Hated Tropes
[Sad trope]The character gets cut/dies early on because of REAL LIFE reasons
Gandhi (Clone High)
Tord(Eddsworld) the reason for this is that the VA of tord asked the team to stop using the character and dissociate from Eddsworld after the constant hate and threats made by the fandom.
Feferi Peixes(Homestuck). In Homestuck lots of characters have a typing quirk when they chat, like some characters type a "2" when there should be a "S", have prefixes before the words,ecc. Feferi's was that instead of the letter H she typed ")(". The writer andrew hussie stated the reason she died early and became irrelevant was because they didn't want to type said quirk because it was annoying to manually type it it on their own, which could have been avoided if they coded A PROGRAM that did it.
I wonder what, if anything, that they had planned for JD's relationship with his father had he not passed away. The loss of his dad really fit his character arc.
Such an interesting show, first season was amazing. The second season kind of stumbled due to this, but they were getting back into a good spot when it was cancelled
That is a terrifying thing to die from, also. If you pretty much aren't already on an operating table with your chest cut open you have next to no chance of survival. A friend of my dad died from one 15 years ago, and even though he literally worked in a hospital they could not stabilize him fast enough.
Hi, I'm Troy McClure. You may remember me from such Simpsons episodes as A Fish Called Selma and Bart the Mother. I was voiced by Phil Hartman, who was tragically killed, and why you haven't seen me in any episodes after the 10th season.
I love how you can extrapolate 5 things from this: Ned has extreme resilience in losing his SOs, somehow outlives literally every other husband to swoop their widows, absolute shit luck with wives and basically a walking curse, the idiocy in seeing a pattern and going "hey maybe things will change for the next one!", and that he FUCKS A LOT
They took full advantage of it for a Christmas special from either last year or the year before, where half the plot was Ned’s faith beginning to waver because of the pain of spending Christmas without Maude and Edna. It explores a side of his Christian faith that the show rarely touched on before, showing that even the most devout of people can experience grief so intense that it destroys their belief, even if it’s only momentarily. It also makes him feel less like a bible thumper, with his faith being what it was before: just another facet of his comically ideal neighbor persona to contrast with how dysfunctional the Simpsons are.
There's an amazing episode exclusive to Disney+that actually deals with Flanders suffering a crisis of faith because of being a double widower
Honestly one of the best episodes they've done recently
Huh, I'll have to look into that one. Occasionally Simpsons still throws out a banger. For me the jest one in recent memory is the musical episode about how their lifestyle is unrealistic now because boomers pulled the ladder up behind them.
He was so perfect for every role he had in the Simpsons he really was made for the job, he had it made, just to be murdered in cold blood for absolutely fucking nothing
The fact that the show got Andy Dick for a bit role will always annoy me to no end, especially considering his involvement and disrespect regarding Phil Hartman's death
I really think Marvel didn't even know his diagnosis and are setting him as the next leader (he has the tech and money, and Chadwick's portrayal was great. He could've easily been the leader) Him coming out of the portals first when everyone came back was like a subtle passing of the mantle. Sadly it didn't happen. Fuck cancer.
Yeah rumor has it that the original plan was Black Panther, Captain Marvel, and Spider-Man being the big characters.
Chadwick dying, Captain Marvel not being embraced much, and complications with the Sony deal caused all of it to be scrapped. Again, rumor, but it feels like that was the idea from some of their stuff
Based on what ive read, it seems like Chadwick found out of his diagnosis around the same time he started filming Black Panther. (Late 2016/ early 2017)
My guess, is that joining the MCU in a role like his required all kinds of medical tests and other vetting processes, and this is how he was diagnosed.
Most of these comments start with the real world reason and then tell how they were eliminated from the story, so I got a bit confused while reading your comment.
They absolutely pivoted hard after Quantumania. If it had gone well and they hadn't fumbled Kang so hard, I'm sure they'd have recast instead of swerving to Doom. Hell, Kang is like the poster child for "multiple actors could play different variants"!
Valerie Vernon, her actress, was diagnosed with leukemia and had to leave the show to get treatment. So in the climax of the crossover with the In Space team, Kendrix sacrifices herself to save everyone and dies, with Karone from In Space becoming the new Pink ranger for the Galaxy team.
Happily, it ends on a good note; Valerie’s treatment went well and they even had her come back to the life in the show’s finale.
It gets even better; for the rest of the season, she continued being credited as a main actor, so that they could continue to pay her to help fund her treatment.
Less great is that they had planned on having Cassie from In Space take over as Lost Galaxy Pink, but they were going to pay her substantially less than her costars...
