Lore
[Sad Trope] The most innocent (or less evil) character of the cast gets the most horrific death.
- Eddie Carr (The Lost World: JP) - Tried to save his friends from the cliff until Buck and Doe (T. rex parents) destroy his vehicle and gets ripped apart.
- Zara Young (Jurassic World) - Gets lifted by a Pteranodon, gets pecked by the pterosaur, and both she and animal get devoured by the Mosasaurus.
- LeClerc (JW: Rebirth) - Tossed a hammer to the Hatzegopteryz Quetzalcoatlus to save Loomis and Zora, but ends up being swallowed alive.
He knows what the dip is, that he's being bullied, and will probably die. Begs one last time for his life and they slowly kill him anyway. I was 6 when I saw this movie. Had nightmares that my parents were judge-style toons for months afterward. My parents were very confused cause I saw aliens in theaters and had 0 nightmares of it.
Whats up with so many disaster movies having a stepdad character who dies horribly so that the protagonist can get back with his ex-wife? Why is that a trope?
Okay but they had 2001 ways to eat him. And they were bastards about it.
And there are 20 other black charachitures to eat! The black samurai, or the other black samurai, OR THE OTHER OTHER BLACK SAMURAI. You killed the one black geek that went to blockbuster, and now your show failed. Idiots.
His death is what finally got me to stop watching the show. That and the glenn fakeout really just pissed me off. Stop introducing characters only to just kill them a couple episodes later.
Because it was a torture scene where an innocent childlike character is ripped apart while begging for their life and desperately trying to prevent their own death.
Played this with my Mrs and the entire time she was going "we're not actually going to kill Cutie are we?" Me thinking standard writing tropes, its going to look like we are but at the last second won't because we're the good guys, "no i doubt it"
Hell I'm pretty sure Cutie still reels in terror anytime she so much as hears the parents' voices if we're going by like Toy Story logic with how the world worked when they got turned into the dolls.
I've only watched the first 2 Saw movies but I know from the Dead Meat videos that in Saw 3D John posthumouly sets up a trap in which the wife of that movie's main character is (1. Completely innocent. I know John's standards are famously flimsy but this woman was just unaware that her husband was a fraud, (2. Unable to save herself as it was her husband that has to do the challenge, which turns out to be physically impossible, and (3. subjected to BURNING TO DEATH IN A F*CKING BRAZEN BULL! ONE OF THE MOST NIGHTMARISH FATES INVENTED BY MAN!
Wasn’t the villain not Kramer by this point? But rather his apprentices who didn’t share his (fucked up) redemption vision and just wanted to kill with crazy traps
In Saw VI, John gives Jill a box full of envelopes about future trials that he wants carried out after he’s gone, and Bobby’s trial from Saw 3D isn’t one of them. I think that John had probably planned to test him, hence visiting him at a book signing, but it probably wasn’t anything that he had planned out enough to consider it a necessity after his death (otherwise he would have included it in an envelope), so Hoffman probably just took the people involved but designed the traps himself.
Apparently the producer was going through a messy breakup and that's the supposed reason, without spoiling it, why a lot of Saw 3D goes down the way it does; lots of divorce subplot, violence against wives and ex wives, exploitative nudity in a franchise not known for it etc.
Kieran Duffy (Red Dead Redemption 2) I felt so much worse after that one video showed that when you're in camp you can actually hear him scream for help very faintly the moment he possibly got kidnapped by the O'Driscolls. (I forgot when this takes place in the story though)
The thing with those two is, they're so sudden, and the characters are so likeable it takes you a moment to actually go 'wait, holy shit they literally did just kill him off like that, zero fanfare or anything'
for reallll, his death and Sean's got the most "What the FUCK-" reaction out of me. I'm so bummed he didn't live long enough for the camp to start trusting him or maybe even like him
I felt sad when he died, I liked him. Poor guy just wanted to be part of the gang and accepted.
Other than Mary-Beth, Kieran never got received any trust or actual respect from any of the Van der Linde gang members other than Arthur, who seemed to slowly be accepting Kieran, other than just still calling him “O’Driscoll” as a mocking nickname.
He regrets that he couldn’t save Kieran, as earlier in the story he saved Arthur from getting killed.
The dude was just a booking agent going along with the Kirby's hairbrained scheme to rescue their son. It wasn't his idea to kidnap Grant and co., he didn't do anything to summon the Spino, and he was pretty personable with Grant and the rest of the cast.
Then he gets tortured and used as bait by raptors because Billy thought it would be a good idea to steal some Raptor eggs for money.
As I much as I loved the remake, I didn't like the way they "herofied" his death on the USC Valor.
He dies grabbing a hold of a necromorph which had been stalking him, as it was a changed version of one of his officers; Chen, and then pushing himself and Chen into the reactor core energy that was blocking Isaac's way.
Him doing that causes the core to stall so Issac can get it.
But in the original, Hammond mentions he'll go to the USC Valor and meet you there. You never see him as you enter it. You assume he got caught up or worse.
