Offing the leader/mentor

[Mindfire]

The mentor dying, doesn't have to be literally dying. It's figurative and they just have to be removed from the equation so they can not help the protagonist in time or at all. Doing this sets up the protagonist so they have to succeed without a safety net, where the protagonist's failure is the failure of everything. Where's the tension if the protagonist fails and then the mentor just steps in and saves the day? The story might as well have been about the mentor instead of the student because for all intents and purposes the protagonist didn't matter.

That's sort of what I meant. For the purposes of the story, mentor death is kind of inevitable.

 

[Benjamin Clayborne]

That's sort of what I meant. For the purposes of the story, mentor death is kind of inevitable.

The Matrix comes to mind. Morpheus is the obvious mentor character for Neo, but Morpheus doesn't die; in fact he outlives Neo.

However Morpheus's role as a mentor ends partway through the first movie, so in that sense, the mentor does "die," even if the character embodying the mentor role is still hanging around for the rest of the series.

You certainly could write a story where the mentor role persists through the whole story, but it probably wouldn't be very satisfying, since the hero then has the mentor crutch with him the whole time, instead of having to tackle the problem on his own. Which is probably why you don't see this happen very often.

 

[JCFarnham]

Some thing that does come to mind is the BBC series Merlin. The mentor (Gaius) is still very much around and counciling the hero (Merlin). I haven't watched with an awful lot of interest, but it seems to me that they've engineered a reason why Gaius does nothing aside from expository remarks, and the odd healing. I believe this is because that while knowledgeable he isn't as magically strong as Merlin... Plus old and frail. There could very well be a convinient reason for all the action taking place away from camalot.

This proves something at the very least. If you do have a mentor figure around, he can't interfere. You can keep him around for sure but like in The Matrix, he needs to begin to fulfil another role. Or else draw the limelight.