general media Wasted Characters, Plot Devices, Storylines, Etc.

[Castle Bleck 19,440]

Sure, The Fallen in Transformers: Revenge Of The Fallen rivaled Spider-Man 3's Venom in terms of lousiness, but at least he still had Tony Todd's epic voice, some cleverness in picking his spots, and a couple of pretty nifty abilities before ultimately getting chumped.

 

Arcee, Chromia, and Elita-1, however, were barely even there at all -- I actually had to check online credits to be reminded about them! -- and 1 of them ultimately just died out of nowhere while the other 2 just flat-out disappeared entirely.

Edited May 5, 2016 by A.V.

[TheAnimationFanatic 3,606]

I'm still mad at Zack Snyder and David Goyer for certain decisions he made with Batman V Superman.

[PoisonClaw 8,173]

Speaking of Transformers, Beast Wars ended up with several dangling threads, abandoned plotlines and wasted characters near the end since it was rushed to run into Beast Machines.

 

For instance, Tigerhawk, the fusion of Tigertron and Airazor, who was supposedly meant for greater things and could use cool magic attacks, was instead unceremoniously killed off in the very next episode. Granted, he did put up a good fight against a legendary Decepticon warship, but then that same warship would go on to also kill several Predacons for no good reason, namely Quickstrike and Inferno, the latter of which was meant to have gone out in a blaze of glory episodes before, but was saved due to his popularity just to die by Megatron going mad.

 

Then there was the deal with Taratulas, who was apparently neither Predacon nor Maximal, but a third faction with ties to Unicorn planning on destroying the Arc, thus wiping out both the Autobots and Decepticons. That's not even getting into his beef with the Vok, a powerful race that were built up as galactic puppet masters for pretty much the entire show. Again, they ended up really going nowhere.     

Edited May 5, 2016 by PoisonClaw

[Megas 28,069]

lol I didn't even know Arcee, Chromia, and Elita-1 were in the Bayformers films until I looked it up. Boy did they get the finger

 

I don't know if I'd call them wasted, but Armarant from Final Fantasy IX, Khimari from FFX and Kongol from Legend of Dragoon are some of the worst offenders of "just there" characters I've seen in an RPG(that I've played so far). I mean, Khimari was Yuna's supposed first guardian, they could've at least went into detail about his relationship with her

 

Also in MGS4

 

Ocelot being possessed by Liquid via connections to the dead thanks to him being the son of The Sorrow sounds like a logical assumption. BUT NOPE HE TRICKS HIMSELF INTO THINKING HE'S LIQUID BECAUSE NANOMACHINES AND PSYCHOTHERAPY

 

 

EDIT: Thanks to Concerned Bystander for reminding me of Captain Phasma

Edited May 5, 2016 by Megas

[Concerned Bystander 2,904]

The most recent example of a MacGuffin character that springs immediately to mind is Captain Phasma in 'The force awakens'. 

 

 

I assume she'll resurface in Ep.VIII, and maybe justify her existence.

Edited May 5, 2016 by Concerned Bystander

[Castle Bleck 19,440]

Shockwave in Transformers: Dark Of The Moon.

 

Basically, take the aforementioned Fallen, remove any of his aforementioned positives, and give him about the same amount of screentime as any of the aforementioned female Autobots.

 

Oh, and flat-out lie about both his role in the movie and his actor, too.

 

Congratulations!

 

You now have Bay!Shockwave!

Edited May 5, 2016 by A.V.

[cmarston1 5,962]

As someone who used to be a fan of Total Drama, this is exactly the reason why I ended up frustrated with All Stars.

During Season 3 Gwen and Courtney ended up becoming friends and having a character dynamic that I rather liked, but then Duncan cheated don Courtney with Gwen and all of that went down the toilet because of the love triangle.

Two seasons later it seemed like finally Courtney who is/was my favorite character was being treated respect and was the character that I enjoyed back in season one and the whole story of her reconnecting her friendship with Gwen was starting out to be really good.

But then came Sundae Muddy Sundae the worst episode of the entire franchise which completely flanderizes and villainizes Courtney beyond belief, and makes any and all development the two had over the course of the season completely pointless.

It seemed like things were finally being fixed after the flaws of the love triangle brought, but only for the season to deliver false hope and a final nail in the coffin for poor Courtney's character.

[Twilight Dirac 721]

How about Star Trek Generations.  Introduce the two most beloved characters in Star Trek, Kirk and Picard, to the big screen and have them team up together solely to get into a fistfight with an old guy on top of some rocks.  Then give Kirk a death that is so bad it makes the deaths in X-Men 3 look good.  They could have done so much with the premise of that movie but everything it had going for it was wasted.