This needs to be emphasized more, as this is “kill your darlings” taken too far, literally.
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If resurrection was a possibility before the death, then sure. It was set up by the author, and it makes sense that the characters would want to bring back their friend.
But if it just shows up, and now we’re on a resurrection quest? It’s cheap. The author clearly wasn’t planning to do this, so why are we doing it now?
And to be clear, I don’t mind authors adjusting the plan as they go. But once a book is published, there are threads that the author has to deal with. And one of those threads is if a character dies.
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I think resurrection in stories works well as a vector for character development. There has to be change, a way that the character has been permanently altered and their perspective changed as a result of their brush with death.
As a positive example, in Lord of the Rings, Gandalf the Grey becomes Gandalf the White, and his attitude changes entirely due to his death and resurrection.
As a negative example, in Game of Thrones, Jon Snow is barely affected at all by his death and resurrection, largely shrugging it off in a way that renders the experience pointless.
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Better a cheap bandage than an open wound.
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Id say its less a cheap bandage and more like stuffing dirt in the wound. The moment a single death is cheaply revoked because the author made a “mistake” and the book is worse off for the character loss. The worse it will get. Especially if standards within the book must bec changed to revoke said death. Sometimes the death doesnt go as planned but what makes it good isn’t the actual death, its the after effect. Death is but a few sentences. But its effects last books. If you dont properly nurture it and develop the changes and feelings around the death. Then it will feel cheap and just for drama. Because nothing actually changed besides the character no longer being around.
It doesnt just need to be for major characters. Even a minor one who the main character isnt as attached to can cause a good shift. Whether in someone elses story or by making the Main character change. Whether by changing strategies if they believe they couldve stopped it or if their death presents an unexpected threat that brings new opportunites for growth.
All of that disappears the moment you revive them to fix a “mistake” as opposed to actually being a good plot needed decision. Deaths alongside revivals need to be considered. Not haphazardly done based on feedback. Even if you’ve screwed up and wrote a subpar death that does damage your story. Its better to go with the flow and figure out how to make it better than to delete it later and return them without proper setting and preparation.
Because if the book sequel suddenly builds up revival as a concept solely because of that mistake. You fucked up.
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Ok but I never said it was impossible to do a character death correctly (though I definitely disagree with most examples people cite when asked), I’m referring specifically to when it just doesn’t work or add anything besides possibly raised stakes. I’m talking about when people agree the death was bad for the story but still try and argue against it being undone (a character turning out to just not have died also counts).
Because now you story have revivial in it and you need to go out of your way to make any death stick.
It is not just for characters you like too. True resurrection after death is like time travel. As an author you really need to think what gigantic reprecussion and limits it have before you employ, because it is an pandoras box and once you open it you cannot close the lid again.
It is not something to be employed to fix a stupid mistake you made.
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It’s really not that hard to establish proper limits. And in any case I still maintain it’s the lesser evil compared to letting a character stay dead that it was a bad idea to kill.
Mmh. I’m not categorically against it (and even less against not-really-dead situations… that would be hypocritical, I’ve done that myself), but I am of the opinion it shouldn’t be done haphazardly.
Then again, I’m also of the opinion one shouldn’t kill characters haphazardly either.
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There are two types of deaths: the ones that serve to the narration and the ones that don’t. The second ones shouldn’t happen because they are bad writing. The first ones can be separated into points of rebirth and the logical ends of the narrative. Resurrection naturally follows the death that are there to facilitate the rebirth. The second ones are the last grand scene of the character, those deaths show what those characters are literally ready to die for. And if there is no development for them planned after that death - because they reached the end of their journey - then there is no point in that character living anymore, neither they can contribute to the story’s themes nor there is probably enough room for a resurrection quest for the rest of the cast and what does a sacrifice even mean if nothing was sacrificed?
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See this baffles me too. A character fulfilling their purpose doesn’t mean it’s a good idea to kill them off nor does it make that not a mistake worth rectifying.
They presumably didn’t know they’d come back. Good enough.
Yeah in a perfect world but people keep doing it and this is about how to go about rectifying it.
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Of course, not all characters that served their purpose have to die, that’s not how it works. But if it’s a conflict of values or a sacrifice - then those values and sacrifices are meaningless if nothing was sacrificed. And if the death was caused by conflicting views - then there is no point to bring back the character, because they won’t help our hero’s quest.
No, sacrifice is a permanent thing, there are no takies backies, or it doesn’t have sense. If they didn’t know they will comeback - then there are no established ways of revival, so it requires a lot to make that revival fit with the rest of the story and it has to be a very big thing, taking a lot of space in the narrative, and you may just not need a resurrection quest in your book. If there are established ways of revival, then that means that a sacrifice reversed wasn’t a real one, which cheapens the sacrifice, the character and the writing.
And sticking to your guns even if you didn’t execute your intent flawlessly isn’t stupid - it’s just doing your best.
