History Franchise / MonsterVerse

While each entry varies in terms of plot, three constant elements were commonly featured: the existence of the Titans, gigantic ancient monsters capable of [[{{Terraform}} reshaping Earth's ecosystem]] just as much as [[GaiasVengeance it reaps chaos everywhere it goes]]; an [[LastEpisodeNewCharacter ever-shifting cast of characters]] caught in the chaos caused by these creatures; and the presence of Monarch, a [[GovernmentAgencyOfFiction secret worldwide organization]] sought to uncover the many mysteries regarding the Titans and [[FantasticNatureReserve accordingly deals]] [[CreatureHunterOrganization with them]].

* ''Comicbook/JusticeLeagueVsGodzillaVsKong'' (2023)

Interestingly, the franchise has given Toho enough confidence to throw their hat back into the ring with making new Kaiju movies, introducing the "Reiwa era" with ''Film/ShinGodzilla''.

Interestingly, the franchise has given Toho enough confidence to throw their hat back into the ring with making new Kaiju movies, starting with ''Film/ShinGodzilla''.

[[caption-width-right:600:Amongst gods and monsters, beyond logic lies truth.[[note]]From top to bottom: Franchise/{{Godzilla}} and [[Franchise/KingKong Kong]][[/note]]]]

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Skull Island|2023}}'' (June 22nd, 2023) - Animated series premiering on Creator/{{Netflix}} set on the titular island and following a group of explorers as they try to survive the alien environment.
* ''[[Series/MonarchLegacyOfMonsters Monarch: Legacy of Monsters]]'' (November 17th, 2023) - Live-action series premiering on Creator/AppleTVPlus featuring Godzilla and the Titans, centered on a family discovering secrets about their history linking them to Monarch.

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The movies are distributed by Creator/WarnerBros and produced by Creator/LegendaryPictures in partnership with Creator/{{Toho}}, the Japanese studio that [[TropeCodifier codified]] the Kaiju genre and owns most of the well known Kaiju [=IPs=]. The franchise is expanding on streaming series as well on Creator/{{Netflix}} and Creator/AppleTVPlus.

Interestingly, the franchise has given Toho enough confidence to throw their hat back into the ring with making new monster movies, starting with ''Film/ShinGodzilla''.

The movies are distributed by Creator/WarnerBros and produced by Creator/LegendaryPictures in partnership with Creator/{{Toho}}, the Japanese studio that [[TropeCodifier codified]] the Kaiju genre and owns most of the well known Kaiju [=IPs=]. Currently, the series counts four films, which is as extensive as Legendary's initial contract with Toho lasted. [[https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/heat-vision/adam-wingard-next-godzilla-kong-movie-director There are talks for a fifth film]], while a live-action series set in the universe is [[https://deadline.com/2022/01/apple-tv-godzilla-legendary-monsterverse-1234916545/ in development at]] Creator/AppleTVPlus. In March 2022, [[https://variety.com/2022/film/asia/godzilla-vs-kong-sequel-australia-1235210265/ it was announced]] that a new [=MonsterVerse=] project would begin filming in Australia by the end of the year, with no other details given other than it being a sequel to ''Film/GodzillaVsKong''; it would later be announced that ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' director Creator/AdamWingard would return to direct the new film. The film was later announced to release on the 15th of March, 2024.

Interestingly, the franchise has given Toho enough confidence to throw their hat back into the ring with making a SharedUniverse of monster movies after 2020 ([[GenreThrowback naturally featuring people in rubber suits]]).

While each entry varies in terms of plot, three constant elements were commonly featured: the existence of the Titans, gigantic ancient monsters capable of [[{{Terraform}} reshaping Earth's ecosystem]] just as much as [[GaiasVengeance it reaps chaos everywhere it goes]]; an ever-shifting cast of characters caught in the chaos of these creatures; and the presence of Monarch, a secret worldwide organization sought to uncover the many mysteries regarding the Titans.

[[quoteright:350:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/monsterverse.jpg]]

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* AbortedArc: ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' set up a couple new arcs which were unfortunately completely dropped by subsequent installments.
** ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' and ''Godzilla: Dominion'' do this to the mass awakening of the other Titans in ''King of the Monsters''. The film makes the Titans' awakening out to be the DawnOfAnEra, but ''Godzilla Dominion'' ends with Godzilla commanding the newly-awakened Titans to return to hibernation before the events of ''Godzilla vs Kong'', as there's too many of them and resources are thin.
** The ''King of the Monsters'' closing credits mentions that Titans are mysteriously converging on Skull Island after the ending. An early script of ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' would have addressed this, but it ended up being scrapped, and nothing is mentioned of the convergence again.
* AcePilot: Lauren Griffin in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' is credited as this, and ''Kingdom Kong'' features several of these.
* AchillesHeel:
** Godzilla is the King of the Monsters, but his neck is shown in all his movie appearances to be a weak spot, because despite his crocodilian armor, the gills on his neck are sensitive to attacks.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Mechagodzilla is a HumongousMecha designed to kill the King of the Monsters himself, but it's reliant on its satellite uplink to function [[spoiler:even after Ghidorah's consciousness possesses it and makes it sentient]] -- disrupting the satellite uplink causes the Mecha to stall for a moment.
* ActionGirl: Mothra once again is a particularly powerful case. Among the humans, there's Mason Weaver in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'', and ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' and to a lesser extent ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' have dropped hints of Madison being a teenage one, plus there's several {{Ace Pilot}}s who try to fight Camazotz in ''Kingdom Kong''.
* ActionizedSequel: As the franchise trudges along, the films become much more epic and action-centric than ''Film/Godzilla2014'', which while not entirely without exciting fight scenes between the Kaiju, is an atmospheric apocalyptic horror film compared to its successors.
* AdaptationalAbomination: The {{Kaiju}} are mostly made out to be a lot more [[TimeAbyss timeless]], unknowable, and completely beyond mankind's ability to control, than they were in the earlier ''Franchise/{{Godzilla}}'' or ''Franchise/KingKong'' continuities. Their origins are made out to be slightly more mysterious, and most notably, it's ''impossible'' for human intelligences to safely and completely control the creatures, especially if they don't want to be controlled.
* AdaptationalDumbass: The {{novelization}}s make a few of the characters dumber than they were in the films. [[Film/Godzilla2014 Akio]] is more clueless of his surroundings, while [[Film/GodzillaVsKong Director Guillerman and especially Mark Russell]] are shown in the novel's extra scenes to be more incompetent than in the film (Mark as both [[TookALevelInDumbass a "Godzilla expert"]] and a [[MyBelovedSmother family man]]).
* AdaptationalBadass: Pretty much all of the major Kaiju carrying over from Toho and ''King Kong'' -- Godzilla, King Kong, Mothra, Rodan, King Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla -- get this treatment, becoming far more powerful, skilled and/or durable.
* AdaptationalExplanation: The {{novelization}}s provide some expansion which clears up a few Headscratchers and other plotholes in the movies.
* AdaptationalHeroism: While both of them have always had TragicMonster traits, Godzilla and Kong are presented as almost completely heroic in this continuity. Kong is explicitly described as protecting the creatures and natives of Skull Island from the Skullcrawlers and only attacks the invaders when they threaten his home or attack him first; he even goes out of his way to help and protect the invading humans as they help him in return. Godzilla, for his part, never directly attacks humans at ''all'', the damage he causes is merely an unavoidable effect of his battles and massive presence.
** The Skull Island natives themselves are also heroic. While in the original film they practiced human sacrifice to ward off Kong, and in various other adaptions they're monstrously deformed, in ''Kong: Skull Island'' they are taciturn but peaceful and friendly to outsiders.
* AdaptationalIntelligence: The non-original Titans in this franchise tend to be among the smarter iterations of their names that have come onto the big screen, with heightened combat prowess in many cases. Godzilla goes from a belligerent and tragic beast, to an animal capable of reasoning with humanity and Kong; Kong has shown virtually human-adjacent levels of intelligence [[spoiler:including the usage of sign language]]; and Ghidorah has been re-railed from the puppet of other alien beings who simply zaps everything in sight, to an independent threat who aims to take control of the other Titans on Earth so that he can use them to wipe out all life as we know it and apparently xenoform the planet into a home for himself.
* AdaptationalMundanity: The [=MonsterVerse=] is apparently doing this for the NotQuiteHuman characters of the old Toho movies. The Shobijin who serve Mothra are instead [[spoiler:humans with an uncanny HereditaryTwinhood in their family history and an implicit PsychicLink to Mothra]]. And the {{Human Alien}}s who use MindControl on King Ghidorah and other kaiju (the Xiliens and others) are substituted for genuinely-human antagonists who find EvilIsNotAToy and become {{Big Bad Wannabe}}s when they try to control Ghidorah.
* AdaptationalVillainy:
** Mechagodzilla in this continuity graduates from being a heroic, anti-heroic or soulless machine as it was in previously continuities, to being the SecretWeapon of a mass-murdering NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist which gets possessed by the soul of ''[[OmnicidalManiac Ghidorah]]''. Rodan in this continuity is portrayed as more of a demonic creature than past iterations, and he sides with [[OmnicidalManiac Ghidorah]] against [[BigGood Godzilla]] and [[FriendToAllLivingThings Mothra]] instead of vice versa.
** The official {{novelization}}s subtly make the human {{Big Bad Wannabe}}s out to be viler than their film portrayals. [[GeneralRipper Packard]] even more knowingly endangers his remaining men without their knowledge; [[MisanthropeSupreme Alan Jonah]] takes extra measures to stop Emma Russell from trying to stop King Ghidorah's global destruction, and he outright [[WouldHurtAChild threatens Madison's life]] more than once; and [[CorruptCorporateExecutive Walter Simmons]] is even more explicitly confirmed to be gleefully doing everything he can to maximize the death and destruction which endangers millions of people.
* AdaptationAmalgamation: Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla all mix various distinct traits from their incarnations in past continuities.
* AdaptedOut:
** Toho has to give Legendary explicit approval to use specific {{Kaiju}} for the series, meaning that the only monsters that are licensed out to the company are Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah, and Mechagodzilla. Presumably, this is the reason why Rodan is showing up before Anguirus. That being said, Toho is very supportive of the series, and it's likely that the approval process is based on determining what the movies need as opposed to there being real legal red tape preventing certain characters from being used.
** The [=MonsterVerse's=] iteration of Skull Island also adapts out the dinosaurs of older ''King Kong'' movies and instead utilizes mostly BigCreepyCrawlies.
* AdmiringTheAbomination: The Titans tend to attract awe and amazement from human characters, Monarch in particular, at least once per film. Although this is mostly directed at benevolent Titans who are humanity's protectors, even the genuinely hostile and dangerous Titan miscellanea like Shinomura, and [[IsleOfGiantHorrors Skull Island in general]], attract some awe and fascination from the human heroes at least once.
* AdvertisedExtra: Joe Brody was heavily featured in trailers for the 2014 movie, but in the movie proper, he dies fairly early on and is barely mentioned again after the LectureAsExposition. Likewise, the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' trailers put emphasis on Mark Russell and Ren Serizawa, but in the final film, Mark was a minor character with only a few scenes, while Ren despite [[AntagonisticOffspring his connection to the previous films]] was just an EliteMook. Promotional materials for ''WesternAnimation/SkullIsland2023'' emphatically feature a Skullcrawler and a Croc Monster, which are only in one episode of the show for a couple minutes with no bearing on the plot, respectively.
* AesopAmnesia:
** Admiral Stenz in the 2014 film went from trying to nuke Godzilla and the [=MUTOs=] to conceding Serizawa might be right about letting them fight. Come ''King of the Monsters'', and Stenz has apparently gone right back to considering Godzilla a threat and thinking the military should be in charge of fighting the monsters.
** In ''Kong: Skull Island'', Dr. Brooks' use of seismic charges on Skull Island while trying to map something he didn't understand causes things to go to pot, indirectly endangers and kills dozens of lives, and nearly puts the civilized world in danger of Skullcrawlers. Nearly fifty years later, in ''Kingdom Kong'', he tries ''again'' to use seismic charges on Skull Island and map something there that he doesn't understand, causing things to go to pot -- [[DeconstructedTrope THIS time, Brooks' actions cause or at the very least accelerate the island's extinction]].
** Mark Russell spends the course of ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' transitioning from using unresolved grief as justification for hating Godzilla's guts, to realizing that kind of outlook puts the whole world in danger from even worse monsters, to making peace with both Godzilla and himself. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Mark has gone back to being an inharmonious man, using unresolved angst to justify him distrusting Godzilla, which once again puts the fate of the world at stake, showing that he didn't internalize anything.
** The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization has extra cases of characters forgetting lessons they learned during the previous movie's events. ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' ended with Monarch building a more open and trusting relationship with the public (due to the harm their continued secrecy caused with the government and military trying to take managing the Titans into their own hands), and with humanity realizing that they can coexist with the Titans ''and'' flourish on their presence without harming the planet. In the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization, Monarch is portrayed as withholding secrets from the public once more, and humanity generally are going back to their old ways of over-exploiting the environment.

* AgeLift:
** Godzilla has always been described as ancient, but in this continuity he survived the Permian Extinction, which happened [[TimeAbyss 252 million years ago]].
** Judging by TheStinger of ''Kong: Skull Island'', Mothra, Rodan, and Ghidorah are also a lot older than their Toho counterparts. The original movie involving Ghidorah mentioned that he was over 5,000 years old, but based on Godzilla's own AgeLift and the fact that the two have already fought at some point in ancient history, he's most likely '''[[TimeAbyss significantly]]''' older here.
** In the meantime, Kong is conversely much, '''much''' younger than the other versions of the character, which are described as being prehistoric in nature. While his species of ape has been around for that long in this continuity, Kong himself is only a teenager in TheSeventies and still growing.
* AgentMulder: Serizawa's grandfather Eiji firmly believed in Gojira at a time when the rest of the fledgling Monarch thought the creature only existed in stories, Dr. Rick Stanton alone among the Monarch brass believes the HollowWorld theory to be true, and Bernie Hayes is a CloudCuckoolander ConspiracyTheorist who's entirely ProperlyParanoid about Apex Cybernetics.
* AggressiveCategorism: [[ColonelKilgore Packard]], the main human antagonist of ''Kong: Skull Island'', only sees the world in terms of "ally" and "enemy", and this becomes increasingly apparent as his sanity erodes. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Emma Russell believes that ''all'' the Titans are ultimately beneficial for the world regardless of their variations in behavior, while Mark Russell believes that all the Titans are monsters that should be wiped out regardless of their variations in behavior.
* AlienBlood: Some of the creatures on Skull Island bleed black, green or even white blood, as do the Warbats in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', whilst Ghidorah [[spoiler:who is an actual extraterrestrial]] in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' bleeds black blood.
* AllThereInTheManual: In the lead-up to the home release of ''Kong: Skull Island'', social media pages for the movie have been releasing video timelines for the [=MonsterVerse=]. Notable events include the establishment of a Monarch research base at a Caribbean volcanic island in 1991 (presumably Rodan's roost), the discovery of Mothra's cocooned form within her temple in China in 2009, and finding Ghidorah frozen in MysteriousAntarctica in 2016. The spin-off graphic novels and the {{novelization}}s for each film provide quite a bit of lore expansion.
* AncientEvil: Not all of the long-dormant prehistoric Titans are bad, but not all of them are good either. The [=MUTOs=] in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' and ''Godzilla: Aftershock'' are amoral {{explosive breeders}} which caused at least two of the planet's past mass extinctions before their contemporary awakenings. King Ghidorah in this incarnation has been [[MonsterInTheIce frozen in the Antarctic ice]] for thousands of years before he's thawed out in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', and he's just as much of a planet-threatening, {{sadist}}ic OmnicidalManiac as ever. ''Kingdom Kong'' reveals that one of the other prehistoric Titans, Camazotz, was a [[BatOutOfHell gigantic monster bat]] who went on to destroy Skull Island and almost all its inhabitants after he awakened.
* AndManGrewProud: A recurring theme throughout the [=MonsterVerse's=] mythology is past and present civilizations and organizations that built and achieved grand and amazing things falling into utter and irreversible ruin, often as a result of hubris when it came to trying to manipulate, conquer or destroy the greater Titans like Godzilla for their own benefit.
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' reveals that AdvancedAncientHumans like those who built the AdvancedAncientAcropolis in the HollowEarth attempted to enslave the Titans as war machines, which led to a human-Titan war which ultimately decimated both sides and destroyed the human civilization.
** ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' reveals that Kong's and the Iwi's ancestors built a vast temple in the Hollow Earth, and the ''Titanus Kong'' crafted weapons out of Godzilla's brethren which harnessed Godzilla's bio-atomic powers, but a GreatOffscreenWar occurred between the ''T. Kong'' and Godzilla, and now Kong is the {{last of his kind}}, living a completely primitive lifestyle after his ancestors were forced to migrate to Skull Island and were whittled away by the Skullcrawlers. The hi-tech corporation [[EvilInc Apex Cybernetics]] become a present day example: they, ignoring ''all'' the lessons in humility and harmony with nature that were ''apocalyptically'' enforced on humanity in previous [=MonsterVerse=] instalments, attempt to usurp Godzilla and the Titans for themselves by building a HumongousMecha in Godzilla's image so they can conquer them, and they're arrogant enough to essentially use [[OmnicidalManiac Ghidorah]]'s brain as Mechagodzilla's brain and use little-understood GreenRocks as fuel, which leads to Ghidorah's subconsciousness taking control of Apex's Mecha and using it to destroy them, threaten humanity once more, and presumably annihilate the corporation's name.
* AnimalNemesis: Both of the main protagonist Kaiju, Godzilla and Kong, have respectively been this to various human characters at times, and every time they have, it's either the {{deconstructed}} version of the trope or said humans are presented as fallacious and vindictive antagonists. [[GeneralRipper Packard]] in ''Kong: Skull Island'' is obsessed with killing Kong, as is his SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute General Ward in the ''Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' tabletop game; whilst Mark Russell in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and [[AntagonisticOffspring Ren Serizawa]] in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' both respectively want Godzilla dead due to MisplacedRetribution over Godzilla's indirect role in their loved ones' deaths.
* AnimalsRespectNature: Godzilla and Kong in this continuity are basically an AnimalisticAbomination and a colossal GentleGorilla respectively, who each in their own way keep the ecosystems they govern in check: Kong maintains Skull Island's ecosystem whilst Godzilla maintains the global ecosphere as his own territory, combating {{Kaiju}}-sized invasive species which threaten those ecosystems. Spin-off materials such as ''Godzilla: Dominion'' and the ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' novelization outright confirm that Godzilla is conscious of the positive effects his victories have on the world's ecosphere and he considers them good. ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' in particular explores the notion that the majority of Earth's Kaiju (Titans) are guardians and antibodies which maintain the balance of nature, although it's ultimately shown that most of those other Titans only enforce the natural order when they're strictly under Godzilla's control, not when they're following their own whims or when they're under the control of a [[Characters/MonsterVerseKingGhidorah more malignant Alpha Titan]].
* AntiVillain: The [=MUTOs=] in the original 2014 film are by far the least malevolent kaiju antagonists in the franchise, being motivated solely to reproduce and carve out territory, and Godzilla himself ultimately becomes this in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' when he [[spoiler:goes on a rampage trying to find Ghidorah's NotQuiteDead remnant]]. Admiral Stenz, with his {{wrong assumption}}s about the Titans just being a threat per the genre norm, and with his inability to learn his lesson coupled with his genuine well intentions, can be seen as this.
* AnyoneCanDie: The whole franchise is fond of [[DecoyProtagonist decoy protagonists]] and SurprisinglySuddenDeath. Curiously, and unusually for this trope, the overall series hews heavily to the Idealistic side of the SlidingScaleOfIdealismVersusCynicism.
* ApocalypseHow: The [=MUTOs=] will cause [[ApocalypseHow/Class4 global mass extinction]] if they repopulate and infest the globe. If King Ghidorah succeeds in reshaping the Earth's environment, he'll [[ApocalypseHow/Class5 strip the entire biosphere save himself back down to pure bacteria]] -- before he's defeated, Ghidorah manages to [[ApocalypseHow/Class0 destroy multiple cities globally]] and (in the novelizations), he [[ApocalypseHow/Class4 destroys a few ecosystems beyond repair]].
* ApocalypseNot: ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' saw the greatest Titan cataclysm in any [=MonsterVerse=] installment to date; with Ghidorah being unleashes and with his alpha call causing over a dozen Titans to spontaneously devastate the world, and with Ghidorah himself causing the complete destruction of Washington D.C., Boston and (indirectly) the displacement of an entire Mexican island's population. In subsequent instalments, this seems to have been largely brushed under the rug: the film's ending was {{retcon}}ned so the awakened Titans returned to hibernation instead of re-entering the global ecosystem as [[NothingIsTheSameAnymore the film implied]], a remark by Dr. Brooks in ''Kingdom Kong'' hints that Washington D.C. might have been rapidly rebuilt and re-settled by the U.S. government, and the socio-political, environmental and economic impacts of ''King of the Monsters''[='=] events aren't explored.
* ArchEnemy: Godzilla's most notable enemies are the [=MUTOs=] (recurring antagonists which are one of the reasons he's the LastOfHisKind after they killed the others to breed), and Ghidorah/Mechagodzilla (two of his most iconic enemies brought over from the Toho franchises [[spoiler:and [[CompositeCharacter rolled into one]]]], with whom Godzilla has a more visibly-personal enmity). For Kong on Skull Island, the Skullcrawlers are to him as [[Series/DoctorWho the Daleks are to the Doctor]], that being his most recurring enemies who contributed to him being the last of ''his'' kind. A MalignantPlotTumor in the [=MonsterVerse's=] later instalments is that Godzilla and Kong's species apparently have an old blood feud, but it turns out Kong actually cares very little for the feud and Godzilla doesn't even see Kong as that big of a deal.
* AscendedFridgeHorror:
** In ''[[Film/Godzilla2014 Godzilla]]'', the male and female MUTO originate from spores implanted into the same dead Titan (implying that they may have been laid in there by the same parent, depending on how the [=MUTOs'=] early life cycle works)... and upon maturing, they seek each-other out to mate, laying a nest of eggs. ''Godzilla: Aftershock'' reveals that these eggs were laid by a single MUTO Prime which subdued the spores' host, posthumously confirming that the MUTO couple were [[BrotherSisterIncest brother and sister]].
** ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'' and ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' both canonize FridgeHorror from preceding films respectively. See those films' trope pages for details.
* AsianAndNerdy: Though an American franchise, the [=MonsterVerse=] has seen several egghead characters who happen to be of Asian nationality and exceptionally smart. Monarch's monster experts and field specialists include the [=MonsterVerse's=] resident Dr. Serizawa, the Chen family and San Lin, whilst Serizawa's son Ren is a technically-gifted engineer, and Hiro in ''Skull Island'' is an expert cryptozoologist.
* AsYouKnow: Joe Brody in the 2014 film tells his wife whose job is looking at the nuclear reactor even more directly than him what'll happen if she gets caught in the radiation leakage, and Mark Russell in ''King of the Monsters'' snaps at Coleman for talking as if he doesn't know what the ORCA is even though he worked on the prototype.
* AttackOfTheFiftyFootWhatever: This universe's entire premise is that the world is filled with these, and while they've been mostly dormant, they're making a comeback.
* AttackTheMouth: This occurs with the Titans in some form in nearly every film. From [[Film/Godzilla2014 Godzilla's Kiss of Death which gets past a MUTO's natural armor]] to [[Film/KongSkullIsland Kong ripping out Ramarak's innards]] to [[spoiler:[[Film/GodzillaVsKong Mechagodzilla's attempt to end Godzilla's life via a Kiss of Death]]]].
* AxCrazy: Some of the Titans are good, some neutral, some bad, and after that some of them are, well... ''this''.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''; Ghidorah, upon waking up, takes a good look at the humans around his former resting site, then with a [[SlasherSmile smile]] on his [[MultipleHeadCase middle head]]'s face, proceeds to atomize them with all three heads' worth of [[BreathWeapon Gravity Beams]], and he continues to give any and all humans he encounters the same treatment for the rest of the movie. Upon taking over as the reigning global King of the Monsters, Ghidorah galvanizes the other Titans into attacking cities and engulfing the globe in a NaturalDisasterCascade, threatening to cause a global extinction event, ostensibly because he's violently xenoforming the Earth to his own liking -- and the novelization briefly notes that he [[ForTheEvulz might not even be doing the latter]].
** This trait carries over to Mechagodzilla once whatever's left of Ghidorah's consciousness reincarnates into it and makes it autonomous, in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''. The very first thing the Mecha does with its newfound sentience is murder its own creators, and upon breaking out of their base and seeing the Hong Kong skyline, it immediately turns its all-destroying BreathWeapon on the fleeing people and city blocks below, ''then'' it hyper-focuses on beating down and killing Godzilla at all costs, seemingly having the time of its life while it beats an exhausted Godzilla senseless.
** The Kraken in ''Skull Island'' attacks and tears apart the ''Once Upon a Maritime'' upon detecting it in the ocean, though not before it uses its body-detecting tentacles to toy with the humans onboard and violently throw them around, and it continues to attack and tear apart ''any'' manmade craft that attempts to pass over Skull Island's waters. The Kraken later rips an innocent whale out of the ocean and violently throws its body at Kong's home in an effort to goad Kong into fighting it in the sea, [[spoiler:and the WholeEpisodeFlashback shows it almost gleefully slaughtering the human village the day after it awoke from hibernation, then leaving the villagers' corpses behind for Kong to find as a taunt]].
* BaldOfEvil: Packard, the AxCrazy BigBadWannabe who is obsessed with killing Kong in ''Film/KongSkullIsland''. This trope is also {{downplayed}} and PlayedStraight in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', with that film's Big Bad Wannabe [[MisanthropeSupreme Alan Jonah]] and a couple of his {{Mook}}s respectively.
* BattleAmongstTheFlames: Both the {{Final Battle}}s in the 2014 film and ''King of the Monsters'' see the city smouldering and set aflame beneath the cloud-darkened sky.
* BattleInTheRain: One of the {{Kaiju}} battles in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' (although we only see that battle's beginning). Also nearly every battle against Ghidorah after he departs Antarctica in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', which is {{justified}} in his case because his WeatherManipulation forms a rainy PerpetualStorm wherever he goes. There's also Kong's battle against Camazotz in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', again justified by Camazotz causing a Perpetual Storm to close in over Skull Island.
* BeCarefulWhatYouWishFor:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Mark Russell starts the movie wanting Godzilla dead due to a bitter grudge over the past death of his son -- the Oxygen Destroyer seemingly grants Mark his wish, but he can't take any joy in it as Godzilla's apparent death directly enables King Ghidorah to begin wreaking global destruction unopposed.
** Madison has apparently gotten this between ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', as in the latter movie she's [[JumpedAtTheCall no longer as interested as she once was in having a normal life]], but her biased father won't let her return to being homeschooled and she finds she's miserable in a public school.
** In the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization, Ren Serizawa gets this during his death -- he wanted to be able to feel like a god indefinitely by finding a permanent power source for his psionically-controlled Mechagodzilla, and [[spoiler:once Ghidorah's remains take over the Mecha, Ren's consciousness is absorbed in a MindReformatDeath]].
* BeenThereShapedHistory: In addition to the Titans' OneMythToExplainThemAll; the 2014 film and its supplementary materials reveal that the nuclear bomb tests of TheFifties in the Pacific Proving Grounds were actually attempts to kill Godzilla and that Monarch believe the Great Smog of London was caused by another creature; whilst the ''Godzilla Aftershock'' graphic novel reveals that the [=MUTOs=] likely caused at least two of Earth's past major extinction events and also the Greek Dark Ages.
* BehemothBattle: Being a {{Kaiju}} franchise, giant monsters fighting, often to the death, is the [=MonsterVerse's=] crux; featuring at least one of these battles in every instalment, either in an urban area (Godzilla instalments) or on Skull Island (Kong instalments).
* BenevolentConspiracy: Monarch serves as an institution to make sure the monsters are kept in check, and are instrumental in helping the governments of the world prepare and deal with these threats accordingly. That being said, [[NiceJobBreakingItHero they do far more harm than good]] in ''Kong: Skull Island'', to the point where none of their people would have died if they hadn't agreed to ''bomb'' the place to try and map it.
* BerserkButton: For quite a few of the Titans, the sight of their respective rivals is a Button that'll drive them into a state of aggravation. In the case of protector Titans such as Kong and Mothra, seeing smaller creatures that they consider to be their own threatened is a sure way to get them on the defensive against you. Ghidorah also tends to go ''berserk'' with murderous intent when he hears the ORCA's signal transmitting. Among the humans, Emma Russell tends to lose her faux cool when someone brings up one of her children and questions her sanity in tandem.
* BewareTheNiceOnes: Mothra and Kong are two of the gentlest and kindest Titans around when it comes to humans, but even they are forces of nature if you cross them, and they won't show ''any'' mercy to hostile and invasive species which threaten their domains.
* BigBad:
** ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'': King Ghidorah; the rival Alpha Titan who uniquely equals Godzilla in terms of power, and who, upon Godzilla's temporary downfall, takes control of the other Titans for himself and attempts to wipe out all life as we know it. The threat that he poses forces the humans to band together with Godzilla and Mothra in order to take their planet back from Ghidorah.
** ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'': Mechagodzilla, a HumongousMecha created from Ghidorah's undead remains, whose existence sets off the entire plot and continues to instigate Godzilla's rampage. Upon becoming sentient, the Mecha kills its own creators, and it threatens to kill both Godzilla and Kong while exterminating any humans it lays eyes upon.
** ''WesternAnimation/SkullIsland2023'': The Kraken which terrorizes Skull Island's waters is responsible for shipwrecking the human cast on the island, [[spoiler:killing Mike's father Hiro in the process,]] and it presents the biggest and toughest obstacle to the human cast escaping the island with their lives. [[spoiler:It's also revealed to be responsible for killing several of Kong's beloved charges in the past and going out of its way to antagonize him, giving Kong a personal motivation for opposing the monster]].
* BigBadDuumvirate: In the 2014 ''Godzilla'' movie, the main antagonists are a MUTO BattleCouple. In ''King of the Monsters'', [[FallenHero Emma Russell]] and [[MisanthropeSupreme Alan Jonah]] work together to set the Titans loose on the world and let them devastate humanity.
* BigBadEnsemble: In ''Kong: Skull Island'', the GeneralRipper Packard poses just as much of a danger to the remaining human cast as Kong's giant Skullcrawler arch-enemy does: whereas Packard is obsessed with killing Kong for revenge regardless of how much he endangers everyone else, the Skullcrawler seeks to kill and eat Kong, and then everything and everyone else on the island. In ''King of the Monsters'', [[EcoTerrorist eco-terrorists]] Alan Jonah and [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] [[TeethClenchedTeamwork (shakily)]] work together to unleash Ghidorah in the belief that they can manipulate the latter into healing the world's ecosystems at the cost of killing billions of people, only for Ghidorah to fly off and do his own thing (attempting to wipe out humanity and bring even worse calamity to the global ecosphere than we would have), whilst the eco-terrorists initially try to resume their own plans by awakening Rodan.
* BigBadWannabe: The human antagonists in every film. They could all pose a genuine threat in a setting which ''didn't'' hold borderline-EldritchAbomination ancient Kaiju who represent forces of nature. As it stands, these human antagonists often at best end up on the losing end of an EvilerThanThou or at worst get squashed by a Titan like the bugs they are, often as a direct result of thinking they can control the Titans.
* BigCreepyCrawlies: Most of the creatures on Skull Island are this combined with {{Planimal}}. Other insectoid-looking Titans include Mothra, the [=MUTOs=] and Scylla.
* BigEntrance: Godzilla in his first two film appearances, and all the other big hitters in ''King of the Monsters'', make dramatic entrances which would make the cast of ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda3'' clap with glee.
* BigGood: Godzilla is the known world's main line of defence against hostile Titans by circumstance, due to him considering the world his global territory and maintaining its ecological balance. Kong serves the same role within Skull Island's borders [[spoiler:until the island is destroyed by Camazotz' HostileTerraforming]].
* BigRedButton: Monarch's Titan containment sites in the 2014 film and ''King of the Monsters'' have Big Red Buttons which activate emergency procedures designed to kill the captive Titans (or rather ''try'' to kill them). Ultimately, they only serve a very minor role in the plot of either film, as they either don't get pressed, or they dramatically fail to so much as make the Titans bleed.
* BlackAndNerdy: Dr. Brooks, Matemavi and Ben are all highly-intellectual (and in at least two cases, physically capable if unassuming), dark-skinned Monarch operatives. Bernie Hayes is a wily, African-American BunnyEarsLawyer.
* BladeBelowTheShoulder: The Mother Longlegs on Skull Island use their bladed legs for immobilizing and killing smaller prey, whilst Mothra has raptorial bladed forelimbs.
* BloodierAndGorier: While the classic films could have some blood, things are a lot more bloody and brutal here. This is especially clear when it comes to monster deaths, which have thus far included decapitations, disembowelments, and visceral incinerations.
* BloodKnight: Several of the {{Kaiju}} clearly enjoy themselves when fighting to the death. King Ghidorah's [[MultipleHeadCase right head (Ni)]] is described by the ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' director as the head that's constantly itching for a fight, Godzilla shows ambiguous signs of smiling when he's brawling with other monsters ([[SlasherSmile not so ambiguous]] in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong''), and Mechagodzilla [[spoiler:once it's possessed by Ghidorah's subconsciousness]] looks like it's enjoying literally and figuratively throwing Godzilla around much more than it needs to. This isn't just limited to the Kaiju: Lieutenant Colonel Packard in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' is a ColonelKilgore who is well and truly at home in a God-forsaken war zone away from civilization.
* BlueIsHeroic: Godzilla's atomic breath and dorsal spines glow blue, as per usual, and the [=MonsterVerse=] version is one of the more exclusively heroic iterations, acting to protect the world and generally not antagonizing humanity. Likewise, although Mothra's bioluminescence flashes with a variety of different colors, blue and teal are the most prominent colors, and she's [[AllLovingHero possibly the nicest Kaiju in the whole MonsterVerse]]. In ''Kong: Skull Island'', the heroic freelance mercenary James Conrad wears a blue shirt.
* {{Bookends}}:
** ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'': If we include the opening flashback to the time frame of ''Film/Godzilla2014'', then the movie begins and ends with the Russell family caught up in a city-destroying apocalyptic BehemothBattle which includes Godzilla fighting to save the world; [[spoiler:a battle where one of the family dies]].
** ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'': It both begins and ends with Kong going on his "morning stroll" in a jungle with Jia nearby.
** ''[[WesternAnimation/SkullIsland2023 Skull Island]]'': Several.
*** The beach where Mike and Charlie wash ashore on Skull Island at the end of the first episode is also where the FinalBattle of the season takes place in the last episode, with the presence of a broken mug among the jetsam on the shore linking the two scenes together.
*** The show's first season both begins and ends with [[WildChild Annie]] being cast into seawater, [[spoiler:losing consciousness, and waking up in an unfamiliar new environment]].
* BrainyBrunette: There's ''lots'' of brown-haired, exceptionally smart people, particularly on the heroes' side. Joe Brody, Dr. Graham, Madison Russell, Sam Coleman, Nathan Lind, Ilene Andrews, Jia, most of Aaron Brooks' Skull Island expedition, and almost every non-dumb human in the ''Skull Island'' animated series.
* BreathWeapon: Godzilla, as per usual, can fire a flaming ray of Atomic Breath from his jaws. [[OurDragonsAreDifferent Ghidorah]], also per usual, can fire [[PsychoElectro yellow rays of lightning]] from his heads' mouths, and Mothra can spit tough {{projectile webbing}} out of her mandibles. [[EvilKnockoff Mechagodzilla]] has an artificial imitation of Godzilla's Atomic Breath called the [[RedIsViolent Proton Scream]].
* BrokenTears: Joe in the 2014 film is reduced to tears when he's forced to [[ShootTheDog seal his wife inside with a lethal radioactive cloud]], which traumatizes him for the rest of his life. In ''King of the Monsters'', Madison is tearing up once she realizes that [[spoiler:her mother is a madwoman who's willing to commit global genocide by proxy and that]] ''Madison herself'' is complicit in crimes against humanity.
* BrutalBirdOfPrey: Rodan and the Hellhawks are built like birds of prey, and they're generally portrayed as aggressive and vicious beasts who pose a very real threat to the humans who disturb them.
* TheBusCameBack: James Conrad and Mason Weaver of ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' (2017) return in the storyline of the tabletop game ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'', released in 2023. Lee Shaw, a supporting character from the ''Film/Godzilla2014'' supplementary prequel graphic novel ''Awakening'', is finally set to return in the 2023 TV series ''Series/MonarchLegacyOfMonsters''.
* ButtMonkey:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', [[MultipleHeadCase Ghidorah]]'s left head in particular has the goofiest personality of the three heads, and it suffers the most misfortunes and indignities throughout the movie: being pushed around by the middle head for getting distracted, taking a barrage of missiles to the face, being decapitated by Godzilla's attacks ''twice'', and being the only head who ends up ramming himself through a skyscraper in Boston.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Maia Simmons is the [[KarmicButtMonkey karmic]] variety. Out of her depth and weak-willed to the point of idiocy, she ends up vomiting seawater, she vomits for real upon being one of the first humans to enter the HollowEarth since prehistoric times, [[spoiler:and finally; she dies a comically {{undignified death}} when her panic drives her to irrationally shoot at Kong, prompting him to grab the HEAV she's inside and crush it while she's shouting out a RapidFireNo string]].
** In the ''Skull Island'' series, one of Irene and Sam's mercenaries -- a bulky, blonde man -- is goofier and more prone to misfortune than the others. He gets tossed aside like a ragdoll when the mercs are luring Dog into a trap, becoming the only merc to get injured in the clash. [[spoiler:He also, in a much darker twist, is one of the mercs who don't make it off the island, getting murdered by the Kraken via its elastic tentacles when he's miles inland from its territory, with the Kraken tossing him around like a ragdoll before it lets him permanently disappear beneath the water]].
* TheCameo:
** Godzilla makes a cameo, and Rodan, Mothra and Ghidorah all make [[EarlyBirdCameo Early-Bird Cameos]], in the form of cave paintings at the end of ''Kong: Skull Island''.
** Several creatures from the first two films make cameos in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'': we see the female [=MUTO's=] remains, we see Leafwings at the film's end, [[spoiler:there's a skeleton modeled after [[Characters/{{Godzilla}} Anguirus]]]], and Kong has a single scene in the movie's novelization. Dr. Brooks from ''Kong: Skull Island'' also returns for a single scene.
* CanonForeigner: A lot of monsters are created for the series, including the [=MUTOs=] and the Skullcrawlers.
* CaptainErsatz: The [[ArchEnemy Skullcrawlers]] that Kong regularly fights on Skull Island are based on the Deathrunners from ''Literature/KongKingOfSkullIsland'' which is based on the [[Film/KingKong1933 original]] ''[[Film/KingKong1933 King Kong]]'' continuity as reptilian predators who wiped out Kong's family and the rest of his species. Dr. Rick Stanton who debuted in ''King of the Mosters'' is based on [[WesternAnimation/RickAndMorty another, animated Rick on Adult Swim]] as a cynical, alcoholic, white-haired scientist who deals in the fantastical in a sci-fi setting.
* CentralTheme: Both Godzilla films share the theme of a [[DysfunctionalFamily fractured family]] getting caught in the middle of the kaiju chaos and trying to survive and reunite.
* ChuckCunninghamSyndrome: All the surviving humans of ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' sans Dr. Brooks (and a post-movie cameo by his wife Dr. San Lin) are completely absent without explanation from all the subsequent [=MonsterVerse=] stories, even stories which bring back the Monarch presence on Skull Island with Dr. Brooks involved; despite the movie's [[TheStinger post-credits scene]] setting up James Conrad and Mason Weaver to join Monarch after their island experiences. Weaver and Conrad's syndrome finally ended after two subsequent movies, four graphic novels and an animated series; six years after their original movie was released, when the characters were brought back for the post-movie storyline of the tabletop game ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure''.
* CivilizationDestroyer: Later entries heavily imply that various Titans were responsible for the downfall of several ancient and even prehistoric civilizations when they rampaged. ''Godzilla: Aftershock'' reveals that an exceptionally powerful MUTO caste called MUTO Prime or Jinshin-Mushi caused the Late Bronze Age Collapse. The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization reveals that Godzilla himself caused the downfall of ''Titanus Kong''[='s=] ancient Hollow Earth-based civilization amid a war between the two Titan species, driving the surviving ''T. Kong'' to migrate to Skull Island on the surface and slowly devolve into a primitive lifestyle.
* ClimacticVolcanoBackdrop: In ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', Riccio's visions of Kong's parents -- [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane which might or might not have been hallucinogenic]] -- depict their fatal last stand against the Skullcrawlers as occurring amidst a volcanic eruption, with lava oozing and exploding all around them. When the parents are dead and the Skullcrawlers gone at the vision's end, the volcanism is gone.
* {{Cloudcuckoolander}}: Humans who've stood out for their ''quirky'' personalities include Zamalek in the ''Godzilla Awakening'' graphic novel, [[FishOutOfTemporalWater Lieutenant Marlow]] and [[FantasticallyIndifferent Captain Cole]] in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and [[ConspiracyTheorist Bernie Hayes]] in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''. And there's Ghidorah's [[GeniusDitz quirky, childish]] [[MultipleHeadCase left head]] in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''.
* ColonelBadass: Packard in ''Kong: Skull Island'' is a Vietnam vet, but he also turns into a GeneralRipper thanks to his ColonelKilgore. Colonel Foster in ''King of the Monsters'' is the G-Team's FrontlineGeneral.
* CombatTentacles: Shinomura is capable of growing tentacles for combat due to its [[TheWormThatWalks unusual composition]]. Kraken/Na Kika uses its tentacles to kill the Monarch scientists near its resting site when it falls under King Ghidorah's thrall in the ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' novelization. On Skull Island, the Mire Squid uses its tentacles as arms to fight Kong in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and the far-more powerful and vicious Kraken of Skull Island in the animated series (not to be confused with Na Kika) has sets of tentacles which it uses for grappling and attacking prey or foes, and for stinging them with bio-electricity and venom. The Mother Longlegs of Skull Island, and the Titan Scylla, both have tendrils around their orifices which they can use as grasping appendages.
* CommanderContrarian: Admiral Stenz, though [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure far from the stubbornest example of this trope]], has a track record of initially [[IgnoredExpert turning down Monarch's cautions]] and attempting to kill the Titans using military weaponry, causing things to go horribly awry before he takes Monarch's advice on how to clean up the mess. Packard in ''Kong: Skull Island'' ignores every rational-minded person who disagrees with his plan to kill Kong as his SanitySlippage turns him into a GeneralRipper. Riccio in ''The Birth of Kong'' opposes the expedition leader Aaron putting the group's safety first every time it compromises Riccio's own obsessions with studying the Iwi and Kong. Mark Russell tends to disagree with ''anything'' that doesn't adhere to "Titans are bad, Godzilla is the bad guy, and the whole world revolves around me feeling sorry for myself", at least until it blows up in everybody's faces.
* ConceiveAndKill: {{Discussed}} a couple times in supplementary materials. In the ''Godzilla Aftershock'' graphic novel, Emma Russell theorizes that had the [[Characters/MonsterVerseKaiju MUTO pair]] that featured in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' succeeded in reproducing, the female MUTO probably would've killed the male, although Emma seems doubtful in this theory in light of Monarch's analysis of the MUTO Prime. The ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' {{novelization}} reveals that studies of the [[Characters/MonsterVerseSkullIslandKaijuAndOtherCreatures Skullcrawlers]] (who are driven by pure HorrorHunger due to their hyper-metabolism constantly keeping them on the brink of starvation) have indicated that copulations among the creatures tend to end this way.
* ConflictKiller:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Monarch and the U.S. government are butting heads over whether to preserve and try to cohabit the world with the more benign Titans, or to adopt an active policy of indiscriminate Titan extermination; whilst a Monarch traitor [[spoiler:named Emma Russell]] wants to accelerate the dormant Titans' awakening and have them reclaim the planet from humanity. The schism continues until [[OmnicidalManiac King Ghidorah]] takes control of the other Titans for himself, and initiates a global apocalypse with the Titans at his beck and call which threatens to wipe out all life on Earth. At that point, Monarch, the military and the traitor all put aside their differences, and they do all they can to aid Mothra and Godzilla in killing Ghidorah at all costs.
** According to the [=MonsterVerse=] timeline in ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'', before the above events, the mere knowledge of Titans' existence caused worldwide governments and nations to put aside their differences and divisions in the face of a common potential existential threat to humanity.
* ConspiracyTheorist: Joe Brody in the 2014 movie became firmly convinced that a government organization has been covering up the truth about what happened the day Janjira became Japan's very own Chernobyl and he's obsessed with getting to the truth. Bernie Hayes in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' is a much broader conspiracy theory, who espouses about everything from [[TheCuckoolanderWasRight an evil corporation meddling with Titans]] to lizard-people running the world.
* ContrastingSequelAntagonist:
** Both the [=MUTOs=] and the Skullcrawlers are merely animals acting on instinct, but while the [=MUTOs=] are bulky, insectoid and they're portrayed as somewhat sympathetic and tragic, the Skullcrawlers are reptilian, slender, and played for full-on horror. Then they're followed by the draconic King Ghidorah, and later [[spoiler:his mechanical reincarnation Mechagodzilla]], and the marine, crustacean-cephalopodic {{sea monster}} the Kraken; all of whom are genuinely evil, sadistic and malicious creatures [[AxCrazy whose violent streaks go well beyond any normal animal instinct]]. It's also worth noting, whereas the [=MUTOs=] and Skullcrawlers are primordial, natural creatures, [[spoiler:Ghidorah is an ancient extraterrestrial of unknown origin who's considered an invasive species to Earth's biosphere]] and Mechagodzilla is a newly-manmade cybernetic beast, [[spoiler:then after the two of them we get a prehistoric beast in the Kraken again]].
** When it comes to the human antagonists, the films do this more than once and ultimately go slightly back and forth. The first human antagonist in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' is an insane GeneralRipper who wants to kill the Titans allegedly to keep humanity safe; then in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', the human villains are pro-Titan [[EcoTerrorist Eco-Terrorists]] who want the Titans to reclaim the world from humanity, then in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' we're back to anti-Titan villains with delusions of taking the planet back from the monsters for humanity. However, whereas the ''Skull Island'' and ''King of the Monsters'' human antagonists were underground, military and somewhat ragtag organizations in their own respective ways, the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' human fiends are wealthy, techy and well-dressed EvilInc operatives who have at least a moderate public image.%%

