It’s what I’ll call an annoying yet common trend in franchises when things go to shit.

Pacific Rim 2, Diablo 3, and other stories. Aren’t you tired of some characters you enjoyed in a previous story being killed for shock value in the first .0000125 milliseconds of the new installment or sequel? Don’t you like it when the new creative lead on board decides to show their worth and make an indelible mark upon the pre-existing audience, in the most ham-fisted way possible?

Whether it’s an attempt to show themselves as the new kid in town by taking beloved characters and killing them, or by coldly calculating that using up characters that audiences may have had an emotional investment in would evoke some emotion, any emotion, for whatever script they want to “strengthen,” the showrunners pyrrhicly used up whatever emotional investment there may have been but leaves nothing for future projects in the same story.

Yay, Deckard Caine is dead! Now what? …let’s leave all of tristeham behind entirely, nothing else to do there.

The female protagonist of pacific rim is dead, along with somebody’s mom. Now what? Newt is also rewritten to be a bad guy. What are you going to do now, after byrning bridges narratively, and embittering apathy towards your future projects? Nothing? Okay.

There’s even the rare case where new showrunner syndrome can come from within, with the original showrunners of avatar the last airbender deciding to kill off all of the previous incarnations of the avatar, leaving the series with nothing more than korra and the newly introduced Rava. Some people may like this retcon and resetting of the status quo, but I for sure found it unpleasant, positive feelings for legend of korra aside.