Bury Your Disabled

As to the exposure of children, let there be a law that no deformed child shall live.

—Aristotle (384-322 BCE)

Bury Your Disabled is a trope often employed by authors, playwrights and screenwriters to demonstrate certain ideas about the disabled person and/or their killer. The ideas, sadly, are often problematic and frequently have Unfortunate Implications. This is extremely common; in 1992, for example, researchers Guy Cumberbatch and Ralph Negrine showed that disabled characters in TV fiction are three times likelier to be dead by the time the show ends than non-disabled characters.There are at least five different types of this trope.

1. Natural Causes: The disabled character dies at the end of the book, movie, TV episode, etc., due to natural causes, and often due to the disabling condition and/or complications from this condition and/or emergency surgery. In Glee, Jean Sylvester, Sue's older sister is this type; she had Down's Syndrome and died of pneumonia. Another prime example occurs in Rory O'Shea Was Here), where the eponymous character dies of Duchenne muscular dystrophy. Often a case of Truth in Television; Duchenne muscular dystrophy, for example, is characterized by muscle degeneration and early death.
2. Violence: This type occurs when the disabled person is killed off in a violent manner, usually involving murder or neglect. This can be because they (the disabled character) were considered, by the writer and audience, an easier victim because of their disability. While authors and directors often employ this one as a Tear Jerker and as a means of demonstrating the killer's evil (who would prey on someone so much weaker?), it has Unfortunate Implications, such as shooting the death from the POV of the person responsible (thus encouraging the audience to identify with this person and consider the possibility that what they're doing is not that bad), as well as suggesting that someone who is disabled can't protect themselves. ^[1]
3. Suicide: which carries the Unfortunate Implication that one is better off dead than disabled. Or, in the worst case scenario, the writer who uses this trope really does believe that one is better dead than disabled. The fate of the male lead in Me Before You (a rich quadriplegic man who commits suicide) is a textbook example of this type.
4. "Mercy Kill": Someone close to the disabled person either kills the disabled person at their request or straight up murders them -- as in Suicide, because either the victim or the killer considers disability more detestable than death. This has serious Unfortunate Implications in that it not only presents disability as something that cannot and should not be lived with but also presents the killer as someone who is performing a difficult but righteous and merciful act.
5. Accidental: The disabled person dies in an accident, often one that would not have taken place if the disabled person had been more careful.

More than likely, the character in question is being killed off by the writers specifically because he/she is disabled. This is usually a plot point that is supposed to be a Tear Jerker or, in the case of horror movies, meant to be shocking. This can also combine with the trope of the Littlest Cancer Patient: the frail, wheelchair-bound waif is Too Good for This Sinful Earth, and their death will be a sweet release at the end.

Bury Your Disabled will most likely happen to a current or (near-)future wheelchair user, a paraplegic or quadriplegic person, or someone with an intellectual disability. See also Death by Disfigurement, which has some similar Unfortunate Implications, and Throwing Off the Disability, which disposes of a disabled character by erasing their disability.

As a Death Trope, all Spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware.

Examples of Bury Your Disabled include:

