Chuck Cunningham Syndrome / Literature

• Artemis Fowl
  • Doodah Day. At the end of Lost Colony, he is mentioned as having started working as a private detective along with Mulch Diggums. The Time Paradox takes place mostly in the past, so it's understandable that he wouldn't appear, but Mulch is actively involved in The Atlantis Complex and not only does he not seem to be working as a detective, there is absolutely no mention of what Doodah is doing.
  • Minerva Paradizo. At the end of book 5, she is stated to have spent 3 years obsessing over Artemis, waiting for him to return, and she was set up as a very obvious Love Interest. Three books later, and she hasn't been mentioned once since then.
• A Series of Unfortunate Events: The wart-faced man from Count Olaf's troupe disappears after the 1st book and is never mentioned again. He also didn't reappear in the movie that was made 5 years later.
• Animorphs: Hey, remember Gafinilan and Mertil, the Andalites that had also survived Elfangor's ship's crash and had been living on Earth for the entire war? Remember how he was found by the kids and decided to remain in hiding? Or maybe you don't, because they were only in one book. Having more Andalites on board would've been very useful for the kids. Even if those two didn't join the kids for their own reasons- Gafinilan has a genetic disease that is slowly killing him, and Mertil lost his tail and is allergic to the morphing technology- it would've been nice for them to get another mention, seeing as Andalite war heroes living on Earth is kind of a big deal. Bringing in one or both of them is common Fanfic Fuel.
• Rifleman, Stile's ally and mentor in the ways of Citizenship in the first Apprentice Adept trilogy. When the second trilogy starts up, he's nowhere to be found or mentioned.
• In King Lear by William Shakespeare, the Fool, one of the only characters who can tell Lear the truth, disappears in Act 3, Scene 6. Lear later says, “And my poor fool is hanged,” but he's referring to another character at the end of the play—we don't really know what happens to his court jester, and no one speaks of it again.
• In "Cheaper By the Dozen", Mary, the second eldest child dies at age 6. This isn't mentioned in the book. She simply stops appearing.
• In The Baby-Sitters Club, this was the eventual fate of most of the girls' non-club friends, fuelling speculation that the girls were disturbingly cult-like...The major exceptions are Laine Cummings, Stacey's on-again, off-again best friend from New York, and Sunny Winslow, Dawn's Troubled, but Cute best friend from California. But Sunny started her own baby-sitting club, anyway, so she doesn't really count.
• Don Quixote: In Chapter I, Part I, Cervantes mentions the people who lived in Don Quixote’s house: his niece, his housekeeper and a lad who helps them with the field and the marketplace... we'll never see or hear anything about that lad again. Obviously, Cervantes had completely forgotten about this character, and didn't want to write him even in the Second Part of the novel, but in his defense, one of Don Quixote's themes is about how silly it is to detect errors of continuity in a silly fictional tale...
• Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The series started off with a slightly larger cast of supporting characters, who aren't seen as much with the increasing focus on Vacation Episodes and the Denser and Wackier tone.
  • Greg's friend Chirag, best known for appearing in Rodrick Rules as the victim of one of Greg's pranks. He disappeared after a cameo in Cabin Fever, although he has been in the film series.
  • Holly and Heather Hills, two of Greg's love interests, haven't been seen since Dog Days.
  • The school's Vice Principal Roy, an authority figure to Greg, last appeared in Double Down (2016).
• Discworld:
  • In the early novels the Unseen University had a different Archchancellor every book, with the previous Archchancellor never getting a mention. As the position appears to be held for life and the Klingon Promotion nature of Discworld wizardry was established early on it can be safely assumed why they are missing, but it is still a little strange and irritating that a major character like Cutangle (from Equal Rites) vanishes without a word. This ceases to be an issue after the appointment of Mustrum Ridcully in Moving Pictures, as he proves henceforth to be unremovable.
  • Agnes Nitt disappears after Carpe Jugulum. When the Lancre coven appears at the end of The Wee Free Men, it's just Granny and Nanny, and even when later Tiffany books feature all the witches (the Trials in A Hat Full of Sky, the Going Away Party in Wintersmith) she doesn't get a mention. The Shepherd's Crown finally establishes that she returned to her musical career.
• Family Skeleton Mysteries: Yolanda "Yo" Jacobs, a graduate student who appeared in books 1 (where she examined Sid's skeleton, revealing that he was murdered) and 2, isn't even mentioned in book 3. However, given her dissertation was due the preceding May, she may have simply graduated offscreen.
• Near the end of Frankenstein Victor notes that, with his wife, baby brother and best friend murdered and his father dead from grief, he has lost every important person left in his life. ...Except wait, didn't he have another brother named Ernest? Did the monster get him too?
• Footfall by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle: the character of Bob Anson, a thinly disguised avatar of Robert Heinlein, who was a member of the Threat Team (a group of SF authors including avatars of the authors of the work), vanishes without explanation from the team halfway through the novel.
• In the first book of He Who Fights With Monsters, Jason's friend Rufus mentions that he has a brother, but in later books Rufus is an only child.
