Leaderboard

Are you seriously trying to argue that a character shouldn't be killed off on the basis that their real-life counterpart wouldn't want it to happen? C'mon, man. I don't think people believe that. It's simply that when investing time into a story, folks tend to seek immersion - we read and watch fictional works because we want to relate to the characters and live out their adventures along side them. This is hard to do when the work itself lacks realism or authenticity. When characters are virtually invincible and any harm that might come to them is understood to be an arbitrary illusion for the sake of a spiel, the actions taken to both avoid and inflict said harm lose their meaning. If your characters continuously escape any and all threats posed to them, then said threats will eventually lose their power to captivate the audience, and once that happens, the story is robbed of its emotional impact. It doesn't matter how high the stakes are raised, because in the end, the hero always wins, and nothing of value is lost. That's why folks like tragedies - rather than present an emotional constant, tragedies offer characters whose survival/happiness is not guaranteed, and whose actions matter, which in turn means that the audience is invested in everything that happens. You're not just observing the plot, you're experiencing it. To say that an author lacks creativity for creating an actual story rather than a narrative stasis is delusional. Just to make this clear, you're degrading the work of the likes of Homer, Dante, Saavedra, Doyle, Harris - hell, just about any famous author. Claiming that tragedies are solely about destruction is contradicting the very nature of such works. Tragedies aren't just about death and decrepitude - they're about the creation of beauty, the sacrifice of the established, and the celebration of the flawed. Hamlet might have been a tragic story, but in the end it was an examination of the futility of vengeance and rage. The Odyssey might have told of a thousand deaths, but its purpose was the celebration of Odysseus' journey and the bonds that carried him through it all. You are oversimplifying and defiling one of mankind's greatest artistic achievements, and sloppily at that.