Does this include characters who didn't appear in the original?: Doomed By Canon

There seems to be disagreement over whether this YKTTW is redundant with this trope. One person claims that this trope applies only to pre-existing characters, while the other cites the fact that the current page image (admittedly in Image Pickin' for being Just A Face And A Caption) is of a character that wasn't pre-existing. Which is it?

The trope does not specifically mention characters that are or are not present in the original work. It only says "they also doom characters and plots to inevitable failure or success". This indicates that plots and characters not present in the original work also fall into this, since their success or failure is often inevitable due to the events of the original work.

This would basically be proposing a split, at least how Doomed by Canon is generally used. It's the knowledge that something has to happen and if it doesn't happen it is an outright contradiction to the "prime" story. A primary character in the prequel who was never seen or mentioned in the original story must either die or be Put on a Bus, they can't survive and stay with the main characters without causing a continuity gap. Or, for instance, in the Halo series it was well established about the absolutely devastating defeat at Reach. Thereby in Halo Reach, no matter what happens to expand the mythos, Reach must fall.

I don't see a need for a split, there would be too much overlap and narrowly defined differences between tropes tend to result in identical tropes because of the general community slightly widening the parameters.

Maybe if we outlined two versions of this trope on the same page? I mean, I agree that the YKTTW is too similar to this trope for its own page, but maybe we should make a note of the difference between new and pre-existing characters.

There is no real different between new and pre-existing characters. It's the same trope. The difference is meaningless. It's about on par with splitting the trope between blonds and brunettes. The trope already covers the YKTTW and always has.

I tend to agree with Shima. The trope Doomed by Canon is simply "Because of the canon established in the original work, the end result or fate of a character or characters in the prequel is already established."

And I don't see why Amidala wouldn't be an example. The original movies established that the woman who was Luke and Leia's mother and Anakin's wife died. Therefore, once Amidala and Anakin marry, there are only two major ways it can be resolved: either she doesn't stay with Anakin and is not the kids' mother; or she is their mother and she dies.

I think there is a big difference, actually. If it is a character that have previously established to be dead by the time of the sequel, seeing it in the prequel means the character will die before it ends. There is no way for the character to be alive, because we already know it dies.

However, for a completely new character things are different. We don't know their fate. They are abscent of the original work, yeah, but it could be for any reason. Yeah, they may die during the prequel, explaning why they don't show in the sequel. However, if may be only that they are not important in the old story, so they were just conveniently never mentioned.

Using Star Wars as an example, Jar Jar Binks is one of the main character of the first movie of the prequels and completely new. He never died during the prequel times and, in fact, if you take the Expanded Universe ended up surviving all the time period shown by the movies.

At any rate, there may be a situation where the original canon never actually contradict one character of a prequel, not being Doomed by Canon. However, because coming up with a explanation for why the new character never appeared, killing them off is usually the simplest solution, becoming the proposed YKTTW.

By the way, a "seemingly important prequel original character that have never been mentioned in the original work, even in situations where it would be appropriate" seems to be a trope on its own. Do We Have This One?

Jar Jar isn't Doomed by Canon because he isn't in the original canon at all. He's only in the prequels. Not all characters in the prequel works are going to be Doomed by Canon; most won't be.

And not only is he not in the main trilogy, he had nothing to do with the events of the main trilogy. Fiction doesn't keep track of every character on a planet. Your proposed trope would just be a listing of any character that was only in a prequal when most of those characters, like Jar Jar, have no bearing on later events.

edited 8th Jun '11 11:36:18 AM by shimaspawn

I do believe that your last example is Remember the New Guy?, or a variant thereof, although it doesn't specifically mention applying it to prequels. Anyway, Jar Jar's absence in the OT could easily be ascribed to being Out of Focus, and otherwise EP III does a pretty good job of linking characters to their appearance (or lack thereof) in the OT.

I don't see why Doomed by Canon can't apply to characters not specifically named but who were implied to be dead (or whatever). For example, any Jedi present in the Star Wars prequel trilogy other than Obi-Wan and Yoda pretty much have to die to set up A New Hope — never mind the EU's habit of finding "missing" Jedi under every rock. Padmé is doomed by virtue of Vader's kids being orphaned (well, not technically, but you get the idea. Missing a mom). You don't have to know her name — and in fact, Leia's mention of her in Return Of The Jedi would have applied if it hadn't been retconned to be about her adoptive mother.

edited 8th Jun '11 12:08:17 PM by Fighteer

Yes. What Fighteer said. Doomed by Canon is not "every character in the prequel (or even 'every character who is important in the prequel') has to have their fate established or confirmed in the original."

As a further example, Mercedes Lackey's Heralds Of Valdemar series establishes in the first novel of the Arrows trilogy that Vanyel was the last Herald-Mage and died 600 years ago doing a You Shall Not Pass!-style Heroic Sacrifice. Based on this, one can reasonably conclude that, by the end of the aptly titled Last Herald-Mage prequel trilogy, all the other Herald-Mages will have died. This is Doomed by Canon for all involved.

However, any characters present in those prequels who were not Herald-Mages do not have their fates automatically known ahead of time and so this trope doesn't apply.

Similarly, we know that the heroes lose at the end of The Black Gryphon and set off the Cataclysm, because history established in the modern-day novels makes this clear. We don't need an itemized list of who died, except for the Big Good himself — and correspondingly, none of those other characters are Doomed by Canon because we don't know ahead of time if they live or not.

edited 8th Jun '11 12:28:57 PM by Fighteer