Yes, but it’s gonna require someone to be the first to let the other have the last word. I’ve got no dog in the fight… just wanted to point out that you can be the change you want to see in the world. 
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Ngl, as much as I like the character, Toshiro should’ve died. Bro literally got cut in half.
Hiyori got cut in half too, and Rangiku got a hole put through her and her arm cut off. Like a lot of them just go through grevious injuries.
Funnily enough one of the times someone died, Tsukishima. I didn’t even realize it when he showed up again, before remembering they live in the afterlife.
I mean, you were reducing it to only someone only being capable because of killing, plus in this case yeah you could without killing people, but it’d inherently be less isolating and the reader probably wouldn’t feel it either. And you could change the plot to keep people alive, but that’s changing the story, I’d be judging something else.
Nevermind dying can sometimes be the happy ending for a character, especially in cases where you can see the alternate outcomes like games, resurrection, time travel etc.
Plus CSM is a dark series with resurrection too.
Also i love Fujimoto being a troll to his editor, asking which of two characters to kill and picking the one they wanted alive.
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@comradelenin, you know this conversation goes and goes on in circles for one simple reason: for some reason you keep insisting that your preferences are a better way of critiquing art than literally thousand of years of human experience in dramaturgy. It’s okay to not like certain trops, I don’t like a bunch of them and I know the difference between not liking something because it’s bad craft or because I just don’t like this and that’s that. But you just keep insisting that because you don’t like a certain tool in the dramaturgy no one should use it, and using it not perfectly is actually a mistake and must be rectified by committing an even bigger mistake from the dramaturgy point of view. That’s not how it works. We write by certain rules because those rules proved that they work and produce the desirable result. We write by certain rules because it’s the language of art; and while you can be understood when speaking a broken language, everyone will see that you can’t speak that language properly, and you won’t be able to express complex thoughts in it because the mistakes will bury everything under them. All of us see that you just want to basically cut off a part of that language, and we don’t think that it’s a good idea, because it’s only taking away, not adding anything.
Characters’ deaths are one of the tool dramaturgy has. Yes, there are other way to raise the stakes and to set the mood and one can use them, but one can also use this tool, and it’s not a mistake to reach for one of them to communicate in the art language because it’s a totally valid way to express one’s ideas.
You personally, of course, have the right to seek things that don’t use this instrument of telling stories, you don’t have to spend your time on the stories that you don’t like. The only question I have left after reading this exchange for the past few days, is why did you, a person who hates characters’ deaths, choose to watch AOT, the show about people dying horribly?
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I dunno, Anarore… feels to me like this sets up your preferences as some Law of Art even more starkly than anything comradelenin has said so far.
There’s no rule of dramaturgy that says “kill characters” or “don’t kill characters.” I certainly don’t agree with lenin that it’s bad to kill a beloved character…but not because I think he’s ignoring the Language of Art without which complex thoughts cannot be expressed.
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No, laws of writing don’t tell you to kill or not to kill. They tell you the ways you can make a good death and how to avoid bad deaths. And they also tell you how and then to return a character and how and then not to do it. And one can also break those rules too if they really understand what they are doing. Because breaking rules in order to make your art resonate - that’s also a rule.
It’s okay not to like characters deaths - it’s not that I like when characters die left, right and center, I’m a sucker for a happy end. But to say that not killing the characters is the only way to make a good book, show, whatever - that’s not a sustainable point of view.
And also not having characters die really makes it difficult to talk about, you know, death. The thing that bothers a lot of people. The thing that will happen to us all. So are we just supposed not to talk about it in media ever or it should be done only by the way of convoluted metaphors?
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I think ‘rule’ might be the wrong word used here. I think what she’s saying is more akin to character death being a tried and tested trope that’s been proven to work, particularly when used in certain specific cases and certain specific ways, and that advocating to completely stop using that tool because you don’t personally like it is biased.
(@Anarore_Kriptih Lmk if I misunderstood what you were meaning to say btw)
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It’s hard to talk about taste without sounding like you’re legislating for all art everywhere. But I think it’s worth making the effort.
There aren’t laws or rules that make writing as such good or bad. There are tastes which vary by time and culture, genre and medium, artist and audience. There’s great art made by people totally ignorant of “the rules” of a given time, not just by experts consciously breaking them.
Where comradelenin was talking as if “don’t kill a beloved character” is some kind of law of good writing, I disagreed with him too. Where he was complaining about people saying “bringing back a character who’s died is just bad writing,” I had a lot more sympathy.