* ContrastingSequelMainCharacter: Or rather, Contrasting ''Prequel'' Main Character, on account of the fact that both the "new" main characters in these instances debut in an instalment that was released after but chronologically takes place before the "old" main character's previous cinematic appearance, respectively.
** Kong in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' to Godzilla in ''Film/Godzilla2014''. Although Kong and Godzilla are similar in the fact that they're gigantic, destructive beasts that nonetheless possess a modicum of intelligence, and both act as counterbalances to far worse threats, they are still quite different from each-other. Where Godzilla, although not actively destructive, doesn't really care about the well-being of humans, Kong is explicitly the defender of Skull Island's human natives and he exhibits a significant instinct to protect human life. Conversely, whilst Godzilla is usually apathetic to humans even when they're attacking him, Kong is much more deliberate when he slaughters the military envoy and kills Maia Simmons for attacking him. Although both Godzilla and Kong are described as being the last of their respective species, Godzilla is a millions-of-years-old sea beast with the personality of a GrumpyOldMan to match; meanwhile, Kong is a teenager to young adult by his species' standards, and has presumably been active ever since he was born. Godzilla may not necessarily intend to fight his opponents to the death, and may choose to let them live if they back down and submit to his authority, while Kong always fights his opponents with lethal intent, going for the killing blow as quickly as possible. Kong is also willing to make use of tools and resources in his surroundings such as {{improvised weapon}}s to give him the edge in a fight, which is something Godzilla almost never does in ''his'' fights. Finally, Godzilla is a semi-aquatic reptile and Kong is a strictly land-dwelling primate.
** Charlie in ''WesternAnimation/SkullIsland2023'' to Madison Russell in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong''. Whereas Madison was closely affiliated with Monarch by parentage and was privy to top expert information on the Titans including Godzilla; Charlie and his father just work for an unaffiliated cryptozoologist group, and he's blindsided by the existence of Skull Island and Titans whilst remaining in the dark about Kong's true nature. Whereas Madison put on a steely front around her companions, Charlie is openly vexed and nervy around his. Whereas Madison felt naturally drawn to Monarch- and Titan-related work and had an ObsessivelyNormal father trying to obstruct her from that, Charlie's relationship with his own father is the complete inverse: Charlie wants a normal life, while his eccentric father wants him to take up the cryptid-hunting mantle.
* ContinuityReboot: The franchise represents the third reboot of the ''King Kong'' film series[[note]]not counting Toho's version[[/note]] and the first American reboot of the ''Godzilla'' franchise following the [[Film/Godzilla1998 1998 movie]].
* CosmicHorrorStory: Earth is a hellish world in which humanity is surrounded by [[{{Kaiju}} gigantic monsters]] that have existed long before everyone was even born, and they are basically powerless against them once they awaken and begin reclaiming the world for themselves. Unlike the aliens and gods in the Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse or Franchise/DCExtendedUniverse, the heroic monsters are rather indifferent towards humanity and can be every bit as destructive as the villainous monsters. However, that does not preclude the monster being friendly and benevolent, as evidenced by Mothra and Kong, or by [[spoiler:Godzilla organizing his fellow monsters to leave humanity unharmed whilst replenishing the world's ecosphere]]. Oh, and [[spoiler:Ghidorah is living proof that alien life on par with the Titans exists, and the hydra in question is every bit as malicious and [[OmnicidalManiac hellbent on razing the Earth clean of life]] here as he ever was]].
* CouldHaveAvoidedThisPlot:
** {{Discussed}} in the 2014 movie: Ford believes that the entire plot after the DistantPrologue would never have happened if Monarch had tried to kill the metamorphosing male MUTO while they were monitoring it before it hatched.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Madison spells out to the BigBadWannabe[='s=] face that the only reason why the entire plot -- from Godzilla acting aggressive to his clash with Kong -- happened is because the Wannabe provoked Godzilla by creating Mechagodzilla for the sake of his own delusions, disrupting the entirely-beneficial truce which humanity and Godzilla had been at since the previous movie's ending.
* CreatureHunterOrganization: {{Subverted}} with Monarch. The organization was originally formed by the government and military with the explicit end-task of finding ways to exterminate any [[{{Kaiju}} Titans]] they discovered, but Monarch's own operatives tend to grow to admire and even revere the creatures after studying them up close, and they recognize both Godzilla and Kong as protectors of humanity against the more hostile Titans as well as the human race's only liable line of defence. Combine that with Monarch's findings that the Titans are essentially crucial antibodies to the Earth's ecosphere which human life can't survive without; and by the start of ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', Monarch's top brass are actively in a legal battle opposing the government's mounting pressure to see all the Titans indiscriminately exterminated. [[EvilInc Apex Cybernetics]] in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' see themselves as this trope or at least make themselves out to be so with their anti-Titan MugglePower plan, but in reality they're nothing more than [[TooDumbToLive obscenely]] [[{{Pride}} hubristic]] and amoral bastards using MugglePower as an excuse for their own selfish and thoroughly villainous end-goals.
* CrowdPanic: As would be expected from a {{kaiju}} franchise, there's at least three instances of people running and screaming in the streets when the monsters arrive, across at least three movies (the 2014 movie, ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and ''Godzilla vs. Kong'').
* CrypticBackgroundReference: There are references to past Titan events, and previously-undocumented and long-gone ancient civilizations, peppered in every movie, though one shouldn't hold out hope of them ever getting properly explained and expanded upon. From the elaborate ruins dotted on the wilderness-claimed Skull Island, to the hieroglyphs and mythology documenting Godzilla and Mothra's original ancient conflict with Ghidorah, to the ''Titanus Kong'' species' ruined temple and GreatOffscreenWar with Godzilla in the HollowEarth.
* TheCuckoolanderWasRight: More often than not. The biggest instance is in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', when Dr. Serizawa's open beliefs that Godzilla is ultimately the world's protector rather than its destroyer, dating back in the 2014 movie, are finally vindicated. Joe Brody in the 2014 movie is seen by his son as a wackjob who lost his mind with grief, but he's proven completely right that the government are covering up a living creature. Dr. Brooks and Bill Randa in ''Kong: Skull Island'' have been dismissed as loonies by the government and ''even by other Monarch operatives'' in the past for believing in Skull Island and HollowEarth theory (both of which are proven to be 100% real, much to the delight of Brooks' cynical, alcoholic token advocate Dr. Stanton). Bernie Hayes in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' is a very ''wacky'' ConspiracyTheorist who's 100% right that Godzilla is GoodAllAlong and that Apex Cybernetics are up to something sinister.
* CurbStompBattle:
** Pretty much all of Kong's fights except those against the Skull Devil, Godzilla and Mechagodzilla are swift, and his opponents -- whether they be military men or Skull Island's other creatures -- barely stand anything resembling a chance against the King of the Primates up to the point where he takes them out.
** Speaking of Skull Island; [[FauxActionGirl Helen Karsten]] in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', despite being a trained ex-Navy survivalist armed with a machete, gets torn apart by Death Jackals within ''seconds'' and doesn't manage to get a single hit in.
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' features '''several''' curb-stomp battles. The paramilitary eco-terrorists pulverize Monarch's outposts without difficulty, Rodan pulverizes Monarch's aerial forces without difficulty, Ghidorah overwhelms and defeats Rodan without difficulty, [[spoiler:and [[SuperMode Burning Godzilla]] finally pulverizes Ghidorah without any further difficulty]].
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', a [[ArchEnemy Ghidorah]]-possessed Mechagodzilla literally and figuratively wipes the floor with Godzilla (albeit after Godzilla had expended much of his strength cutting halfway through the planet and fighting Kong), and it takes Kong's intervention on Godzilla's behalf to even out the fight.
* CurbStompCushion: Rodan lasts a full minute or two during his aerial battle with Ghidorah in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' before being taken down, whilst both of Kong's fights against Godzilla in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' are this with Kong being the cushion.
* CuriosityKilledTheCast: PlayedWith. ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' is so far the biggest offender, but despite Monarch's heroism, one can also partly blame the plot of ''King of the Monsters'' on them actively seeking and containing the seventeen new Kaiju as part of doing their job (which is what gave the [[EcoTerrorist Eco-Terrorists]] something to work with, including freeing [[BigBad Ghidorah]]).
* DarkIsEvil: Among the Titans, the [=MUTOs=] and Camazotz have a primarily black and dark-gray color scheme (and in the latter case go so far as to bring TheNightThatNeverEnds with their presence), and they're mainly portrayed as hostile creatures which threaten man and nature on a regional (Camazotz) to global ([=MUTOs=]) scale if Godzilla or Kong can't defeat them.
* DeadpanSnarker: Quite a lot of human characters. There's Elle Brody in the 2014 film, Captain Cole in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and there's Tarkan in ''Godzilla Aftershock''. ''King of the Monsters'' and the ''Skull Island'' 2023 series in particular have [[WorldOfSnark pretty much the whole cast acting snarky and quippy at least once]].
* DeathByIrony:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', the Titans are portrayed most emphatically as having the potential to change humanity's world for the better instead of the worse, and Monarch are shown to have a very reverent attitude to the Titans they study -- which makes it all the more tragic when hundreds to thousands of Monarch's containment staff around the world are slaughtered by the very Titans they hold in awe once [[KillAllHumans King Ghidorah]] spontaneously brings them under his thrall. [[spoiler:Dr. Serizawa, who survived the atomic bombing of Hiroshima as a baby and is very mindful of nuclear power as a result, ultimately gives his life by willingly and manually detonating a nuclear warhead to heal Godzilla so the latter can stop Ghidorah, representing Japan coming to terms with nuclear power after their trauma as a nation at the dawn of the atomic age]].
** In ''Skull Island'', the Croc Monster is introduced [[DynamicEntry ambushing and eating a mercenary alive]], and then a few minutes later, ''Kong'' is introduced ambushing and eating the Croc Monster alive.
* DeathByOriginStory: Quite a few of the human characters are directly influenced by the loss of loved ones in their backstories. Joe Brody's wife Sandra, Andrew Russell, Dr. Lind's brother David and Bernie's wife Sara.
* DeathFromAbove: The male MUTO in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' employs a hit and run strategy using its wings, and dive-bombs [[spoiler:the boat carrying the nuclear bomb the military intended to use to kill him, the female and Godzilla]]. The spin-off graphic novel ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'' recycles the Vinestrangler -- a creature that was cut from ''Film/KongSkullIsland'', hanging from trees and using its CombatTentacles to ambush and devour unsuspecting prey that wanders below it -- as a Monarch creature profile.
* DeathGlare: Quite a few over the course of the franchise. The most notable examples include Packard frequently dishing these out to anyone who pisses him off, Ichi (Ghidorah's middle head) giving Madison one when the heads spot her and he realizes she's responsible for broadcasting the ORCA signal, and Godzilla and Kong exchanging such looks mutually at the end of their first battle.
* DeathWorld / EldritchLocation: Skull Island is not that far off from being an AcidTripDimension, and it's inhabited by various giant monsters who could easily hunt any humans on the island until there's none left if they weren't being kept in check by Kong. The same applies to the HollowEarth, which is speculated to be directly connected to Skull Island's origin.
* DeepBreathRevealsTension: {{Invoked}} in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' when Emma and Madison are walking past piles of fresh corpses, and Emma is telling Madison to regulate her breathing just like they practiced. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Nathan Lind has to take a breath to steady himself after Walter Simmons gives him condolences for [[ILetGwenStacyDie his brother's death]].
* DefiantToTheEnd:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', [[LittleMissBadass Madison]], cornered by a peeved-off [[BigBad Ghidorah]] with no way out as the dragon is charging up his [[BreathWeapon Gravity Beams]] to personally atomize her, decides to go out screaming in defiance at the three-headed False King, before a [[DynamicEntry timely arrival]] by Godzilla saves her bacon. [[spoiler:At the movie's end, at least [[MultipleHeadCase two of Ghidorah's heads]] go out fighting against Burning Godzilla ([[GeniusDitz one]] more reluctantly than [[HotBlooded the other]]), whilst the remaining head dies [[ScreamsLikeALittleGirl shrieking like a little girl]]]].
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', a severely-beaten Kong roars defiantly in Godzilla's face rather than submit to him, [[spoiler:even when Godzilla has decisively won their last battle and inflicted near-lethal injuries on Kong]]. At the movie's end, the Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla dies trying to fire its BreathWeapon at Kong, even after Kong has hacked off all but one of its limbs and is readying the killing blow.
* DemotedToExtra: Whilst the franchise does bring some characters from previous entries back in future instalments, if they're not Kaiju then they're pretty much guaranteed to experience this trope. Admiral Stenz, Mark Russell, Dr. Brooks, and also the Skullcrawlers, all have a lot less screentime and a more minor part in their second movie appearances that they did in their debuts respectively.
* DenserAndWackier: The franchise has been getting increasingly zany and further from its grim, semi-realistic roots which each new film: the further a movie is from ''Film/Godzilla2014'', the less recognizable it is as part of the same universe.
** ''Godzilla'' was grim and dead-serious, it was fine with suddenly killing off a DecoyProtagonist and hosts of minor characters, and it tried to be as grounded in reality as a movie which features dai{{kaiju}} big enough to break the square cube law could hope to be.
** ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' introduced more exotic monsters and an outright EldritchLocation as the main setting, and some of the new characters upped the hamminess, quips and black comedy; but it was still a fairly dark and serious film, and it maintained the 2014 film's choice to give the kaiju slow and weighty movements befitting their size.
** ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' retained the previous films' dark and apocalyptic tone and [[AnyoneCanDie the killing off of significant characters]], but it also widened the WillingSuspensionOfDisbelief. Monarch was changed from the moderately-funded and somewhat dusty organization of the previous movies to the [=MonsterVerse=] version of [[Characters/{{MCUSHIELD}} S.H.I.E.L.D.]], complete with tens of billions of dollars' worth of hi-tech and its very own institutionalized military division, ''despite'' the fact the organization is on trial in this film; the human characters spout considerably more jokes and humor; the kaiju start to get more agile for their size (though still mostly maintaining a weighty pace); and kaiju which are much less close-to-human than [[GentleGorilla Kong]] get more anthropomorphically expressive and emotive than the creatures in previous films. One of these monsters even includes an actual extraterrestrial that's supposed to be even more otherworldly than the other kaiju.
** ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' takes the wackiness further. It all but ditches the weighty pace and makes the kaiju move like seven-foot people, and it all but removes the apocalyptic atmosphere of the previous films in favor of a LighterAndSofter treatment where [[OnlyEvilCanDie nobody who's both good-aligned and a significant character EVER dies]]. More of the new human cast including the antagonists are [[ConspiracyTheorist goofy]] and [[{{Narcissist}} hammy]], the newer hi-tech gadgets and the featured Eldritch Location are now on the verge of reaching ''Franchise/StarTrek'' levels of fantastical, and both Kong and (to a much lesser extent) Godzilla are further anthropomorphized.
** ''WesternAnimation/SkullIsland2023'', a prequel set inbetween ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', is somewhere in the middle between the ''Kong'' movie and ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' in terms of dense and wackiness, harkening back more to ''Kong: Skull Island''[='s=] exotic but gritty and bloody tone. On one hand, the cast is in a WorldOfSnark, the monsters (particularly Kong, Dog and a giant hawk) are TheSilentBob levels of expressive like the monsters in the later two [=MonsterVerse=] movies were, and one of the new creatures is basically a giant, mutant werewolf-pitbull creature who behaves much like a dog even in the wild. On the other hand, the series features none of the later two movies' fantastical hi-tech (the closest approximation being a TrackingDevice small enough to conceal inside handcuffs being available to high-paying mercenaries in the early [[TheNineties 1990s]]), and characters who don't deserve it die horrible and often bloody deaths at the creatures' hands. The kaiju themselves in the animation vary in the speed and weight of their movements, from semi-realistically slow and weighty like in the earlier movies to speedy enough to match Woody Woodpecker despite the laws of physics, depending on the scene.%%

