Misused: Dropped A Bridge On Him

This trope has been seeing quite a bit of misuse lately.

Particularly, a lot of people are misusing it as just "character dies because something fell on them." A good example of this is this, which I cut from DroppedABridgeOnHim.Live Action Films:

• The character of Grandpa Gohan in Dragonball Evolution is killed by having a...house dropped on him. In the manga that this was (very, VERY loosely) based upon, he got stepped on by Oozaru-mode Goku, although this was from before the series had started.

Gohan's death was not a proper example. He was beaten to a pulp by the villain BEFORE the house was crushed, and even afterward he got a long dying speech to his grandson. There was nothing anti-climactic about it, he wasn't even a main character. As near as I can tell this example was ONLY here because someone was looking for a trope about a character dying because something fell on them, and thought this was it.

A few more examples:

• From Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith:
  • Many Jedi die quite abruptly, but Canon Immigrant Aayla Secura is executed particularly brutally, being shot over and over as if to assure us that she's really dead. Amazingly, some people still insisted that she wasn't.

The scene in question is part of a montage of various minor Jedi characters being betrayed and killed by the clone troopers. None of them were major characters, and there were far too many to warrant extended, drawn out sequences for all of them.

• Blade The Series: Agent Ray Collins, a recurring secondary character who is slowly discovering the world of the vampires. Finally, in a late-season episode, he is paired up with Blade to hunt a pureblood vampire... and gets bitten by her when he lets his guard down. Blade is forced to stake him.

Might be a legit example, as it's barely explained at all so it's hard to tell, but as near as I can tell from this, he got bit and had an entire scene or maybe an entire episode dedicated to him as a vampire... how is that anticlimactic? This trope isn't just for when somebody's favorite tertiary character dies in exactly the way you would expect such a character to die.

• Forever Knight (1989-1996): [....] Actually, all but one of the main characters (the villainous LaCroix)may or may not die at the end of the series, including possibly Nick himself.

How is this relevant? They're alive at the end, but it's implied they might die... really? This is a case of people apparently just using the trope for "a character died."

• Lexx: Zev. In the second episode of the second season, the lone female on the Lexx spacecraft is caught on a medical station when her friend and captain, Stanley, has to go for an operation. She is tortured for the majority of the episode by a doctor who is trying to steal the Lexx's activation key from her, but she escapes and sacrifices herself seconds later to save the life of the undead assassin, Kai, with whom she is deeply in love. She ends up as a pile of goo, and eventually reforms into Xev (played by Xenia Seeberg). Eva Habermann (who played Zev) wanted out of the show due to wishing to persue other projects, but her death scene was a particularly mean-spirited way to go.

There was an entire episode devoted to her end, she got to die in a Big Damn Heroes moment saving the life of someone else, and then she came back to life afterwards!! How is this an example?!

• Merlin: Poor Lancelot. At first the writers gave him a pretty great death: he willingly sacrifices himself by stepping into the spirit world in order to save Merlin's life and fulfil his vow to Guinevere to keep Arthur safe from harm. Arthur subsequently has a memorial service in which he is remembered as the best and noblest knight of Camelot. Unfortunately, the writers couldn't leave well enough alone, and Lancelot is resurrected by Morgana in order to stir up trouble between Arthur and Guinevere in the lead-up to their wedding. This Zombie!Lancelot is a slave to Morgana's will who exists only to do her bidding, and after Mind Raping Guinevere with an enchanted bracelet, he ensures that Arthur catches them making out, leading to the dissolution of their relationship and Gwen's exile from Camelot. He is then ordered by Morgana to kill himself, and does so in the grimy prison cell into which he's been thrown, to be remembered not as a hero but as a traitor, whose last act on earth was to destroy the life of the woman he adored, and who died not out of love for his friends, but because Morgana told him to. For a man who was characterized as the epitome of honour and self-sacrifice, it's probably the worst imaginable way they could have killed him off.

