Michael Jackson - obvious reasons
George Lucas, obviously.
Yes, but also his readers.
But that would have also ended the story of Serenity and her crew. Mal was the driving force behind everything they did, so killing him would have cut short any future possibilities. Sure, Zoe could have taken over the ship or whatever, but it wouldn’t have been the same underlying dynamic in any meaningful way.
? The show and the movie was over?
China Mieville laughs at their joyful optimistic sparkle 'n rainbow worlds…
Robert Fripp.
The love is easy to explain- he’s made some amazingly good music, over the years.
But the hate is NOT just because he’s such an off-putting, nonsense-spouting dweeb. It’s because EVERY time a band he’s in does some promising work and seems to be on the verge of sustained brilliance, he either gets tired of the people he’s working with and breaks up the band… or he alienates everyone else, until they all quit.
Indeed. Spoiler ahead for Perdido Street Station:
[spoiler]There’s a great trivia question: "Who has the happy ending in Perdido Street Station?
The answer is a character who, midway through the book, says, “Screw this, I’m outta here,” and leaves. Now, they’re probably captured by some sort of termite-people and used as a living fungus-farm for the next thirty years, but we don’t see that happen, so we can imagine that, unlike every other character in the book, their life isn’t a protracted negation of every hope and dream they’ll ever have.[/spoiler]
But I like that kind of thing. Whedon’s willingness to kill characters off arbitrarily and almost whimsically is, in my opinion, one of his great strengths as a storyteller. Deaths change the story in his works, but they don’t necessarily serve the story; rather, the story responds to death. That makes it hit home much more powerfully than deaths that seem to be in service to the story, dramatically-appropriate deaths where the tragic hero goes out with a bang.
That is, in fact, untrue. It’s just a popular legend that he was paid by the word. My theory is that he had a certain amount of space weekly/monthly to write a chapter, and tried to fill up that space as much as possible.
She does seem to be particularly sadistic towards her protagonists. Nevare in the Soldier Son series has it even worse than Fitz IMHO. This is different from various authors who go out of their way to create a grim world where everyone is miserable.
Alan Moore.
Love him:
He’s created some incredible stories. He’s well read and intelligent, and at his best brings that to his comics work. He’s wonderfully WEIRD in his public persona.
Hate him:
He hasn’t created any of those incredible stories in near-on a decade at this point. He’s also obnoxiously CRANKY in his public persona. He constantly decries the darkening trend in mainstream comics, while producing stuff that’s 10 times worse than any of it. (At this point, there’s a certain part of fandom who hears Moore’s name, and immediately wonders which character got raped, since he goes to that well so consistently.*) On that note, he also nominally accepts his ‘blame’ for being part of creating the trend, while spinning history so that he’s not the bad guy. (eg: The Killing Joke ‘It wasn’t meant to be in-continuity’ and ‘I asked if I could have Barbara paralyzed and the editor said “Cripple the bitch”.’) He constantly blames people for wrongs against him that they never committed - either legitimate gripes about previous publishing regimes, still visited upon the current gang (eg, Marvel and DC ripping him off in the 80s), or whiny moments about unrelated entities (like demanding DC apologize for something the Wachowskis said concerning the V for Vendetta movie, instead of the Wachowskis and Warner Brothers’ film division). He doesn’t seem to understand how a shared world works, and thinks that building upon the stories that he wrote is ‘creatively bankrupt’.
- The most mindblowing recent example (at least that I have subjected myself to) was Neonomicon - the heroine is gangraped over the course of two issues, then given to a Deep One to rape so that she could be the mother of Cthulhu. Yah.
Stephen King.
He writes fantastic journies and I should have learned by now to leave the last chapters alone. But I haven’t. Damnit.
Tara was not a warrior, Athena damn it! Neither was Fred. They were both too sweet to die, and anyone who says different is a Welshman.
Wesley died a fine death, though.
Aaron Sorkin.
When it comes to his political views, I think he’s a pretentious ass-twat. Especially on “The Newsroom.”
I enjoy his writing because it’s about intelligent people who are unapologetically intelligent. When his characters are confronted with stupidity, they deal with it using Sorkin’s elegant and concise dialogue. That never gets boring.
When it comes to The Newsroom, however, the dialogue that comes out from these characters almost always undercuts their message and intelligence. It’s hard to take someone seriously when they think calling the Tea Party the American Taliban is an example of good news reporting. When I think of the stories that “The Newsroom” is so proud of, I imagine the ramblings of a bunch of neckbeards around a college coffee stand, rather than the reporting of respectable news organization.
I love his dialogue though, and will probably stick around for season two.
Of course they didn’t deserve to die. Their deaths were not heroic. They died pointlessly for no reason. And that’s the point.
I don’t know a single person in real life who died heroicly, or who died for reason, or who died trying to serve the greater good. Instead they got cancer and died. Or they got hit by a random car and died. Or they got old and lost their faculties and died.
If I want real life, I’ll read the newspaper, thankyouverymuch. 
Whedon is capable of doing realistic deaths very well; we all know what episode I’m talking about. I’m merely bitching about his propensity to kill off likeable characters – hell, characters far, far more likeable than his protagonists, in Tara & Fred’s cases – in ways that break my black little heart.
My first thought.
Any spectacularly talented artist who becomes an addict, dies, and stops making great art.
Robert Downey, Jr. appears to have been clean for the past few years. I hope it sticks.
And what does real life have to do with escapist fiction? The part about people dying for no reason is part of the reason real life sucks. You’re a fiction writer doing fantasy. Make it better.
Agreed. My favorite Whedon death was Ballard’s end on Dollhouse. He’s on the fringe of a firefight, and he catches a bullet. Unlikely it was even aimed at him, and he never saw it coming. That’s how people die, all the time.