| abstract | - Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A character who remains alive in a work of fiction dies in the adaptation. Both a death trope and an adaptation trope, this comes in two variations:
* More commonly, a character who did not die in the source material is killed off in the adaptation.
* Alternatively, a character who did get killed at some point in the source material is killed off a lot sooner in the adaptation. The reasons for doing this vary. Perhaps the crew wanted to surprise everyone, including fans of the source material. Perhaps they personally viewed the unfortunate character as The Scrappy and wanted to get rid of them. Maybe Executive Meddling required this change to be made. Maybe the character in question was a villain, and in grand movie tradition, the villain had to die at the end of the movie, even if he or she was a recurring villain in the source material. Whatever the reason, the result is the same: a character you did not expect to die met their end. Frequently a cause of They Changed It, Now It Sucks and is actually one of the cases where that can be a very valid complaint. Despite the above hypothetical example being a movie, this trope is hardly limited to book-to-film adaptations, as you'll see in the examples. Compare with Schrodingers Cat where a character's fate is different from the source material, but the source material is still ongoing (which may create the need for a drastic rewrite if the character in question becomes important later on in the source material). Contrast with Spared by the Adaptation where a character who died in the source material does not die in the adaptation. Not to be confused with Doomed by Canon. Examples of the first type:
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