A Time to Kill (Writing Essay)

[mark_asphodel]

 OK.  So, over on myaru 's journal, she and sacae  had a little exchange about killing characters off-- the pros and cons thereof, squeamishness when it comes to one's favorite characters, and so on.  I had some things I wanted to say there, but hijacking that particular thread wasn't the right place for it.

I guess I'll start with the quote from sacae  that got my wheels turning:

But then I realized... Damn, I put the characters through literal hell in the outline, and THEN KILL ONE OF THEM?!  That seemed a bit too much.  Too much drama, too much angst, and for a reader, very disappointing.  I don't always think "Happily Ever After" is the answer to an ending, obviously, but I do think that most readers prefer that they read a long story and come away with... something.  Something good.

Now, I'll admit right off that I'm not "most readers" and my tastes are, shall we say, weird, but I think my arguments here are fairly well-grounded in classical lit, or at least they bear a passing acquaintance with classical lit.  So, consider this an apology of sorts for putting characters through hell and then killing them.

All arguments below assume that the author is interested in a "serious" piece to start with-- in other words, a piece where the idea of killing off characters in a non-humorous manner is even an issue.  If your main interest is romance, comedy, or fluff, then feel free to ignore me. 

Point the first: Tragedy should be, oddly enough, a positive experience.  There are various "schools of tragedy" in Western lit, but as a general rule, the conclusion of a tragedy is actually a reassertion of the Way Things Ought To Be-- of order.  Outright evil is not rewarded, and the social system, with nobility at its apex, continues.  Macbeth goes from hero to horror and dies a bloody death, but the rightful prince of Scotland claims his father's throne.  Brutus and Cassius come to grief, but Octavian is there in the background, waiting to usher in the Roman Empire.  Electra and Orestes get their revenge on their terrible mother, but in turn they will have to atone for the act of matricide.  "Tragedy" as a genre sets limits on how far the carnage can go.  There should be something affirming, something uplifting, embedded in it all.  Ever wonder why the Prince of Verona gets the last word in during Romeo and Juliet?  Nobody cares about him, after all, but he's the embodiment of social order.  Life proceeds, and hopefully everyone has learned a lesson.  

Point the second: Sad character death is not necessarily tragic.  Let's imagine Kent and Lyn on the plains of Sacae, celebrating their honeymoon.  Lyn gets bit by a snake and dies in Kent's arms.  That's sad, but it's not tragic.  For an actual tragedy, imagine Kent pleading to St. Elimine to give Lyn a second chance, and Elimine grants it because of Kent's phenomenal loyalty (and besides, Athos already filled her in on the whole Nergal business when he showed up in heaven), but only if Kent  agrees to not even look at Lyn for three whole days.  And this upsets Lyn, who is already pretty discombobulated with the whole alive/dead/alive business, and she pleads with Kent to look at her just once, and she soon becomes afraid that Kent's not looking at her because she's somehow ghastly after being dead, and eventually Kent can't stand to listen to the anguish in her voice and turns to Lyn to reassure her and... poof!  Lyn goes bye-bye.

So, in the first scenario, Lyn and Kent have their happiness interrupted by a random crappy stroke of fate.  There is no real lesson there other than Crappy Life is Crappy.  Aristotle would term it "misadventure," and we would just call it suckage.  The second scenario is tragic not just because more stuff happens, but because the characters act instead of just being acted upon.  Specifically, Kent makes a mistake.  He disobeys Elimine's ground rules, and while the audience could understand why, it doesn't make it excusable.  Rules are rules.

Point the third: Active characters are more interesting than passive ones.  This is just a general rule, really.  Whether it's a character having the world hand them good stuff, or a character just being dumped on by the world, a passive character gets annoying pretty quickly.  "Life hands you good stuff while you're sleeping" might be the original moral of Sleeping Beauty, but when you realize that the "good stuff" involves being raped and impregnated, maybe you're better off staying awake and looking after your own fortune.

Now, active characters have the chance to make mistakes.  This is really, really important to the whole concept of tragedy.  We have it fed to us in high school that tragic heroes possess a critical character flaw, but the real key is not so much that there's something inherently wrong with the character as that they make a mistake.  Sometimes a trivial one.  But the mistake has consequences-- for them, and often for many around them.

Point the fourth: Allow your characters to make mistakes.  Don't coddle them.  This is easier said than done, I know, and I grappled with it for years.  My heroes and heroines always had to be right, so if bad things befell them (oh, the angst!) it was never ever their fault.  It was... the stars, or Bad People, or too many magpies on the telephone lines that day.  That makes for crappy reading and I think we've all reached that point where we can see an author coddling their favorite character and instinctively look away in annoyance.  At least, we see it in what other people write.  Our own favorites... well, they're special!  We love them.  :)  

