Daily VA-11 Hall-A 2022 #12

A couple of days ago I talked about my own goal to strive for naturalism. I actually have another personal philosophy creating things that, while still an extension of this one, I’d say it’s separate enough to talk about it individually.

I call it “A respect for death”.

Now, this post is going to talk about character deaths and its use and I wanna preface with something. Not necessarily a content warning (though feel free to see it as one) but rather a disclaimer.

To put simply, I don’t mind characters dying on principle. Did I ever show you any of you my collection of Warhammer novels? I eat that shit by the spoonful and love it. HOWEVER, something that you need to understand is that just because you love a certain kind of media doesn’t mean you feel compelled to make more of that kind of media.

For example, my favorite genre of game is, unironically, “DLSite game made in RPG Maker about a girl with massive tits whoring herself around town”, I love them so much that I literally have a bunch of them in quick access as comfort porn.

You all should check Black Metal u-1’s work by the way, love their work and they’re one of those smaller names that I’ll boost if I can.

But among other things, the things I love the most about that sort of game (hot girl is a glorified masturbatory aid) runs against something I hold as holy in my own creative process (character autonomy).

And what I wanna get at by explaining so much is that the following paragraphs don’t come (HAH) from a strictly critical or (god forbid) moral side. It’s all strictly about the creative side of things. So they will be written with that understanding so I don’t have to clarify myself more than I already did. By extension, I’m gonna generalize by necessity, so this is all with the implicit knowledge that there ARE many notable exceptions, but they’re the outliers to the perceived trends addressed here.

With that out of the way…

I have this problem with the way fiction treats death. More specifically as a hard binary of a character being either alive or dead. By binary I don’t mean a lack of ghosts or some sort of eldritch unborn entities, but rather the fact that a character is either alive, a survivor from impossible odds, killed, or slowly killed.

Realistically, if I was walking on the street and some dude punched me just because, that would fuck me up. It isn’t a situation where I was on the brink of death, I’m not even talking about a Gantz situation where the punch deforms my skull like I’m made of plasticine, all in all I would be left with a bruise at best, a missing tooth at worst, and anything beyond that would require more contrivances.

But even with just a bruise, it would still fuck me up. I would be scared to go out for a bit, I would be jumpy when people walk near me, and “that one time a random dude punched me in the face on the street for no reason” would be ingrained in my brain, not necessarily haunting me but still something that I would stumble upon every so often.

If this sounds oddly specific I’m basically disguising an anecdote and changing it to illustrate a point. I already got sidetracked by porn, let’s not get more than one sidetracked thought per post.

Regardless, this doesn’t sound far-fetched, right? And it’s only the most mundane, impersonal, barely bruised, random sort of aggravation. We’re not even talking about deaths.

People are SCARRED by death. It doesn’t even have to be a family member of a friend, people can be left shocked and grieving from hearing that the old lady from 5 blocks away that was always on their entryway and you never talked to but saw when doing errands died. And yet you don’t see that sort of impact in stories unless a singular such death is the whole focus of the story.

Now, this isn’t weird by any means. A big element of fiction (the main one, I’d argue) is the idea of exploring thought processes or hypotheticals safe in the knowledge that they’re just that: fiction. So obviously things like “what if I just went into that building and tore everyone apart with my hands” “what if someone was forced to be injected molten iron on their veins” and so on and so forth exist not out of some underlying deviancy but because by exploring the thought in hypotheticals you’re, in a way, facing those ideas head on.

Sure doesn’t stop others from using it for pure shock value and then acting as if they’re being mature though.

The thing about shock value is that it’s a way to trick readers. People react to something making them emotional, if something makes them feel something then surely that’s a good thing… except that in this case, it fails to account if maybe, for example, a really gruesome imagery just made you react the way gruesome imagery naturally does and then they try to pass that as emotional depth.

Of course, like character death, shocking and transgressive imagery is a tool unto itself. It can be used correctly, it can be used cheaply.

So when you have this media environment where character death rightfully has so much impact attached to it, it’s all too easy for a creator to dangle the well-being of characters like an abusive partner.

Like… I can’t be the only one with a deep distrust of any story with a conflicted main character with a partner that’s very clearly their only emotional support, right? There’s a reason you shouldn’t leave precious cinnamon rolls near anthills.

I think many of you will get the idea. It creates a situation where you can’t even wonder what happens if the character does survive. There’s no narrative space for dealing with any trauma that isn’t contributing to the aesthetics of it all.

And this respect for death as a whole is what I had in mind when I wrote that Sei was trapped in the Apollo Trust bank.

Stella is distraught and listless; Jill, who had only met Sei a couple of times by then, is appalled by the situation. And when Sei does survive things aren’t immediately fixed, her sprite changes for the rest of the game, her personality is the same but we see it in terms of her dealing with the aftermath. It’s not only her physical wellbeing, her emotional trauma, or her brush with death, it’s also how it all upends the path she had in life.

And that’s not even mentioning how the main plot of the game as a whole revolves around a singular death. Not a gruesome event, not a serial killer. The sort of quiet, disease-induced death that comes suddenly for anyone.

And I feel that if I didn’t have this respect for the concept of death in a story, if I didn’t heavily weigh how it affects anyone related to it, I wouldn’t have been able to create an environment where Stella can still stand strong despite the crazy situation that led to losing an eye, where I can explore how Sei has to slowly heal from seemingly impossible odds, how Gil heading out the moment the protests starts leaves a nagging feeling in the back of your head.

I don’t want people to feel threatened because I might kill Fore for the sake of a plot point. I want people to be absolutely distraught because Fore wasn’t able to have a couple of his meals and he was alone for a whole night while Jill was stuck at the bar. Because at the end of the day that’s how real life is, at the smallest scale of society people will deeply feel for someone that dropped their coffee. And that smaller scale level of tragedy is one that I feel helps ground me.

If you’re playing along, today was supposed to be the first day of the second week (Day 7).

Things are gonna get heavier before long, so let’s talk tomorrow about something lighter before The Bomb drops.