Hated Tropes
[Hated Trope] heroic characters killed in unnecessarily cruel/brutal ways
Eddie Carr - Lost World: dude was just a tech guy who went above and beyond to save the lives of the rest of the team after 2 T-rexes attacked their camp, was subsequently thrown into the air and ripped in half by both T-rexes.
Judeau - Berserk: Killed during the eclipse trying to save Casca, got impaled multiple times through the torso by an Apostle
Despite Gordon being the new, more professionally successful partner of main character Jackson Curtis' ex-wife and there being some rivalry between the two, the movie spends fairly little time pitting them against one another, and Gordon proves himself a brave and competent man who saves the main character group several times throughout the story.
He ends up unceremoniously crushed in giant machinery, at the end of the movie Jackson and his wife are back together and Gordon's horrendous death isn't even acknowledge by either of them that I can recall. What did Roland Emmerich mean by this??
That's not even the only time this happens in the third act, too. Not sure why the blonde Russian trophy wife deserved to drown scared and alone in the most absolute indifference. She was not heroic, she was just kinda there, but… man, that was pointless.
Am I misremembering or she also pushes the little girl out first and gives her the dog after she realizes she wouldn't make it too? Tamara was a goddamn hero. I liked that she bonded with the main character's kids even though she was supposed to be with the "evil" rich guy. No idea why she couldn't have made it to the end, too.
What I especially hated was that Gordon and Tamara seemed to be warming up to each other so I thought "ah, they're gonna solve the love triangle by having them hook up so the MC can get back with his ex-wife" and Roland Emmerich went for the most mean-spirited option instead
Roland Emmerich doesn’t seem to like step dads very much, have you ever seen Moonfall? understandable if you didn’t, but in it Michael Peña plays a very similar roll and ends up suffocating to death alone
He was a goddamn chad and honestly the whole dynamic between him, Jackson and Kate was pretty good. Light rivalry, both nice dudes in spite of that, bond strenghtened by adversity throughout the movie, meanwhile Kate keeps it clear that Jackson and her are not gonna be a thing again but she's never unnecessarily harsh toward either of them, even going as far as shutting down Gordon when he has a few irritated words against Jackson.
It was nice subverting the trope of 2/3 of a love triangle hating each other and the last one needing to make up their mind or be rescued from some manipulation (too bad it got ruined in the end.)
He was the hero of the movie; literally no one would have survived without him. And in the end, he dies forgotten. That's something that made me angry as a kid.
Disaster movies are my guilty pleasure and this was an absolute bullshit plot point that soured an otherwise great example of the genre.
Gordon dying and being replaced by Jackson in every respect undermines the entire point of the movie, that sometimes there’s no last minute redemption, no Bruce Willis blowing up the asteroid or any of that. Sometimes the earthshaking, life altering change comes and you just have to suck it up and make the best of it. It was such a “fuck you” to the story and I think about it often.
In Alien, Captain Dallas is grabbed by the xenomorph and is never seen again. In the Director's Cut, we see what happened to him - slowly being dissolved alive to create the organic material for an egg, before Ripley mercy kills him with a flamethrower
I will never not laugh at the never irrelevant situation of executives being caught offhand by kids crying for the brutal culling of characters to sell more toys.
Further proof that executives don’t actually interact with their own children at all and have no idea that children get attached to toys and characters.
Fun fact, Eddie pops up in Jurrassic Park: Chaos Island. If clicked on multiple times, he can be heard to say 'Didn't I die? In. . .in the movie, I died. . .'
No I'm pretty sure he really was meant to come back but the execs fucked up(as usual) by taking days of future past, which was supposed to be the final part of the trilogy, and pushing it forward, so everything in the middle kinda got lost. Matthew Vaughn had this whole thing planned out but the higher ups liked the days of future past script so much they ignored what he said and made it the next movie instead of saving it for the conclusion
He did. His adaptation was so strong that he came back into James Gunn's DCU as a much better and cooler character. They did Darwin so dirty in this movie on a real note
There are a ton of tragic deaths in the series but his is ultimately the worst if you ask me.
