Question

[cleolinda]

A Formspring question (yes, I do sometimes answer those still, although I have a backlog of 80+ now) that I don't know how to answer:

I don't usually get emotionally involved in fictional stories, but I have been strongly affected by the death of my favorite character. (The story is not Harry Potter, by the way.) How do I move on from this? I am

Comments

[greyduck]

(Yes, we can include the works of Joss Whedon.)

Okay, we can. But should we?

[teaa]

Doyle is one of the few I will absolutely forgive him for regardless of the fact that I love Doyle. The actor was a heroin addict who couldn't come to work sober and eventually ended up dying of an overdose.

[starlight976]

Wait, what? I'm sure I'm thinking of the wrong one. Buffy the Vampire Slayer, short & nerdy guy, also played a character on Gilmore Girls?

[the_rainbow_jen]

When I read a character death in Dragonlance, one of my favorite pre-teen series, I cried. Nowadays, I just shrug and revert to fanfiction that includes the character. I'm rather sad at how jaded I feel, in retrospect.

I guess I tend to revert to philosophical thinking and ask, which is more real, the character in the book as it was written, or the character in my mind as I experienced it? I'd say the latter, and hold on to the good times, same as I think you would any feeling of loss. All a matter of approach.

[kokopellinelli]

Dragonlance was the first time I remember being really sad over the death of a character. I was seriously upset for a couple weeks.

[the_rainbow_jen]

When Tas died in Dragons of Summer Flame, my mom was worried because I just sat there with tears rolling down my face. From a literary standpoint, it was the first time death really wasn't fair. Maybe I was sheltered, but it hit me pretty hard. No other character death has gotten me quite so emotional since then, I'd say.

[ext_256431]

Sometimes I just go into denial. With scifi and fantasy you can always imagine some way to get them back to life. I had that happen in the highlander tv show and Buffy .

[greyduck]

Highlander tended to compound the issue by recasting the same actor as a different character later on. (Raven was especially bad about that... one actor, two "big bad" villains, over the course of how many episodes?)

[calliopes_pen]

If I'm remembering right...didn't they have the actor who played Xavier St. Cloud for a few episodes suddenly be a random nurse in a psych ward in season 6?

[sandoz_iscariot]

For me fanfiction helps, in a "Oh, I can still read stories about her/him!" kind of way.

Though as a superhero comics fan, it's often a matter of waiting until another writer comes around and brings Favorite Dead Character X back. That's probably affected how I react to character deaths in other mediums as well. And until they come back, fandom does help.

[particle_person]

I tend to respond the way you did - I am much less likely to finish the series. Whether I do or not depends also on how invested I am in all the OTHER characters, and how near the death comes to the end of the series. If Rowling had killed off Hermione in Book 5, as some people wondered at the time, that might have been it for me. With Sirius, I felt bad for Harry, but I wasn't so invested in him that I even considered not finishing the books, plus I would have wanted to know what became of the trio.

[fairies_exist]

Killing one of the Trio would have broken my heart. Seriously, I got so invested in the series that if they were killed, albeit heroically, before the Final Battle of Doom?

I would have just.. gone on strike. Forever.

[jubilantia]

SERIOUSLY. Also, if they killed Hermione, the other two would be totally useless. "Reading" Harry Potter again with Mark's blog reiterates just how many little plot dealies Hermione orchestrated or was a significant part of.