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Torch the Franchise and Run

750 statements
145 feature instances
17 referencing feature instances

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Torch the Franchise and Run	comment	A writer/artist/producer has created a franchise, but they don't own the legal rights to what will happen to the franchise; the publisher, network, studio or whatever does. Or maybe they share the rights with someone else and just don't have as much control as they would like. They want to stop writing it and move on to something else, but they don't want anyone else being able to handle their property, even though they don't legally own it. Even if they did own the franchise, what happens when their kids get their hands on the franchise after their inevitable death? The solution? Torch the franchise and run. Write one last story that totally wrecks everything. They kill off everyone they possibly can. They make the lives of all of the characters a living hell before executing them. They make 100% sure that everyone is dead, and those who aren't have no way of returning to the status quo or main premise of the show. However, the author can also achieve this in the form of an unambiguous happy ending where the villains are defeated for good and the conflict is resolved in such a way that everyone lives Happily Ever After. This version often gets combined with the Distant Finale, which locks down the fates of the cast for the next few years, decades, or even centuries—forcing future writers to either take the plunge with a vastly different status quo, or attempt to retcon the ending entirely. Essentially the authorial version of breaking your own toys so that nobody else can play with them. Fan backlash can cause this to backfire in the most unpleasant ways. This may force the author to use an Author's Saving Throw if the new franchise they attempt to start sinks like a stone, either because it didn't have the same spark as the old series or their old audience is so angry at them from the fact that they killed off what was once considered a good franchise (essentially making the new franchise a Replacement Scrappy). Note that this is not necessarily a bad thing. Creators can create a successful and well-received conclusion that resolves the existing plot threads (even if said ending is good or bad), whilst preventing other potential creators from attempting to revive the franchise. Usually, a Franchise Zombie resulting from this would have Fanon Discontinuity and sometimes the Creator declaring their own Canon Discontinuity. Not to be confused with Franchise Killer, which describes a work in a franchise that's received so poorly that there probably won't be any more installments anyway regardless of what damage is done to the status quo. Basically, Torch The Franchise is a deliberate attempt to invoke Franchise Killer, and the attempt may fail (and many franchise killers are accidental, not deliberate). See also "Everybody Dies" Ending, though this is done less for the story and more for the personal or legal satisfaction of the author. Related to Writer Revolt. When this happens in a physical sense, you get Trash the Set. As many of these examples show, this isn't guaranteed to succeed even in its main goal of ending the franchise, never mind the fan reaction. If the publishers want to keep the franchise going badly enough, they'll find a way, whether that's making prequels, finding a way to press the Reset Button, or (if push comes to shove) retconning the entire Downer Ending and restarting from an earlier point, and in the case of a happy ending, pulling a Happy Ending Override. Sometimes, if against a truly determined owner, the only way a creator can pull off a successful torching is if they make an Audience-Alienating Ending that renders the whole franchise so unpopular that audiences won't care about any subsequent attempts to write around or retcon the sabotage. If an author attempts this, fails, and the "new direction" is well-received, then it's a Springtime for Hitler. Can also be the result of The Character Died with Him, especially when it's the main character and the creators don't want to recast the character. As this is an Ending Trope, Spoilers Off applies and every spoiler is unmarked. Beware.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_12300cc3	comment	Watchmen ends so definitively and conclusively with its bleak ending that few fans believed a sequel would work even though there were hooks for one. Moore's original proposal had licensed heroes, first from MLJ and then from the newly acquired by DC Charlton Comics' characters, but DC editor Dick Giordano told him to create original characters as the company had plans for the Charlton characters, so he was given free rein to destroy the heroes and their world. Watchmen remained a standalone miniseries for over 20 years, and when a follow-up was made, Doomsday Clock it was less a true sequel and more an attempt to fold the characters and themes into the mainline DC Universe.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1377df	comment	Terminator 2: Judgment Day has this feel. The whole "Judgement Day is inevitable" angle that future entries have is completely defied here; the protagonists attempt to render Judgement Day impossible by destroying everything and everyone involved in Skynet's creation. An alternate ending, featuring an adult John Connor in the US Senate decades into the future, would have cemented this interpretation. There's no last-second twist, no uncertainty, and no Stable Time Loop (the most open thing is that the ending speech notes "The unknown future rolls toward us."). The third film invented the "it is inevitable" spiel to Hand Wave the issue, by basically saying that all that was done in T2 merely "delayed the inevitable" (literally; future installments just kept pushing Judgment Day further and further into the future).
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1685d0da	comment	Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later might have what can be considered a happy ending case of this trope, with Michael Myers, the core of the franchise, decapitated, finally bringing an end to his terror. It didn't work, as Halloween: Resurrection came out and changed it from Michael Myers being the one that was decapitated to someone else dressed as him. Apparently this was intended from the start, however, and the reveal was only put off because Laurieâ€™s actress wanted to have people actually think sheâ€™d killed Michael for a few years.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_17293dfa	comment	The final chapter of Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony takes this up to eleven. Tsumugi Shirogane, after being outed as the mastermind, reveals that everything that has happened in the game is "Ultimate Real Fiction" based on Danganronpa. In the Danganronpa V3 universe, the previous games and anime are exactly that, games and anime. The franchise became so popular that it eventually got adapted into a reality show where teenagers willingly and eagerly sign up to have their minds wiped and replaced with the fabricated identities of Danganronpa characters so they can kill each other for real on live TV. And the "V3" in the title? Stands for 53, meaning this show has potentially been going on for 50 seasons (since the earliest it could have started would be Danganronpa 4). Following this reveal, the protagonist swears to destroy Danganronpa, which culminates in a boss battle against the Danganronpa fanbase. The fight ends with the fanbase losing interest in Danganronpa and moving on. Following this, K1-B0 destroys the Ultimate Academy, seemingly killing everyone before self-destructing. Given that K1-B0 was the Audience Surrogate for the in-universe fanbase, this could be seen as a final goodbye to the Danganronpa franchise. However, in a post-credits scene, Shuichi, Maki, and Himiko are revealed to have survived K1-B0's rampage and decide to move on to see if what they were told is true or not, hinting that Danganronpa may not be over after all. Needless to say, this ending led to an enormous Broken Base in the fandom.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1bd4c2fc	comment	The final volume of B.P.R.D., The Devil You Know, pretty much closes the book on the entirety of Mike Mignola's Hellboy universe, as it ends with all of the agents of B.P.R.D except for Fenix and maybe Liz dying and newly-resurrected Hellboy returning to the afterlife, all the while Earth is ravaged by the Odgru Jahad and their spawn before their destruction by the Osiris Society, with remnants of Humanity surviving in the subterranean caverns with the hope of eventually rebuilding society.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1bdab048	comment	When Nova and Guardians of the Galaxy were scheduled to be cancelled because of low sales, Dan Abnett and Andy Lanning decided to finish them out via a crossover called The Thanos Imperative. By the end of the mini-series, Phyla-Vell and Drax were both dead, while Star-Lord, Nova, and Thanos were trapped inside the Cancerverse. It would be several years before the Guardians were plucked from Comic-Book Limbo and relaunched under a new creative team.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1bdeba5a	comment	X-Men spin-off X-Statix creator Peter Milligan bloodily slaughtered all the surviving team members in the book's final issue. Not that this stopped him from revisiting some of them for a miniseries set in the afterlife, or other writers from bringing back Doop in future series. And twenty years later the characters were reintroduced in a series called The X-Cellent, taking advantage of the post Hickman status quo that death is never permanent for mutants.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1e236912	comment	Attempted, and ultimately double subverted, with 22 Jump Street, with its credits showing what would happen if they made increasingly ridiculous sequels set in ninja academies, retirement homes, space, and as a video game, among other things. However, a sequel was greenlit anyway and there were talks of a crossover with Men in Black...until said sequel/crossover eventually ended up getting cancelled altogether.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1e703d1f	comment	The acrimony between Amy Sherman-Palladino and Warner Bros. was so great that when she couldn't be signed on for a seventh season of Gilmore Girls, she crippled the show so much in the sixth season finale that most of the fanbase refuses to accept that The CW-fied seventh season ever happened. The new show head David Rosenthal was unable to do much of anything to fix what was broken, the new writing staff hurriedly thrown together seemed to not know the characters at all and miswrote them, and somehow a smalltown ensemble drama was changed around to be yet another generic teen drama with adults written like teens because without the creator around, nobody knew how to write them.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1f2e31da	comment	Digimon Adventure: Last Evolution Kizuna was intended as this to the original Digimon Adventure continuity as explained by this interview. Ironically enough, the director of the original anime series was going to work on Kizuna but stepped out because the movie was contradicting the rules of the original setting. The next version of this series ended up being a Continuity Reboot that disregards the film entirely. A sequel involving the cast of 02 was released a few years after, though how much it retcons the preceding film is up for debate.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_1feb2526	comment	After a few years of just writing the occasional special, David Renwick finally agreed to make one last series of One Foot in the Grave on condition that he could kill off the protagonist at the end.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_20ac8a71	comment	This is actually common practice with Doom Patrol. When the original series was cancelled, the entire team was killed off, but the cover encouraged readers to write in to save them, and since then it's happened multiple times that most of the team is killed off at the end of a run. Rather than an attempt to end Doom Patrol, this is used as a way to "clear the board" so that the next writer can essentially do whatever they want; Grant Morrison talked with their predecessor Paul Kupperberg to specifically plan how the latter's run would end with only the characters Morrison wanted to use surviving.