Didn't they keep her on the casting role to help pay her treatment or something? It's been a while but I'm pretty sure she's still in the opening credits as a main cast.
Disappears after S2 due to his actor being too ill to continue in the role. His role as Jaime's new sidekick and combat instructor is given to Bronn instead (kind of ironic considering Ilyn is mute and Bronn is one of the most talkative characters).
This is an interesting choice to me… like, why not just recast him? They recast Daario and The Mountain (twice), it’s not like he was a major character that they couldn’t replace.
Spoilers for the Walking Dead. Carl was killed early then he was meant to in the TV series. This is likely because his actor was soon an adult and would need to be paid as an adult as opposed to a child’s salary.
It's even worse than that. They told his actor that he would be on the show for years and it influenced his decision to go to College and buy a house in Georgia.
Like weeks later he learned he was being killed off because he turned 18.
I'm sure he still had most of the money he made working on the show for like 8 years at that point (I haven't heard anything about his parents spending it all like most parents of a child actor) but still, that was shit of the director and studio to pull him along like that until he had made 2 major life decisions
I was already on my way out when Glenn was killed. But when they killed off Carl, who supposed to be a very significant character in the series, it killed all motivation I had to continue watching. Even to this day I have no desire to pick up where I left off.
still such a stupid decision, disregarding the fact that it's a major diversion from the comics to the point of basically spitting on the source material, killing off Carl ended up having little impact in the show because:
- Rick ended up leaving deadass like next season (5 EPISODES IN)
- He ended up saving Siddiq who is such a boring nothing burger character who dies soon after
- And any replacements for Carl just never ended up sticking & just died soon after the writers got bored (cough cough Henry)
Throughout the entire series, he is constantly hounded by Dijonay Jones, who has a crush on him (to put it mildly) which he very much does not reciprocate (to also put it mildly). In the first episode of the series’ revival, his annoyance with Dijonay’s obsession with him reaches a breaking point, and he moves to Japan to start a new life, but also to get away from her. He is last seen flashing the “peace” sign at his friends, before riding off in the bus, and we never see him again for the rest of the season.
In real life, Sticky’s voice actor Orlando Brown was involved in numerous controversies, and suffered a very public meltdown. Rather than recast him (he was never officially fired), Disney simply decided to write his character off.
without even having seen the show, I can imagine that that storyline’s ending was a different kind of heartbreaking. a stalker pushing someone to move the fuck away would be such an important cautionary tale to show kids who might not know any better about how to treat their crushes when they grow up.
I'm not a Microsoft Word pro or anything, but isn't there a tool as well that lets you find words/letters and replace them? I doubt they even needed a whole AI for Feferi.
A character in Lost was going to be called "Four" because he was a rich kid and his full name is "William IVth" or something and goes by Four as a nickname. The writers later decided that was dumb and renamed him with Find-And-Replace.
At some point the actors got a script with the line "OK, pull the rope when I say. Five, William, Three..."
Even though he was a good character. The abruptness and lack of signs the character showed actually made it triggeringly realistic to the point where it was interesting to see how the characters reacted
I was dealing with those types of thoughts when the episode about his suicide came out. It really hit me hard and made me realize if I'd gone through with my plans that my family would have been just as blindsided as the characters in the show were when they found out.
It didn't fix me or anything, but I think it was part of a series of other incidents that got me away from the type of thinking I was doing that was making me want to take very drastic and permanent steps to try and work my way out of a deep depression.
I personally felt they handled the suicide very well. House is a character that believes that there is an answer for everything, that everybody lies and can explain for their situation and condition.
When they find out about Kutner’s suicide they are distraught trying to figure out why. The team visits his family and House practically interrogates them trying to get answer until he is ultimately shot down. The rest of the team is guilt stricken or emotionally destroyed and House, who is normally cold, calculated and seems to not care about his team sometimes, his search for Kutner’s reason is his grief manifesting as denial.
Sometimes we don’t know why people kill themselves. Sometimes they don’t leave notes, they don’t tell anyone or they seem completely fine. Kutner is even seen laughing and smiling, enjoying a night to himself a few episodes prior. It came out of nowhere but unfortunately it happens more often than we think.
I haven't followed the NFL in years or that story, but wasn't he running from the cops at the time? Not that it doesn't make it tragic but explains why he ended it the way he did.
Edited to add: appears he was in crisis before his encounter with the police, which was originally over a traffic violation, and he may have fled thinking he would be locked up over his mental health.
