10 TV Character Deaths That Pissed Off Fans
These deaths incited a tide of fan rage.
Death is a natural part of life, and so too is it part of our entertainment - characters live and then they die, but where major characters are concerned, writers bear an enormous responsibility to ensure they're done justice in death.
It's extremely common for heroic characters to die in bittersweet fashion, perhaps sacrificing themselves for the bigger picture, or occasionally dying totally out of nowhere.
Unsurprisingly, fans tend to get attached to characters after spending dozens or even hundreds of hours with them, and so, there's predictable heartbreak and anger when they die.
Often the fan reaction is simply a symptom of how much they care, that seeing a beloved hero bite the bullet feels like losing someone close to their heart, while in other cases it's because fans objected to the actual storytelling nature of the death.
Whether these characters received deaths deemed excessive, nonsensical, silly, or cruel, or simply went out before fans were ready to say goodbye to them, each ignited the rage-filled fires of the fandom, who took to social media to vocallise their displeasure at what went down.
In some cases the death was clearly the right call for the story, while in other it's easy to see why fans were so damn furious...
10. Glenn Rhee - The Walking Dead
The Walking Dead alone has enough maddening character deaths to fill an entire list, but none stoked the fanbase's ire more aggressively - or traumatically - than beloved hero Glenn Rhee's (Steven Yeun) brutal exit in the season seven premiere.
Poor Glenn ended up having his head smashed to a pulp by Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) with his trusty Lucille - a baseball bat wrapped in barbed wire.
As you can probably guess, Glenn didn't die quickly, and the scene left even seasoned gorehounds thoroughly nauseated by the focus on both the extreme grisliness - Glenn's eye is popped out of his head, for one - and Glenn's prolonged suffering.
Though Glenn's death was inevitable given that it also happened in the comics in much the same way, the unflinching, arguably over-the-top nature of its depiction incited a debate among fans and critics over the acceptability of ultra-violence in storytelling.
For a character as beloved and just damn good as Glenn, it was painfully ironic that he suffered one of the series' most horrifying and unforgettable deaths to date.