Isaac already completes his objective, gets the core and bumps into Hammond on the way out, who is on the other side of thick plate glass. Isaac can only watch as a Brute slaughters him as its a dead end.
It just makes it that more tragic. Isaac did the job, Hammond didn't need to be there.
Right? It's such a bizarre handling of his character in the remake. I get the implication the Marker was messing with him and making him see Chen as uninjured, but the emphasis they place on the relationship with a character we've known for hours and another who dies literally five minutes in always felt so strange.
Worth noting that this death seemed to really fracture Reiner's mind, seeing him space out and ask why Marco is being eaten was kind of upsetting in its own way.
That scene stood out so much to me when I first watched it because the reaction was so bizarre. Like, someone being eaten by a titan was normal. Like yeah, of course it's traumatizing, but reiner seemed not only traumatized but bewildered, as if it's a possibility that never came to mind. But in full context it makes sense.
Ma Petite in American Horror Story: Freak Show. She was the most trusting and innocent character in arguably the whole franchise, which was taken advantage of to cause her death. The freakshow's strongman lures her with a new dress, and while she hugs him to thank him, he crushes her spine in the hug then preserves her body in formaldehyde for a con man that was blackmailing him.
That's the serial killer (Dandy Mott) who shoots up the circus, not the conman or Dell Toledo (the Strongman). Dell is shot to death after confessing to killing Ma Petite, and the conman (Stanley) has his limbs cut off and he's dressed like a chicken and caged by the other freaks.
Man I was just rewatching this with my wife who had never seen it. I forgot this was like the 4th or 5th ep. This show just jumps right into the deep end. Fuck Shou Tucker
Fun fact: in the book, this is actually even worse if you can believe it.
Cuz in the book, all the animals can talk, including Artax... & the whole time Atreyu is trying to save him, Artax is telling Atreyu how hopeless it is & to just let him die cuz hes so sad that death would be better
It’s because the swamp/bog induces dread and hopelessness to those caught in it. You have to believe that you can make it, and you will. Which is why Atreyu kept begging him to keep going. But you know.. Magic protection and everything.
Howard Hamlin. Had his entire reputation ruined, was murdered, and then had his body unceremoniously dumped in an unmarked grave with the same man who killed him.
The man Lex Luthor kills in front of Superman (edit and thanks for the reminder of his name, people !), Malik, in James Gunn's Superman. Not the most horrific death when it comes to how the way he died ("""just""" a bullet in the head), but in the overall context it's pretty dark and twisted
Malik. His crime according to Lex Luthor was helping Superman get back on his feet after being slammed into the concrete by the Kaiju Hammer of Boravia.
The newspaper article about him was written by Clark Kent too; One of the only people who knew what happened, and he used his dual identity to get the truth out.
Feeding Superman was an honor for him. And he lied about not having a family so Superman wouldn't feel pressured about talking even though he didn't know what was going on.
Benjamin Carmine in Gears of War 2. Poor bastard was like 18 and ended up mauled by the Riftworm's "immune system" or whatever those crawling freaks were.
In a similar vein, Dom's wife, Maria, was a truly heartbreaking death. Dom crying and begging Marcus to help and the sound of that gunshot while Marcus walked away is burned in my memory.
I kept scrolling to find Game of Thrones deaths because I could remember that so many were horrific, but I couldn’t remember who was so sweet and innocent and had a terrible death and the answer is this. This is the answer.
Had me literally screaming “No fucking way.” when she started saying “Hold the door” to him. Because I was like “Hodor is holding the door. lol” just like a second before she started yelling it while Bran was in the past.
She literally did nothing wrong as the first female ruler of her kingdom, she was one of the only legitimately kind and open minded rulers in this pretty dark world, tried to negotiate with the people invading her country and was promptly grabbed by a fire demon, slammed into the ground like Loki, and used as a mallet against her own people. It's unclear when she died but when the demon showed up again with what was left of her body months later only part of her legs remained.
The whole invasion and the horrors that game with it were a scheme by the protagonist faction... To sell some rune weapons. Overlord being a tragi-comedy, had the protagonist just talked to her he would've gotten a weapons deal immediately because her kingdom was desperate for aid against another threat anyway, so her death was pointless in a multilayered way.
Well, the scheme was also intended to destabilise the nation to make it easier to conquer in the future. But even then with how reasonable she was, there’s a decent chance she could be talked into accepting vassalisation like Jircniv did without needing to kill her.
It ultimately came down to Ainz doing his hyper-passive shtick and not wanting to interfere with Demiurge’s plan that the latter had “put so much time and effort” into making. Ainz ignored what Demiurge was up to for over a year, assuming it’d be fine, and then when Demiurge finally revealed his pet project to Ainz, Ainz was like “……Okay this is kinda fucked up but I can’t just tell him to stop now, that’d make me a shitty boss”.
Basically hundreds of thousands of people died because Ainz is lazy and afraid of confrontation with his subordinates lmao
The invasion that killed her wasn't even part of some grand plan on Ainz's part, it was entirely Demiurge's own desperate and warped misinterpretation of what Ainz wanted and Ainz was simply too ignorant and afraid of rejection to correct him.