Film

• The eponymous character from Rory O'Shea Was Here (aka Inside I'm Dancing) died due to complication from his Duchennes Muscular Dystrophy.
• Franklin Hardesty from the original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre.
• The TV-movie When You Remember Me. Of course, considering it's based on real events, this is a case of real life writing the script.
• Averted in Alien Resurrection, where Vriess, despite being disabled, survives till the end of the movie. This being an Alien movie, that is quite a feat!
• Maggie Fitzgerald from Million Dollar Baby. Also a feat of Unfortunate Implication since Clint Eastwood had a battle against the Americans with Disabilities Act before the movie was made.
• Marvel Ann from Psycho Beach Party. Though it may be possible she was killed because she was a huge bitch.
• Averted in Feast. Hot Wheels was one of the survivors at the end.
• Semi-averted in Diary of the Dead. Samuel doesn't kill himself because he's deaf, he kills himself because he gets bit by a zombie. Subverts Type 2 because Samuel was more than capable of defending himself from zombies. Makes it more like a case of Better Dead Than Undead.
• In Friday the 13th Part 2, Jason doesn't pick favorites, and kills everyone equally. Including the guy in a wheelchair who got a machete to the face and was then pushed down the stairs... in the rain.
• Kevin Dillon from the film, The Mighty.
• Played straight in Breakfast On Pluto. Patrick "Kitten" Braden's childhood friend dies in an IRA bomb blast. The police sent in a simple robot to disarm it, and he rushed out assuming it was a toy. The friend in question, Lawrence, had Down Syndrome.
• Will in A Nightmare on Elm Street 3: Dream Warriors. Possibly a subversion, since he was killed in his dream, where he can walk. In Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare the deaf character gets his head exploded.
• In the first Final Destination they make a point of showing that one of the passengers on the ill-fated Flight 180 is a physically and mentally handicapped man.
• The 1971 film The Zodiac Killer has a scene where the villain shoves a person in a wheelchair off a cliff.
• The wheelchair user Uncle Albert gets slashed to death by the eponymous vengeance demon in Pumpkinhead: Blood Feud.
• Derek, the Token Minority in Hellraiser Hellworld, has very severe asthma, and "dies" in his hallucination when he wanders off alone to look for his inhaler after losing it. In the real world, he just had an attack and died from it.
• Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi is probably the most famous example, with Darth Vader, a quadriplegic and quadruple amputee dependent on cybernetics and a ventilator, being the object of the example.
• Gattaca subverts this trope then plays it straight. The subversion comes along in the form of Inspirationally Disadvantaged Vincent Freeman, who is disabled by society's standards by not being genetically engineered. He has a life expectancy of 30.2 years, yet he's alive by film's end. Played straight with Jerome Eugene Morrow, who is paralyzed from the waist down and commits suicide at the end of the movie by climbing into an incinerator.
• Rubber subverts (or averts?) this with the wheelchair-bound Spectator at the end of the movie. The closest type he fits is Type 2, however it's obvious he's more of a case of Anyone Can Die than Bury Your Disabled considering the nature of the killer in the film (a Psychokinetic Tire).
• Chirrut Îmwe, the Blind Seer Warrior Monk played by Donnie Yen in the film Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, activates the switch to send the Death Star plan to the rebels...and is hit by a thermal imploder and dies shortly afterwards. Probably closest to a Type 5--though he's hardly unique among Rogue One characters for dying.

Literature

• Played straight in the second-to-last Animorphs book, where all of the Auxiliary Animorphs (all of whom had been handicapped at some point and most of whom still were) are ruthlessly murdered by Visser One/Three.
• Played straight in Louisa May Alcott's books. Between Little Men and Jo's Boys, two minor characters die, one physically disabled ( Dick, the young hunchback, the other mentally ( Billy, the boy driven to mental illness by his dad).
• Narrowly averted in The Great Brain when Andy Anderson loses his leg to gangrene and tries to kill himself with J.D.'s help. Neither attempt is successful to begin with, but Tom walks in on the two trying to hang Andy in the barn and offers-for a fee, of course,- to teach Andy to do his chores and play games with his peg leg.
• The books Jason X: Death Moon and Jason X: To The Third Power both feature blind characters who get their heads chopped off.
• Black House by Stephen King and Peter Straub, includes a blind character who is killed by a murderer wearing his dead wife's perfume.
• Averted by House of Leaves, in which Reston, a black man in a wheelchair, survives the book intact.
• Lenny from Of Mice and Men, killed because he was incapable of controlling his strength.
• Snowkit in Warrior Cats is killed by hawk, because as a deaf kitten he can neither hear the bird, nor warnings about it.
• Smike in Nicholas Nickleby.
• In A Single Shard, Crane Man (who has always been forced to live as a beggar due to his bad leg) dies. However, it's justified for three reasons: one, it's established that Crane Man was very old, two, he had a heart attack from a fall into a river, and three, Death by Newbery Medal demands it.
• In Iron Fist, Ton Phanan appears to be between Types 2 and 3. He crash lands on a hostile world and his wingmate follows to try and save him, but though Phanan tries his best he refuses to let them be captured by the enemy, who after all would treat the injuries created in the crash. He suffered from a great deal of Cybernetics Eat Your Future, and Word of God is that though he feared death and tried to avoid it, he didn't feel any great impetus to live. It was more important that the mission continue and the Big Bad be killed, than that he lived and the Big Bad went on making more people like him before he could be stopped.
• The blind man in Guy de Maupassant's short story of the same name ^{[dead link]} .
• In the novel The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Quasimodo is a Type 3. He heads to the Gibbet of Montfaucon, the main gallows of France at the time of the story and where Esmeralda was hanged. He remains there and eventually starves himself to death.

