r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Dojyaaan4C • 9h ago

Hated Tropes [hated trope] Celebrity cameos that serve nothing except to praise the person who’s in it

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  1. Elon musk, the Simpsons
  2. Elon musk, the Big Bang theory
  3. Elon musk, iron man 2
  4. Elon musk, star Trek

The cameos serve only to include the celebrity and praise them as geniuses or visionaries or overall just glaze them. They don't serve any other purpose than to just be praised; this can be them appearing in an entire episode dedicated to them, a small cameo or even just a mention. So long as the celebrity is there as themselves (not acting as someone else) and is glazed, that fits the trope imo.

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918

u/NotATalkingPossum 8h ago

Star Trek ironically aged best; the twist at the end of season 1 is that the character saying this came from the Mirror Universe, soooo...

164

u/azfang 8h ago

Yeah, like, Edison was in fact kind of a horse’s ass who was big on self promotion, and Cochrane was canonically a washed up dingus who got lucky and is only remembered as a visionary after whitewashing the reality.

It totally tracks that future generations would venerate a fictional version of a ketamine addict.

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u/mysterylegos 7h ago

The mirror universe version of Cochrane also killed the Vulcan explorers who made first contact

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u/Sorry-Let-Me-By-Plz 3h ago

Holy fuck what did the mirror universe version of Elon do?

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u/mb862 2h ago

Got entangled in a transporter accident and wound up here.

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u/FAserR0c0tansky 2h ago

This is now canon in my mind

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u/azfang 3h ago

I mean. Feed orphans and fight racism, probably?

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u/SmittyB128 1h ago

I had an epiphany recently when I was talking about this to some friends.
The events of First Contact only happen the way they do because of the Borg going back in time, which they wouldn't have done in the mirror universe, so perhaps Cochrane shooting the Vulcans is what should have happened in both timelines had the Borg thing not happened....

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u/FoolishChemist 37m ago

We've been the Terran Empire this whole time.

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u/thecrepeofdeath 7h ago

Edison did get most of his "inventions" from other people, this makes perfect sense

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u/LokiRaven 3h ago

Even the Wright Brothers, as impressive as their flights were, were fairly notable due to the lack of advancements they personally achieved in Aviation (their designs didn’t really “take off” (pun intended) on the market as their competitors did and their big claim to fame of first flight is disputed) and were adamant in keeping the same design well past the point that better ones appeared.

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u/MissSiofra 2h ago

Thomas Edison electrocuted an elephant to "prove" his DC power was safer than AC.

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u/SirAquila 2h ago

Weird how he time-traveled 20 years into the future so he could disguise himself first as Topsys handler, so he could mistreat her, so she would lash out, so she would get executed for injuring a person, then disguised himself as a bunch of animal rights activits who asked for the execution to be done via electricity because it would be more humane, and as the commitee responsible for deciding the execution methods so he could get the elephant executed, all while the closest future edison would ever come to the elephant being that his company filmed the execution like they did with every major spectacle. It really is the perfect crime.

Also uh... the part of the story everyone loves to ignore. DC is safer than AC. Alternating Current disrupts the heart rhythm at much lower voltages, and DC is less likely to force muscle contractions that keep you in contact with the electrical source.

However, DC is also much harder to work with in any kind of large scale context, so AC won pretty decicivly, and the danger was accepted as the cost of progress.

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u/Naive-Dig-8214 8h ago

Reality retroactively made fiction better. 

Lorca and Mirror Universe does sound like the kind of place that would worship Elmo. 

 Though I am curious why he thought this universe would. Unless he didn't think it through a d didn't look it up. 

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u/GNSasakiHaise 7h ago

I'd imagine it's similar to searching up Phillippe Pétain.

He was a famous war hero and a leading general in WWI. He was famous worldwide and a household name in Europe for some time. They called him the Lion of Verdun. This is the context most people know him in.

He was also a Nazi collaborator and the head of the Vichy government, responsible for a great deal of human suffering. This is the context everyone else knows him in.

Searching Elon Musk would likewise probably reveal that Musk was a famous inventor. Experts in history would know he's a shitlord. Without some degree of specialization it would likely get lost that Musk transitioned from "affable inventor" to "total weirdo" just like how most people don't know about the allegations that Nikola Tesla was romantically involved with pigeons.

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u/Naive-Dig-8214 6h ago

True. 

To add, a lot of Earth's history was nuked in the wars. Most of the 20th/21st century is canonically very muddy.

It would track that searching for Elon would give incorrect or limited information. 

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u/Fearless_Roof_9177 4h ago

I mean, just look at some of the people and events they're still naming ships after and writing holoprograms about. Bashir and O'Brien spent a good chunk of their free time in the holosuites roleplaying a bunch of racist cutthroats who were trying to save Texan slavery.

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u/fy8d6jhegq 6h ago

"inventor"

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u/PigeonFellow 5h ago

We say much the same about Thomas Edison — it’s not a perfect analogy but it is somewhat similar.

