In all seriousness, Daredevil's murder of Bullseye. I know it kicked off a big event and everything, but Bullseye is one of my favorite characters, and Shadowland seems like a weird event, with really nothing coming out of it besides Bullsye being dead (nobody in-universe seems to even remember Daredevil getting possessed and going bad).
You guys like Let's Plays? You guys like shameless plugs? Well, come on down!DC comics has not only been killing characters off in pointless, gross ways since Identity Crisis (can't wait to see Linkara tear that a new one) but they even went so far as to bring all of them back... as zombies. Because what Ralph and Sue Dibney's fans really wanted was to see them eating Hawkman and Hawkgirl's hearts! -_- And then they fully revived only those characters they had immediate plans for.
I think that what most modern comics writers (and editors) don't realize is that *each and every character* has its fans. The characters themselves are fictional, just concepts to be exploited for money- but their fans are real people, who spent much of their time and money following their stories (and the companies want them to still do so, right?) Destroying those characters for cheap shock value is an *insult* to their customers.
edited 1st Jan '12 4:29:07 PM by Sijo
About that storyline Ultimatum...I'd like to point out that most of the characters in that Marvel Universe were total Jerkasses with no redeeming qualities. Perhaps the writers felt that they would make wonderful Asshole Victims who didn't deserve a dignified death in any shape or form!
Now Ultimate Spider Man had an entire storyline where he dies, and the writers went out of their way to make it a dignified death. Oh, and he was one of the few characters to not be a total Jerkass. Maybe the personality of the character is a factor in determining how dignified their death is going to be!
Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!Wallflower, New X-Men #25, and Wither, X-Force #25 (though the latter wasn't really all that "shocking"). Yeah, nobody knows who these characters are, but I'd followed them from the beginning! The former in particular was a classic fridging, being done solely to motivate a male character, and she only died because everyone was holding a colossal Idiot Ball; Wolverine restrains the healer (who was also her boyfriend) from going to her for no apparent reason, and when he finally does reach her, he doesn't even try to heal her, he just cradles her and sobs. While the run wasn't all bad, much of the conflict in it resulted solely from characters acting like morons, with the only competent character being X-23.
I gotta go for the most shocking death in Y The Last Man (I won't spoil it, but if you've read the series, you know the one I'm talking about). It came almost completely out of the blue, the explanation for the killer's motive felt contrived (it was essentially a part of a complex version of Suicide by Cop), it was timed so that it happened at the exact moment it would feel the most shocking and tragic to the reader, and it didn't have any relevance to the larger themes of the series. Basically it was there only because Brian K. Vaughan seems to think that True Art Is Angsty. And since Y The Last Man is a not a superhero comic, you knew the death would not be reversed. This is one of the few times I've become so angry at a writer that I almost stopped reading the series there and then.
The reason why it was so shocking to me is because Vaughan is genuinely good writer, and able to flesh out sympathetic, three-dimensional characters. But apparently he also likes to permanently kill at least one of those characters near (or at) the end of the story just to shock the reader; Y The Last Man isn't the only series where he's done that. I'm kinda of wary of reading anything by Vaughan anymore because of this tendency of his.
edited 3rd Jan '12 5:44:36 AM by Tuomas
^^ They killed off Wither? I hadn't actually read the comics he was in, but the concept of the character fascinated me.
Goddamnit. I would have loved to read the Wither/Wallflower relationship if I didn't already know they were both going to die horribly. (Then again, I've stopped following Marvel at this point . . .)
Edit: The biggest shocks to me usually come from Wikipedia, when I look up an interesting-sounding minor character and consider reading about him. My least pleasant discovery was that Magog was dead, but from what I've heard, it wasn't that surprising—apparently, he was badly written after his initial appearance in Kingdom Come (the last mainstream comic I read.)
edited 4th Jan '12 1:45:43 PM by feotakahari
That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something AwfulReally, I feel this way about any death. My first experience with this came from the Clone Saga, when I was first really getting into comics. I found Ben Reilly interesting as a character because he had to deal with separate issues from Peter. Then BAM. He's killed off just to appease the fans who saw him as a Replacement Scrappy.
That was my first harsh lesson on comic book fandom.
Lola from the Catwoman series. Granted: the series was little more than cheesecake on top of more cheesecake, but at least it was fun. Issue 2? We've got a poorly developed character's corpse on her doorstep.
Issue 3 was where I dropped it. Now I'm reading Red Sonja. Yeah, it's cheesecake, but hey: if I'm going to read a series about someone hacking thru hordes of minions, the protagonist might might as well be aesthetically pleasing. That, and it makes no pretense that it's not cheesecake.
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Did you expect any less? Y The Last Man was a dark series, and what happened solidified that this is a dark and depressing series. It was a reflection of humanity, and despite the fact that they succeed in saving it, it's still flawed to the point of corrupt.
edited 5th Jan '12 5:57:51 PM by EnglishMajor
With blood and rage of crimson red ripped from a corpse so freshly dead together with our hellish hate we'll burn you all that is your fateI didn't think Y: The Last Man was that dark; compared to most "after the apocalypse" stories it was pretty optimistic. Sure, there were some totally fucked-up characters, but that was to be expected in a series like this, and most of the characters were portrayed as decent people. (And with the case of Hero, you even had a totally fucked-up character taking a Heel–Face Turn and becoming a decent person.) Also, to me the Distant Finale didn't imply that humanity was "flawed to the point of corrupt"; quite contrary, the fact that they manage to rebuild human societies in a relatively short time felt like the story believed in humanity.
