So you wrote a work with an Ensemble Cast, a number of Rotating Protagonist, multiple storylines running at once and/or a work where Anyone Can Die. As an author, you have a careful plan for how you're going to use all of the characters and how they will factor into the story. But how do you let your viewers keep track of the names and survival status of your cast? While a list might work for literature, in a more visual media like comics or animation this would make it hard to keep the audience engaged.
Enter this trope. Symbolic Cast Fadeout is when the author lists out the cast in the story, usually at the beginning or the end of the chapter, and symbolically "marks" them whenever a character gets killed off. Despite the name, there are many methods to accomplish this. A gray fade-out is the most common, due to the Death Is Gray trope and also the color gray allows the artist to still keep a black outline of the character visible even after they are faded out. Red is another common color to mark the character in a non-black-and-white medium as red is the color of blood. An X is another common method since there is a strong association of the letter X with the concept of death.
Naturally, due to being a list that corresponds to the status of the characters in the story, the author can have some fun with this. When a character is revealed to be Not Quite Dead or Back from the Dead, the author usually removes the mark from the character's picture. If a character is not dead but is unable to take part in the story for some other reason, the author might note the special status of that character ("missing", "injured" etc.)
Compare Fade to Black and Fade to White, where the screen fades to those colors for important moments, or Fade Out, where the screen going black marks the end of the work or an episode/chapter. See Evolving Credits, for when Cast Fadeouts are reflected in a work's openers and closers.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Inverted in The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You. The anime shows group shots of the titular girlfriends, with those who have joined the harem in the anime being filled in, while those who have yet to join are shown as silhouettes.
- The ending theme of Angel Beats! features the cast in a crowd shot with cast members fading in separately as the song progresses, but as each character disappears (the show is set in a purgatory-like high school and the characters already know they are dead and are trying not to disappear as they don't know if they reincarnate, cross over to another afterlife, or cease to be) they are removed from the ending image. The last episode after everyone has crossed over reverses this and has the ending start with a shot of the full cast with each character fading out instead of in..
- The manga adaptation of Battle Royale (in which the deaths of its "contestants" are tracked) includes a panel at the end of each volume with all the students of Class B showing their vital status, with grayed out photos being students who have died by the end of that volume.
- In Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day, the opening credits show the main cast as kids, then as teenagers, but missing Menma (whose death as a child broke up the friend group and drives the entire plot).
- The Kindaichi Case Files: After introducing the setting and cast for the mystery, every chapter of the case would start with a cast list with the face, name, and age of the characters with the victims being gray out.
- One Piece regularly does this for each arc, displaying members of the Straw Hats involved, their role(s) in events, other individuals they've met wherever the arc is taking place... and as battles unfold, those who are defeated are greyed-out.
- Each chapter of Monkey Peak opens with the faces, names, and ages of the characters, with the deceased characters' pictures grayed out. This is a major hint that some characters survive their apparent death. The only exception is Chief Hagasawa who was marked gray after his first apparent death and his return before being revealed to be Evil All Along. The same also goes for Miyata who was also grayed out for around 5 chapters after falling off a cliff but later revealed to have survived.
- SCR Yed: One of the subtler aspects of the Evolving Credits is that characters who have died appear Deliberately Monochrome in episodes airing after their death. Given the show, that's a decent chunk of the cast by the end of the series.
- In the suspense/mystery manga Shi ni Aruki most chapters end with a 3x3 grid showing part of the cast. If a character dies, their character portrait is greyed out and splattered with blood in a way that resembles what killed them. In the event that the chapter ends with their fate left ambiguous, their portrait is merely greyed out. After everyone in the Kurosu family besides Tokiko dies, the lineup is swapped out to showcase the remainder of the cast.
Comic Books
- Fantastic Four: Downplayed in Jonathan Hickman's run, which has a logo with spots for all four members bordering it. Following the Last Stand and death of the Human Torch, his spot is left conspicuously empty.
- X-Men:
- X-Men Forever had a cast list showcase with the X-Men having their picture. When they are killed, they have a "dead" cross posted over their faces in the following issue and then are removed, and when Wolverine was killed off in the comic's second arc, his crossed-off picture remained in the cast list for the next six issues to hammer home that yes, he was Killed Off for Real.
