Wick Cleanup: Killed Off For Real

Well, the books, at least, are actually a case where deaths don't always stick.

But in the TV series, only one person has managed to come back to life and it's made clear that he's the exception, not the rule.

What about fake-out deaths and such?

None that I can recall.

I'm gonna start contributing a bit to this cleanup. Killed Off For Real has always been one of my pet peeves, as anyone who has spent any time on TV Tropes can instantly recognize its spoilered silhouette in a character page. Its like the Walking Spoiler of tropes.

What do we do about Arkham City, its a comic book story line just like this trope was meant to apply to, but its definitely not a story where Death Is Cheap in any way.

edited 10th May '13 7:41:08 AM by SalmonPunch

^ If death isn't cheap, this trope doesn't apply regardless of the media. Comic books are just where you usually find that it is cheap, not that it's a requirement of the medium.

I was just wondering because people could make the argument that because staple character insertnamehere is revived for the next alternate universe batman storyline unrelated to Arkham, that the death of that staple character in Arkham is counted as killed off for real.

edited 10th May '13 12:53:36 PM by salmonpunch

I may agree with that - even if Death Is Cheap doesn't apply to that specific game, it does to the franchise at large, so one assumes it does to the game.

(Also, Death Is Cheap arguably does apply to the series - almost half a dozen villains who are taken down in the first game appear in the second no worse for wear, and one who we see die in the second uses a resurrection chamber.)

The ones from the first game don't die, though—they are assumed to die, and then it turns out they're fine. That's not Death Is Cheap. And the villain who dies and comes back in the second game is Ra's al Ghul, who is not indicative of the game as a whole. Death Is Cheap for him, no one else.

Didn't we establish way back on the first page that Death Is Cheap isn't the only thing in which Killed Off for Real can apply? Basically, any time characters are frequently presented as dead but come back anyway (whether through explicit resurrection, it turning out that they were Only Mostly Dead, or whatever), then Killed Off for Real can apply. I'm unfamiliar with the work, but it sounds like a bunch of villains in the Arkham series were presented as dead but came back anyway, so I think Killed Off for Real would be applicable. Unless serious question was raised about the various villains' possibility of survival (which seems unlikely to me if it happened to a half dozen of them), they're narratively "dead", but return alive in the sequel.

edited 10th May '13 3:12:44 PM by NativeJovian

They weren't presented as dead. They disappeared in the middle of the game, and it wasn't quite clear whether they were dead or not, and fans assumed they were. Specifically: Bane gets rammed off the island by the Batmobile, Scarecrow gets dragged underwater by Killer Croc, and Killer Croc falls a couple hundred feet into an underground river.

In the second game, two characters die: Ra's al Ghul and the Joker. The first one dies multiple times throughout the game, and his corpse is conspicuously missing at the end, but the second is very, very dead, as confirmed by the devs shooting down every possible way he could have avoided death (and possibly direct Word of God, though I'm not sure). He's a case of Killed Off for Real, yes.

I think the conversation got confusing because I wasn't arguing with salmon and Amy if KOFR applied, I was arguing about Death Is Cheap.

What are we going to do about the Bible's pages having this trope? I don't want a theological edit war starting...

Er, what? There's one resurrection in the entire Bible; listing anyone as Killed Off for Real is entirely missing the point of the trope.

There are actually multiple resurrections in the Bible, Fighteer, the most famous after Jesus being Lazarus, but there's at least seven others I can think of. It's not exactly a one off thing. That doesn't count mass resurrections either.

edited 14th May '13 8:32:34 AM by shimaspawn

This trope is about defying the expectation that a character won't stay dead. If most of the people who die in the Bible stay dead, then it can't apply, regardless of the presence of the occasional exception.

edited 14th May '13 8:40:56 AM by Fighteer

Since we are getting more into detail...

The mass revival of the dead in the book of revelations is one of the main factors that might be argued over, since if memory serves it's the entire human race pre-Christs birth that gets revived over the course of two "waves" of ressurection.

Took me a long time of Googling but I found the passage in question.

"...they lived [or came to life] and reigned with Christ a thousand years. But the rest of the dead lived [or came to life] not again until the thousand years were finished. This is the first resurrection" (Revelations 20.4-5 in King James Bible).

Anyway... I personally think we should take this specific topic (about the Bible deaths) to a new thread on the Bible's discussion page so the rest of the Wick cleaners can get back on the main topic.

Hasn't that not actually happened yet? As in, it's in the future? So it's kind of ridiculous to assert that someone dies = KOFR under those circumstances. There's also a difference between "not resurrected" = KOFR and "not resurrected" = Goes To Hell.

Whatever, take it to the discussion page if you want.

@Fighteer: Please see the new discussion thread I started on the Bible's character page.

I wasn't saying that revival=KOFR, I was playing devils advocate (so to speak) and presenting a topic that will most likely be presented to us when we attempt Wick cleanup, a topic that genuinely needs discussing.

edited 16th May '13 7:40:29 AM by SalmonPunch

Just checking in to ask a question. How much progress has been made? What was the count before the wick cleanup began? its around 4400 as I'm writing this post.

edited 16th May '13 7:34:41 AM by SalmonPunch

^The default assumption is "no progress" since it's hard to measure it otherwise.

And it's up to 4539. What should be done to make this cleanup tractable?

Maybe we can get Fast Eddie to stick a banner across the top of the site for a couple of weeks to tell people not to use Killed Off for Real except where resurrection is possible. The problem's not going to go away unless we can get a whole bunch of wiki volunteers to clean this thing.

And as long as I'm dreaming, I'd like my prof to accidentally leave the final exam at his house tomorrow.

edited 10th Jul '13 2:20:57 PM by StarSword

Or we could have it inserted as a notice while editing articles, much like the "This entry has YMMV on a non YMMV page" notice thing that pops up.

Either way, I think your right in that we need to deal with the fact that most people are unaware that they are using the trope incorrectly.

Current link count is still 4500+

Part of the problem I've been having with the cleanup is that non-literal resurrection counts. In a series where characters have faked their deaths (and the audience didn't know it), Killed Off for Real applies. It's making things a little annoying.

What I'm honestly considering is replacing any and all even mildly unclear examples with Character Death, leaving behind an edit reason to the effect of "Killed Off for Real is only for when a character has a possibility of coming back (though actual resurrection or just a faked death) and doesn't. Do not re-add unless they meet this requirement." And just burn through every single wick like that. Hell, with the number of wicks we're dealing with, I'd prefer to have the mods search and replace every instance of Killed Off for Real with Character Death. But that's a pretty massive move, and maybe it's just my headache talking.

edited 10th Jul '13 5:51:13 PM by Discar

On that subject, take a look at what I did on Characters.Person Of Interest not too long ago. With Death Tropes open in another tab for reference material, I went through and replaced every instance of KOFR (since the series is set in the real world, more or less, with All Deaths Final) with stuff like Heroic Sacrifice, Dropped a Bridge on Him, et cetera, using Character Death when I couldn't think of anything else.