This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
BT The P: I'm not sure there's any reason for this to be on three indicies. It's very clearly a Death Trope, the Anime and Animated indicies are mainly for stuff that only shows up in animation. Most story tropes are universal to animation and live-action, it's mostly the visual idioms that need separtation and sorting. If no one argues the point, I'll streamline the entry, which is otherwise excellent.
Looney Toons: I'd say go right ahead. If I'd given much thought to it when I separated them with rule lines, I might have done the same thing.
Should this be split into "karmic death" and something along the lines of "convenient death" (the difference being that karmic ones have some attempt at justification)? —Document N
The Spider-Man entry about Green Goblin is in both this article and "Hoist by his own Petard". Is this really needed?
Caswin: Does the Yzma example really count? I think, at the very least, it should be pared down to her falling and not dying.
I sincerely doubt that the Song of Ice and Fire example belongs here. Viserys being "crowned" with molten gold is less an example of Karmic Death (since he wasn't attacking Khal Drogo) than it is Death by Hilarious Irony.
fleb: Maybe. The problem isn't that he's not attacking (he was threatening Khal's pregnant wife), but that he's not really The Villain™, whose method of demise spares The Hero's unblemished hands, unless we count his sister as The Hero to his Villain. Which would seriously stretch it.
Citizen: Removing a thread-mode example that can't make up its mind:
- In the Star Trek Voyager episode "Worst Case Scenario", the villain (a hologram of Seska) is killed by a backfiring phaser rifle — which she herself had sabotaged to make it backfire on another character earlier, and had picked up without realizing it was that particular phaser.
- Actually, it was a different phaser rifle. Chakotay just reprogrammed it before handing it over. It's still kind of an example, though, since he probably wouldn't have thought to do it if she hadn't done it earlier.
- Actually, it was Tuvok who set the phaser rifle - it was his holoprogram that Seska had found and reworked to kill him, remember?
fleb: Tentatively cut a few. Adolf Hitler definitely doesn't fit. Viserys doesn't either, or Good Omens, since neither are the bad guy of the story— but they both are Death by Irony, just not this kind.
- * A Song Of Ice And Fire, with Viserys Targaryen, who obsesses over regaining his throne, to the point where he defies a BARBARIAN WARLORD leading 40,000 men, roughly 40,000 more than Team Viserys. Said warlord accelerates the prince's coronation schedule significantly; the impatient fellow doesn't even wait for that molten gold to be forged into a crown first.* Good Omens by Terry Prachett and Neil Gaiman featured a bunch of annoying telephone marketers getting grusomly eaten by a pissed-off demon because they dialed the wrong number. (The disembodied demon was stuck on the tape of the answering machine.)
- * Adolf Hitler considered Slavs, among many other ethnicities, to be "sub-human" and therefore inferior to the Germanic people. In the end, it was the Slavs (in the form of the Soviet Union) who smashed his armies, rolled over Germany, and caused his suicide and the destruction of the Nazi party. It doesn't strictly fit the definition of this trope, but damn if it isn't Karmic.
