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Main character deaths


nintega137

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Many people often have mixed feelings on this trope, especially with its tendency to bring them right back, but I have a genuine question.

 

How exactly does someone do this story element correctly? Any examples?

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I'm not entirely sure, but you obviously need to make sure that the character needs to make a big impact on the viewer emotionally before you kill them off. Again, I'm being obvious here on how you should write it.

*sniff* Sayaka....

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Many people often have mixed feelings on this trope, especially with its tendency to bring them right back, but I have a genuine question.

 

How exactly does someone do this story element correctly? Any examples?

Depends on the circumstances.

 

I'm only gonna tackle the "bringing characters back to life" part, because that something that people easily mess up more than characters dying. Quite frankly, there's absolutely nothing wrong with bringing a character back to life. Thing is, if you're going to do that you need 1) a reason or justification for it, preferably one that strengthens the story, 2) something that believably establishes the possibility of resurrection characters in your setting (meaning, you can't asspull it with a Deus Ex Machina - it needs to be established as early or as smoothly as possible), and 3) perhaps more importantly, an explanation as to how they're alive. I emphasize that last part because there have been cases of characters being brought back to life with no explanation as to how. This is one of the things that really screwed over Shadow when he came back in Heroes, and there are plenty of ways they could have brought him back with no problems.

 

As for how to do this element correctly, let's take Zero of Megaman fame. He's essentially the same as Shadow, but is a robot. But there's a big difference with Zero: he dies 3 times in the Megaman franchise and comes back. A strong justification for how he comes back is because he's a robot that can be rebuilt, but his resurrection, or the intent to gather his remains at least, serves to strengthen the story because he still contains powerful technology that could be used for both the heroes and the villains. Come around his final death in the Megaman Zero series after taking the monstrous Dr. Weil with him to the grave, he gets brought back in the ZX series in a soul jar called Biometal. It's funny, because the series also establishes that dead robot characters can actually still live on in cyberspace or as cyber-elves. Not to mention that, despite Zero and Weil's death (as well as X and the Guardians), them still living on as Biometals in the future is also a central plot point.

 

Now, tying into the above, another thing with resurrection is to not abuse it. Again, nothing wrong with multiple resurrections, but sometimes people love their characters so much that they're willing to kill them off just to show how high the stakes are, only to bring them back everytime. It ends up being cheap if you can't add even more tension to it, and it can end up lessening the stakes because why should anyone worry over someone dying if there's an easy way to bring them back? However, a great way to make the resurrection of a character less cheap is to give that second chance at life a risk. Basically, if you bring a dead character back to life, there should be something to hinder it being done a third time so easily. Like, a character gets brought back from the afterlife, but if they die again, then end up reincarnated instead, with no memories or resemblance of their old life - they're physically and emotionally a new person for all intents and purposes. Mind you, you don't have to do this, as the Megaman examples above have been wonderful despite that. But it would take away the resurrection feeling cheap and make it more risky.

 

You could keep bringing the character back to life, but worsen their situation or the world around them as a result. This is another thing that happened to Zero in Megaman. Whenever he was brought back, things got worse, reaching their most horrific in the Megaman Zero series where the world was a wasteland and the only remaining government in the world was commencing genocide of his own people to stave off an energy crisis. And even when he was brought back as a biometal, while the world was much better in the future, it still had problems.

 

Now compare all this to Shadow the hedgehog, who's resurrection played nothing crucial to that extent. And the funny thing is that no one gives Zero anywhere near the same flak as Shadow despite him dying and coming back to 3 times more than he did. That's quality writing preventing that bile from dripping on him.

 

The point here is really an equivalent exchange: if you want to do something, you have to give something up for it. That way it balances out.

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Many people often have mixed feelings on this trope, especially with its tendency to bring them right back, but I have a genuine question.

 

How exactly does someone do this story element correctly? Any examples?

 

You don't.

