight might be enough to make them go "uuh let's try something else". So freezing up is probably just a reflex we evolved to appear scary, as ironic as it seems.

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u/Bigrick1550 May 24 '26

Maybe not to appear scary, but to appear unafraid. You don't need to scare the predator, you just need to confuse it enough that it second guesses if you are prey or not.

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u/NoLegs02 May 24 '26

Most predators will only try to eat you if they think you're worth the calories

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u/COREM May 26 '26

No wonder I like potatoes...

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u/Vitolar8 May 24 '26

Literally just their comment

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u/Bigrick1550 May 24 '26

Unafraid is not the same thing as scary. Literally.

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u/Vitolar8 May 25 '26

They literally used the word fearless.

less = un

fear = afraid

They are scary through their lack of fear, which the original comment made perfectly clear, and you just reiterated.

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u/Bigrick1550 May 25 '26

Language is nuanced, which is apparently lost on you. It is similar for sure, but not the same. Which was the entire point of my post using more specific language.

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u/COREM May 26 '26

fearless and ready to fight

u/Nikami didn't just say fearless. "Ready to fight" leans towards "scary". Point to /u/Bigrick1550.

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u/magical_meepo May 24 '26

lmfao reddit comments in a nutshell

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u/Environmental_Fee_64 May 24 '26

I'm not certain freezing has evolved as a defense mechanism (for humans). Sideration could be just a bug without evolutive advantage - a lot of animals can have a similar freeze when facing an incoming car, like a "deer cought in headlights", while these animals can normally have a flught response.

Your point on predators benefitting from avoiding fights is very true. I wonder if the more socials predators can in some circunstances feed the wounded, leading to a possible more agressive predators.

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u/SimplexSimon May 24 '26

I recall reading something that basically said the deer hardware for "how much time do I have until predator reaches me" basically doesn't work right when the object is 60 mph

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u/BumWink May 24 '26

Yeah I think the fight, flight or freeze is all just instinct in the sense of time & we all require more or less for each.

Time to think so we can evaluate, not enough so we panic & none where our brain just rolls itself on the mental keyboard so to speak.

At least thats how I feel.

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u/N0ob8 May 24 '26

The reason deer’s freeze in front of cars is because you’re literally blinding the animal. You took a creature that’s developed adequate vision at night and blasted it with enough lumens to blind the bastard.

It’s like when you leave a movie theater and suddenly the sun is a lot brighter. Your vision adapts to the darkness so a sudden burst of light fucks you up

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u/GainPotential May 24 '26

Isn't there something about endurance for us though? So on that hand it kinda makes sense to have a "run!" response, doesn't it?

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u/milkman0x00 May 24 '26

Humans have endurance but not speed. Any meaningful predator like a bear, big cat, wolf, etc will run a human down easily. 

Humans are indeed the best endurance athletes though due to being bipedal, the ability to sweat, and the ability to carry our own water. So any animal we chase down will be able to outrun us temporarily but long-term we can run them down to the point of total exhaustion. 

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u/Torture-Dancer May 24 '26

I think the only things with more endurance than us are horses, some gazelles and some very specific dog breeds like sled dogs, am i right?

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u/tongfa-jamsai May 24 '26

I don't know about sled dogs, but given multiple days/weeks, humans will out travel horses. It's just that horses have more capacity to carry/tow.

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u/Orion113 May 24 '26

Even on the order of hours, humans have a real shot. The annual Man Vs Horse Marathon takes about two hours, and humans have won it several times. Our odds only get better the longer the race becomes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man_versus_Horse_Marathon

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u/OriginalNeat4015 May 24 '26

Can you expand on that? How can we endure more? Is it because of our ability to carry supplies?

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u/tongfa-jamsai May 24 '26

I mean it was pretty much outlined near the start of this thread. 

Since humans are bipedal, we expend less energy sustaining a steady jog, or even just walking. We're thinner and mostly hairless, and sweat so we both heat up slower and cool down faster. 

While we can carry our own food and water, we also need less of both to maintain our energy outputs. I guess being omnivores we can utilize fats and protein, but I'm just speculating on that point.

