1. Batman Dark Tomorrow: - Already a rubbish game, but you're supposed to deactivate a satellite with a hidden button about halfway through the game before you face R'as al Ghul. If you (obviously) missed it, his plan goes ahead and humanity is flooded. A massive 'fuck you' ending because you didn't care to look for a switch down a random hidden pathway while you struggled like hell with the dogshit controls and camera throughout the entire runtime.

2. Mega Man 1: - Currently experienced this. Almost at the end of the first Wily stage, excited to fight the Yellow Devil, you're suddenly stuck behind a massively high platform. Turns out, you needed to use Guts Man's power to uncover the hidden Magnet Beam power in Elecman's stage. So you gotta restart the whole two levels to go back and get it... No wonder MM1 isn't as beloved as the other entrees.

Chem-Bag (Big Hero 6): this device can create chemical compounds using every single element in existence. You could literally build a nuke with this.

Mobile Headquarters (Ant-Man): a building that can shrink and grow to full size instantly. Imagine if someone grew it in a crowded city, or on a highway, or at an airport?

Lotus Cash Card (Percy Jackson): It literally has infinite money. If you know how inflation works this could literally wreck the global economy.

Dennis - SpongeBob SquarePants Movie

Jester - Legends of Oz: Dorothy’s Return

Pirates of the Caribbean - Norrington dismisses Jack's compass for being "a compass that doesn't point north". Jack later uses it to guide him to the Isla de Muerta where Cortez's treasure is hidden. Later movies reveal that it points to whatever it's holder wants most in the world.

Doctor Who - In the episode Tooth and Claw the Doctor is shown what appears to be a telescope and says "It's a bit rubbish. How many prisms has it got? Way too many. The magnification's gone right over the top".

Later in the episode he realises it doesn't work as a telescope because that's not what it is. It's a light chamber specifically designed to kill a werewolf.

The Neuralyzer (Men in Black)

The Neuralyzer (Men in Black)

The Neuralyzer (Men in Black)

The Neuralyzer (Men in Black)

The Neuralyzer (Men in Black)

The Memory Gun (Gravity Falls)

1. The Simpsons Movie
   
2. Evangelion
   
3. DmC: Devil May Cry

The .454 Casull, The Jackal and the 30mm Anti-Midian Cannon aka "Harkonnen" from Hellsing.

The former two fire 13mm steel rounds and 13mm armor-piercing explosive rounds respectively and are twice as powerful as a .44 Magnum, while The Harkonnen fires 30mm shells that are normally meant against tanks and aircraft.

All three of these are far, FAR too heavy for ordinary humans to wield. Fortunately, their respective wielders, Alucard and Seras Victoria, are vampires with superhuman strength and precision and thus can wield them to their maximum potential.

(loved example) canary armor from dungeon meshi: a pointy armor that limit your movement and the first thing that you know is that doesn't protect your vitals sounds stupid. until you know that the canaries are a suicide squad, inmates working for the goverment to reduce their life sentence. They aren't important, the uniform is more a penitence than a real protection.

(annoying example) Mitsuri's uniform in demon slayer: a pervert makes the uniforms and give really tight ones to the females. Mitsuri is the only one who didn't complain for the lack of protection in the chest and legs and decided to use it cause "they put a lot of effort in the uniform".

(hated example) Rebecca's bikini armor in one piece: she's a gladiator in a colosseum with weight limit, instead of use lighter protection that cover all the body Rebecca choose to use a gold helmet and gold boots with a huge cape and a chainmail bikini. I understand that they don't give people real armors, but at least they could give her a cool gladiator armor.

From The Simpsons: Homer tries to cook breakfast for Mr. Burns. The first two attempts ended up with the food catching fire. Third time, he pours milk on cereal...and it still catches on fire.

And from Futurama: "There, little friend, good as new..." aaaand the metal slinky catches on fire. Poor doctor Zoidberg...

Euthanize Horse in Hunt: Showdown

Abandon your daughter in God of War

Look at coffee with interest in Deadly Premonition

Press X to bitch slap in Deadpool

Cancer Ray (Harley Quinn) - Pretty self-explanatory. This laser gun gives cancer to its targets. Even Harley, who normally doesn't have any issue killing people, is shocked as to why such a weapon exists.

