Lets have fun: Popular story descriptions turned on their head

[Cikomyr]

You probably heard these descriptions:

1- A psychopath draws two homeless people into his home to subject them to countless physical and psychological torture.

Spoiler: What story is this?

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Home Alone

2- After the death of his family at the hands of the government, a young boy gets indoctrinated into a religion by a bearded man and commits a terrorist attack, killing thousands, maybe millions.

Spoiler: What story is this?

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Star Wars

3- a man's wife is brutally murdered by a serial killer and his son is left physically disabled. In a twisted turn of events his son is kidnapped and he has to chase the kidnapper thousands of miles with the help of a mentally disabled woman

Spoiler: What story is this?

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Finding Nemo

These are ones i already knew. I thought we could try our hands at more jokes of the same kind. Lemme try:

4- A veteran coming back early from the war decides to undermine the local authorities' mandate from the Commander in Chief to finance that war. All the way claiming to act in the name of the very same Commander in Chief, putting the local authorities in an impossible position.

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Robin Hood

Another one:

A laborer only manages to keep doing his job by literally cannibalizing his coworkers. He eventually meets a girl, and decides to follow her home without her consent. He immediately starts to immisce himself in her environment; slowly befriending everyone that she lives with so she would have no choice but succumb to peer pressure.

In a way to make her dependant on him, he antagonizes her relationship with her boss.

Spoiler: What story is this?

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Wall-E

[Traab]

A band of thieves have kept property they know is stolen and in fact are planning to see it destroyed rather than allow it to be given back to its rightful owner. Multiple species unite in order to make sure another species is kept sealed away in a wasteland despite only occupying a tiny portion of the fertile land themselves.

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Lord of The Rings

[An Enemy Spy]

After his estranged son suffers an electrocution, a father must choose between furthering his career and trying to repair their relationship.

Spoiler: What story is this?

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Return of the Jedi

[Lord Raziere]

A young man doomed to never achieve his dream in eternal sisyphean torment is joined by a womanizing jerk who will never find love, and a girl who is forever seeing approval from her family but is never respected despite all her efforts. Together they abandon their homes, and go around enslaving dangerous animals to make them fight one another for their own amusement.

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Pokemon.

A bunch of idiots waste time punching and killing each other for the sake of their own selfish desires, causing much collateral damage in the process, instead of using literal wish granting powers to make the world a better place, using it only to cover up the fallout of their near disastrous escapades while neglecting to teach anyone how to better defend themselves against cosmic threats which few even know exist. The criminals and murderers that join them get off scot free.

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Dragon Ball Z

A teenager with a good heart and plans to make the world a better place is granted the power to do so by a hot girl, building a righteous rebellion to free a nation from an empire, along the way facing a warrior who is a wimp too weak to do anything but follow orders, various evil nobility, and eventually uniting the world against tyranny and wiping it out for good with his selfless sacrifice.

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Code Geass

A genius discovers a new tool to improve the world drastically in a short amount of time and uses it liberally. The police kill him for it and renders all his accomplishments moot.

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Death Note

A crazy homeless person goes around asking people questions about a murder, no one cares enough to help him. When they find out that the first murder was to cover up the existence of someone preparing to launch a terrorist attack, he is then killed to cover up the truth about that successful terrorist attack.

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Watchmen

A consumate liar tells his story of lying, cheating and fooling every member of the government he has ever met to a member of the governments secret agents, this secret agent lets him off scot free with no repercussions, then publishes his autobiography to other secret agents to read while keeping this scoundrel and his crimes secret from the public.

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Ciaphas Cain

A foreigner from a peaceful home arrives in a culture of fighters out in the wild. He descends into becoming a territorial raider, losing all trappings of civilization then consistently breaking the laws of his own tribe for his own desires, accuses respected figures of his adopted tribe of being evil out of paranoia, and eventually becomes the leader of this tribe because of it.

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Warriors (Cat)

A bunch of criminals go around opposing a government attempting to unite everyone in peaceful unity, not caring at all for the collateral damage they cause to the ordinary people around them, standing in the way of the rightful execution of dangerous people capable of mass destruction, of their group includes a crazy conspiracy theorist, a known inventor of dangerous weapons, a thief, and a reckless dangerous criminal with ambition who assaulted an important figure of the government.

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One Piece

[Frozen_Feet]

Suvakkihuora rakastuu haittamaahanmuuttajaan. (In English: stupid hippie slut falls in love with savage immigrant.)

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Disney's Pocahontas

Three crippled war veterans move illegally into United States, form a biker gang and start dishing out vigilante justice towards local mob boss. They spend their free time drinking, shooting guns, pumpin' iron and making sexist comments about their female mechanic.