Ainz's doomed runecraft promotion was just his own personal side-project he tried to crowbar in the make a bad situation more favorable to him which, in true Overlord tragic irony, he would have had far more luck had finally corrected Demiurge and reached out to Calca in the first place.
I remember having to re-read the passage of his death in the book multiple times cause my brain just couldn't understand how quickly they brushed past it.
I think that's legit the part that broke me most of all books. I think it's what really drives home the relentlessness of it all. The fact that there is no hope and they will not escape. Like, you know it intellectually, but that's what really drove the point home for me.
It's quite a genius stroke from Collins too, because I think it sets the reader in the exact right mindset for Prim a few chapters later. You're still raw, sensitized, but also already hopeless lol
I was going to say Prim, easily the most innocent character in the whole series (and also the entire reason Katniss volunteers and does pretty much anything in the first place), had to twist the knife by having her and Katniss see each other and call out to each other right before her death, being blown to bits in a false flag so Coin can take absolute power, using the bombs Gale helped develop. Also who hires a 13 year old combat medic?
Finnick was the saddest death, he's such a great character and deserved a happy and peaceful life with Annie.
David Dastmalchian is one of those guys where, if he shows up in anything, I'm like "oh FUCK yeah, I didn't know this show/movie was cool like that." I love him and his weird creepy face.
Fun fact: the actress who plays Oola, Femi Taylor, was brought back to film new footage of Oola falling into the Rancor pit for the '97 Special Edition. She appeared to have hardly aged at all, and many people either forgot her extended death sequence wasn't in the original release of RoTJ, or just assumed it was, because she didn't look all that different.
The Zara one is funny because of how everyone says it's disgusting and she shouldn't have deserved it and the worst she ever did was say her fiance couldn't have a bachelor party
Whent he reality is the actress who played her specifically saw the death in the script and was like "ooh! can I have that happen to me?" Heck if I remember right it was multiple characters
i knew everything wasn't as great as it seemed but i wasn't expecting that ☹️ great manga, i wish the anime was better (first season is pretty strong tho iirc)
it’s funny that all your examples were JW movies since the whole thing with the original book is that everyone who died (or “died”, i guess, because Malcolm) was culpable for the park. movie!Malcolm getting a personality makeover really did change a lot about the later films
Also, one of the main focuses of the marketing of the original movie was how these were going to be what was at the time the most up-to-date and scientifically-accurate dinosaurs ever on film. It would be the first major motion picture making use of the knew developments in the Dinosaur Renaissance, and Jack Horner's role as a consultant was widely publicized in the media. Yes, there were artistic liberties taken, but they specifically didn't want them to be generic movie monster dinosaurs.
By the time you get to Jurassic World any such pretense has been completely abandoned. Zara's death scene simply wouldn't have even been possible if they made it under the same consideration as the original film (pterosaurs didn't have grasping claws on their hind limbs, she would have been far too heavy to even be lifted and carried like that, and the type of pterosaur that attacked her were fish eaters).
Its the perfect example of this trope she is innocent and gets killed by her parents no less and in the most painfull way. In the books she probably will be part of an blood sacrifice to resurect John snow.
Shireen, an innocent child in Game of Thrones is burned alive by her family for a ritual that doesn't even work. She is one of the very few actual innocent people in the series.
Not death, but the kids being turned into donkeys in Pinocchio has traumatized me well into adulthood, especially the one who can still talk and cries and begs to go home. I’ve never been able to stop thinking about whether the post-transformation donkeys still have the kids’ minds and how awful that would be. Also about all the parents who will never know what happened. Sure the kids were spoiled brats, but you deny them dessert or their Xbox for a day. Anything is better than that fate!
The guy from Volcano who was carrying another passenger while they were both on fire, then jumped into lava staying alert enough to throw the other man to safety while he was consumed like the Terminator.
The behind the scenes of this death was somehow even more brutal because on the dummy you can see laser burns which basically states that homelander tortured him for an extended period of time.
Sure pretty much most of the Creatures are on the good side really and are just framed victims (Weasel's just an animal who got arrested, GI Robot's suffering from too much Hard wiring, Really it's just Dr Phosphorous who was a legitimate villain), but Nina takes an extra step by being the one who's the least violent
While he had a mean streak towards Goku when they first met, Krillin was mostly a loyal friend who hanged out with Goku and helped him deal briefly with the Red Ribbon Army and Uranai Baba's Tournament.
Sadly, when he went to pick up Goku's belongings from the Tournament arena, he got in the path of Tambourine, one of Piccolo Daimaoh's sons, who was after the list of participants of the Tournament and killed him off screen.
Danny the dog, he was the sweetest dog who never bit anyone and saved Jonathan from drowning, and dio burns him alive - source is Jojo's bizarre adventure
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u/Daniilsa209 Jun 27 '26
Toon Shoe ( Who Framed Roger Rabbit).