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I have to disagree with you on Lupin and Tonks. It had a nice synchronicity with what Harry and Nigel both lost. I remember when I was reading the books (SPOILER, [as if!]) and Sirius was killed, I yelled, "Oh, come on!" because I felt so bad for Harry. They took his parents, TWO of his father figures and his best friend's brother. I agree that it would have been too much to take Hagrid too, although I lived in terror of it throughout the books.

I'll disagree slightly on Wash's death. You can't go through all those events and not have someone not make it. Not in a crew that big. Mal is story-protected -- therefore also Inara. River is story-protected too. If Kaylee had died, people would have left the theater. Can't kill Zoe either. The only other options were Simon or Jayne and that wouldn't have had the visceral gut punch.

I will agree with Darth Maul. I always felt it would have been cool if he had been rebuilt as General Grievous -- thus explaining his skills with the lightsaber and his disdain for the Jedi as well as his propensity for running away from a fight he's losing.

Great article, Rob. Wash's death in Firefly was completely unnecessary, since it did nothing to advance the plot. At least Book's death provided the kick-in-the-pants the big damn heroes needed to become big damn heroes. Wash's death was just another example of Whedon's "nobody can be happy" rule, which really really sucks. It was shocking and galvanizing when Tara died, but when you go to that well EVERY SINGLE TIME, it starts to get stupid. I wasn't surprised at all when Wash died, and that made me even angrier than the fact that he DID die. Ugh.

Double disagree on Hitler in 'Inglourious Basterds'. For one, the movie is not just a revenge fantasy, it is a reflection on the transformative power of (movie) fiction in reality (remember the Germans are watching a propaganda film just before the slaughtering happens- the clearest example of fiction influencing reality). So the killing of Hitler is the logical conclusion point for a film that wants to drive home that point.
Second: the minimal on-screen time and, in fact, complete ineptness of the titular Basterds is also the point- this is a film where the villains are endlessly more cunning and capable than the supposed (again by the title) heroes. Which is another debunking of the "viewer’s own knowledge of history and World War II movies". I don't understand how this movie has been so horribly misinterpreted, but I trust that time will prove this to be Tarantino's masterpiece.

Whole-heartedly agree with Lupin & Tonks and Wash. Those deaths (plus Fred. Oh lawd Fred) make me weepy every time.
Also choosing Darth Maul was unexpected, but you make a really good point. He was badass and would have greatly improved the next two episodes. Lucas be crazy.

In the Buffy finale, I noticed that the humans survived and the non-humans didn't.

Nigel?

I always thought Hagrid should of been killed by one of those poor misunderstood monsters he was always telling the kids were really friendly. You know when they werent trying to eat them.

While I agree with what other commenters have said on the deaths of Tonks and Lupin, it still pisses me off. Storytelling be damned, those two were fun.

This is a really fun list. I agree that Wash's death was pointless. Serenity was more of an action film than a drama, and you never kill the wise-cracking side-kick pilot in an action film. The wise, old mentor and spiritual guide to the hero? Suuuure. Even killing off Jayne would've made more sense; he at least was a warrior who would've been okay with it. But Wash? The wise-cracking side-kick pilot? Just a silly, pointless misstep.

I'd like to see the opposite of this list too. Characters that should've died but didn't.

Lupin is my favorite Harry Potter character, and I think that the thing I was angriest about was not that Rowling decided to kill him, but that he didn't even get a particularly good death. It was an afterthought -- off screen in the book as well as the film. An "Oh, and these people are dead too, war is hard, yadda yadda." If he was going to die, he deserved a good death. A brave death. One that we could see and mourn properly. Damn it.

He's a man with a permanently crippling and socially undesirable illness. All of his friends either die or betray each other, and he spends most of his adult life alone and in poverty. He finally gets some friends, finds his place within the Order as a leader, and, after some rockiness, seems to have found someone who loves him for who he is and has a child with that person (there are some people who think Tonks was more a beard/consolation after Sirius died... but he has a kid regardless...) and then he dies. How fucking tragic is that???? I mean, come on! She could've blown the top off of that death.

Sorry.

I'm still angry. As you can tell.

Jerry,

I think he was alluding to the fact that so many people hate Alien 3.

Which is stupid, because crappy early 90's cgi aside, it's a great entry into the Alien oeuvre.

Seriously folks, what were they going to do with Newt? Make another movie where she gets kidnapped by the aliens and force Ripley to rescue her? Someone give me a plausible 120 min. movie scenario that doesn't quickly devolve into Aliens part deux. Unless they float through hypersleep...again...and age the characters.

Even had she lived, she was a non-entity character and she lived up to her purpose...in Aliens.

Hicks, on the other hand...Personally I think there's a conspiracy in Hollywood to relegate Michael Biehn to supporting/bit part characters. Damn shame, too.

Lame.

FYI - I don't think Darwin really died. He got blown up in a somewhat similar fashion in the comics too, but was found to have survived by turning into a being of pure energy. So there's still a chance he could come back in a future X-men movie.