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_2172e43f	comment	Double subverted with Batman: Arkham Knight, which ends with Scarecrow revealing Batman's Secret Identity to the entire planet and follows it up by literally torching Wayne Manor with Batman and Alfred still inside. The endings to the Riddler and Penguin sidequests make it clear not even his closest friends will see him again. Only for almost everything about this to later be abandoned in Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, which is not only set in the continuity of the Arkham games, but directly features the actual, genuine Batman returning (doubly serving as the final role of the late Kevin Conroy)... then that game finished the torching that Arkham Knight started by having Batman Killed Off for Real at the hands of the Suicide Squad assigned to kill him and the rest of the Brainwashed and Crazy League.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_23553960	comment	The Phantom Pain does this more subtly by ending at the beginning of the original Metal Gear, thereby ending the prequel saga. With Kojima falling out with Konami, it certainly feels like Kojima tried this. This didn't stop Konami from trying to put out more games (such as a Metal Gear Solid 3 pachinko game — no joke — and Metal Gear Survive), but given the backlash Konami received over their treatment of Kojima, the fans might finish the torching for Kojima. It ultimately didn't quite take since Konami eventually re-gathered enough manpower to announce Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (a HD remake of the third game), but there's been no indication of any legitimately new storylines either.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_261c8d3f	comment	The Simpsons has an In-Universe case of this in one episode. In said episode, there's an issue of Radioactive Man where the titular superhero is pitted against three supervillains and ends up being killed by them, bringing an end to the series. Immediately after, however, the first issue of a reboot series of Radioactive Man is released.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_26674ed5	comment	He first attempted this approach with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. This is why we got the infamous ending. While it might have been Kojima explicitly trolling the fanbase, he had already stated that it would be his final entry in the Metal Gear series.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_291e9857	comment	The creator of the Dark Souls games was upfront that the franchise as we know it would end with Dark Souls III. The game's premise is that the Eternal Recurrence established in Dark Souls II is grinding to a halt and in the base game's ending the First Flame is either on its last legs or snuffed out completely. Even in the DLC, the most you can manage is to create a new world inside a painting, leaving nothing of the world players had become familiar with.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_2b70efd4	comment	The Old World of Darkness was well-known for its Metaplot, which steadily built up towards the end of the world. Which ultimately happened across several books (one each for Vampire: The Masquerade, Werewolf: The Apocalypse, and Mage: The Ascension, with an additional book called Time of Fire to wrap up the other lines), ending the Old World of Darkness. Later revisits to the setting were "metaplot-agnostic", taking place before anything got really bad, until Paradox Interactive got the license. The next editions stayed in the same continuity but simply ignored the Final Nights and declared that all of the apocalyptic foreshadowing led to...not the end of the world.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_2c15b0d3	comment	The final arc of Batgirl (2000), Destruction Daughter, had to wrap up the series while it was being cancelled due to DC editorial deciding they have too many female-lead titles, to be replaced with a book that lasted four issues and the editorial already planning to turn the main character, Cassandra Cain, evil in one of worst cases of Character Derailment in comics history. As such, Destruction Daughter has Cassandra find out Lady Shiva is her mother and working for the organization that nuked Bludheaven, killing all of the book's supporting cast. This leads Cassandra to break her Thou Shalt Not Kill rule, murder Shiva and quit superheroics, deciding she is no longer worthy to wear the bat-symbol.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_2d316bc0	comment	Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012) was originally intended to end with the three-episode "Mutant Apocalypse" arc. It entailed the Turtles failing to stop a Mutagen bomb from exploding while they were still teenagers, and then, with the exception of Raphael and Donatello, spending the next 50 years separated, until Michelangelo is found and Leonardo's cured of his mutagen-induced insanity, and they find their way to their final destination. The showrunner, Ciro Nieli, admitted this was done so that nobody could come in and continue the series after he was done with it. This didn't exactly work and ended up being unnecessary: Nickelodeon advertised "Mutant Apocalypse" as an alternate universe What If? storyline, aired it in the middle of the final season with the "Wanted: Bebop and Rocksteady" arc taking its place as the Grand Finale instead, before moving on to creating the next franchise installment in a new continuity.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_34b2a410	comment	In The Day the Music Died by Sam Starbuck, a short story about everything possible going wrong with a Harry Potter-like fandom at once, this is one of the things that goes wrong. The author — who's writing the last novel of a series while on his deathbed — decides to finish with an apocalypse to prevent anyone from writing any sequels after his death.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_34fd3cf6	comment	The series finale of Aqua Teen Hunger Force ends with Frylock and Shake dead, Carl moving away, and Meatwad starting a family in a Distant Finale. Given how it was cancelled on the creators and wasn't their decision, they probably aimed for this trope to make sure there wasn't a revival. This is immediately subverted when it was revealed that not only was that episode not the final one to be released (the next one aired online three days later) but also it wasn't even the last one chronologically (Shake watches the events on TV and claims that they happened last week). Then again, the series does run on Negative Continuity. The series then was revived with a series of web shorts in 2022, followed by a movie later that same year. A twelfth season consisting of five episodes was then announced and subsequently premiered in 2023.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3504b58e	comment	Subverted in the long run with Mortal Kombat 11: at the end of the story mode, Kronika is defeated, however, how the final battle ends determines the outcome, with the post-story DLC Aftermath adding two new endings to the list and leaving the whole thing as an Ambiguous Situation. Come the next game, and it turns out it's a Continuity Reboot taking place after one of the endings, only for the game to eventually reveal that all endings from 11 (including the alternate endings as well as all of the Towers of Time endings) are canonical Alternate Timelines, with every winner becoming a Titan and Keeper of Time in their respective timeline. After the Battle at the Pyramid of Argus, there's a new clean slate for the franchise to continue.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3558eaa2	comment	Parodied in the fifth season finale of Community, where Abed suddenly tells the audience that if the show isn't renewed for another season, then an asteroid struck the earth and killed everybody. ("And that's canon.")
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_35e675e2	comment	The final season of Vikings does this by killing off most of the surviving main characters (including all of the fan favorites except Floki, but he is stated to be dying) as well as Bjorn's children. Historical and mythical characters that had kids are rendered childless in the series.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_35e88987	comment	This tactic ultimately led to the downfall of Jim Crockett Promotions and killed the National Wrestling Alliance as a major national force. Jim Crockett Jr., believing this tactic to be the only way to compete with Vince McMahon on cable, directly shut down more territories than McMahon, who "allowed" more of his acquisitions to fail first while hiring on popular talent with great potential — leading the WWF to become the number 1 wrestling promotion in the world, up to and after the Monday Night Wars.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_364144a3	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_364144a3	comment	The cast and crew for Sledge Hammer! figured that they weren't going to get renewed for another series. So they had the final episode end with a nuclear bomb going off. However, they wound up getting a second season. Thankfully the show being an Absurd Comedy to begin with meant they just said the second season was five years before and then continued off like nothing happened.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_38974f2	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_38974f2	comment	While not outright torching the franchise, The King of Fighters 2000 ends with Clone Zero destroying South Town with a Kill Sat. South Town being the setting for the majority of the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting games, and thus the first recurring setting SNK ever made, and the origin of many KOF mainstays, its destruction symbolized the end of SNK (as it declared bankruptcy soon after) and made it clear that even if future games were made, they'd never be the same again. Notably, when the original SNK staff came back as SNK Playmore and reacquired the rights to their IPs, they made a big deal of South Town being rebuilt in The King of Fighters 2003.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3aeb1c75	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3aeb1c75	comment	Dragon Ball: The original manga is this on a personal level for Akira Toriyama, with a Distant Finale that, while ending on a note of And the Adventure Continues, feels a bit rushed (which Toriyama addressed somewhat in the Kanzenban release). Comments by Toriyama soon after the manga ended have tones of Creator Breakdown, such as expressing frustration over having to do designs for GT (which are either experimental or the ones he already did for the end of the manga), and commenting that the fans won't let the franchise die. This is likely because he had been making manga since Dr. Slump in 1980, and had expressed intentions to end the story since the Saiyan Arc (hence Z's name). Pointedly, while Toriyama has since become involved with Dragon Ball again, particularly in The New '10s with Battle of Gods and all subsequent media, he has never created another serialized manga since. Dragon Ball GT was a Post-Script Season to the anime, and its lack of planning showed, with the production suffering from many teething issues, as well as the ratings and merchandise sales slowly declining due to franchise fatigue, something that started with the Buu arc of Z. As a possible reflection of that, the ending is far more final than Z's, which had left plenty of room for continuation. It concludes with the show's main plot device and Reset Button, Shenron, vanishing from reality and taking the Dragon Balls with him while lecturing the cast about how they abused their power. Goku goes with him after taking the time to visit his friends and provide some closure on his relationships with them. After that, a Distant Finale confirms that Goku and Shenron don't return for the next century, and by then all the other characters barring his granddaughter Pan are dead. Incidentally, the writers of GT has this ending in mind from the very beginning, as they knew they were on borrowed time. When making Dragon Ball Super, Toei decided to set it in the middle of the ten-year Time Skip between Kid Buu's defeat and the end of the manga, and over several years it slowly made clear that it didn't acknowledge GT (meaning Super doesn't have to worry about it if it were to tell stories after the end of the manga).