Live-Action TV

• Played straight and narrowly averted in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode Ethics. Worf becomes paraplegic after an accident. By Klingon tradition, he can commit ritualistic suicide (and he comes close to it). However, he takes another presented option when a research doctor wants to test her theory that she can create a new spinal cord for him.
• Inverted on Cold Case, when a student at a school for the deaf kills his best friend because he'd gotten a cochlear implant and stopped being disabled, which made the culprit feel both insulted and abandoned.
  • But played straight with a retarded teenage boy, talked into standing before a train.
• Three Evil Cripples featured on Criminal Minds (horribly burned Randall Garner in "The Fisher King", paraplegic Ian Coakley in "Roadkill", and quadriplegic Mason Turner in "To Hell and Back") die at the end of their respective episodes. Averted with wheelchair-bound Jeffrey (another Evil Cripple) in the episode "A Family Affair" and with the UnSub from "Into the Woods" (he only had a limp but still had a ton of painkillers).
• In Dead Set, the Jerkass producer, Patrick practically pushes a wheelchair user in front of a zombie so that it can eat him and save his own skin by hiding in a toilet cubicle.
• Glee: Averted with Artie and Becky, who, despite being paraplegic and having Down's Syndrome respectively, are perfectly fine otherwise. But it's played straight with Jean Sylvester, Sue's older sister, who also had Down's Syndrome and died of pneumonia.
• The original Survivors plays it straight with wheelchair user Vic Thatcher, who died at the start of the second season when a fire broke out in the Big Fancy House the main cast had moved into. Almost qualifies as a Type 1, however, as this was long before British fire-safety law was tightened up to ensure that escape routes were suitable for wheelchair users.
• Mikey Bellow, a mentally disabled immortal on Highlander who had a savant knowledge/love of trains, was killed off specifically because of his disability. He does the deed himself by laying his neck on a train track as a train approaches.
  • An off-screen Type 2 version of this trope took place in the episode "The Ex-Files" on the spin-off show, Highlander: the Raven. Immortal Julian Heller was behind an organization that dealt in black market organs. The source of those organs? Prisoners and disabled people, both of whom were killed for their parts.
• The character Te Rangitahi "Rangi" Heremaia of New Zealand's soap opera Shortland Street. Rangi was recovering from paraplegia when he was murdered by his mistress and her husband.
• Both averted and played straight with Hope Wilson in The Young and The Restless. Despite Hope being blind and subsequently dying of pancreatic cancer, the character continued to appear on the show after her death as a vision that other characters were having.
• An off-screen example of (and onscreen plans for) Type 4 on House. Thirteen is revealed to have killed her brother, who had Huntington's Disease (a progressive inherited disease causing multiple motion, cognitive and psychiatric problems), at his own request. After she discovers that she too has the gene for Huntington's, she admits to House that she's terrified because she will eventually get the disease as well and she has no one who will kill her as her body and mind break down, leaving her helpless. House agrees to euthanize her.

