Spoilers ahead.
2008′s “Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots” serves as a sendoff to not only the iconic character of Solid Snake (or Old Snake as he’s known in this game), but also to his genetic father Big Boss. During its record-breaking long-ending cutscene, the two sit in a graveyard as Boss lays, dying.
The pair of chainsmokers decide to spend their final minutes with one last drag. Snake lights a cigar for his father, and after a few puffs, Boss coughs as he dies on the ground. The music swells as it cuts to black and a slow rendition of “Here’s to You” plays over the credits. It’s emotional and evocative, yet, it is not necessarily unique.
Regardless of the health issues associated with smoking in real life, nicotine addiction in fiction tends to be shorthand for “this character is cool.” This is so prevalent that smoking often is the centerpiece of emotional death, particularly in video games.
Last year’s “Resident Evil 4″ remake shares something similar with agent Leon Kennedy lighting one last cigarette for the suave scientist, Luis Serra, as it falls out of his mouth in his death. In the same year, “Final Fantasy XVI” once again has this iconography, as a dying Cid Telamon lights a cigar before transferring his powers to his partner in crime Clive Rosfield before the stick slips out of his mouth in his final breaths.
There’s something about this image that resonates with the player. Something like a “last hurrah” or the feeling of enjoying one’s final moments. But what makes these kinds of fictional deaths so powerful?
“Death is really about how we mourn someone,” said ZD Dochterman, a USC lecturer on writing.
How do we grieve for someone? How do we change our lives now that this person is gone?
— ZD Dochterman
Dochterman is no stranger to writing on death. His dissertation centered on the literature of Nicaragua during the Sandinista Era, and many of these stories wrestled with the notion of martyrdom and what death means for a revolutionary cause. To Dochterman, there are certain conditions in which a literary death makes sense: fulfilling a character’s arc or exploring those left behind.
“It has to do two things: It has to be the epitome of the character’s personality or journey or story, so the way the character dies needs to be consonant with the rest of the story… and it needs to be the culmination of everything about that character,” he said. “On the other hand, death is about the community that it forms once that person is gone, or the collective processing of the person’s death.”
In regard to the latter point of collective processing, death can drive a story forward, serving as a motivation for the protagonist or establishing a new sense of conflict the characters are forced to confront.
Consider the iconic scene in “Lion King” where Mufasa, betrayed by his brother, is thrust into a stampede as his son finds his body in the aftermath. Mufasa’s death drives Simba into a journey of self-discovery before returning home to face his evil uncle. In “Top Gun,” Goose is killed during an operation. That trauma informs Maverick’s actions not only for the rest of the film but even in its legacy sequel made 36 years later as he reckons with training his late partner’s hot-headed son.
The death of the secondary character is an art in and of itself. Sometimes it can be used as a plot device, and other times, it can actually be fulfilling.
— Ethan Huang
The result is powerful arcs often imparted on the side character. The “Yakuza/Like a Dragon” series is famous for this, so much so that developers RGG Studio decided to market their latest games with a literal funeral for the many characters they killed off throughout the series, from fresh-faced yakuza to redeemed antagonists.
However, another major reason why so many of these emotional deaths are given to secondary characters in television or gaming is frankly because it is hard to kill a protagonist. This leads into the other kind of “good” death: one that serves as the epitome of a character’s story.
The death of a protagonist can work easily in film but is difficult in other mediums. “Gladiator,” “Citizen Kane,” and “V for Vendetta” all see protagonists biting the bullet at the end, mainly because it can be easy to complete their narrative in two to three hours. In games and television, protagonist deaths are rarer because the companies are looking to bank on sequels or future seasons, with that final breath often only coming at the very end of a series.
Walter White’s journey from chemistry professor to drug kingpin is fully realized in its final season. As Walter reminisces about his glory days, he finally falls, bleeding out as his sins finally caught up to him. This even applies to situations where characters don’t truly die. The reason why “Doctor Who” remains one of the most iconic long-running science fiction series of all time is because the Doctor is able to “change faces” at the brink of death every few seasons.
Whether it be in film or television, these deaths also become more than just the characters moving forward following the loss of another individual, but the audience themselves are reflecting on a world without these characters and their stories.
Joan Miller, an ABD at USC Annenberg, is an expert on fandom and the intersection of popular culture and civic engagement. To Miller, the reason why people care about fictional death is because of a one-sided relationship audiences form with these stories.
“We’ve grown to really care about these characters, we spent so much time with them, we, in some cases, identify with them,” said Miller. “I think that is also key to empathy and emotions in general is there’s this degree of vulnerability that we see with both [the characters] and their death scenes.”
In fact, the whole reason Miller became fascinated with fandoms is the reaction audiences had to the first “Avengers” film when Captain America fanboy Phil Coulson is killed by Loki. Miller recalls how the character’s death sparked an online fan movement calling for his survival, one so effective they revived him in his own television show, “Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.”
“I was like ‘What? That doesn’t normally happen,’” recalls Miller.
This is a testament to how potent fictional death can be to the audience, and that the personal grief felt by the viewer can influence the real world.
It is true that strong, evocative deaths can inspire audiences, even causing internet movements that can sway studios looking to appease consumers. Fiction allows for the freedom to do so, whether it is good for the story or not. But what happens when a death goes wrong?
There are controversial deaths, ones so abrupt, audiences begin to question its necessity, and in some cases, grab their digital pitchforks. While they may reflect the reality of sudden death, these are often the ones with the biggest backlash.