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3b7abee2	comment	Half-Life downplays this trope. The decision to nuke Black Mesa in Opposing Force was done to halt pressure to set a sequel to Half-Life in Black Mesa, which Valve felt would be creative death. While two further expansions to Half-Life would also be set in Black Mesa, Half-Life 2 is set in a completely different setting.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3d58d686	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3d58d686	comment	The last episode produced for Uncle Grandpa began and ended with the main cast being made into a sandwich, only for a giant Ham Sandwich (the kid Uncle Grandpa helped in the pilot) to pick said sandwich up and eat it, with the implication that all the main characters are about to die. Uncle Grandpa even states that itâ€™s the end for them as they're being eaten. The episode also showed this was a recurring nightmare Uncle Grandpa kept having, with the end indicating the events looped endlessly. This was made to prevent any revival from ever happening, especially since the show was screwed by Cartoon Network, though the showâ€™s creator, Pete Browngardt, eventually bounced back with Looney Tunes Cartoons. The actual last episode aired was a flashback to when the main characters first decided to live in the RV together, letting the cast at least leave on a happier note.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_3defe34c	comment	Discussed (sort of) on Daria:
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_413aa2f7	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_413aa2f7	comment	This is why the title character regains his sanity and dies at the end of Don Quixote. After publishing what became Part One, Cervantes was dismayed to see other writers producing unauthorized Quixote stories of their own, so he wrote Part Two as he did to give the character a definite ending.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_42c05590	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_42c05590	comment	This is parodied in the Rocko's Modern Life episode "Wacky Delly": Rachel (then known as Ralph) Bighead wants to get out of her contract with a TV network, who want her to create another hit show for them, so she hires Rocko, Filburt, and Heffer to come up with Wacky Delly, the worst possible show imaginable. Despite the production being a complete wreck due to their inexperience, on top of her earnest efforts to sabotage it, the show becomes a huge hit. When convinced to accept her lot and actually put actual time and effort into the episodes herself, Wacky Delly is immediately cancelled.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_42c17ca1	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_42c17ca1	comment	Power Rangers in Space certainly went in this direction, what with Zordon dying and his energies being used to purify all evil and apparently take away the Rangers' powers. Obviously it didn't stick.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_43c677fc	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_43c677fc	comment	The Ruby and Nora series has Cold go in this direction, albeit with a happy ending. By the end of the story, all the villains are dead or permanently incapacitated, including Salem and Void, and even all Grimm are gone from Remnant. The 10-year Time Skip that the epilogue story shows resolves the stories of most surviving characters and indicates that things with Remnant are now prosperous with no more conflict.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_44127c7c	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_44127c7c	comment	Power Rangers: Power Rangers in Space certainly went in this direction, what with Zordon dying and his energies being used to purify all evil and apparently take away the Rangers' powers. Obviously it didn't stick. The rumored "Hexagon" version of Power Rangers Ninja Storm would have been this as well, ending in a Civil War (2006)-type battle that would end with everyone pulling a My God, What Have I Done? and Hexagon leader Tommy letting everyone go. This was likely the plan with Power Rangers RPM as Disney was done with the series and didn't want to produce it anymore. The world was wiped out by an evil computer virus, with all that remains of humanity trapped in a domed city, with only the smallest hint that the future will be bright. After Saban bought the rights back, RPM was rendered an alternate universe, though with the occasional nod or cameo from a past ranger to keep it in the loop.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4456bd7b	comment	The Riverdale Grand Finale episode "Goodbye Riverdale" ends with everyone dead in 2023 (having been changed via Time Travel to have been born in the 1930s), though they're shown enjoying milkshakes at Pop's in what's implied to be a "perpetual high school" afterlife.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_44e08ee8	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_44e08ee8	comment	Homicide: Life on the Street ends with the death of at least one major character (and one ambiguous but strongly implied death).
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_474c18c1	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_474c18c1	comment	Part two of BioShock Infinite's DLC Burial at Sea kills off by far the most developed and full of potential character, Elizabeth, who was also one of the only remaining protagonists, and inescapably ties the lore of both Rapture and Columbia together before all rights for the BioShock franchise were transferred to the people who made BioShock 2.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4885590d	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4885590d	comment	Forever Knight ends with virtually all of the cast dying in the last three episodes, culminating with Nick accidentally killing his girlfriend and committing suicide. The last line of the series sums it up quite well: "Damn you, Nicholas."
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_497c7fab	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_497c7fab	comment	Done it again, obviously, in Halloween Ends where both Michael Myers AND the guy who was established as a sort of successor, Corey Cunningham, are definitely dead by the end of the movie. The movie goes out of its way to establish Michael's gone by not only having him killed by Laurie, but his lifeless corpse paraded through town and ultimately grinded to a pulp in a car grinder. Evil Died That Night indeed.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4b882a66	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4b882a66	comment	One explanation for the "It was all an autistic child playing with a snow globe" ending in St. Elsewhere, as no other explanation makes sense (most of the plots were far beyond anything an isolated child would be able to think up all by himself). And indeed producer Tom Fontana has stated in an interview that he always wanted the series to end on a completely definitive note (and kill off the possibility of a reunion show).
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4c095a1f	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4c095a1f	comment	Season 1 of The Transformers infamously ended with all of the Decepticons being pushed into a river of lava just in case if the show was cancelled early. After, Transformers G1 was proven successful enough to turn the toyline into a franchise, the ending was changed so that the Decepticons are all revealed to have survived the lava after all.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4c5406b0	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4c5406b0	comment	The Finder ended with Walter arrested, Isabel losing her badge, and Willa having to run away to escape an arranged marriage with her cousin, leaving Leo all alone.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4c56381b	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_4c56381b	comment	The Binding of Isaac: Rebirth does this with the Repentence DLC. After seemingly every single expansion making Isaac's story worse, Repentence adds one more True Final Boss. Beat it, and Isaac, free of all his self-hatred and sins, lets go of the mortal coil and ascends to Heaven. There's simply nowhere more for the story to go, and understandably the creators have stated it's the last DLC.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_50b1087a	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_50b1087a	comment	In-universe: the short story "Umney's Last Case", published in Nightmares & Dreamscapes, revolves around a Captain Ersatz of Raymond Chandler causing his main character, Umney, one disaster after another - his friends abandon him, he loses his clients, and his life is overall ruined. This was done with the purpose of allowing the author, who lost his wife and child and is suffering from a severe case of shingles, to enter Umney's world and take over his life, choosing the endless adventure and charm of his own fiction over the drab harshness of reality.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_5144055f	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_5144055f	comment	Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge has the infamous Gainax Ending which implies that the creators just wanted the series to end or screw over whoever would take over the series after they left. There are problems with this view, however, as Ron Gilbert always said that he wanted to make a third game, and the ending contains a Sequel Hook stinger implying that the screwy ending is just an elaborate ruse. The Curse of Monkey Island, the next game in the series, followed this lead by implying the previous game's ending was a voodoo spell LeChuck cast on Guybrush, while Return to Monkey Island explains this ending as Guybrush's son recreating his dad's adventures with his friends while at an amusement park.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_531d0627	comment	The DC Animated Movie Universe (often nicknamed the New 52 Animated Universe by DC Fans) was a continuous series of Direct-To-Video movies that were set in the same universe that shared designs and art style unlike most of DC's animated movies that were standalone adaptations or original stories. Starting with Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox and continued with other movies that were either directly or loosely based on well-known New 52 story arcs with them later adapting pre-New 52 stories like The Death of Superman and Teen Titans: The Judas Contract into the universe. However, due to a combination of So Okay, It's Average to They Changed It, So It Sucks reception, mediocre sales in comparison to their other animated movies, and a desire to move away from the DCAMU, it was decided to end the universe in Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, where most of the heroes are killed off or crippled, Earth is left near-inhospitable and Flash is ordered by John Constantine to go back in time to prevent the entire tragedy from ever happening, with everybody knowing that the entire timeline will change as a result, just like what happened when Barry went back in time to save his mother, making sure there wouldn't be any future installments in this universe, with the exception of an animated short, DC Showcase: Constantine - House of Mystery which addressed the fate of John Constantine after he made Flash time travel.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_578048aa	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_578048aa	comment	After sales for Druid (1995) were so low that it'd been turned into a four-issue miniseries, Warren Ellis ended the series by having every major character who wasn't Hellstrom and Nekra killed — including Dr. Druid himself. In a case of in-universe, literal torching, Hellstrom sets fire to Druid's body and dumped the charred corpse into a dumpster.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_59151283	comment	Metal Gear: Series creator Hideo Kojima has been very open about how he has seen every game after Metal Gear Solid as the very last in series, and as a result, he has deliberately tried to make every installment work as an airtight finale for the series, only for more sequels to be commissioned. He first attempted this approach with Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty. This is why we got the infamous ending. While it might have been Kojima explicitly trolling the fanbase, he had already stated that it would be his final entry in the Metal Gear series. Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has series protagonist Solid Snake turned into an old man as a result of the cloning process used to create him and is given less than a year to live by the end of the game, leaving little room for Snake to appear in future sequels. The only Metal Gear games since then had been prequels (Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and The Phantom Pain) and a spin-off (Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance) set after Metal Gear Solid 4 that doesn't even reveal Snake's fate. In the first draft of Metal Gear Solid 4, the whole "torch and run" was a lot more blatant: the game was originally going to end with Snake and Otacon getting arrested and executed for terrorism. A Writer Revolt forced Kojima to abandon this idea. The actual ending is still pretty conclusive and final, though, albeit far more satisfying, with the Patriots being defeated, Meryl and Johnny getting married, Rose and Raiden reconciling, Otacon adopting Sunny, the FOXDIE virus infecting Snake's body being cured, and Snake reconciling with Big Boss in the latter's final moments, after which he resolves to spend these last few months he has left with Otacon and Sunny before he dies of his accelerated old age. The Phantom Pain does this more subtly by ending at the beginning of the original Metal Gear, thereby ending the prequel saga. With Kojima falling out with Konami, it certainly feels like Kojima tried this. This didn't stop Konami from trying to put out more games (such as a Metal Gear Solid 3 pachinko game — no joke — and Metal Gear Survive), but given the backlash Konami received over their treatment of Kojima, the fans might finish the torching for Kojima. It ultimately didn't quite take since Konami eventually re-gathered enough manpower to announce Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater (a HD remake of the third game), but there's been no indication of any legitimately new storylines either.