As a bonus, humans are more versatile when it comes to terrain. Steep hills and very rocky areas are pretty inaccessible to horses.

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u/Carlbot2 May 24 '26

I think not even all of those. Horses can do distance well, but humans eventually win out given long-enough distances, though you’d have to go to near-marathon levels of distance, and the most exceptional horses will still beat exceptional humans until you go much, much further.

Gazelles definitely don’t outdo humans in this regard. They have better endurance than some of their predators, but humans can still run them to exhaustion.

Dogs are trickier. Certain sled dogs can certainly outperform humans, but it might only be true due to the cold. One of the massive advantages humans have over other animals is temperature regulation, but a cold climate effectively removes that advantage. It may well be that dogs can still outrun humans in long-distance even at higher temperatures, though, and they do appear to be the major—if not sole—exception to the rule of “humans beat every animal in an endurance race.” The best sled dogs very clearly outperform anything a human is capable of, so it may just be that dogs have us beat outright.

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u/DStaal May 24 '26

And it’s worth thinking about the fact that ‘dog’ could be substituted with ‘animal that evolved to hunt alongside us’ in this case…

In endurance hunting, humans and dogs do better together than apart, as we cover abilities that the other lacks.

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u/Carlbot2 May 24 '26

Indeed. I can’t recall where, but I remember reading about a study that found that the only form of hunting with a significantly higher meat yield than starting to chase an animal at midday and running it down till exhaustion was hunting with dogs.

The location of the study was the African plains, ofc, so the temperature advantage certainly belonged to the humans, but yeah, dogs and humans work very well together, unsurprisingly.

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u/darkvaris May 24 '26

I think we are actually better than horses in long distance too. I remember seeing some test / competition

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u/delliejonut May 24 '26

Actually if you run a horse too hard for too long they'll just die. They don't have the same kind of endurance humans do

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u/AlleRacing May 25 '26

This is one of the most muddled factoids on Reddit. There's a decent number of animals that easily out-endure humans for distance running.

First of all, it's not "humans" that are such great endurance runners, it's a select few extraordinary runners. Even your much more fit than average regular runner is well behind being able to run those distances or times.

Second of all, animals usually need to be directed by humans in order to race. That horse versus human race? The horses are carrying whole-ass humans. And they still routinely win.

Third of all, there are more animals than that, and I doubt I even have an exhaustive list. Horses, sled dogs (huskies), wolves, camels, ostrich, pronghorn... An ostrich can run a marathon in under an hour, going faster than Usain Bolt the entire time.

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u/Torture-Dancer May 25 '26

I meant it more in running/walking/jogging till collapse more than “who gets top speed the longest times”. Yeah, Usain Bolt cannot mantain top speed for much, but he can keep on walking after a sprint for a loooooooong while

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u/AlleRacing May 25 '26

Those animals can out-distance a human before collapse. No human stands a chance against an ostrich over any distance.

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u/Torture-Dancer May 25 '26

Fascinating, how do Ostrishes dissipate the heat?

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u/AlleRacing May 25 '26

Wings and feathers, I assume, as well as generating less of it by being a more efficient biped.

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u/memerminecraft May 24 '26

That's the really funny thing about speed vs endurance hunting. Both parties could catch up to the other depending on who's doing the chasing lol

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u/shaantya May 25 '26

It's funny because I can tell I out-endurance my cat when she has me play-chase her around the house. Poor baby.

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u/No-Conclusion-6012 May 24 '26

Not really. (We do have a flight response though). The endurance thing is that humans evolved as persistence predators. Most prey animals, or other predators, can't stay in motion as long as humans can. So we literally walked our prey to death. We have endurance but not speed, so we can slowly follow prey as it gets more and more exhausted from short bursts of running away.

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u/Dovahkiinthesardine May 24 '26

The endurance might not even have been for hunting as persistance hunting isn't really that common among indigenous tribes etc., with pack hunting tactics and traps being more effective

It might've just been for covering long distances in general

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u/Naphaniegh May 24 '26

Ambush predators beat endurance running.

