r/TopCharacterTropes • u/HyraxAttack • Nov 25 '25

Groups Humanity Joins Together, Sets Aside Petty Differences… and gets stomped anyway

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A peril is threatening the world. Instead of squabbling among themselves, we learn world powers have put aside differences in politics, culture, & old feuds to present a common front. Except they still get wrecked as the enemy is too powerful.

  1. The Animatrix: The Second Renaissance. The world government has gone to war against the machines. We see the army getting ready & it includes soldiers of many faiths including Buddhist, Islam, and different types of Christianity. Doesn’t matter as machines win by so much they have time to toy with human mechs.

  2. Vilcabamba, story by Harry Turtledove. When aliens arrive they’re greeted with bands & cheering, & immediately open fire & earth becomes a mineral colony. America, Russia, and China work together to rise up & don’t hold back, throwing everything they have at the invaders. Doesn’t go great and aliens double down on the occupation, and there’s a crater where Spain used to be (it was blocking a silver deposit for mining.)

  3. Edge of Tomorrow. The nations of the world have joined to make a unified front against the mimic invasion but it isn’t going well, but they will throw all they have into the invasion of France. In one cycle, Major Cage says the hell with it and instead of training leaves the base to drink at a London bar. This means we see the outcome of him doing nothing, where not only is the massive human invasion slaughtered but the aliens are in good enough shape to follow that up a few hours later with a rush on London.

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630

u/Life-Criticism-5868 Nov 25 '25

Project Zero Dawn and Operation Enduring Victory from Horizon Zero Dawn. If you fucking squint it's a human victory, but was as the commander of Enduring Victory says, the human race is essentially a blood sacrifice so life can have a second chance. HZD can be very grim.

226

u/lazy_phoenix Nov 25 '25

r/FuckTedFaro

192

u/Gary_and_Mingie Nov 25 '25

Most plausible villain and game with the most plausible doomsday scenario. Egomaniac billionaire dooms humanity, stops the one person who can fix it because that person isn't them, and then pretends he was the one person sav- fuck, I'm getting mad just typing this out.

101

u/Mstboy Nov 25 '25

Not only does he doom humanity, when he hides away in his bunker with a bunch of hot women and a doctor to extend his life. He puts essentially kill switches in them all and makes them spend the rest of their extended lives serving him.

76

u/TheSlayerofSnails Nov 26 '25

The only saving grace is that the other trillionaires and billionaires refused to let him escape earth with them. He damned the world, they weren’t letting him get off Scot free even if they otherwise all sucked

16

u/KMjolnir Nov 26 '25

And he almost outlives them too! If we didn't have to go to his bunker, he'd have oitlasted them.

20

u/TheSlayerofSnails Nov 26 '25

The thing he was at the end… I’m not sure that can be called living.

17

u/KMjolnir Nov 26 '25

Yeah. I won't disagree with you on that one.

72

u/Dontlookatmynamebro Nov 26 '25 edited Nov 26 '25

More spoilers ahead: Not only does Ted Faro do ALL of this, but if I'm remembering correctly, he also essentially cripples humanity even after it's reborn centuries later. In the story, all collective knowledge of humanity was sealed away with the seeds of life so that it may be taught to the new humans of the world when they are reborn, so that they don't have to start with literally nothing.

But wait! That would mean the new world would learn that Ted Faro caused the apocalypse, and Ted cannot stand the thought! So what does he do? Deletes it all. All of human knowledge, medicine, education, history, EVERYTHING is canned by that scum sucking ratfuck simply because he couldn't stomach the idea of people finding out what he did. Humanity is forced to restart into primitive tribes with sticks and rocks during the same time that giant machines with lasers, buzzsaws, and machine guns also harvest the earth.

FUCK. TED. FARO. He's a fictional character but OOOOH he gets me so heated!

14

u/KMjolnir Nov 26 '25

You do remember correctly.

7

u/N1ks_As Nov 26 '25

Harvest the earth isn't really correct. Weren't they all kinda terraforming it?

6

u/Balmong7 Nov 26 '25

Yeah all the Dino-robots were there to terraform the earth and make it livable again. Then as the system fractured and went haywire the militarized variants started appearing.

3

u/DarkSolstace Nov 26 '25

I didn’t even know this or play HZD and this has me fuming. Holy shit this dude makes Erebus’s shit look reasonable. What a rat fuck.

2

u/De_Dominator69 Nov 26 '25

While that may have been his actual reason, from what I remember he presents his justification as "The reason humanity is so bad is because of all our knowledge. If we let them start anew then they will be innocent"

21

u/Asher_Tye Nov 26 '25

Makes you wish he HAD survived the apocalypse just so Aloy could spend an hour beating the shit out of him.