* DetrimentalDetermination:
** ''Kong: Skull Island'': Disgruntled and inwardly-bloodthirsty war vet [[NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist Packard]] singles Kong out as his new "enemy" after the latter slaughters half his men and strands the cast on [[IsleOfGiantHorrors Skull Island]], setting himself on killing the ape at all costs before he even seriously ''considers'' getting the people he still has to protect off the island. He refuses beyond reason to give up his vendetta against Kong after the cast learn that Kong acted in defence of his territory and that he's the only thing keeping the island's Skullcrawler horde from becoming an unchecked threat to the world, and he makes calls which place his remaining men needlessly in harm's way and get more of them killed. [[spoiler:In the end, all his remaining men, who would've once followed him into hell itself if he ordered them to, desert him once they realize Packard has gone completely insane, and he dies alone trying to kill Kong before he perishes]].
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'': The eco-terrorists Alan Jonah [[spoiler:and Emma Russell]] stick doggedly to their plan to set as many Titans loose as possible and let them rampage to change the world to their liking. Jonah doesn't appear to realize that King Ghidorah will kill him, his men and all life on Earth both human and not in the end, [[spoiler:while Emma not listening to her daughter's pleas to have a HeelFaceTurn sooner ends up alienating her from the only person she cared about more than her plan]].
** ''Godzilla vs. Kong'': Godzilla is so focused on destroying or beating any threat to his dominance into submission that his sheer aggression turns an oblivious human race against him, and he ends up wasting his own precious energy on brutalizing and crippling an Alpha Titan who could've helped him neutralize the real threat (Mechagodzilla) earlier. [[BigBadWannabe Walter Simmons]] is so overconfident and so obsessed with proving humanity superior to Godzilla and conquering the Titans, he's more or less ignored all the aesops of the previous films in favor of pursuing his warped dream, and his sheer recklessness in harnessing Ghidorah's telepathic skull to that end and in ignoring his subordinate's cautions out of impulse leads to a Ghidorah-possessed Mechagodzilla killing him, and destroying everything he worked for. Mark Russell, having learned next to nothing from the previous film, is too dogmatic and close-minded in his insistence that he knows what's right (which he blatantly doesn't): he {{easily condemn|ed}}s Godzilla without any real proof, which helps Simmons to endanger millions, and he can't see that his own controlling effort to keep Madison safe while reconnecting with her is only driving her away from him all over again.
* DevouredByTheHorde: The Leafwings and their relative the Psychovultures on Skull Island, being as small and swarming as they are, tend to do this, as do the Death Jackals also on Skull Island; in ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''The Birth of Kong''.
* DidntThinkThisThrough:
** Several-fold in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''.
*** The eco-terrorists want to release the Titans to restore balance to nature before a manmade mass extinction ensues, but they're so indiscriminate in ''which'' Titans they set loose (not considering that only ''some'' of them are capable of coexisting with humanity and the current natural order), they unwittingly awaken an even ''worse'' threat to man and nature alike in the form of Ghidorah. [[NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist Not that their misanthropic leader minds]].
*** [[spoiler:The eco-terrorists' accomplice Emma needlessly dragged her own daughter Madison into the plan without properly indoctrinating her, and she's completely clueless when Madison is justifiably traumatized by their atrocities, permanently alienated from Emma, and becomes more trouble than she's worth to their plan's success]].
*** The U.S. military panic and fire their Oxygen Destroyer in an effort to kill the newly-rampant Rodan and Ghidorah ''without'' first consulting the on-site Monarch presence, leading to an EpicFail when the weapon cripples Godzilla instead and leaves Ghidorah free to galvanize the other Titans into completely destroying mankind.
*** Madison, [[spoiler:using the ORCA to disrupt Ghidorah's global Titan control and lure Ghidorah himself to a FinalBattle against Godzilla in Boston]], handles the DistressBall by staying put and ''waiting'' for a pissed-off Ghidorah to arrive at hers and the [=ORCA's=] location. And ''then'' she unwittingly gives away her exact location to the human-killing monster when she unplugs the ORCA from the PA system so that its Titan-attracting signal is solely emitting from the device in her hands.
** The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization notes that Dr. Nathan Lind has a [[FatalFlaw bad habit]] of tunnel vision when he sets his eye on an end-goal, and that he's also the only one on Team Kong who doesn't (however half-heartedly) suspect Apex are up to no good nor think they should be asking ''why'' a Protector Titan like Godzilla is behaving the way that he is before they try to kill him. The former trait contributed to Nathan's brother's death in the backstory, while the latter trait makes him a perfect UnwittingPawn for Apex who doesn't realize he's furthering an evil plan until Apex have gotten what they need out of him.
** In the ''Skull Island'' animated series, Irene, as part of her plan to get Annie back without the latter's loyal monster companion Dog obstructing her efforts and killing her men, tries to kill Dog [[spoiler:by luring him into the Hawk Monster's talons]]. [[spoiler:After Irene is revealed to be Annie's long-lost mother who just wants her [[MissingChild daughter]] back,]] Annie calls Irene out for thinking the former would ''ever'' want anything to do with a woman she barely remembers if she'd succeeded in killing the only companion that Annie had for most of her life while she was fending for herself on an IsleOfGiantHorrors, making it clear that Irene is very lucky that Annie knows Dog survived her attempt to get rid of him.
* DisappearedDad: Supplementary materials reveal that Dr. Vivienne Graham and James Conrad's respective fathers both died in their backstories when they were young -- in Vivienne's case, before she was born. In the backstory of the ''Skull Island'' animated series, Annie and Dog's respective fathers [[MutualKill killed each-other]] on [[IsleOfGiantHorrors Annie's Island]] when Annie and Dog were very young.
* {{Doublethink}}:
** [[SanitySlippage Walter R. Riccio]] in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'' once he loses his mind. He rants that they need to prove whether or not Kong is the protector the Iwi and Houston Brooks believe him to be... by endangering Kong's charges via exposing them to Skull Island's hostile wildlife, comparing it to something as inevitable and necessary as childbirth. Oh, and if Kong ''doesn't'' intervene to protect the Iwi, then it's a sign that the whole world deserves to burn in Riccio's book.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', [[NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist Alan Jonah]] believes that saving the rest of the world's biosphere from a manmade extinction event is worth anything... up to and including letting an OmnicidalManiac of a Titan wreak even worse destruction on the Earth's global biosphere than our species would have, [[MisanthropeSupreme so long as said Titan makes sure humanity is one of the species that perishes completely]]. [[spoiler:His partner-in-crime Emma Russell isn't any better: after losing her son in a Titan attack five years prior, she wants to ensure nothing like that happens to anyone ever again... by setting all the remaining Titans loose on humanity ahead of schedule so that they'll surely decimate civilization and create millions more broken families, taking out her rage on the world and refusing to acknowledge it]].
** In the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization, [[EvilGenius Ren Serizawa]]'s POV shows that he believes the Titans he's helping Apex to try and conquer are nothing more than a new kind of rival animal for humanity to domesticate or kill off, and he scorns the notion that individual humans matter in the bigger picture of the overall human race's advancement... while believing that he alone is going to [[GodhoodSeeker ascend to godhood]] when he gains full control of his cybernetic HumongousMecha that is [[EvilKnockoff based directly on a Titan]].
* DownerBeginning: The movies don't exactly open up with sunshine and rainbows.
** ''Godzilla'' (2014): A husband and father is [[ShootTheDog forced to lock his own wife and several co-workers inside an irradiated chamber to die]] whilst his former home city becomes the Japanese Chernobyl, because of a prehistoric monster that mankind knows almost nothing about escaping into the world.
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'': The opening reveals that the ocean is suffering mass die-offs, humanity is still reeling from the devastation that occurred in the first movie five years on, and everyone is anxious or fearful about the presence of even more Titans in the world.
** ''Godzilla vs. Kong'': The opening establishes that Kong's island home and all but one of his charges have been wiped out, whilst the normally-heroic Godzilla, King of the Monsters seemingly launches an attack on a coastal city for no reason.
** ''Skull Island'' (2023): Several. The overall series storyline begins with a hyper-aggressive [[KrakenAndLeviathan kraken monster]] destroying the human cast's boat, and one of their own being murdered in front of his son's eyes, leading them to be shipwrecked on [[IsleOfGiantHorrors Skull Island]] and separated from each-other. Episode 5 opens with Annie and an ailing Mike getting effectively captured by the PrivateMilitaryContractors, Dog getting carried off by the [[KidnappingBirdOfPrey Hawk Monster]], and Charlie being left all alone. Episode 6 opens with a flashback to the night [[DisappearedDad Annie's father died]], just before he went to his death.
* TheDragon: In this continuity, this trope is notably retconned from Ghidorah, as it's a one-dragon AlienInvasion by himself, and in both his film appearances, the human antagonists attempting to control him ends up being a total EvilIsNotAToy, truly making him '''King''' Ghidorah. In a bit of AdaptationalVillainy, Rodan becomes King Ghidorah's Dragon in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' after Ghidorah defeats him, staying close by Ghidorah as his vanguard whilst the rest of Ghidorah's Titan army is spread out across the globe. Among the human antagonists, Alan Jonah is a big DragonInChief to [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', and Ren Serizawa is [[CorruptCorporateExecutive Walter Simmons]]' close right-hand man in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' (revealed to be a DragonWithAnAgenda in the novelization).
* DramaticallyMissingThePoint:
** In ''Godzilla'' (2014), it's hinted that Admiral Stenz misconstrues Serizawa's effort to make him understand that man isn't nearly as powerful in the face of nature as we think we are as Serizawa being personally afraid of another Hiroshima bombing due to his own past, when Serizawa shows Stenz his father's stopped pocket watch to try and dissuade Stenz from an extremely risky nuclear strike against the Titans. Stenz hasn't learn his lessons by the time of ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' (2019) either.
** In ''Kong: Skull Island'', Marlow and Dr. Brooks try to impress on [[GeneralRipper Packard]] that Kong is necessary for mankind's survival because without him, the Skullcrawlers that he's been working to keep in check will reproduce out of control and devour everything. The only message that Packard in his SanitySlippage takes away is that he should wipe out the Skullcrawlers too ''after'' he's killed Kong, assuming that he's capable of doing such a thing on his own when Kong hasn't been able to do more than keep the creatures underground and limit their numbers while they were small with youth.
** ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' shows that after the events of the previous movie, [[HotBlooded Mark Russell]] realized he was wrong to [[ParentalNeglect cut himself out of his daughter's life]]... so instead, he's overcompensating in the other direction by being a [[MyBelovedSmother demanding, patronizing, obstinate helicopter parent]] who insists he knows what's best for Madison better than she does, and no matter how many arguments Madison has with him, he refuses to realize that he's liable to start driving her away from him all over again, which is the very outcome he's desperately trying to avoid.

* DrawAggro: The human cast diverting the Alpha Skullcrawler's attention and distracting it to help Kong beat it in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and Emma Russell preventing King Ghidorah's NearVillainVictory by distracting him from sucking an exhausted and empowered Godzilla dry of energy long enough for Godzilla to use the energy to reach his SuperMode.
* DroppedABridgeOnHim: This happens to a few human characters. Joe Brody in the 2014 film and Bill Randa in ''Kong: Skull Island'' are made out to be major characters during the early part of either film and are then abruptly killed off no more than halfway through either film, whilst [[spoiler:Dr. Graham]] from the 2014 film reappears in ''King of the Monsters'' only to be killed by Ghidorah roughly 1/3 into the movie's run time.
* DrowningMySorrows: It's not seen, but mentioned a few times. Mark Russell turned to drinking in the initial aftermath of his son's death, and the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization mentions Bernie briefly did this after his wife died.
* DugTooDeep: This is one of the main causes of the Titans' emergences and is recurring throughout the franchise; with prominent examples including the [=MUTOs=] in the 2014 film and the Skullcrawlers in ''Skull Island''.
* DynamicEntry: Godzilla does this a good few times against his opponents in his first two film appearances, whilst Mothra and Rodan both utilize this when they enter the FinalBattle of ''King of the Monsters'' respectively.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:E-H]]
* EarlyBirdCameo: TheStinger of ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' features cave paintings of Mothra, Rodan and Ghidorah, teasing their debuts in the flesh as major characters in [[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 the next movie]]. In ''WesternAnimation/{{Skull Island|2023}}'', Sam first appears without a name or any lines of dialogue among a crowd of mercenaries chasing Annie in the series opening, before he reappears later as Irene's sociable and competent right-hand man.
* EarNotch: A horn variation. Ghidorah's PerpetualFrowner right head (Ni) has a broken horn in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', as does Camazotz the Dark Titan in ''Kingdom Kong''.
* EarnYourHappyEnding: The 2014 film ends with Godzilla saving the world from the [=MUTOs=], and the human lead making it home to his family after all the hell he's been through. ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' likewise ends on a surprisingly happy note [[spoiler:with Godzilla and Kong burying the hatchet after all the villains have been defeated]].
* EldritchLocation: Skull Island, which Bill Randa describes as "the land where God did not finish creation", is a truly otherworldly IsleOfGiantHorrors that's populated by gigantic {{planimal}}s, closed off from the world by a {{perpetual storm}} encircling the surrounding waters, and host to atmospheric and geological anomalies. It's speculated in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' that Skull Island is basically a piece of the HollowEarth (which is itself an Eldritch Location in that movie), which bled onto the surface world. The monster-populated inner Hollow Earth in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' is separated from the Earth's crust by a gravity-inverting membrane, which makes it difficult to access while also speeding up the 3000km travel time from the planet's outside to its inside, and the Hollow Earth's [[AcidTripDimension floor and ceiling have their own gravity fields with a kind of gravity-free neutral zone in the altitudinous center]].
* ElementalPersonalities: The various {{Kaiju}} (Titans), especially the ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'' ensemble, tend to have elemental power alignments and personality traits to match them.
** Water:
*** Godzilla is a giant semi-aquatic creature, and despite the fear he inspires, he's ultimately committed to defending the world's natural balance against those who would disrupt it, even displaying a distinct tolerance of humans so long as they don't make themselves a major threat to that balance. He's survived being nuked point-blank ''multiple times'' and grown stronger for it.
*** Na Kika/Kraken is a gigantic, vaguely cuttlefish-like, ocean-dwelling cephalopod, whose abilities to [[ChameleonCamouflage camouflage]] and [[MasterOfYourDomain mimic organ failure]] make them one of the single most biologically-adaptive Titans around.
** Light: Mothra is physically characterized by her [[BioluminescenceIsCool Beta-Wave Bioluminescence]] and [[LightIsGood blinding God-Rays]]. Shown to be one of the most benevolent Titans toward humans by far, she directly refuses to obey nor tolerate [[OmnicidalManiac King Ghidorah]]'s reign of terror.
** Fire: Rodan is portrayed in this continuity as a bio-volcanic creature that hibernated inside a volcano and has [[HotWings lava-leaking wings]]. He's trigger-happy when provoked to defending his territory and when serving Ghidorah, displaying an excessively violent streak towards humans.
** Electricity: Ghidorah has [[PsychoElectro bio-electric powers]] which basically make him a living superstorm. He's completely AxCrazy to a point far beyond the instincts of other hostile Titans, actively slaughtering any humans he sees for the fun of it, and actively seeking to usurp Godzilla's global domination and radically change the planet's entire environment per his own wants.
** Earth: Kong (a.k.a. the Mountain Who Thunders Death), and Methuselah (a giant rocky {{Planimal}}) are described as Protector Titans; relatively peaceful, and environmentally and symbiotically beneficial. Kong is even more expressively protective of the humans he considers under his charge than Godzilla is, but he's willing to put emotion aside in favor of reason [[spoiler:when he aids Godzilla against the greater threat posed by Mechagodzilla, and when he decides it's better to just bury the hatchet with Godzilla]]. Methuselah is described in its Monrch profile as a MightyGlacier who is very resistant to attacks and [[TurtleIsland even allows humans to shelter on its mountainous back]].
** Metal: Mechagodzilla is a chrome, metal HumongousMecha, created by an [[EvilInc evil corporation]] who have remained stubbornly set in their views that Godzilla is an enemy even after Godzilla was vindicated. [[spoiler:Soulless in origin and intended to be an unfeeling RemoteBody for a human pilot, Mechagodzilla becomes possessed by the lingering consciousness in Ghidorah's undead skull, and despite only being "alive" for less than an hour, the Mecha makes ruthless, knowledgeable and efficient use of its arsenal to wear Godzilla down]].
** Darkness: Camazotz, "the Dark Titan", is a giant black bat which lives in darkness and [[WeakenedByTheLight cannot stand light]]. In the graphic novel ''Kingdom Kong'', he's revealed to be the force responsible for enshrouding Skull Island in a closed PerpetualStorm, which was part of his gambit to emerge in the resulting darkness and take the island from Kong in a deadly fight, indifferent to how his actions would spell the extinction of the island's native life.
** Air: The male MUTO in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' is a MetamorphosisMonster who becomes airborne in his adult form, characterized as caring about very little except plundering nuclear food and making babies with the only other available female of his kind. Like his [[BrotherSisterIncest sister-girlfriend]], he couldn't care less about how their species repopulating spells an extinction-level disaster for the rest of the world.
** Wood: Behemoth is a moss-covered, part-rock creature, who has an extra deal of emphasis placed on his ability to [[FertileFeet replenish the environment and cause whole new ecosystems to sprout]]. His normal behaviour is gentle and protective, although he's not strong enough to resist King Ghidorah's command to destroy.
* ElitesAreMoreGlamorous: Ford Brody in the first movie is an elite military EOD expert, and he's the SoleSurvivor of more than one military scrape with the [=MUTOs=] during the movie. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', almost the ''entire'' U.S. military gets wiped out by King Ghidorah, Rodan, and the Titans distributed around the world, except for the (developed) members of Monarch's elite military G-Team detachment.
* EnemyMine: The least generous interpretation of [[AdaptationalHeroism Godzilla]] and humans repeatedly working together against another Titan which threatens them both (the [=MUTOs=], Jinshin-Mushi and Ghidorah) -- we say "least generous" because compared to most Godzilla iterations, the [=MonsterVerse=] incarnation of the Big G is remarkably less antagonistic and more benign towards humanity even in the absence of a common enemy, and ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' explores the concept of cohabiting the world with him in mutually-beneficial symbiosis. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', the titular monsters go from being at each-other's throats to working together once Mechagodzilla emerges as an even greater threat than either of them.
* EtTuBrute: In ''Kong: Skull Island'', [[BigBadWannabe Packard]] looks shocked and heartbroken for a split-second when one of his own men turns his gun on him. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Emma Russell's colleagues and her ex-husband are so shocked by the revelation of her betrayal in Antarctica, one of them at first can't believe it and another almost can't bring himself to speak of it.
* EvilGenius: Emma Russell in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' uses her technical prowess to build a device that can manipulate the Titans via bio-acoustics, [[spoiler:so that she can set them all loose on the world]]. Ren Serizawa in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' uses his [[GadgeteerGenius engineering and electronic skills]] to build a HumongousMecha so that he can frame Godzilla for killing millions of people and then kill Godzilla himself.
* EvilIsAngular: Whereas Godzilla in this incarnation has fairly rounded and curvy edges to his design and he's [[AdaptationalHeroism one of the more benevolent incarnations of the character]]; his arch-enemies [[Characters/MonsterVerseKingGhidorah King Ghidorah]] in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' and [[Characters/MonsterVerseMechagodzilla Mechagodzilla]] in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' both have more edges and angles, in the forms of spiky protrusions, bat-like wings (Ghidorah), and a more cuboid and sharp-edged anatomy with an industrial theme (Mechagodzilla).
* EvilIsBigger: Ghidorah, introduced in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', is the largest Titan in the franchise at a whopping 521 feet as well as the evilest, serving as the BigBad of that movie. Ghidorah's reincarnation Mechagodzilla in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', though not as big, still stands taller than both of the other two Titans in that movie, and he's just as murderous as Ghidorah was. The Kraken in ''Skull Island'' supersedes Kong himself in total body size, and it's a [[AxCrazy thoroughly nasty piece of work]].
* EvilTakesANap: Many of the bad Titans as well as the good ones, if not outright [[SealedEvilInACan canned]], are usually found by humans in deep hibernation somewhere in the world. And then the humans, or something stupid that humans did, wakes them up.
* EvilWearsBlack: [[BigBadWannabe Alan Jonah]] in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', and all three of the major human antagonists in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''; all of them favor darker-colored clothing including pitch-black garments.
* ExcessiveMourning: The franchise seems to have a habit of doing this with grieving parents. Joe Brody in the 2014 film went from a respected power plant engineer to living in an apartment teaching English as a second language after his wife's death, and he remains obsessed with finding out the truth and ''very'' haunted after an entire decade and a half has passed since the event. Both Mark and Emma Russell are in their own ways reacting this way to the PlotTriggeringDeath of their son Andrew five years ago at the start of ''King of the Monsters''.
* EyeAwaken: Kong does this a few times, whilst with Godzilla it's more downplayed as the latter does it in a more tired, slow and world-weary way. Mechagodzilla pulls off a GlowingMechanicalEyes variation when it activates.
* EyeScream: In ''Kong: Skull Island'', one of the giant Skullcrawler's eyes (its real eye, not the eye sockets in the skull jaws) gets shot out with a flare gun. In the 2023 ''Skull Island'' series, Kong gouges [[ExtraEyes two]] of the Kraken's eyes out in the FinalBattle[[spoiler:, and the Kraken in turn injures one of his eyes]].
* FaceHeelTurn: [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019''. It also looks like Godzilla has turned against humanity in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', but [[spoiler:it turns out he was GoodAllAlong]]. Both those films' novelizations have also featured a couple of Monarch's operatives making these (one due to agreeing with [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] that the Titans should be free, the other for money) respectively.
* {{Facepalm}}: Chapman in ''Kong: Skull Island'' facepalms when he realizes he's stranded, cut off from the rest of the cast, on an island filled with giant monsters, commenting that life sometimes just "kicks you in the balls". Dr. Brooks facepalms in dismay when he realizes his son disappeared because he went to Skull Island after their last argument over their differing views on the Titans, in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong''. Dr. Serizawa facepalms in ''King of the Monsters'' when he realizes that the eco-terrorists are planning to forcibly awaken all the dormant Titans because Emma has taken Serizawa's [[TheXenophile Xenophilic]] views on the creatures to the extreme.
* FailureHero:
** [[GeneralFailure Admiral Stenz]], for all his reasonability and well intentions, doesn't manage to do anything meaningful except for making a bad monster situation so much worse and thereby endangering more of the people he's trying to protect. His plan to nuke the kaiju in the 2014 movie gives the [=MUTOs=] the means to reproduce ''and'' it nearly causes a nuclear fireball to consume 100,000 people, leaving the military's hands tied. And his ambiguous support of the Oxygen Destroyer's usage in ''King of the Monsters'' not only fails to kill either of the Titans it hits, it enables King Ghidorah to galvanize a global Titan army unopposed, leading to the destruction of multiple cities and [[NearVillainVictory almost enabling Ghidorah to strip away all life as we know it]].
** Aaron Brooks in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', though not nearly as bad as Stenz, fails to save any of his comrades despite his efforts and he ends the graphic novel as the {{sole survivor}}. Even stopping the massacre that the humans unwittingly unleashed was all Kong's doing rather than Aaron's.
* FamilyUnfriendlyDeath: The majority of kaiju are killed in this fashion, such as the female MUTO having her insides roasted with the Kiss of Death before Godzilla rips her head off.
* FatalFlaw:
** '''Amongst the heroes (or at least non-villains):'''
*** Admiral Stenz's narrow-mindedness makes him unable to wrap his head around the idea of the Titans being anything more than a threat to civilians, hindering his recognition of the GreenAesop which the franchise runs on. This has led to him being directly complicit in unwittingly [[FromBadToWorse making the situation even worse than it needed to be]] in both his movie appearances.
*** With Mark Russell, it would probably be easier to say that he has ''several'' crippling fatal flaws: he's [[HotBlooded hot-headed and impulsive]], he can't separate his emotions from doing his job unless his life is immediately on the line, he thinks so much about the (worst parts of the) past that he occasionally neglects to focus on what's happening the present, he's prone to [[ItsAllAboutMe self-centeredness and pity parties]], and he refuses to confront his own personal baggage head-on. All of this limits his competence and potential when it comes to using his Titan-predicting skills for good, and leads him to tarnish and sabotage his relationships with his beloved family (twice with his daughter as of ''Godzilla vs. Kong'').
*** Dr. Nathan Lind is implied in the movie, and confirmed in the novelization, to have a tendency towards tunnel vision when he becomes fixated on an end-goal, neglecting to make adequate intellectual and organizational preparations to ensure the journey can go smoothly. This trait contributed to the spectacular failure of his and his brother's first attempt to enter the Hollow Earth, and it shows again when he becomes focused on helping Apex to get Kong to the Hollow Earth, making him the perfect UnwittingPawn for Apex.
** '''Amongst the villains:'''
*** Lieutenant Colonel Packard's [[GeneralRipper obsessive thirst for revenge on Kong]] leads him to put his own beloved men at unnecessary risk, and it gets him killed in the end... though not before it's driven everyone else who was once loyal to him to desert and abandon him.
*** Ghidorah is possibly the most powerful Titan introduced in the entire setting, rivaled only by Godzilla, as well as one of the more intelligent; but his sadism is so great that he ends up drawing out his targets' and enemies' deaths for too long just to indulge himself, giving Godzilla multiple openings to catch him off-guard while he's distracted.
*** As competent and intelligent as [[FromCamouflageToCriminal Alan Jonah]] is, especially comparative to the other villains, his [[MisanthropeSupreme hatred of humanity]] is so great that it overrides his intelligence when he realizes King Ghidorah can exterminate humanity completely. He overlooks the certainty that he and his men will also sooner or later die in that scenario, and the ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' novelization states more explicitly than the film does that Jonah genuinely thinks against all logic that he and his troops will be able to eke out a worthwhile living after Ghidorah has been allowed to turn the entire Earth into a dead wasteland.
*** Emma Russell's pride and arrogance means that once she's set her mind on solving a problem in a certain way, [[DetrimentalDetermination she'll keep pursuing the end through that specific means, no matter how many people get hurt by her actions as collateral]]. She thinks she's ultimately helping the world and giving her daughter a better tomorrow with her plan to manipulate the Titans, but her [[spoiler:amoral]] methodology and sloppy execution traumatizes and alienates her child instead, and it leads to her unwittingly unleashing a certain three-headed OmnicidalManiac that tries to destroy the world entirely.
*** Walter Simmons is basically a walking meat-sack of hubris. He seeks to glorify himself and realize his [[FeelingOppressedByTheirExistence ideals of solely-human planetary domination]]; but he's so convinced that [[CrazyEnoughToWork fortune always favors the bold]] that he doesn't bat an eye at using '''[[DraconicAbomination Ghidorah's]]''' not-entirely-dormant alien neurology as the core of the ''control system'' that he's betting his entire plan on, and he's even stubborner about throwing GreenRocks into the mix without first even ''trying'' to examine them. This leads to a homicidal space dragon Titan's consciousness being reborn within Simmons' anti-Titan superweapon, which in turn leads to Simmons' death and his weapon doing [[KillAllHumans exactly what he claimed it would stop the Titans from doing first]].
* FauxAffablyEvil: All three of the human {{Big Bad Wannabe}}s in the movies -- Colonel Packard, Alan Jonah and Walter Simmons -- at some point each present themselves as AFatherToHisMen, polite [[WickedCultured and slightly cultured]], and/or charismatically chummy, but it scarcely veils their true colors as self-absorbed assholes whom are willing to get anyone killed if it'll get them closer to what they want.
* FearlessFool: The Skullcrawlers due to their HorrorHunger, and this is a big part of [[spoiler:Emma Russell]]'s arrogance, and Ghidorah's right head shows definite signs of this.
* FisherKing:
** Most of Skull Island is lush and tropical if extremely hostile forestry, but the Skullcrawlers, which stand out from Skull Island's other creatures for being a subterranean invasive species that would wipe out the entire ecosystem if allowed to run amuck, make their home in a barren boneyard wreathed in toxic fumes where almost nothing else lives.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', several of the Titans' domains reflect their temperaments as they shape the world around them according to their nature. The egg that hatches Mothra, the most benevolent and [[FriendToAllLivingThings life-friendly]] Titan of all (who literally gets pissed off at a {{containment field}} bug-zapping her domain's flies), is found deep in a rainforest in an overgrown temple that's teeming with life. During the third and fourth acts of the film where the violent, psychotic and omnicidal Ghidorah has usurped Godzilla as the reigning King of the Monsters and is engineering world-threatening global chaos, every location the main human cast visits is being pelted by torrential storms of thunder and rain, reflecting how King Ghidorah's global dominion is upturning and threatening to ultimately annihilate the global natural order including humanity.
* FlatCharacter:
** Dr. Vivienne Graham, who appears in two movies alongside Dr. Serizawa before being killed off, is (at least on the silver screen, less so in the graphic novels and novelizations) a SatelliteCharacter of her mentor except without the compelling Hiroshima backstory.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'': Dr. Ling Chen is basically just a copy of her more developed sister Ilene who exists solely to complete the Shobijin set for the [=MonsterVerse=]. Ghidorah's [[MultipleHeadCase right head]] is a BloodKnight who has a fairly simple personality, compared to the intelligent but sadistic middle head and the submissive, childlike but [[GeniusDitz perceptive]] left head.
** For the most part, the [=MonsterVerse's=] human antagonists are written as nuanced individuals who have at least some humanizing qualities or otherwise a FreudianExcuse that explains their crimes and pathology. Walter Simmons in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', however, is just a {{narcissist}}ic CorruptCorporateExecutive with a sociopathic mindset and no backstory, who shows up one day looking to start a war against the Titans.
* ForTheEvulz:
** Ghidorah kills people because he can, not because we're a threat or in his way, as does [[spoiler:his reincarnation in]] Mechagodzilla. It's even speculated in the novelization that Ghidorah isn't really motivated by [[HostileTerraforming turning Earth into a more suitable environment for himself]] so much as he is murdering every living thing that isn't him.
** In the ''Skull Island'' animated series, the Kraken goes out of its way to kill anyone or anything that passes over its territory, and it tosses the remains of its kills at Kong to taunt him, with the cast deciding that it acts this way just because it's an asshole.
* FreudianExcuse: Most of the major human antagonists except for [[TheSociopath Walter Simmons]] have one. [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] bemusingly decides the way to honor their son's tragic death as the casualty of a Kaiju battle is by conducting a UtopiaJustifiesTheMeans which technically involves engineering repeats of the same incident on millions of families around the world, whilst Jonah became the PutThemAllOutOfMyMisery MisanthropeSupreme he now is due to decades of war experience causing MaddenIntoMisanthropy and because of (according to the ''King of the Monsters'' novelization) the gruesome murder of his daughter while he was away on a tour of duty. The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization reveals [[EvilGenius Ren Serizawa]]'s personal motivations for wanting Godzilla dead are because he feels the Titan robbed him of his [[ParentalNeglect highly-absent father]]'s love and attention his entire life.
* GadgeteerGenius: Monarch's chiefs of staff introduced in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' include a director of technology who made a self-learning computer program when he was just 15, and a crypto-sonographer with an engineering history. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', [[HumongousMecha Mechagodzilla]]'s designing is led by the chief technology officer of an ultra hi-tech ResearchInc.
* GaiasVengeance: One of the core themes of the franchise, with the Kaiju generally being depicted not as [[NuclearMutant Nuclear Mutants]], but as powerful and ancient beasts who embody aspects of nature or act as invasive species, and whom humanity is almost powerless against once antagonized. Adding to the GreenAesop is that human activity such as strip mining, seismic charges and atomic testing are directly responsible for the Kaiju's emergences from long dormancy.
* GeneralRipper: Colonel Packard in ''Kong Skull Island'', who starts the film off as somewhat unstable and then goes ''completely overboard'' in his mad obsession with killing Kong. Downplayed with Admiral Stenz, who is persistently distrustful of the Titans and prone to thinking NukeEm moves on them will do anything other than cause an EpicFail but does try to be reasonable. {{Inverted}} with the U.S. government in ''Godzilla Aftershock'' and ''King of the Monsters'', who are shown to be ''at least'' as short-sighted as Stenz and even more obstinate than him about the matter of seizing any excuse that might see Godzilla killed and being blatantly blind to the long-term consequences biting them in the ass. The ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' role-playing game campaign features a SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute of the aforementioned Packard, his old friend General Ward who leads a band of mercenaries and seeks revenge on Kong.
* GentleGiant: Both Kong and Godzilla are relatively placid (or as much as their size allows them to be) unless they're attacked (although Godzilla doesn't fight back against humans when they attack him and only seeks to destroy the [=MUTOs=]).
* GiantEqualsInvincible: There's very little that humans' general arsenal can do against the Kaiju except maybe piss them off. Subverted in ''Kong: Skull Island'' where humans are able to easily kill some of the lesser monsters of Skull Island.
* GiantEyeOfDoom: In the 2014 film, Femuto's eye... slit-thingy passes eerily over Ford Brody and Tre Morales in one shot, when the two are trying to avoid being noticed by her. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Ghidorah's heads glare into Fenway Park's press box when they locate Madison and the ORCA there, prompting an OhCrap from Madison. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Maia Simmons shits bricks when Kong grabs the HEAV she's inside, [[spoiler:''after'' she pissed him off by having the HEAV shoot at him,]] and he peers directly inside at her with one eye.
* GiantFlyer: Unsurprisingly for a {{Kaiju}} franchise, there are lots of monsters that are capable of flight: including [[BigCreepyCrawlies Hokmuto]], [[TheWormThatWalks Shinomura]], [[DraconicAbomination Ghidorah]], [[TerrorDactyl Rodan]], [[ButterflyOfDeathAndRebirth Mothra]], [[BatOutOfHell Camazotz]], [[BrutalBirdOfPrey Hellhawks]], and [[KidnappingBirdOfPrey the Hawk Monster]].
* GiantSquid: Skull Island has Mire Squids, gigantic predatory squids that live in the waters, one of which appears in ''Kong: Skull Island''. {{Subverted}} by the sequel animated series: the Kraken ''seems'' like it's going to be a classical version of its namesake when we see it solely by its octopoid CombatTentacles dragging ships, helicopters and people into the ocean, but its full appearance is actually more of a fish/lobster/octopus chimera.
* GlowingEyesOfDoom: A few Titans display this, including the [=MUTOs'=] eye-like slits, Ghidorah's eyes tending to glint brightly, and Godzilla's eyes lighting up with blue light when charging his Atomic Breath from ''King of the Monsters'' onward.
* GodzillaThreshold:
** Godzilla seems to only use his Atomic Breath as a last resort in his earlier appearances, allegedly because activating it massively drains his radiation stores. This completely goes away in later instalments, where he practically spams his Atomic Breath.
** In the 2014 film, Serizawa clearly only resorts to attempting to have the incubating MUTO killed once he realizes the threat it poses. Admiral Stenz, unlike the usual GeneralRipper, is hinted to be reluctant to resort to [[NukeEm using nukes]] but believes there's no better way, and when ''that'' plan [[EpicFail fails spectacularly]], Stenz hesitantly concedes to holding out hope that Serizawa is right about Godzilla being our ally.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', the threat posed by King Ghidorah is so great and the circumstances so dire, Serizawa defies his own preaching against human intervention and against the use of nukes by intervening to manually detonate a nuclear warhead that will give Godzilla the strength he needs to stop Ghidorah.
* GoneHorriblyRight: Attempting to lure out Kong by dropping bombs on his home in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and charging Godzilla's atomic-powered body up with the full power of an exploding nuclear warhead in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''; both respectively "work a little too well", with Kong ''slaughtering'' the people who dropped the bombs on his home, while Godzilla almost ends up exploding like a hydrogen bomb during the FinalBattle. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', [[MugglePower Apex Cybernetics]] designing Mechagodzilla to be able to compete with Titans as powerful as Godzilla so that Apex could conquer the Titans and TakeOverTheWorld means that once [[spoiler:Ghidorah's consciousness remnants take control of the Mecha]], in essence, Ghidorah has a new body that stands a serious chance at defeating [[BigGood Godzilla]] before it resumes Ghidorah's end goals of wiping out humanity.
* GoodAllAlong: Kong at first appears to be a bloodthirsty monster in his debut, but it's revealed later that he's quite passive and protective when not provoked, and he only attacked the cast earlier because from his point of view, a bunch of tiny alien jerks popped up on his land out of the blue and started carpet-bombing everything. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Godzilla is EasilyCondemned as a rabid monster after he suddenly attacks an Apex Cybernetics factory, and he continues to act aggressive toward humans, [[spoiler:but the reason he's acting this way is because he can sense that humans' meddling with King Ghidorah's remains is reanimating the evil hydra's consciousness]].
* GoodColorsEvilColors: Godzilla's Atomic Breath produces [[BlueIsHeroic blue light]], whereas a couple of his enemies -- the [=MUTOs=] in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' and Mechagodzilla in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' -- instead produce [[RedAndBlackAndEvilAllOver red]] [[RedIsViolent light]] with their powers. Even the fire-themed Rodan [[AdaptationalVillainy functions as an antagonist]] in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019''. ZigZagged, as Godzilla himself briefly turns red via his Burning mode in the aforementioned movie. Taking this association further, [[Characters/MonsterVerseMonarch Monarch's]] bases tend to be lit with blue and green light. Yellow is also mainly an evil color, associated with [[BigBad Ghidorah]] and with the base of the eco-terrorists whom are ''letting'' Ghidorah destroy the world.
* GoodLipsEvilJaws: PlayedStraight in ''Film/Godzilla2014'', ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' and the graphic novel ''Kingdom Kong''; with Godzilla and Kong being the Good Lips and the [=MUTOs=], Warbats, Mechagodzilla and Camazotz being the Evil Jaws. {{Averted}} in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' with Ghidorah, whilst the [[Film/KongSkullIsland Skullcrawlers]] have bone "lips" on their skulls.
* GoodScarsEvilScars: Mostly Good Scars. Godzilla is CoveredWithScars and is ultimately the BigGood of Earth, as is the MUTO Queen who initially serves King Ghidorah but later submits to Godzilla without a fight. Kong, the compassionate guardian of Skull Island, has scars of his own across his chest.
* GrayRainOfDepression: In ''King of the Monsters'', it's raining '''wherever''' most of the human heroes go around the world when [[OmnicidalManiac King Ghidorah]] reigns supreme over the Titans and is in the process of destroying the world, due to Ghidorah's growing hypercane disrupting and changing worldwide weather patterns. In the ''Skull Island'' series, rain starts falling on Charlie as soon as the latter's separated from his friends and stuck on his own in the middle of Skull Island.