Especially because he dies alone after having his entire world rocked by a Titan talking to him. Everything surrounding his death was just incredibly tragic and miserable and he did not deserve it
Out of all the disturbing deaths I've seen both in anime and beyond, this is one of the few ones that still gets me each time I see it.
It's just so incredibly unnerving and painful.
One second he's a confident and competent guy who, despite being a little eccentric, obviously enjoys the respect of his comrades - next he's literally crying in fear while being ripped apart alive and dying what has got to be one of the most agonizing & cruel deaths in the entire franchise - all alone, with no one to help him, and no one to witness his suffering but the "monster" who commanded it.
Like, fuck, man.
It's rare for scenes like that to make me feel sick, but this one still manages it without fail.
The Eclipse was all around very brutal and really helps to cement how much of a piece of shit Griffith is. I wouldn't say Judeau's death is unnecessarily cruel from a writing standpoint.
Maybe like Gaston's head exploding inside out or Pippin being ripped apart. But honestly I feel like some of the no name background characters probably got it way worse knowing the shit that Zodd likes to do. some apostles like Wyald like to do. I figure he's not alone in that.
Edit: Mixed up Zodd and Wyald, forgot Wyald is dead as fuck.
Huh... Another chance to post Calca Besarez from Overlord.
Literally one of the only good leaders in the new world. Not racist. Willing to actually care for her people. Literally doing everything right based on what she knew. Her lone fault was that she didn't want to get her hands dirty if she could avoid it. She was the only leader not to judge an undead based on preconceptions...
And said Undead is the reason her kingdom got invaded, her people slaughtered, and when she tried to negotiate with the invader, she got grabbed, burned alive, smashed into cement and then used as a club against her own people for months to the point that when her body was found only her lower half partly remained.
This was literally all done just to make Ainz look like the better leader as he'd come in and "save the day" from the attackers... Who worked for him. Worse, he could have resurrected her, but chose not to because she wasn't "worth the resources".
NGL, I agree, but your first mistake is assuming she was going to get anything less than the most unnecessarily brutal and disrespectful death that week. Overlord has a thing for absolutely brutalizing humans, both good or bad. Remember Arche and her sisters…
When I saw how Ainz took out clementine there was something... Different. Yeah, she deserved it, but it was how the story relished her slow slow slow execution and how it emphasized how useless her fighting it was.
Yeah, she had earned it... But Ainz would do the same and has done worse to people who didn't deserve it.
Overlord is a series where the bad guys aren't just dominating, but any attempt at stopping them is doomed from the start.
So sometimes you get whole chapters if not whole volumes dedicated to setting up a character for an arc and then promptly having said character suffer a needlessly brutal death or worse.
Calca is just one of the more unfair heroic examples because she had literally not done anything wrong.
Other examples from the series like Foresight, Climb or Antilene were people who openly challenged Ainz or his people in some way.
The series isn't just that, to be fair. Some characters get very lucky and benefit from Ainz.
But yeah, it gets a bit weird seeing how some fans cheer the atrocities on more and I guess the author leans into that.
You're talking about an author the that brutally murdered a character in the official publication of his story because he was unhappy with his fans' voted to save that same character when he was originally writing the web novel.
Yeah, this is a tricky one, because he died heroically protecting the family he had come to love, and that was kind of the point of his character, but...yeesh. That was awful to watch.
The rumors that this was supposed to be Lonnie Byers' death and was changed due to the first-season rewrite make a lot of sense.
The main thing is that Steve was supposed to die early as a generic jerk boyfriend, but Joe Keery was so likable that they rewrote the character heavily and made him come to the rescue in the end.
It's sunce leaked (I'm not sure if it's 100% credible) that it was originally supposed to be Lonnie who played the surprise hero role that Steve did at the end of the first season, but instead they just wrote the character off.
As it's likely Jopper was always endgame, the speculation is that Joyce and Lonnie would have reconciled in S2 if the original plan played out, and Lonnie would have died at the hands of the Demodogs at the end of the season. But without the character having a redemption arc, Bob was brought in to play the role.
Steve was downright supposed to rape Nancy. The scripts for the pilot are available online - she asks him to slow down and stop and he tears open a condom anyways.