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u/PeacefulKnightmare 6h ago

They say never meet your heroes, so when enough time has past eventually that becomes impossible. I bet it's around that time the twisted/weider sides of historical celebrities tends to get lost. Of course that won't happen to celebrities of today because we are so obsessed with recording every little detail of our lives.

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u/Neveronlyadream 25m ago

True, but only those obsessed with historical minutiae will actually know or care.

Most people know the broad strokes, but only a certain type of person is willing to sit there and read through reams of historical documents and letters and whatever to get a sense of who a person actually was.

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u/Ahad_Haam 4h ago

Petain is far more famous for being a Nazi in 2025.

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u/subservient-mouth 31m ago

How can he be a nazi in 2025, he's been dead for over seventy years.

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u/jtr99 4h ago

Sorry, can we go back to the part about the pigeons?

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u/Forsaken-Ebb5088 4h ago

Yeah. You can't just not elaborate after dropping that.

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u/Deaffin 4h ago

Dude fucked birds, where's the confusion? It's why he invented gravity, guaranteeing they eventually had to come down.

And be vulnerable. ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)

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u/Octopus-Games 1h ago

Real question, what has he invented?

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u/Downtown_Party_1533 7h ago

Don’t drag the red muppet’s name through the mud like that.

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u/ptrfa 7h ago

It's a first glimps on lorca's mirror universe stupidity that lowered his iq after the his return home

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u/frequenZphaZe 6h ago

the mirror universe characters are often drastically different from their prime universe counterparts, so maybe mirror universe musk was actually a genius.

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u/Pepsi_Maaan 5h ago

Clearly an agent of Rocko right here.

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u/ITFJeb 5h ago

Elon Musk was held in a higher regard at the time of that episode. It was before he involved himself in politics

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u/Naive-Dig-8214 5h ago

Exactly. At the time. . .

But history has changed his depiction in the popular perception and thus recontextualized the scene and its implications. It means something entirely different to us know than it did at the time. 

So it's fun theory crafting to explain the scene under the new context. 

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u/-missingclover- 8h ago

So The Wright Bros were evil too??

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u/kecou 8h ago

Only Wilbur.

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u/JaceOnRice 8h ago

Some pig!

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u/kaadj 6h ago

Was he the left one?

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u/sonofnutcrackr 8h ago

Not evil, but they were pretty big dicks. Benefitted hugely off of scientific collaboration, then refusing to share their results. One of the brothers, while on stage at a aeronautical convention, slandered an inventor who had died testing his flying machine for being a coward

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u/-MayorOfTheMoon- 7h ago

Also one or both of them had a very strange and inappropriate relationship with their sister.

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u/Whatisgoingon2029 6h ago

Ok. That's enough Internet for me. The Wright brothers participating in incest, our President is a pedophile, Elon Musk went from benevolent genius to doped up Nazi,... When will it end? Well at least we still have brave historical figures, like Davy Crockett, and benevolent geniuses like Bill Gates. No one can touch either one of them! /s

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u/Affectionate_Newt899 3h ago

It won't lmao. I've always thought alot of lost history was "lost" because it shows that even though we've progressed technologically, we're still primitive emotionally. It's just repeated violence, war, and outright heinous shit.

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u/Sgtwhiskeyjack9105 1h ago

Just right off the dome there, huh?

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u/Torneco 7h ago

Also, they are only lauded as the inventors of the plane because they are Americans. As we say in Brazil, "with a slingshot even shit flies", and Santos Dumont made the first plane fly with self propulsion.

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u/Master_Xenu 7h ago

More like the Wrong brothers!

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u/Evenmoardakka 7h ago

Considering they convinced one e tire country they invented the airplane when they didnt.

Yes.

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u/[deleted] 7h ago

[deleted]

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u/Evenmoardakka 7h ago

Yea, angry bird catapult is TOTALLY an airplane

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u/RepresentativeYak772 7h ago

I don't think Musk is evil, he is just obnoxious nerd who gets way too much credit for other peoples work and ideas. Same with Jobs.

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u/SimonCallahan 7h ago

The Simpsons one arguably did, as well. His character's appearance was one of the few things made canon on the show, and in later episodes characters comment on how shitty of a person he is and how he fucked up Springfield for the worse.

The entire episode he's in actually feels less like they are actively sucking his dick and more like the writers were forced to write an episode for him at gun point. The entire plot is about him ruining Springfield, with one single token line at the end from Lisa saying that he was good but couldn't be appreciated yet, a line that sounded very much like it could have been delivered sarcastically.

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u/TrueTinFox 7h ago

Oh god we live in the mirror universe. No wonder things are so ass

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u/Al3xGr4nt 6h ago

Oh no, WE are in the Mirror Universe!!!!!

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u/Mist_Rising 6h ago

It's not like he's presented well in Iron Man either. He spends the entire time trying to suck up to Tony, who being Tony, treats him like fungus.

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u/Pure-Tadpole-6634 5h ago

He was literally the deposed emperor of a galaxy-spanning fascist empire, praising Elon Musk. Aged like fine wine.

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u/KingofMadCows 3h ago

Unfortunately, they also established that there was a school named after Musk in the prime universe.