* GreaterScopeVillain:
** The MUTO Prime which features as the main Kaiju antagonist of the ''Godzilla Aftershock'' graphic novel. It, or at least a specimen of the same subspecies, sired both of the [=MUTOs=] which served as the BigBadDuumvirate of the 2014 film. This also makes the MUTO Prime indirectly responsible for TheUnmasquedWorld that the MUTO pair's rampage caused.
** Ghidorah, the BigBad of ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', as he's the source of many of humanity's draconian myths and legends, [[spoiler:and in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' his partly-alive remains are what set off Godzilla's rampage and by extension the events of the whole film, before Ghidorah briefly returns as the Big Bad by becoming reborn in Mechagodzilla]].
** In ''King of the Monsters'', EcoTerrorist Alan Jonah is the film's resident BigBadWannabe who is responsible for freeing Ghidorah from his icy prison. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', [[spoiler:Jonah is indirectly responsible for the events of the entire film due to the severed Ghidorah head he obtained ending up in Apex Cybernetics' hands, with the novelization confirming that Jonah willingly sold the skull to them]].
** The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization reveals that [[EvilInc Apex Cybernetics]], the film's human antagonists, [[spoiler:were the ones the government contracted to build the prototype Oxygen Destroyer before the events of ''King of the Monsters'', making them indirectly and unwittingly responsible for Ghidorah's entire apocalyptic NearVillainVictory]] in the second half of ''King of the Monsters''.
* GreenAesop: Humans are not the masters of the Earth, and we should live in harmony with the ecosystem rather than trying to rebuild the world to our needs, [[SpaceWhaleAesop or we'll wake up the Earth's real rulers and they'll wreck our civilization]].
* HalfwayPlotSwitch:
** In terms of the human element (which it should be said is consistently more foregrounded in this movie): roughly the first third of ''Godzilla'' (2014) is about a strained father-son relationship between Joe and Ford, with Joe coming across as the deuteragonist. Then shortly before the midway point, [[spoiler:Joe [[DroppedABridgeOnHim gets a bridge dropped on him]], and]] the plot switches to Ford embarking on a cross-country journey to get back to his wife and son amid a classic {{Kaiju}} catastrophe.
** Roughly the first 60 minutes of ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' (2019) are a cross-continental chase around the world, with Monarch trying ([[YouCantThwartStageOne and failing]]) to stop eco-terrorists from loosing each of the other {{Kaiju}} "Big Four" of ''Film/GhidorahTheThreeHeadedMonster'' one-by-one, whilst Godzilla is trying to fight off the reawakened [[AncientEvil Ghidorah]]. At the film's midway point, Ghidorah takes spontaneous control of the other Titans around the world and commands them to attack the planet as his army, causing the eco-terrorists to all but stop mattering as the plot shifts from a GottaCatchThemAll-esque global hunt to an all-out apocalyptic war between good and evil.
* HarmfulToMinors: Pretty much a given for any child raised on [[IsleOfGiantHorrors Skull Island]], where anything including you or your loved ones can die horribly to the local beasties eating you alive or tearing you to shreds at any moment, if Kong doesn't save you by mauling them to death first. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', watching dozens of people including her personal mentors get slaughtered by armed mercenaries in a hail of gunfire[[spoiler:, on the orders of Madison's own mother no less,]] is just the ''beginning'' of twelve-year-old Madison Russell's trauma.
%%* HeldGaze
* HelicopterFlyswatter: What did you expect from a {{Kaiju}} franchise? Kong in his debut movie invokes a very deliberately excessive instance of this trope when he ''massacres'' a fleet of helicopters in retaliation for them carpet-bombing his home and firing on him. Various Titans in ''King of the Monsters'' take down lots of military aircraft including choppers and tiltrotors with their sheer size and weight, and the only airborne rotor vehicle to show up in the first season of ''Skull Island'' gets torn apart by the Kraken like paper.
* HellishCopter: ''Never, ever'' assume that a helicopter, tiltrotor or similar vehicle is a safe mode of transport in this universe. They get it the worst in ''Kong: Skull Island'' (where Kong wipes out an entire fleet of military choppers single-handedly), ''King of the Monsters'' (where Ghidorah and the Titans seemingly annihilate ''the majority of the U.S. military''), and ''Skull Island'' (where, though only one chopper shows up in the first season, its sole purpose is to be effortlessly ripped in two by the Kraken and establish that the monster isn't letting anyone get off Skull Island so long as it's around).
* HeroAntagonist: In the 2014 film and ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Stenz is genuinely just trying to keep as many people as he can safe, but his [[GeneralFailure methods]] put him at odds with the heroes that ''know'' Godzilla is our ally. Godzilla himself slips into this territory in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', serving as an antagonist who threatens Kong and acts more destructive than he previously did but is ultimately out to stop Ghidorah's ungodly new reincarnation from awakening.
* HeroicLineage: The Serizawas consist of wise naturalists with a profound respect for Godzilla (the exception is [[AntagonisticOffspring Ren]] who's the latest in the lineage). Kong's duty of fighting back the Skullcrawler hordes on Skull Island started with his parents before him. The adult Chen twins are the third generation of their family to work for Monarch, and their family has an even older, maybe not-so-earthly connection to Mothra. There's also Ford Brody and Admiral Stenz in the 2014 film's novelization being the sons of men who themselves served in the military.
* HeroicSacrifice:
** In the 2014 movie's opening, Sandra Brody encourages her husband to [[ShootTheDog seal her inside a radioactive hallway to die]] because she's already been lethally exposed, and the radiation cloud could kill thousands more if it gets out.
** In the graphic novel ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', Helen Karsten gives her life occupying a Death Jackal horde -- who promptly rip her to shreds -- to buy the rest of the new Skull Island expedition time to reach safety.
** Several in ''King of the Monsters''. Dr. Graham loses her life to Ghidorah while saving Mark Russell in Antarctica, [[spoiler:Serizawa gives his own life to manually detonate a nuke that will revive Godzilla so the latter can save the world from King Ghidorah's rampage, and Emma Russell gives her life ensuring that all the heroes' efforts to help Godzilla stop Ghidorah weren't for nothing at the end]]. The novelization of the movie also confirms that the soldiers who [[TooDumbToLive stood and shot at Ghidorah in Antarctica]] were actually trying to keep Ghidorah focused on them to save their comrades rather than expecting their firepower would have any effect on the dragon.
* HeroKiller: Members of the MUTO species including the MUTO Prime have previously killed others of Godzilla's species, including a benign ''Titanus Gojira'' who ancient Phoenicians knew as Dagon. The Skullcrawlers are the reason why Kong is the {{last of his kind}}; Kong's ancestors were protectors and deities to the Iwi like Kong himself is in the present, but the Skullcrawlers killed the rest of Kong's brethren off, including his parents. Ghidorah kills a lot of heroes during his single cinematic showing: Mothra, and on the human side he kills Vivienne Graham, Admiral Stenz ([[UncertainDoom implicitly]]), and he gets more than half of Monarch's global staff killed via galvanizing the other Titans to rampage in his name.
* HeroWithBadPublicity: Godzilla, though he's definitively an AntiHero in this continuity, is initially just seen by most of humanity as a monster and a threat to their peace until the events of ''King of the Monsters'' make humanity see him as their savior -- and even then, when he begins rampaging seemingly unprovoked in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', the human race are surprisingly quick to assume he's gone bad. Monarch also get shtick in TheUnmasquedWorld and are often blamed by the public and government for whatever damage the Titans cause.
* HisOwnWorstEnemy: Emma Russell in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' wants to save the world and make her daughter proud of her, but her methods [[spoiler:and her insanity]] completely traumatize and alienate her child whilst unleashing an even worse threat to the world than what Emma was trying to avert. Walter Simmons in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' should be a frigging '''poster boy''' for the SelfDisposingVillain, wanting to conquer the Titans and be hailed as a hero, and shooting himself in the foot multiple-fold with his [[{{Pun}} Titanic]] levels of arrogance.
* HisStoryRepeatsItself: In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Mark and Emma's character development following the PlotTriggeringDeath of their elder child amid the Titans' past battle in San Francisco culminates in them trying to save their remaining child's life amid this movie's FinalBattle in Boston. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Nathan Lind's character journey orients around him successfully launching the first manned mission to the Hollow Earth, a task at which he previously and traumatically failed with his brother dying.
* HitAndRunTactics: Both [[GiantFlyer Mothra and the male MUTO]] respectively use this strategy to dealing with their larger Titan foes respectively.
* HollowWorld: Introduced to the series in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and expanded on in ''King of the Monsters'' and ''Godzilla vs. Kong''. Exists in two forms: massive caves and tunnels extremely deep in the Earth's crust (and possibly mantle); Godzilla uses these tunnels for rapid travel in ''[=KotM=]'' and rests in a massive radioactive underwater cave. Even deeper, there's an empty space at the Earth's core containing a full ecosystem. It is from here, it is theorized, where all terrestrial Titans originate.
* HomefieldAdvantage: For Godzilla as an aquatic saurian, it's dragging foes who are poorly suited to water (Ghidorah and Kong) into the ocean. For Kong in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', as a giant ape, being in the middle of Hong Kong enables him to use the skyscrapers to swing around and dodge Godzilla's Atomic Breath. For Camazotz, it's being in the air as a GiantFlyer whilst Kong is more or less land-bound. For the Kraken in ''Skull Island'', as a semi-aquatic Titan, it has the advantage over Kong when they fight in the ocean.
* HomeOfMonsters: Besides [[IsleOfGiantHorrors Skull Island]] being carried over from the ''Franchise/KingKong'' franchise, there's also the HollowEarth, which is believed InUniverse to be the true point of origin of most if not all the Titans including the creatures on Skull Island. The idea is first addressed In-Universe in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and its existence is effectively confirmed in ''King of the Monsters'', before it's physically further explored in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
* HorribleJudgeOfCharacter:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Emma Russell's AggressiveCategorism drives her to believe that ''all'' the Titans are good for the Earth's ecology in one way or another, despite her having had a hand in releasing [[AxCrazy Ghidorah]]. Plus she works with [[ObviouslyEvil Alan Jonah]] in the mistaken belief that him being a MisanthropeSupreme means his goals align with her more well-intentioned brand of eco-terrorism.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Mark [[EasilyCondemned easily condemns]] Godzilla for attacking an Apex factory [[TookALevelInDumbass despite being a so-called top Godzilla expert who should know better]], and he regards [[RebelliousSpirit Madison]] as a naive kid in need of a firm hand and sheltering, to the point of being delusional. The movie's novelization also explicitly shows that Nathan Lind, who works with [[DevilInPlainSight Apex Cybernetics]] while being none the wiser to their evil plan and their role in the disaster, is the only person who ''doesn't'' see through Apex's benevolent facade nor at least have some suspicions about them.
* HorrorHunger: A couple of the more voracious predators on Skull Island show signs of this. The most notable is the invasive Skullcrawlers in [[Film/KongSkullIsland the]] [[Film/GodzillaVsKong movies]], whose hyper-metabolism keeps them constantly on the brink of starvation and therefore driven to hunt and eat endlessly. There's also the Death Jackals in the spin-off graphic novel ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong''; according to their Monarch profile, they're prone to MonstrousCannibalism and even ''AutoCannibalism'' if other prey is hard to come by.
* TheHorseshoeEffect: If there's just two things that all the MisanthropeSupreme and anti-Kaiju human {{Contrasting Sequel Antagonist}}s have in common besides being {{Knight Templar}}s, it's these: they don't care how many people have to die to see their plans through, and they're too {{pride}}ful and reckless to care that their plans are liable to spiral out of their control and risk causing TheEndOfTheWorldAsWeKnowIt.
* HostileTerraforming: It's theorized by Monarch that several of the hostile [[{{Kaiju}} Titans]] -- namely the MUTO species, Ghidorah, Camazotz -- respectively seek to alter the regional or planetary environment to suit themselves, ecosystem-destroying effects on other species be damned. This makes an interesting parallel to humans, who are themselves doing this to the world already both InUniverse and in RealLife -- in the Titans' case, Godzilla and Kong are the embodiments of natural balance working to stop these hostile Titans when they threaten the natural equilibrium of either Titan's respective territories.
** In ''Godzilla: Aftershock'', Emma Russell theorizes that if [[ExplosiveBreeders the MUTOs]] repopulate, they will cause extinction-level tectonic upheaval and ecological destruction while destroying or reshaping entire ecosystems to suit their own needs.
** In ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'', King Ghidorah commands the other Titans to join him in [[KillAllHumans tearing down humanity's cities]] and causing a NaturalDisasterCascade on top of Ghidorah himself [[WeatherManipulation covering the Earth's atmosphere in massive storm systems]]; all on a global scale, which threatens all multicellular life on the planet down to Earth's bedrock. Dr. Stanton theorizes this is Ghidorah's way of xenoforming the planet to his own liking.
** In ''Kingdom Kong'', Camazotz causes a [[PerpetualStorm perpetual superstorm]] to permanently close over and envelop Skull Island (as Camazotz [[WeakenedByTheLight can't stand daylight]] and [[TheNightThatNeverEnds the storm will block it out for good]]). Although Camazotz is stopped, the drastic change he made to the island's climate is permanent, and over the following three years, the ecosystem and terrain all break down as the storm blocks out all sunlight and batters everything with downpours and gales 24/7.
* HotBlooded: Mark Russell is practically a simmering tea kettle of bitterness and spite, mixed with enough bull-headedness to give any even-tempered person a headache. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Rodan is a MagmaMan who responds to jets firing missiles at his home by relentlessly flying after and systematically exterminating every last one of them, before he charges at an Alpha Titan that ''severely'' outclasses him; Ghidorah's right head is a PerpetualFrowner that tries to take on Godzilla ''with nothing but its jaws'' whilst the other two heads and their entire body are incapacitated; and a soldier named Hendricks screams like a maniac while shooting his gun at Ghidorah's heads.
* HowlOfSorrow: In the original movie, the female MUTO ''screeches'' in anguish when her eggs are blown up in a fireball with none surviving, before she goes into an UnstoppableRage. In the ''Skull Island'' animated series, after Kong has buried his human friend and noticed that the Kraken which killed her is still on his kingdom's border, he roars at the top of his lungs from a peak, before his silhouette can be seen crumpling to his knees.
* HumansAreInsects: How humans are usually viewed by the Kaiju, which is very fortunate because when a Kaiju such as the malevolent Ghidorah or a provoked MUTO ''actively wants humans dead''...
* HumansAreMorons: Speaking broadly, humans are so {{pride}}ful that not all of them can ever learn the lesson from each movie's events and just leave well enough alone, often putting themselves as much as the entire planet in mortal peril that could have otherwise been avoided. In all of the first three movies, it's the military trying to contain the bad and good Titans their way that threatens to put the world at large in even greater mortal peril (from the [=MUTOs=], Skullcrawlers and Ghidorah) than before; and immediately after Godzilla barely saves the whole world including humanity from extinction by Ghidorah in ''King of the Monsters'', a NebulousEvilOrganization has the [[SarcasmMode genius idea]] to [[spoiler:use Ghidorah's BizarreAlienBiology to create the WorldsStrongestMan for themselves with zero regard for the threat that Ghidorah posed to humanity last time]].
* HumansNeedAliens: One of the core themes of the franchise, often to the ire of the military leaders and Apex Cybernetics. Regardless of humans' attempts to create superior technology and other means that'll enable them to kill Titans themselves, they're simply outmatched by the Titans who are for all intents and purposes {{Physical God}}s, and their attempts to prove they can bend these forces of nature to their will are liable to only make things even worse for mankind. Humans need benevolent Titans such as Godzilla, Kong and Mothra around to defend them against the more malevolent Titans because it TakesOneToKillOne. {{Downplayed}} in ''Godzilla: Dominion'' and ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', where MugglesDoItBetter starts to come in.
* {{Hypocrite}}: Quite a few of the human villains implement a lot of hypocrisy into their agendas. Packard puts all his remaining men at risk in pursuit of his vendetta against Kong for killing his men, and he refuses to take responsibility or understand why Kong committed the actions he did. Jonah pretty much uses any excuse to justify letting King Ghidorah destroy the world completely, even when it directly contradicts his earlier attempts to meddle with nature and claims to be preventing the world's ecological destruction; never mind ''[[spoiler:Emma]]''[='s=] utterly twisted idea of the best way to honor their dead son's memory being to create over a dozen more repeats of the incident that killed him. [[GoodIsNotNice Mark Russell]], being the [[{{Jerkass}} piece of work he was]] at the start of ''King of the Monsters'', is quite ObliviousToHisOwnDescription, when he's scorning Serizawa for allegedly "kid[ding] himself" and when he's scorning Emma for putting her grief before her health and her family, in a HolierThanThou tone of voice. Dr. Serizawa himself gets called out on how he's willing to be proactive when the eco-terrorists' plan to unleash the Titans threatens the world, yet he wasn't taking the senators' [[WrongAssumption misguided]] plan to attempt exterminating the Titans in their sleep seriously at all despite the fact he should have known it was equally dangerous.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:I-L]]
* IdiotBall: Several times in the 2014 movie -- from Monarch and the Americans disposing of a dormant radiation-eating giant monster egg by dumping it in a bunker stacked with barrels of nuclear waste and not regularly monitoring it, to the military initiating a plan to try and kill the rampaging radiation-eating monsters by [[NukeEm dropping a nuke]] on them and hoping it doesn't just make them even stronger (even though one of those monsters already survived a nuclear strike point-blank in the past), to the military train team heading ''towards'' the sounds of screaming and gunfire to "check it out." In ''King of the Monsters'', the cast take quite a long time to work out that the "tropical storm" which they lost track of the electrical typhoon-generating flying hydra in is ''not'' just a mundane meteorological storm which the monster happened to fly by.
* IgnoredExpert: Naturally, there's at least one instance per film. Monarch's advice against the military's NukeEm measures get ignored in both ''Film/Godzilla2014'' and ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' with catastrophic consequences, and [[GeneralRipper Packard]] in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' could've avoided a lot of casualties had he listened to Marlow. [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] in ''King of the Monsters'' and Ren Serizawa in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' both end up being villainous Ignored Experts to their co-conspirators toward the climax.
* ILetGwenStacyDie: In the 2014 movie, Joe Brody feels responsible for his wife [[TheLostLenore Sandra]]'s death many years later, since she was only at the heart of the disaster because he told her to go down to the nuclear reactor before things got serious. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Nathan Lind has been in a HeroicBSOD since his brother died a couple years prior, blaming himself because it was partly his tunnel vision that got his brother and several other people killed. In the ''Skull Island'' animated series, Kong is haunted by the death of the Island Girl years after the WholeEpisodeFlashback, and it's {{implied}} that he feels responsible [[spoiler:because he was too late to save her and her village (whom were all under his protection) from being exterminated by the newly-emerged Kraken, to say nothing of the possibility he might have eventually worked out that ''he'' unwittingly caused the Kraken's awakening to begin with after his moment of arrogance when dealing with the Killer Chameleons]].
* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: How Godzilla kills the male MUTO in the 2014 film. This is also how the Mother Longlegs on Skull Island kill their prey. Mothra inflicts a non-fatal form of this on Rodan to take him out of the fight in ''King of the Monsters''.
* ImpossiblyGracefulGiant: Largely avoided with Godzilla and the [=MUTOs=] in ''Godzilla'' (2014) -- their massive size and weight really shows in their slow and weighty movements on-camera. In the next movie, ''Kong: Skull Island'', Kong and the Skullcrawlers are significantly more agile and acrobatic, leaping great distances through the air despite their sheer size and gravity, but they still have an appropriately slow and weighty quality to their movements here. Godzilla and other giant monsters' movements become a little more fluid and faster-paced in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' (2019), but ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' ditches the early movies' realistically slow Kaiju movements even further to make the monsters ridiculously agile and fast, a la the change in giant portrayal that ''Film/PacificRimUprising'' was widely criticized for.
* InsecureProtagonistArrogantAntagonist:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', the humans heroes consist of scientists who are ambivalent (to the point of inaction) about whether or not the Titans they study are the key to humanity's salvation or the gateway to its destruction, and a TragicBigot with multiple {{Fatal Flaw}}s under his belt. The human antagonists are eco-terrorists who believe they can set the Titans loose on the world and then try to control them using an experimental device, without expecting it to spiral out of their control ([[NatureIsNotAToy which it does]]).
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', there are ambivalent human heroes on both Team Godzilla and Team Kong: Madison Russell is struggling with a shell of a father who neither believes in nor listens to her, and she's trying to convince people that Godzilla has been EasilyCondemned at a time when almost no-one is willing to listen to her; while Nathan Lind is a ScrapHeapHero trying to achieve Team Kong's mission via completing and perfecting [[HisStoryRepeatsItself the same failed venture which previously claimed his brother's life and destroyed his career]]. The human villains are a CorporateConspiracy whose members are ''so'' arrogant; they genuinely don't anticipate their plan to [[MugglePower conquer the Titans and prove humans' superiority]] will run into problems because they hinged it all on hooking ''[[KillAllHumans Ghidorah]]'s'' lingering neurology up to a HumongousMecha (before they added some untested GreenRocks in for good measure), nor do they anticipate that threatening Kong's charges while Kong is standing several feet (meters) away will lead to Kong attacking them.
* IntroducedSpeciesCalamity: Whereas Godzilla and Kong are compared to keystone species and guardians of nature which act to restore the ecosystem's equilibrium if it's been disrupted, their rivals and foes are compared to invasive species. The [=MUTOs=] are ancient parasites which lethally fed on Godzilla's kind and caused mass extinctions just by reproducing, the Skullcrawlers are invaders which crawl up to Skull Island from the HollowEarth and will overrun the entire ecosystem without Kong to keep them in check, [[spoiler:and Ghidorah is a literal alien whose plans threaten to sterilize the entire Earth. Ironically, despite his beneficial role in Skull Island's ecosystem, ''Kingdom Kong'' reveals that Kong and his forebears are themselves a non-indigenous species, and Dr. Brooks speculates that the island's ecosystem won't support Kong anymore once he's fully grown]].
* InASingleBound: Kong can leap vast distances, and Godzilla manages to do this when leaping out of the ocean at Ghidorah in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''.
* IronicEcho: In ''Godzilla: Aftershock'', the U.N. Security Council throw Serizawa's "let them fight" line from the 2014 movie[[note]]referring to letting Godzilla fight the [=MUTOs=] so that Godzilla will remove the threat they pose and restore peace[[/note]] back in his face when they commit to an absolutely insane plan to stand by and ''let'' [[ExplosiveBreeders Jinshin-Mushi]] kill Godzilla. In ''King of the Monsters'', [[MisanthropeSupreme Alan Jonah]] quips "Long live the king" when Ghidorah usurps Godzilla as King of the Monsters, and later, Emma defiantly reiterates the same line as a pledge of allegiance to [[RightfulKingReturns Godzilla]] taking back his kingship from Ghidorah.
* IslandOfMystery: Skull Island, as always, is a remote IsleOfGiantHorrors hidden away from the civilized world, home to various prehistoric and otherworldly monsters including King Kong. This incarnation of Skull Island, which is mostly a hot and humid tropical island, is cloaked from the outside world by a PerpetualStorm (which the island is usually within the eye of) and by magnetic anomalies which fool navigation instruments. The island is home to bizarre phenomena which include gigantic {{planimal}}s and aurora-like atmospheric anomalies. The source of most of the island's phenomena is that it's a gateway to the HollowEarth and the gravitational inversion inbetween the Hollow Earth and surface world. Skull Island is also home to the Iwi tribe, whom have survived under Kong's protection and are fortunately much friendlier than the natives of other Skull Island incarnations. The island hosts huge, ancient ruins from a time when the Iwis' original ancestors and Kong's ancestors were much more advanced and powerful. Many shipwrecks and WWII planes have disappeared from the outside world over centuries because they washed ashore on the storm-cloaked Skull Island, where their derelict wreckages remain.
* IsleOfGiantHorrors:
** Skull Island is adapted from the ''Franchise/KingKong'' franchise as Kong's domain, hidden from the outside world by a PerpetualStorm system encircling its waters, and populated by a host of man-eating BigCreepyCrawlies and gigantic {{planimal}}s and other beasts, with the gigantic gorilla himself being the ''least'' hostile of them all. The island's preternatural properties here are indicated to be a result of its direct connection to the HollowEarth.
** The ''Skull Island'' animated series reveals that there's another uncharted island twenty miles away from Skull Island, which is also populated by monsters including Dog and giant bugs.
* ItCanThink: Despite their animalistic nature, most if not all of the Titans are ''not'' dumb; they're capable of complex problem-solving, tactical thinking in a fight, and emoting care, grief, malice, fear and wrath.
* ItsAllAboutMe: This is a nigh universal trait of the antagonists, both human and Titan. The Titan antagonists threaten humanity and the natural balance of the world whilst seeking to benefit themselves or their species to the detriment of all other life; i.e., the Skullcrawlers with their HorrorHunger being left to conquer unchecked, the [=MUTOs=] and Ghidorah threatening to create an extinction event whilst ostensibly reshaping their territory to suit themselves. And the human antagonists tend to be [[NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremists]] who are ultimately putting the whole world at risk all because of their own sense of entitlement, their spite or their ExcessiveMourning. [[GoodIsNotNice Mark Russell]] himself can often be a very egocentric man beneath his veil of self-righteousness.
* ItsPersonal: Quite a few examples occur over the franchise. Amid Godzilla and Ghidorah's feud for dominance, their interactions indicating they truly ''despise'' each-other because of their past history. Kong's hatred of the Skullcrawlers implicitly comes from them killing the rest of his kind including his parents until he was the last ape standing. Kong also has personal reasons to hate the Kraken in the ''Skull Island'' animated series, [[spoiler:as the creature is responsible for killing several of his beloved charges and has been tossing the remains of its kills at him to taunt him for years]]. In the 2014 movie, Joe Brody has been obsessed with uncovering the truth about Monarch and the male MUTO for years, after his wife died amid the destruction of Janjira as an indirect consequence of his actions before the MUTO attacked. Packard's insane obsession with killing Kong in ''Kong: Skull Island'' starts with Kong killing several of his men, and Packard latches onto that as a justification for a vendetta. The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization confirms the movie's vague hints that Ren Serizawa has a personal fixation on killing Godzilla because of his father's death while saving the Titan, and it furthermore reveals that Bernie Hayes is trying to expose Apex because they apparently silenced his wife to hide their dirty secrets.
* IWillFindYou: In ''King of the Monsters'', Mark's initial main motivation for actively helping Monarch's efforts to save the world from rampant Titans instead of continuing to complain and wallow in self-pity at his mountain cabin is so that he can rescue his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter, [[spoiler:although getting the former back justifiably goes out the window once he learns she was allied with the terrorists from the start, focusing solely on rescuing his daughter]]. In ''Skull Island'' (2023), this trope is revealed to be mercenary leader Irene's true motivation: [[spoiler:she's after [[WildChild Annie]] because the latter is her daughter who was lost at sea and presumed dead years ago, and she just wants her daughter back]].
* JaggedMouth: Rodan's beak is shaped like a jagged maw carved with a pumpkin knife, as are Mechagodzilla's lipless metal jaws.
* {{Jerkass}}:
** In ''Kong: Skull Island'', Packard doesn't act nice towards Weaver at all once he finds out she's part of the profession he blames for the Vietnam War's disappointing conclusion, threatening her ''after'' she's saved his and his men's asses, but the novelization furthermore reveals that Packard tends to be condescending to anyone who isn't in the military.
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' features several. The Titan Rodan is a WildCard who enjoys tearing through humans way more than he needs to, [[spoiler:and who makes a blusterous show at Godzilla in the aftermath of his three-headed former master's downfall only to quickly back down once Godzilla gives him a DeathGlare]]. Among the humans, aside from Mark Russell; the sardonic Senator Williams has nothing but disgust for the Titans, which she wants the military to wipe out, and she conveniently forgets or just ignores any counter-arguments that she's faced with onscreen during a hearing.
** Mark Russell is happy to use his grief to throw pity parties in both his film appearances while acting spiteful, and he's extremely rude to his allies in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' before his character development reaches its turning point (even when his allies are the people charged with rescuing his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter). Not even his family is safe from him using his grief to indirectly hurt them while he wallows in his own self-centeredness: he [[GriefInducedSplit abandoned his wife and daughter so that he could mope alone]] after Andrew's death, leaving them to deal with their own grief without him when they needed him more than ever before; and in his second appearance, Mark doesn't hesitate to guilt-trip Madison to make her shut up and do what he wants instead of arguing.
** Maia Simmons in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' is a JerkWithAHeartOfJerk: she's a sarcastic RichBitch who sees Kong as little more than an overgrown dumb animal, and she acts demeaning towards the rest of Team Kong, but she [[PetTheDog briefly rushes to Jia's aid in a life-threatening situation]]. She seems to tone down her jerkassery as the movie goes on and it becomes clear that she's out of her depth, but it doesn't stop her from betraying Team Kong, threatening their lives (Jia included), and leaving them all to die once she has what she accompanied them for and they start protesting to her actions.
** The Kraken in ''Skull Island'' is an extremely AxCrazy Titan that kills any human presence that it encounters in a disturbingly playful rather than predatory manner, and it's been throwing innocent whales to their deaths in an effort to enrage Kong to the point where he'll be goaded into fighting the Kraken to the death in a setting where the Kraken has HomefieldAdvantage. The humans briefly wonder why the Kraken acts so sadistic, and Sam's leading theory is that the creature is, to put it mildly, "a dick."
* JerkWithAHeartOfGold: Godzilla comes across as the PrehistoricMonster equivalent of a GrumpyOldMan overall but has a genuine fondness for humans. Mark Russell can be a hotheaded asshole who thinks [[ItsAllAboutMe it's all about him]], but for all his many faults and failings as well as his unpleasant personality, he genuinely loves his daughter and he does have his compassionate moments. [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] used to be this in ''Godzilla Aftershock'' as a highly arrogant but truly committed member of Monarch, before their FaceHeelTurn.
* JumpedAtTheCall: The ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' website expands on the backgrounds of several members of Monarch, stating many of them were all too happy to join a secret monster-hunting organization. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Madison Russell has grown to hate the normal life her father is trying to give them and is all too happy to investigate Godzilla's recent attack, but unfortunately, her father blocks her from having anything to do with Monarch which forces her to strike out on her own.
* {{Kaiju}}: The series is about gigantic monsters rampaging through human cities; what else would you expect from a franchise built upon the two most well-known [[TropeCodifier Trope Codifiers]] of the [=kaiju=] genre (Kong and Godzilla respectively)?
* KarmicDeath: Packard and Ghidorah both respectively are killed by the very heroic Titans (Godzilla and Kong respectively) that they were attempting to murder; in Ghidorah's case, whilst Godzilla was the chief cause of his downfall, Mothra (who [[spoiler:Ghidorah earlier killed]]) and humans (whom Ghidorah actively wants wiped off the face of the Earth and has been actively slaughtering with sadistic glee) also played a part, all working together to see the three-headed Living Extinction Event defeated. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Walter Simmons and Ren Serizawa are both killed as a direct result of their hubris in [[spoiler:exploiting Ghidorah's remains as the control mechanism for Mechagodzilla and also taking advantage of the Ghidorah remains' effects on Godzilla for immoral EngineeredHeroics, leading to Ghidorah's subconsciousness hijacking control of the Mecha and killing them both]].
* KilledMidSentence:
** Packard's last words in ''Kong: Skull Island'' just before Kong [[SquashedFlat crushes him]]:
--->"''Die, you motherfu-!''"
** [[PsychoSupporter Riccio]]'s last words in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'' before Kong also crushes him:
--->"''Great god Kong, savior of humankind, we give you thanks! We are worthy! We are-''"
** Master Sergeant Hendricks' last words in ''King of the Monsters'' just before Ghidorah's gravity beams turn him to ash:
--->"''[[CurseCutShort Oh, shi-]]''"
* KilledOffscreen: Gunpei Ikari during the 28-year TimeSkip in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and the Sirenjaw that's killed by Kong before the cast find its carcass in the sequel graphic novel ''The Birth of Kong''. In ''Godzilla vs Kong'', the Iwi except for Jia have suffered BusCrash. In the backstory of ''Skull Island'', Annie's and Dog's respective fathers died in a MutualKill, although we only see the leadup to and the fallout of that event in flashbacks.
* KillerGorilla: Although the [=MonsterVerse=] King Kong is one of the more heroic iterations, if you cross him, he'll go straight for the kill whether you're a human or a rival {{Kaiju}}. The main antagonist of ''Film/GodzillaXKongTheNewEmpire'' is set to be an orangutan-like Titan, who is seen in the teaser glaring murderously at the camera, while sitting on a primeval throne surrounded by the bones of dead Titans.
* KillItWithFire: How Ford Brody destroys the [=MUTOs'=] nest of eggs in the 2014 film. This is also one of the more effective methods of killing or weakening creatures on Skull Island in ''Kong: Skull Island''. And it's [[spoiler:{{exaggerated}} by Burning Godzilla using skyscraper-melting heat and thermonuclear pulses to vaporize King Ghidorah once and for all]] in ''King of the Monsters''.
* KnightTemplar: The human antagonists in every film. Preston Packard in ''Kong: Skull Island'' is an AxCrazy GeneralRipper who thinks he's doing his duty by picking a fight with Kong and risking the Skullcrawlers becoming a threat to the rest of the world. Alan Jonah and [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' think they're being [[GaiasVengeance Gaia's Avenger]] by actively releasing all the Titans to decimate humanity, unaware that one of the Titans they've unleashed is [[spoiler:an invasive alien OmnicidalManiac who will create an even worse extinction event than humanity]]. And Apex Cybernetics in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' use a MugglePower agenda to justify themselves in light of humanity's relatively helpless state in the Titan power discrepancy.
* KrakenAndLeviathan: Several. Aside from the crocodilian, semi-aquatic Godzilla himself, the franchise has featured two cephalopodic, tentacled marine Titans that are capable of inflicting mass destruction on the settings, and both of them shared the name "Kraken" at some point. The first Kraken, Na Kika, is among the monsters enthralled by King Ghidorah to attack the world during the global Titan rampage in ''King of the Monsters'', having been hibernating on the Indian Ocean floor beforehand; while the second Kraken in the ''Skull Island'' series (named by the series' executive producer and writer, who admitted on Twitter that he hadn't been aware of Na Kika before the show's release); is a highly-aggressive and malicious beast which attacks anyone or anything that approaches Skull Island's waters from either direction.
* LabcoatOfScienceAndMedicine: Several people wear white labcoats, even in settings which normally wouldn't require such garments: the MUTO-monitoring scientist Jainway in the 2014 film, the scientists at the China outpost monitoring Mothra's egg in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', and several Apex scientists involved in [[HumongousMecha Mechagodzilla]]'s development at the Pensacola facility in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
* LackOfEmpathy: Among the human {{Big Bad Wannabe}}s, Jonah in ''King of the Monsters'', and Simmons and Ren in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' display ''zero'' signs of concern or empathy for the ''millions'' or '''billions''' people whom are hurt or killed by their {{Evil Plan}}s.
* LastOfHisKind: The vast majority of Titans are this, and Jia is this to the Iwi after the tribe's BusCrash in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
* LastRequest: In the 2014 movie, Sandra Brody's last request to her husband is for him to [[TakeCareOfTheKids take care of their son]], and ''his'' last request to their son is that he do whatever it takes to protect his family. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Serizawa's last request is telling Mark Russell to take care of the former's colleagues.
* LeanAndMean: Both Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla, despite being among the larger Titans, have very lean and lithe physiques -- they're also a lot eviler than the other Titans, being ''actively'' genocidal creatures who murder humans every chance they get. The orangutan-like Titan in the ''Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire'' teaser cuts a slender physique, and is implied to be a ferocious warrior Titan and an antagonist.
%%* LectureAsExposition: In ''Godzilla'' (2014), ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''King of the Monsters''.
* LethallyStupid: In the 2014 film, the military fire at Godzilla in the San Francisco Bay when there's still civilian evacuees on the Golden Gate Bridge trying to escape, plus their firing on Godzilla not only fails to harm him, it provokes him into destroying the bridge while acting in self-defence. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Emma Russell releases Ghidorah on the world in the belief that he's ultimately beneficial for the world's renewal, not knowing he's actually an OmnicidalManiac who proceeds to slaughter any humans he sees for his amusement; meanwhile, the military attempt to kill both Ghidorah and Rodan on their own terms by firing their untested FantasticNuke at the creatures, but the bomb instead cripples Godzilla whilst failing to affect Ghidorah at all, enabling Ghidorah to initiate a global apocalypse which destroys numerous cities and claims countless lives. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Apex Cybernetics end up unwittingly [[spoiler:bringing Ghidorah back into the world and giving it a chance to pick up where its previous identity left off with razing the entire planet, because Apex were stupid and arrogant enough to think they could incorporate Ghidorah's NotQuiteDead remains and a practically-unknown energy source into Mechagodzilla and ''not'' expect it to liably backfire on them]].
* LightFeminineAndDarkFeminine:
** In ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'', Madison Russell is a young but kind girl and is the most well-balanced member of her grieving family. On the other hand, her mother Emma Russell, who kept custody of her after the divorce, [[spoiler:is an extremist EcoTerrorist who wants to instigate the {{Kaiju}} in a way which will kill millions of people, and she proves to be extremely arrogant and unbalanced]].
** In ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', Dr. Ilene Andrews is the most maternal character in the cast, whilst her and her team's benefactor Maia Simmons is an unfriendly RichBitch [[spoiler:who's using them and plans to betray them]].
* LightIsNotGood: Ghidorah emits yellow lightning from his body, and causes superstorms filled with lightning wherever he goes -- and he's an OmnicidalManiac, seeking to wipe out all life as we know it, and taking pleasure in killing humans wherever and whenever he can. His reincarnation Mechagodzilla, who emits red light, is just as bad in personality, on account of Ghidorah's subconsciousness controlling him.
* LightningBruiser: A lot of the Titans including Godzilla, Kong, Rodan, Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla and the Skullcrawlers are ''far'' from being the MightyGlacier when it comes to max speed and reflexes.
* LikeFatherUnlikeSon:
** The franchise's starkest case is Dr. Ishirō Serizawa (who died in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''), and his son Ren (who debuted in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''), who are complete polar opposites. Whereas Ishirō is a compassionate, wise, cautious and mindful man who loves nature and is critical of humanity's arrogance, reveres the Titans and all but worships Godzilla; Ren is a [[LackOfEmpathy callous]], twisted, ruthless and arrogant GadgeteerGenius who has absolutely no empathy for the millions of innocent people that he endangers, he exhibits the very arrogance which his father criticized man for to an exaggerated degree, he chauvinistically believes that mankind is destined to surpass the Titans, and he's [[ItsPersonal personally]] gunning to kill Godzilla himself.
** ''King of the Monsters'' character Sam Coleman's Monarch Sciences bio establishes that he and his father Michael were the JockDadNerdSon type. Michael was a loud sports fan, in contrast to how Sam is a stuttering, soft-spoken (and skinny) GadgeteerGenius.
** Mark and Madison Russell. Mark is HotBlooded, [[ItsAllAboutMe self-centered]], blinded by his emotions, prone to self-pity, cynical about the Titans, and wants to have a normal life without the creatures in it; whereas Madison is a lot more rational-headed, compassionate, and considerate of the greater good whilst exhibiting good gut instincts, she has a much more positive outlook on the Titans, and she eventually finds that she'd prefer being a part of Monarch over pretending to be normal.
** Cap and Charlie in ''Skull Island'' (2023). Cap is an enthusiastic and eccentric marine cryptozoologist who loves what he does, and he notably maintains a cool and rational head as much as possible on the IsleOfGiantHorrors. His son Charlie hates his father's work, wants to leave for college [[IJustWantToBeNormal for the sake of tasting normalcy]], and he loses his temper when his nerves are frazzled by the situation.
* LineageComesFromTheFather:
** GenderInverted by the Chen family. Introduced in ''King of the Monsters'', they're a family with a history of worshipping Mothra and an apparently preternatural [[HereditaryTwinhood disposition to always birthing sets of identical twin girls]]. Their family photo in the movie, which features at least three generations, consists exclusively of female sets of twins, and there isn't a single male member in the photo who could have fathered any of the younger women and girls.
** PlayedStraight in the backstory of ''Skull Island''. Dog and his father are the only two known members of their kind on Annie's Island, and the latter's death in a MutualKill against Annie's father was the catalyst for Dog and Annie banding together.
* LogicalWeakness: Several of the Titans are presented with a realistic case of this. Godzilla's short arms have limited reach not unlike a ''Tyrannosaurus rex'' which makes a smaller opponent like the male [=MUTO=] going for his head quite effective, and he actually needs ''breath'' when exhaling his Atomic Breath [[spoiler:which ultimately enables Mechagodzilla, as a MechanicalAbomination with no such bodily requirement, to win their BeamOWar]]. Ghidorah is a massive powerhouse, but because his body is built for flight, he can't swim and is at a severe disadvantage when Godzilla drags him under the ocean. Mechagodzilla itself, [[spoiler:though technically Ghidorah reincarnated, lacks any kind of HealingFactor to repair damage to its machine body]]. Camazotz, having developed super-sensitive hearing to navigate in darkness, is extremely sensitive to sonic booms too close to his head.