Point the fifth: If your characters make mistakes, allow those mistakes to have consequences.  And this circles back to the reaction I had to sacae 's quote above.   I would much rather read a piece, even a long piece, where characters screw up and suffer the consequences than one in which they screw up and get bailed out for the sake of a happy ending.  Imagine that Ephraim and L'Arachel go through their canonical years-long courtship and finally triumph over the objections of the Rausten theocrats, but state business keeps them apart entirely too often.  Ephraim, hot to spend more time with his lovely lady, decides over the objections of cooler heads (Seth and Kyle say hi) to ride his horse over dangerous terrain on a stormy, moonless night to see L'Arachel a day sooner than he would have otherwise.  Now, is the "proper" conclusion to a series of reckless and self-indulgent mistakes going to be a) fun time with L'Arachel or b) death?  I'm infinitely more inclined to go with option b, at least if the point of the story is that Ephraim and L'Arachel are making self-indulgent mistakes.  If the point of the story is that Ephraim and L'Arachel are sexy together, then damn the theocrats and go with (a).  I'm more interested in a story about people with responsibilities jacking things up than I am a story about Character A and Character B making a cute couple.  Your mileage may vary.      

In conclusion, it's okay to put characters through hell and then kill them.  At least, it's more OK to do so when the hell, and the tragedy, unfold as an inevitable (even logical) result of the characters' own actions.  A character might be struggling against a predetermined fate, or against some exterior force (expectations of society, whatever), but if a character is simply the passive recipient of their doom, then yes, it's depressing.  If Fiora marries Eliwood and then mopes herself to death because she finds out an Ilian mercenary is Not Good Enough for Pherae, it's all right for a pity party but not necessarily tragic.  If Fiora undercuts herself by misreading expectations and picking the wrong battles in the Lycian courts, then things get interesting.  It's not "true" tragedy if she's just a victim.  It might not even be interesting.  But if Fiora pushes herself along the road to an early grave-- ensuring that her only son grows up without a mother and arguably giving Eliwood a shove towards a premature demise himself-- then we see the seeds of tragedy.  And yet, because we know the overall context, even so it's not that tragic.  Maybe whatever Roy hears, or even witnesses, of his mother's struggles make him that much stronger, that much more able to handle the crap that comes his way all too soon.  But we know he endures, and Lycia emerges even stronger, and the social order of kings and queens and marquesses triumphs in spite of all the corpses scattered around, and the audience leaves the drama knowing that the world is not just about Crappy Life is Crappy, but about something more, something that every would-be hero and heroine out there has a stake in.  They leave knowing that the choices they make actually matter, for good or ill.

And that, perhaps, is the most comforting fiction that any tale-teller can spin.  

Comments

[hooves.livejournal.com]

(I may struggle with letting beloved characters make serious mistakes, but killing them off is considerably easier, lol.) I at least tend to prefer reading about people being forced to live on and deal with their mistakes (or not), but that does make things considerably messier and difficult to pull off. (Though in the case of FE6/7 sometimes the limitations of canon comes into play here...)

Yeah, this is kind of true for me, too. Sometimes it is easier to kill them than it is to let them live, because death = resolution in a lot of cases, whereas living means a lot of hard work and toil/labor that is not just a pain in the ass to write, it's a pain in the ass for the characters, too. However, I do enjoy reading about people living through terrible circumstances like that's not obvious. I've just found that I'm not quite as good at writing it as I wish I was.

Also, Fiora: I could absolutely see her like that. If Eliwood /did/ marry Fiora, things would be interesting. Isn't there something in Lyn and Eliwood's ending that mentions them not quite being accepting of her? I can't remember. But if I'm remembering right, then Fiora would have a much worse time of it. Lyn's at least of part royal blood-- Fiora is not.

Also I just really like Fiora sometimes. <3

[shimizu-hitomi.livejournal.com]

death = resolution -- exactly. For instance, in A Thousand Snows, I'm STILL not sure if it was the "right" choice to kill off Sain -- that fic has bothered me a lot since I first posted it because I felt for the longest time like the only thing people got out of it was "boohoo Sain died" (and still kind of suspect this is the case). On one hand, it was a natural ending to his particular character arc, and it's not like things were *completely* resolved... but on the other hand, I did think it would be interesting to see how his relationship with Fiora, among other things, would be impacted post-war if he'd survived (it would NOT have been an automatic happy ending, though I think the status quo would have gone through drastic changes, at least).

And yeah, the Eliwood/Lyn ending mentions the controversy of Lyn being (part-)Sacaen, while with Eli/Fiora it's because she's a mercenary iirc. It would definitely be tougher for Fiora, too, since there's this impression you get from the games that the Ilian pegasus knights are just not very well respected. While Eli/Lyn already have a history of alliance (i.e. during the inheritance plot), so the pairing would at least make sense to people on a political level. (And puts slightly different nuances on the choice to dump Caelin on Hector.)

Though -- slightly off-topic -- that's also one of the things that annoys me about Hector's cookie cutter endings. Florina would not handle things like Farina would not handle things like Lyn, so the cut & paste job with their endings is kind of frustrating! At least Eliwood's endings get SOME character-specific details. And I personally would find it really interesting to see any of the three sisters thrown into Lycian politics. XD

/edited for typo, gosh my brain is not functioning tonight