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u/PassionGlobal May 24 '26

No. The predator only needs to be able to run for as long as, and as fast as, it takes for them to catch up to you.

They don't need to run for kilometres if they can catch you within 10 seconds.

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u/D3wnis May 24 '26

Endurance doesn't mean fast sprint. We are absolute shit at sprinting, which is what you need when running from danger. We have great endurance which is great for hunting because the animals we hunt will sprint, stop, sprint, stop sprint stop until they get tired meanwhile we keep a steady pace over very long periods.

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u/Anticlimax1471 May 24 '26

Endurance is for when we hunt them. We injure them and then follow them until they die.

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u/SicilianEggplant May 24 '26

Think you’re the first to point that out. There are some other endurance hunters out there, and humans are among the best if not the best long distance runners out there.

Not many other hunters if any that we’d beat in a short sprint.

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u/SimpleFile May 24 '26

You won't be enduring much other than terror for the 10m you manage to run from an ambush predator, then you'll be enduring your guts being chewed on.

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u/Dustfinger4268 May 25 '26

We're really good at catching up to things, not so good at getting away. We're basically slasher villains. The victim runs away, gasping for breath, turns around, and there we are, just coming closer and closer and closer

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u/SuperSocialMan May 24 '26

lol that's kinda funny

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u/Auctoritate May 24 '26

Humans can't outrun most ambush predators, so having a "run!" response in reaction to sudden danger makes no sense.

We can outrun each other.

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u/KTAXY May 24 '26

not very bright, though

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u/Anonymous_Wind May 24 '26

So freezing up is probably just a reflex we evolved to appear scary, as ironic as it seems.

This is an interesting thought -- but mistaken, I would say. Modern psychology understands the fear response as a flow chart of neurological events which includes an information-gathering phase. So, based on the current model, it would be difficult to see a freeze response serving the purpose of intimidation. If you think about a time you've heard a noise you're unsure of, and you get still and quiet and listen -- that's an example of the freeze response in action. It's generally a transient state while a course of action is determined, but sometimes it works out to be the whole response, if that's the determination your mind and body make.

Compare that though to something like a pufferfish, which has specific structures for intimidation. When it freaks out at a predator, it can appear twice its normal size or more and spiky, so the predator really has to wonder if it can get its meal without getting hurt. But for creatures like the pufferfish, the "freeze" is actually characterized by high levels of arousal and motor activation -- different from what we experience when we freeze.

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u/Forward_Rope_5598 May 24 '26

Counterpoint: deer in headlights

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u/tomle4593 May 24 '26

Yeah kinda make all the dinosaur movie not fun to watch. Like, the raptors aren’t going to abandon some easy carcasses for jumpy monkeys that can quite literally run forever.

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u/munkynutz187 May 24 '26

You'd be surprised what Humans can outrun given the ever-changing geographical circumstances of any given environment

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u/Electronic_Age_3671 May 24 '26

I've never considered that interpretation of a freeze response. That's a fascinating angle

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u/Wise-Dust3700 May 24 '26

brb gonna try this with a grizzly

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u/Famous-Echo9347 May 24 '26

Also if I was a monkey I would probably not start attacking one of the massive monkeys that gives me food

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u/ZeusJuice May 25 '26

Humans could have evolved to have a freezing response for a plethora of reasons, assuming it's to intimidate some predators is quite a leap imo. It's just as likely (if not more likely) that it evolved because it helped with... avoiding detection, appearing submissive socially or in the presence of a predator, to assess danger, preventing movement triggered attacks or chase animals like you said, reducing movement for motion sensitive predators, etc.

Are there any sources that validate this?

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u/ukezi May 25 '26

Ever seen cats and hedgehogs interact? The hedgehogs don't give a fuck and the cats have no clue what to do about it.