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Biker Mice from Mars

EDIT: Some more:

A young Scottish boy leaves the land of his fathers to pursue the American dream. Unfortunately, the hard capitalist-imperialist values he adopts to cope in the harsh world alienate him from his family, and he ends up as a bitter, hateful old man living in seclusion, with just his wealth to keep him company.

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Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck. Not even turning anything on its head, just leaving out the last few chapters where he reconnects with his family and becomes slightly less awful.

A single man grows lazy and demotivated due to spiral of unemployment and short-term jobs. His moneygrubbing uncle holds him in de facto debt slavery and forces him to do dangerous or humiliating jobs at below-minimum wage, while his girlfriend cheats on him with another man. He takes out his frustrations by beating his nephews, the custody of which was forced on him by their deadbeat mother. Eventually he snaps completely, starts idolizing a deceased master criminal, dons a disguise and begins a crusade of vigilante justice against those who have wronged him.

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Donald Duck, and Donald Duck as Paperinik

[Cikomyr]

This is fun! I loved the two most recents.

- A group of cultists claiming that reality is a devilish lie are committing terrorist actions while ordaining the arrival of their Messianic Figure.

They justify their indiscriminate killing of the innocents by claiming that "Satan" can instantly possess anyone's living body to oppose them.

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The Matrix

A man with daddy issue gathers a group of unscrupulous mercenaries who seeking to sate their lust for money, power and bloodshed, in order to assassinate his father's old nemesis so he can get his approval.

While performing this hit, he inadvertently puts the whole world in jeopardy and gets captured by a nation state's Special Force operative.

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Order of the Stick

[Eldan]

A single man grows lazy and demotivated due to spiral of unemployment and short-term jobs. His moneygrubbing uncle holds him in de facto debt slavery and forces him to do dangerous or humiliating jobs at below-minimum wage, while his girlfriend cheats on him with another man. He takes out his frustrations by beating his nephews, the custody of which was forced on him by their deadbeat mother. Eventually he snaps completely, starts idolizing a deceased master criminal, dons a disguise and begins a crusade of vigilante justice against those who have wronged him.

Don't forget that he is aided by an inventor who at various times has invented faster than light space flight, teleportation, dimensional travel, matter replication and space travel, who then proceeds to outft him with... tear gas grenades, a cape and a slightly faster car.

(That one always annoyed me as a kid.)

[Rater202]

A teenage girl with depression falls in with a crowd of crooks, and over the course of a few months becomes a crook herself, takes over her city's criminal underworld, commits multiple thefts, murders, assaults, and technically even treason. She's given a chance to repent due to outside interference, a good lawyer, and a screw up by the authorities, but the distrust of her new boss and her own inability to move on results in her being distant from others. She relapses, briefly takes over the world with the help of serial killer and a woman who mutilated and brainwashed her own sister, and kills the world's greatest hero before being shot twice in the head.

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Worm. Removing all context and the epilogue makes the whole thing read like a tragedy.

[Rogar Demonblud]

A child is born with a small but noticeable disfigurement. The parents try to mainstream him, but the other children torment him when he's not driven into isolation. Acceptance only comes when he helps the cool older guy finish a massive project on the very last day.

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Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer.

[Rysto]

A teenage girl travels through time to help a friend welch on a legal agreement.

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Puella Magi Madoka Magica

A boy decides that he's spending too much time playing his favourite video game and begins to walk a path that leads him to murder its creator.

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Sword Art Online

A group of girls barricade themselves in their school and force their mentally-ill friend to stay in the building at all times. Anyone else who enters the school is brutally beaten to death.

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School Live!

The glorious army of the Gods take advantage of an enemy soldier's frustrations with her superiors and nearly complete the mission for which they had fought for three full centuries.

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Yuki Yuna Is a Hero

[Cikomyr]

A genius rich man has to cope with his sentiment of loneliness and abandonment. He does this by pushing away everyone and going on the street anonymously to beat up the economically disfavored instead of using his wealth and intelligence to solve society's real problems.

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Batman

[JNAProductions]

A young woman finds friends in unlikely places, and eventually saves the world!

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Worm again.

[Wookieetank]

Rookie racer goes on a property destroying bender, gets kidnapped by the locals and forced into indentured servitude.

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Cars

Unqualified outsider decides to take over an industry by kidnapping the CEO and impersonating them.

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Nightmare Before Christmas

A young girl invades an alternate dimension and then proceeds to undermine the local ruler at every turn.

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Coraline

A single mother and her 3 children go on a cross country trip with a just met, seedy male.