 

Death is the laziest way to make your audience emotionally disturbed. In a medium where you can have psychologically broken characters, characters that can never be together, characters that struggle with their own existence, and all the many ways to make your audience feel bad for your characters, erasing the character's existence is the shittiest way to do it.

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I'll have a more thorough answer later, but I wanted to add my two cents real quick anyway.  One thing about main character deaths is simply don't overdo it.  For all the times James Bond is thought to be killed, not once does anyone believe it.  Not just because he's the main character, mind you, but because common precedence says so.  If you're going to kill off the main character, either do it or fool us once but never again unless you have something really valuable to add to that warrants the viewer believing the character to be dead. (There are very few instances where this is actually the case)

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I can't say too much, but I feel that it really depends on the situation and how it's handled. If you do a fantasy that depends on philosophy to make sense at the last minute and bring someone back, it might come across as the writer just being a jerk.

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Resurrections in particular aren't generally executed well because it makes the intended emotional impact of the original death feel pointless. You'll have to give a meaningful reason for the character to come back to life, and that's tougher than it sounds. I'd just avoid going the resurrection route all together, honestly - it's not easy to get right, and even when executed well it's not particularly strong due to how much it dampens the impact of the character's death.

 

It can be done, but doing it in a way that doesn't suck borderlines on being a crapshoot. The game/movie/tv show can give it very rightful justification, but it will almost always end up being such a major plot point that if everything surrounding it isn't executed just as well, if not exceeding the quality of the death/resurrection of the character in the first place than everything can come crumbling down around it.

 

Chrono Trigger, for example - that's a goddamn good game, but it's hard to say that the heroic sacrifice and subsequent resurrection of Crono didn't dampen the impact of the story the game was telling. It wasn't even executed that badly, in spite of the heroic sacrifice a trope that has to be executed damn well just in order not to suck and feel cheap. He died to save his friends. What was the point of everything in between that and his resurrection? We got Magus in our party. Great. But Crono wasn't preventing that at all, and Magus could've joined our party with Crono alive and well. We got to see our characters operate without a leader. Excellent, but how does that contribute to the end goal of stopping Lavos other than being pointless filler? 

 

The best reason I could come up with is getting a bit of extra development for the side characters, but the issue with that is that they get plenty of extra development in the side quests after Crono is brought back to life, even more than Crono himself, which might not be saying much, considering that he is a silent protagonist.

 

Which is another flaw in the execution of the death/resurrection in Chrono Trigger - it's tough to get attached to a silent protagonist. He had no personality, and while this is usually done so that way the player can imprint their personality on the character in question, I personally can't recall one time I've gone through thinking "Aye, this is me so what would I do here?" and often times just follow a route of good or bad when it comes to making decisions.

 

Do you see what I'm getting at here? This is one of the most iconic death/resurrections of a character in all of videogames on top of being one of the greatest videogames of all time to boot. There was so much wrong with this one in particular, and this is almost as good as death/resurrections come.

 


 

Anyway, like someone said earlier in this thread, death in general is often times just a cheap way to incite an emotional reaction from the audience. That's why they're used so often in bad fanfics It's usually not something surprising to see in a movie anymore, and honestly, unless I'm seeing a kid's movie I've just grown to anticipate a death or two. Even in kid's movies, someone often dies in a half-assed attempt to get people more emotionally invested in the film

 

It takes a lot to make death in a story meaningful to me anymore. If a main character dies, then it's often very poorly done because of the subsequent resurrection brought into place. If he doesn't come back to life, then righty-o, that's a good start, I guess. 

I think the best way to execute the death of a main character would be to have them die in meaningful yet grounded way - so toss a heroic sacrifice out of the equation. Then just have the rest of the secondary cast carry on to complete the main character's end goal in a way that's kind of in his or her legacy, maybe just to fulfill their beloved companion's last wish. Then bang, you've got an improvement. Not much, though.