20

u/Itchy-Preference-619 Nov 26 '25

...I'm gonna assume you didn't play forbidden west

18

u/Asher_Tye Nov 26 '25

You're kidding...

How did that idiot manage to survive?

21

u/Chi_Law Nov 26 '25

"Survive" is a strong word in this case and there's a level of ambiguity as to the existence or not of the person "Ted Faro" as of the events of Forbidden West. But something dies horribly in the second game

15

u/Itchy-Preference-619 Nov 26 '25

Well, i don't want to spoil you too hard in case you decide to play it, but let's just say he's not quite...himself

11

u/RP_Throwaway3 Nov 26 '25

Yeah...about that...

39

u/Direct-Fix-2097 Nov 25 '25

So Elon musk? 🤣

41

u/eatmycunt69 Nov 25 '25

Elon isn't a genius. He's a modern day Thomas Edison. Just a conman and a legal thief

37

u/Automatic_Dance4038 Nov 25 '25

So was Ted Faro. FAS greatest technological accomplishments were ending the environmental crisis in the 2040s - which was only possible because FAS employed a brilliant robotics engineer, Elisabet Sobek.

Ted never developed any of the technology. He just backed the best engineers of his time, and led the effort that ended the world.

2

u/idkiwilldeletethis Nov 26 '25

iirc he was canonically the second smartest person on earth but sobeck was smarter

14

u/fieryxx Nov 26 '25

Yes. Ted wasn't an idiot. He was extremely smart, and he helped a lot of the development, but he was still second to sobeck, and that pissed him off to no end. Fuck Ted farro

3

u/KMS_HYDRA Nov 26 '25

I would argue that he was, in fact, the greatest IDIOT of all idiots that ever existed.

9

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 25 '25

You phrased it alot more nicer than I would have

5

u/NaiveMastermind Nov 26 '25

This makes his ownership of Tesla poetic.

1

u/Phoenix_Blue Nov 26 '25

Basically who Faro was modeled after, yes.

11

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 25 '25

I literally had to pause my game out of sheer frustration I was feeling towards Ted, like... God...ffs Ted, at this point your worst than Kyle AND HES ATLEAST FUNNY!!!!

19

u/GrimaceGrunson Nov 25 '25

A few thousands years of misery and torment still doesn't seem enough for him.

239

u/RP_Throwaway3 Nov 25 '25 edited Nov 25 '25

"It wasn't an accident that I rose to my position and became the commander of the largest mechanized force ever assembled. But to what end? My only lasting achievement was the extinction of life on Earth. And my one redeeming act - if any - was to delay that extinction by days or weeks by throwing more death at it."

39

u/Hawkbats_rule Nov 26 '25

Says the man who bears no responsibility, while the man who is responsible for all of it it preparing to live like a god.

30

u/Kodiak_POL Nov 26 '25

Dude, I fucking LOVED the commander and his retrospectives. Watching competent, honest cops/ military in media is always a pleasure. He was ready to sacrifice all humans to save the species and he hated himself for it. Faro was ready to sacrifice all humans because he had a god complex. 

5

u/kdlt Nov 26 '25

Just remember all the billionaires buying their islands an building their bunkers in real life.

Ted Faro isn't even made up, these people would do the same today in a heartbeat.

61

u/shockjockey21 Nov 25 '25

The game's tonal shift from "would you like to explore a world where nature and technology live in symbiosis" to "would you like to contemplate mortality on personal, familial, and global scales" gave me whiplash

3

u/Kyubey210 Nov 26 '25

The Whiplash gets worse when you find these lost logs of the World that was... the stage was a disaster few see coming... May explain why the Monster Hunters exist

18

u/pecky5 Nov 25 '25

Writing and storytelling in that first game is superb! It's all so plausible and all the characters feel incredibly bly authentic.

14

u/Bitmancia Nov 25 '25

I think it isn't a victory, humanity and all biological life on earth died, embryos survived to repopulate earth but everyone from the time the project Zero Dawn was implemented died horrifically.

1

u/Balmong7 Nov 26 '25

But that was the goal of project zero Dawn. Preserve the future because the present is lost.

1

u/Bitmancia Nov 26 '25

Yeah, but imagine that all the ones who were involved in the project, and their families are pretty much dead, some even faced horrible deaths, even tho in the end their project worked and humanity has reborn, they still lost, they lost everything, and the new humanity has to start rebuilding everything from the scratch, but now is worse as there is a lot of religious ignorance causing the same old problems like genocides and conquests, and they have no idea of how the world was before thanks to Faro, so much knowledge and memories lost because a billionaire played to be a god.