* LovecraftLite: It has the classic conceit of ''Literature/TheCallOfCthulhu'' of beings of unfathomable age and power waking up and showing humanity's smallness -- Godzilla himself was at the Castle Bravo nuclear test, the largest nuclear explosion by the United States, and despite being point blank, he survived. This is softened because most of the monsters are much more interested in fighting each other than harming people, with some such as Kong being legitimately fond and protective of humanity, and Godzilla almost goes out of his way to avoid destruction. Furthermore, the only way humanity can survive against the genuinely dangerous Kaiju is via AlwaysABiggerFish in the forms of such benevolent kaiju as Godzilla or Kong, and despite humanity's smallness, they can still contribute majorly to the outcomes of the kaiju's battles (i.e., distracting the malevolent kaiju long enough to give the benevolent ones an advantage).
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[[folder:M-P]]
* MalignantPlotTumor: The titular fight in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' is made out to be a huge deal that the first three films have been leading up to, even though the mere ''notion'' that Kong and Godzilla have any relevant relationship with each-other wasn't introduced anywhere onscreen until the third film; and even then, it's only explicitly revealed that the two Titans' species were once rivals in the very last shot of that film's CreativeClosingCredits.
* {{Mangst}}: Dr. Serizawa and Lieutenant Ford Brody both present themselves as TheStoic, but it's apparent that just under the surface, Serizawa is still haunted by the shadow that the Hiroshima bomb cast on his motherland's history, while Ford is still haunted by his mother's death which ([[TheCuckoolanderWasRight supposedly]]) caused his dad to lose his marbles. Both men are also clearly devastated by the loss of a loved one: [[spoiler:Dr. Vivienne Graham for Serizawa, Joe Brody for Ford]].
* ManipulativeBastard:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Alan Jonah uses manipulation to keep Emma under his thumb, [[spoiler:encouraging her belief that sticking to their evil plan is the only way to save the world, until he doesn't need her anymore. Emma herself is an [[AbusiveParents emotionally-manipulative mother]] who has dragged Madison into her and Jonah's radicalist plot by preying on [[WellDoneDaughterGirl Madison's desire to please her]], but she's not as competent as Jonah, as she's nonplussed when her and Jonah's atrocities actually drive a traumatized Madison away from them because Emma hadn't done anything to condition Madison for the nastier parts of their plan]].
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Apex Cybernetics, whom are fitting led by a [[TheSociopath high-functioning sociopath]], are highly reliant on manipulation and subterfuge to get what they want. They deliberately paint Godzilla as a menace for attacking one of their facilities seemingly unprovoked, giving them an in to convince Monarch to help them obtain the {{unobtainium}} in the Hollow Earth to combat Godzilla; [[spoiler:and then Apex plan to use Mechagodzilla's bio-acoustics to drive Godzilla into destroying another, even more densely-populated city]], so that Apex will be hailed as heroes and won't fall under widespread scrutiny when they attempt to murder Godzilla using Mechagodzilla.
* {{Masquerade}}: Upheld in ''Kong: Skull Island'', since the island itself is hidden away and any information about what happened there is classified. Upheld for about half of ''Godzilla'', at which point Godzilla and the two [=MUTO=] [[TheUnmasquedWorld completely do away with it altogether]].
* MassOhCrap: The human cast of ''Kong: Skull Island'' when they first see the titular ape about to attack them. [[TheDreaded Ghidorah]] causes a few of these amongst the whole of Monarch, Team Godzilla and even one of the ''bad guys'' across ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
* MauveShirt: In both ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''King of the Monsters'', there are dozens of expendable, nameless red shirts, but several soldiers in either film get special characterization that makes them stand out, and some of them in either film survive to the ending whilst pretty much all the others are killed by the Titans.
* MaybeMagicMaybeMundane: Despite the much more realistic and grounded tone of the [=MonsterVerse=], there are a number of elements that seem to toe the line between science and supernatural. For example:
** Skull Island has bizarre {{Planimal}} wildlife, strange atmospheric anomalies like auroras and a surrounding PerpetualStorm, and natives that Marlow comments don't seem to age. Randa even refers to it as [[EldritchLocation "the land where God did not finish creation."]]
*** In the graphic novel ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', Walter Riccio while on the island experiences several visions depicting Kong's parents and depicting Skullcrawlers killing them right after Kong's birth. Were these visions purely hallucinations brought on by Riccio's overconsumption of the Iwi's medicinal brew (which was implicitly fueling his SanitySlippage), or were they "The devils of this island whisper[ing] into his ear" as Ato put it and he really is viewing Skull Island's past?
** Mothra has a strange connection to a family line of identical twins, BornAgainImmortality via GeneticMemory, and [[spoiler: Madison reviving after having a vision of her]] that all seem to suggest she may be an ''actual'' PhysicalGod. In the same vein as Mothra, there are some hints that Camazotz might have PsychicPowers which affect those humans who have come into contact with him.
** In the graphic novel ''Kingdom Kong'', there are some hints with Camazotz that Mothra might not be the only supernatural Titan on Earth, the strongest being that Tam who was put into a coma by encountering Camazotz in 2019 just ''happens'' to come out of said coma around the same time that Camazotz resurges and is defeated two years later. One has to wonder, are Captain Burns' flashbacks and waking nightmares of Camazotz, and even her fear and despair almost crippling her during the battle, merely her PTSD or are they also signs she's sensitive to and being affected by Camazotz' PsychicPowers?
*** Speaking more of Camazotz, the aforementioned ''Kingdom Kong'' and the ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' guidebook both heavily imply that the Iwi outright ''prophesized'' both Camazotz' emergence and Skull Island's resulting destruction in 2021.
* MeaningfulLook:
** ''Godzilla'' (2014): Ford and Joe exchange a shocked look with each-other when they realize that the bridge Joe is standing on is about to collapse. Toward the climax, Godzilla half-collapses into the streets [[spoiler:after he's killed Hokmuto]], and he locks eyes with a mesmerized Ford for a moment.
** ''Kong: Skull Island'' (2017): Kong casts one last look back at Conrad and Weaver before they part ways, after he's saved Weaver's life.
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' (2019): When Godzilla is near-dead [[spoiler:in the HollowEarth]] with Ghidorah free to rampage over the world unchecked, he sees Serizawa approaching his head. [[spoiler:His neutral gaze seems to soften when the dying Serizawa reaches out a hand to touch Godzilla]].
* MeaningfulName: Quite a few. Besides the Kaiju carried over from Toho and the ''King Kong'' franchise directly, and besides Ghidorah's RedBaron as the One Who Is Many in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''; there's also the [[MoleMonster MUTO Prime]] being named after a mythical "Earthquake Beetle" in ''Godzilla Aftershock'', the Skullcrawlers' name describing their anatomy (and their Iwi name Halakrah translates to the accurate description "[[SuperPersistentPredator persistent enemy]]"), [[TheWormThatWalks Shinomura]] being named after a phrase meaning "''swarm of death''" in ''Godzilla Awakening'', [[MugglePower Apex Cybernetics]]' name referring to both their end goal and [[HumongousMecha the means they intend to use to accomplish it]] in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', and Annie naming her loyal megafauna companion on Skull Island [[GiverOfLameNames Dog]].
* MilitariesAreUseless: The series follows the trend set up in the original movies of the military standing no chance against the Kaiju. That being said, the exact degree of uselessness varies between movies.
** Downplayed in ''Godzilla'', in that they're shown to be otherwise fully competent (being able to quickly and efficiently evacuate San Francisco, and help survivors), just completely out of their depth.
** Likewise downplayed in ''Kong: Skull Island''. The military is not useless, so much as they're completely out of their element, which leads to them doing more harm than good.
** Played straight in ''King of the Monsters'', where not only are they completely helpless against the Titans (beyond just irritating them), but they end up actually making the situation ''much worse'' than it otherwise would have been; when they deploy the Oxygen Destroyer, which cripples Godzilla, giving Ghidorah a chance to usurp his position as Alpha Titan and achieve a NearVillainVictory which almost spelled global extinction.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', they quickly join the others in concluding that Godzilla's done a FaceHeelTurn, and fire on him whenever they see him. All this really serves to do is provoke him further.
* AMillionIsAStatistic: Generally, in the family-centered [=MonsterVerse=] movies thus far, the focus family's suffering is played for extra pathos. In ''Godzilla'' (2014), Joe Brody is driven to discover the truth about Monarch and the Titans because of the death of his wife, but he never mentions the several other co-workers who died alongside her (and were much less willing than she was to accept their fates at the end); not even when he's calling Monarch out and saying that his loss means he has a right to know the truth. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' (2019), the Russell family's angst and conflict after they were among the thousands affected by the destruction of San Francisco is played for a lot of sympathy, despite the parents' self-centered attitude to it all [[spoiler:(especially [[MoralMyopia Emma's]], who intentionally sacrifices millions of innocent people during the film so long as they aren't [[VillainousParentalInstinct her daughter]])]]; whilst Monarch isn't shown dwelling lastingly on the deaths of dozens of their nameless and minor colleagues, but Serizawa ''is'' shown grieving the death of supporting character Vivienne Graham briefly.
* AMinorKidroduction: Ford Brody and Madison Russell are both introduced in their respective movies as children in the DistantPrologue, before we meet their present day selves. Their intros as kids also set up something about their present day selves' characterization: Ford's childhood bedroom is strewn with army toys, while the seven-year-old Madison reacts to Godzilla's thunderous arrival with open awe instead of fear or horror.
* MisplacedRetribution: Mostly along the same or similar lines to RevengeMyopia. In ''King of the Monsters'', Mark Russell hates Godzilla for his son's death in Godzilla's battle against the [=MUTOs=] even though the [=MUTOs=] were to blame, and Mark's son was just an accidental casualty, never mind that Mark is too blinded by emotion to remember that Godzilla is an animal who bore no ill will. In the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization's expansion, Ren Serizawa wants to kill Godzilla because he blames the Titan for the ParentalNeglect Ren suffered while his father devoted his life and time to his work studying Godzilla, not caring that Godzilla as an animal likely has no idea of this or that he's trying to undo the very thing his father gave his life for.
* MissingMom: Sandra Brody, Ford's mother in ''Film/Godzilla2014'', is killed by the Janjira reactor breach in the DistantPrologue. Meanwhile, practically nothing is known about Ishirō Serizawa's mother even after the release of ''Godzilla Awakening'', but the prequel seems to hint she either died in the Hiroshima bombing or otherwise left/died before the event (the baby Ishirō was in a different part of town from his father when the bomb fell, and Eiji chose to leave Ishirō in the care of his grandparents after the bombing).
* MissingStepsPlan: In ''King of the Monsters'', Mark briefly gives up hope of helping the heroes stop King Ghidorah, and he attempts to go out and find his missing daughter on his own, even though she could be hidden in literally any Monarch bunker around the world, surrounded by misanthropic cold-blooded killers no less; although Mothra's timely emergence stops Mark from going through with this. In the ''Skull Island'' series, Irene hatches a plan to manipulate the Hawk Monster into getting rid of Dog so she can recapture Annie and then they can get off the titular island -- only for Cap to remind her that they have no chance of leaving the island alive while the Kraken is in the waters offshore, and that they don't know how they can kill it.
* MissionBriefing: There are a few of these which serve to infodump important plot details to the audience; in ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''King of the Monsters''.
* MrExposition: Recurring characters Drs. Ishirō Serizawa and Vivienne Graham devote a good chunk of their respective dialogue to expositing about the Titans and explaining immediately-relevant things about them for the audience's convenience. This role in also taken up by Joe Brody in the 2014 movie, Hank Marlow in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and Dr. Chen in ''King of the Monsters''.
* MonsterDelay: In Godzilla's movie debut, we don't see his full body until at least 1/4 through the movie. Like husband like moth, since in ''King of the Monsters'', Mothra's imago form's face and full body aren't seen by the audience until at least 30 minutes after the scene where she hatched. In both Kong's cinematic debut ''and'' his animated debut, his full appearance including his face is obscured in his first scene, and we don't see his full likeness until later on. A much more villainous case of this trope coming into effect is the extremely violent Kraken in the ''Skull Island'' series, which is only seen by its CombatTentacles (and a few glimpses of parts of its body in the first episode), before its full appearance is revealed in the season finale.
* MonumentalDamage: In the 2014 film, Las Vegas' Eiffel Tower and Statue of Liberty replicas are trashed by the [=MUTOs=], and the Golden Gate Bridge is torn in two by Godzilla. In ''King of the Monsters'', King Ghidorah's conversion of Washington D.C. into his {{Mordor}} scorches the Capitol's iconic dome, while Godzilla and Ghidorah's FinalBattle in Boston disintegrates the former John Hancock Tower.
* MoralDisambiguation: In the first couple of movies, [[AdaptationalHeroism Godzilla]] and Kong are on humanity's side more due to circumstance than anything else. Godzilla causes mass destruction in his own right, and it's ambiguous how much he is out to destroy the more hostile [=MUTOs=] because they're disrupting the balance of nature at large, and how much he's just out to kill his natural enemy. In his debut in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'', Kong is an AntiHero and not above massacring U.S. military forces when they unwittingly disturb and threaten his kingdom. Meanwhile, Godzilla and Kong's kaiju foes in early installments are [[NonMaliciousMonster simply doing what nature built them to do rather than being deliberately malicious]]. In subsequent movies; Godzilla, and especially Kong, become more heroic and pathic to humans, whilst the antagonistic kaiju get more petty, sadistic and/or genuinely AxCrazy.
* {{Mordor}}: On Skull Island, the vicious and invasive Skullcrawlers who serve as Kong's primary foes and the main threat to the island make their home in a barren, noxious graveyard of Titan bones which stands in contrast to the rest of the island's lush and tropical terrain. In ''King of the Monsters'', King Ghidorah, an actively-malicious [[spoiler:alien]] Titan who wants to reshape the entire Earth with [[PerpetualStorm endless storms]] and numerous Titans rampaging at once until all other multicellular life is dead; is accompanied by a dark-clouded, lightning-filled hypercane[[note]]basically a hurricane on overdrive[[/note]] wherever he goes -- he transforms Washington D.C. into a blasted, inundated, apocalyptic hellscape of scorched and half-submerged buildings with not a trace of non-monster life in sight when he makes the city his roost.
* MoreTeethThanTheOsmondFamily: Many of the monsters have more teeth inside their mouths than a person would feel comfortable seeing. Skullcrawlers, Swamp Locusts and the Kraken on Skull Island, Mokele-Mbembe in the wider world. Even Ghidorah has a couple extra teeth in his heads' gums.
* MultipurposeTongue: The recurring Skullcrawlers, and the chameleon monsters from the animated series, both of which are residents on Skull Island; have elongated tongues which they fire out of their mouths to grab prey as large as people and drag them into their waiting jaws.
* MustMakeAmends: The movie {{novelization}}s have a couple cases. In the ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'' novelization, [[Characters/MonsterVerseMadisonRussell Madison]] wants to make up for her own part in helping the [[EcoTerrorist eco-terrorists]] to unleash a [[OmnicidalManiac King Ghidorah]]-led army of {{Kaiju}} on the world when she takes matters into her own hands [[spoiler:by stealing the ORCA and risking her life to help the heroes put an extra dent in Ghidorah's plans]]. In the ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' novelization, Dr. [[Characters/MonsterVerseMonarch Ilene Andrews]] admits during the mission to find Kong a new home that she feels guilty about Monarch's role in Skull Island's destruction by Camazotz.
* MyGreatestFailure: Dr. Nathan Lind's greatest failure which he tries to fix is getting his brother and several other people killed during his failed first attempt to pioneer manned travel into the HollowEarth. Mark Russell's greatest failure which he feels the need to amend for is being absent from Madison's life for years while she was growing up [[spoiler:and while her mother went insane]]. In the ''Kong: Skull Island'' novelization, Conrad is ashamed and disillusioned because of a disastrous clandestine rescue mission which ended with the young rescuee and Conrad's own men dead.
* MysteriousAntarctica: Antarctica is where [[SealedEvilInACan Ghidorah]] was found by Monarch before ''King of the Monsters'', the ancient evil creature having been frozen in a glacier millennia ago, and Ghidorah was notably at the time considered a particularly mysterious Titan by Monarch. It's also revealed in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' that Antarctica is home to a gigantic Vile Vortex leading into the Hollow Earth, and the film's novelization notes that the vortex is much too close to Ghidorah's former prison for it to be a coincidence.
* NarrowAnnihilationEscape: In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', the cast have ''several'' narrow escapes from story-relevant locations as they're physically destroyed; from Ghidorah and Rodan's respective resting sites when the Titans awaken, to the protagonists' original home city, to the newly-discovered AdvancedAncientAcropolis in the Hollow Earth. The latter happens again in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'': Team Kong barely escape with their lives as the mysterious temple built by Kong's ancestors' civilization is destroyed minutes after they've discovered it.
* NatureIsNotNice: Everything humans thought they knew about the creatures they share the Earth with is really just the ''insect kingdom'', humanity included. There was once an entire world of gigantic, radioactive, borderline-supernatural beasts who will fight and kill each-other for dominance and survival, but fortunately, most of these creatures are indifferent to humans the same way we're indifferent to the ants we see in our garden. Somewhat ZigZagged, as some of the Kaiju such as Godzilla, Mothra and Kong are capable of higher intelligence and even displaying benevolence towards humans, and ''King of the Monsters'' establishes the Kaiju have a cross-species hierarchy amongst themselves which enables them to coexist with each-other.
* NearVillainVictory:
** In ''Godzilla: Aftershock'', Jinshin-Mushi wears Godzilla down and it comes within ''seconds'' of laying its parasitic MUTO eggs in Godzilla's body (at which point it would've been game over for Godzilla), [[spoiler:before Emma's intervention distracts Jinshin-Mushi and enables Godzilla to regain the advantage]].
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Ghidorah has more than one. From usurping Godzilla's position as the King of the Monsters and using his new authority to instigate a global Titan apocalypse unstopped, to weakening a returned Godzilla and almost VampiricDraining him to death, take your pick.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', [[spoiler:the Ghidorah-possessed]] Mechagodzilla brutally wears an already-weakened Godzilla down, and it's a split-second away from finishing Godzilla off with its very own [[AttackTheMouth Kiss of Death]] [[spoiler:when Kong intervenes to help Godzilla defeat the Mecha]].
* NerdGlasses: In the movies, Dr. Brooks, Dr. Stanton and Ben are all Monarch scientists with big-rimmed glasses, plus there's Madison's "hacker" friend Josh Valentine in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''. ''Godzilla Aftershock'' depicts Vivienne Graham with a pair of such glasses in one scene.
* NervesOfSteel: There are several examples amongst the humans. Mason Weaver and Alan Jonah both respond very much this way when they find themselves staring down the barrel of a gun respectively, whilst Lieutenant Brody and Lieutenant Colonel Packard respectively handle themselves very calmly in intense situations, and Director Guillerman doesn't panic when in the radius of Godzilla's rampage.
* NiceGuy: Ford in ''Godzilla'' (2014) goes out of his way to help a stranger boy who's been separated from his parents on a train ''before'' the monsters show up, and he takes all the grief and suffering around him quite well, all things considered. In ''King of the Monsters'', Drs. Graham and Coleman act kind and sympathetic, and the former doctor is described in the film's novelization as the most compassionate person Serizawa ever knew.
* NiceJobBreakingItHero: There are quite a few cases. The biggest offenders are Admiral Stenz, whose support of the Oxygen Destroyer in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' directly causes Ghidorah's NearVillainVictory that takes up the second half of the film; God knows how many of the people Stenz was trying to protect die horribly around the world as a result of this, to say nothing of how Ghidorah's victory would have spelled the extinction of humanity and all other complex life on Earth. Dr. Brooks, whose seismic operations on Skull Island in ''Kingdom Kong'' (a mistake of his which previously unleashed the Skullcrawlers in ''Kong: Skull Island'') debatably secures [[spoiler:the destruction of Skull Island's entire unique ecosystem by PerpetualStorm]], much to his horror. In the WholeEpisodeFlashback of the ''Skull Island'' series, Kong being cocky when he takes on the Killer Chameleons gets him injured, and unfortunately when he treats the wound afterwards he accidentally awakens the Kraken which causes Kong and the human cast a lot of death and grief throughout the series.
* NighInvulnerability: Nearly all the Titans are immune to manmade weapons, and whenever humans build a new weapon specifically so they can kill Titans, it ''always'' makes things much worse for humanity instead of making things better. A recurring core theme of the [=MonsterVerse=] is that it TakesOneToKillOne, and humans who fail to realize that often make things worse with their hubris.
* TheNightThatNeverEnds: Camazotz actively seeks to inflict this on Skull Island via PerpetualStorm (and actually succeeds), whilst before him it was implied that Ghidorah would've blanketed the entire Earth in endless storms if he won.
* NobleMaleRoguishMale:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Godzilla is the rightful King of the Monsters who fights for the natural order, while one of his opponents, Rodan, is a HotBlooded WildCard with shifting allegiances. On the human side, Dr. Serizawa is a stoic and professional scientist, while Mark is a rugged and experienced field zoologist.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Kong is portrayed as the more compassionate, kind and restrained of the titular Titans, while Godzilla is portrayed as a lot more aggressive and forceful than he was previously.
* NoOneGetsLeftBehind: In ''Kong: Skull Island'', [[GeneralRipper Packard]] uses this mentality to justify risking all his remaining men's lives by traveling to the crash site ostensibly to rescue Chapman. In ''King of the Monsters'', Dr. Graham stays behind in a downed tiltrotor to save a pinned Mark Russell while everyone else evacuates; an act which [[HeroicSacrifice indirectly costs her her own life]].
* NoRangeLikePointBlankRange: Godzilla's "Kiss of Death", shown in the 2014 movie, involves forcing his opponent's jaws open with his bare hands, leaning in close, and firing his Atomic Breath directly down their open gullet. In ''King of the Monsters'', Alan Jonah kills a Monarch scientist named Dr. Mancini with a headshot from six feet away, and Ghidorah defeats Rodan by having his [[MultipleHeadCase side heads]] grab Rodan's wings while his middle head fires a Gravity Beam into the bird's chest at range.
* NormalFishInATinyPond: On average, the creatures on Skull Island are in a lighter weight class than the Titans distributed around the world, but still a mortal threat to any humans that run afoul of them. Kong, the Skullcrawlers and the Kraken are the island's top dogs who vie against each-other to be the island's apex predators (a position which Kong holds and maintains), but Godzilla and the worldwide Titans are in another league altogether, [[spoiler:as Kong himself learns the hard way in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' once the global King of the Monsters stops holding back on the King of Skull Island altogether]].
* NothingIsTheSameAnymore:
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' initially set this up with the dormant Titans having been awakened around the world and Godzilla enforcing a human-Titan coexistence leading to the DawnOfAnEra, but subsequent installments unfortunately subverted it and mostly turned it into an AbortedArc by having Godzilla command all the Titans to return to hibernation.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Skull Island has been engulfed in an ecosystem-destroying PerpetualStorm due to Camazotz's actions in the graphic novel ''Kingdom Kong'', forcing Monarch to remove Kong from the island while all but one of the natives and everything else on the island perishes. Kong ultimately finds a new home reigning in the Hollow Earth.
* NotQuiteDead:
** Godzilla multiple times appears to be dead, only to then stir and get back up: first when he has a PostVictoryCollapse in the first movie, then when he seemingly flatlines and disappears from the plot for a short while after being hit by the Oxygen Destroyer (a device which really ''did'' kill some of his previous iterations including [[Film/Godzilla1954 the original]]) in ''King of the Monsters''.
** Speaking of the first movie, the male MUTO seemingly dies when its chrysalis is electrocuted by Monarch, with all visible activity and life readings from the chrysalis ceasing, only for the [=MUTO's=] adult form to explode out after a minute, none worse for wear. And the [=MUTO's=] female counterpart's spore was assumed by Monarch to be safely inert for years, until they realize it's been communicating with the male as of late and has likely hatched by now.
** Rodan is taken out of the FinalBattle in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' when Mothra impales him through the shoulder with her stinger, collapsing to the ground. He only turns up again at the battle's end, after Ghidorah's death.
** {{Downplayed}} by Ghidorah. At the end of ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', all that's left of him after Burning Godzilla [[NotEnoughToBury completely vaporized him]] -- which was heavily implied to be a necessity to ensure Ghidorah couldn't regenerate his body from any pieces[[note]]since the completely-severed middle head [[LosingYourHead was still alive and kicking]] inbetween vaporization stages, and Ghidorah previously demonstrated an unnaturally-potent HealingFactor after losing and regrowing a head[[/note]] -- is the severed version of the head that Ghidorah lost and regrew much earlier in the movie, hinting that Ghidorah might not be completely dead yet. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', that head has decayed to a skull, but it's revealed that it still retains at least enough of Ghidorah's telepathic consciousness to hijack Mechagodzilla's A.I., driving the machine to {{kill all humans}} and pull out almost all stops trying to kill [[ItsPersonal Godzilla]].
* NotSoStoic: Dr. Serizawa and Ford Brody are both presented as TheStoic, whilst [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] tries (and fails) to be TheUnfettered. Across the 2014 film and ''King of the Monsters'', all have moments where they're just pushed too far to not show emotion, due to a loved one dying or being threatened.
* NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist: Just about every human BigBadWannabe in the movies presents themselves as going to extreme lengths in the name of a just cause, yet it becomes clear as things go on that their evil acts' true motivations are entirely selfish and that their superficial "well intentions" are just an excuse.
** [[GeneralRipper Packard]] in ''Kong: Skull Island'' presents his vendetta against Kong for killing several of his men as being entirely justified, and he rants about how he's a soldier getting his hands dirty so that his country won't have to live in fear of the knowledge that such things as Kong exist, but he refuses to take responsibility for leading his remaining men to their deaths all to satiate his own insane love-hate obsession with defeating Kong.
** [[MisanthropeSupreme Alan Jonah]] in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' says he's awakening the Titans and slaughtering everyone in his way because his plan is the only way to prevent the human race from irreversibly wrecking all life on Earth, but once King Ghidorah begins engineering an even worse extinction event than the one humanity was in the process of causing, Jonah uses increasing InsaneTrollLogic and a [[MisanthropeSupreme rant about the true evils of human nature]] to justify ''letting'' Ghidorah do what it wants, showing that [[EcoTerrorist eco-terrorism]] was nothing more than an excuse and Jonah is willing to let potentially ''all life on Earth'' die so long as it'll satiate his all-consuming hatred for humanity.
** [[CorruptCorporateExecutive Walter Simmons]] in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' paints his and his company Apex's machinations with Mechagodzilla as them giving humanity a secure line of defence against the Titans and a way to retake dominance of the planet, but [[spoiler:they fired the first shot which disrupted a peaceful human-Titan coexistence by creating Mechagodzilla, they have been ''knowingly'' putting millions of people in Godzilla's warpath on purpose as part of EngineeredHeroics, and the art book states that they would've turned the world into a corporate police state if they'd succeeded in conquering the Titans]]. It becomes clear during Team Godzilla's confrontation with Simmons that he's just using MugglePower as an excuse, having committed his evil actions because, in truth, '''he''' wants to be able to call himself the top dog over everything on the planet for the sake of his own ego.
* NuclearOption: Although the franchise for the most part has a NuclearWeaponsTaboo (not solely because of the nuke's destructive power but mainly also because the Titans feed on radiation), there have been a couple times where using a nuke actually worked out for the best: namely against Shinomura in ''Godzilla Awakening'', and when a nuke was used to [[spoiler:speed up Godzilla's recuperation]] in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019''.
* NukeEm: At least twice. The military in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' think it's a brilliant idea to throw a nuke at Godzilla and his enemies and just hope it kills all of them instead of the radiation making them even stronger. Then in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', the military have been working on an even more destructive weapon so they can kill Titans, and they throw it at Ghidorah and (somewhat unwittingly) Godzilla in a seeming panic without bothering to work out what precisely is going on, and the result is... well, the consequences that ensued made it an EpicFail on the military's part.
* ObstructiveBureaucrat: The United Nations Security Council in ''Godzilla Aftershock''. They've made up their minds about what ''not'' to do about the MUTO Prime crisis as soon as they heard the part where the MUTO Prime succeeding in its goal of wearing down and fatally impregnating Godzilla with its parasitic spawn will cause the MUTO Prime to go back into dormancy. They're convinced this will solve both their problems with [[HeroWithBadPublicity Godzilla]] dead and the MUTO Prime inactive, in blatant and frankly obscene disregard of the bit where allowing the MUTO Prime to do that will result in its spawn being unleashed on the world to at best trigger a repeat of the 2014 incident or at worst succeed in causing worldwide extinction including the destruction of civilization, with no Godzilla to fight them (or any other hostile Titans) off this time.
* OffscreenMomentOfAwesome: In the 2014 film, ''King of the Monsters'', and the graphic novel ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong''; several monster fights occur entirely offscreen. These include the entirety of Godzilla's first ever brawl in this incarnation, which is also the first time that the [=MonsterVerse's=] StarterVillain gets seriously pushed on the backfoot; and a good chunk of the global destruction [[BigBad King Ghidorah]] causes after he [[TyrantTakesTheHelm rises to supremacy over the monsters]].
* OffWithHisHead: There seems to be a pattern when Godzilla and Kong dispatch their enemies. Godzilla kills Femuto via a [[AttackTheMouth Kiss of Death]] which literally causes her neck to melt until her head and shoulders are severed from each-other, and he rips one of Ghidorah's heads off when overpowering the three-headed dragon in the ocean. Kong tears off a Warbat's head (albeit post-mortem) so that he can drink its innards after killing it, and he finishes the fight against Mechagodzilla by wrenching its head off.
* OldHeroNewPals: Godzilla and Kong, whom are basically the poster boys and the two main heroes of this franchise, are the only two consistent characters across all four movies and their spin-offs thus far. With each new movie that features either kaiju, they take on a new set of human allies, whilst the previous set [[SequelNonEntity disappears]] except for one or two (if any) members.
* OminousFog: The expedition in ''Kong: Skull Island'' ends up amidst one whilst being attacked by a Skullcrawler. In ''King of the Monsters'', it's {{justified}} by Ghidorah's [[AliensAreBastards otherworldly]] WeatherManipulation powers.
* OncePerEpisode: Every movie has the main antagonist dying due to circumstances related to the head:
** In ''Godzilla 2014'', the female MUTO dies when Godzilla forces her jaws open and fires a torrent of atomic breath down her throat, completely disintegrating from the inside out.
** In ''Kong: Skull Island'', Kong rips out the Skullcrawler's guts by shoving his hand down the kaiju's throat, finally killing the beast.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Ghidorah finally dies when Godzilla grabs the only surviving head in his mouth and vaporizes it entirely with his Atomic Breath.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Mechagodzilla is defeated the moment Kong rips his head out of his body.
* OneMythToExplainThemAll: The various Titans are [[OneMythToExplainThemAll implied to have been the source of many mythological creatures (such as the Hydra, Scylla, Dragons, and the like)]] as well as being treated as Gods and Demons in many different cultures. For examples; Ghidorah inspired many civilizations' ideas of devils and dragons, Mothra inspired angels of all things, and the dead ''Titanus Gojira'' and MUTO Prime inspired the myths of Dagon and Jinshin-Mushi respectively. Riccio believes in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'' that the titular island was the source of mythic islands such as Atlantis, Lemuria and Thule.
* OneSteveLimit: Names in the franchise which have respectively belonged to two or more different characters include Martinez, Sam, Walter, Rick (in the ''King of the Monsters'' {{novelization}}), Ilene, Michael (in the Monarch Sciences website), and [[KrakenAndLeviathan Kraken]].
* OnlySaneByComparison: There have been a few examples of this in the franchise. Admiral Stenz comes off as this compared to the rest of the U.S. government in ''King of the Monsters'', Madison and Josh both have differing shades of comparative sanity among the three-man Team Godzilla in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Ren Serizawa is ''one'' point ''less'' obscenely TooDumbToLive than the rest of Apex's Mechagodzilla team, and even [[MultipleHeadCase one of King Ghidorah's three heads gets this comparative to the other two heads]].
* OurGodsAreDifferent: The {{Kaiju}} are {{Physical God}}s and are often described and considered InUniverse to be TheOldGods. Specifically, they consist of various ancient primeval "super-species" and/or the [[TheLastOfHisKind endlings]] of such species which evolved when the Earth was much more radioactive than it is in modern times (Ghidorah is the exception as [[spoiler:an extraterrestrial invader]]). Traits, powers and weaknesses vary, but they have some things in common. They're in the "Scarily powerful" spectrum, they have Near Immortality if not Advanced Immortality, they're Anthropomorphically Subhuman (being literal super-evolved animals), and their needs are in the "Sustenance and Sleep" category (specifically, they tend to cycle between being active and entering long periods of dormancy). Unlike most gods, being naturalistic, the Kaiju don't need [[GodsNeedPrayerBadly prayers]] to function, although sources of radiation (which can be considered a sort of offering to them in later films) do feed and strengthen them. Morally, they're generally Exemplars; their temperaments vary from being {{Destructive Saviour}}s to [[DestroyerDeity Destroyer Deities]], with Mothra and Ghidorah being the most extreme Kaiju at either end of the scale respectively. Generally, the [=MonsterVerse=] follows Henotheism (modern humans generally favor worship of Godzilla as their main DestructiveSaviour, but they also worshipped other Titans in forgotten ancient times, and Mothra is still revered) and Polytheism (the Kaiju as it turns out have an [[AlphaAndBetaWolves Alpha-led hierarchy]] currently headed by Godzilla, but a rival Alpha can potentially overthrow him). The Kaiju did not create the universe or even the Earth as far as we know, but with the exception of Ghidorah, they're considered essential to the maintenance and defense of the Earth's biosphere.
* OOCIsSeriousBusiness: You can tell in both ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' that Godzilla takes [[spoiler:Ghidorah posing a threat]] ''deadly seriously'' with his sheer agitation and fury. In either film, it's a sign things are serious when Dr. Stanton loses his snark and becomes soft-spoken, and Jia cries for the first time since Dr. Andrews met her when the last surviving vestige of Skull Island's ecosystem is destroyed, respectively.
* PapaWolf: A common and recurring theme. Joe Brody in the 2014 film, Eiji Serizawa in ''Godzilla Awakening'' and Mark Russell in ''King of the Monsters'', despite the latter character's many faults and despite all three characters' shortcomings as fathers, turn into this when they're fearing for their child's life. This trope also occurs among the Titans, with the male [=MUTO's=] diligence defending his nest from Godzilla and with Kong's ferocious reaction to Team Kong (implicitly Jia especially) being threatened in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
* ParentalNeglect: In his backstory when he was a young man, Dr. Serizawa was on the receiving end of WhenYouComingHomeDad, which led to a reconciliation in his adulthood when his father revealed the truth of his work for Monarch. The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization reveals that Serizawa repeated this parenting style with his son Ren, but unfortunately in Ren's case it led to him deeply resenting his father and finally turning into an AntagonisticOffspring upon his father's death. Joe Brody was implicitly this towards his son Ford after the death of his wife Sandra, whilst both of Madison's parents (her father physically and her mother emotionally) repeated that pattern after her brother's death.
* ParentsAsPeople: Joe Brody in the 2014 film genuinely loves his son but has been quite inattentive, first due to being the {{Workaholic}} and then due to becoming the ConspiracyTheory with an obsession with finding out what really caused his wife's death. Mark Russell was arguably too much of a prick to everyone around him who wasn't family to qualify for this trope in ''King of the Monsters''; but in the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization, he's become a lot more sociable since his MovingBeyondBereavement, yet he's essentially swung from one parental extreme to [[MyBelovedSmother the other]] in an attempt to make up for five years of being an absent parent, and his egocentrism spills into his parenting style with Madison with how he projects his own idea of what would be ideal onto her and dismisses her complaints to the contrary.
* PerpetualFrowner: A hard scowl is the default expression of Kong and most of the Iwi, whilst Ghidorah's [[MultipleHeadCase right-handed head]] has a constant murderous grimace in contrast to the other two heads' {{slasher smile}}s and bland-faced curiosity respectively.
* PerpetualStorm: Skull Island is surrounded by a perpetual typhoon which acts like a barrier, shielding it from the rest of the world while the island usually sits in the storm's clear-skied eye except for episodes where the storm overlaps with the island's shores to bring wind and rain -- according to ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'', the main theory about the storm's origin and true nature is that it's a byproduct of the HollowEarth's gravity inversion barrier interacting with the surface's atmosphere via Skull Island's Vile Vortex. Ghidorah, once he's awakened, begins generating a perpetual lightning-filled hypercane around himself which gets more powerful the longer he's active, and it's implied he would've ultimately covered the entire Earth in perpetual storms if he was allowed to reign unchecked. As of the ''Kingdom Kong'' graphic novel, Skull Island's perpetual storm has permanently closed in and enveloped the whole island after Camazotz merged a perpetual storm leftover by Ghidorah's rampage with the storm barrier, leading to the island's destruction as an ecosystem.
* PetTheDog:
** In the 2014 film, the [=MUTOs=], despite all the chaos and destruction that they've callously caused to humanity, have a surprisingly sweet HeadbuttOfLove when they meet up with each-other to mate.
** In ''Kong: Skull Island'', Packard, despite being a ColonelKilgore who becomes obsessed with killing Kong, has multiple dog-petting moments with his men due to his strong comradery with them, even midway into his SanitySlippage, although they disappear once he's too far gone.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', the eco-terrorists that are out to awaken the Titans and let them decimate humanity have dog-petting moments. [[MisanthropeSupreme Jonah]] at one point attempts to assuage Madison's understandable terror with a hand trick, although this doesn't mean he's above threatening Madison or giving her a savage verbal dressing-down later on. [[spoiler:In a RewatchBonus, Emma tries to [[InvokedTrope invoke]] SerendipitousSurvival on one of her Monarch colleagues before Jonah's forces launch their massacre, innocently encouraging him to take a break]].
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', DaddysLittleVillain Maia Simmons is the first person to run to Dr. Andrews and Jia's aid after the two girls almost drown.
* PlotParallel: The 2014 ''Godzilla'' film, ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', and ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' all respectively tie at least two character storylines that seldom intersect to each-other, and the protagonist Titans' plotlines mirror the humans' at least once in each film.
* PluckyComicRelief: Dr. Stanton of Monarch's key brass and Jackson Barnes of Monarch's G-Team in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''. {{Inverted}} in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', where Madison has shades of OnlySaneWoman among the three-man Team Godzilla.
* PoisonousPerson: A bio-electrical sting inflicted by the Kraken's tentacle in ''Skull Island'' can leave a struck human with dark lesions, which progress to TaintedVeins and increasing fever and sickness if the person lives for long enough beyond that. Supplementary materials reveal that the Titan Scylla produces water-poisoning bacteria, and the Mother Longlegs on Skull Island use a neurotoxin to paralyze their prey.
* PosthumousCharacter: Dagon is a specimen of Godzilla's species who died thousands of years ago, killed by MUTO eggs which a MUTO Prime implanted in him during a battle. Andrew Russell died offscreen five years before the events of ''King of the Monsters'', but his death [[PlotTriggeringDeath set almost the entire plot of the film into motion]] by turning Mark Russell into a wreck [[spoiler:and turning Emma into an unstable EcoTerrorist]].
* PreciousPhoto: The Russells in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' have copies of a family photo which includes [[PlotTriggeringDeath Andrew]]. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Nathan Lind has a photo of himself and his late brother David, and Bernie Hayes carries a photo of his [[DeathByOriginStory late wife Sara]].
* PrehistoricMonster: Godzilla, the [=MUTOs=], and many more existed well before the dawn of mankind.
* {{Pride}}: The pride and hubris of human beings in relation to the Titans (who represent nature) is a recurring theme throughout the franchise. Namely, contrary to humans' belief that they are the dominant species of Earth (or that they ''should be'' the dominant species after the Titans become public knowledge), mankind are just a technologically-ingenious race of insects compared to the Titans. True to Dr. Serizawa's words below, in every [=MonsterVerse=] movie, it's human beings and organizations attempting to harness or conquer these eldritch forces of nature, failing to realize that some forces of nature are completely beyond human ability to control, that always makes things worse instead of better. Whether it be the military thinking they can kill the Titans the moment they become inconvenient yet being short-sighted to their efforts making things even worse for humans, or eco-terrorists who want the Titans to restore Earth's ecology thinking that attempting to manipulate them won't go awry, or a NebulousEvilOrganization being TooDumbToLive when thinking they can create something more powerful than the Titans in the Titans' image. It's also a recurring theme that only some of the human cast realize and wholeheartedly accept that HumansNeedAliens (namely the benevolent Titans) to survive against the hostile ones, whilst others just refuse to accept that.
-->'''[[Film/Godzilla2014 Dr. Serizawa]]:''' [[Film/Godzilla2014 The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way round]].
* PrimateVersusReptile: The majority of Kong's {{Behemoth Battle}}s are against reptilian-looking opponents: his primary enemies on Skull Island are the Skullcrawlers, and he comes into conflict with Godzilla in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
