Death in Storytelling

Spoilers, people die. You also die at the end of your life. Broadly speaking across the entirety of human history we only know of one man who was capable of coming back from death, and even then it’s contested whether or not that such an event even happened. Yet, in the land of fiction, such restrictions do not apply and you’re free to whisk people to and fro the land of death like it’s absolutely nothing.

That’s not necessarily a bad thing, I’ve seen quite a few good stories where people don’t die, either through true immortality or some sort of limbo state. Usually these stories tend to have a sense for the value of life, and more importantly the value of death, that things not dying builds up a lasting stagnation and exsistential crisis that ultimately ends in the undying wishing they could.

What really bugs me about death in fiction is when its treated like a sort of disease that only need be cured. The protagonist’s lover or whatnot accidentally trips and falls on a table corner but as long as the protagonist can collect all 4 scrimblos across the world she can be saved, or something along those lines. I despise this.

Dragonball Z is easily the worst offender in popular memory. After the Sayian arc it’s become almost tradition to just have every single dipshit who isn’t the bad guy just casually come back to life. The Sayian arc killed off nearly the entirety of the world built up to that point, and the only reason that Toriyama brought everything back was because he realized he wrote himself into a corner and had difficulty digging his way out of it without an asspull, also a common Dragon Ball tradition.

It’s just so cheap, death is a lot of things but more than anything else it’s finality. There’s no coming back from death, metaphorically or otherwise. Even if a semblance of something comes back, it’s always a little different. Revivals of movements are never anything like the movements themselves, they’re always wrapped in a romantic idea rather than having the more chaotic elements that inspired the movement in the first place.

When someone dies, and you’re not making a statement about life itself, that asshole should just stay in the ground. Maybe you take the approach that he moved on to the afterlife or whatever, or that everything is just darkness, either option is better than just making him alive again. Something should’ve changed.

Similarly, stories of immortality. It seems to be primarily American in nature but sometimes stories can make immortality seem like way too nice of a thing. Immortality would suck unless you have the mental fortitude and power of God himself. Either you’re the only immortal, in which case you live to the end of everything and then some alone, you have a group of immortals, in which case the relationship becomes dull over the course of uncountable years, or the entirety of everything is immortal, which prevents anything new from being made ever again without threatening to clog up reality itself.

There’s no happy end here unless you just imagine that you’d somehow act differently about it. Yet such a thing is often treated like a treasure to be coveted.

One webcomic I’d read recently, The Rule of Death, tells the story of such an immortal but then never seems to address the punchline to the entire situation. It seems we are meant to cheer on the newly undying protagonist, scorn his villian that seeks to eliminate immortals, and come across thinking that it was good of him for creating a society of people who surely could not die even if they were rendered to atoms.

It’s a nice comic sure, I enjoyed it, but that never really sat right with me. Perhaps I’m looking at it wrong, and underneath it all is a sense of melancholy, but if that were true then certainly Pete Colby would’ve eventually decided that perhaps it was a little too much to let undeath spread so far. At least he would’ve figured it out before 3000 years passed.

If what the webcomic implies holds, then every one of them would just slowly end up as a scrappy corpse barely being held together at best. It’s been 3000 years, his heart stopped, and his bullet wound never healed, and yet it seems as if I’m supposed to think it’s awesome that all the undead people ended up in a bar at the end.

You know I’m just talking about death here but really you can apply these same principles to a certain kind of death prevention as well: time travel. It seemed like for the longest time the concept of time travel having horrific effects on reality was something most people kind of accepted.

At least, up until Marvel accidentally upped the ante a little too hard and were forced to use it as a plot device because 50% of the universe died.

Don’t worry, this time they’re Good™ ramifications for the future and not the bad ones!

It just bugs me. I guess everything’s alright in the end, except Iron Man died or something, but you know if you’re not willing to have 50% of the universe die then why exactly does 50% of the universe die? It’s backtracking, they had to backtrack the entire script because they wrote themselves into a corner.

Why should I really care if anyone ever dies again when we can just asspull another reason to go back in time? Does going back in time have any negative ramifications on the future?

Oh wait, they use this thing called ‘branch theory’. So… is it like S;G/Titor rules? But then most of the outcomes would end up very similar due to gravity collapsing possibilities… If not, then did they just make a new timeline and say “oh yeah we won :)” I guess fuck the other timeline then!

It just means they have to up the ante from one universe to every single goddamn universe ever to properly up the stakes. Either way, drama is diminished. I don’t know maybe I’m just not understanding something about this, it seems a lot more like a re-do than a terribly permanent thing and I’ve always hated those.

You know, I guess my problems are two-fold here really. The first is the idea of immortality being an objective good, which is primarily saying that stagnation is a good thing. We should simply have great heroes last forever and let their ideas influence us forever. The fundamentals of death and rebirth are so essential to life that pretty much every single serious story has some element of this.

The only ones I can think of that don’t are like, newspaper comics. Even these things get mocked for never changing.

The second is that things that happen can simply be undone. That after some thing occurs we can 100% return to the way that it was before. It’s a bizarrely sacchrine way of looking at reality.

When things happen, they can’t be undone. You can try to heal the cut, but you can’t just simply get rid of it. The skin that replaces the skin removed is inherently different.

For a practical non-physical example, nostalgia revivals are always plagued by ‘what was’ and try to follow in it footsteps while the initial event never had this precursor. No matter how much you try to match it to the original, it’s inherently different by the virtue of the time period and the fact that there is already precedent.

This isn’t really to say you can’t make immortality or death-preventing time travel interesting, what I primarily want is a story to not forget that we’re all living the human experience. Change is fundamental to our lives, and the most simultaneously depressing and boring thing is to see something never evolve.

It doesn’t matter how much someone wants to stick in the same place, the world around them is still going to move. Even if the entire human race decided to stay perfectly still, the Earth would still rotate and spin around the sun and the universe would continue expanding.

Change is important. Don’t blunt the emotional impact of your works by simply removing change as a factor.