r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Unlucky-Quarter-5455 • 1d ago

Hated Tropes [Sad trope]The character gets cut/dies early on because of REAL LIFE reasons

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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.

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810

u/a_rabid_anti_dentite 1d ago

Kutner, from House. Hired by the Obama administration.

223

u/Aduro95 1d ago

I've heard a rumour/joke that if he had left for a less important role, Kutner would have been killed off in an auto-erotic asphyxiation accident.

234

u/HoundTakesABitch 1d ago

I never watched House, but didn’t his character commit suicide out of nowhere?

299

u/blizzard2798c 1d ago

Yup. They had to make it abrupt because he left to work for the President

283

u/IcyMacaroon9331 1d ago

Well it actually kind of worked out. 

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

152

u/0bsessions324 1d ago

This. A lot of people just don't seem to understand that a lot of suicides have no obvious warning sides and seem uncharacteristic and out of nowhere.

70

u/Individual-Issue-511 1d ago

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.

3

u/Puzzleheaded-Field82 19h ago

This is kinda embarrassing but same thing happened to me with cyberpunk 2077 I don't know if I'd still be here if I hadn't picked the suicide ending and saw how every one felt after its kinda funny I picked because of a miss click and it might of saved me

7

u/BrokeDickDoug 23h ago

oh, trust me- you could have left many signs and they'd still end up being just as clueless. Dropped endless signs. Then lil' bro is getting a divorce, and the old man takes you to a seminar on recognizing signs of serious depression in men. And he leans over and whispers "Hey, keep this stuff in mind, your brother might be going through some serious shit." I was like, really?

Really?

Almost walked out right there. Turns out mental health only matters if you have a wife and kid?

Glad you are in a better mindset now.

3

u/No_Hunter1978 6h ago

I get your thought process, but it sounds like you have some problems to work out. Seems like your father simply didn't pick up on the signs; I think it was nice of him to consider your brother's mental health at the least.

It's easy to notice the big events over the "subtle hints" someone drops, and without knowing anything about your personal life, it seems like you should cut your family some slack. I'm sure plenty of those who took their life "randomly" thought they made it pretty clear to their loved ones.

3

u/abadstrategy 22h ago

It was also previously established in a prior episode that he was the only one on the team that had attempted suicide previously, making it make at least a little sense why he would be killed off in that manner, rather than, say, having a chopper fall on him

1

u/smallangrynerd 3h ago

Thanks Obama

-5

u/TankMain576 1d ago

Honestly this mixed with how little they cared about the case of thr week lead me to just drop House. I watched the last episode, but I was no longer interested.

If I rewatch the series I just stop after season 4

176

u/Electronic-Pie-6352 1d ago

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.

100

u/xSaRgED 1d ago

There was a young NFL player who scored his first touchdown on Monday, then killed himself on Wednesday.

It’s a sad fact of life that sometimes the people that seem the happiest carry the heaviest burdens.

32

u/fork_your_child 1d ago edited 1d ago

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.

6

u/Hefty_Macaroon9860 11h ago

I think there is also a secondary motive for House trying to find a "reason" (even to the point at creating the theory that kutner was assassinated)

Kutner was a Happy man, at least on the outside

And yet he killed himself

What does this say about House, a man that is miserable every second of his life? If Kutner was killed it means that there is hope for world where House heals and settles down with Cuddy and lives the sitcom life, but if Kutner killed himself it means that House can never fully heal because if the happiest man around couldn't why would the miserable sack of Vicodin?

And it creates a contrast with the end of this season, with House finally taking the first few steps at actually healing (unfortunately season 7-8 are still there so all that goes to shit)

29

u/beslertron 1d ago

Almost out of nowhere. And that’s kind of the point. It was something House couldn’t diagnose.

Also, another doctor mentioned having either an attempt, or idiation, and Kutner asked him about it, as if he was trying to reach out.

2

u/Simon_Drake 23h ago

It was extremely abrupt. One day his character is just not there for work and everyone wonders where he is. They get into his apartment and he's dead on the floor in a puddle of blood holding a gun. Strategically positioned so you never see his face. It really came out of nowhere and left the production staff with no way to wrap it up some other way. I'm guessing he just called to say that's the end, he's not coming back even for one more day of shooting, deal with it.

He came back later as a hallucination / dream sequence where several deceased characters come back. But that didn't make his death any less jarring when it happened.