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_5ada53ed	comment	The James Bond films had a couple of instances: For Your Eyes Only opens with a character specific example with Blofeld. Some years after losing a lawsuit with Kevin McClory (who collaborated with Ian Fleming on a then-failed film screenplay that ended up being reworked and made into the Thunderball novel and film), producer Albert R. Broccoli killed off SPECTRE's leader Blofeld note or, at least, an unnamed character widely presumed to be Blofeld in the Action Prologue of For Your Eyes Only, in a deliberately and insultingly throwaway manner, just to stick it to McClory (who prevented Blofeld from being the villain of The Spy Who Loved Me and later revisited the Thunderball story he still held the rights to in Never Say Never Again). No Time to Die might be only the end of Daniel Craig as Bond, but the producers made sure to do it in a way that can only be followed by another Continuity Reboot. Bond's Best Friend Felix Leiter (played by Jeffrey Wright) is killed off. So is his nemesis Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), and all of the evil organization he runs, Spectre. And to close it off, Bond himself dies, choosing to remain in the villain's lair as it is bombarded with missiles after getting infected with a variant of the Heracles Virus by Saffin.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_5bb5ad89	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_5bb5ad89	comment	JLA (1997): When Grant Morrison's run ended with the "World War III" arc, they only wrote out most of the characters they'd introduced during their run, leaving the same core 'Big Seven' team they started with (plus Plastic Man), and essentially handing the next writer a blank slate. The only character who died was Aztek, one Morrison themself had created, since the character's own comic was cancelled before it had a chance to end properly and Morrison rectified that by having Aztek appear in their run as a member of the League and had their final arc serve as a Fully Absorbed Finale for Aztek by having him give up his own life to beat the threat.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_5d354f8	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_5d354f8	comment	The reason the Red Dwarf episode, ''Only The Good" had an Uncertain Doom ending with Rimmer dying and the ship about to be destroyed was because Doug Naylor wanted to make a Non-Serial Movie that ignored season 8. To accomplish this he wanted to destroy the TV continuity and make a ninth season impossible.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_605ffc6a	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_605ffc6a	comment	Attempted in-universe by Dante in Dante's Night at Freddy's 2: Animatronic Boogaloo. After learning Fazbear's Fright is going to be a thing, Dante has a brief mental, fourth-wall-breaking meltdown before destroying the establishment and appearing to kill Spring Trap. Judging by the Sequel Hook, this unfortunately doesn't work.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_6234eae7	comment	His most infamous case of this happening was with Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. Tomino was struggling with a severe Creator Breakdown at the time Victory was being made and as a result, he deliberately tried to sink the franchise by writing the show to be as depressing and unpleasant as possible and discouraging toy sales by making the villain mecha ugly and unmarketable, then walked away from the franchise for several years. Tomino succeeded inasmuch as Victory remains the last Universal Century TV series they've madenote Not counting Mobile Suit Gundam UC RE:0096, which was an OVA that got Recut into TV-length episodes a couple of years after it ended, but Sunrise kept the franchise going by freeing it from Tomino's continuity with the "Alternate Universe" shows. Tomino himself, after some Creator Recovery, regretted most of his creative choices with Victory, came back with a better attitude and created ∀ Gundam in 1999 and Gundam: Reconguista in G in 2015, both of which are set in the far future from the Universal Century.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_62ceda02	comment	A similar example happened with Sonichu; following years of Internet mockery and a feud with the creators of Asperchu, in 2010 author Chris Chandler ended the tenth issue conclusively, killing off almost all of the antagonists before going into an extended hiatus. While new issues began to be published 5 years later, releases were sporadic at best, and by 2021, it had once again sputtered to an abrupt halt.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_631805af	comment	Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots has series protagonist Solid Snake turned into an old man as a result of the cloning process used to create him and is given less than a year to live by the end of the game, leaving little room for Snake to appear in future sequels. The only Metal Gear games since then had been prequels (Peace Walker, Ground Zeroes, and The Phantom Pain) and a spin-off (Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance) set after Metal Gear Solid 4 that doesn't even reveal Snake's fate. In the first draft of Metal Gear Solid 4, the whole "torch and run" was a lot more blatant: the game was originally going to end with Snake and Otacon getting arrested and executed for terrorism. A Writer Revolt forced Kojima to abandon this idea. The actual ending is still pretty conclusive and final, though, albeit far more satisfying, with the Patriots being defeated, Meryl and Johnny getting married, Rose and Raiden reconciling, Otacon adopting Sunny, the FOXDIE virus infecting Snake's body being cured, and Snake reconciling with Big Boss in the latter's final moments, after which he resolves to spend these last few months he has left with Otacon and Sunny before he dies of his accelerated old age.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_63e72a51	comment	2000 AD had an in-universe example in a Future Shock titled "The Mainstream". The author of a series of books known as the Clench series gets sick of writing science fiction, so he writes a story where the main character gets into a near-fatal accident and has several body parts replaced with cybernetics and then goes on to be assimilated by the titular Clench, where his mind overrides their collective consciousness. His agent calls him out on it, but he doesn't care. Then he gets attacked by his own creation and left in a coma. Maybe.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_69a00c38	comment	John Darling was a comic strip spin-off from Funky Winkerbean by Tom Batiuk that ran for about twelve years. Batiuk and his syndicate came into conflict over the rights so Batiuk killed off the title character and ended the strip, leaving the syndicate with a worthless property. Years later, Batiuk revisited the story in Funky Winkerbean to solve the murder. Later still, introduced Darling's daughter, Jessica, as part of the Funky cast.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_69d15cc0	comment	While the entire Marvel Cinematic Universe is still going as a whole, several of its sub-franchises have written some of its stories and character arcs written in ways that they could no longer be continued. Avengers: Endgame does this for The Infinity Saga, as Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow) dies from sacrificing herself for the Soul Stone, Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) dying after using the Infinity Stones that were gathered from the time heist to snap 2014 Thanos and his goons out of existence. Also, the original Infinity Stones were destroyed by OG Thanos five years earlier, and Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) ends up traveling back to the 1940s to stay with Peggy Carter after returning the time-heist Infinity Stones to their original points in time and his elderly self passes the shield to Sam Wilson (aka Falcon), believing him to be a worthy successor for the Captain America mantle.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_6b85085e	comment	Mortal Kombat: Ed Boon wanted Mortal Kombat: Armageddon to do this to so that he could easily reboot the series with a new cast by bringing upon the apocalyptic Battle of Armageddon, a legendary conflict that promises The End of the World as We Know It, hence why it is a canonical Dream Match Game. When this plan fell through, he took a different approach: Mortal Kombat 9 reveals that Armageddon has ruined the world with Shao Kahn as the victor and god-like power now his only for a dying Raiden to invoke a different kind of reboot. Subverted in the long run with Mortal Kombat 11: at the end of the story mode, Kronika is defeated, however, how the final battle ends determines the outcome, with the post-story DLC Aftermath adding two new endings to the list and leaving the whole thing as an Ambiguous Situation. Come the next game, and it turns out it's a Continuity Reboot taking place after one of the endings, only for the game to eventually reveal that all endings from 11 (including the alternate endings as well as all of the Towers of Time endings) are canonical Alternate Timelines, with every winner becoming a Titan and Keeper of Time in their respective timeline. After the Battle at the Pyramid of Argus, there's a new clean slate for the franchise to continue.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_7485e16e	comment	Animaniacs (2020) does this in the finale episode, with a little bit of End-of-Series Awareness. In the last episode of the show, some characters criticize the reboot and the franchise as a whole for being repetitive and formulaic. To top it all off, the final scene has a meteor crashing down on Earth, killing the Warner Siblings, the show's cast and everyone else. The end.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_75fcf08a	comment	Llamas with Hats: By the end of the series, every single living being on earth is dead and the main character, who was the sole survivor, decides to commit suicide after finding the corpse of his best friend. In a blog entry, Jason Steele comments about how the series could have "gone forever" like Garfield or The Annoying Orange, but instead of that, he preferred to end it.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_7884ec15	comment	The highly anticipated finale of Seinfeld, called "The Finale," was notorious for ending the show by having the main cast being put on trial, convicted, and imprisoned for everything that happened on the show.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_7965bb13	comment	The real reason behind the creation of Chapter 16 of Digimon Re: Tamers within Citadel of the Heart was a half-baked attempt by the author to drop the burden of having to write for a long time. Admittedly this was because the author was kind of losing it at the time, but once he managed to regain his sanity, Chapter 16 as a whole was Retconned into being a simulation of a possible future for the story. MF217 is fully aware it was such an Ass Pull way to keep the story from ending, but considering the Reality Subtext it was a Justified case of Acceptable Breaks from Reality.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8192cba	comment	Similarly, the Toy Story film series ended with Woody and Buzz parting ways in Toy Story 4 in order for Pixar to prevent any more sequels from being made, especially since the third installment is considered a Tough Act to Follow. Though, like Shrek above, this doesnâ€™t mean the end of the franchise, as spin-offs like Forky Asks a Question premiered on Disney+ and another theatrical film called Lightyear was released in 2022. Ultimately this wasn't enough, and a fifth film was announced.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_88233763	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_88233763	comment	In The Last Book of Swords: Shieldbreaker's Story Fred Saberhagen destroyed all but one of the Twelve Swords, ensuring that no further stories could be written involving his 'characters'.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8827bf0d	comment	The final game in the Championship Manager series created by Sports Interactive was so bad that there is widespread belief that the company deliberately made it horrible, knowing they were going to split and create their new Football Manager series.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8a39c411	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8a39c411	comment	Done in-universe in the Hyperion Cantos: the poet Martin Silenus, finally realizing that his profitable series of books has become a brain-dead Cliché Storm, decides to just kill the thing off, completely and utterly, so that he can go and search for his "muse" and work on real poetry. (Though in fact his audience had such bad taste that the torching didn't work, but he decided to walk away and let his publishers do what they willed with it.)
