# Dead or nearly dead tropes? **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [February 25, 2025, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-or-nearly-dead-tropes/1014797 "2025-02-25T23:14:47Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 111
**Author:** ![solost](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/solost/32/11776_2.png) [@solost](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/solost)\ **Post date:** [February 26, 2025, 5:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-or-nearly-dead-tropes/1014797/111 "2025-02-26T17:11:49Z")
> [@griffin1977](#): > > Yeah there is yet another head injury related trope that I think has now died. It’s that you can safely and reliably knock someone out with a blow to the head, and they will rendered unconscious long enough to be transported to whatever location the plot demands whereupon they’ll wake up healthy and with no repercussions for being beaten into unconsciousness I still see that one pretty regularly. I think that trope will survive as long as there are hacky screenwriters who need a convenient way to take somebody out of the story temporarily. Here’s a once common drama / thriller trope: bad guy sees the error of their ways and decides to renounce their evil ways. It’s usually a ‘second in command’ bad guy, because the plot still needs a ‘big boss baddie’ for the good guys to defeat. But the reformed bad guy cannot have a happy ending since they’ve committed too many unredeemable bad things. So the only redemption arc available to them is to die heroically while helping out the good guys. Darth Vader is a good example of this trope. It’s not as common since the notion of the ‘anti-hero’ enables just about anybody to have a ‘happy ending’ redemption arc, no matter what terrible things they did previously. But you still see it occasionally, for example Walter White in Breaking Bad. --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/dead-or-nearly-dead-tropes/1014797)._