- Days of Future Past on the cover of the opening issue of the story, Uncanny X-Men #141, the cast of the X-Men were shown on a wanted poster in the Bad Future listing them as either slain or apprehended, with only Wolverine still wanted.
Fan Works
- Much like the original franchise, each chapter of the Series Fic Danganronpa: Memento Mori, Danganronpa: Komm Susser Tod and Danganronpa: Paradise Lost ends with a picture of the remaining students arranged in a grid, with the dead vanishing one by one.
Film — Live-Action
- The marketing posters for Avengers: Endgame list its huge cast with a gray background and a black and white color tone for the characters who were the victims of Thanos, the Big Bad of the previous movie. All of these characters (except for Gamora, whose presence is filled by a pre-Character Development alternate universe counterpart) are brought back during the course of the movie to join the final fight against an alternate universe version of Thanos.
Literature
- Galápagos does it preemptively, marking a character's name with an asterisk when they're going to die by sunset of the day the narrative is describing.
- The Illuminae Files: In Gemina, when a team of 24 mercenaries arrive at a space station to kill everyone on it the author displays a chart showing each mercenary's face, name, codename, and mission specialty. As the heroes gradually kill off the mercenaries the author periodically reshows the chart with all the dead mercenaries x-ed out.
Live-Action TV
- America's Next Top Model: At the start of the season, there is a group shot of all the contestants. As the models being eliminated, their full body picture is faded out from the group shot at the end of the episode until the final winner is revealed. In rare cases when a contestant enters the competition after the first episode or another contestant returns, their full body picture is abruptly added in to the group shot.
- Band of Brothers did this in a church in a later episode; each permanent casualty just slowly faded out of the room.
- The North American editions of Big Brother feature a "memory wall" of photos of the houseguests. After a houseguest is evicted from the house, their picture will change to black & white. If a houseguest re-enters the game, their picture will be restored back to color.
- Hell's Kitchen: Whenever a contestant is eliminated, their jacket is hung to a hook underneath their profile picture before their profile picture being burned. In rare cases where Gordon allowed the contestant to keep their jacket, only their profile picture is burned.
- Kamen Rider:
- Kamen Rider Ex-Aid: Riders considered "dead" during the story (such as Kiriya after Dan kills him have their portion of the actor-montage replaced with a blank screen and color-appropriate static.
- Kamen Rider Geats: Dead Riders find themselves greyed-out during the opening sequence of the show whenever a new in-show round begins.
- RuPaul's Drag Race: All-Stars Season 1 featured a wall with a large portrait of RuPaul and a portrait of a questions mark surrounded by smaller portraits of the other queens. After the team of queens were eliminated, they would take their portraits down from the wall. This feature was abandoned in later seasons of All-Stars.
- The Traitors features a big wall in the dining room with portraits of all the contestants. When someone is revealed to have been 'murdered', a big production is made out of their portraits being taken down (returned later with a big red X over the face). They also did the bit of restoring people's portraits when it turned out Kieran and Amos weren't permanently out of the game after all.
- True Beauty: The series with the contestants having their face shot in profile pictures. These pictures are hung in a big picture frame in the Hall of Beauty. At the end of each elimination, the contestant picture is taken off the Hall of Beauty and put in a cart. The winner picture is given the spotlight treatment, signifying they are crowned as a "True Beauty" inside and out.
Video Games
- Genshin Impact: Raiden Shogun's character teaser
has her being surrounded by friends and her twin, Makoto before each fades away one by one. This hints at the many tragedies suffered during the cataclysm and her motivation to isolate Inazuma in a misguided belief that only an "unchanging" eternity could protect her nation.
- Missing Parts: The TANTEI Stories
- The game has a character list in the menu section. The ones who are alive are colored and the ones who are confirmed dead fade to grey, with the description of the causes of their deaths.
- The Stealth Sequel series to Missing Parts: The Tantei Stories, Nagomu Ichiyanagi no Junnan, has a character list in the menu section, complete with the characters' descriptions and status. The pictures of dead characters (either dead before the story starts or get murdered in this case) fade to grey.