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8ac4e993	comment	Gundam: One reason for Yoshiyuki Tomino's "Everybody Dies" Ending tendencies was a desire to avoid making sequels. It didn't stop one of his shows from becoming one of the biggest franchises in all of anime. His most infamous case of this happening was with Mobile Suit Victory Gundam. Tomino was struggling with a severe Creator Breakdown at the time Victory was being made and as a result, he deliberately tried to sink the franchise by writing the show to be as depressing and unpleasant as possible and discouraging toy sales by making the villain mecha ugly and unmarketable, then walked away from the franchise for several years. Tomino succeeded inasmuch as Victory remains the last Universal Century TV series they've madenote Not counting Mobile Suit Gundam UC RE:0096, which was an OVA that got Recut into TV-length episodes a couple of years after it ended, but Sunrise kept the franchise going by freeing it from Tomino's continuity with the "Alternate Universe" shows. Tomino himself, after some Creator Recovery, regretted most of his creative choices with Victory, came back with a better attitude and created ∀ Gundam in 1999 and Gundam: Reconguista in G in 2015, both of which are set in the far future from the Universal Century. Due to his reputation, Tomino's novelization of Mobile Suit Gundam is often mistaken for this; it ends with The Hero getting killed during the Final Battle and most of the White Base crew retiring from the military. However, in interviews Tomino has said that he gave the novels a definitive conclusion because he thought that was the end of it; he didn't anticipate Gundam becoming so popular and successful, and would have written the ending differently otherwise. This all is largely exactly due to the situation mentioned in the trope description: Tomino doesn't own the rights to the UC, but was usually given the free reins over the creative side of the production. This, however, looks to change recently, as Bandai, which does own the rights, seems to push forth the alternative canon based on the manga written by his former collaborator, and several light novels which, for now, appear to contradict a lot of things written by Tomino.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8e09ebf	comment	The rumored "Hexagon" version of Power Rangers Ninja Storm would have been this as well, ending in a Civil War (2006)-type battle that would end with everyone pulling a My God, What Have I Done? and Hexagon leader Tommy letting everyone go.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8fc868f5	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_8fc868f5	comment	After five seasons, the writers of The Brittas Empire were done with the series, and ended the final episode by killing the main character Gordon Brittas very definitely. Due to the series' popularity, the BBC continued it for another two seasons under different writers, with the script resorting to literal Divine Intervention to get Brittas back (which honestly wasn't that far-fetched considering the tone of the show). Then their final episode ended on a possibly even more depressing note as the entire series turned out to have been All Just a Dream by Brittas as he was napping on the train on the way to the job interview for the position where he started in the first episode.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_909b004d	comment	The Transformers (IDW): Once IDW announced they were ending the series and starting a reboot, head writers James Roberts and John Barber realized they didn't have to worry about keeping the setting intact for later writers and it shows; Cybertron and all of its colonies were destroyed, over half the cast died, most of the major factions were wiped out, all the overarching plotlines were tied off, and the ending goes out of its way to squash the idea of continuations. Even the Sequel Hook pretty much says "this continuity's done, go read the next one if you want more." Later on, IDW's use of the Transformers comic license was about to lapse and return to Hasbro, so their response was to have the writer-artist duo Nick Roche and E.J. Sui make one final story that depicts the near-entirety of the Cybertronians having gone extinct after centuries of war, with the sole survivor going on one final adventure.note Granted, there was still one more story after that, but even then it's explicitly a follow-up to one set in a different continuity and universe.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_90c73dda	comment	The final book in Animorphs ended the main conflict and thrust the team into a Bolivian Army Ending three years later, strongly hinting that every member of the team died but Cassie. Ironically, this final book was titled The Beginning. K.A. Applegate would later defend the ending as being a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome, arguing that wars never have a quick and easy solution, but she's also been quite bitter about Scholastic owning the rights to her franchise. It might even be a bit of both.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_91e45f5	comment	Apollo Justice: Ace Attorney was the last game in the Ace Attorney franchise that was led by Shu Takumi, and Takumi knew it. To ensure that no more Ace Attorney games would be made, he had Phoenix Wright lose his attorney's badge and gave the legal system a jury. This did not work: In the next game, Dual Destinies, Phoenix gets his badge back, and all plans to rewrite the legal system were forgotten and never brought up. Then, in the game after that, Apollo leaves the Wright agency, returning almost everything to how it was before Apollo Justice, except that Takumi is still contractually forbidden to work on any mainstream Ace Attorney game. However, he still worked on The Great Ace Attorney, as well as the crossover with Professor Layton, so the split must have at least been somewhat amicable.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_92844ddb	comment	Jim Henson's Dinosaurs ended the world in the very last episode, so that revivals couldn't happen.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_93542e0c	comment	The reason why Shrek Forever After was made was so that DreamWorks Animation could prevent the Shrek franchise from decaying any further after the middling reception to Shrek the Third. Even the title was changed from Shrek Goes Fourth to Shrek Forever After to cement the idea that it was a Grand Finale — and while reactions to the film were mixed, it's usually considered better than the third film, and a fitting send-off to the characters. Since then, the only new entries have been the Puss in Boots spin-off films and their associated Sequel Series made for Netflix. A Continuity Reboot was announced, but seems to have been quietly canceled; Puss in Boots: The Last Wish presents itself as a direct sequel to the original Shrek films and ends on a Sequel Hook that suggests DreamWorks intends to continue the series after all.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_93f27f86	comment	Army Men had an example with Sarge's War, which kills off the original cast including Sarge himself; which happened after 3DO went bankrupt and the rights were sold to Take-Two Interactive. Only a handful of games were published after that; and none of them featured characters from the main series.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_97e7606f	comment	Alan Wake has an in-universe example, where Alan Wake is planning to end his popular mystery series by killing off the main character.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_98dc652b	comment	Dragon Ball GT was a Post-Script Season to the anime, and its lack of planning showed, with the production suffering from many teething issues, as well as the ratings and merchandise sales slowly declining due to franchise fatigue, something that started with the Buu arc of Z. As a possible reflection of that, the ending is far more final than Z's, which had left plenty of room for continuation. It concludes with the show's main plot device and Reset Button, Shenron, vanishing from reality and taking the Dragon Balls with him while lecturing the cast about how they abused their power. Goku goes with him after taking the time to visit his friends and provide some closure on his relationships with them. After that, a Distant Finale confirms that Goku and Shenron don't return for the next century, and by then all the other characters barring his granddaughter Pan are dead. Incidentally, the writers of GT has this ending in mind from the very beginning, as they knew they were on borrowed time. When making Dragon Ball Super, Toei decided to set it in the middle of the ten-year Time Skip between Kid Buu's defeat and the end of the manga, and over several years it slowly made clear that it didn't acknowledge GT (meaning Super doesn't have to worry about it if it were to tell stories after the end of the manga).
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_9d47a2a2	comment	When asked how A Song of Ice and Fire will end, George R. R. Martin said 'No one will be alive by the last book. In fact, they all die in the fifth. The sixth book will be just a thousand-page description of snow blowing across the graves'... which, even though he was clearly partly joking, especially since the fifth book was released since then, implies that he intends to do something like this to his series. Whether or not the final books will ever be published is a different question, though.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_a1d383d7	comment	It's all but stated that this was meant to be the case with Riddle School 4, as clicking on anything drops the main character into a lava pit, and the ending text implies that this game was supposed to end the series. Fortunately, JonBro retconned this game as a dream and gave the series three more games and a proper conclusion.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_a660fd96	comment	Avengers: Endgame does this for The Infinity Saga, as Natasha Romanoff (aka Black Widow) dies from sacrificing herself for the Soul Stone, Tony Stark (aka Iron Man) dying after using the Infinity Stones that were gathered from the time heist to snap 2014 Thanos and his goons out of existence. Also, the original Infinity Stones were destroyed by OG Thanos five years earlier, and Steve Rogers (aka Captain America) ends up traveling back to the 1940s to stay with Peggy Carter after returning the time-heist Infinity Stones to their original points in time and his elderly self passes the shield to Sam Wilson (aka Falcon), believing him to be a worthy successor for the Captain America mantle.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_a725fd30	comment	For Your Eyes Only opens with a character specific example with Blofeld. Some years after losing a lawsuit with Kevin McClory (who collaborated with Ian Fleming on a then-failed film screenplay that ended up being reworked and made into the Thunderball novel and film), producer Albert R. Broccoli killed off SPECTRE's leader Blofeld note or, at least, an unnamed character widely presumed to be Blofeld in the Action Prologue of For Your Eyes Only, in a deliberately and insultingly throwaway manner, just to stick it to McClory (who prevented Blofeld from being the villain of The Spy Who Loved Me and later revisited the Thunderball story he still held the rights to in Never Say Never Again).
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b00aafbe	comment	This happened with the Genesis comic Universe by Malibu Comics before The Ultraverse when the sales are low that the company just killed them off literally in the final issue of the protectors.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b2913b67	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b2913b67	comment	One of the episodes of Friday the 13th: The Series revolved around a cursed comic book that could turn its owner into an invincible comic book character. However, on learning that the creator of the character had tried to Torch the Franchise and Run but been stopped, they were able to find out the character's one weakness via his artwork.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b2ac2311	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b2ac2311	comment	Averted by Peanuts. Charles M. Schulz just retired, died a day later, and his final strip just said goodbye. No artist or writer in their right mind would ever dream of a Peanuts comic without Schulz. Regardless, since there was 50 years' worth of strips, newspapers were content with re-runs.note That doesn't extend to films or TV specials, since Bill Melendez was mostly responsible for those. However, The Peanuts Movie still felt the need to have Schulz involved to lend it legitimacy.