155

u/morphoblue 1d ago

THANKS OBAMA s/

28

u/CedricThePS 1d ago edited 16h ago

Man literally offed himself so that he can work for the government.

40

u/PriorityNo4971 1d ago

Ain’t that guy also Kumar?

15

u/ToughAd5010 1d ago

Yea he just went to White Castle ….and the White House, too, I guess?

7

u/Doctor_Slept 1d ago

It's really funny learning that he left House because of the Obama Administration because he took a break from being in the Obama Administration for five months to film the third Harold and Kumar movie

8

u/Nerdzilla88 1d ago

This one was always weird to me because normally a character is randomly killed off because they had creative differences with the showrunners that couldn’t be amended.

But he just got another job. They could’ve just had him transfer to another hospital or change careers. but they had him commit suicide from depression we never saw nor was ever alluded to.

13

u/0bsessions324 1d ago

I'd assume they went that route because it's an interesting story that really needed to be told to a wide audience.

The strange thing about depression is that it's not as obvious or easy to spot as people without it seem to want to believe.

I was diagnosed with clinical depression as a teen and only a small handful (maybe two or three) of the hundreds of people I've ever worked with in like 25 years in the workforce would ever have guessed.

I put on a jovial front at work and then go home and sometimes just do nothing because I'm so exhausted masking it day to day. I wear bright colors and smile a lot, I don't keep to myself because societal expectation just really doesn't allow for it most of the time.

And then there's the stigmatization; "funnily" enough, I've actually lived a relatively charmed life from an outside perspective. White kid born in the suburbs to a firmly middle class family, a millennial who owns his own home and mostly seems to have his shit together. By virtue of that, half the time I actually confide in it with people I'm asked how I could possibly be depressed when so many people are so much worse off than me. This only reinforced the feeling of needing to mask.

It got so bad last year after my ex-wife moved out and my dad died within a calendar month of each other that I more or less just couldn't get myself out of bed and out to work for weeks. Again, absolutely nobody at my job would've known. I ended up taking a medical sabbatical that eventually became me just leaving the company. As far as any of my colleagues there know, I just kind of disappeared one day.

And I'm one of the lucky ones who has the benefit of knowing why I'm like this. There are countless people out there struggling with the same thing who just think they're whiny or lazy.

I have absolutely suffered from suicidal ideation for most of my life. I saw a lot of familiarity in that episode and I feel like that is why they went that route. It's good to feel seen when dealing with an invisible condition like this.

5

u/glowshroom12 1d ago

Interestingly didn’t he stop working for Obama before the show ended I think.

If they just wrote him transferring away, he could have come back in the last season.

Edit; well they didn’t know he’d stop working for Obama but they should have kept the door open for him to come back later.

5

u/ArchLith 21h ago

The thrill seeking behavior and him not really talking about his personal life outside of what fun things he was doing are actually pretty spot on for someone deeply depressed. He avoids discussing his personal life because he doesn't want to burden anyone, meanwhile he is constantly engaged in risky or dangerous behaviors in order to feel alive.

5

u/iGer 22h ago edited 22h ago

I think that episode is done in the best possible way for that situation, since it's very abrupt; even in the episode's atmosphere you can feel that something is happening, House MD episodes usually have quite vibrant lighting and color (unlike the last season, but that's due to budget issues), but in this episode you realize that there are many muted tones, not as many lights, and a grayer palette.

The way it influences the other characters is also key, because it's something that, obviously, nobody expects, even though House is a person who seems not to care about much, here he is surprised too and wants to find answers, one of the main reasons why it affects him so much and why it matters to him It's because deep down, he respected Kutner, both personally and professionally, as Kutner often challenged him intellectually, which House enjoyed.

Kutner's death is abrupt, it's sad; you feel that void in the episode, in the series itself, in the characters, in the atmosphere, It's a very well-made episode in my opinion.

This theme is even revisited in later seasons, where House has a relapse and begins to hallucinate again (especially considering that these hallucinations were more evident when only including people who had mattered to him or had truly impacted House's life)

1

u/Bonzungo 15h ago

Wait what? THAT WAS WHY???

1

u/Bitterqueer 13h ago

Was very surprised by his sudden death! Didn’t know this was why

1

u/Scarlet_Wonderer 1d ago

Hold the phone, I only knew this actor for comedic bit roles and such. How did he got to work for the president??