If you could take a single character out of a piece of media (book, film, TV show, video game, etc) who would it be?
They would lose any magical powers they may have had in the book, but anything they are, rather than can do, will stay. For example people from the His Dark Materials world would keep their daemons. You can take them out at any time in the story's plot, but for all other people consuming the media, it will be shown that the character suddenly disappears, with the rest of the plot being affected accordingly. People will notice this happening. The character is not under any sort of control by you once you have taken them out of the story, although they will appear next to you to start with.
Corny as fuck, but here goes… Superman. Very powerful, very ethical. His abilities are specifically not magical, but a natural product of his Kryptonian physiology reacting to our sun.
The world could use someone incorruptible who has the strength to back up their words.
So instead of killing Lois, you instead remove Superman from interacting with everyone he knows and loves, but he can still see what happens to his world without him...