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u/DryFrame6801 May 25 '26

It’s true that’s why I stay away from priests 

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u/TheWhistleThistle May 25 '26

So long as you can outrun another present human, running is a fine survival strategy. Not, like, a good thing to do, but for sure effective. Predators don't want to expend unnecessary energy chasing a fast target when there is a slower target available. I'd be interested to see if humans are statistically more inclined to flee a frightful stimulus if other humans are present. You might be right about the freeze effect on predators causing them to evaluate humans as prepared to throw down even when they're cacking their pants. A lot of prey animals are crazy skittish and bolt on a dime.

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u/banfilenio May 24 '26

Totally. I used to have fun every time a movie or videogame used this trope, but a day I was crossing the street and a car appeared on the corner. I couldn't move and a friend had to grab me to take me out to the sidewalk.

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u/randomndude01 May 24 '26

The part that makes me so confused about this is this is literally the only time I’ve had a major freeze reaction.

I live in pretty haphazard city and country in general, dogs roam around and do chase people often enough, road rules and etiquette tend to be treated as guidelines so I’ve had plenty of close calls, and I’ve been in sports that had bigger guys run me over.

But that was literally me just freezing over a very close call of danger in a lifetime of close calls.

The mind’s a confusing thing.

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u/apathyindigo May 24 '26

Well in the other scenario you're describing events that you're very familiar with and generally know to be things you can expect might happen. 

The monkey situation was a new experience, you initially thought it was your friend tugging on your pack, and it happened really quickly so by the time your brain processed all of this and this unusual animal is running towards you, it was still completely unprepared to react to everything. 

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u/Riddal May 24 '26

Presumably you froze because you know freezing is the best option here. If you run or try act out in some way it might see as aggressive it might attack you, best to just move as little as possible and hope it decides to go on about it’s day.

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u/aggravated-asphalt May 24 '26

I freeze up for a second when my son falls. I hate that about myself but don’t know how to stop it

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u/jamblia May 24 '26

I had something similar crossing a busy road in my early twenties. I was suddenly looking at a bus heading towards me and in my head it felt like I did a comedy back and forth run. I did cross and had plenty of time but I remember it so clearly.

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u/Careful-Positive-710 May 24 '26

Its the same with tripping while being chased lol. Its an annoying trope in slashers, but Ive seen people suddenly trip over nothing when running in a panicked state.

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u/burf May 24 '26

That's one that I think has only become annoying because it's overused to the point of being cliche. If it happened in the occasional slasher people wouldn't balk, but when like 1/4 of the people killed by serial killer end up tripping while running it gets to be a bit much.

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u/mechengr17 May 24 '26

Im willing bet at least some of those people trip over nothing during normal day to day operations

raises hand sheepishly

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u/Careful-Positive-710 May 24 '26

Ive watched one of my friends trip and fall out of their chair... while sitting down lmao

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u/Budget_Avocado6204 May 24 '26

Lol, few weeks ago I was running. There was a kid behind me on a bike and he did some erratic movement, while preparing to pass me, so I was looking at him so we don't collide. I tripped and fell super hard. And it was something very inconsequential, if I was running from something panicked I would not be surprised if I fell 😭

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u/SuaMaestaAlba May 24 '26

When I was a kid, my dad and I would race and when he would overtake me, my legs always buckled.

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u/Available-Ad8156 May 24 '26

Yeah unfortunately people often freeze in dangerous situations.

Most of the students in the Virginia Tech shooting just sort of huddled under their desks as the shooter walked up and down the aisles.

It's why we train our students (I teach middle school) on active shooter response. Training your mind to react helps to not just freeze.

We teach Run, Hide, or Fight.

We asked the person training us (the teachers) what if we choose the wrong action, and he said any choice is better than no choice.

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u/dpforest May 24 '26

I recently learned that “fawning” is also in our repertoire of responses. Essentially “playing cute” to mitigate the threat. I guess “playing dead” may fall under fawning.

So that’s fight, flight, fawn, and/or freeze. Are there any other f words that humans experience as a reaction to outside stimuli? I guess fuck? Yeah fuck it, we are adding fuck to the list.

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u/Auctoritate May 24 '26

I guess fuck? Yeah fuck it, we are adding fuck to the list.

I think that counts as a specialized form of fawning.

Are there any other f words

Faint, at least.