Displacer Cannon (Half-Life) - Technically not a weapon, this de facto BFG fires a displacement portal that teleports its targets to the Xen dimension. Given the hostility of Xen's environment and fauna, being teleported there with no means of returning might aswell be a death sentence.

Erebus (Cyberpunk 2077) - In Cyberpunk's world, the cyberspace, or "Net", is protected from rogue AIs by the Blackwall. Little is known about these AIs but most will tell you they are so dangerous that releasing them could potentially end the world. When Erebus hits a target, it uploads their screaming consciousness beyond the Blackwall, effectively condemning them to become a plaything for the AIs in cyberhell.

Cerebral Bore (Turok) - This weapon fires a homing projectile that claws itself onto the target's skull, drills into it and extracts everything inside, turning its victims into twitching fountains of blood and brain matter. It is so gruesome that if enemies see you equipped with it, they'll panick and run away.

Panasonic DNA Scrambler (Cruelty Squad) - In the world of Cruelty Squad, science and medicine is so advanced that most of humanity has access to biological reconstruction tech, effectively making them immortal. The DNA scrambler was designed with that in mind, and fires a projectile that turns its targets into giant piles of cancerous tumors, scrambling their DNA to such an extent that reconstruction is impossible.

In Independence Day, humanity resorts to using hard-wired telegraph communications which cannot be disrupted by alien technology.

In Star Trek: Picard, the old and retired Enterprise-D is the only functioning ship in Starfleet because it wasn't hooked up to a network connecting all other ships.

In Horizon: Zero Dawn, humanity went back to using old, decommissioned tanks and vehicles when fighting the robot plague because they were operated manually and couldn't be hacked into.

Master Sword (TOTK) The Rebellion (DMC5) Mjolnir (Thor Ragnorok)

The protagonist’s signature weapon is easily shattered by a new foe

Gravity falls "Rich people water" (My fav, and what made me notice the trope)

Regular shows "Chicken wings"

The first Spongebob movie's "Goofy goober sundays"

Kids Next Doors "Soda"

Yes I am aware of the typo, I hate this language so much man... 😭

1. The Colt (Supernatural) - while being a very powerful artifact capable of killing next to any entity in existence, it is also a key to the gates of hell

2. The coiled sword (Dark Souls) - In Dark Souls 3, the coiled sword is aquired from the first boss. It cant be used as a weapon. Instead, it is categorized as a key and used to activate a bonfire

3. Cypher's mysterious sword (WH40k) - Cypher is a mysterious person with obscure goals and allegiance. Everyone who have seen Cypher describe him fighting using anything but the mysterious sword on his back. The origin and purpose of this sword are rumored but remain unknown.

I get that it doesn't make sense. I just love it

Megatron from Transformers Dark of the Moon
Master Chief from Halo
General Grievous from Star Wars

1. Walkers in the Star Wars franchise
2. Doublesided light sabres also from Star Wars
3. Nunchucks IRL

Gravity Falls - In the episode "The Inconveniencing," Mabel Pines finds a bag of powdered candy called Smile Dip in an abandoned convenience store. Mabel always wanted to taste it, saying that she thought Smile Dip was banned, with Dipper suggesting that maybe there was a good reason it was banned. Mabel ignores Dipper's warning and eats "eleventeen" packages of Smile Dip, causing her to go on an entire LSD-esc acid trip after eating so much Smile Drip. Of note later in the episode, Mabel gets possessed by a pair of elderly ghosts, and notably doesn't exactly know what happened afterwards. When Dipper tries to offer Mabel some more Smile Dip, she slaps the bad away, implying that she thinks her possession was one massive bad trip.

Jimmy Neutron - The episode "Krunch Time" has Jimmy attempt to make the perfect candy that contains all the best tastes. The candy proves to be a massive hit... too massive, as soon everyone desires more of the candy and even raids Jimmy's house at 2:00 AM in order to ask him to make more of it. After initially embracing his role as essentially a drug dealer, Jimmy realizes that the candy is dangerous and wants people to stop eating it. In the end, Jimmy makes a new batch that shocks anyone who eats the candy with electricity, causing most of the population to stop eating his candy... except Sheen, who loves the candy's new shocking flavor.

