The Pacific/YMMV

Crowning Music of Awesome - The opening credits, as scored by Hans Zimmer; hell, the whole score's a Crowning Music of Awesome.
High Octane Nightmare Fuel - The wounded Japanese soldier committing suicide while Marine corpsmen were helping him following the night attack in Part One with a grenade. This troper was so not expecting that...
- Familiarity with the history of the Pacific theater really doesn't make things like this all that surprising. There were some very pragmatic reasons for the Marines in the field to adopt a "take no prisoners" attitude against the Japanese
- A group of Marines are found blown up and dismembered in a crater; one of them still has his head, but not his face, which was a few feet away
- Snafu digging out a gold tooth of a dead Japanese soldier with his Ka-Bar. Bonus Nightmare points in that he was just eating with it beforehand
  - Snafu dropping pebbles into the pool of brain matter/blood that's left in a Japanese soldier's head, the top of which has been blown off
  - Earlier, another Marine attempts to take gold teeth out of a STILL LIVING Japanese soldier. Snafu comes over and puts him out of his misery... then says to Sledge, "It makes it easier." It's hard to tell if he was joking or not
    - The real event, as documented in Sledge's nonfiction book, "With The Old Breed" was even more nightmareish. The Marine, on finding it so difficult to dig the still living man's teeth out, slashed both of his cheeks wide open to make his hunt easier. As the Japanese soldier sputtered and coughed his own blood, the Marine kept digging. Only then did someone put the man out of his misery.
  - Let's just say Snafu in general
- Peleliu as a whole: some marines have described it as the most horrific battle they fought in the entire war
- The Iwo Jima landings
  - This troper would dare say those few minutes in Part 8 made the Omaha Beach landing in Saving Private Ryan look tame by comparison
- Every single second of Part 9; just watching it will make you get post-traumatic stress disorder
  - Okinawa is the definition of this: constant rain to the point the ground got so muddy corpses began to sink underneath so all you could see was a skeletal hand with maggots eating it. The island had the highest casualties of the Pacific War on both sides. Even the civilians inhabiting Okinawa were not only caught in the crossfire, but were used as human shields by the desperate Japanese.
  - Sledge falling into a watery, maggot-filled machine-gun nest with a rotten corpse deserves special mention
- Anything involving Okinawan civilians
Ho Yay: Sledge and his best friend Sidney Phillips. The homoerotic subtext between these two "best friends" is just too obvious to ignore. Their reunion in Part 5 makes it more blatant
- Agreed; they laid the Ho Yay on thick in Band of Brothers with Richard Winters and Lewis Nixon, but this isn't just subtext: it's outright TEXT
- Sledge/Snafu seems to be popular in fandom as well. The fact Snafu seems to have no concept of personal space when it comes to Eugene just adds fuel to the fire
  - Hello, the oh-so-wonderful scene with the letter about Sledge's dog makes this practically canon.
  - Snafu's fixation on Sledge in general, though it comes off as a bit one-sided.
- Strangely enough, Ack-Ack/Hillybilly. They have such little screen time together, yet a good part of the fandom still ships them.
  - Probably has something to do with the fact that every time they're on screen they're together, and Ack-Ack's seemingly heartbroken reaction to Hillbilly's death.
- Leckie/Hoosier has a solid fanbase as well, mostly because of Leckie's (sarcastic) declaration of wanting Hoosier to be his date if they ever have a fancy dress ball on the island, and Hoosier's amiable response
Moral Event Horizon - The Japanese killing and using civilians in combat on Okinawa.
Nausea Fuel - Goes without saying
Tear Jerker - Sledge cradling a mortally wounded Okinawan woman in his arms and stroking her hair as she dies in part 9
- Knowing full well John's newlywed wife Lena Mae Riggi Basilone has become a widow at the end of Part 8
  - They definitely put her crying on the beach where she and John fell in love at the end of the episode just to invoke this trope
  - Not to mention the epilogue tells us she never remarried
  - When you read and understand how much John really meant to her, it makes things that much more tragic: historically, she carried a picture of him in her wallet until the day she died, and when a friend asked why she never remarried, Lena's response was "Once you've had the best, you can't settle for less."
- Captain Haldane's death is definitely one, especially when one reads Sledge's book and sees that he really was that honorable and beloved by his men.
- When Snafu and Sledge are on the train home in Part 10, Sledge is asleep with they arrive at Snafu's stop. He gets up and leaves Sledge without waking him to say goodbye. Made much more heartbreaking when the epilogue reveals Snafu didn't contact him and other Marines for over 35 years after the war
- Sledge's post-war Heroic BSOD, where he weeps bitterly and apologizes to his father for having enlisted
- Just the opening credits with the gorgeous animation and the stirring score by Hans Zimmer was enough for this troper basically every freakin' week.
- Captain Ack-Ack quietly saying "Eddie? Eddie?" when Hillbilly dies, as if he can't believe he's dead

Back to The Pacific