I agree that dealing with death is an incredibly valuable thing that literature can help us do. We can say that without accusing people who don’t have a taste for it of ignoring the laws of literature.
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I mean, obviously writing has no real rules (I’ve read PKD’s Ubik, so clearly even “make it understandable” isn’t a rule). Like, whatever you do, the writing police isn’t going to break your door down, delete your manuscript, and magnetise your hard drive and/or set your typewriter on fire.
But we have figured out some things that make for pretty-much-universal unsatisfying narrative points. For example, I find the genre of Alien 3 (survival horror) FAR superior to that of Aliens (war movie), but I’m unshakeable on ranking Aliens above Alien 3, because of two big points:
- killing Newt and the whatshisname marine off-screen pre-movie. The problem isn’t that they die (it’s an Alien franchise movie, I go in expecting pretty much anyone to be gankable), it’s that their deaths have no impact and carry no weight, and appear to serve no other purpose other than isolating Ripley again. Which is an acceptable goal to have, but you need to make that goal happen on-screen, and you need to give Ripley a fighting chance at stopping it (and it doesn’t matter that she’s doomed to fail because this is scripted and it’s going to happen). (see also: the first of Disney’s SW movies, which just continues the status quo of the OT, even though the Rebellion to Restore the Republic wins at the end of Return of the Jedi and therefore that status quo should’ve been upended, or at least given a massive shake).
- the prisoners are meaningless. I couldn’t even tell you how many of them die during the movie while watching the movie, because besides the priest dude and Dr. Charles Dance none of them are given any individual personality. They’re not characters, they’re blobs, and so when they die it doesn’t mean anything, and if they had lived it wouldn’t mean anything either. Contrast with Alien and Aliens, which take time to establish the Nostromo crew and the marines as people, so each of their deaths has weight.
These are instances of bad writing. They spend writer’s resources and the viewer’s time for no gain, and that’s terrible.
I don’t think it’s NECESSARILY bad writing, but it does create a precedent that, generally speaking, is poorly handled going forward. Sure, Gandalf has sort-of-something-happen to him and then he gets better and we love it, but that’s because Gandalf is an actual literal angel so he’s working with completely different rules from the rest of the cast except Saruman and Sauron.
Now imagine Tolkien had brought back Boromir*. If somebody else died, why would we care? Boromir came back and he’s supposed to be playing by the same rules as everybody else, so why won’t everyone else just come back? You just end up with that comic panel from when Nick Fury “dies” for the billionth time and the Howling Commandos are just partying and placing bets on whether it was a skrull, a clone, or an LMD.
Or FF7, when deranged katana dude just stabs Aerith once and goes away and Cloud is very very sad while having like 50 phoenix downs in the item bag, and that’s just stupid.¨ In fact, Sephiroth (just remembered his name) is going to stab pretty much every party member a bunch of times in future fights, and they all feel just fine afterwards.
*I mean, it wouldn’t really have mattered, because he’s played by Sean Bean and therefore would just die again, but still
¨Tifa is by far the superior FF7 waifu anyway, and the Italian parliament agrees
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@JBento and @Sally_Forth
what they said, yes
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I guess I’ve read enough very old, foreign, and recent literary fiction to think there’s nothing resembling “pretty-much-universal” rules for a good narrative. Current genre conventions, satisfying as they feel to those of us steeped in them, aren’t the culmination of millennia of storywriting evolution. (Nor are the very different conventions of avant-garde fiction.) So when someone has a strong taste that cuts against those familiar rules, replying “you’re wrong” doesn’t strike me as very constructive.
I understand that the temptation can be hard to resist when the person with that strong taste can’t resist telling other people they’re wrong about their tastes. But still.
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Yeah, how about resisting a temptation to paint yourself more well-read than your opponents, mm?
Obviously there will be differences in ideas between different times and places in their approach to stories. Still to claim that the modern understanding of storytelling hasn’t been build on those different ideas from at the very least different periods of the western world is strictly untrue.
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I’m not a fan of the argument that says “because there are exceptions, there is no rule”. Writing isn’t an exact science, true, but saying there are no patterns, rules or good practices is not true.
Anyway, this wasn’t even what I wanted to say. I’m not one to tell people to stop talking, I can just remove myself from a conversation I don’t find productive. But, man! After going in circle for forever, now it’s definetely deranging off topic. People, just chill and change the subject.
Edit:
In the spirit of being the change I want to see, let me kick off a different topic.