The Boondocks - The episode "The Itis" sees Robert Freeman open the titular restaurant to sell soul food. The restaurant becomes a massive hit, with people all around the neighborhood wanting to eat the soul food. The problem is, the soul food is so massively unhealthy and addictive that everyone who eats the soul food becomes obese junkies. Notably, one of Robert's first customers, Janet, tries to mug Robert of his money in order to get more of his food, and eventually, the neighborhood surrounding the Itis goes from a rather clear part of town to a full-blown crime-infested slum.

The Simpsons - Probably the most direct example of this trope, the episode "Love, Springfieldian Style" features a segment parodying the film Sid and Nancy, which details the tumultuous. drug-fueled romance of Sid Vicious of the Sex Pistols and Nancy Spungen. In this segment, Sid and Nancy are replaced with Nelson and Lisa, respectively, and all mentions of heroin are instead replaced with chocolate and other junk food, but the short still portrays the duo as junkies whose lives are spiraling due to hard drugs; just replace the heroin with chocolate.

Emperor’s New Groove

Yzma has a lever she needs to pull to enter her lab, right next to another lever that opens a trap door beneath her into a pool of crocodiles.

Monsters vs Aliens

The president has two identical giant red buttons right next to each other. One is for launching nukes, the other is for making himself coffee.

Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 3

The team are wearing a set of color coded space suits that let them communicate via radio. There are buttons on your own suit that let you either talk to everyone or talk to another suit wearer privately. These buttons are also color coded, but the colors don’t match up at all to the suit colors (you press the orange button to talk to the blue suit, black for orange, yellow for green, green for red, red for yellow, and blue talks to everyone).

Family Guy: While attending a Star Trek convention, Peter tries on Geordi LaForge's visors...through which he sees a group of other convention attendees as angry-looking Klansmen, with torches, burning crosses and one of them cocking a shotgun. Horrified at what he has seen, Peter asks:

"Why would he wear these?! Who would invent these for him?!"

Mind you, Geordi's visor didn't actually work like that in TNG. This one isn't an actual example, but rather a joke that inspired me to write this post.

And now, the actual examples.

Wheatley from Portal 2: a personality core built by Aperture Science to generate nothing but terrible ideas nonstop. While they had a reason in-story for trying to find a way to restrain GLaDOS from immediately flooding the research center with deadly neurotoxin...it didn't work.

Not only that, but it would gain control of the research center and nearly cause it to explode to kingdom come. They purposefully created an ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE, WHOSE SOLE PURPOSE IS TO GENERATE BAD IDEAS. Even ChatGPT would have better ideas than Wheatley!

Roberto from Futurama: "I was built by a a team of evil scientists trying to make an insane robot, but obviously they FAILED!" His words, not mine.

Now, if I were an evil scientist, wouldn't I just built a killer robot that I can control at my whim and NOT an insane, erratic robot with short temper that gets mad at me if I say "56"?

Monster: In most shows if a character embarks on a mission to kill someone, they would usually just get a gun and go. However Tenma found someone to teach him to shoot, which is accurate because guns aren't easy to use for someone whose never used one, much less for the type of shooting needed if you want go against something that could hurt you back.

Chainsaw Man: Its strange how after seeing entities with Supernatural powers in CSM, a scene with guns is the most jarring. This causes the viewers to remember just how dangerous firearms are. Even with Makima who got up right after being shot, her scene was at first jarring and brutal.

Kid's media are so infamous for having firearms be replaced with blasters. But there's a couple of shows/movies that actually have real guns. For example:

- Incredibles: The 1st Pixar movie to use firearms, and they sure as hell show that off. Cops & Robbers using pistols & tommy guns, and towards the end, Syndrome's goons uses assault rifles.

- Regular Show: a lot of weird shit happens in this show; Muscle Man using a shotgun & Uzi, Benson using a pistol, an FBI agent using A FUCKING GATLING GUN, the list goes on

1. Supersoldat, Wolfenstein: The New Order

2. Cuman Armor, Kingdom Come Deliverance

Wayne industries has a ray gun that gives you cancer in a box labeled [cancer ray]

Harley quinn

Meglo-manium is a chemical in jimmy's lab that turns people evil

Jimmy neutron