About: Stupid Surrender   Sponge Permalink

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This is when we're told a character has no choice but to surrender, even though we've seen the character easily get out of worse situations before. The tough guy is able to beat up Mooks by the dozen, but when three of them corner him later in the story, he suddenly decides that he can't fight odds like that and drops his gun. Or some characters think nothing of dodging a hail of bullets in a fight scene, but later are terrified into submission by a single gun pointed at them from across the room. Or a hero kills half an army while Storming the Castle, only to give up in despair when it turns out the Big Bad has two whole guards in his throne room.

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  • Stupid Surrender
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  • This is when we're told a character has no choice but to surrender, even though we've seen the character easily get out of worse situations before. The tough guy is able to beat up Mooks by the dozen, but when three of them corner him later in the story, he suddenly decides that he can't fight odds like that and drops his gun. Or some characters think nothing of dodging a hail of bullets in a fight scene, but later are terrified into submission by a single gun pointed at them from across the room. Or a hero kills half an army while Storming the Castle, only to give up in despair when it turns out the Big Bad has two whole guards in his throne room.
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  • This is when we're told a character has no choice but to surrender, even though we've seen the character easily get out of worse situations before. The tough guy is able to beat up Mooks by the dozen, but when three of them corner him later in the story, he suddenly decides that he can't fight odds like that and drops his gun. Or some characters think nothing of dodging a hail of bullets in a fight scene, but later are terrified into submission by a single gun pointed at them from across the room. Or a hero kills half an army while Storming the Castle, only to give up in despair when it turns out the Big Bad has two whole guards in his throne room. Why can't the heroes just beat up the baddies like they usually do? Because the plot requires that the heroes get captured at about this point, that's why. The writer has just decided that they want the story to go in a certain direction - maybe this is because they want to write a prison escape sequence, or because they want a hero to be freed by the villain's beautiful daughter as part of a romance sub-plot, or because they just want some drama because invincible heroes are boring. That's fine, but the catch is that if you've spent a long time building characters up as badasses, you'll need to hit them with one hell of a threat if their backdown is going to look plausible. If you don't, you're asking the audience to believe that enemies who were previously just an inconvenience have suddenly and inexplicably become an overwhelming danger, and people may not buy that. It's a kind of Plot Induced Stupidity, and may be a result of a character being handed an Idiot Ball. Sometimes generates Fridge Logic. It can be combined with Stupid Sacrifice if the reason that the character surrenders is that it gives someone else a better chance of escaping - just not better than if the hero actually defeated the bad guys. If a writer wants this to happen in video games, there exists a problem in that players will resist surrendering to opponents who they know or think they can beat. This inconvenient fact can be overruled with Cutscene Incompetence or by making sure Stupidity Is the Only Option. Examples of Stupid Surrender include:
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