Again, he got a good death, and then had an entire storyline devoted to his second death - it sucked yes (by which I mean it was an awful thing for him, not that the storyline itself sucked), but it wasn't unceremonious or anticlimactic. It was hugely meaningful and served to make you hate the villainess more. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought this trope was for when a main character dies in an unceremonious fashion unbefitting a hero, not just when anyone dies, and not for when your favorite character dies in a way you dislike.

• In Final Fantasy IV, a lot of characters make a Heroic Sacrifice to...allow other characters to enter the hero's limited party. This wouldn't be bad if EVERY SINGLE DEATH SCENE (with one exception) weren't being so blatant on "Hey, I'm getting rid of the character!" A particularly annoying instance is when Palom and Porom sacrifice their lives to save the party from a classic "wall-smashing" trap. It would be okay if there weren't two doors in the room. Both made of plain wood (and possibly any character of the party would be able to destroy a insignificant wooden door).

The characters in question "died" to save their comrades from certain doom. How is that unceremonious or unbefitting a hero? Also, I use quotes because the only character who ACTUALLY died was Tellah, who went out in spectacular fashion, casting himself to death to try and get revenge on the villain and then got to give a long death speech to his surviving allies.

• In Syphon Filter 2 Teresa appears to be Killed Off for Real by The Mole Chance at the end, and there's even a funeral. However, in the third game, she is back from Faking the Dead, via Retcon.

Dropped a Bridge on Him is NOT just a synonym for Killed Off for Real, or for Back from the Dead.

• Echo in Red Faction II has a bridge dropped on him in the "Hangin' in the Hood" mission via the Face Heel Turned Quill's railgun.

Again, this just seems to be being used as "character was crushed" and not as it's intended use. I've realized that this wasn't the intention of the entry. It's still a bad entry, though, because Echo was a tertiary character at best who you only meet once, and was actually being used to set up Quill's Heel–Face Turn.

I don't think the trope is necessarily as a critical level of misuse yet. It might not need an actual name change, but it has a LOT of bad examples that need to be cut and I don't really think I can do all that work myself.

edited 27th Oct '14 1:44:51 AM by wrm5

This thread was opened a while ago apparently; bumping.

I'm not surprised that the trope is being misused by people who think it literally means "a character was crushed by having something big and heavy dropped on her", especially if they are not familiar with the Star Trek movie in question. It's a name that invites misuse in that sense. Should we do a wick check to see if this misuse is rampant enough to warrant a rename?

That people just think the trope means "Character X was killed" is a bit more puzzling, but perhaps they just made a hasty generalization for seeing it being used in the legitimate sense, thinking that it's just a colourful expression for being killed off? This as well would indicate that a rename would be in order. It would be good if the trope name at least hinted at what the trope is about...

Edited: oops, over 2000 wicks. Renaming it would be a major undertaking. Just cleaning up bad examples would be a lot of work, I suppose...

edited 27th Nov '14 5:27:01 AM by GnomeTitan

This trope has fairly sizable wicks and inbounds. And googling the trope name shows a fairly consistent usage. Seems like the name has caught on.

I don't see that many examples that take the name literally. Most of the misuse seems to be for death scenes that are brutal or humiliating. Or "mean-spirited" as the Lexx example says.

EDIT: I also noticed the main description does not even mention that the character must be important. That's only in the Laconic.

edited 27th Nov '14 5:53:17 AM by DiamondWeapon

I must confess that when I think about it, the meaning I tend to assign to "they dropped a bridge on him" is a fatal version of "they put him on a bus". Perhaps it has overtones of being a rather abrupt death — no long death scenes with proper farewells and so on.

Clock is set.

Dunno, isn't it okay for minor characters, Red S Hirts or Mooks to die unceremoniously, en masse?

Yeah. This trope is about main characters being killed off in an unceremonious way.

Re-clocking.

Data on links plz? Pretty sure just misuse cleanup would be easy.

Clock is up with no progress; closing.