 

So yeahhh...I'm not a big fan of killing off a main character. Killing off characters in general often strikes me as cheap as is, let alone something as integral to holding the story together as the protagonist. 

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These are good points all around. So, what about temporary resurrection? If I revive a character it's always temporary. Like the Reanimation Jutsu in Naruto, though it's more like their spirits manifest for a while before fading. Is that alright?

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About that one major death in Gurren Lagann:

I honestly did not consider Kamina to be a main character in any way when I started watching, it felt obvious from the start that Simon was the primary protagonist while Kamina served as the mentor big brother figure who wasn't going to have his own character development and personal journey aside from reaching the surface. While his death is a shock, it still surprises me to this day that people put so much weight on Kamina's role in the show when absolutely nothing was implied to be his POV. It's like, nobody watched A New Hope and mistook Obi-Wan to be the main character rather than Luke Skywalker.

Also whoever thinks that TTGL starts sucking after episode 8 is an idiot

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I disagree.

 

 

Death is one of the most naturally occurring things in life, its something we don't like to think about and its something we actively try to prevent. Fictional deaths are admittedly overused for the sake of shock value and nothing else, but that's discrediting the actual competent writing behind it that's there too. 

 

Nobody can tell me that Mufasa's death in The Lion King isn't one of the most poignant examples of the trope ever; It wasn't just shock value, it had consequences for the entire rest of the film and its still felt even after it happens. It forces the protagonist to run away to discover themselves and the antagonist to seize opportunity and take over.

 

Its not the trope that's the problem, its the execution of it. 

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Are we talking "main character" as in the protagonist?  Because if so, I can't think of many reasons to kill off the protagonist in a story unless the story is ending.  Plenty of stories end with the main character's death, because it's just showing the literal end of their story.

 

But then there's the topic of resurrection, which I cannot think of any good examples of.  The biggest problem with killing the protagonist and then bringing them back is that it's a situation that is very much unrelatable to the audience, on top of ridding death of consequence.  

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About that one major death in Gurren Lagann:

I honestly did not consider Kamina to be a main character in any way when I started watching, it felt obvious from the start that Simon was the primary protagonist while Kamina served as the mentor big brother figure who wasn't going to have his own character development and personal journey aside from reaching the surface. While his death is a shock, it still surprises me to this day that people put so much weight on Kamina's role in the show when absolutely nothing was implied to be his POV. It's like, nobody watched A New Hope and mistook Obi-Wan to be the main character rather than Luke Skywalker.

Also whoever thinks that TTGL starts sucking after episode 8 is an idiot

 

Do we really have to spoil this, the show is over half a decade old.

 

 

In any case, I think its because of how out of nowhere it was honestly. Like, if I had never heard anything about TTGL and watched it from the beginning blind, I would swear up and down Kamina would have lived until the ending. I mean yea, Simon is the primary viewpoint character from the beginning, but story itself was more or less his and Kamina's as it was about their quest to make it to the surface and survive.

 

I don't think the Obi-Wan connection really works because the story never really tries to pretend its his story in any capacity.....and even then, you can argue it sorta was given how the entire original series is about Darth Vader and the fallout from his relationship with Obi-wan :V

 

Mufasa also is a secondary character.

 

Secondary characters dying to advance the development of the main character is entirely different from killing off the main character because "omg so emotional"

 

Maybe you should have specified then :V

 

 

I don't really see too many instances of the main character dying...cuz you know, they're the main  character.

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The best examples I've ever seen where a main character dies is when the story is meant to be ultimately biographical or a life chronicle of sorts.  A lot of military books ("All Quiet on the Western Front" being one of them) feature the main character dying, as they're intended to chronicle the lives (and deaths) of soldiers.  The novel version of "The Fox and the Hound" also has the main character die at the end from exhaustion.  Again, though, it's less of a cohesive, three-act structure, and more of a chronology of the life of a fox.  An example in more traditional storytelling would probably be I Am Legend, where the main character sacrifices himself in the end.

