- Hob, the first major character to die in the comic. Despite being basically a Mauve Shirt (and who would be followed by a lot of protagonists), his Heroic Sacrifice was the comic's first real Death Is Dramatic moment that indicated they were playing for keeps.
- "Please get this right. I really miss him."
- Though all protagonist deaths are sad, the death of Pronto here (spoilers, obviously) was particularly bad. Look at Panel 9... Brad visibly sways on his feet, and Nick falls to his knees in shock.
- Brad's death. Having been introduced into the comic during its second week and having been Schlock's best friend for almost a decade (and Only Friend for much of that), he was the longest-running character to be permanently Killed Off for Real.LOTA: King Lota thinks it is a little too big.
Schlock: Brad's best friend thinks it's almost big enough. - The deaths of the microbes here is strangely sad. Their utter incomprehension of their imminent demise...though obviously the googly eyes are mere poetic license.
- "Nope. Not done crying."
- "The End." Quite possibly the most heart-wrenching strip of the comic's entire run.
- For all that s/he might have deserved it, and in spite of the fact that s/he was clearly at peace with it, Mako's death is pretty tragic. "Maxim 20: If you're not willing to shell your own position, you're not willing to win."
- "We failed to preserve galactic civilization and culture beyond the boundary...."
- One would think that the technology to replace someone upon their death would render most tearjerkers moot. Captain Tagon is not one such man.Tagon: That man who carried a ship-killing warhead into the engineering bay? He was not me. Yeah, we were close. We grew up together. We lost our family together. We served together for thirty years. In all that time, we never once left each others side. And then we did. I got frozen in time, and he got vaporized in a millisecond. I'm not the one you should be asking about survival; he is.
- It's never a good thing when a hostile force hacks into your ship. It's even worse when they hack into your friends.
- While the destruction of the Maxim 39 is a tearjerker in and of itself, the reaction of Para's suborned Soshiko is particularly heartbreaking.
- So is Chinook's decent into madness. When Petey sums up what she lost, it really puts things into perspective.
- Elf gets an award, but isn't in the mood to appreciate it."Hey, Elf. You left before dinner showed up. Can I bring you anything?"
Beat
"A pulse? ... It's for a friend..." - "We did not find a smoking gun. We found a murder." The murder in question is a Pa'anuri gutting an exogalactic worldship to repurpose its shell into a warship to attack Milky Way's people. An entire civilization, possibly with trillions of souls and hundreds of millions of years of history, erased in one fell swoop, for no reason but as a means to continue further genocide, with absolutely no one to help them in vast intergalactic emptiness or even remember them. More tragically, those beings only fled into said emptiness in an attempt to avoid exactly this fate, but the worst is that it has happened to countless other civilizations - enough to supply the Pa'anuri with an entire armada to invade our galaxy.
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/TearJerker/SchlockMercenary
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