But even if you disagree and think that the shocking death was thematically fitting, you can't deny that justification for it (the killer's motive) was kinda far-fetched, and that Vaughan deliberately timed the death so that it would have the biggest possible shock effect. That's why it felt like the main reason for killing the character was that Vaughan thinks True Art Is Angsty. If he wanted to make some grand statement about humanity, he could have used the distant finale to do it; killing one character in a random manner felt merely... random.
edited 9th Jan '12 2:01:31 AM by Tuomas
Well, it was technically a Decontruction of Stuffed into the Fridge: in very literal and specific terms, Altar killed 355 because she wanted to motivate Yorick to "be a man" and kill her out of revenge. The problem is that it deconstructs the trope while also playing it as straight as a trope could possibly be played.
edited 9th Jan '12 1:05:13 PM by KingZeal
I don't see how it's a deconstruction of Stuffed into the Fridge. The original definition of it is that a female character is killed off solely (or at least mostly) for the purpose of causing anguish to a male character. That is exactly what happens in Y. The death doesn't really serve any other purpose than to give Yorick a Downer Ending. Where's the deconstruction in that?
Because the entire point of it was that merely being a man made Yorick Altar's target for the trope. If anything, the entire story had been building up to and developing the fact that Yorick was atypical of most men. An earlier storyarc established that Survivor's Guilt had been a motivator for Yorick, but he'd now put that behind him and was able to recognize it in someone else. Part of the Stuffed into the Fridge trope is that the man feels motivated by his loved one's death into doing something heroic or macho. Thus, the trope is intentionally invoked, played straight, discussed, and then subverted (when Yorick doesn't kill Altar as she wants. It breaks the trope down into a self-aware mechanic and demonstrates its failings in a constructive manner.
That is a deconstruction.
edited 10th Jan '12 3:25:56 AM by KingZeal
I think you're misinterpreting Stuffed into the Fridge. Its original formulation is that a female love interest (or other female character close to male hero) is killed to give a male hero angst. Neither the original formulation, nor the description we have here at TV Tropes, says anything about the motivation of the killer, nor that the hero needs to seek revenge by slaying the killer. (Since Stuffed into the Fridge was originally defined as a superhero trope, and superheros generally don't kill on purpose, the aftermath often plays pretty much the same as in Y: the hero confronts the killer, but doesn't kill him/her.) Those may vary between different works. Whatever Y has to say about the motivation of the killer and reaction of the hero is not a deconstruction of Stuffed into the Fridge, though I guess it might possibly deconstruct some other trope(s).
The gendered part of the trope is not that the hero should do something "macho" after a loved one is Stuffed into the Fridge; it's the fact that female characters are used as "plot cannon fodder", casually killed for the sole/main purpose of causing anguish to the male hero. In a Stuffed into the Fridge story, the death of the female character isn't related to any story arc she might have had, her death is only relevant in how it makes the male hero feel. If you look at the death in Y, it follows this pattern to the tee.
In this case, Yorick's reaction was Alter's entire motivation. She intentionally invoked this trope (giving Yorick anguish) in order to motivate him to kill her. All because he was a man, and for no other reason.
At one point, the trope was written with the implication that women were stuffed into refrigerators in order to motivate male characters. However, it seems that is now covered by Disposable Woman.
Also, I thought I said in my very first post that the problem is that Y: The Last Man both deconstructs the trope and plays it completely straight. There's nothing saying that a deconstruction can't also play a trope straight at the same time. In fact, it's kind of necessary. It's difficult to deconstruct a trope without constructing it first.
That, and Y The Last Man shows that a world without men is not necessarily any better. Indeed, it shows that female characters are just like male characters in a lot of ways!
How about every female character in the Incredible Hulk's life? Boy, it's like he causes them to happen!
Oh, Equestria, we stand on guard for thee!
Respect the Red Right Hand

A growing complaint among comic fans - the industry's growing love of killing off named and/or important characters for the sake of cheap, shocking drama, effectively cheapening the impact and worth the characters actually had in an effort to cash in a brief sense of rage for the hero or the (at this point) irritated audience.
Lots of people who don't really know about comics claim "oh, that's ok, they'll just come back," but honestly a lot of characters who die in comics don't come back. You're just expected to accept that the writers didn't care about the characters beyond what they could get from their deaths and move on.
I've heard Linkara rant and rave about Lian Harper, and he really makes me want to say that she's my most hated example of this, but I'm going to have to go with Billy Connors from Spider Man. My first intro into the character (besides the old Spiderman The Animated Series) was the Feral storyline, and looking up the character I really liked the idea of Connors having a son and, y'know, a life outside of the Lizard - it (as well as his common secondary character status) really tied into the idea of him being a regular guy, and a good man besides. Billy being his Morality Pet was also great, and I was really interested in the idea of him being made into a mini-Lizard during a period where Kurt was insane. I wanted to see where they went from there.
When I next looked up the character, I found out they killed the kid during a cheap attempt at "reimagining" the Lizard. I was furious. So much potential for character growth and usage, wasted, and a good character besides. The truth is like a lot of Spiderman characters you don't see a lot of characters like Curt Connors - sure, DC has Kirk Langstrom, but he's nowhere near fleshed out or major a character as Connors, and it shows.
By killing off everything that made Connors a character (their intention), they effectively killed off everything interesting to me about the Lizard (one of my favorite characters) as well in a stupid attempt to make him Darker and Edgier. So Yeah, I was mad.
Thoughts?
P.S.: Now, just want to note that to me there's a difference between characters who die in a respectful way in comics - you know, given an actual impact for their death, having their death actually matter in one way or another, and having the story that kills them be handled well and have it make sense.
I've long felt that characters should die, not be merely killed off (if that makes any sense)
Thoughts?