 

I wouldn't really compare those to, say, The Room's attempt at creating a sudden empathy for Johnny by having him brutally off himself just for shock value.  The main character's death can be done correctly, but it's that much harder to pull off, because it depends not just on the death itself but the format of whatever you're working with.  It's particularly hard to pull off in a series, because then you have to explain why this would kill the character, but not the thousands of other things that they miraculously survived.  It's difficult, but it can be done.

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Do we really have to spoil this, the show is over half a decade old.

I do it because you never know who hasn't seen a particular thing and you just may happen to meet someone who gets into a work and absolutely loves it while experiencing it totally blind. I know a lot of people who don't even know what happens in TTGL, and I've met people who have never seen Psycho or Citizen Kane and have absolutely no idea what their big plot twists are. Hell, even I didn't know anything about Citizen Kane's ending before I saw it. I also didn't know a single thing about BioShock before I played it, which made the first five minutes absolutely mindblowing.

So there's no harm in me spoiler-tagging plot-relevant things and there's no need for you to act so unnecessarily annoyed by it

EDIT: Before anyone assumes this, I'm not saying that twists such as Psycho's or Citizen Kane's should be spoiler tagged since they're so ingrained in pop culture. I merely brought them up as examples that are far better known than a single anime's major character death, yet there are people who exist who don't know about them. TTGL doesn't have the pop culture relevancy that things like Star Wars or FF7 have.

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Main character deaths...I'm indifferent about them. Sometimes they work, other times they really, really don't. It's all to do with the execution of the scene, the writing and how much we care for the character. Tara already mentioned The Room which in my opinion was a hilariously bad death scene. Not only because of the awful acting and writing (he's humping his future wife's dress wtf), but also because the character is not very sympathetic. Not to mention he looks like a creep!

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I don't like wholesale ruling out of plot devices.  I don't think there are really any bad ideas in fiction, just ideas that are harder to execute well, much harder, maybe even practically impossible, than others.  So for main character death, I'd say you probably (but not definitely) have to make it:

 

1. Relevant - the reader should see why it's happening, that it's an event that matters, that it doesn't just fly out of the blue for no good reason;

2. Interesting - it might support the themes of your work for the main character to just be suddenly knifed in an alley, but chances are that won't satisfy the readers and won't match up to the significance of that character;

3. Emotional - if the readers don't care, there's no point doing it;

4. Uncommon - this isn't really under your control as an author, but if everyone else is killing off their main characters at around the same time, it might not be a good idea to be seen as jumping on the bandwagon.  Though imagine that, if a bunch of different authors' main characters in popular fiction all got killed off around the same time; I'd really like to see that.

 

Not all main character deaths are simply for cheap shock value.  But it can be hard to tell sometimes.

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Killing off a protagonist at least in my eyes spells out a conscious decision to paint a picture of consequence or sacrifice. It works the best I feel when it's something you don't really get the chance to see coming or when the narrative is trying to paint a picture of inevitability.

Hotline Miami 2 is a good example of this.

The game has a total of

twelve playable main characters. And all of them die in the end. The story deals mainly with the fallout of the first game and how the original protagonist figuratively shaped the world around them. In two cases, you're playing as characters who were already dead during the first game - one of them which turns out to serve as a huge retroactive twist to the first game and what we thought about their circumstances. The central "character" that draws the connection between everyone, the rooster mask "Richard", keeps reminding people of the inevitability in the path they take. The lack of a good outcome in it exists from the start - but it's a compellingly told tale in spite of it because although it is inevitable, it doesn't disrespect the viewer's penchant for details and it doesn't spare on the cyclical dynamic that exists to inform how every character, in some way, influences each other.