* PrivateMilitaryContractors:
** The human initial antagonists of ''Skull Island'' (2023) are a team of guns hired by Irene, looking to capture [[WildChild Annie]] and bring her back to the U.S. with them.
** According to the ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' sourcebook; Monarch, Apex Cybernetics, government agencies and General Ward all hire contractors and mercenaries among their respective staffs stationed on Skull Island.
* ProfaneLastWords: A RunningGag in every film. See below for details.
* ProphetEyes: Methuselah in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and the one-eyed Camazotz in ''Kingdom Kong'' both have this kind of eyes.
* PsychoElectro: ''Every'' creature in the [=MonsterVerse=] with [[ShockAndAwe bio-electrical powers]] thus far -- Ghidorah, the Kraken and the Psychovultures -- has been sadistic and murderous at best, a straight-up OmnicidalManiac at worst, with all of them exhibiting murderous hatred for all other life that goes well beyond normal predation instincts.
* PsychopathicManchild: Ghidorah's [[MultipleHeadCase left head, San/Kevin]], displays a notably more childlike personality than the other two heads whilst having no compunctions against the atrocities that the middle head (Ichi) leads them in committing. This also applies to the guy who got his hands on a piece of Kevin's severed head, Walter Simmons, who displays all the giddiness and impulse control of an eight-year-old on Christmas morning when it comes to his immoral Mechagodzilla project.
* PupatingPeril: The male [=MUTO's=] long metamorphosis in the 2014 film, and Mothra's far shorter one in ''King of the Monsters''.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:R-S]]
* RankUp:
** In his ''Kong: Skull Island'' debut, Brooks is basically just an assistant to Bill Randa. Come ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', and he's a prominent enough figure in Monarch to be part of the team sent to the site of Mothra's pupa in order to monitor her, and he's known and respected by Dr. Ling and multiple other Monarch figures in the novelization. Then in ''Kingdom Kong'', Brooks is the managerial chief officer of Monarch's operations on Skull Island, [[spoiler:until he decides to leave Monarch and [[YouAreInCommandNow transfer his responsibilities to Dr. Andrews]]]].
** It's subtle, but Stenz was apparently promoted by two stars in the U.S. Navy in-between his two movie appearances: in the 2014 film, Stenz' uniform sports a two-star Rear Admiral insignia, whereas both the military uniforms he wears in ''King of the Monsters'' sport a four-star Rear Admiral insignia.
* RasputinianDeath:
** The Big One in ''Kong: Skull Island'' gets choked with an anchor chain, stabbed with the blades of a rusted propeller, shot in the eye with a flare gun, ''and'' gets its throat and chin vertically sliced, and it ''still'' gets back up each time; only going down for good once Kong [[CruelAndUnusualDeath puts his fist down its gullet and rips his hand back out with the Big One's entrails in his grasp]].
** In ''King of the Monsters'', Ghidorah gets blasted ''thrice over'' by city-leveling Nuclear Pulses from Godzilla's SuperMode, disintegrating his wings, his right and left heads, ''and'' the majority of his body, in that order... and after the last pulse, Ghidorah is ''still'' alive as a [[LosingYourHead thrashing, bodiless middle head]] which shrieks and tries desperately to escape Godzilla's wrath. Godzilla activates his [[BreathWeapon atomic breath]] while still holding the neck stump's incision in his jaws, cooking the head from the inside out and then blowing it to confetti, and only ''then'' is Ghidorah (mostly) dead.
** The Kraken in ''Skull Island'' has its long-range tentacles ripped in half, two of its four eyes are gouged out when Kong stabs it in the head [[spoiler:with a shipwreck, and it receives a ''merciless'' NoHoldsBarredBeatdown from Kong while it's propped on a rock above water -- and after all that, it's ''still'' alive and tries to kill Kong]]. The thing only dies for good when Kong hoists it above his head with two hands and ''rips it in half'' at the mid-section.
* ReasonableAuthorityFigure: Dr. Serizawa listens to others' advice on how to best handle a Titan situation Serizawa is overseeing at Monarch, as does the military's commander Admiral Stenz (mostly). In the 2014 film, Joe Brody used to be a reasonable nuclear power plant engineer when keeping an eye on approaching tremors -- in the present, the master sergeant in charge of transporting the nukes lets Ford hitch a ride only once Ford makes a decent case. Shaw in ''Godzilla: Awakening'' gives Eiji Serizawa the time of day regarding his concerns about Godzilla. Miles Atherton in ''Godzilla: Aftershock'' is concerned about Monarch's jurisdiction but does everything in his political power to help them combat the apocalyptic threat posed by Jinshin-Mushi. Admiral Wilcox in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' listens to Team Kong on how best to combat the threat.
* ReclaimedByNature: In ''Godzilla'' (2014), the abandoned city of Janjira is overgrown with vegetation, and wild dogs are roaming the streets. ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' (2019) reveals that after the first film's events, rich vegetation overgrew the ruins of the trashed cities (one of which is located in the middle of Nevada) at a rapid and anomalous rate, cluing Emma Russell in that Titans like Godzilla and the [=MUTOs=] have FertileFeet which cause life to flourish once the dust has settled after their calamitous passages.
* RedBaron: Quite a few Titans have a bunch of names and titles to themselves from ancient myths and legends. Besides Godzilla being the literal King of the Monsters here, there's Rodan the Fire Demon and the One Born From Fire, Ghidorah the One Who Is Many and the Death Song of Three Storms, Camazotz the King of the Deep and Eternal Enemy of the Sun, Jinshin-Mushi the progeny of the Unclean Thing That Lurks in the Shadows Beyond the Light of Creation, etc..
* RedEyesTakeWarning: The [=MUTOs=], Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla all have red eyes (or, red eye-like sensor-thingies in the [=MUTOs'=] case), and all of them are the main antagonists of their respective debut films, posing an existential threat to humanity. To a lesser extent; Kong has reddish eyes, and Godzilla's eyes have an orange hue from ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' onwards, and neither Titan is someone you want to mess with.
* RedIsViolent: Rodan has a red coloration and is a particularly destructive and HotBlooded Titan, Mothra's LivingMoodRing turns a red color when she's angry, and Godzilla displays this [[spoiler:during his literally city-leveling SuperMode which coincides with an UnstoppableRage]], in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Mechagodzilla's body produces a crimson light, and it's as psychotically malevolent as [[spoiler:Ghidorah]] ever was once it becomes sentient, plus the [[HorrorHunger Skullcrawler]] sicced on the Mecha has a red coloration.
* RedshirtArmy: The U.S. military's soldiers from any of the four branches try to defend their charges against Titan attacks, but in all of the first three movies, they drop like flies due to how outmatched or arrogant they are (depending on the film).
* ReptilesAreAbhorrent: {{Downplayed|Trope}}. While most of the antagonistic Kaiju are reptiles, so is Godzilla. That being said, it could be more accurately stated that some kinds of reptiles are abhorrent - most antagonistic reptilian Kaiju introduced so far, especially the ones on Skull Island, have a [[SnakesAreSinister snake theme]], while the heroic Godzilla has a [[NeverSmileAtACrocodile crocodile theme]].
* {{Retcon}}: ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'' places considerable emphasis – the novelization even more so – on the awakening Titans reclaiming the Earth, and the ending makes it clear that {{nothing is the same anymore}} and [[DawnOfAnEra a whole new world has begun]] with humans and Titans now forced to cohabit the planet; plus the HollowEarth is discovered by Monarch and the public to be real. ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' and its spin-offs ignore or rewrite all these things, making the events of ''King of the Monsters'' out to be little more than a dramatic global hiccup instead of a bittersweet permanent turning point in history: the Titans have gone back into hibernation, things in the world have gone back to the way they were before, and the Hollow Earth for some reason is once more treated by the public as an unproven quack theory. It's almost as if ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' takes place in an {{alternate continuity}} from its predecessor entirely.
* RevengeMyopia: There are quite a few examples of human characters hating a good-aligned Titan due to blaming them in an irrational manner for a loved one's death; from Packard's refusal to see reason after Kong kills his men in provocation and in defence of his territory, to Mark Russell's hatred of Godzilla for his son being a casualty of a past battle in ''King of the Monsters'', to Ren Serizawa's similar hatred of Godzilla in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' due to his father's HeroicSacrifice to save Godzilla robbing Ren of reconciliation with the man.
* RightForTheWrongReasons:
** In the backstory of ''Godzilla'' (2014), Joe Brody correctly concluded that there was a massive cover-up occurring in the ruins of Janjira surrounding the meltdown which got the city evacuated and abandoned, but he incorrectly believed for years that they were covering up a design flaw or a military screw-up, until he heard Hokmuto's pupa communicating.
** In ''King of the Monsters'', Mark Russell is ''technically'' right that rebuilding the ORCA will cause the Titans to wreck humanity instead of minimizing the future collateral, but the bad scenario doesn't happen for the reasons that he originally believed it would. Rather than Monarch using the ORCA to try and pacify the Titans having the complete opposite effect, the ORCA is stolen by eco-terrorists who start using it to awaken as many dormant Titans as possible and let them decimate their human-populated surroundings with the aim of culling humanity — and to make things worse, one of the first Titans the eco-terrorists unleash is Ghidorah, who later awakens all the other Kaiju at once and bends them to his will so that he can thoroughly wipe out all multicellular life on the planet.
* RoarBeforeBeating: Per the [[{{Kaiju}} genre]] norm. At least once in every film, a Titan (often Godzilla or Kong) roars at another Titan before they fight each-other.
* RoyalsWhoActuallyDoSomething: {{Justified}}. Practically all of the Alpha Titans have a RedBaron calling them a King/Queen (King of the Monsters, Queen of the Monsters, King of the Primates, etc.), and they at times have to fight other Titans to maintain their positions of dominance due to the creatures' AsskickingLeadsToLeadership.
* RunningGag:
** Listen closely, and in every movie, a character says "[[ProfaneLastWords Oh, shit!]]" or otherwise [[CurseCutShort tries to]] right before being killed by the {{Kaiju}} BigBad of the movie they're in. A soldier who's killed by the female MUTO in the 2014 film, Bill Randa before he's eaten alive by a Skullcrawler in ''Kong: Skull Island'', Hendricks before he's atomized by Ghidorah firing his Gravity Beams in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', and Walter Simmons before he's killed by Mechagodzilla in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
** The director of ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' thinks that Ghidorah's [[MultipleHeadCase left head]], San/Kevin who displays a rather [[PsychopathicManchild eccentric]] [[GeniusDitz personality]] compared to the other two heads, has been decapitated a lot more frequently than his brother heads in Ghidorah's life. In the movie proper, Kevin is the only head to get decapitated twice (he regrows from the first decapitation, whilst the second is part of Ghidorah's RasputinianDeath), and then in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', [[spoiler:Mechagodzilla (which has gained sentience as a RoboticPsychopath as a direct result of Ghidorah's SoulFragment in Kevin's severed skull merging with its AI) is killed for good when its head is ripped off]].
* {{Sadist}}: Ghidorah is different from most of the other Titans in that he'll kill any humans he sees not because they're an inconvenience or are in his way, but just because he enjoys it; flashing {{slasher smile}}s as he attacks, and often disengaging with the big atomic lizard who ''does'' pose a threat to him when an opportunity to slaughter humans for his own amusement presents itself. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Ren Serizawa grins in ecstasy when Mechagodzilla is violently sawing a Skullcrawler in half under his control. In ''Skull Island'', the Kraken kills anyone or anything that passes by its aquatic territory, and it furthermore has a nasty habit of taunting Kong with the remains of its kills (some of whom were Kong's own beloved charges).
* SanitySlippage: In ''Kong: Skull Island'', the titular IsleOfGiantHorrors and all the nasties it throws at the cast gradually bring out Packard's inner ColonelKilgore -- by the time Packard dies, he doesn't care if he gets everyone including his own beloved men and even himself killed in the name of taking down Kong. Walter R. Riccio in the graphic novel ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'' similarly loses his marbles amid his [[MaybemagicMaybeMundane visions which might or might not be real]], although he ironically goes down [[PsychoSupporter the opposite path]] [[ContrastingSequelAntagonist to Packard]] while being even more of an active danger to the humans. Emma Russell in ''King of the Monsters'' evidently isn't all up there after the death of her son (even if she's the only one who won't acknowledge that fact), [[spoiler:what with her plan to honor his memory involving the creation of millions more dead kids and grieving mothers on a global scale]].
* SatanicArchetype: King Ghidorah is the biggest case of this by far as well as the biggest threat and arguably the true {{Satan}} of the [=MonsterVerse=], but there's also a couple other Titans besides him who have Satanic symbolism attached to them; namely Ramarak and Camazotz.
* SaveTheWorldClimax: In both the first two films, the Kaiju crisis isn't revealed to be truly world-threatening until around the midway point. The [=MUTOs=] in ''Godzilla'' (2014) are ExplosiveBreeders that are seeking one-another out so they can flood the world with a tidal wave of technology-disabling, city-terraforming creatures like themselves. And the Skullcrawlers in ''Kong: Skull Island'' are an [[IntroducedSpeciesCalamity invasive species]] that could wipe out all animal life on Skull Island and then threaten the civilized world if Kong isn't around to keep their population checked.
* SayMyName: There's a lot of characters dramatically screaming their compatriots' or loved ones' names at the tops of their lungs in (often Titan-related) times of distress and mortal peril; in the 2014 ''Godzilla'' movie (Joe Brody), ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'' (Aaron Brooks), ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', and the 2023 ''Skull Island'' series.
* ScientistVsSoldier: This trope seems to be absent in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', perhaps due to the events of ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', but it's otherwise a recurring theme across the previous movies, and the Scientist side of the conflict are always ultimately proven to be the ones in the right (although the military often get portrayed with at least a little more sympathy than the usual DisasterMovie standard regardless). The military leaders (from ReasonableAuthorityFigure Admiral Stenz to the AxCrazy Preston Packard) seek to use increasingly-ludicrous methods to attempt destroying the Kaiju, and they often don't care to discriminate between the bad and good Kaiju nor do they realize that [[HumansNeedAliens humanity needs the good kaiju around in order to stand a chance at survival]]. The Monarch scientists meanwhile, are sooner or later made {{Ignored Expert}}s by the military, and it can be argued that all the Monsterverse's first three films, the military can be rightfully blamed for causing things to go FromBadToWorse and for unwittingly assisting the hostile Kaiju.
* ScrapHeapHero:
** Mark Russell starts ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' as a bitter recluse at a cabin, having quit his job at Monarch, fallen into depression and abandoned his family after his son died amid Godzilla and the [=MUTOs'=] battle. Over the course of the film, he lets his hatred of Godzilla over his son's death go, and he makes the first steps to reconciling with his remaining child [[spoiler:who ends the film sure to go into his custody after her mother has been killed by Ghidorah]]. ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' shows that Mark has taken up active work at Monarch again, but the trope is somewhat deconstructed, as he accomplishes nothing across the entire film except for unwittingly aiding the human villains' plot [[spoiler:which leads to Mechagodzilla devastating Hong Kong]].
** Dr. Nathan Lind in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' has quit Monarch after several people including his brother died due to miscalculations when he attempted to launch them into the HollowEarth, and he's been furthermore laughed out of the scientific community and left him languishing in a dead-end job in a university basement when the film starts. He's convinced to rejoin Monarch, and he succeeds at accessing the Hollow Earth while helping Kong where he failed before, giving him closure and enabling him to take up his old work again.
* SealedCastInAMultipack: Many kaiju are slumbering or trapped somewhere on Earth waiting to be awakened in some way. The [=MUTOs=] were in a sealed undergrown cavern until a mining organization DugTooDeep and according to the Monarch Timeline, Mothra is dormant in a cocoon in a temple in China, Rodan is sleeping in a volcano, an unknown kaiju is dormant and contained in Siberia, Kong is keeping things under control on Skull Island, and Ghidorah is sealed away in the Antarctic ice. [[spoiler:King Ghidorah awakens a large number of them and Mothra awakens to help Godzilla, but the end credits montage reveals many of them are still out there slumbering.]]
* SealedEvilInACan: The original MUTO pair's eggs were sealed away in Adam/Dagon's subterranean grave for thousands of years before a mining company breached the underground pocket, accidentally setting off the eggs' awakening. [[AlienInvasion Ghidorah]] was dormant [[MonsterInTheIce within the]] [[MysteriousAntarctica Antarctic ice]] since ancient times, until [[EcoTerrorist eco-terrorists]] forcibly broke him free and awakened him without knowing [[OmnicidalManiac what he really was]].
* {{Seers}}: {{Inverted}} twice. In ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', [[Characters/MonsterVerseSkullIslandExpedition Riccio]] believes he's seeing Skull Island's past when he starts having visions; which [[MaybeMagicMaybeMundane might be real or might just be hallucinations from overusing the Iwi's exotic medicine]]. ''Godzilla Dominion'' and ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' reveals that Mothra (and Godzilla as a lasting consequence of absorbing her ashes) has an instinctive and almost scientifically-inexplicable awareness of Earth's entire geological and ecological history right back to when it was a molten rock billions of years ago.
* SenselessSacrifice: One of the cast tries to make a HeroicSacrifice at the climax of ''Kong: Skull Island'', but it's for naught: [[spoiler:Cole stays behind with a grenade in hand, trying to get the Alpha Skullcrawler to eat him and the grenade, but the creature sees through his trick and lethally swats Cole away, making no difference]]. In ''King of the Monsters'', Hendricks and several soldiers fire their machine guns at Ghidorah instead of fleeing, in an effort to keep Ghidorah's heads focused on them while the main cast flee -- but once Ghidorah activates his gravity beams to vaporize the soldiers, the resultant static surge disables the main cast's escape vehicle, and then Ghidorah quickly turns his attention to attacking the main cast anyway.
* SequelEscalation:
** ''Film/Godzilla2014'' has only one full onscreen battle between the Kaiju as the FinalBattle, with two earlier battles which are mostly offscreen, preferring to focus on the human characters' perspective of the Kaiju's destruction. ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' doesn't shy away from depicting the action onscreen in such a way. ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' has lengthier Kaiju battles (particularly the FinalBattle), though it tends to show them from both the Kaiju's and the humans' perspective almost equally. [[spoiler: ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' focuses primarily on the monster aspect, though two human teams, one for Godzilla and one for Kong, have some significant impact.]]
** Whereas the 2014 film only has two types of Kaiju in total (Godzilla and the CanonForeigner [=MUTOs=]); ''Skull Island'' has a variety of monsters but they're again mostly Canon Foreigners; and then ''King of the Monsters'' features the Big Four kaiju who originally featured in ''Film/GhidorahTheThreeHeadedMonster'', in addition to a small handful of new kaiju and ''ten others'' who are TheGhost.
** Furthermore, in ''King of the Monsters'', the ApocalypseHow occurring in the second half of the film is immediately ''global'' in scope, rather than a regional ApocalypseWow which threatens to go widespread if TheBadGuyWins like in the previous two films; and the stakes are presented as higher, with the human forces and benevolent kaiju all allying together more directly than in the 2014 film, and with Ghidorah's unnatural true nature as an [[spoiler:invasive alien]] OmnicidalManiac and a rival alpha to Godzilla establishing it as a greater threat than the predatory Skullcrawlers and [[NonMaliciousMonster Non-Malicious]] [=MUTOs=] respectively.
** {{Averted}} and {{inverted}} by ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', which is overall LighterAndSofter than ''King of the Monsters''. There are only three Titans which are part of the major conflict; [[spoiler:while Ghidorah does effectively return as the BigBad when he becomes reborn in Mechagodzilla, his new body lacks his past life's world-ending WeatherManipulation and HealingFactor and is implicitly weaker]]; and there's a lot less death and destruction both among the main cast and for the world in the fictional setting overall.
* SequelNonEntity: When a new film is released, chances are that most of the characters from the preceding film won't reappear nor get a mention, regardless of their importance to the setting or any appearance they had in the movie's [[TheStinger Stinger]]. James Conrad and Mason Weaver didn't reappear for [[ChuckCunninghamSyndrome six years, two movies, four graphic novels and one TV series]] after ''Kong: Skull Island'' set them up to join Monarch: the sequel storyline of the tabletop game ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' finally brought them back in. And almost all of the characters from ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', including most of Monarch's top scientists, are completely absent from ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' during Monarch's investigation into Godzilla's rampage.
* SeriesContinuityError:
** ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' presented several relative to earlier Franchise/MonsterVerse instalments. It portrays the HollowEarth[='s=] confirmed existence as still being Monarch-privileged knowledge which is unknown to the public, but this directly contradicts a news article in the CreativeClosingCredits of ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019''. Likewise, Nathan Lind says at the movie's start that manned travel between Hollow Earth and the surface is impossible, even though Monarch successfully performed a ''two-way'' journey in the previous movie. Skullcrawler Number 10 is also portrayed as having [[AlienBlood light-green blood and innards]], whereas the previous ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' movie and the later ''WesternAnimation/SkullIsland2023'' TV series both portray the Skullcrawlers bleeding red.
** The fates of the Iwi sans Jia after Skull Island was destroyed by PerpetualStorm are contested between [=MonsterVerse=] instalments. The aforementioned ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' briefly states that they were wiped out, and the novelization more explicitly confirms this and that Jia is the LastOfHerKind as far as anyone knows. ''Kingdom Kong'' and the ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' guidebook directly contradict this, stating that most of the Iwis besides Jia were evacuated and survived the island's doom.
* SerkisFolk: The giant monsters are animated through MotionCapture. The TropeNamer himself, Creator/AndySerkis, assisted in the animation of Godzilla, albeit uncredited.
* SharedUniverse: One of several conceived in the wake of the Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse achieving success with ''Film/TheAvengers2012'', and one of several owned by Warner Bros. (the others being the Franchise/DCExtendedUniverse, the [[Film/HarryPotter Wizarding]] [[Film/FantasticBeastsAndWhereToFindThem World]], the ''[[WesternAnimation/TheLEGOMovie LEGO Movie]]'' series, and ''Film/TheConjuring'' universe).
* ShutUpKirk: [[GeneralRipper Packard]] has a simple and admittedly golden response in this category towards Weaver in ''Kong: Skull Island'', whilst [[spoiler:[[VillainHasAPoint Emma Russell]]]] has a counter-argument for most of the moral highground arguments that Monarch make against her plan in ''King of the Monsters''.
* TheSilentBob: Many of the more prominent {{Kaiju}}, though bestial, have clearly-realized personalities which their actions, complex facial emoting and overall body language communicate clearly. Godzilla and Kong are among the more demonstrably expressive Kaiju, as are [[Film/Godzilla2014 Femuto]], [[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Ghidorah and Rodan]].
* SingleSpecimenSpecies: [[AvertedTrope Averted]] for the most part. Most of the important kaiju discussed early on were stated to be the [[LastOfHisKind last of their respective kinds]], being relics from ancient prehistoric days when creatures of that size were common, so it's generally assumed that this is true of the other kaiju as well. [[spoiler:The exception is King Ghidorah, who is a malevolent extraterrestrial [[MysteriousPast whose origins before he came to Earth are unknown]]]].
* SkepticismFailure: Pretty much anytime that humans doubt Godzilla is really a protector rather than a destroyer. The HollowWorld theory, which most of the Monarch brass apparently consider a load of hokum in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', is explicitly proven to be true. It's also worth noting that while the Titans are treated by more objective characters as super-animals, some of the creatures have gotten real MaybeMagicMaybeMundane hinting at a truly supernatural nature as {{Physical God}}s.
* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVsCynicism: So far the franchise seems to lean towards the cynical end of the scale, particularly when compared to the [[Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse MCU]] and similar franchises. Humanity is surrounded by [[{{Kaiju}} gigantic monsters]] that have existed long before everyone was even born, and they are basically powerless against them once they awaken and begin laying waste to the world. Though there ''are'' some monsters (Godzilla, Kong, etc.) willing to protect the humans, they can be [[DestructiveSavior just as destructive to their immediate surroundings]] as the ones causing said destruction, being preferable to their rivals mainly in that they aren't liable to take that destruction setting-wide or ''global''. Comparing the [=MonsterVerse=] to its genre, however, it is surprisingly Idealistic. Godzilla himself is at his most heroic since the late Showa era, and as of ''King of the Monsters'', [[spoiler:the fallout from a worldwide rising of kaiju is... surprisingly positive. The environment is benefitted immensely, and humanity itself seems to be reaping rewards too - kaiju waste is even implied to work as a renewable resource!]] The day tends to be saved through faith, cooperation with each-other and nature, and proper application of science. This idealism probably stems from the influence that ''Film/PacificRim'' has had on the kaiju genre, even if ''Pacific Rim'' is humanist and the [=MonsterVerse=] is anti-humanist -- but ''not'' anti-human.
* SlidingScaleOfUnavoidableVersusUnforgivable:
** ''[[Film/Godzilla2014 Godzilla]]'': The film debates whether Admiral Stenz' decision to drop a nuclear warhead on Godzilla and the [=MUTOs=] -- which he makes despite knowing full well that radiation makes the creatures even stronger and one of them already survived a weaker atomic bombing unscathed in the past -- is a desperate gambit that just might work, or a classic [[NukeEm "throw nukes at the monster without any forethought" mindset]].
** ''[[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Godzilla: King of the Monsters]]'': Emma Russell's plan to [[spoiler:forcibly awaken the Titans via global eco-terrorism, and then]] manipulate the Titans into repairing the world's ecosystems using the ORCA. On one hand, [[spoiler:her plan involves committing global mass genocide by letting the Titans cause potentially billions of collateral deaths mid-awakening, and]] she's far too arrogant and sloppy in her assertions that the Titans will play ball. On the other hand, the world is already seeing the first warning signs of a looming manmade mass extinction, and Monarch, despite knowing that the Titans are the key to restoring the balance of nature, can't stop {{the government}} from planning to shut them down and try exterminating the Titans in their sleep.
* SlouchOfVillainy: In ''Godzilla: Aftershock'', [[FromCamouflageToCriminal Alan Jonah]] slouches in his chair when he's being interrogated as a prisoner on Guam. The ''Godzilla x Kong: The New Empire'' teaser depicts a malevolent-looking, orangutan-like Titan slouching on a throne surrounded by Titan bones.
* SmallRoleBigImpact:
** Hokmuto and Femuto are the franchise's {{starter villain}}s. Although they're killed off in their debut, their rampage devastates several cities and directly [[TheUnmasquedWorld exposes the existence of Titans to the public]], which has lasting ramifications across the graphic novel and film sequels. Without Hokmuto and Femuto, none of the events of later [=MonsterVerse=] stories would have likely come to pass.
** The prequel graphic novel ''Godzilla: Awakening'' reveals that the real reason Monarch was founded was because of a Kaiju named Shinomura, which is killed at the end of the book. Monarch didn't learn of Godzilla's existence until ''after'' Shinomura's existence was verified.
** Although Camazotz is a one-off villain who's defeated in ''Kingdom Kong'', he's directly responsible for the extinction of Skull Island, a key location in the setting.
* SmugSmiler: Two of them: Riccio in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', and Simmons in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', just ooze smarminess and self-assuredness when they smile their cocky little smirks. And despite their differing world views which would be very diametric if they'd ever met, [[OneSteveLimit they both share the same first name]]!
* SmugSnake: Packard in ''Kong: Skull Island'' greatly overestimates his ability to harm Kong. Alan Jonah crosses into this trope's territory in the ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' official novelization's expansion, which portrays him as having a genuine OriginalPositionFallacy in the face of the existential threat King Ghidorah poses to all life as we know it. Apex Cybernetics in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' see themselves as visionaries but are TooDumbToLive to an ''insane'' degree.
* SnakesAreSinister: The Skullcrawlers, King Ghidorah, and the Warbats are all antagonistic Kaiju, and all of them are snake-themed. The closest to a heroic snake-themed Titan we've gotten so far is the crocodilian-looking Godzilla.
* SoftReboot: ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' is a soft reset. ''Film/Godzilla2014'' and ''Film/KongSkullIsland,'' though very different from each other in tone, both presented the universe as fairly realistic and grounded aside from the presence of giant monsters. Monarch is depicted as a fairly small outfit in both films, relying extensively on the U.S. military to get anything done. ''King of the Monsters'' ups the ante considerably with the addition of more monsters (one of whom is [[spoiler:an extraterrestrial]]), and reimagines Monarch as a massive organization with incredibly advanced technology and seemingly endless resources. ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' follows the same direction but takes it even further, moving the setting into the near-future and adding even more advanced tech via Apex Cybernetics, and going much further into the pseudoscience of the "Hollow Earth" the previous films had only alluded to. The end result is a barely recognizable as the same universe that the 2014 film established.
* SoMuchForStealth: In ''Kong: Skull Island'', the cast attempt, unsuccessfully, to sneak their way through a fog-enshrouded monster graveyard where [[HorrorHunger Skullcrawlers]] make their den. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', the Team Kong cast attempt, unsuccessfully, to sneak their way across the oceans where a pissed off Godzilla is hunting.
* SortingAlgorithmOfEvil: Not in release order, but if the franchise's film and animation instalments are put in ''chronological'' order, this trope is in full effect until ''Film/GodzillaVsKong''. In ''Film/KongSkullIsland'', the Skullcrawlers are relatively small by Kaiju standards, and Kong who ''isn't even fully mature yet'' can beat back hordes of them. In ''WesternAnimation/SkullIsland2023'', the Kraken can hold its own in a fight against a more mature Kong, coming close to killing him. In ''Film/Godzilla2014'', the [=MUTOs=] are nearly the size of Godzilla, they create an {{EMP}} around themselves which does a lot to cripple the entire U.S. Navy's efforts to track and stop them, and the pair make Godzilla (whom ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' would later establish to be basically a lot more physically powerful than Kong) work quite a bit to kill them both, and it looks like the [=MUTOs=] nearly win the fight against him. In ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', Ghidorah is roughly ''twice'' the size of Godzilla, he's powerful enough that Godzilla is considered the ''only'' force on Earth that can truly rival him (and even then, in a fair fight without Mothra's assistance or watery terrain, Godzilla despite himself does seem to be the underdog), Ghidorah generates an intensifying electricity-filled hurricane around himself merely by being active, and he gains command of ''all the other Kaiju on the planet'' except Mothra when Godzilla is briefly incapacitated. ZigZagged by ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', where the BigBad Mechagodzilla [[spoiler:is essentially Ghidorah's {{reincarnation}}, but is implicitly not quite as powerful as Ghidorah was: lacking Ghidorah's HealingFactor, EnergyAbsorption and apocalyptic WeatherManipulation, with Word of God and the novelization suggesting the Mecha only succeeded in curb-stomping Godzilla because the latter was already heavily weakened before their fight, and with the heroes successfully killing Mechagodzilla before it can take control of any other Titans]].
* SpaceWhaleAesop: It varies slightly from film to film, but the overall messages that permeate every film are:
** "[[Film/Godzilla2014 The arrogance of man is thinking nature is in our control, and not the other way round]]." The demonstration: the world is actually populated by giant, prehistoric {{Kaiju}} endlings from prehistoric ecosystems, whom mankind are ''ants'' in comparison to.
** Don't bother trying to forcibly control or destroy a natural species or aspect of nature just because it conflicts with human interests or is an "inconvenience". If you take the wrong Kaiju out of the ecology, there'll be nothing to keep its more malevolent opponents in check and they'll start wreaking havoc.
* SparedByTheAdaptation: Kong and Godzilla both survive their movie appearances, with Godzilla in particular surviving an encounter with a MythologyGag that outright ''killed'' him in past continuities, whilst Dr. Serizawa is ultimately the "dies later than in the source material" form of this trope.
* SpeculativeBiology: This continuity takes a surprisingly scientific approach on its Kaiju, featuring the likes of Godzilla and King Kong in a more scientific light and portraying them as ancient superspecies who are ([[{{Revision}} initially]]) portrayed as coming from a more-radioactive Permian period. Granted, there is a lot of ArtisticLicenseBiology regarding how such big creatures can live in Earth's gravity or how they can sustain nutrition from radioactive material, but nonetheless the series explores the behavior, ecology and biology of the creatures of Skull Island and the Hollow Earth in a way that portrays them like an actual ecosystem that once existed in nature.
* SpellMyNameWithAnS:
** Vivienne Graham's first name is mispelled "Vivian" in the graphic novel ''Godzilla: Aftershock''.
** ''Godzilla vs. Kong'': "Mechagodzilla" (as the movie's subtitles and novelization spell it), or "[=MechaGodzilla=]" (as a screen in Apex's HQ and the film's toy merchandise spell it)? Also, in the novelization, Ishirō Serizawa's first name is mispelled "Ichiro".
* SpreadingDisasterMapGraphic: In the 2014 film, the US Navy's digital map depicts what area the nuclear warhead's fallout will cover if it goes off near the coast, whilst in ''King of the Monsters'', Monarch's digital world maps are used to depict first Ghidorah's moving hurricane, and then to depict the Titan crisis and Ghidorah's WeatherManipulation going global after Ghidorah becomes [[TheUsurper the new King of the Monsters]].
* SquashedFlat: Packard is crushed into the ground by Kong's fist in ''Kong: Skull Island'' (2017). At least one or two soldiers are crushed by falling ice boulders during Ghidorah's awakening in ''King of the Monsters''. In ''Skull Island'' (2023), Hiro is flattened by the Kraken's CombatTentacles, and Kong kills a Killer Chameleon by rolling a much-larger boulder over its body.
* StargazingScene: Kong and his human allies have had a couple such scenes on Skull Island. First, Conrad and Weaver admire the island night sky's aurora effect, while Kong is shown to be doing likewise on another side of the island. In the ''Skull Island'' series' WholeEpisodeFlashback, Kong and the Island Girl take time to watch the stars together on a mountain.
* StartXToStopX: In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Emma's way of honoring her son's memory and ensuring his tragic death as a casualty of a Titan battle wasn't for nothing is by [[spoiler:essentially engineering a dozen repeats of the disaster that killed him on a global scale]], and probably the most stunning thing about her is how ignorant she is of the contradiction. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Apex Cybernetics claim they built Mechagodzilla so that humanity can fight off any Titan that might otherwise attack them, but as Madison points out, they're directly responsible for [[spoiler:all but ''deliberately'' provoking Godzilla's rampage on population centers and disrupting a peaceful human-Titan coexistence]].
* StealthyColossus: Various Titans including Godzilla, Kong and the other creatures of Skull Island are remarkably good at pulling this off despite their gigantic size.
* StoicSpectacles:
** Dr. Serizawa in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' and ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' fits this trope with his stoic and intelligent personality and his narrow, thin-rimmed choice of spectacles, though he's a little bit older than most examples. It's even slightly {{lampshaded}} in ''King of the Monsters'', when he has his glasses off while mourning [[spoiler:Dr. Graham]]'s death, but puts them back on once he recollects his resolve for the time.
** Also in the 2014 film, the only Monarch operative who's calm and cold enough and/or doesn't have enough love for the kaiju to ''not'' avert his eyes when they're trying to kill one carries around a pair of narrow-rimmed spectacles.
** In the prequel graphic novel ''Godzilla Awakening'', Serizawa's wizened father Eiji has traded his youthful self's NerdGlasses for a pair of thin-rimmed spectacles in his old age.
** In the other prequel graphic novel, ''Godzilla: Aftershock'', Miles Atherton is bespectacled, and he's the most calm-mannered and stern member of the main team.
* StrawCharacter: Admiral Stenz is quite a genial portrayal of the GeneralRipper: compassionate, reasonable, and genuinely committed to the protection of the public, he tries to listen to the experts on the monsters; but he primarily thinks in terms of strategy, logistics and what his superiors tell him to do, ''not'' in terms of the franchise's GreenAesop; which means that he only sees the Titans as monsters, and he [[FromBadToWorse ends up making a bad situation even worse]] while trying to destroy them. The U.S. government and military get even more reckless in ''King of the Monsters'', ignoring all of the warnings that they're making a mistake, and dropping a deadly prototype FantasticNuke in extranational waters rather than broach the idea that this ''isn't'' necessary to neutralize several awakened Titans.
* StreetSmart: Mason Weaver in ''Kong: Skull Island'' is savvy at working around the patriarchal societal norms of the decade that the film takes place in in pursuit of what she wants, and she has good intuition. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Josh Valentine, [[NerdGlasses of all people]], is the most people-savvy and danger-conscious member of Team Godzilla.
* StuffBlowingUp: This is a {{Kaiju}} franchise, what did you expect. Surprisingly, the 2014 film is very light on the explodium, courtesy of the director of ''Film/Monsters2010''. ''King of the Monsters'' is technically the most fireball-heavy [=MonsterVerse=] instalment.
* SuperPersistentPredator:
** Godzilla hunts not for food, but to eliminate any rivals who pose a challenge to his dominance or disrupt his global territory's ecological balance, and once he has such a target in mind, he won't stop until either the threat is dead or he is. He's pursued rival Titans including the [=MUTOs=], their sire, Ghidorah, and Mechagodzilla's signal all over the globe from one continent to another, [[spoiler:and he goes out of his way to seek a fight with Kong once the latter has effectively intruded on Godzilla's territory as a perceived rival Alpha due to humans shipping him off Skull Island]].
** The Skullcrawlers on Skull Island are literally called the "persistent enemy" in the Iwis' language, never stopping once they've targeted prey due to their HorrorHunger.
** In the ''Skull Island'' series, the Croc Monster, setting its sights on trying to eat Mike and Charlie (and ''immediately'' after it's already eaten a grown mercenary no less), pursues the boys along the rapids of a river that the Croc itself fears, and even ''over a waterfall'' which is the main reason the Croc fears the rapids. Dog's father in the backstory was so persistent in hunting humans that he spent some time tearing his way through a ship's hull, and he even died in a MutualKill against one of those humans acting defensively rather than keep himself alive for the sake of caring for his pup. The Killer Chameleons in the WholeEpisodeFlashback, once antagonized, don't stop trying to kill both Kong and the Island Girl until they're 100% dead, and not even being ''mortally impaled through the chest'' stops the chameleon that goes after the girl.
* SuperScream: Jinshin-Mushi in ''Godzilla: Aftershock'' and Camazotz in ''Kingdom Kong'' both have weaponized screams which can cause immense physical pain and harm to their Titan opponents.
* SuperWeight:
** Type -1: Jia.
** Type 0: U.S. government and U.N. officials, Akio, Apex Cybernetics, Monarch top brass, most humans.
** Type 1: Alan Jonah and his eco-terrorists, G-Team, Emma, Mark and Madison Russell, Annie, Island Girl.
** Type 2: Chen family, Madison Russell (in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters -- The Official Movie Novelization''), Rock Critters, Scaly Quadruped, Grass Hedgehogs, Nightboys.
** Type 3: Hellhawks, Warbats, most Skull Island creatures.
** Type 4: Kong, Mechagodzilla, Mothra, most Titans.
** Type 5: Ghidorah, Godzilla.
* SurprisinglyRealisticOutcome: Can be found in spades throughout the franchise due to being a more "realistic" take on the {{Kaiju}} genre. One major example present in each film is how the [[AttackOfThe50FootWhatever Titans]] affect the world around them; [[Film/{{Godzilla|2014}} Godzilla rising from the ocean too quickly can cause a tsunami,]] [[Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019 Rodan devastates a town simply by flying over it,]] etc.
* SuspiciouslySimilarSubstitute: A couple characters like Lieutenant Preston Packard and Mark Russell have considerable similarities to characters from previous ''Godzilla'' and ''King Kong'' continuities. Within the [=MonsterVerse's=] own continuity, Dr. Ilene Chen seems like one to Dr. Graham, and Ren Serizawa has a lot in common with Aaron Brooks. [[GeneralRipper General Ward]] in ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' sounds a lot like Packard, being an antagonistic, vengeful military commander with a grudge against Kong for the deaths of his men.
* SwallowedWhole: There are a few times where human characters meet their doom this way. The Skullcrawlers do this frequently due to their hyper-metabolic HorrorHunger, whilst [[spoiler:Dr. Graham]]'s SuddenSequelDeathSyndrome where she's killed by Ghidorah this way in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' is an infamous example. There's also the female MUTO devouring most of the bomb squad in the 2014 film and Rodan doing this to a pilot in ''King of the Monsters''.
* TheSwarm: Shinomura in the graphic novel ''Godzilla: Awakening'' is technically TheWormThatWalks, composed of many flying, smaller individual organisms. In the graphic novel ''Kingdom Kong'', Camazotz has a horde of flying monsters resembling miniaturized versions of himself at his beck and call.
* SwissCheeseSecurity: The human antagonists in the two most recent movies have lax and completely useless security in their evil lairs, enabling people that might be up to stuff diametric to the villains' goals to slip around and do what they want undetected. Madison Russell can attest to this in both cases.
* SympatheticVillainDespicableVillain:
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' attempts to make Emma Russell out to be more sympathetic than Alan Jonah, because she has a VillainousParentalInstinct and is horrified by the notion that King Ghidorah will wipe out all multicellular life on Earth instead of healing the planet, whereas Jonah is a NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist who is happy to let Ghidorah kill everything if it makes humanity die screaming.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Godzilla is more antiheroic than Kong and goes out of his way to attack the latter, but he's still fighting to save the Earth from a far bigger threat: [[spoiler:Mechagodzilla, which is possessed by Ghidorah's reanimated subconsciousness, causing the Mecha to attack every living human it sees and attempt to murder Godzilla for supremacy over the Titans once more]].
** In the ''Skull Island'' Netflix series, the mercenaries who captured Annie are just trying to get a particularly-aggressive and -capable [[WildChild feral child]] back to her grieving mother by force if necessary, and they're happy to work with and support the human heroes when the latter aren't getting in their way any longer, whereas the [[BigBad Kraken]] is an extremely vicious Titan with a homicidal personality which has killed Kong's friends and his charges as well as Mike's father.
[[/folder]]