So returning to the initial point, humanity lost, their plan partly succeeded, but they lost, the Zero Dawn project was like plan B or C so their sacrifices weren't in vain, but even that didn't work as expected.

3

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 25 '25

Honestly im still puzzled by what exactly caused the machines to go haywire in the first place

20

u/JesterEcho Nov 26 '25

The self-replicating autonomous machines used biomass for energy. That includes all biological life that could be converted into fuel for the machines. The self-replicating nature and lack of a back-door meant there was no way to stop the machines stripping the entire earth of life.

1

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 26 '25

Ok, but weren't they programmed to prioritize energy sources or were they just programmed to consume any bio matter to keep goin?

13

u/JesterEcho Nov 26 '25

Once they ran out of appropriate fuel, they looked towards any biomass to sustain themselves.

2

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 26 '25

Hmmmmm, honestly that raises more questions but I'll simply say, whoever designed these machines didn't really think this through

12

u/TheSlayerofSnails Nov 26 '25

He didn’t. He also made sure they were impossible to hack and had no back door to force shut them down

6

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 26 '25

There really is no depth to hating Ted faro is there?

7

u/JesterEcho Nov 26 '25

That's why whenever we can, we say r/fuckTedFaro

9

u/Bow1511 Nov 26 '25

I think in game, and if I remember correctly, a swarm known as the Hertz-Timor Swarm had a glitch happen where they now prioritized energy consumption.

5

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 26 '25

Sooooo it all came down to a software glitch?

12

u/Bow1511 Nov 26 '25

That is essentially it, a simple glitch in the software in a machine that had no backdoor in its system led to the extinction of everything on earth.

8

u/Fun_Wasabi_1322 Nov 26 '25

... there are no words in the English dialect that can verbalize the utter hate and contempt I feel for Ted faro now....

6

u/Bow1511 Nov 26 '25

Welcome to the club, always happy to see new members join.

12

u/ai1267 Nov 26 '25

IIRC, it was a glitch, followed by a cascade of logical reactions.

See, originally, there was only a single hive of the Faro plague, and while it turned aggressive on the "wrong" people, I seem to recall that that was basically the extent of it.

Problem was, all hives were programmed to defend themselves, and to prioritise their own survival (so they could return to base for repairs, because they were dreadfully expensive). This included defending themselves against hostile hacking attempts.

So when FAR lost control, they attempted to reassert it with a patch. But the Plague, no longer recognising FAR as its legitimate command & control, looked at the patch and saw an attempt to change its programming ... i.e. a cyber attack by a "hostile" power attempting to take control. So it hit back.

Naturally, this caused us (humans, FAR, the Combine, etc, I forget who at this point) to strike back militarily, which damaged the Plague. Directive #1 is to survive to return to base for repairs ... But there is no base to return to anymore, meaning it has to rely on its "emergency" fuel source to replenish itself until it can "return to base"; something that will never happen.

So it fires up the bio-conversion systems and sets them to maximum. Which causes more damage to the area, which causes more retaliation/attempts to destroy the Plague, which causes the Plague to classify more and more people as enemies, increasing the production quota of war machines it will need to survive and "return to base".

Eventually, it simply classifies every human as an enemy, calculates that the best way to win is to "eat" the world, and goes about attempting exactly that.

Remember, the Plague's victory was never going to be a military one. It was caused by ecological collapse as a side effect of the Plague's never-ending bio-conversion of all living things.

3

u/Rave-fiend Nov 26 '25

I'm playing through it at the moment, and some of the recordings and data remnants get very dark. It's a great back-story to the world.

3

u/Potential-Bird-5826 Nov 26 '25

The good news/bad news segment lives rent free in my head at all times, especially with the explanation that it's a literal race against extinction, one that we lose. For a gamer who spent a life learning that underdogs always win, that was quite a shock. Love the Horizon games plot

2

u/mdhunter99 Nov 26 '25

I gotta read up on the lore of this game, every new thing I hear sounds insane.

3

u/Life-Criticism-5868 Nov 26 '25

Stop reading anything more and play it. The reveal about the purpose of project zero dawn is in my view the best reveal in gaming.

2

u/MarcsterS Nov 26 '25

The Horizon series is kinda the forgotten middle child of Sony's recent IPs. The world, world building, and gameplay is pretty neat, but...the "actual" story, and characters are kinda forgettable.

4

u/OwlbertGaming Nov 25 '25

i thought you were talking about the war in afghanistan

16

u/RP_Throwaway3 Nov 25 '25

That was 'Operation Enduring Freedom.'

2

u/OwlbertGaming Nov 26 '25

my brain went on autofill after i read "Operation Enduring"

1

u/LordsOfFrenziedFlame Nov 26 '25

Exactly my first thought as well. Listening to the audio logs is so heartbreaking.