fajrdrako | Ten Shocking Fictional Deaths... (Reply)

The article Oh No! Ten Shocking TV Deaths didn't contain any deaths that shocked me because I'd never seen any of them except Joyce Summers on Buffy. But it made me think: what would be my list of the most shocking deaths? I suppose most of them would be on Torchwood alone. And death in comics, though frequent and dramatic, is seldom shocking, because the characters come back. Except, occasionally, when they don't.¹

Since I don't watch enough television to get ten deaths from that alone, I'll make it deaths in fandom, in general. And what the heck, I'll make it a picspam.

My list:

Ianto Jones on Torchwood, because he was such a fan favourite, and such a central part of the story. And, dammit, he was Jack's boyfriend.
Toshiko Sato on Torchwood, because I loved her so very much. A geeky genius with charm, ingenuity, courage, an interesting past, and, best of all, bisexual. I miss her as much as Jack and Gwen do.
Wash in Serenity, which is cheating, because he died in the movie, not the TV show. But it was all a continuum and I was horrified by his death: not because it happened (them's the breaks) but because it was so pointless, so stupid, and such uncharacteristic bad writing on Joss Whedon's part.
Krycek in X-Files. I loved Krycek: an unsung antihero, a dark intriguer who was, after all, only trying to find the alien menace and save the world while the plot got increasingly murkier. Besides, he was sexy. His death was pointless and uninteresting from a story-telling point of view. The most painful but: he was gratuitously shot by a character I wanted to slash him with. It was the last straw for X-Files, to my way of thinking. A total deal-breaker.
Henry V in the production of Shakespeare's Henry V I saw in Ottawa last year. But, my Shakespeare-savvy friends will be saying, Henry V doesn't die in Henry V. Yeah. That's what I thought.
The death of Will Scott in The Disorderly Knights by Dorothy Dunnett. Heartbreaking. Yes, I know he really died, historically. That isn't the point.
Richie Ryan in Highlander. I wasn't a Richie fan, but what happened to him was... weird. Shocking and unexpected. Not that it happened, but that it happened in that way. Still... I respected him in the end.
Amanda, wife of Sarek and mother of Spock, in the 2009 Star Trek movie. Amanda is one of my favourite Star Trek characters. She isn't supposed to die. She's supposed to life on to be a humanizing influence on Spock.
John Winchester, in Supernatural. Because I loved him.
Supergirl, in Crisis on Infinite Earths. It was an end of an era; though the character has come back in various guises, she has never been the same. This is not entirely a bad thing: Supergirl suffered a lot of abuse in her brief, original lifetime. But as a child I adored her, and when she died, the DC universe lost some of its innocence.