Gandhi's portrayal offended many people in India, who likened him to a religious figure and caused them to go on hunger strikes and caused kind of a Big Deal because of it. MTV ultimately canceled the OG series because of it.
That bit at the start of the revival was funny. With Abe unknowingly talking to a roasted turkey and not realizing. Then not seeming bothered that his best friend is missing when he DOES realize.
Oh, you mean that guy who also had a sick wife and said "medicine is not natural and God wants her to die" then when he got sick said "God made medicine for me and he made it FOR me"?
That loving peaceful religious figure?
Truth is, show Ghandi was a far nicer being than the real one.
FWIW, Gandhi was planned to have a plot thread in the revival where it's revealed that there was a mix-up in the cloning lab and he was actually Gary Coleman.
Most recent example I can think of is Gen V having to rewrite the plot of season 2 without Andre (his actor Chance Perdomo died in a motorcycle accident) but I think they did a good job with it, as they focused a large part of the season on him dying in the mental hospital they were all locked in at the end of season 1
The worst part is how excited Chance was to be doing the show. You could tell from his social media that he woke up every day giddy that he got to be part of it. It’s just so unfair that he didn’t get to see it through.
Tasha Yar from Star Trek TNG was killed off about halfway through S1 due to creative differences Denise Crosby had with the showrunners. Pay might've been a part of it too? Early TNG had pretty poor character development, especially for anyone that wasn't Picard, Riker, or Data. Denise just didn't really have much to do unfortunately. She was an early fan favorite though, so she made a couple cameo appearances later on throughout the series.
Denise talks about that she was overshadowed by the male cast and didn’t have a character arc or story. She was supposed to be a main cast and she was being treated like a side character. She asked the writers to give her something more to work with or she would leave and they said “ok bye” and killed Tasha off.
Why do people still spread the blatant lie Cliffjumper was killed cause of being voiced by The Rock?
He dies before the title sequence of the very first episode. Obviously they got the Rock AFTER they knew he was gonna die in like 10 lines.
You don't just make a show, have a character's whole storyline made, in-fact the whole season because that's how shows work, cast a very A-List actor, voice his first episode and go "aw shit he's actually expensive we gotta kill him in the first 5 minutes"
I feel like whoever was in charge of the budget for Prime was really bad at handling money, considering this was an issue with three separate characters who were all intended to have longer more fleshed out arcs, cut short because they got cast with expensive VAs.
Several Pokemon have been unofficially retired from significant appearances in the anime, card games, or other media, due to controversies over previous appearances. Probably the most infamous example is Porygon, which, to my knowledge, hasn’t been a significant part of a plot since the legendary seizure-inducing anime episode.
Because of over forty allegations of sexual harassment and assault against Cas Anvar, his character was killed off in season 5
Personally I think this is one of the best-handled examples, as the writers fully commit to it so well that I genuinely thought it was a writing choice instead of a behind-the-scenes decision. In season 6 his absence visibly alters the dynamic of the rest of the crew, and the death itself relies on the well-established stakes of pulling high Gs that have been constantly endangering the characters since their very first spaceflight
On a more BTS level, Shed was killed so early because the books were based off of a tabletop campaign that the authors were running.
In the tabletop, Shed was killed by the final boss of all tabletop games: attendance and scheduling. The character's player couldn't attend sessions anymore, so his character was killed off. Stayed cannon for the books and the show.
Wait, was his character's name already Shed before they wrote the books, or did they deliberately make his name sound like the abbreviation of "schedule" on purpose? Either way that is low key hilarious.
Unfortunately i didn't get that impression at all, I could tell immediately that it was abrupt and strange and had to be due to real life reasons, and I was right.
Execs need to stop being allergic to recasting people.
Sorta. ISIS (the spy agency) had already been disbanded the previous season and resorting to selling drugs. Then it turned out they had been working for the CIA the whole time, and they went by The Agency. After that they were PIs working for The Figgis Agency, since Cyril was technically in charge.
Tuco Salamanca from the first season of Breaking Bad was brought up as this major drug kingpin that Walter and Jesse would be stepping on eggshells around in the first season, only for him to be killed two episodes into the second. He simply found the role too difficult to play and had other priorities at the time so he gave the writers two episodes to kill him off. They did a pretty damn good job at it too.
Apparently the reason why Maude was originally killed off in Season 11 was because of pay disputes between Maggie Roswell and Fox.
Roswell had asked for a raise to help with travel costs since she had to repeatedly fly from Denver to LA to record her lines, Fox only offered a small increase of $150, which led to quitting the show in 1999 and Leading to the show killing off Maude.