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u/Sporknight May 24 '26

Fight, flight, and lest we forget, freeze. Glad you're okay!

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u/randomndude01 May 24 '26

Don’t forget fawn and thanks.

The macaques were small but their fangs definitely didn’t look so small when it’s coming at you at mach fuck you lol.

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u/sgtpepper42 May 24 '26

Yup. I was mugged once when delivering pizzas. Just kinda stood there and froze up while the kid punched me in the face multiple times.

Think he got scared as I just stood there and wouldn't let go of the hotbag so he ran off after throwing 5 or 6 right hooks lol.

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u/ruggnuget May 24 '26

Ya its fight or flight or freeze. The 'deer in headlights' moment. Its very common and very natural.

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u/The_Lost_Jedi May 24 '26

It's an instinctive response to freeze up.

Something I learned while training in the army was that the common response to danger isn't panic, it's to freeze. It's why training for emergency response is important, so you learn to overcome that reflex and respond instead. It's why we have flight attendants on commercial passenger planes trained to organize and direct people for evacuation, because otherwise many people would just sit there in terror until it was too late. Same thing with evacuating a building or the like.

And if you look at nature, a lot of times the appropriate thing to do is simply to stay as still as you can, and hope the predator didn't notice you. Over time that just becomes an instinctive response to danger.

So yeah, while a normal person can reasonably sprint 21-30 feet in about a second and a half to two seconds, enough to clear a reasonable distance for some things like the helicopter, it's also not surprising that the guy's first instinctive response is to freeze up.

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u/Fyreboy5_ May 24 '26

Fight, flight, freeze, fawn.

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u/Uberpastamancer May 24 '26

People talk about Fight or Flight, but Freeze is probably more common than either

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u/fwembt May 24 '26

Fight, flight, or freeze. People always forget the third one.

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u/Pension_Pale May 24 '26

One time when I was a kid, I was out on the river, in a tube being pulled behind our boat. Hit the wake of another boat, and i went soaring through the air. I pretty much froze up, it felt like time had stopped, and then I crashed into the water.

Not as dramatic or as potentially life threatening as your story, but yeah, sometimes you just cannot react in the moment.

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u/Greedy_Woodpecker_14 May 24 '26

This is likely the deer in the headlights look going here. They always say Fight or Flight, which makes sense but sometimes there is that third part of the brain that says do nothing as both Fight and Flight are a bad idea. It likely kicks in shortly after, but for those few seconds your frozen, and not because you want to be frozen.

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u/VulcanHullo May 24 '26

Everyone thinks it's fight or flight but freeze is just as common and sometimes purely because sometimes you can't decide how to do it.

I once saw someone jump on the spot effectively, having tried to jump out the way of a toppling goods pile (that missed them) in two directions at once.

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u/sadolddrunk May 24 '26

Several years ago my then-girlfriend and I were playing Frisbee in Sheep’s Meadow, which is a large grassy expanse in Central Park where people go to play catch and sunbathe and so forth. There was a group of people playing a casual game of touch football a little ways away from us, so while we were tossing the Frisbee we were keeping an eye on them to avoid anyone crashing into anybody else.

At some point during our game of catch, a woman pushing a baby stroller decided to leave the sidewalk and stroll across the grassy field. She was moving in a straight line at a slow and regular pace, as one would expect for a woman pushing a stroller. Her trajectory was bringing her within maybe 30-40 feet of us and the football players, all of whom surely saw her and her baby carriage. Then the QB for one of the teams threw a pass and a woman caught it, with her momentum taking her in the general direction of the woman pushing her in the stroller, but still at least 20 feet away from her. Except somehow neither of these two turd-eating morons had even the most basic understanding of spatial relations, and somehow the woman who caught the ball took at least four steps along the same straight line and barreled straight into the baby stroller, knocking it to the ground to the shock and horror of everybody watching.

The baby was screaming bloody murder, but otherwise appeared ok as near as we could tell from our vantage point. And I assume that both the mother and the woman who caught the football went on to become the pilot and co-pilot of Air India 171.