“The Last of Us: Part II” was divisive to say the least. The game, previously marketed as a continuation of the story between Joel and Ellie, is undercut when Joel is beaten to death with a golf club at the start of the game. In a subversion of expectations, players are forced to play as Joel’s killer, Abby for half of the game. The moment drew the anger of fans unable to separate the character from the performer, as they sent hate mail and threats to Laura Bailey, Abby’s actress.
But what constitutes a technically “bad death,” besides just audience disappointment or inevitable grief?
To Dochterman, a death may not be as effective if it comes before a story is fully fleshed out. He points to “Game of Thrones” as a series where death often undercuts the character’s narrative.
“That was the one show where I got into that a little bit where it feels like [some characters’ deaths] didn’t fulfill their potential in their moment of death. It didn’t fulfill their arc,” said Dochterman. “They were taken out too early or needed to do something before they died.”
Dochterman explains one death he felt was unearned was Darth Vader’s in “Return of the Jedi” (Disclaimer: Dochterman has not watched the Star Wars prequels in which Vader’s entire arc is fleshed out in detail).
“It’s such an abrupt character reversal to try to redeem Darth Vader that it just feels really cheesy,” said Dochterman. “You can’t imagine in ‘The Silence of the Lambs’ Hannibal Lecter going, ‘Oh, I’m going to be good, let me help you, let me be a good guy now.’ It just doesn’t make any sense in quite the same way.”
Sure, Vader’s story is expanded upon in other material, but within the confines of the original trilogy, the arc could feel unearned. To some, this issue can become frustrating, because in many cases, it means the character’s potential remains untapped. Lazy arcs can become even worse when considering the ultimate purpose for a character’s death.
In some cases, death becomes more about the function of the event as opposed to the humanity and emotion tethered to it.
As Miller points out, the trope of “fridging,” or utilizing a character’s death or injury (often a woman’s) to further another’s narrative without giving agency to the victim remains divisive. She references the iconic Batman comic book “The Killing Joke,” as an example of this.
“When Barbara Gordon gets maimed by the Joker, it’s not about Barbara Gordon at all,” said Miller. “It’s about her dad and the Joker, and she’s just an object, so, that’s the sort of thing that can really piss people off.”
There are many situations in which one can argue that death can be unjustified, but could there be so-called “unsatisfying” deaths that could be critiqued as effective?
“There’s a distinction between the aesthetic fulfillment of the character’s arc and personal attachment, so I think that sometimes there can be confusion between ‘that was a good aesthetic fulfillment, but I’m personally attached to the character, and I wanted them to continue,’” said Dochterman.
A critic might argue a sudden death works well for the sake of the narrative, but an audience member may feel cheated. Take “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” To redeem himself of his greatest failure, Luke Skywalker confronts Kylo Ren, his former protegé. He uses the last of his strength to buy enough time for the Resistance to escape before fading out of existence. To some, Luke’s death was a powerful display of growth, while to fans who idealized Luke, this moment and the rest of the movie is severely out of character.
Albeit not as controversial, the most famous death in video games was one such sudden death. The murder of Aerith Gainsborough in “Final Fantasy VII” at the hands of a one-winged angel came as a shock to players in the 90s and are now revisiting it with “Final Fantasy VII Rebirth.” The moment is an unpleasant truth, as Aerith is a character the players had been actively controlling as a member of their party for their entire playthrough. Even so, it works because the story uses the rest of the characters’ grief to propel the story forward while concluding Aerith’s narrative post-mortem.
So, why do audiences feel so much for people who do not exist? To some, characters are not truly fictional.
“Emotionally in your head, you’re not drawing a distinction between fictional characters and strangers that you haven’t met,” said Miller.
The reason for this, according to Miller, is that these fictions have become a type of idolatry in an increasingly secular culture. She describes how in the same way people might feel personal and emotional attachment to the fantastical and supernatural stories of faith, others have shifted their fixations upon works less divine in nature.
“The relationships that we have to these characters are sometimes more important than I think people give full credit to,” Miller said. “Especially in an era where less and less people are religious, but more people participate in popular culture, it’s like these are our shared mythologies.”
As in fiction and in reality, the Grim Reaper awaits. Are there such things as “good” deaths or “bad” deaths? Or is it that the author is dead, and the subjective response of the audience is the only value of merit? These questions bring to mind one last moment that frankly embodies every piece of this conversation.
The anime and manga series “JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure” is no stranger to emotional character deaths. In the series’ sixth part, “Stone Ocean,” the finale sees a crew of heroes fighting against a priest looking to effectively reset the universe, destroying all life as it is and having it reborn in an alternate reality. And he succeeds.
While the crew is able to defeat the villain, all the characters, including series protagonist Jolyne Cujoh, are killed. However, they are brought back to life in another universe with new identities and new memories separate from the previous 39 episodes audiences followed. It means that while the characters we know live on, the impact remains as they exist as strangers wearing the faces of our beloved cast.
Author Hirohiko Araki chose this ending because he felt that he had hit a limit and that these deaths would be a creative reset allowing him to tell new stories in the series untethered to the previous canon.
Death, as much as it is an end, can also serve as the path to something new. It is about moving forward without the baggage of the past.
— Ethan Huang
It is hard to swallow, but inevitable for the characters, the author, and the audience. The emotion that people feel for the fictional is perhaps a proxy for reality, but nonetheless the cultivation of something tangible.
Paradoxically, the escapist nature of fiction cannot overcome the one thing humanity cannot escape. It is that one reality that forces the reader back to Earth for a brief moment in recognition of the life that they still have.