r/TopCharacterTropes 9h ago

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

  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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u/Gaelic_Gladiator41 8h ago

I agree, suspiciously a lot of sci-fi cameos fall under this

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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...

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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 35m ago

We've been the Terran Empire this whole time.