- Overwatch: Ana's Origin Story has a picture of Ana and her daughter Pharah. As she become a more active member of Overwatch, more characters begin to appear in the picture, symbolizing them getting closer to her inner circle. As her regret towards the actions she took and the corruption within Overwatch grew, the characters began to fade out one by one, symbolizing the bond between them beginning to sever.
- In SINoALICE, the story chapters in each Act are displayed in a grid, with each chapter's participant(s) shown at the very top. During the Act of Elimination, after you finish each chapter, the face(s) of those killed during the chapter are scratched out of the grid to reflect their demise.
Visual Novels
- Choices: Stories You Play:
- America's Most Eligible: Being a novel inspired by game shows, the novel has the eliminated cast member being faded out from the full body cast picture at the end of the chapter they were eliminated. The cast member faded in when they are returned to the competition by a twist.
- Blades of Light & Shadow: The series has the full body group picture with members of the main cast fading in and out as they enter or in the case of Kade as well as Nia in Book 1 and Aerin in Book 2, leave the core group.
- Danganronpa: Very common in the series, as a Deadly Game is the main premise of the main entries. In all three main games, during the class trials, the students each stand at a court-esque podium, with the podiums for the dead students being filled in with a grey-scale portrait of said student that's been crossed out. The second and third games add another example, where before the trial starts, the protagonist recaps the situation as a set of collages of the students appear. In said collages, the students who are alive have a blue-tinted picture, while the dead students are tinted with red. The second game also has Evolving Credits, where when the game is started, it checks the most recent save file for where it is in the story, and the students who are dead at that point have their picture in the opening given a red filter and occasionally blood splatters. At the end of each chapter in all three games, silhouettes of the remaining students are shown, as well as a counter of the number of them left. The silhouettes of the students who died that chapter fade into a different color (black for the first game, pink for the second, and colors varying by chapter in the third) as the counter audibly ticks down.
- Umineko: When They Cry: The character portraits in the character bios on the TIP menu fade into gray and get splattered with blood in the matter they died.
- Your Turn to Die: The summary at the start of every chapter after 1-1 has the cast assembled on a couch, and characters who have died in the past chapter fade out as the narrator reaches their part.
Webcomics
- Chasing Tails: Each chapter ends with nine pictures, representing 9 victims who were trapped in the wreckage. As the series goes on, their face, name, age, and survival status are revealed, with the victims who died in the wreckage being grayed out. In the final nine chapters of the series, each picture of the victim is removed from the end of the chapter.
- Surviving Romance does this in several different ways with the classmates of the protagonist Chaerin/Huisu. The cast list with the name of the characters in Chaerin/Huisu's class appears at the end of each chapter. When any of the classmates start to trust her, the characters are no longer shadows in the cast list and have their full faces revealed. When they die, their picture becomes gray and has a red X mark on them. When they start to gain sentience, the character's picture is removed from the cast list with a tear mark. The only characters not listed on the cast list are Minwoo and Jeha (both of whom are the male leads of the original novel) and the Big Bad, the original Chaerin. When Se-Eun is revealed to be the Greater-Scope Villain the Devil her picture is replaced with a red handprint on a black background.
- This trope is inverted with Everyone Is Home during the comic's "Everyone Is Dead" arc. When the majority of the Super Smash Bros. characters are poisoned during a banquet hosted by Sephiroth, the surviving cast set out to resurrect each slain character. The final panel for each comic during this arc would show thumbnail portraits of the cast with the still dead characters greyed out, each portrait being replaced with a colored one after they're brought back to life.
Web Video
- Edgar Allan Poe's Murder Mystery Dinner Party: The opening credits show Lenore putting placeholders for each of the main characters (all famous authors or one of Edgar Allan Poe's characters) on the table for the titular dinner party, their image appearing beside it (Except for Emily Dickinson, whose placeholder is instead removed from the table, since the cast tends to forget she's there). As each of the characters is killed off, their placeholder is cut from the title sequence.
Western Animation
- Adventure Time: The eight-part mini-series "Stakes" has Marceline tracking down five vampires. Every time she slays one, the episode ends with a picture of the five, with the one killed in that episode crossed out.
