Killing Important (and Nice) Characters

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MarkEsq

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I'm writing an article for HuffPo about why it's important for authors, tv writers, and film scriptors to kill off major characters.

I'm doing this because I kill a good guy character in my third novel, and I got one very bad reaction from a reader. So I'm giving reasons, but I want examples from other works to show I'm not the only one (I don't watch Game of Thrones but I'm told there are a few surprise deaths in it).

So I'm here to ask you why you think major characters need to be killed off, and to give me some examples from books, tv, and movies.

Please note:
1. I'm talking about killing good guys, nice people, not bad guys.
2. If you post here, you are giving me permission to steal your examples and ideas.

For which, I thank you. :)
 

Dennis E. Taylor

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LOST killed off people regularly. Wish they'd killed the whole show :Soapbox:

I've noticed that a lot more shows are more willing to kill off characters, and not just the nasty ones. Keeps characters from getting stale, allows new plotlines, keeps the actors from getting uppity :Shrug: and keeps the audience guessing. In books, Steven Baxter kills off characters at the drop of an apostrophe. the first time he did it in a book I was reading, I actually recoiled in shock. But after a while, it can get unbelievable that the same group manages to survive firefight after firefight (or whatever), and you can't just keep importing red shirts to be killed off without becoming cliché. In the book I'm writing, I've already killed off a couple of lovable characters -- in fact I've gone out of my way to make them lovable -- so one of the MCs will have a meltdown.
 

asroc

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Well, for example in Game of Thrones, some characters are killed because they believe in justice and honor while living in a world that doesn't play by those rules. And since they don't have the manpower to back up their beliefs, they eventually end up dead. When you play the game of thrones, you win or you die.

So if, in the context of the story, the death of a character is a logical conclusion then it's important that they actually die.
 

Ari Meermans

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Karin Slaughter. In her Grant County series, Sara Linton and Jeffrey Tolliver together with Lena Adams were the three main characters. Sara is a pediatrician with her own clinic and is also the coroner. Jeffrey was the Chief of Police, and Lena his best detective. Jeffrey, described by Ms. Slaughter as a "horndog", and Sara marry. Sara comes home to find him in bed with the town's sign-painter. Sara divorces Jeffrey though they still love each other. Over the course of five subsequent books—count 'em, FIVE—they begin to reconnect. Jeffrey grows into a better man. As a couple they have everything to live for and are more in love than ever and remarry. Because Sara can't have children (ain't giving no spoilers here, sorry), they apply to adopt. Six months into their second marriage, they receive word they've been approved as adoptive parents and will be able to adopt a 9-month-old baby boy. Minutes after getting the news, Jeffrey is killed by a bomb in their mailbox.

I was devastated and swore never to buy another book in that series. But, you know what? Sara came back a stronger and more multi-layered character. Still, it's tough to take when there's so much invested in a character, especially one who is growing and developing.
 

Sage

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Joss Whedon got kinda known for killing off favorites in his series. In SERENITY, he killed off the goofy, nice guy character, Wash, though it may be worth noting that it somewhat divided the Browncoat fan base. But the reason that it was the right choice was that you spend the rest of the movie thinking that all these other beloved characters have a really good shot of dying, instead of thinking that they're safe.
 

JustSarah

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Kill off characters, but only sparingly. Only if it means something. Not haphazardly and watonly. With that said, I don't believe in sparing gory details. (That's assuming your writing young adult and above.)
 

Marian Perera

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So I'm here to ask you why you think major characters need to be killed off, and to give me some examples from books, tv, and movies.

Gone with the Wind. Bonnie (Scarlett and Rhett's daughter) died partly because she was fearless and headstrong, much like her mother. She took her pony over a fence that was too high. However, for story purposes, the death needed to happen to drive Scarlett and Rhett apart, to make him hit rock bottom, and to ensure there was no reason left for him to stay with his wife. If Bonnie had remained alive, he would have struggled along in an unhappy marriage for her sake.

Likewise, Melanie died because she longed for another child, but she'd been warned her health couldn't endure it. She took the risk and got pregnant anyway. But for story purposes, her death was one of the final steps Scarlett needed to take into adulthood. Scarlett realized just how much Melanie had done for her, and finally appreciated her - late in the day, but better than never.

Also, Scarlett was in love with Ashley, Melanie's husband, right up till that moment. Ashley's reaction to Melanie's death highlighted why he was completely the wrong person for Scarlett - and although she could now have him, she realized he'd never be more than a millstone around her neck. If Melanie hadn't died, Scarlett would probably have persisted in her infatuation with Ashley. Finally, the promise Melanie asked from Scarlett (to look after Ashley) bookended the promise Ashley extracted from Scarlett years before that (to look after Melanie when he went away to war).

