Generally, if writers want to remove a character from their ensemble, they will either kill that character off or put them on a bus (or both) to explain their absence. Sufferers of Chuck Cunningham Syndrome, on the other hand, simply disappear into limbo. One day they will walk out of a scene, and just... never walk back in. They will often be retconned right out of the story's history, and everyone still left onscreen will simply carry on as if the character never existed or had any impact on the story.
https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/ChuckCunninghamSyndrome
Anyone come to mind? I’d say Yelena fits the bill. All mention of the volunteers’ crimes are brushed over as if the yeagerists were responsible. Meanwhile Yelena herself, fanatic that she was, walked off stage-left and vanished with no repercussion. What was the point of surviving her execution scene? She only had like 3 more lines afterwards and it was all trivial.
Was there anyone else who unceremoniously disappeared from the story like this?
I partly want to say Marco, considering how important he was to bother Reiner's and Jean's story, yet he doesn't appear as a force ghost at the end 😭
Nah Marco had an overt death scene that took up a lot of screen time. This trope is about characters that up and vanish, and sometimes are even retconned as never having existed.
Honestly the 145th king kind of fits the bill. The post-rumbling story overwrite his dilemma with Ymir and the 1st king’s instead.
Ymir Freckles is a better example
Nah Freckles had a decent sendoff. Well, it was pretty contrived but it definitely doesn’t fit this trope. Her own life and death were a major focus of her arc so her leaving the story was sufficiently set up imo. The ccs trope is about a major character simply vanishing.
Yelena tried to break up the alliance by bringing up their past actions, tried to lie about Eren’s location, and told the alliance that Eren was heading to Fort Salta
Aside from revealing that Marley’s airships were the rumbling’s priority target Yelena really didn’t do anything of note. During the alliance camp fire she was used as a device for the other characters to disagree with. “Nuh uh we scouts don’t want to kill these marleyan warriors”. It would not have been hard to rewrite that scene without her.
What I’m honing in on is her last scene. More specifically that she had an execution scene, survived it, but then disappeared somewhere along the way to the final card.