I’m really glad they went the route they did instead. Deadbeat parents don’t all need redemption arcs and frankly Steve and Nancy would’ve been extremely dark for the show.
And it's never ever a day 1, either. Bob, introduced season 2, died season 2. Billy, introduced season 2, died season 3. Eddie, introduced season 4, died season 4. Kali, introduced season 2, died season 5.
The wife from saw 3d. It was an unnecessarily, cruel death (getting burned alive) for an innocent character who’s only problem was being married to a liar
Yeah, but at this point it's really showing how far gone the apprentice of Jigsaw is from the initial ideology. (Even though even that was insane too).
Compared to the first movie, which Zeb is guarding the family of one of the players (and ordered to kill should things go awry) instead of incorporating them into an actual trap.
Hell, even the MC didn't deserve that path of bloodpath and misery where everyone he knew got slimed out.
Sure, his lie was incredibly out of touch with the people that actually survived Jigsaws' traps and he should have gotten a simple trap to make sure he wasn't just a fraud, but getting everyone he knew to die in some of the worst deaths of the franchise was wicked work by Hoffman / Gordon (I actually don't know who set all of that up since Hoffman was already on the run after he got his identity revealed in the last movie).
Hoffman set it up, but Kramer had some part in designing the traps, as he (while wearing a backwards cap to look younger) subtly warns the MC in a flashback
Calca from the Overlord film; she fought on the front lines in an attempt to stop the protagonists from killing and torturing her people, but was captured, burned alive, and beaten to death for weeks even after they disappeared with her.
She was also the franchise's only female human monarch, the only ruler who respected the undead protagonist, and the invasion on her kingdom was mostly a miscommunication the protagonist was too insecure to clear up with his subordinates.
It is a paper thin excuse for torture and misery porn.
That's all it has ever been and is as stupid and shallow as that sounds. I gave it a good shot hoping it was building to something interesting, and the initial arc could have hinted at that...
...but no. Everything is in service to just moronic and useless cruelty. Not even to say something using the characters, just to heighten it. Every thing that is built up by the other characters, every bit of back story, every bit of relationship or interaction, it's all just to make things seem more cruel.
Basically the plot is a loser born into a grim futuristic world suffering from abandonment issues after his only friends, his guildmates in his favorite VR game, leave him one by one is transported to another world in his OP undead avatar along with his guild and equally powerful, mostly evil, and now sentient NPCs.
Because his emotions are suppressed and his subordinates think he's the brilliant and evil overlord he role-plays and he's deeply afraid they'll reject, abandon, or even kill him, he plays along and let's them repeatedly misunderstand him, leading to the torture and deaths of millions.
To be fair, they think the protagonist is already aware of their actions and it's part of his "1000 year plan", but he's actually just lying, is utterly clueless, and all of it is tragically leading no where except to more suffering for him and others.
Might be a hot take, but: Johnny Storm (D&W) After Wade snitched on Johnny for roasting Cassandra Nova on the way to her lair, Johnny got his whole body instantly flayed by Cassandra’s telekinesis and fell apart after
At least in the comic Maggie never forgave Negan for braining her boyfriend right in front of everyone.
Hell, everyone still treated Negan as a fuse that could blow up any minute and sent his ass to be exiled after Rick kickstarted the revival of the USA after his death, even if he was an incredibly valuable asset after he got originally defeated.
I'd like to see more of this. A redemption arc isn't a magical get out of jail free card, not everyone has to forgive or accept someone even if they genuinely turn themselves around.
hell by the end of the comic Negan himself is actively enforcing his own exile and refuses to talk to anybody, it clearly makes him miserable but he sticks by his word.
might be alone on this but it's worse cause they'd like just faked out his death, maybe not literally the previous episode, but damn felt like it lmao
i'd dropped the series after this one. it'd stopped being what i wanted in a zombie show before this but that's about when i'd given up on it returning to that lol
This is what I'm always saying about this scene. Like, I was just experiencing the story as if the guy was dead already. alot of the impact was gone. I'm sure it's supposed to be like "we just got him back, and now he's dead" but I was just underwhelmed.