I used to really dislike RGN (randomness) in IF, but I’ve always liked RPGs and rolling the dice is so cool. I’ve been wondering about this incongruency, and I’ve come to the conclusion that is not the dice in IF that I hated, but the fact that it happens “behind the screen”. It’s not understanding the rules of resolution and not understanding/knowing the mechanism (if any) to mitigate randomness (like buffs on rolls based on stat or proficiency). It’s not even being able to see the number I got, and just getting a failed outcome.
Recently I’ve been playing Studies in the Dark, that implements the FitD system. Every time you roll a dice it tells you the number you got. I found that to be, ironically, very entertaining. Made me rethink my position on it.
What do you guys think? Do you hate randomness in any form?
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Fair enough. That wasn’t my intent – I was trying to explain why I disagreed with the implications of Joao’s well-chosen examples, and maybe get the rest of you well-read people who disagree with me to think of some examples from old, foreign, or literary fiction that you’re familiar with. But I see how it came across.
@cup_half_empty: I like randomness.
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I don’t like when I need to replay the whole game when a dice roll prevent me from getting the specific outcome I’m trying to get.
I do like, however, how that allows me to get a failure in a situation where I otherwise would inevitably succeed (what if I like the failurestate more?) or succeed in where I would otherwise inevitably fail (especially if everyone then just goes what just happened?), Disco Elysium being a prime example.
I haven’t been able to reconcile these two views.
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Hey, I appreciate that.
I mean, sure, we can speak, for example, about deus ex machina, how for the actual Hellene and Roman people solving problems with magic was part of the deal, because back then people didn’t know everything we know they still had perfectly logical to them view of the world, which explained things that were outside of people’s control by the acts of other, higher beings, and other similar ideas, like autogenesis of actual living creatures from mud. People definitely understood cause and effect, but their causes and effect in some places differed from ours. But even then there was critique of plays that relied on this magical solution to all the play’s heroes’ problems, there was an idea that it’s just laziness. However, while talk about Tolkien, the Professor believed that such things, those happy happenstances, those miracles were important part of the fantasy, of the escapism for which those kinds of stories like the Lord of the Rings were written.
At the end of the day, I think, the idea that everything must have cause and effect, that things our heroes get should be earned, both good and bad, won. If you ask people, they most likely will agree that it’s good when there is a buildup to things: to conflict resolutions, relationships, everything. And of course one can still use deus ex machina, but in order to get the desired effect one must understand this trope’s place in the modern storytelling and use it accordingly.
Have you played Breach? It also implements the visible rolls
I think my enjoyment of randomness depends of what the author and I think that range of successes and fails should include. If the punishment for failing is reasonable and actually adds something in its own way too - then yes, I can deal with some randomness here and there. If the punishment is unreasonable harsh so it turns into some sort of darksouls of the IF - then no, thank you.
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If it happens once, it’s a miracle. If it happens every other page, it’s no longer a miracle and loses basically all weight. Just like a character death should have a point, a miracle also should have a point. Tolkien I think was actually pretty good about it.
Regarding randomness, I see little point in it if easy save-load is allowed tbh. Like in BG3, where you can save right in the middle of the dialogue and just reroll until you get the needed result.
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I have the same opinion. Frodo still made a great sacrifice to get where he was, and he had new problems that weren’t magicked away as a result of his adventure. And Tolkien also had the desire to make this part of the story to give people hope that everything will be okay in the end. He knew what he wanted to achieve with using something that goes against the conventional idea.
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Ngl I feel like you’re throwing stones in glass houses here, given you gave a speech about how your preferred tropes are iron law and anyone who thinks they’re bad is poorly read or less literate because the tropes are old.
I didn’t say that, I said I didn’t like those stories. The thread is called “Disliked Elements, Mechanics, and Tropes”. Disliked is the operative word. I even said several times that the matter was subjective. I did draw attention to some cases where things were bad from a pure quality analysis standpoint but quality is already subjective.
Simple, it had other selling points. Just because a show is known for something doesn’t mean it’s the main draw for everyone or even that everyone thinks it’s a good quality. Every story has something to dislike about it, there’s no avoiding every trope you dislike. I watched in spite of the character deaths, not because of them.
This. I hate randomness in IF when I really want a specific outcome. If I like a fail state more when decisions are stat based, then I can just pick a choice I know I don’t have the stats to pass and get the failstate that way. (Or pick the option I know I’m good at if I want to pass.)
If there is a good character building moment for the first one I like it. I.e. the MC has an internal crisis about the results of their failure when they should have succeeded, but for the most part failing where I should succeed frustrates me. On the other hand, I do love a good succeeding where it shouldn’t be possible scenario.
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