[[folder:T-Y]]
* TailSlap: Godzilla weaponizes his tail as a slapping tool against other Titans, as does his EvilKnockoff Mechagodzilla. The Skullcrawlers likewise use their tails as whips and clubbing weapons, as does Mokele-Mbembe when it rampages in the Sudan.
%%* TakeMyHand
* TaughtByExperience:
** In the 2014 movie, Ford invokes this to convince the master sergeant handling the nuclear warhead to give him a ride on the freight train to San Francisco, bringing up his EOD experience: unlike the rest of the team, Ford ihas professional experience "put[ting his] fingers in a live bomb."
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', the eco-terrorists start out directly invading Monarch's outposts in person, gunning down anyone they encounter, and setting Mothra and Ghidorah loose manually. But after the second mission almost goes south when Monarch catch up to the terrorists and get very close to thwarting them, they instead choose to remotely hack into the next Monarch outpost in order to free Rodan.
** The ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization states that after Monarch's kill switches failed to kill any of the contained Titans in the previous movie when Ghidorah awakened them, the organization looked into other methods of subduing captive Titans, leading to the development of the drug they use to tranquilize Kong.
* TechnicolorToxin: In ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''The Birth of Kong'', the boneyard where the Skullcrawlers live has a sickly yellowish-green hue in the air -- the files in the ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' sourcebook confirm that this is because geothermal vents in the boneyard emit poison gases. The far more deadly military-grade gas released from the canisters in the movie also manifest as dark-green clouds.
* TeethClenchedTeamwork: Emma's teamwork with Tarkan and especially Atherton in ''Godzilla: Aftershock'' is strained due to her [[InsufferableGenius insufferable and abrasive attitude]], and her teamwork with Jonah in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' is likewise strained due to their differing end-goals. The {{novelization}} of ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' confirms that DragonWithAnAgenda Ren Serizawa has to clench his teeth while working with Walter Simmons.
* TentacledTerror: Na Kika (''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', ''Godzilla: Dominion'') and the Kraken of Skull Island (animated series) are both colossal marine monsters with CombatTentacles who attack humans, although the former mainly does so under [[OmnicidalManiac Ghidorah]]'s control, whereas the latter is completely AxCrazy all on its own. Speaking of Skull Island, one of its resident species is the giant Mire Squid that lies in wait in rivers, and it tries to ambush Kong with its tentacles in ''Kong: Skull Island''. And then there's Scylla, a Titan with a beard of tentacles, who debuted in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'': she's classified by Monarch as a Destroyer Titan, was implicitly dreaded by the inhabitants of Easter Island, and has some really squicky biological traits.
* TheoryTunnelVision:
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', '''nothing''' stops [[NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist Alan Jonah]] from believing that unleashing the Titans to cause mass destruction will save the Earth's other species from [[MisanthropeSupreme the horrors of humanity's worst individuals]]. When his [[spoiler:faux]] hostage points out that King Ghidorah is wreaking just as much ecological destruction as humanity and then some, Jonah continues to justify letting Ghidorah and his Titan army supplant humanity as the Earth's sole rulers.
** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', [[CorporateConspiracy Apex Cybernetics]] still cling to the mindset that all Titans, not least [[BigGood Godzilla]], are monsters that pose an existential threat and need to be either corraled or destroyed; past the point where the previous movies already proved creatures like Godzilla, Kong and Mothra are on humanity's side so long as we don't cross them, and that humans and Titans ''can'' share the planet in beneficial balance. Instead, Apex and their egotistical CEO have implicitly just taken the events of the previous films as proof that humanity needs to build even bigger and more dangerous weapons in order to annihilate Godzilla and take over his kingship.
* ThereCanBeOnlyOne: Emma theorizes in ''Godzilla: Aftershock'' that if the [=MUTOs=] ever successfully reproduce and overrun the environment, then they'll ultimately turn on each-other until only the strongest of their kind is left alive. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Dr. Ilene Andrews and Walter Simmons firmly believe (in their own very different ways) that there can only be one alpha predator at any given time: Andrews believes that Godzilla will stop tolerating Kong and will try to kill him for dominance if Kong ever leaves Skull Island, while Simmons uses this mentality as justification for his plan to murder Godzilla and conquer all the Titans in the name of MugglePower.
* TheyCalledMeMad: Dr. Brooks mentions that he joined Monarch as a scientist with a keen interest in Hollow Earth theory after he was laughed out of a college auditorium for proposing the Hollow Earth was real. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Dr. Nathan Lind is a ScrapHeapHero who was laughed out of the scientific community for the same reasons, because everyone magically forgot that the Hollow Earth's existence was revealed at the end of the previous movie.
* ThisCannotBe:
** In ''Godzilla'' (2014), Dr. Vivienne Graham is in vocal disbelief when she and Serizawa realize that the second MUTO spore which they thought to be completely inert has reactivated and hatched.
** In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' (2019), Dr. Stanton says in disbelief that it's impossible for any storm to change direction and move as sharply as the typhoon which their scanners lost sight of Ghidorah in has done, at which point Dr. Chen realizes Ghidorah himself is moving the storm around his body. Commander Crane quotes the trope when informed that Monarch's submarine has suddenly been transported 600 miles in a matter of minutes [[spoiler:due to slipping down a Vile Vortex into the Hollow Earth]].
** In ''Kingdom Kong'', Audrey Burns cries out in disbelief when she hears Camazotz's scream and realizes that he's reappeared here on Skull Island.
* ThroatLight: Several of the Titans produce shining light in their throats. Shinomura produces light from its composite forms' mouths constantly, whilst Ghidorah, Mechagodzilla (and Godzilla in his later film appearances) produce light in their necks when they're charging up their {{breath weapon}}s.
* TimeSkip: ''Film/{{Godzilla|2014}}'' begins in 1954, then skips to 1999, then once more to 2014, where most of the film takes place. ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' briefly opens during World War II, before jumping to 1973.
* TooDumbToLive: Naturally there's a lot in this kind of franchise. Besides MilitariesAreUseless, other major examples include: the G-Team standing and shooting at Ghidorah when it awakens (the novelization amends this into a HeroicSacrifice via AdaptationalExplanation); the military firing their untested Oxygen Destroyer prototype at Ghidorah, which unwittingly gives Ghidorah a direct opening to almost ''succeed'' at exterminating all complex life on Earth (leading to the military losing a lot of their own trying to fight Ghidorah and its Titan army off); but arguably taking this trope up to eleven is everyone who was directly involved with Apex Cybernetics' Mechagodzilla project, [[spoiler:which involved using King Ghidorah's still-partly-alive telepathic skull as the '''brain''' for the machine (a machine which was designed to be the WorldsStrongestMan) and doing this '''''after''''' what happened in ''King of the Monsters'' with Ghidorah's OmnicidalManiac rampage]].
* TwoFirstNames: Vivienne Graham in the 2014 film and ''King of the Monsters'', the Russell family in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', James Conrad in ''Kong: Skull Island'', and Alan Jonah in ''King of the Monsters''.
* TwoFistedTales: The movies mix some of this flavour in with all the {{kaiju}} action, particularly in the films featuring Kong. ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' is a LostWorld adventure set in TheSeventies, and in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', the big ape travels to an even ''lost-er'' world BeneathTheEarth where he finds a gigantic axe that basically turns him into a 335-foot tall BarbarianHero.
* UnblockableAttack: In ''Godzilla'', Hokmuto's {{EMP}} blasts are practically a OneHitKill for all U.S. military hardware. In ''King of the Monsters'', Burning Godzilla's fiery Nuclear Pulses are able to power through Ghidorah's [[WingShield wings]] and cripple him as if the dragon is made of nothing.
* UncertainDoom: Admiral Stenz' status is unknown after his latest appearance in ''King of the Monsters'', with the novelization and a deleted scene both heavily implying that he died at the Washington D.C. battle against Ghidorah and Rodan due to his submarine sinking, but the former account doesn't confirm anything explicitly. In the first season finale of ''Skull Island'', it's unknown if the Rock Bug which Kong throws at the Kraken survives getting ''violently'' swatted out of the air into the ocean.
* UnderestimatingBadassery: Almost once in every film. Admiral Stenz in both his appearances (along with the military and the government in ''King of the Monsters'') underestimates the Titans' resilience to manmade weaponry and he even doubts Godzilla will be able to fight off the [=MUTOs=] despite him having already done so once. Madison Russell is frequently on the receiving end of this, in the form of JustAKid regardless of her commendable accomplishments and bravery even after ''King of the Monsters''.
* UndignifiedDeath: The final death of King Ghidorah's [[MultipleHeadCase middle head]] in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' is darkly comical: being reduced to a severed, frantic head, which Godzilla flails around like a chew toy and then burns from the inside-out with his Atomic Breath like he's smoking a cigar. [[spoiler:This trait carries over to Ghidorah's reincarnation in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', when the possessed Mechagodzilla's limbs are hacked off one at a time by Kong until it falls over, before Kong decapitates the Mecha (for bonus points, this is how the Ghidorah head whose skull gave the Mecha consciousness previously died, and Word of God says decapitation was a RunningGag for that particular head throughout Ghidorah's life)]]. Ren Serizawa's death in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' is also quite humiliating, especially when contrasted against his father's HeroicSacrifice, as he's electrocuted to death by his own weapon gone rogue [[UnknownRival before he even gets a chance to square off against Godzilla]].
* UngratefulBastard: Packard in ''Kong: Skull Island'' goes as far as pointing a gun at the face of the same journalist who earlier saved his and his men's lives for trying to talk him down. The Russell parents really are a match made in an un-heavenly realm: Emma treats Tarkan like dirt after he saves her from [[FearlessFool getting herself killed]] rather than acknowledge any of her own wrongdoing in ''Godzilla: Aftershock'', while Mark in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' takes his {{misdirected outburst}}s out on the people whom are currently trying to track down and save his kidnapped ex-wife and daughter. Apex Cybernetics in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' want to KillAndReplace Godzilla even after everything he did to save the world previously, not giving a damn that all of humanity would have been wiped out by King Ghidorah if not for him.
* UnluckilyLucky: The human characters and humanity as a whole seem to have this going for them in this universe. As while Godzilla and Kong do cause them a good amount of grief, they also end up taking out the threats that would have done ''so'' much worse.
* TheUnmasquedWorld: After Godzilla and the [=MUTOs=] rampage over Hawaii and the U.S. West Coast, nearly seven decades of Monarch and the government maintaining the {{Masquerade}} come to an end and the whole world officially know that giant prehistoric monsters exist. Although not all of the Titans are hostile and some can coexist with humans or (in Godzilla and Kong's cases) are straight-up protectors of the world, at first the government and the vast majority of the public in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'' think that all the Titans should just be indiscriminately exterminated, not least due to having seen the massive loss of human life Godzilla and the [=MUTOs=] caused, and few besides Monarch care for the fact that humanity would probably only succeed in waking and provoking the Titans if they tried exterminating them nor for the fact the Titans are essential to the planet's ecosphere and can reverse manmade damage. After the events of that film which saw Godzilla actively save humanity and the world from Ghidorah and successfully get the other Titans in-line (and also saw humanity's attempt to kill the Titans themselves end up being an EpicFail which almost doomed the world to an extinction event), most of the former anti-Titan sentiment has seemingly gone away or quietened down, but ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' and its novelization indicates there's still some people in power like Walter Simmons who still think humanity should be trying to kill the Titans and become the planet's dominant species again.
* UnwittingPawn: In ''Kong: Skull Island'', most of the Skull Island expedition are this to Monarch operatives Randa and Brooks at first. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Monarch (Nathan Lind in particular) are this to [[EvilInc Apex Cybernetics]], and it's hinted Apex in turn might have been this to [[spoiler:Ghidorah's UndeadAbomination skull the entire time before it hijacked control of Mechagodzilla]], whilst the novelization suggests Apex's CorruptCorporateExecutive Walter Simmons is this to [[DragonWithAnAgenda Ren Serizawa]].
* VictoriousRoar: [[Characters/MonsterVerseGodzilla Both]] [[Characters/MonsterVerseKingKong of]] the franchise's main Titan heroes tend to roar to the heavens in victory after killing the serial's resident BigBad. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters''; in a much darker twist on the trope, the now-King Ghidorah lets out a triumphant screech after he's [[TyrantTakesTheHelm seized Godzilla's office as King of the Monsters]], with the sound awakening other Titans around the world and bending them to his will.
* VilerNewVillain:
** The [=MUTOs=] in ''Film/Godzilla2014'' are overall [[NonMaliciousMonster Non-Malicious Monsters]] if highly callous, they just want to survive and reproduce regardless of how their life cycle threatens other life, and they do get some TragicMonster treatment. In the subsequent prequel film ''Film/KongSkullIsland'', the Skullcrawlers are voracious and relentless man-eating predators who are driven by an extreme, biologically-ingrained HorrorHunger: though they're ultimately just doing what they're programmed to do the same as the [=MUTOs=], the Skullcrawlers are played for a lot more horror. Then in ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'', the BigBad is King Ghidorah, who compared to the previous films' kaiju is {{sadist}}ic to an unnatural degree, being aware of its actions whilst exhibiting unmistakable ForTheEvulz tendencies; killing humans with no gain other than malicious amusement to be found. ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' has [[spoiler:Ghidorah's reincarnation Mechagodzilla, who is just as sadistic as its predecessor]]. And in the prequel animated series ''Skull Island'', set in-between ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''King of the Monsters'', the Kraken is murderously sadistic and it's only less vile than Ghidorah in that it's solely focused on conquering Skull Island instead of conquering and destroying the rest of the globe.
** This is also present among the main human antagonists. Preston Packard in ''Kong: Skull Island'' is an AxCrazy ColonelKilgore who becomes more and more willing to sacrifice the lives of everyone around him in pursuit of his vendetta, but his fall into darkness is framed in a tragic light. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', the FromCamouflageToCriminal MisanthropeSupreme Alan Jonah, though he has very tragic reasons for being so disillusioned with humanity, is a nasty piece of work who not only slaughters people left and right in pursuit of his goals, but is willing to let the three-headed monster he helped release condemn ''almost all life on Earth'' to certain extinction so long as he gets to see the human race that he so despises wiped off the board. ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' has Walter Simmons, a {{narcissist}}ic egotist who has ''no'' tragic backstory to explain his actions, and whose justifications are presented in the story as even more hollow than the eco-terrorists': he's simply a self-spoiled industrialist who puts millions of people's lives in mortal danger by [[spoiler:instigating and knowingly continuing to instigate Godzilla's rampage]], all to satisfy his own ego.
* VillainExitStageLeft: There are a couple times where Godzilla's Titan enemies pull this on him, namely Ghidorah in ''King of the Monsters'', and the MUTO Prime in ''Godzilla Aftershock'' exploits this trope in order to wear Godzilla down so it'll have an advantage.
* VillainHasAPoint: In ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', Aaron acknowledges at the end that despite Riccio's dangerous insanity and the harm he caused, he did prove in the end whether Kong is a monster or a protector, which in itself was Aaron's original mission. In ''King of the Monsters'', the eco-terrorist [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] makes some legitimate arguments about the Titans' potential to restore balance to the world without destroying humanity, and about the government's looming intent to try exterminating the Titans in their sleep: arguments which the novelization notes the heroes can't completely refute.
* VillainousBreakdown: In ''King of the Monsters'', King Ghidorah has an ''epic'' breakdown into utter terror and naked panic for his life when Burning Godzilla starts atomizing him piece by piece, destroying his still-thrashing central head last. In ''Skull Island'', the Kraken loses all composure in the tail-end of the season's FinalBattle, after Kong has grievously wounded it by stabbing out half of its face.
* VillainousLegacy: Some surprisingly positive in the long run, others negative. The MUTO pair who rampaged in the 2014 film before being killed by Godzilla are directly responsible for TheUnmasquedWorld in all instalments chronologically set afterwards. The global Titan-rampage that was caused by King Ghidorah and indirectly caused by [[spoiler:Emma Russell]] in ''King of the Monsters'', after both characters' respective deaths, has made the world at large much more aware of the power discrepancy between human and Titan and the Titans' positive effects on the ecosystems mankind relies on -- beforehand, the population's main sentiment was that the military should try to kill every Titan indiscriminately, and there was little regard for the probability that would only piss the Titans into attacking. It's also revealed in the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization that Packard's attack on Kong taught later generations of Monarch a thing or two about how to effectively tranquilize Kong. On the negative side, Ghidorah left a PerpetualStorm behind after his death which, together with the Dark Titan Camazotz's actions, is responsible for the destruction of Skull Island in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' even after Camazotz was defeated.
* VillainousRescue: The [[HorrorHunger Death Jackals]] in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'' unwittingly enable Aaron and the Iwi to escape [[spoiler:[[SanitySlippage Riccio]]]] when they ambush the group, whilst in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Mechagodzilla when it's still under Ren Serizawa's direct control unknowingly saves Madison from the Skullcrawler that's been sicced on the Mecha when said Crawler was a ''millisecond'' away from killing Madison Russell.
* VillainousUnderdog: Given that this is a franchise where Kaiju which are literally beyond humanity's ability to control or effectively destroy exist, the human {{Big Bad Wannabe}}s are this to the heroic Titans such as Godzilla or Kong when they seek a direct confrontation with them, and the main threat these human antagonists present comes not so much from the threat they pose to the heroic Titans' lives but from their ability to put them at a disadvantage or exacerbate their situation with the villainous Titans who ''do'' pose a threat. Notable examples include [[GeneralRipper Colonel Packard]] in ''Film/KongSkullIsland'' attempting to kill Kong with manpower (and releasing Ramarak in the process), for which Kong [[SquashedFlat squashes him like a bug]]; and [[EvilInc Apex Cybernetics]] in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'' plotting to use [[HumongousMecha Mechagodzilla]] to kill and usurp Godzilla [[spoiler:and also being responsible for provoking Godzilla's rampages on population centers due to their creation's Ghidorah-derived organic parts emitting a signal, only for Apex to suffer HoistByTheirOwnPetard when Ghidorah's leftover subconsciousness hijacks Mechagodzilla for itself and makes it destroy them]].
* WeHardlyKnewYe: [[Creator/SallyHawkins Dr. Graham]] is infamously a victim of this, getting the bare minimal characterization in the movies as anything other than Serizawa's SatelliteCharacter before she suffers SuddenSequelDeathSyndrome. There's also Sandra Brody plus Serizawa and Graham's colleagues at the Janjira containment site in the 2014 film, Victor Nieves in ''Kong: Skull Island'', Alan Jonah's close MookLieutenant Asher in ''King of the Monsters'', and Karsten (the first one to die) in ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong''.
* WhatIsGoingOn: This stock phrase is used several times in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' by both Emma and Mark Russell, and once by Nathan Lind in ''Godzilla vs. Kong''.
* WhatTheHellHero: Mark Russell receives a few for his biased behavior and shoddy judgment (particularly in regards to Godzilla); first from Dr. Serizawa for holding a toxic and fallacious AnimalNemesis grudge against Godzilla, then from Madison for jumping to an unbelievably-contrived conclusion about Godzilla's rampage. Emma also calls out Serizawa in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', for lecturing her on gambling with billions of people's lives after '''he''' hasn't done enough to stop {{the government}} from unwittingly causing an impending apocalypse without her. In the ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' novelization, Jia calls out Dr. Andrews and Monarch for saying they're drugging and restraining Kong for his own good when their actions only feed Kong's distrust of them.
* WhyWeCantHaveNiceThings: Dr. Brooks' and Monarch's recurring visits to/harassment of [[IsleOfGiantHorrors Skull Island]] eventually lead to ([[DownplayedTrope or at least assist]]) the island's terminal extinction in the graphic novel ''Kingdom Kong'', when Camazotz reaches the island's surface due to Monarch's seismic surveys and he permanently enshrouds it in a PerpetualStorm. Skull Island is the single most unique and alien ecosystem ever discovered outside of the HollowEarth, populated by {{planimal}}s and other bizarre creatures found nowhere else on Earth, but ignorant and cocky if well-meaning scientists harassing and trampling over it one time too many accelerated a precious, alien pocket world's erasure from the planet.
* WideEyedIdealist: Monarch are seen InUniverse by the military, the government, and the public in TheUnmasquedWorld as this (at least initially) for their reverence of the Titans and their protests against human intervention attempting to kill the creatures on their terms, but Monarch are actually very much a case of GoodIsNotDumb since they're quite aware of how the Titans tie into the GreenAesop. Madison Russell starts as this in ''King of the Monsters'', due to her mother's influence and having only been exposed to the benevolent Mothra before she gets to witness the consequences of Ghidorah awakening.
* WoobieDestroyerOfWorlds:
** [[EcoTerrorist Alan Jonah]] despises humanity and seeks our total destruction, because decades of fighting for his country in the world's worst war zones, where he repetitively saw with his own eyes just how monstrous human beings could become, have broken his mind. The novelization also reveals that his daughter being abducted and her corpse found stuffed in a storm drain days later while he was away on military service contributed to Jonah's fall into darkness.
** Jonah's co-terrorist in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', [[spoiler:Emma Russell]], is filled with rage towards humanity, wanting the Titans to decimate us as punishment for our hubris; because she blames humanity's environment-damaging mistakes, which instigated the [=MUTOs'=] rising, for the death of her child during the [=MUTOs'=] rampage [[spoiler:and the subsequent disintegration of her marriage]].
** It's implied in ''Godzilla vs. Kong'' that [[HiddenAgendaVillain Ren Serizawa]] has joined Apex's {{corporate conspiracy}} to endanger millions of people and to {{kill and replace}} Godzilla due to a [[ItsPersonal personal motivation]]. The novelization confirms this: [[spoiler:Ren's father Ishirō [[ParentalNeglect barely showed him any acknowledgement]], and Ren was left all alone to organize his mother's funeral as a teenager while his father was almost always away from home chasing the Titans, until finally, Ishirō's untimely death via a {{heroic sacrifice}} to save Godzilla irreversibly put Ren's hopes of reconciling with his father in life beyond his reach. As a result, Ren feels on a deeply personal level that Godzilla has robbed him of his father's love for his entire life]].
* TheWorfEffect:
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'': A MUTO, which was the main antagonistic species of the 2014 ''Godzilla'' movie, turns up here as a mere thrall to the apex Alpha Titans, first serving [[BigBad King Ghidorah]] and then submitting to Godzilla at the end. Rodan is an [[InvertedTrope inversion]]: he's awakened shortly after Ghidorah, and he immediately performs impressively in massacring Monarch's military jet squadron, but when he faces off against the three-headed dragon, Ghidorah curb-stomps him inside of a couple minutes and then makes Rodan his [[TheDragon vanguard]].
** ''Godzilla vs. Kong'': The Skullcrawlers, the main antagonists of ''Kong: Skull Island'' who threatened all the island's other inhabitants and wiped out the rest of Kong's kind, are reduced by Apex Cybernetics to mere target practice for Mechagodzilla, who mercilessly cuts through a Big One-sized Skullcrawler like a wolf through a crippled rooster.
* {{Workaholic}}: Joe Brody in the 2014 movie [[ForgotTheirOwnBirthday forgot his own birthday]] while he was on the phone talking about work first thing in the morning, and he immersed himself in his decade-spanning investigation into the cause of his wife's death after the Janjira meltdown. According to Mark Russell in ''King of the Monsters'', Emma Russell drowned herself in her work on trying to understand the Titans after [[OutlivingOnesOffspring their son's death]].
* WorldOfSnark: In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and the ''Skull Island'' animated series, pretty much '''everybody''' in the cast is quippy and snarky to some degree. It sometimes gets to the point where you'd think it was an epidemic.
* WouldHurtAChild: In ''Skull Island: The Birth of Kong'', [[PsychoSupporter Riccio]], upon [[SanitySlippage losing his marbles]], has no compunctions against hitting a child across the face, nor against exposing an entire village including children to being decimated by Skull Island's man-eating predators. In ''King of the Monsters'', Ghidorah, in reference to his ''Film/RebirthOfMothra'' iteration, is all too happy to murder a child using all three heads' gravity beams, to say nothing of how his global plans call for all life on Earth being slaughtered by rampant Titans, storms and natural disasters under his command. Ghidorah isn't the only one in ''King of the Monsters'' either: Alan Jonah in the novelization threatens the twelve-year-old Madison's life, ordering one of his men to slit her throat if her mother defies them (to say nothing of how in both versions of the story, Jonah and his organization were willing to set over a dozen Titans loose on the world and cause potentially billions of deaths before Ghidorah took over). The Kraken in the Netflix ''Skull Island'' series is no better than Ghidorah, slaughtering a whole village including children in the WholeEpisodeFlashback, and toying with and attempting to kill human teenagers during the first episode.
* WrongAssumption:
** Admiral Stenz thinks that things work like in the more classic kaiju movies, where the monsters will overthrow humanity if the military don't put them down ASAP, and gambling the fate of humanity on trying to keep them alive for ends aimed at benefiting humanity is not worth the risks. Unfortunately, where Stenz could be a near-''perfect'' military leader in any of the older and more cynical kaiju movies' settings, in the [=MonsterVerse=], his skepticism of Monarch's pro-Titan attitude and limited thinking end up making a bad situation even worse in both his appearances; where his efforts to kill the Titans instead make the bad ones even stronger and place even more people in immediate mortal peril.
** Stenz' above assumptions also apply to most of humanity initially in ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', after [[TheUnmasquedWorld the world discovered that monsters were real]] five years prior, massively fueling the movie's entire plot from behind the scenes.
** In the animated ''Skull Island'' series, Charlie assumes that the firearm-wielding shady human bad guys who are on the same titular IsleOfGiantHorrors as him and his friends must be poachers of exotic creatures... which would have been on the mark in some of the earlier ''Franchise/KingKong'' cartoons and continuities, but isn't so here.
* WrongGenreSavvy: A lot of people InUniverse (particularly before the events of ''Film/GodzillaKingOfTheMonsters2019'') such as Admiral Stenz believe that humanity needs to attempt to kill the Titans using manmade super-weaponry in defence of their right to rule the Earth uncontested and to prevent future destruction and casualties; and Monarch's arguments against that and tendency towards admiring the creatures make most people see them as [[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nnHmUk_J6xQ that one guy in a monster movie who insists on keeping the monster alive For Science at the risk of causing the end of the world]]. As it stands, many of the Titans in this setting are capable of coexisting with humans peacefully if a benevolent Alpha like Godzilla or Kong keeps them in line, and they're furthermore [[GreenAesop allegories for forces of nature]] -- attempts to up technology to a level which can deal serious damage to Titans ''always'' goes awry, doing nothing but leaving the world in an even worse situation with the Titans than it was in before, and humanity is simply reliant on the Titans to survive in the long-term since many of them act as antibodies maintaining the world's ecosphere. Monarch are in actuality [[GoodIsNotDumb every bit the Titan experts that they're supposed to be per their job]] because of their pro-Titan arguments. This Wrong Genre Savvy is quite central to the ridiculously-arrogant Apex Cybernetics' EvilPlan to control or exterminate all the Titans in ''Film/GodzillaVsKong'', and to Apex's downfall.
* TheXenophile: Most people in Monarch are positively fascinated by the Titans they study, and in some cases are outright reverent towards [[BigGood Godzilla]], [[GentleGorilla Kong]] and [[BenevolentMonsters Mothra]]. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Mark Russell, even [[FantasticRacism at his worst]], seems to feel an almost unconscious connection to Godzilla and really knows his stuff when it comes to predicting Titan behavior.
* YellowPurpleContrast: In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Ghidorah is covered in golden scales and his powers produce [[YellowLightningBlueLightning yellow-tinted lightning]]. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', the room where Apex Cybernetics are harnessing Ghidorah's undead skull's telepathy is saturated in purple light.
* YouCantThwartStageOne: All four films have the cast being warned that "this monster-related thing" mustn't happen, and before the movie's climax, it happens and the stakes elevate.
** ''Godzilla'': Despite Monarch's warnings and the U.S. military's (crazed) effort to counter it, the [=MUTOs=] succeed in meeting up, mating, and building a nest of hundreds of MUTO eggs, wrecking San Francisco in the process.
** ''Kong: Skull Island'': The "Big One" Skullcrawler that Marlow warned the cast must never wake up because it stands a serious chance at killing Kong? It wakes up, and it challenges Kong, looking for a fight to the death.
** ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'': The first half of the film is the cast trying to stop the eco-terrorists from awakening all the dormant Titans that are being monitored around the world. King Ghidorah proceeds to do the job spontaneously, [[NearVillainVictory and Armageddon begins]].
** ''Godzilla vs. Kong'': The human villains succeed in their efforts to power up Mechagodzilla, leading to the FinalBattle.
* YouKillItYouBoughtIt: Titans can claim territory and positions of leadership from other Titans via killing them. In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'', Godzilla [[TyrantTakesTheHelm loses his kingship to Ghidorah]] when crippled and seemingly killed by the Oxygen Destroyer, then he [[RightfulKingReturns takes his rightful kingship back]] by vaporizing Ghidorah. In ''Kingdom Kong'', Dr. Brooks believes that if Camazotz succeeded in killing Kong, he would've become an Alpha-level Titan in Kong's stead on top of gaining Skull Island as his own. In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', [[CorporateConspiracy Apex Cybernetics]] plan to usurp Godzilla as the King of the Monsters by building [[HumongousMecha Mechagodzilla]] to fight him to the death.
[[/folder]]