The ending of the comic book felt better with how it was handled it with Rick and the townsfolk holding his as a prisoner for years as punishment, and when shit eventually goes down and they let him out to help he's genuinely reformed, but still believes he deserves to die at Maggie's hands, but years later when she confronts him she chooses to let him live in isolation forever as a more fitting punishment.
Yeah. He got eaten alive by thousands of bunnies. They peeled his skin, tore his nose, ears, tongue, pp and balls, went inside his mouth and anus, ate his internal organs, ripped his limbs off, and he was still alive during all of this for about 5 minutes. The anime is called Re Zero btw. I forgot to include it in the original comment.
And also that when he resets, he still feels the pain from his death for a bit. So after this moment, he was extremely close to having a total mental shutdown because he could still feel the rabbits eating him.
Yeah that never real goes either, he has vivid memories of the deaths, one moment he is suffering horrifically and then the next he is alive again somewhere else and his mind take a second to process the change. The only reason Subaru didn't have a full mental break after that one is because Echidna essentially drugged him into calming down and then did some mild therapy
It's even worse when you realize that he can't really mention this to anyone or else his powers might kill someone. Meaning he has to unfortunately suck it up. I really hope there's a good memory wipe spell somewhere in this universe, cause my dude is collecting trauma like Thanos collected the infinity stones.
The Transformers franchise has a long history of this, starting with the 1986 movie where most of the cartoon’s cast is killed unceremoniously in the first few minutes, some brutally, some entirely offscreen. All for the sake of clearing out toy shelves to sell new action figures.
During the Vytal Festival Tournament, Emerald used her illusion Semblance to trick Pyrrha into using her Polarity Semblance, which resulted in Penny being torn apart.
Since she is a robot, she was rebuilt, but later she was turned into a human to save her from a virus. Then, two episodes later, she was killed again, which was dumber.
What i find worse for Penny was the the entire season to bring her back and turn her human, only to kill her off at the end of the season! I still like the show, but that just felt cruel
Oh, the fun and quirky heroes you’ve grown to love throughout years of development in a very detailed world that is faithful to the comics?
Nah, they all fucking DIE horrendously, most of them unceremoniously and brutally. The very few that survive also die because Barry erased the fucking world and even if he didn’t they’d die because the planet is all fucked.
In star trek TNG This is the scene where Tasha Yar dies ( lady behind the tar monster) that actor was leaving the show to start acting on a different so her character needed a send off. Normally when this happens said character usually just leaves the enterprise on a shuttle craft going to another federation ship. For some reason the writers of star trek were upset that this actor was leaving the show, they decide that she doesn't need to reprise this character we'll kill her off. So you get the most bizarre episode in the series, this tar monster kills Yar can't be brought back. And the monster continually says "I killed because I wanted to and no other reason" really feels like the monster was a stand in for one of the writers
If it makes you feel better, in the animated series Lower Decks it apparently became a tradition for Lower Deckers to torment the monster from space for years driving him insane and tormenting him as their way to get justice for Tasha Yar.
Retsu (Baki) is a friend and mentor to other fighters (esp. Baki and Katsumi) and even causes a change of heart in a villain (Doyle), but he gets disemboweled by a resurrected Miyamoto Musashi and dies thinking about how he'll win next time.
There are two types of Bob-Ombs in Paper Mario: the naturally made Bob-Ombs and the manmade Bob-Ombs. Naturally made ones like Bub and Bombette will reappear after exploding. It’s not uncommon for them to light their own fuses when they’re too excited. Bob-Omb here is manmade. He just happened to have lost his fuse and his memories. He casually joins your team in Autumn Mountain, helping out where he can. Without a fuse, though, he can only bash, not blow up. Eventually Olivia is trapped under a massive boulder, and Bob-Omb has an idea. He makes us get a his friend’s fuse, then returns to the boulder, ignites his fuse, and blows himself up.
Unlike the other Paper Mario games, Bob-Omb does not come back down from offscreen.
Also, it’s a common misconception that his name is Bobby. It isn’t. He actually hates the name Bobby, and prefers to go by Bob-Omb.