So to sum it up, these deaths are not only organic parts of the story (stemming from the characters' personalities), they work for the story itself. And the fact that Margaret Mitchell was willing to kill off the heroine's child was... well, a shock when I first read this book at 15. But it was the kind of shock that has to happen sometimes.

A Game of Thrones is like that too. Khal Drogo, Daenerys's husband, is a warlord who loves her and protects her... but at the same time, if he had lived, she would always have been his subordinate - and his priorities came first. He doesn't even decide to win back her father's throne for her until one of the Usurper's assassins strikes at her while she's pregnant with their son. When he died it was still a shock, partly because of the manner of his death - infection, not even a glorious fall in battle - but his death meant that Daenerys finally came into her own.
 

MarkEsq

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Thanks for the examples, people. I just realized how tough this is to write because I don't want to spoil books/films for people.

Best I use either general examples, or older ones. I mean, if people haven't seen LOST or DEXTER by now...

But keep 'em coming. Are there any examples from classic literature? I mean, Shakespeare, but anything slightly less 17th century... :)
 

Ari Meermans

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Shakespeare, sure. He killed off Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Mercutio was Romeo's boyhood friend (and practically the only decent person in the whole cast) and decides to duel Tybalt when Romeo refused. Romeo's interference caused Mercutio's death, thus the phrase and Mercutio's dying words, "A plague on both your houses." :)
 
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Andros

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I can't really think of anything "classic" right now, but The Stand is old enough that you could probably use it...maybe just give a spoiler warning?

Stephen King has talked about his decision to kill off several of the good guys (at least one of them was a major character who I loved dearly) about halfway through the book. For him, he said the characters were getting stale...settling into their lives and starting to make the same mistakes that had led to society's demise in the first place. So they needed to be shaken into action again. I'm paraphrasing, but I think that's what he was getting at when he talked about it.

I still hate him a little for it though.
 

mrsmig

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If Johnny Nolan had not died in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, his daughter Francie, a budding novelist, would never have learned to recognize the beauty and tenderness in her own squalid existence and write about that, instead of the "pretty" stories she had been writing to please others.

In the children's classic The Island of the Blue Dolphins, Karana leaps off the ship which is taking her tribe to another land, in order to be with her little brother Ramo who has been inadvertently left behind. Ramo is killed by wild dogs not long after, and Karana must survive alone by teaching herself the hunting skills forbidden to women of her tribe. If Ramo had lived, Karana might not have learned those skills.
 
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alleycat

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I was talking with a couple of friends the other day about the first long books we read when we were kids.

One of mine was a book on the Trojan War told from the Trojans' point of view; I don't remember the title. Of course, Hector gets killed in the end (and dragged around a bit), as well as Achilles.

The Iliad might be something you could use as a example since it's well-known and one of the earliest works of literature.
 

Siri Kirpal

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No one has mentioned the Potter series?? Dumbledore, Sirius Black, Cedric, Fred Weasley all die. They have a few flaws, but they're all certified good guys. A few women who aren't important to the books die too.

These deaths give Harry the will and the courage to do what he has to do.

Blessings,

Siri Kirpal
 

DoNoKharms

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Killing off characters establishes stakes and tension; it creates a universe in which you know goodness doesn't render you invulnerable, which in turn allows action, suspense, etc., to have narrative tension. Look at the Hobbit films for an inverse example: because the films go out of their way to establish that no harm will come to the dwarves, the endless barrel rides and goblin chases just become dragging, tedious filler, a theme park ride at best.
 

ScarletWhisper

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What Queen of Swords said. Death is a human finality that everyone faces and can relate to. It creates conflict and a chance to redirect. Massive plot device.

Also, there is a difference when you read or watch something when you know that a character might actually die. So much of the time, a character will manage to thwart a seemingly certain death. That jades a reader/viewer. Knowing that your favorite character really could die (because hey, it happened to that other guy) makes the audience more sensitive to mortality and risk.
 

sheadakota

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Downton Abby set in early 1900s England- Sybil, the youngest well-to-do daughter of the Earl dies in childbirth.

After a long fought for happy ending, Mary's husband- a genuine nice guy- dies in a car crash as Mary is giving birth to their son.

Not that my work is note-worthy, but I did kill off a major nice guy character in book two of my series. Got some flak about it from readers, but most understood why it had to happen.
 

Jamesaritchie

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I like stories where the protagonist make sit through alive, but everyone else is fair game, and a goodly number of them need to die.

When only red shirts get killed, stories get exceedingly boring.
 