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Peanuts (Comic Strip)	hasFeature	Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b2ac2311
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b4fe32c9	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_b4fe32c9	comment	Invader Zim: Lampshaded. Long after the show had been cancelled, Trolling Creator Jhonen Vasquez announced on his website that, as the maker of IZ canon, he officially declares that Zim crashed his spaceship and died off-screen, in response to constant fan inquires about reviving the show. Vasquez and Nickelodeon would do so years later with a comic continuation and a TV movie.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ba366aa8	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ba366aa8	comment	This appears to have done this to the Syphon Filter series with Logan's Shadow, as the ending involves the possible deaths of three of the four main characters. Sony has no plans for further sequels. The series made a comeback with Days Gone, with an Easter Egg not only revealing that the games take place in the same universe but also implying that the zombie virus is in fact a strain of the titular Syphon Filter bioweapon, meaning that the franchise ended with the protagonists failing and a Zombie Apocalypse destroying most of humanity as a result.
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Syphon Filter (Video Game)	hasFeature	Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ba366aa8
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ba3d2f37	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ba3d2f37	comment	Logan does this for the Wolverine franchise, and the X-Men franchise as a whole, by taking place 20 Minutes into the Future, after the X-Men disband for good, having a now-senile Xavier die in the middle of the film, and killing Logan at the end. Though this retroactively didn't mean as much as the creators intended as 21st Century Fox started the process of being bought out by Disney less than a year from its release. The acquisition went through in March 2019 and now the entire X-Men Film Series is being rebooted under the umbrella of the Marvel Cinematic Universe.
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Logan	hasFeature	Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ba3d2f37
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_bee7440	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_bee7440	comment	One reason for Drakengard's Mind Screw structure with seemingly disjointed alternate paths and heavy body count, was due to creator Yoko Taro not expecting his game series to get any sequels and therefore making the game as "conclusive" as he could make it. In a twist of irony, it was this trait that gave him and his franchise its following and allowed the series to continue.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c03c2b44	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c03c2b44	comment	Attempted in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Director Gore Verbinski was getting so fatigued by the ever-expanding scope of the trilogy's subplots that he eventually intended for this movie to resolve all the characters' stories so conclusively that there would not be another movie. Two more movies happened anyway, but Verbinski refused to do the fifth one because he believed it existed solely to make money. Ironically, said fifth film ended up doing the torching for Verbinski, becoming a Box Office Bomb, that combined with the legal troubles behind lead actor Johnny Depp would lead to Disney working on a Continuity Reboot.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c13792a1	comment	God of War III ends with an apocalypse, all the Greek gods dead, and Kratos performing a Heroic Sacrifice to save what's left of humanity. The Stinger however hints at Kratos' survival. The next installments God of War: Ghost of Sparta and God of War: Ascension were prequels designed to answer the few mysteries left. It wasn't until 2018 that the timeline continued with the Soft Reboot God of War (PS4), focusing on Norse Mythology instead; that game, however, does establish, through the appearance of Athena and the return of the Blades of Chaos, that the previous games still happened.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c35714d6	comment	Three of the four series of Blackadder ended by killing off some or all of their main characters either as a real or parody version of this, as theyâ€™d all be alive and reincarnated in a different time period the following series. The third one was the only one where this didn't happen. Sure, the Prince Regent died, but Blackadder took his place.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c3c1f1d2	comment	The Matrix Revolutions, due to its Grand Finale status for the original trilogy. Zion has been saved, but the world is still ruined and the dock has been devastated by the thousands of Sentinels and the drill that bored through earlier. Additionally, Trinity, Smith, and Neo are all Killed Off for Real, and the Architect lives on to continue his Affably Evil existence, though the Oracle survives to combat him and ensure the era of peace between man and machine will last.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c43df4d8	comment	Doctor Who webcast "Death Comes To Time" is an odd example of this, coming out when the original series of the show had been cancelled. It features the Seventh Doctor, even though the Eighth Doctor had already appeared (though the canonicity of the TV movie was heavily disputed before the Revival Series), and has the Doctor dying when he uses Time Lord powers that only appear in this story to kill a rogue Time Lord and save Ace, and claims that the age of the Time Lords is over. It is used by some fans to de-canonize the TV Movie and the New Series. However, the majority of fans don't hold this view, and it is widely believed to be non-canon, largely because of how unlike DW a lot of it feels, the audio drama "Zagreus" implying it takes place in an alternate reality.
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Doctor Who	hasFeature	Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c43df4d8
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c74a0802	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c74a0802	comment	In-universe: in Misery, the author Paul Sheldon grows to hate his series of romance novels about Misery Chastain. In his latest book, he kills Misery so he can end the series and focus on more "serious" writing. Then he finds himself under the care of a demented fan (Annie Wilkes) who's very unhappy with that ending. She forces Paul to write one more novel to undo that ending.
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Misery	hasFeature	Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c74a0802
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c817238f	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c817238f	comment	Call of Duty: Zombies reached a fairly definitive conclusion with Revelations, the final map of the Black Ops III season which resolved the main Myth Arc and provided an Earn Your Happy Ending for the heroes. However, Treyarch brought the series back for Black Ops IV, with a storyline that undoes the happy ending, and seemed to be building to the true finale with a great, epic final battle in the works. Ultimately, the story ends on a shockingly dark, bleak note as all the heroes die as they literally destroy the series's universe in hopes of finally ending all the chaos and zombie mayhem. Few of the ongoing plot threads were resolved, the main antagonist ended up not being faced, and literally everyone died except for Samantha and Eddie. Many fans suspect that this was Treyarch's tough-love way of ending the franchise and refusing to do anything further with the series, and asking players to move on. Things didn't stay that way for long however: the Zombies mode for Cold War, Vanguard and Modern Warfare 3 reboot opted to continue the storyline in a different universe with references to the classic Aether story arc.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c867f05c	comment	The 2022-2023 run of The Punisher ends with a rather decisive denouement of Frank Castle's main character and concept. Frank finally ends up Jumping Off the Slippery Slope and goes on his most brutal rampage yet, culminating in him coming within a hair's breath of murdering an unarmed teenage member of a white supremacist group that hadn't actually committed any crimes before other heroes intervene and arrest him. While imprisoned and awaiting sentencing, the heroes individually give Frank a scathing "The Reason You Suck" Speech, outlining exactly how selfish and hypocritical his "crusade" against crime really is, that his actions were never about "righteous vengeance", but sating his own bloodlust, and that he's no better than the criminals he's killed. All of this is capped off by Frank's newly resurrected wife confronting him and making it clear that she never wanted any of this, that she is horrified and disgusted that countless have died in her and her children's names, and that she doesn't want anything to do with him anymore and has liquidated all his assets, safehouses and equipment to charity. This finally breaks Frank, who makes a Deal with the Devil to be transported to another world to start over, not as an avenger, but a protector and has seemingly ditched the Punisher name for good.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_c97651d6	comment	Flight of the Conchords: Brett Mckenzie and Jemaine Clement used up most of their existing material in the first season and had a hard time writing the second; rather than struggling to continue, they end the second season with all three leads being deported back to New Zealand and stuck working as shepherds (which they're apparently okay with).
