Fictional Characters Are Not Just Characters

It's Valentine's Day, so let's talk about love.  Not romantic love, but the love readers or viewers have for fictional characters.

Obviously fictional characters are not real, that's the whole point of them being fictional, and yet the loss of a character in a book or movie or TV show or whatever can affect us as much as the loss of a real person.  And yet for the author of books, movies, TV shows, or whatever there are often reasons that characters need to be eliminated.  (I see you Game of Thrones and Walking Dead.)  It's the gap between the author and audience that can create problems.

One of the most recent examples is The Last Jedi, where Luke Skywalker was killed off, much to the dismay of many fans.  For many people (including writer/director of that travesty Rian Johnson) it's like, "So what?  It's just a movie."  But this shows a certain amount of ignorance.  Sure, he's just a fictional character in a movie but this is the dude who blew up the Death Star!  Who confronted Vader and learned Vader was his father!  Who confronted Vader again and turned him back to the light to destroy the Emperor!  This is the character whose action figure we played with and pretended to be in the backyard with cardboard tubes.  We made up our own adventures for him in stories and homemade comics.  So it's not just a character to us; it's like the gods and demigods and heroes to the Greeks and Romans and such.

It reminds me of 1986 when I saw Transformers the Movie for the first time.  Hasbro wanted to introduce its new line of toys, so what to do with the old ones?  Hey, let's kill them off!  So in a huge battle many of the old characters are killed off.  This culminates in a battle royale between Autobot leader Optimus Prime and Decepticon leader Megatron.  And ultimately Optimus Prime gives his life to stop Megatron.

When this decision was made, I don't think anyone really gave much consideration to the audience.  I mean imagine you're 8 years old and watching one of your favorite fictional characters die right there on the screen?  Yeah, that didn't go well.

And of course I wasn't the only one.  It's probably just as well there was not a World Wide Web in 1986 or the fallout would have been worse than it was.  It ended up pretty much being a disaster for Hasbro.  Most people never warmed to Optimus Prime's replacement and within a year he was brought back on the TV show and a couple of years later as a toy.

Learning their lesson, when the GI JOE movie came out a year later on video they only put JOE leader Duke in a coma instead of killing him.  At the end he wakes up and everything is fine.  Don't cry kids, he's OK!  Instead of dying they just didn't really use the character anymore; like that older brother in Happy Days he went upstairs one day and never came down--at least until the next reboot.

This has happened to a lot of popular characters:  Superman, Batman, Captain America, Iron Man, pretty much every other comic book hero, Han Solo, Spock, Kirk, Jon Snow, pretty much every adult Stark in GOT, Glen and too many other Walking Dead characters to list, and on and on and on.

Since much of my readership (such as it is) are authors, you're probably aware of the reasons to kill off characters.  In books it's usually because of dramatic necessity.  Someone has to make that ultimate sacrifice!  I've talked about that in blog entries before.  I think I also talked about how bloodthirsty I was in earlier times, versus more recent times.  And pretty much any significant death was meant for a dramatic impact.

But in other media there can be more practical reasons.  Often in TV an actor wants out and so the character is killed off.  Tasha Yar in Star Trek The Next Generation for one.  Of course it didn't work out too well for her.  It worked out a lot better for George Clooney when he left ER for the movies.  Remember the messy breakup between Charlie Sheen and the producers of Two and a Half Men that led to his character being horribly killed by a train or whatever?  Or like when Han Solo was killed I felt bad but not as bad because Harrison Ford is really old and didn't really want to do 3 movies; I think Mark Hamill is still spry enough to have done two movies.  (I expect his ghost might at least appear in the third one.)  In more recent times shows like House of Cards are going to have to scramble because their lead actor has been accused of horrible things and become untouchable.

So I guess those of us in books are a little luckier that we don't have to kill characters because an actor wants a bigger paycheck or is getting long in the tooth.  But maybe sometimes we want to get rid of a character because they've been around too long.  Remember Misery?  The author in that story killed off his long-running character but a disgruntled fan took him prisoner to try to make him change the ending.

Not all fans (or even many of them) are that obsessive, but they're still going to feel a real sense of loss when their favorite character is gone.

Of course it doesn't have to be just death.  I mean sometimes you feel that loss when you get to the end of a series of books.  Like Lord of the Rings or Harry Potter.  For me it was Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books.  I read all five books and when it was over even though it was a happy ending it was a bummer that it was over.  So what to do then?  Write my own story of course!  Except I don't think I ever finished it.  I'm not sure if I even wrote more than a scene or two.  I'm sure it's long gone though.  I mean it was in a notebook like 30 years ago almost, so yeah.

Anyway, the point is that fictional characters can become as real to us as real people.  That's why the custodians of those characters need to be careful with them.  For those characters that pass down from one writer or director to another, it really is a sacred trust.