Also, totally with you on Wash. Every time I watch the movie (and I've watched it a lot), I tell myself "Wash isn't going to die this time, I know it!"

Agree:

Hicks & Newt: Thank goodness someone else on this site recognizes how movie-killing that turn in Alien 3 was.

Joker: Back in 1989, I didn't know enough about Batman to care about that killing nuance, but you nailed it. And the Ra's Al Ghul bit in Begins was just the crown jewel in a bad third act of an otherwise (overrated) good movie.

Disagree:

Darth Maul: I'll defend the prequels on many fronts beyond what others would find reasonable, but the one part that I think is almost beyond debate in being good is the Obi-Wan / Qui-Gon / Maul duel. Specifically, the lightsaber exchange between just Maul and Obi-Wan is the best lightsaber choreography in any of the three movies. Obi-Wan earned the victory; vanquishing a scary villain like Maul is part of his journey. Maul was underused? Put more dialogue in his mouth, and Lucas critics might argue that he only would have screwed him up. Leave us wanting more, and you can't go wrong. And, yeah, I enjoy both Dooku and Grievous, even if they are a little ridiculous.

Penny: As you acknowledge, it works, and, as such, I wouldn't have it any other way. I don't know what direction the sequel would take, and, yes, Felicia Day would no doubt be great in it. Sometimes as wonderful as something is, though, the fact that there's only a limited amount of it is what makes it all the more precious. Whedon has enough creativity to give us more things, and - who knows? - maybe one day that will include a completely different but no less wonderful musical with Fillion, Harris, and Day.

Hitler: Can't disagree with this more. Of course Landa's fate is more satisfying. He's the developed antagonist of the story while Hitler's little more than a caricature. It's that caricature status, though, that makes the moment all the more satisfying, inevitable, and guiltily fun in my mind.

*shrug*:

Wash: I dunno. I have mixed feelings about that one.

Darwin: His power was kind of ridiculous to me in the first place. The implications of it are...complete immortality? I find it more plausible that a mutant power would have limits, and counteracting Darwin's power is an effective and sobering way of establishing the extent of Sebastian Shaw's power. That said, it would have been fun to see more creative illustrations of Darwin's adaptations.

I love that Penny died. What other option was there, really? Evil genius gets the girl and becomes schmaltzy?

And, though it sucked, I don't have a problem with Wash's death. The abruptness of it all and Zoey's reaction is so pragmatic in a way that most big movies just aren't.

I think this list was made to manipulate my emotions.

I can't read about what corrections people would make to the Star Wars Prequels without thinking of the following takes on this topic:

RedLetterMedia's outstanding (if creepy) hours-long breakdown of everything that is wrong with those movies: http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/

I also think about John Hodgman's essay (Jar Jar Head) about his attempts to rewrite the script of the Phantom Menace in such a way that it would actually make sense. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/232/the-real-story

The point all of this is driving at is this: allowing Darth Maul to survive the Phantom Menace ultimately doesn't do anything to correct the massive, systemic problems with the story, the character design, the dialogue, the continuity, and the cinematography. It would be like putting googly eyes on a turd.

The director of X-Men: First Class is Matthew Vaughn.

(My bad. Fixed! -RobP)

So with you on Darwin. I do hope they didn't really kill him off. I just couldn't understand why the guy who is, yes, effectively immortal could get killed off while the chick with membranous and easily perforated wings was around divebombing things. Also when you take into account that they did pretty actively try to sell the mutant rights = civil rights thing, and killing the black guy off ten seconds in is just... gaah. It's almost like Hollywood is racist or something.

I had so many feelings about Wash's death, none of them good. In the end I realized that Whedon and I just don't enjoy the same kinds of stories, or, rather, that we enjoy the same stories for different reasons. He's free to do his thing without my monetary support.

I'm sure he's crying into his corn flakes as we speak.

A giant word for everyone else on this list. It's not that I think that characters should never die, just that there should be a story reason for their death. Doing otherwise is just a great big middle finger to the viewers.

Dobby, Bambi's Mom, Old Yeller. These are deaths drew tears from me.

Short note on Alien 3, in the comic book world, life existed for Hicks and Newt before Alien 3 was written. Ripley and Hicks were love intrests, and Bishop lived on as half-a-robot. But the worst part was, Newt was a teenage girl, 13 or 14, complete with typical comic book boobs and bad girl attitude. She suffered a terrible fate, comic book cliche.

The Alien movies have always been (and I'm excluding Aliens vs Predator) about Ripley. Its her journey. She lives and everybody else gets left behind. As much as Newt worked in Aliens, you simply couldn't go back to that well again. I give props for coming up for a reason why Ripley was thrust back into the war with the Aliens, even if it made zero sense. I like alien 3, and its just a shame they were forced to resort to CGI aliens.

Hooch (Turner and Hooch)

I get angry just thinking about it.

