Exactly What It Says on the Tin. A character who remains alive in a work of fiction dies in the adaptation. Both a death trope and an adaptation trope, this comes in two variations: * More commonly, a character who did not die in the source material is killed off in the adaptation. * Alternatively, a character who did get killed at some point in the source material is killed off a lot sooner in the adaptation. Despite the above hypothetical example being a movie, this trope is hardly limited to book-to-film adaptations, as you'll see in the examples. Not to be confused with Doomed by Canon.