* AdmiringTheAbomination: The Titans tend to attract awe and amazement from human characters, Monarch in particular, at least once per film, although it should be noted that this is mostly directed at benevolent Titans who are humanity's protectors rather than at the more malevolent Titans (though the latter aren't completely exempt necessarily).

* SlidingScaleOfIdealismVsCynicism: So far the franchise seems to lean towards the cynical end of the scale, particularly when compared to the [[Franchise/MarvelCinematicUniverse MCU]] and similar franchises. Humanity is surrounded by [[{{Kaiju}} gigantic monsters]] that have existed long before everyone was even born, and they are basically powerless against them once they awaken and begin laying waste to the world, and though there ''are'' some monsters (Godzilla, Kong, etc.) willing to protect the humans, they can be [[DestructiveSavior just as destructive to everything around them]] as the ones causing said destruction. However, comparing it to its genre, it is surprisingly Idealistic. Godzilla himself is at his most heroic since the late Showa era, and as of King of the Monsters, [[spoiler:the fallout from a worldwide rising of kaiju is... surprisingly positive. The environment is benefitted immensely, and humanity itself seems to be reaping rewards too - kaiju waste is even implied to work as a renewable resource!]]

* ''VideoGame/SkullIslandRiseOfKong'' (2023)

* ''Skull Island: Rise of Kong'' (2023)

* CommanderContrarian: Admiral Stenz, though [[ReasonableAuthorityFigure far from the stubbornest example of this trope]], has a track record of initially [[IgnoredExpert turning down Monarch's cautions]] and attempting to kill the Titans using military weaponry, causing things to go horribly awry before he takes Monarch's advice on how to clean up the mess. Packard in ''Kong: Skull Island'' ignores everyone who disagrees with his plan to kill Kong on the grounds of common sense as his SanitySlippage turns him into a GeneralRipper. Riccio in ''The Birth of Kong'' opposes the expedition leader Aaron putting the group's safety first every time it compromises Riccio's own obsessions with studying the Iwi and Kong. Mark Russell tends to disagree with ''anything'' that doesn't contain the words "Titans are bad, Godzilla is the bad guy, and the whole world revolves around me feeling sorry for myself", at least until it blows up in everybody's faces.

* HowlOfSorrow: In the original movie, the female MUTO ''screeches'' in anguish when her eggs are blown up in a fireball with none surviving, before she goes into an UnstoppableRage. In the ''Skull Island'' animated series, after Kong has buried his human friend and noticed that the Kraken which killed her is still on his kingdom's borders, he roars at the top of his lungs from a peak, before his silhouette can be seen crumpling to his knees.

* IdiotBall: Several times in the 2014 movie -- from Monarch and the Americans disposing of a dormant radiation-eating giant monster egg by dumping it in a bunker stacked with barrels of nuclear waste, to the military initiating a plan to try and kill the rampaging radiation-eating monsters by [[NukeEm dropping a nuke]] on them and hoping it doesn't make them stronger (even though just one of those monsters already survived a nuke point-blank in the past), to the military train team heading ''towards'' the sounds of screaming and gunfire to "check it out." In ''King of the Monsters'', the cast take quite a long time to work out that the "tropical storm" which they lost track of the electrical typhoon-generating flying hydra in is ''not'' just a mundane meteorological storm which the monster flew by.

** In ''Godzilla vs. Kong'', Godzilla is more antiheroic than Kong and goes out of his way to attack the latter, but he's still fighting to save the Earth from a far bigger threat: [[spoiler:Mechagodzilla, which is possessed by Ghidorah's reanimated subconsciousness, causing it to attack every living human it sees and attempt to murder Godzilla for supremacy over the Titans once more]].
** In the ''Skull Island'' Netflix series, the mercenaries who captured Annie are just trying to get a particularly-aggressive and -capable [[WildChild feral child]] back to her grieving mother by force if necessary, and they're happy to work with and support the human heroes when the latter aren't getting in their way anymore, whereas the [[BigBad Kraken]] is an extremely vicious Titan with a homicidal personality that killed Kong's friends and his charges along with Mike's father.

* UncertainDoom: Admiral Stenz' status is unknown after his latest appearance in ''King of the Monsters'', with the novelization and a deleted scene both heavily implying that he died at the Washington D.C. battle against Ghidorah and Rodan due to his submarine sinking but the former account not confirming anything explicitly. In the first season finale of ''Skull Island'', it's unknown of the Rock Bug which Kong threw at the Kraken survived getting ''violently'' swatted out of the air into the ocean.

* VillainousBreakdown: In ''King of the Monsters'', King Ghidorah has an ''epic'' breakdown into utter terror and naked panic for his life when Burning Godzilla starts atomizing him piece by piece, destroying his still-thrashing central head last. In ''Skull Island'', the Kraken loses all composure in the tail-end of the season's FinalBattle after Kong has grievously wounded it by stabbing out half of its face.

* WorldOfSnark: In ''Godzilla: King of the Monsters'' and the ''Skull Island'' animated series, pretty much '''everybody''' in the cast is quippy and snarky to some degree.

* CompositeCharacter: Godzilla, Kong, Mothra, Rodan, Ghidorah and Mechagodzilla all mix various distinct traits from their incarnations in past continuities, whilst Dr. Serizawa exhibits traits of both his namesake and Kyohei Yamane from [[Film/Godzilla1954 the original movie]].

%%* WorldOfSnark

* '' Justice League vs. Godzilla vs. Kong'' (2023)

* ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' (2023) - Tabletop game

* '' Godzilla X Kong: The Hunted'' (2023)

* TechnicolorToxin: In ''Kong: Skull Island'' and ''The Birth of Kong'', the boneyard where the Skullcrawlers live has a sickly yellowish-green hue in the air. The files in the ''Kong: Skull Island Cinematic Adventure'' sourcebook confirm that this is because geothermal vents in the boneyard emit poison gases.