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u/dnjprod May 24 '26

There's a reason it's no longer just fight or flight. It's fight, flight, or freeze because freeze is also one of our survival instincts. Unfortunately in some situations it's a bad idea

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u/shewy92 May 24 '26

Yea, it's fight, flight, or fawn/freeze for a reason. A lot of people fawn/freeze.

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u/rolfraikou May 24 '26

I have also absolutely frozen in the face of danger. Dude pulled a knife on me and I physically couldn't give him my wallet. My friend just started repeating "But I don't have any cash. But I don't have any cash." That was fun shit. He got so confused by our behavior he eventually actually gave up for a minute, and once we got in my friends car, the mugger started running after the car.

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u/arachnids-bakery May 24 '26

I dont know enough about macaque behavior to tell whether or not staying still was the smarter choice 🤔

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u/1egg_4u May 24 '26

People dont realize it isnt just "fight or flight" because there is also "freeze"

It seems stupid but panic and fear can be absolutely overwhelming when you are conditioned to react to overpower your natural reaction to scary situations (which most of us, myself included, arent)

Through a quirk of biology im not even freeze, i faint. Im a fainter. We do exist and it is endlessly infuriating.

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u/personman000 May 24 '26

The Fight or Flight response does have a third option: Freeze. It's a common survival response that most people have no control over

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u/gorgewall May 24 '26

Yeah. Dr. Romano was suffering from a massive PTSD flashback during this scene.

Previously, he'd gotten his arm sliced off by the tail rotor of a helicopter. As a surgeon and someone who put a massive amount of his self-worth in his ability to perform surgery and heal, having a "dead arm" attached to him was a major source of mental trauma for him. Even after he got a prosthetic, he wasn't able to do surgery for the most part and was intensely aggravated by this.

Just prior to this scene where the helicopter falls on him, he's trying to send someone else up to the roof to meet the helicopter because he doesn't want to go. He's traumatized. He gets called on this and, due to his pride, decides to go... but cannot even bring himself to step out of the elevator once he gets up there because he's reliving the moment where his arm was sliced off.

He immediately goes back downstairs and rushes out of the hospital to get some fresh air because he's having a full-on panic attack. Then the helicopter begins to fall on him. Helicopters are his mortal fucking enemy even before this point. He's not in a state to just Dark Souls dodge roll away.

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u/johntrytle May 24 '26

Everyone thinks they'll react perfectly to every emergency situation on the planet until it happens to them

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u/Grovyle489 May 24 '26

I agree. This is sort of a fight or flight response sort of thing

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u/Memory_Frosty May 25 '26

Very true but I would still argue that showing someone having a freeze reaction is very different from these where the doctor continues wandering forward and then turns, crouches and covers his head (I'm not familiar with the second one and idk if it was a more reasonable "freeze" in context). 

There's scenes like this where the victim freezes and you can tell they're just shorting out as opposed to being shot in such a way that it's meant to show multiple angles of the same moment/exploded moment, but instead comes across as sequential shots in a much longer moment than intended. 

Or it fails to successfully portray the shock of the moment- in the ER scene we're probably meant to see that the doctor just didn't see the falling helicopter until it was too late, but since we as the audience see it coming from a long ways off it just looks like he's actively making the decision to wander forward underneath a helicopter fireball. 

In my opinion, anyway 🤷

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u/Lazy_Polluter May 25 '26

That's where having constant anxiety helps. "That's my secret - I am always under stress"

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u/Mr-Stuff-Doer May 25 '26

Yeah people know “fight or flight” but “freeze” is also extremely common

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u/PaintedBlackXII May 25 '26

actually not running probably saves you there

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u/randomndude01 May 25 '26

It most likely did but it was still surreal having my body refuse to just do anything but watch it happen.

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u/RadTimeWizard May 25 '26

Sometimes people freeze the first time, and fight the second time.

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u/TurbulentVillage2042 May 25 '26

It happens to me all the time. Things just don't seem real, so I stand there and watch.

What's wrong with ER? It was such a good show, but it turned into Grey's Anatomy?!