12. Joss Whedon Kills Your Favourite Characters
Whedon has something of a dodgy reputation for murder in his past, being held responsible for every premature death in his TV shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer (Tara, Jenny Calendar, even Buffy herself!) and never shying away from offing a key supporting character or two in the films he's written and directed. This reputation for being a deathmonger is often backed up by the sheer body count from Whedon's productions but of course that doesn't account for the fact that every death is justified in some emotional or plot-motivating way. He's not interested in torture porn or killing for shock value; Whedon wants us to feel for every character that shuffles off the mortal coil in his 'verse, which is probably why he picks the most sympathetic characters (Wash in Serenity, Coulson in The Avengers) for audiences to get weepy over. But killing beloved characters isn't the Firefly creator's unique repeat offence: after all, Shakespeare did it all the time. It's killing them in more or less the exact same way: in two of the three of t feature films he's directed, Whedon skewers a character through the chest with an unexpected blade and has them die mid-sentence. In Serenity, Wash utters the immortal half-line, "I am a leaf on the wind. Watch as I--" before a Reaver harpoon takes his life. In The Avengers, Coulson's already been gutted by Loki before he whispers to Fury, "It was never going to work if they didn't have something...to..." and checks out for good. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Whedon has previously been quoted as saying that Avengers: Age of Ultron will be "about death."