Because of this the game ends the only logical way it could possibly end. The Pig Butcher gets killed by the very woman he bothered to spare for his own self satisfaction. The Hitman who lacked any direction in his life gets killed by The Fans because of his lack of proactivity. The Fans get murdered by The Son in a vigilante take over that was literally a suicide mission. The Son, in a drug induced stupor primarily invoked by his own stress and inner conflict, ends up committing accidental suicide by walking off of a skyscraper. After reaching his ultimate endgame he had nothing else to aspire for; a machine that just stopped after fulfilling his purpose.

And every other character who survived passed that point were obliterated in the USA nuking because the rampant murders got to the point that the founder of the organization that orchestrated the original mask killings finally succeeded in the coup d'e tat to murder the Russian and American presidents, to which Russia retaliated. While Richter got his happy ending, the point drawn in the end was that his past was eventually bound to catch up to him. Evan could get his happy ending depending on what you chose for him, but the point for him was that he did not have the time enough to make that choice count, meaning that him getting to die with his wife and kids was a moment he only got the fewest moments to potentially savor. Manny ends up blockaded in his apartment with paranoia for his department being on the murderous trail he left. The woman who The Pig Butcher kidnapped ended up living the rest of her days in trauma.

And, given that this was a matter of the entire US getting obliterated, no one would feasibly survive - including Jacket, the protagonist of the first game, who throughout the second game was only seen in cameos. He dies alone, in solitary confinement. But out of all of the characters he was the only one with nothing to lose because he fulfilled his purpose in the first game. He already accepted whatever fate was left for him after he ditched the mask in the first game.

It's a tragic, inevitable but quaint ending that had subtle foreshadowing since the start. It's something you know is the only solution to letting it come full circle but it's something that, out of respect for the characters and their portrayal, you'd rather not want to experience because of your attachment to them. The game was designed to "end" the franchise and bring out the most definitive ending, leaving no plot points unfulfilled. There is nothing left for it to explore passed that. In the end the developers succeeded in putting everything else they could have possibly wanted to add, and as such finally ended it in a literal bang.

FFWF put it the best. It's not a bad idea and there are few ideas that generally are. Like most ideas you need to convince people why it's a thing that's necessary in the context of the plot.

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you can also take killing and bringing back a character to absurdist levels for the fun of it

 

I dunno, I enjoy the clusterfuck that was Desty Nova in Alita Last Order: a scientist who devises a method wherein if he dies, a clone will start being made from nanomachines with his memories. At one point you end up with three different Novas walking around while a ton of other Novas begin being born like bugs due to a programming quirk.

 

Alita also gets a double existence at one point, I suppose, plus a character who dies at the beginning of this manga and when brought back, is a previous-state backup, so in a way she's both back and still dead, as the memories are different.

 

You can play with death in a lot of ways.

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Shadow of the Colossus pulled this off really well, and it's one of the most memorable parts of the game.

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I'm surprised we are far into this topic and DBZ hasnt been discussed. What are you guys thoughts on that

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I do it because you never know who hasn't seen a particular thing and you just may happen to meet someone who gets into a work and absolutely loves it while experiencing it totally blind. I know a lot of people who don't even know what happens in TTGL, and I've met people who have never seen Psycho or Citizen Kane and have absolutely no idea what their big plot twists are. Hell, even I didn't know anything about Citizen Kane's ending before I saw it. I also didn't know a single thing about BioShock before I played it, which made the first five minutes absolutely mindblowing.

So there's no harm in me spoiler-tagging plot-relevant things and there's no need for you to act so unnecessarily annoyed by it

EDIT: Before anyone assumes this, I'm not saying that twists such as Psycho's or Citizen Kane's should be spoiler tagged since they're so ingrained in pop culture. I merely brought them up as examples that are far better known than a single anime's major character death, yet there are people who exist who don't know about them. TTGL doesn't have the pop culture relevancy that things like Star Wars or FF7 have.

 

I wasn't really annoyed, I was just kinda wondering why...

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Usually its better to have a main character die, then brought back sometime later, at least depending on the story.

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