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ca677a95	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ca677a95	comment	Of all shows, Little House on the Prairie ended with the entire town being dynamited, though the cast was spared. According to Michael Landon, the reason for blowing up the set was so that it couldn't be used by later shows or commercials.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_cb570c4a	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_cb570c4a	comment	Mostly Harmless ended with every version of Earth in the Multiverse being destroyed, and almost all of the regular characters dying. Oddly enough, creator Douglas Adams did intend to make a new book in the series to undo the damage, as he'd written Mostly Harmless while severely depressed and was extremely unhappy about where he'd taken things, but died suddenly of a heart attack before he could write it. Eoin Colfer was contracted to write his own continuation.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_cc1ec7ec	comment	Daredevil: While Charles Soule didn't do this with Daredevil (Charles Soule), Chip Zdarsky revealed that he and Soule did joke about writers' tendency to do this with Daredevil when preparing for his own run. The series has long had a tradition of writers ending their runs with either insane Darkest Hour cliffhangers or demolished status quos and leaving the next writer to deal with it, a practice started by Frank Miller when he ended his seminal run with Matt being stripped of his license to practice law and his life plunging into turmoil after Kingpin learned his identity. Later writers would go even further, with such memorable torchings as Ann Nocenti leaving Matt broken up with or betrayed by both of his love interests and struggling to recover, Brian Michael Bendis exposing his secret identity then sending him to prison, Ed Brubaker having him become leader of the Hand after his wife is driven insane by Mister Fear, and Mark Waid going the opposite direction and giving the character a conclusive happy ending that the above-mentioned Soule had to override to tell his own story.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ccf0819f	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ccf0819f	comment	Vince McMahon has done this to every territory and promotion he's taken over, except his father's (which he retooled with Broad Strokes to everything that came before him) and the promotions that died off before he took control of them (American Wrestling Association, ECW, WCW). In fact, his actions stinking up the spot on a Ted Turner station directly led to WCW's creation.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_cdf4ee66	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_cdf4ee66	comment	Master of Martial Hearts ended its last episode with a huge Take That! towards its viewers, anime in general, and especially Panty Fighter series. Any character who wasn't killed was so tarnished that they'd be unlikely to receive any audience sympathy again. It wasn't exactly the highest-quality production in the first place, but still.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ce50887e	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ce50887e	comment	The original manga is this on a personal level for Akira Toriyama, with a Distant Finale that, while ending on a note of And the Adventure Continues, feels a bit rushed (which Toriyama addressed somewhat in the Kanzenban release). Comments by Toriyama soon after the manga ended have tones of Creator Breakdown, such as expressing frustration over having to do designs for GT (which are either experimental or the ones he already did for the end of the manga), and commenting that the fans won't let the franchise die. This is likely because he had been making manga since Dr. Slump in 1980, and had expressed intentions to end the story since the Saiyan Arc (hence Z's name). Pointedly, while Toriyama has since become involved with Dragon Ball again, particularly in The New '10s with Battle of Gods and all subsequent media, he has never created another serialized manga since.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d211d624	comment	Captain Carrot and His Amazing Zoo Crew!: fantasy writer Ezra Hound attempts to kill off his hero, Bow-Zar the Barkbarian, so he can write serious fiction. Bow-Zar, in turn, time travels to the present and attempts to kill off Ezra Hound.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d43be22a	comment	Halloween: Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later might have what can be considered a happy ending case of this trope, with Michael Myers, the core of the franchise, decapitated, finally bringing an end to his terror. It didn't work, as Halloween: Resurrection came out and changed it from Michael Myers being the one that was decapitated to someone else dressed as him. Apparently this was intended from the start, however, and the reveal was only put off because Laurieâ€™s actress wanted to have people actually think sheâ€™d killed Michael for a few years. Another example from the Halloween franchise is Halloween II (2009). Rob Zombie didn't want to continue making more films in the reboot series (and apparently the Weinstein Company had difficulty finding other directors who were interested), so he ultimately went out of his way to make it nearly impossible to continue this iteration of the franchise by having Loomis, Michael, and Laurie all killed.note The Theatrical cut has Laurie committed to an asylum, however. Done it again, obviously, in Halloween Ends where both Michael Myers AND the guy who was established as a sort of successor, Corey Cunningham, are definitely dead by the end of the movie. The movie goes out of its way to establish Michael's gone by not only having him killed by Laurie, but his lifeless corpse paraded through town and ultimately grinded to a pulp in a car grinder. Evil Died That Night indeed.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d56cafaf	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d56cafaf	comment	This was likely the plan with Power Rangers RPM as Disney was done with the series and didn't want to produce it anymore. The world was wiped out by an evil computer virus, with all that remains of humanity trapped in a domed city, with only the smallest hint that the future will be bright. After Saban bought the rights back, RPM was rendered an alternate universe, though with the occasional nod or cameo from a past ranger to keep it in the loop.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d5ddd6c1	comment	Back during the original run of the PokÃ©mon anime, how Takeshi Shudō had intended to end it oozed of this trope. For starters, it would have started with Pikachu leading a revolt against humanity with Meowth as his ambassador, Misty becoming a Faux Action Girl, Ash putting aside his childish To Be a Master dream, and generally playing up PokÃ©mon as fantasy dogfighting which Game Freak has been trying to avoid since day one. Understandably, Game Freak put their foot down on this one the second they caught wind of it. Ash's saga would later receive a more definitive ending with Journeys.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d7081096	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d7081096	comment	Done with the Mother series. Shigesato Itoi wanted the series to end with Mother 3, so he destroyed what little else remained of the entire world, and failed to answer the question of how the characters survived that - but they all personally insist to the player that they survived and they're happy. Somehow. Itoi said that the original script for the game was even darker, so the original ending was probably meant to be an "Everybody Dies" Ending. That being said, Itoi has said that while he is done with the franchise, he is excited to see what fans can come up with.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d7fba9ea	comment	Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter from Mario Vargas Llosa has an in-universe example. A famous radio drama writer enjoys top ratings in all his radio serials... until he starts losing track of his characters. When everyone starts noticing that dead characters still appear, and others start jumping in on other unrelated serials, the scriptwriter ends up doing this to all his serials: Earth-shattering earthquakes, massive fires, stampedes, where even the main characters die.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d8cdb77	comment	Mega Man Zero 4 does this for the Mega Man Zero series by having Neo Arcadia destroyed by the Ragnarok satellite, and ending the game with Zero not surviving Ragnarok's reentry into the atmosphere after killing Dr. Weil. Granted, Zero 4 itself only exists because the development team realized they had left one major plot thread unresolved from Mega Man Zero 3 (Dr. Weil in control of Neo Arcadia) and made sure to give the series a definitive ending this time around, something that can't be said for the other series in the Classic timeline. Also something of a Downplayed Trope, as Zero would get its own Sequel Series in Mega Man ZX, with Zero essentially coming back in the form of Biometal Model Z.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d908efc	comment	Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba ends about as definitively as it can: Over 95% of the cast dies in the final battle, the few survivors are all crippled for life in some way, the demonic threat is permanently ended through the death of Muzan, and the withering of the Blue Spider Lily, which is the origin of said threat. Furthermore, just to erase any lingering possibilities of a continuation, the story's final chapter flash forwards 100 years into the future, showing the lives of the surviving cast's descendants.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d9e5ee89	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_d9e5ee89	comment	Hellblazer #300, final issue of the series in wake of DC's decision to end it and integrate John Constantine into mainline DC Universe, ends on John letting his niece Gemma decide whenever or not to erase him from existence, like if he was never born, which she does. Final pages push it into a Gainax Ending with some extra spite as we then see John back at the bar as if nothing happenned, except his first person narration is gone, as if he's no longer really there.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_dbb68ab6	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_dbb68ab6	comment	The final The Chronicles of Narnia novel The Last Battle ends with all the characters dying minus Susan and Narnia being destroyed, is safe to say C. S. Lewis wasn't planning to write another novel after that.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_dde9b6dd	comment	Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare, aside from the self-explanatory title, opens with Freddy Krueger having killed off the entire child population of Springwood. In fact, the producers rejected other scripts, such as one pitched by Peter Jackson, for not being final enough. Years later, Freddy vs. Jason would have to Hand Wave away the Childless Dystopia in Freddy's Dead to show a restored Springwood.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ded9acbd	comment	No Time to Die might be only the end of Daniel Craig as Bond, but the producers made sure to do it in a way that can only be followed by another Continuity Reboot. Bond's Best Friend Felix Leiter (played by Jeffrey Wright) is killed off. So is his nemesis Blofeld (Christoph Waltz), and all of the evil organization he runs, Spectre. And to close it off, Bond himself dies, choosing to remain in the villain's lair as it is bombarded with missiles after getting infected with a variant of the Heracles Virus by Saffin.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e10d8dba	comment	Another example from the Halloween franchise is Halloween II (2009). Rob Zombie didn't want to continue making more films in the reboot series (and apparently the Weinstein Company had difficulty finding other directors who were interested), so he ultimately went out of his way to make it nearly impossible to continue this iteration of the franchise by having Loomis, Michael, and Laurie all killed.note The Theatrical cut has Laurie committed to an asylum, however.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e11de2a2	comment	Doom Patrol (2019) concludes with Rita Farr/Elasti-Woman dying of old age before she could have her longevity restored, the surviving members of the Doom Patrol disbanding to move on with their lives and Cliff Steele/Robotman shutting down for good after reuniting with his family during his grandson's first birthday since the regaining of his longevity wasn't enough to overcome his Parkinson's. In effect, this prevents any chance of a continuation being produced.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e288fc8d	comment	Death of the Inhumans was essentially this for The Inhumans, with the majority of the Inhumans supporting cast being slaughtered and essentially everything related to the Inhumans mythos except for the Royal Family and the mostly-unrelated Randomly Gifted characters like Ms. Marvel being torched.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e2900ebd	comment	The Hex has an In-Universe example with Secrets of Legendaria, the game that Chandrelle Stormblaze hails from. After getting tired of going through the same thing over and over again, she, during a livestream by a popular streamer, teamed up with the game's villain, Dark Lord Vallamir, and helped him invade the game world, riddling it with glitches that made it unplayable and got the planned series cancelled. As punishment, she was forced to harbor Vallamir in her body for eternity while Lazarus Bleeze, her accomplice, was turned into a Space Marine and booted into the Vicious Galaxy series.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e2b3cc8a	comment	To Boldly Flee was intended to be the Fully Absorbed Finale of The Nostalgia Critic, ending with the character Ascending to a Higher Plane of Existence to never be seen again, thus freeing up Doug Walker to work on other projects. However, like other examples on this page, none of these projects turned out well or had much success, so he was forced to revive the character a scant four months later, with a special revolving around Walker struggling with the question of whether to bring the Nostalgia Critic back or stick with his failing Demo Reel series. It ends with him doing so, writing a brief Hand Wave about the Critic actually being trapped in an illusion (that illusion being Demo Reel, it's revealed that the main character of that show was an amnesiac Critic the whole time) only to escape when a minor recurring character on the show takes his place.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e2f9b5f8	comment	One backup story in Marvel's Conan the Barbarian featured a Robert E. Howard stand-in trying to kill off "Starr the Slayer" (an obvious knockoff of Conan) but the eponymous character somehow came through the fourth wall and slew him before he could do so.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e41ea518	comment	Taken almost literally with the abrupt shutdown of pictures for sad children. The comic's author, Simone Veil, had struggled with mental health issues stemming in part from gender dysphoria (she would later come out as a trans woman) and exacerbated by drug use throughout its run, but in 2014 her struggles spiraled into a full-on Creator Breakdown that resulted in her trying to separate herself from the comic by forfeiting a Kickstarter to give the comic a print run, shutting down the comic's website, and burning print copies of the comic on-cameranote Veil revealed seven years later that they weren't going to be shipped anyways due to various misprints and other manufacturing errors before disappearing from the public eye outside of pseudonymous side-projects and filing takedown notices against reuploads of the strips.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e4f14eec	comment	The Regeneration One continuation of The Transformers (Marvel) seems to have been designed to make any continuation as difficult as possible. By the end of the series, nearly all the Decepticons are dead, as are the vast majority of Autobots and most human characters, Earth and Nebulos are both in ruins, nearly every imaginable plot thread is firmly tied up, and every antagonist is either redeemed or shown in a highly unsympathetic light before being killed off. The universe has been cut off from the multiverse and by extension their god, meaning that no new Cybertronians can be born and the ones that do exist will now die of old age, and a Distant Finale confirms that all the surviving characters did exactly that, living lives of quiet penitence in the aftermath of the war before rusting away into nothingness over the course of many years. The final page suggests that a new form of life will blossom on Cybertron, but it's certainly not played as a Sequel Hook.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e67a7d6c	comment	Negima! Magister Negi Magi received an extremely abrupt Distant Finale ending leaving a lot of unresolved plot threads. A short time later it surfaced that Ken Akamatsu had decided to end the series as a protest against his publisher Kodansha for their attempts to take away all the rights to the work, including the copyright itself and their intention to sue any and all doujinshi artists using the Negima characters and/or setting. Akamatsu, who himself began his career as a doujin artist, didn't take kindly to this, promptly ending the series immediately. The story goes out of its way to make any sort of continuation completely impossible. The Big Bad is dealt with off-screen, and the romance is left ambiguous apart from Ship Sinking for the four most popular pairings for the main character. Akamatsu returned to Kodansha once he worked it out with Kodansha that they would never, ever, try the stuff they had talked about before, such as dual-copyright ownership of the manga, suing doujin artists, etc. He later wrote UQ Holder! as at first a Stealth Sequel to Negima, with a few returning characters, graduallly picking up more and more of Negima's old cast and started honing in on the biggest unresolved plot thread from the previous story, dealing with the Big Bad, even being subtitled UQ Holder: Mahou Sensei Negima 2 after its jump into a monthly magazine. It is worth pointing out the above-mentioned sequence of events is the most generally accepted interpretation of events among fans, pieced together from allusions, comments and vague statements here and there, but no official confirmation on the whole affair and Akamatsu's actual reasons has ever been stated, especially since he and Kodansha kept a professional relationship throughout UQ Holder's run.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e7e37776	comment	Fillion made a similar joke about any potential revival of Firefly ending with Mal's death, because "I don't want it to be like James Bond, where everybody gets a shot at it." note "Speaking of which, I'd really like a shot at James Bond."