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Aristocats

A group of jaundiced mentally challenged individuals is taken advantage of by others, being used for absurdly dangerous work of questionable legality.

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Despicable Me 1, 2 and Minions

Why yes, I do have a small child at home, why do you ask?

Non-movie ones:

A group of individuals, all who have a known dangerous contagion, resist all attempts at quarantining them and then proceed to overthrow the government.

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Final Fantasy 13

A mute individual strip mines the local resources creating an industrial wasteland while attempting to gain dominion over multiple realities

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Minecraft

A group of young adults resentful of a government sanctioned quarantine of Tokyo, enlist the help of demonic entities to assist in their escape.

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Devil Survivor

[Dragonexx]

A preteen boy with mental disabilities lives with his mother who attempts to justify staying in an abusive relationship with his stepfather. After loosing his mother in a car crash he is taken to a secret religious facility where children are trained to fight and kill and then is sent along with similar children on a cross-country journey in the name of their faith involving kidnapping, theft, arson, beheading, brainwashing, contempt for other religions, mutilation, and the bombing of national landmarks that makes terrifying nationwide news and culminates in much damage being done to the city of Los Angeles. Afterwards he creates a convenient lie that shifts the blame, avoiding repercussions. In the end, he meets his real father who tells him to his face that he regrets that he was born, his uncle threatens to kill him, while his mother, revealed to be alive, murders her abuser and hides the evidence, all without shame or regret. Finally upon returning one of the other children at the facility injects him with lethal poison.

Spoiler: What is this?

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Percy Jackson: The Lightning Thief

[Eldan]

A teenage girl with depression falls in with a crowd of crooks, and over the course of a few months becomes a crook herself, takes over her city's criminal underworld, commits multiple thefts, murders, assaults, and technically even treason. She's given a chance to repent due to outside interference, a good lawyer, and a screw up by the authorities, but the distrust of her new boss and her own inability to move on results in her being distant from others. She relapses, briefly takes over the world with the help of serial killer and a woman who mutilated and brainwashed her own sister, and kills the world's greatest hero before being shot twice in the head.

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Worm. Removing all context and the epilogue makes the whole thing read like a tragedy.

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I prefer it as a tragedy and pretend that epilogue didn't happen.

It's just... there's a handful of characters in literature where I get the distinct feeling that they just have to die in the end. Usually because of a combination of stubbornness, ambition, drive, energy, intelligence and more stubbornness. Characters who won't stop until they are dead. And Tailor is one of them.

[Dienekes]

A man loses his home, and to cope goes on a road trip with his best friend and tries to reconnect with an old girlfriend.

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Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

After his father suffers a tragedy, a young man struggles to keep his family and the family business together, while maintaining his own individuality.

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The Godfather

or

Arrested Development

Two selfish idiot children rebel against their parents. Six people die.

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Romeo and Juliet.

As an aside, I hate this play

Single man, tired of being alone in the friendzone, strives to prove his worth to others by bringing back chivalry. Says "M'lady" and thinks he looks cool with his sword collection that he clearly has no idea how to use.

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Don Quixote

An elderly aristocrat follows his dreams of finally leaving his responsibilities behind and seeing London while he still can. Unfortunately, he runs into trouble when a group of locals attack him because of his race.

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Dracula

[Rater202]

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I prefer it as a tragedy and pretend that epilogue didn't happen.

It's just... there's a handful of characters in literature where I get the distinct feeling that they just have to die in the end. Usually because of a combination of stubbornness, ambition, drive, energy, intelligence and more stubbornness. Characters who won't stop until they are dead. And Tailor is one of them.

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You are entitled to your opinion, but I disagree with it.

To me, Worm is Taylor's coming of age story--she goes through a hell of a lot of crap and it ultimately leads to her maturing and learning to overcome her depression.

Besides, this is a story where a the single most traumatized child in the world breaks out of her brainwashing and manages to have a relatively happy ending, so i's not like Worm is that, dark of a story. It's all a matter of perspective, really.

Two selfish idiot children rebel against their parents. Six people die.

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Romeo and Juliet.

As an aside, I hate this play

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To be fair, they rebelled against their parents because both families consisted entirely of idiots who were fighting for some stupid reason, so the two of them are arguably the smartest in their families for not giving a damn about that.

Which is sad, because it shows just how stupid both families are.

[Wookieetank]

Two selfish idiot children rebel against their parents and ultimately commit suicide to prove their devotion to each other. Six people die.

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Romeo and Juliet.

As an aside, I hate this play

You forgot part. I also hate this play.