Theater

• In the musical When The Switch Is Pressed, almost all the characters have committed suicide by the end. One of them is a wheelchair user.
• The Deconstruction of this trope is the main plot of the play The Cripple Of Inishmaan by Martin McDonagh: Billy is born disabled, making him walk poorly and prone to illness. He claims to be dying of TB to gain a sympathy favor from Babbybobby (whose wife died of TB), and Billy is then seen to die from that (Type 1). Then it is revealed that the death scene was Billy playing a cripple dying of TB in a film (subversion of Type 1). Babbybobby is so furious to be deceived that he gives Billy a savage beating (Type 2), but Billy survives. After being beaten, Billy plucks up the courage to ask his crush Slippy Helen out, and she rudely turns him down. Billy is seen to prepare himself for suicide in the same manner of his parents (Type 3), only to be interrupted when Helen comes back and changes her mind. Billy's jubilation over his success is cut short by an Incurable Cough of Death with Blood From the Mouth (Double Subversion of Type 1).
• Lavinia in Titus Andronicus, a play which is basically Shakespeare doing splatterpunk. After she's raped and has her tongue cut out and her hands cut off by her rapists, her father, the titular Titus Andronicus, murders her so that she won't have to live with the "shame" of having been raped and mutilated. Titus does kill Lavinia's rapists before this -- and bakes their flesh into meat pies for their mother to eat. Type 2, though Titus tries to present his daughter's death as a Type 4.

Video Games

• Averted in Mass Effect 2. Joker, the brittle-boned pilot who walks very slowly (at times with a cane), is the only member of your crew who cannot be killed during a playthrough. You can kill literally everyone else in your crew, including yourself, and still finish the game, but Joker simply will not die.
  • It is possible to get Joker killed when the crew is abducted by the Reapers while walking him around the Normandy. If he walks up the ladder too quickly in engineering, he'll be killed by a scion. This gives the "Mission Failed" dialogue, meaning he is the only playable character whose death guarantees that the player loses the game.
• Alexander Caine in Hitman: Blood Money, who dies at 47's hands due to his being the game's Big Bad. He's a Flunky Boss and a Handicapped Badass, so achieving this trope isn't easy.
• The Mortal Kombat series features Mileena, a dual-sai-wielding assassin who is deformed and mentally unstable. She's executed, on Kahn's orders, at the end of Mortal Kombat X; D'Vorah, through mouth-to-mouth transmission, places flesh-eating parasites in her body.

Web Comics

• Zig-zagged in Homestuck with Tavros Nitram, who spent most of the story in a wheelchair and was the first troll to die completely, but only did so after regaining his ability to walk.

Real Life

• Aktion T4 was a program in Nazi Germany to sterilize and, eventually, euthanize the physically and mentally disabled. It was sold to the public as a combination of mercy killing and saving money. However, despite propaganda advocating the necessity of "purifying" the race and "mercifully" ending "lives not worth living", people were hesitant to volunteer their disabled relatives to be euthanized, and so the public face of the operation changed. Families of designated 'targets' were told that their relatives were being transferred to a specialized treatment center...which they could not visit due to wartime regulations. The treatment centers were actually crematoria, and so after some weeks, the families would get a falsified death certificate and an urn of ashes. (Probably not actually their family member's ashes, as the victims of Aktion T4 were cremated en masse.) People started wising up that nobody was actually getting treated (in the towns containing treatment centers, folks noticed full buses rolling in, smokestacks fuming, and then empty buses rolling out, for example) and protested, so the program "officially" ended in 1941, with 70,000 victims, but the lower-level bureaucracy continued with some inertia, leading to some 90,000 "beds emptied" in all.
• The mass murder of at least nineteen disabled people (and the injury of at least twenty-six more) in a care facility in Sagamihara, outside Tokyo, on July 26, 2016. The murderer favored euthanasia of the disabled and said that disabled people should "disappear."

1. ↑ Self-protection can be Truth in Television, but that depends on the specific disability - and even the crippling ones can be compensated for these days. Before the 20th century... not so much.