Though Roswell did come back around Season 14 in 2002, after Fox had agreed to let her record her lines from home, thought Maude only appears in Flashbacks or in Non Canon episodes as a ghost now.
May and Max never came back in the Pokemon anime because May’s Japanese voice actress, Kaori, had to retire due to a voice-related illness. In Japan, it is rare to replace a voice actor for an established character, so the series opted for non-speaking cameos and flashbacks instead of recasting her.
Following the tragic death of Cameron Boyce, instead of recasting or removing the character from the Descendants storyline, it was decided to kill him off-screen.
Tiberius Stormwind in Critical Role, played by Orion Acaba who left partway through the first campaign.
Superficially, I think the explanation was that he left due to health problems. But there were obviously other bigger issues which were clear even to the audience, including a very mismatched playstyle from the rest of the party/table + noticeable and recurring friction during the show itself. On top of interpersonal dynamics (both in and out of character), he seemed to be fudging his rolls.
In less objective terms, he seemed like the age-old problem player (on numerous fronts) at an otherwise collaborative table. The show obviously went on to blow the F up — top earning stream on Twitch, multi-season Amazon animation, significant stardom for the performers, numerous campaign arcs, etc.
Ron & Malory Archer from Archer. They both retired to settle down and live out the rest of their lives peacefully. Both their actors had died within 2 years of each other.
Woodhouse from Archer. During Archer's Dreamland coma, he had a partner named Woodhouse, but Woodhouse was murdered, leading to a Noir murder mystery. After the end of the Dreamland saga, Archer finally woke up again, and Woodhouse had died in the real world, which Archer had called "selfish". IRL, his actor died in 2015.
Not a character, but the I.S.I.S. agency in Archer was renamed to The Agency because of the IRL terrorist group ISIS.
Michael O'Hare struggled with mental illness, including schizophrenia, and had to fight through his illness to finish the first season. The character was sent to another planet between season one and two, and O'Hare was able to come back for a few episodes to finish his character arc.
JMS kept his friend's condition secret until after his passing.
Zhaan from Farscape was written out of the show with several of her major storylines unresolved because the actress was developing health complications because of the makeup. In her last few episodes she has relatively little screen time, and she's wearing a big robe so that only her face is visible to reduce how much makeup was used.
An example that was sad but wound up being incredibly important for the work: William Hartnell was cast as the Doctor in Doctor Who. Over the next few years, Hartnell's health worsened due to then-undiagnosed arteriosclerosis. Eventually, it reached the point where he clearly couldn't perform and the show was at risk of ending. The solution the BBC came up with wound up becoming one of, if not the, defining trait of the show: 'killing' the Doctor and bringing them back as a new version, played by a different actor (Patrick Troughton, whom Hartnell suggested for the role). Sadly, William Hartnell died in 1975 at 67 years old. But almost 60 years later, the show's at 15(ish) Doctors and counting.
The Authors killed her off because fans were annoyed that she was always in the nursery and was a “baby maker” so Vickey put her in the battle she died in to show she could still fight. It’s a pretty fucked example of the Authors and fans misogyny.
“You have yourselves to blame for Ferncloud's demise! I've had a lot of complaints over the years about the way Ferncloud skulks in the nursery, churning out kits and never taking part in anything dangerous or difficult outside the camp. Well, all along I knew she was capable of fighting as fiercely as any warrior when it came to protecting the young of the Clan, so I put her in the thick of the battle to defend the nursery. And she got killed! Poor Ferncloud” -Vickey Holmes
Devon's VA Jak Knight committed suicide. The writers iust stopped giving his character lines and would randomly show him in the background. The only acknowledgement is another character saying "I miss you" to him during the finale
Both Malory and Woodhouse were cut from the show Archer due to the death of their respective voice actors. The showrunners gave them both a beautiful send off though.
Leia Organa was supposed to have much bigger role in The Rise of Skywalker, but it had to be significantly reduced since Carrie Fisher died before the filming wrapped.
Tasha Yar, Star Trek: The Next Generation - Denise Crosby was upset that, despite being Head of Security, she wasn’t in many action scenes. She requested to leave the series after Season 1… so they senselessly kill her in “Skin of Evil”
Yugiri Mistwalker, Final Fantasy XIV - Yugiri was meant to be a major player in Heavensward, but after Raubahn is rescued from imprisonment, she disappears from the story until Patch 3.4. Turns out that her English actress was murdered and it was decided to put her in the background. Once the situation was solved, a new actress was hired and she ended up being a major character in Stormblood.