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That the heroes know about.
It’s just sunk cost fallacy. It’s nonsense in this context. Saying killing off a character means you “didn’t execute your idea perfectly” is like saying the Gallipoi Campaign could’ve gone better. It’s one of the worst mistakes you can make as a writer.
Also nonsense. The intent still matters.
I’m not really sure what you mean when you say values.
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Yeah I agree I just think a haphazard revival is inherently better than nothing.
If you kill the character that means you don’t have plans for them anymore. And even if you kill them in the wrong place, at the wrong time or in the wrong way, dragging them back won’t make the book better - it will be just another mistake to add to the pile.
Also if death aren’t narratively cheap, resurrections are even more costly and require even better crafting. If you can’t pull off a death in a meaningful manner, then maybe you shouldn’t think about resurrections.
Personal values - if a hero and their comrade end up progressing into different views onto something that is very important point and both are ready to die to make their wish into reality - then you can’t bring back that comrade after their death, they are gone for good.
No, it’s absolutely not! An imperfect death still helps to create some stakes about what is happening, you can’t just sweep it under a rug.
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Character death should serve a purpose other than shock value. Deaths that satisfy that condition, as a general rule, should not be reverted, and deaths that do not satisfy it shouldn’t happen in the first place, but if they do happen, then it’s better to stick to it. Reverting the death always proves to be a remedy worse than the poison.
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It’s not ideal but I value likable characters getting a deserved happy ending over the drawbacks any day of the week (it’s worth noting that tragedy typically falls under “stories I hate”, so while they’re an exception in principle, I still don’t much like when they do it because then what I’m reading is a tragedy, and I only read those if I didn’t know that beforehand). I just do not care about anything else enough to want them to stay dead.
It’s also worth noting I did explicitly mention characters being made to stay dead when brining them back is already easy to justify. Robots for example.
I think it’s actually quite rare to have a “bad” death in a fictional context (note that this doesn’t include the events leading up to it, which can indeed be stupid and contrived). Even if you kill a character before they achieve their goals, complete their character development or resolve a conflict they have with another character, that doesn’t make their death a waste. After all, death is meant to leave behind unanswered questions and wasted potential. Its very pointlessness makes a narrative point.
If a character’s death impacts the story, it’s already meaningful in some way, and resurrecting them would only serve to strip said death of purpose and render an entire chunk of the narrative a useless digression before reverting to the status quo. If, on the other hand, a character’s death doesn’t impact the story, resurrecting them would just be a waste of time and it’s better to just move on without them.
This isn’t to say that resurrecting a character is never a good idea, but it’s harder to pull off than killing them in the first place and usually needs to be set up in advance. After all, death is real, which makes it very easy to accept and attach meaning to, while resurrection requires laying more groundwork in terms of worldbuilding and themes.
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Ok but their death having an impact is often a bad thing. It impacts the story in a way that makes it worse. “Meaning” is not, in and of itself, a good thing. All good deaths have it but a bad death can too.
Like, the death of Sasha Braus in AOT was a key event in the build up to the ending because it was a key motivating force for stuff that idk if people still don’t want spoilers. This ending is, imo, the worst ending to an otherwise great story that I have ever seen. That death certainly had an impact but it lead up to pure, undiluted garbage. I know that it was all planned from the start, but it was still bad. Every story event that was caused by this made the plot worse. That’s definitely a meaningful death. In the worst possible way a death can be meaningful.
No, but a lack of meaning is never a good thing, and that’s the result of a poorly executed resurrection. Leaving a character alive can certainly lead to a better story than killing them off, but we’re talking about a scenario where they’ve already been killed off. The “pure, undiluted garbage” (I’ve neither read nor watched AoT, so I’ll have to take your word on this) has already happened. The story events it caused have already made the plot worse and bringing that character back does nothing to fix it.
It’s also important to look at the order in which the narrative itself was constructed. In-universe, a character’s death may make certain events occur, but the out-of-universe cause and effect is often reversed, with a character being killed off to act as a catalyst for events the author has already decided will happen. In this case, the character’s death isn’t to blame for the direction of the narrative, being merely a means of getting from point A to a predetermined point B.
In your AoT example, for instance, you don’t seem to take issue with the character death itself, but with the end it leads to. However, if it was all planned from the start, said ending wasn’t the result of the creator writing themselves into a corner due to killing of a character, instead being something they aimed for from the start. Had they changed their mind about killing the character but not ending, they would’ve simply taken a different path to get there. Conversely, if they’d changed their mind about the ending but not the character, the death would’ve set off a chain of events leading to a different ending.
In the end, the lasting consequences of a death are still under an author’s control even once the death itself has been set in stone. It’s far better to have them change and develop as the narrative continues rather than resort to a resurrection in an attempt to brute force your way out of having any consequences whatsoever.
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