Last spring I was in a rural diner on the way home from the mountains with my mother. As we sat and ate, I overheard a girl passionately bitching about how much she hated that J.K. Rowling had "pointlessly killed off Lupin, Tonks, and Fred, just to emotionally manipulate people, and it was just totally unrealistic and stupid".

It took so much effort on my part not to stop eating and point out that it was war. War isn't clean and pretty. It isn't happy. It wouldn't be realistic to have all of the good guys survive unscathed, and have all of the bad guys die or end up hog-tied and thrown in cells. War is dirty and it is unfair. People you love die, and they die when you aren't there to say goodbye.

While I was absolutely gutted at Tonks and especially Lupin's deaths, I thought they were perfect.

Wash though? Fuck that. As many people have pointed out, Whedon is famous for unnecessarily killing off the favorite character.
People may disagree with me, but I would have been happier/less mad if Jayne, Zoe, or Kaylee had been killed off. (Yes, I may be the only person on the planet not absolutely in love with Kaylee. I like her well enough, but not nearly as much as Wash.)

I'm going to argue this rather counter-intuitively. Darth Maul should never have been killed simply because he was an icon even before the film came out. He was the embodiment of all that is evil - George Lucas' greed. He was what he wanted with Ewoks but didn't get because friggin Star Wars fans aren't 4 years old.

Maul was the new Vader, or could have been if Lucas weren't predisposed to doing the opposite of smart things. The grim spectre of Vader was all but lost after Return, when his mask was removed and his menace turned to sympathy, and Maul was right there to take up the mantle as the new (old) badass in town, but Mr Myopic missed it, underused and then killed him quickly in favor of more time with annoying children and racist aliens.

While Wash's death made me unhappy, I felt it was necessary in the film. Penny's death didn't bother me either, but I'm not partial to Felicia Day.

Disagree with the killing of Hitler in IB. First of all they didn't have to do anything to earn or try and justify killing Hitler.

Second, I loved that they did it. I kept waiting for the scene where Hitler escapes through a back door. That would have killed the movie. QT did what I wished others who dabbled in history would do, change it to make a better story.

At last! I was going to ask why no love for Hedwig and Salieri2 beat me to it. I loved Hedwig and his death at the beginning of the book set up the reader for more deaths of favorite characters. But damn, kill that beautiful Owl?

I definitely agree with you on Hitler, the Basterds getting him really took me out of the film.

I agree with Wash as well, but not Penny (as mentioned above, her death served an important role). There are plenty of Whedon characters who could take her place though, especially Anya from Buffy and maybe Fred from Angel too.

I disagree on Tonks and Lupin. I got that in the book Rowling was trying to mirror Harry's experience with his godson. What did annoy me though was that the film did not take advantage of its medium to show us their sacrifice. It could have been done in thirty seconds and wouldn't even have needed any dialogue. Same goes for Fred too (though at least in the book he got a death). There are a few things that annoy me about the eighth Potter film, and not taking a few seconds to show us the cost of standing up to evil ranks highly. It's up there with the Molly vs. Bellatrix and Ron and Hermione's kiss scenes being cut too short - generally speaking, I think the film had some serious pacing problems.

"Batman doesn’t kill. Period."... you know, I try and hold back my inner comic geek but when people make comments like this I get a little pissed.

You wrote that statement as if you actually understand the history of the character but that comment itself proves you obviously have never read the source material and are just repeating some remark you heard from someone else. Batman does KILL people, in fact he has done it on quite a few occasions, hell the original Batman carried gun with him. Even the current iteration of the character has him killing Darksied (a major DC villain) when he got out of hand.

You internet writers need to take a step back and remember some of the rules of journalism, especially that really important one about doing RESEARCH on a topic before you start writing about it.

If this article is about gratuitous killing of character that does not affect the story or the perception of the story at all, then I must disagree with you on both of the Whedon killings.

Wash had to die because all of us fans who were there on opening night knew that the crew of Serenity would win in the end and that after Book had died that the rest of the crew was safe. Wrong. When Wash died was when I became the most engaged in that film. "Shit got real" and whatnot. Suddenly I realized that no one was safe and that Whedon might have gone off the deep end and was planning on killing even more of the crew. For the rest of the movie I was on the edge of my seat expecting any moment to be the last of another of my beloved characters.

With Dr Horrible, Penny had to die in much the same way that Uncle Ben or Thomas and Martha Wayne had to die ... so that Dr Horrible would be born. She was his only anchor between being a minor villain to a super villain and so in order for the origin to be complete it was totally necessary for her to die.

But if that is not what this article was about then I completely agree with you, I didn't want them to die either. ;-)

Ned Stark from Game of thrones

thank you

@Hod

If Ned doesn't die, there's no story. He had to die, his death is the catalyst for everything that happens afterward, and it also tells the reader/audience that no one is safe. Also, honestly, it would've been totally unrealistic if his dumbass had lived. I love him, but the man had way more honor than common sense.

It's called "Führer" and him dying was the icing on the moviecake.

Utterly indited content, Really enjoyed reading.