Andros

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Downton Abby set in early 1900s England- Sybil, the youngest well-to-do daughter of the Earl dies in childbirth.

After a long fought for happy ending, Mary's husband- a genuine nice guy- dies in a car crash as Mary is giving birth to their son.

These examples are interesting because it goes into territory that is kind of unique to film and television, and wouldn't happen in a book...both of those characters were killed off because the actors wanted to leave the show. Honestly I'm not sure that either of their deaths bring more to the story than their lives would have, but my thoughts on that are also clouded by my emotions about the characters!
 

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I think that a story, at the very least the beginning of a story, is like a rules negotiation with the reader. You want to establish a set of frames, of boundaries, which will determine if the player afterwards feels cheated or not.

I think killing an important or nice character can be a part of that negotiation, and establish a heightened tension in the story. You come to an understanding with the reader that nothing is off the table when it comes to risk, including the reader’s bonds with any particular character.

That way, you increase the tension of the story. You raise the stakes, and you introduce uncertainty so that the reader doesn’t know whether anyone will live to the last page of the book. That then becomes one thing which will resolve.
 

JournoWriter

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In Diana Gabaldon's novels, she has killed off two secondary characters whose deaths brought me to tears. One, in her most recent book, was a child, and it came utterly without warning. I'm still trying to figure out why he had to die - there was no true reason in this book. Hopefully he will not have died for nothing, and she'll make it clear in the next.

Michael Connelly's Harry Bosch series is one of my absolute favorites. When he killed off Harry's ex-wife, someone who's been there from the very first book, it was so sudden and abrupt that I didn't realize how it had happened at first. I had to go back and re-read a few paragraphs. Harry also wasn't able to say goodbye - he had to escape and leave her body behind. It was less traumatizing for me, because I didn't particularly like the character, but it was really stunning for Harry, and we've seen him change and grow in the succeeding novels. That's when it becomes "worth it."

In Katherine Kurtz's novel King Javan's Year, the reader goes into it knowing that the MC is only king for a single year; the genealogy charts in previous books showed us exactly when he would die. His death nevertheless makes my chest tighten a little every time I re-read it. It was an incredibly powerful scene.
 

Karen Junker

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As a reader, I can't stand it when good characters die. For that reason, I read romance. So far, I haven't had to experience a good character's death. But things change in literature all the freaking time.

I mean, Old Yeller? Bambi's mom? Nothing is safe.
 

RightHoJeeves

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I always thought bad reactions to characters dying is a good thing (assuming the reaction wasn't because of poor writing).

It's like people getting scared in horror movies. Stories are meant to provoke emotional responses in you. If you're angry that a good character died, that means the author has provoked a response.
 

jjdebenedictis

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Doctor Who as well. I know Adric wasn't exactly a fan favorite, but I was still shocked when he died.
Adric had been around forever; there was pretty much no other way for him to go than a heroic death.

I haven't watched much NuWho, so I'm mainly commenting on the old Who. When a companion gave up travelling with the Doctor, it often felt like they'd been killed off, regardless of what was really supposed to have happened to them. I.e. It usually came as an unpleasant shock to the viewer -- maybe because the writers only had one episode to foreshadow the departure, and often, they didn't even use that episode to do so.

Sarah Jane gets kicked out by the Doctor for a reason that makes no sense to her. Leela decides to effectively-marry a guy she just met. Teagan inexplicably loses her nerve. Turlough learns he can go home, when going home never seemed important to him before.

Turlough's case was probably the only one of the aforementioned lot that felt like the writers set it up properly in the character's last episode. For the rest, it was "Rocks fall, [X] dies disappears forever. Tune in next week to see who the replacement is!"
 

Fuchsia Groan

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Watership Down was my favorite book as a kid. Tons and tons of death. (Rabbits have a high mortality rate...)

I won't spoil it, but Bridge to Terebithia is another kids' classic that doesn't exactly shy away from this theme.

Death of nice people and main characters was everywhere in 19th-century novels. The Red and the Black, Vanity Fair, The Mill on the Floss, Wuthering Heights, much of Dickens, Moby Dick, Madame Bovary, Little Women, the list goes on and on, with Jane Austen a notable exception. Sometimes the moral exemplars die (usually of consumption or something) to make the main character feel bad, and sometimes the main character messes things up badly enough to bring about his or her own death at the end in classical tragedy style, whether it's technically suicide or not. (A certain popular TV show that ended last year is a good modern example of this...)

In fact, I'd say in the 19th century it was more common to kill the MC or a loved one of the MC than not, unless your book qualified as primarily a comedy or a romance. Needless to say, most books were standalones (though they were sometimes published in serial format).
 
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