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e89f120b	comment	Due to his reputation, Tomino's novelization of Mobile Suit Gundam is often mistaken for this; it ends with The Hero getting killed during the Final Battle and most of the White Base crew retiring from the military. However, in interviews Tomino has said that he gave the novels a definitive conclusion because he thought that was the end of it; he didn't anticipate Gundam becoming so popular and successful, and would have written the ending differently otherwise.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_e9ec19e1	comment	Spec Ops: The Line was written in a way to ensure that no sequels or follow-ups could be made to its story. This is why the story ends with almost everyone dying and the main protagonist, Walker, either dying or ending up a psychological wreck. There was an idea for DLC for Adams since his death was off-screen, but even then, the script for the game made his death unambiguous.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ea684cd1	comment	Bayonetta 3 ends with the protagonists killed off and sent to Hell, and a completely obscure Butt-Monkey declaring herself the new Bayonetta. The studio did manage to make a prequel with what was left of the franchise.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_ed113c02	comment	Saints Row IV was written with finality in mind, as THQ was going through some serious financial troubles and went bankrupt during the game's development. Then came a bunch of expansions... along with a standalone expansion set in Hell, a spin-off that follows from an ending in the standalone expansion, and a hard reboot that attempts to start over from scratch, but that last one flopped due to turning off gangster fans with 'hip outlaw' protagonists and turning off those that just wanted to slaughter people with an endless stream of bugs and latency.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_eef69f10	comment	One of the earliest examples: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was starting to get tired of Sherlock Holmes and wanted to write historical novels, so he had Holmes and his nemesis Moriarty die at the end of "The Final Problem". He did try to ignore the backlash caused by the move, and was successful for a decade, before returning to Holmes after said historical novels failed to sell.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f1e6d15a	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f1e6d15a	comment	Kid Cosmic: The third season wrapped up with the heroes' Cosmic Stones that enabled their powers becoming permanently inert in the process of defeating Erodius and Fantos, Papa G left wheelchair-bound and on borrowed time as a result of giving up the healing stone in his possession and no hostile alien enemies remaining now that Fantos is dead, the Cosmic Stones no longer work and Erodius is no longer destroying planets. This is clearly to prevent Netflix from renewing the series for more episodes without any involvement from Craig McCracken. Though given Netflixâ€™s massive cancellations to its Kids and Family shows that happened soon after Kid Cosmic ended, itâ€™s not like they were going to follow it up anyways.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f31d7d98	comment	This is ultimately how Drawn Together ended in its Direct to Video Movie. After everything was said and done, Spanky accidentally steps on an Eraser Bomb; killing the entire cast and destroying the Drawn Together house. This is in addition to the other housemates being Killed Off for Real.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f38b71c4	comment	Before the release of Dead Space 3, EA stated that there would be no sequel unless the game sold over 5 million units, more than the first two games combined. Needless to say, the game fell far short of that mark. This may explain why the Awakened DLC ends with the Brethren Moons fully awakening and beginning their campaign of genocide on the galaxy, and there is literally nothing Isaac, Carver, or anyone can do to stop them, making further sequels all but impossible. Interestingly, there was a plan on what to do after the DLC, as explained in a Wha Happun? video by Matt McMuscles: it would have remnants of humanity aboard a flotilla and advance from there.note There's still hope for the franchise, as the remake of the first game was a smash hit.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f6a1016f	comment	The Matrix: The Matrix Revolutions, due to its Grand Finale status for the original trilogy. Zion has been saved, but the world is still ruined and the dock has been devastated by the thousands of Sentinels and the drill that bored through earlier. Additionally, Trinity, Smith, and Neo are all Killed Off for Real, and the Architect lives on to continue his Affably Evil existence, though the Oracle survives to combat him and ensure the era of peace between man and machine will last. At least until a Trilogy Creep showed up nearly two decades later, with the indicative name The Matrix Resurrections. And that film, in turn, has been described as Lana Wachowski going out of her way to do this again. She and her sister Lilly had been asked for years to make a fourth Matrix movie, and knowing that Warner Bros. was ready to reboot the series with or without them, Lana decided to bite the bullet and take the director's chair herself, chiefly to make a film that would destroy any chance of that ever happening.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f8956ef3	comment	YuYu Hakusho: A less visceral example than most. Yoshihiro Togashi didn't really want to continue the series past the Chapter Black arc (or at least fought tooth and nail with his editors about the story direction). Which would explain why the Three Kings arc shifts so abruptly to such a low-stakes tournament and the reveal that King Enma had been brainwashing demons and sending them against the human world to generate more crimes to solve. It's also revealed the average demon is no more prone to evil or violence than most humans. Couple that with the fact that Yusuke settled down running a ramen stand, there's no way for the story to continue.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f9192cad	comment	Novas Aventuras de Megaman was almost less torch the franchise and run and more torch the franchise and take over. One of the writers created the character Princess in an attempt to kill everyone there and use it to make it her own series. Thankfully, someone caught him before it could happen and Princess was Put on a Bus.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_f959f1d8	comment	The last Witch World novel had every single character from the series traveling all over the world to shut down all the Gates so that no one and nothing can come through from Outside again, ever. So far it has stuck.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_fab6bdd9	comment	He then, however, had Kid Loki reappear in his Young Avengers run as a Spirit Advisor to Old Loki, although it's not clear whether it's a genuine haunting or a delusion. And then went on to retcon the original torching - it wasn't Old Loki who took over Kid Loki, but a copy Old Loki had created to screw Kid Loki over (Old Loki being definitely dead after the end of Siege). Old Loki's plan worked, but the third Loki was haunted by guilt over killing Kid Loki and subconsciously used his reality-warping powers to manifest the Kid Loki ghost. Once he owned up to what he'd done, the ghost disappeared. That Loki then split into two different versions from alternate timelines, one that embraced Old Loki's evil and one that chose to voluntarily embrace ego death and build a new identity. The Loki that continued after that all shook out within Loki: Agent of Asgard was effectively a fourth version.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_fc1d6ac6	comment	In The Witcher novel series, the protagonist gets killed with a pitchfork in the last book. Most of the named characters are already dead, are dying, or will be dead soon. Just to Salt the Earth, the whole world will also suffer a The Black Death -grade epidemic (which is, in fact, the Black Death dragged from another world into Nilfgaard by Ciri). Then, the video game comes out with a continuation. The author is fairly inconsistent in his approach, though. In an interview from the Enhanced Edition of the game, Andrzej Sapkowski stated that he is fine with the games existing and views them as valid stories in the continuity... but during 2012 Polcon, Sapkowski did a U-turn and declared the new continuity non-canon. When he did write a book, he used Geralt but wrote it as a prequel to the entire saga. Rather than rejoicing, the fandom should accept that it's a Ghost in the Shell situation, with two separate continuities: One for the books only and one for the books and games.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_fc92147	type	Torch the Franchise and Run
Torch the Franchise and Run / int_fc92147	comment	Later on, IDW's use of the Transformers comic license was about to lapse and return to Hasbro, so their response was to have the writer-artist duo Nick Roche and E.J. Sui make one final story that depicts the near-entirety of the Cybertronians having gone extinct after centuries of war, with the sole survivor going on one final adventure.note Granted, there was still one more story after that, but even then it's explicitly a follow-up to one set in a different continuity and universe.
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Torch the Franchise and Run / int_fd6407b	comment	In 1990, after getting a deal with DC, Alan Grant killed off Johnny Alpha, the protagonist of Strontium Dog, to prevent any new writers from messing with him. A few years later, John Wagner started writing prequels and recently brought Johnny Back from the Dead, to the disgust of the fanbase. The end of The Life And Death Of Johnny Alpha leaves it ambiguous as to whether he's dead again.
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Torch the Franchise and Run	processingCategory2	Ending Tropes
Torch the Franchise and Run	processingCategory2	Series Tropes
Torch the Franchise and Run	processingCategory2	Trivia
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