• The 19th-century penny dreadful Varney the Vampire began with three children in the Bannerworth family — Henry, Flora, and George — but George is never mentioned again after Chapter 36.
• The Sisterhood Series by Fern Michaels: This has happened to some characters. Private Detective (former FBI agent) Mark Lane seems to pretty much vanish off the face of the Earth by the book Final Justice. It might be due to the fact that he acts as a source of information for Jack Emery, who by then is getting information before Lane does, and Jack doesn't really need him anymore!
• There were two sequels to Harriet the Spy. Sport and Janie, Harriet's best friends, get not a single mention in either of them.
• Harry Potter:
  • It was mentioned in the first book that a certain Sally-Anne Perks was sorted directly before Harry. Then in the fifth book, when they take their O.W.L.s, the roll call skips straight from Patil to Potter. Where did Sally-Anne go?
  • After serving as a notable supporting character, ex-Minster Cornelius Fudge vanishes completely from the books post Half-Blood Prince. Notably unlike others characters his fate was never revealed in any post-series material, leaving it a mystery whether he survived Voldemort's takeover or not.
  • Why is Bellatrix's last name "Lestrange" if she's from the Black family? Oh, right—she's married. Easy to forget, since her husband Rodolphus and brother-in-law Rabastan are mentioned twice but not at all in the last two books, when they could reasonably appear. (Rodolphus does come up in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child, though.)
• As the Moomintroll series progresses, the Moomins keep acquiring new house-guests, until the second-to-last novel Moominpappa at Sea, where, with the exception of Little My, they all vanish without a word. Particularly jarring is the Snork Maiden, who up until this point has been Mooomintroll's G-rated love interest.
• The Lord of the Rings:
  • Happens to the wizard Radagast the Brown. Among the many scouts sent out from Rivendell before the Fellowship starts out, a party goes to Radagast's house, but he is not there; his absence is never explained, and he is never mentioned again. When asked about this in a letter, Tolkien said that even he wasn't sure of Radagast's fate.
  • For that matter, the two other wizards, deduced from a mention of there being five in total, were Chucked before the story begins, vanishing off the face of (Middle-) Earth somewhere between the wizards' arrival two thousand years previous and the beginning of Frodo's story. (The discussion of them is vague and uncertain even in the wide-ranging unpublished essays and notes on wizards that made it into Unfinished Tales.) Tolkien speculated they may have ended up going astray and creating various magic cults or they might have been a case of Hero of Another Story who combated Sauron's influence in the East. In any case Gandalf seems to have been the only one to return West.
• In The Night's Dawn Trilogy the character of Kelven Solanki plays a major role in the first book in the series, almost rising to the rank of a major protagonist. He abruptly vanishes after the first book and is not mentioned again in the two sequels or spin-off material. According to the author, it was simply one too many character and subplot in an enormous trilogy where he already had more than enough to keep track off.
• In the Redwall series, a few minor characters who appeared early on later did not.
• In Remnants, D-Caf suffers a What Have I Done moment after accidentally killing Anamull in the fourth-to-last book and swears that he'll never release his worms again. Well, it would have been hard for him to—he's never mentioned in the rest of the series, even in the Distant Finale when just about every surviving character got a throwaway reference.
• In The Great Gatsby, Tom and Daisy have a child, but most of the novel takes place with one or both of them outside of the house, and no mention of their daughter after she's been introduced.
• Retroactively the case in the Tortall Universe. The Numair Chronicles has a young man who's later called Numair befriending an ancient crocodile god, taking care of a baby sunbird, and being favored by the Graveyard Hag. You'd think some of this would come up in The Immortals, set fifteen years later or so, especially when Daine is also 'favored' by the Hag, and when she and Numair are wandering the Divine Realms, passing through the swamp of another ancient crocodile god and watching sunbirds overhead. The Hag Loves Secrecy and gleefully prevents Daine from telling anyone about her so it's not hard to imagine she'd also keep Numair from talking, but you'd think he would share about the other stuff. Despite the chronology of events, The Immortals was written more than twenty years before Numair's book.
• In Warrior Cats:
  • It's not uncommon for characters, often ones that only appear in the Allegiances list with minor speaking roles (or none at all), to just plain disappear from the Allegiances between books with no mention of their death.
  • Clawface is mentioned to have gone to the Dark Forest after his death, but is nowhere to be found during the plot with The Dark Forest plotting to take over the Clans in Warrior Cats: Omen of the Stars. He does appear in Tigerclaw's Fury, but he isn't even supposed to be in that one considering he died before Tigerclaw was exiled.
• Most characters in Wild Cards leave the story by dying, being Put on a Bus, or at least wrapping up their personal narratives and retiring but Hiram Worchester is a major exception. A major secondary character for the first seven books, he almost entirely vanishes after being sentenced to probation for killing Chrysalis. He appears only once after that point, is mentioned twice as not being in when people come to his restaurant, and then disappears for good. The last time he is ever mentioned is having retired at some point between 1992 and 2009.

---