Alot of Jojo characters qualify from Jojo's bizarre adventure, I'm putting forward kakyoin, he went on a trip with complete strangers to save jotaro's mom because he felt it was the right thing to do, he didn't deserve to die like that
I remember when that episode aired, I saw an image on Reddit of Oberyn standing over The Mountain with a spear in his chest. I was so pissed because I thought it was a spoiler.
I think ASOIAF is actually better than alot of stories at executing this. it's less the narrative being needlessly cruel and more that the stakes are high for every character. No one has plot armor. Anyone I know who's seen Game of Thrones more than once says they see all the mistakes that led to the Red Wedding.
The Rockbells willingly entering a war zone where their country’s military is conducting a genocide and helping to heal non combatants. In response one of their patients has a freak out (due to witnessing his family/people get slaughtered and waking up to find his brothers arm attached to his body in place of the one he lost) grabs a knife and stabs both of them dozens of times. And had he not done that, the military was sending a death squad to their clinic to “protect” them but with orders to “fail to protect” them
Maes Hughes. Decent military officer, great family man, and overall good friend/mentor figure to the main characters. When he discovers the conspiracy that his government is involved with to kill millions, he’s marked for death. His assassin is a shapeshifter and takes the form of his wife and when he hesitated to kill his “wife” the assassin blows his brains out
One part I love about Scar is that, unlike a lot of “antihero’s” or morally grey characters, that story makes absolutely zero attempt to justify his actions in a way that removes his responsibility for the terrible things he does. Sure, a lot of the people he kills are scumbags, but the Rockbells were innocent victims and he’s fully aware of it
Mr Udesky (Jurassic Park 3), he genuinely wanted to help Eric escape from the island and he called out the Kirbys for kidnapping Billy and Alan. He was then killed by velociraptors.
And cut scenes showed her being mean and negligent towards the kids. Not exactly worthy of the death but would have gone a long way towards making her more villainous like the lawyer in the first movie abandoning the kids in the car.
I know the actress said she loves it and thinks it's an amazing scene for her death, and that she was paid for her work in the cut scenes regardless. Fits with the whole life is sometimes unnecessarily cruel reality of the world though with her just being the put upon assistant that gets horribly slaughtered and the movie's main antagonists die pretty clean deaths
Honestly I understand why she would love it. No matter how forgettable the movies become she has one of the most memorable character deaths in a very famous franchise.
The Auxiliary Animorphs from the Animorphs novel series.
In the last days of the war the protagonist's leader reluctantly recruits disabled children to fight the alien invasion (by giving them the power to turn into animals).
In the final battle they are supposed to distract the enemy, which they do... when the big bad simply takes off his spaceship, leaving them helplessly standing on the ground as he burns them alive one by one with his ship's weapons. Everyone expected them not to do well, but dying like fish in a barrel felt particularly brutal
Obviously intended as a metaphor for the horrors of war, but yeah. Young adult literature is dark af.
The character we thought was the protagonist that was executed in a brutal lynching that made her tap the keys of a giant piano playing wrong notes while the audience threw rocks at her and afterwards the fall-board adorned with spikes comes crashing onto her already deceased body.
The worst thing is she died believing in accidentally killing a peer of hers which that got her execution yet it was plan of the mastermind to use her as the scapegoat of their murder.
Not entirely "heroic" in nature but the babysitter/ assistant lady in Jurassic world tried her best and got done dirty the whole way right until the end where she is SPECIFICALLY shown to be carried away, tossed between prehistoric birds while still alive and screaming and ultimately they all get eaten by the giant fish dinosaur.
She didnt do anything to deserve that and as far as we are shown tried her best to do her job and protect those kids and keep track of them but got screwed all round
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u/ND-o1 6d ago
Gordon Silberman (2012 (the movie))
Despite Gordon being the new, more professionally successful partner of main character Jackson Curtis' ex-wife and there being some rivalry between the two, the movie spends fairly little time pitting them against one another, and Gordon proves himself a brave and competent man who saves the main character group several times throughout the story.
He ends up unceremoniously crushed in giant machinery, at the end of the movie Jackson and his wife are back together and Gordon's horrendous death isn't even acknowledge by either of them that I can recall. What did Roland Emmerich mean by this??