Animated characters have a unique ability to stay a consistent age throughout their entire lives. This shouldn't come as a surprise as their ages and appearances are solely determined by their animators. Fans of The Simpsons, for instance, have seen Bart Simpson stay 10 years old for nearly 34 years now.
Likewise, as long as the voice actors are willing to stay on the show -- or if casting directors can find someone who sounds like them -- then an animated character will stay a part of the show from start to finish. However, there have been rare occurrences when an animated character is either killed off or discontinued from their show. But sometimes, as is the case with the beloved FOX series Family Guy, the character's death is a mere hoax.
Thanks to a single tweet, fans of Family Guy were lead to believe that the matriarch of the Griffin family, Lois Griffin, had officially met her demise. While it wouldn't be the first time that fans were tricked into believing one of their favorite characters had passed, it was possibly the first time that they were tricked by an internet troll and not the show's creator, Seth MacFarlane.
What is the 'Lois Is Dead' Hoax?
In December 2022, social media users may remember the fact that Lois Griffin had died trending all over the internet with the tag: "Lois is dead". The trend started with a tweet by Twitter user @minasdemon, who wrote "Lois Griffin DEAD AT 43". While many were able to recognize this as a hoax, many others believed it to be true.
With upwards of 22 million views as of July 2023, believers took to the reply section to express their sadness and disbelief. At the time of the tweet, Family Guy was in their mid-season break and hadn't aired a new episode in two weeks. So, while skeptics were trying to say the trend was a hoax, people who thought it true were forced to wait another two weeks before the show returned and confirmed that Lois was still kicking.
In these two weeks, though, a dark and somewhat distasteful trend was circling around social media platforms like Twitter and TikTok. What started as light-hearted and innocent videos with people recording their family's reaction to Lois Griffin, a fictional character, dying at 43, quickly went too far when people started telling their loved ones about real-life celebrities dying and filming their reactions to that, dubbed the "Celebrity Death Prank" challenge.
It was then that people became distraught over the possibility that Lois' voice actor, Alex Borstein, was either leaving the show after 21 seasons, or worse, had actually passed away in real life. That was quickly disproved, as Borstein remains perfectly healthy and had even expressed months earlier that she has no intention of leaving Family Guy, as long as she continues to like the writing.
It's amazing that a single tweet could lead to such an uproar among people on the web. But, perhaps it was so believable because it wasn't the first time that fans of the show were led to believe that one of the characters was meeting their end.
Have Other Family Guy Characters Died?
There have been a number of times that Family Guy characters had died or been removed from the show, including -- and possibly most memorably -- Lois. In a two-part episode special from season 6, the first of which is titled "Stewie Kills Lois", Lois is killed by her youngest child Stewie.
Many fans of the show are well aware that in the early seasons of Family Guy, little baby Stewie was dead set on two things: world domination and killing his mother. It took six seasons, but Stewie finally conquered one of his goals in killing Lois while on a cruise ship. Or so it seemed. Throughout the first part, the Griffin's are left wondering what happened to Lois until Peter becomes the main suspect. Just before he is to be sentenced for his wife's murder, Lois barges into the courtroom and reveals the true criminal: Stewie.
The second part of the special then follows the aftermath in which Stewie reveals himself to be evil and embarks on his plot for world domination. In what seems like the end, Stewie is eventually killed by Peter. But, after his death, it's revealed that the entire sequence of events that transpired after Lois' attempted murder was merely a simulation that Stewie played in to see what would happen if he actually killed his mother. So, none of it actually happened.
Similarly, in season 12, episode 6, the Griffin's dog Brian is hit by a car and dies. After previously destroying his time machine, Stewie devises a plan to rebuild his machine and travel back in time to save Brian. He's successful two episodes later and his actions in the past make it so Brian never died in the first place.
On a more serious note, two recurring side characters also passed away, but it was because their voice actors had died in real life. Two fictional funerals were held for both Peter's boss Angela, who was voiced by the late Carrie Fisher, and Quahog Mayor Adam West, voiced by the original Batman himself, who passed away in 2017.
The lesson to be learned through the "Lois Is Dead" hoax is that unless a Family Guy character dies on the show itself, don't be so quick to believe something posted to Twitter. Although, to be fair, MacFarlane does have a tendency to trick his fans for the sake of humor and shock factor.