[Cikomyr]

I love the play for what it actually is. Not for what stupid clueless teenagers think it is.

[The Glyphstone]

A man is traumatized by witnessing a random violent street crime. Instead of hiring a competent therapist, he stalks and brutally assaults strangers in an attempt to displace his feelings into a societally acceptable target.

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Also Batman

[Hopeless]

In a world with a dwindling population all hope lies with the daughter of a legendary scientist who may know the secret of her mother's last invention sadly however her father is an equally legendary soldier who taught his daughter how to survive in this doomed world.

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Appleseed

[Kato]

Let's see... I'll leave the solutions out and see what happens.

Two siblings suffer severe wounds because of their irresponsible experiment and on their quest to fix their problems end up overthrowing a nation's government.


After irresponsible company policies lead to the deaths of her coworkers, a woman decides to take her anger out on company property and an endangered species.


A young boy is considered a messiah by an entire society and thus forced to risk his life again and again.


A boy follows his cool older friend to unknown places. He ends up destroying several planets.

[Rysto]

Two siblings suffer severe wounds because of their irresponsible experiment and on their quest to fix their problems end up overthrowing a nation's government.

Fullmetal Alchemist.

[An Enemy Spy]

After irresponsible company policies lead to the deaths of her coworkers, a woman decides to take her anger out on company property and an endangered species.


A young boy is considered a messiah by an entire society and thus forced to risk his life again and again.

Aliens and Avatar the Last Airbender?

[Lord Raziere]

A boy follows his cool older friend to unknown places. He ends up destroying several planets.

......Dragon Ball (Z)? There can be many interpretations of this, from Goku originally following Bulma, to Gohan following Krillin.....

Though it might also be Star Wars with Luke following Han Solo or Obi-Wan.

or Homestuck, technically it counts as well, since John could be following any number of people into the game of Sburb which are technically older than him like his Nana, or Karkat since he technically existed before Earth and therefore is his creator,

Really vague, you got to narrow this down a little.

[Dienekes]

A young boy is considered a messiah by an entire society and thus forced to risk his life again and again.

Life of Brian or Avatar, I suppose.

[Kato]

Fullmetal Alchemist.

Too easy, I guess.

Aliens and Avatar the Last Airbender?

First good catch, second one no. I admit, it's a bit vague... I mean, I guess it could be. But it would be more like:
"100 year old man finally grows up and takes on the responsibilities he fled from in his youth. Also, he makes out with a teenage girl. "

How can I rephrase it better... All I can think of makes it too easy, I'm afraid...
"Savior sets out to stop genocidal mass murderer by destroying his trinket collection and murdering his pet."?

......Dragon Ball (Z)? There can be many interpretations of this, from Goku originally following Bulma, to Gohan following Krillin.....

How many planets does Gohan blow up? And how is Krillin a cool older friend?
But yes, it's a bit arbitrary... Maybe "several galaxies" instead of "planets" would be better. Also, possibly, a god?

[Cikomyr]

Waaaay too vague. Put some heart into it sir!

[Aeson]

A young boy is considered a messiah by an entire society and thus forced to risk his life again and again.

Harry Potter.

Especially with this

"Savior sets out to stop genocidal mass murderer by destroying his trinket collection and murdering his pet."

as an additional hint.

The original hint covers a fairly large number of "chosen one" and boy/teen adventure stories, honestly, though Harry Potter is probably at present one of the most well-known such stories. It'd probably work for Young Merlin, some of the King Arthur stories, Eragon, the Chronicles of Narnia (granted, that usually involves a group of children as chosen ones, not all of whom are male), the Star Wars prequel trilogy and EU/Legends stories involving Anakin Skywalker between The Phantom Menace and Attack of the Clones, and most or all of the Legend of Zelda games, to name only a few.

Also, I'd argue that Harry Potter is not forced to risk his life because the society of which he is a part considers him to be a messiah but rather because a creepy old man who likes killing people and believes in the power of prophecies decided to stalk him, coupled with a bit of Hogwarts being a really, really unsafe environment in the first place.

[Kato]

Waaaay too vague. Put some heart into it sir!

But I'm trying to make it not too obvious.. I guess I need to keep trying. (or the story is not well known enough)
"the cast starts a cult worshipping testosterone and a handyman tool as symbols for ignoring logic and common sense. "

Harry Potter.

Yes. But I'd argue Harry suffers much more than these others. but I'll admit his suffering is not only caused by his status.


Okay, I'll try another. Maybe too easy though..
"A terrorist kidnaps and brainwashes a woman to use her on his vengeful serial murders until he and a throng of imitators take down a country's government. "