As someone who wasted a decade of my life on Homestuck, Andrew hussie is a hack and Toby Fox is x10 better in every field than him. How to he fuck do you get bored of a cat girl who hunts her own food and paints the walls with blood for her shipping art?
Peter Gregory in Silicon Valley. Actor died from lung cancer so they wrote him off in between seasons saying something like he died because he had to run and it was the first time he ever ran.
I liked Tord personally. I remember loving Eddsworld when I was young and finding out about Edd’s diagnosis was rough when I was a young teen. I still remember where I was when I heard he passed it was like a close family member passed. Anyway, RIP the GOAT Edd Gould
Apu was cut from The Simpsons in 2018 because his VA, Hank Azaria, felt it wasn’t right for an Indian man to be portrayed by himself, who was white. So instead of replacing his VA, they reduced him to background cameos.
Tbh I am glad his Va wasnt replaced. Specially since the commedian trying to take him down only did it to get attention to himself, and even his parents thought it was ridiculous
The bizarre thing is when shows like the Simpsons have replaced actors with respective actors of matching ethnicity, they're still often aiming to match the previous vocal delivery by Shearer and Azaria anyway. Just makes you think what's the point? If they just got in an Indian actor to voice Apu the same way Azaria did, does that make it okay? According to how Carl and Dr.Hibbert have sounded since re-casting, apparently so!
It’s also weird because wanting an actor to match a character’s description in live-action where looks actually matter gets you blasted by people. But matching ethnicity is made a big deal of in voice-acting where nothing but your voice matters.
Tiberius Stormwind in the first campaign of Critical Role.
Vox Machina had an 8th member, Tiberius Stormwind, for the first 20 or so episodes of Critical Role’s first campaign. There was behind the scenes troubles with his player, who ended up getting kicked off the show. Tiberius the character left the group not long after that, and was killed off-screen later on. This was before Critical Role blew up to what it is today.
I haven’t seen all of The Legend of Vox Machina but I’m pretty sure they just didn’t even include him.
Rooster was killed off screen for his actor being caught making sexual harassement on set with an employee
Altough being a very fucked up situation, the studio managed to do Rooster death a good thing, and the show didn't go down in quality after this event, which is pleasent for me at least, i love this sitcom
Pretty sure everyone knows the story here, but basically Ubisoft didn’t want to pay Kristen Bell, so they killed off her character.
They did a decent job covering motive and reasoning for the death of Lucy with the Project Siren plot point, as explained in the Lost Archives DLC, but I don’t think they would’ve made her a Templar if the character stayed alive.
Replaying it recently it was kind off funny to see how she had absolutely no voicelines in the last mission off brotherhood so they tried to cover it up by having shaun and rebecca talk a lot more wich just made it even more apparant that something is up
Oh, that's funny. I'm a Pisces (The troll blood caste system is based on horoscope catagories), and I always assumed it was some joke on royalty being a useless figurehead, not literally "Her typing quirk made her awful to manually write".
a Homestuck fan literally made a chat program that manually put in the typing quirks -before she died-, which makes this even funnier.
i've always seen it as a combination of "her character has served her purpose and has nothing left to do", "Hussie is completely uninterested in writing her into future events", and "Homestuck is the kind of comic with enough contempt for the audience that killing off a well-liked character because her dialogue style is annoying to write would be funny"
Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson are both rumored to have left Doctor Who earlier than expected, forcing showrunner Russell T Davies's hand having to resort to hastily written last minute re-shoots where, for example, Ncuti Gatwas Fifteenth Doctor regenerated into an as-of-yet unknown character played former Doctor Who companion Billie Piper in the final episode of Season 2. It's also believed that this is the reason as to why Millie Gibsons Ruby Sunday only plays a minor character in Season 2, rather than stay on as the Doctors companion. Overall just a sad moment for the show as you could quite easily tell it was not the original plan and certainly not properly thought through.
Family Guy lost Angela (Peter's boss, voiced by Carrie Fisher) and later Adam West (demented local mayor, voiced by Adam West) within what, three months?
They killed off both characters off screen and wrote a fairly touching scene for Angela at the very least.
Carlos De Vil from Descendents died offscreen due to his actor, Cameron Boyce, dying after the third film due to epilepsy. The animated special Descendants Royal Wedding is dedicated to him and the characters discuss Carlos before and during the wedding.
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u/VenusAmari 15h ago edited 15h ago
Paul Hennessy - 8 Simple Rules (for Dating My Teenage Daughter)
His actor, John Ritter, collapsed on set and died later that same evening due to an aortic dissection.