Project Orpheus: Who Would You Save From Death?

 I was reading The Other Side blog a couple of weeks ago and he was talking about how in Baldur's Gate 3 one really popular character had to have her ending rewritten after popular outcry.  Then he and his son devised a campaign to rescue the character from Hell.  I had to look this up on Google/Wikipedia but it's like the Greek myth of Orpheus who went to Hades to fetch his wife, though like Lot's wife looked back when he wasn't supposed to.  I think there have been other similar stories, though I don't know them offhand.  Anyway, that explains the reference in the blog entry title.

It got me thinking about what fictional character I'd want to rescue from the afterlife.  It doesn't have to be traditional Christian Hell that would imply they were evil or something.  It could be anyone who died and stayed dead.  I mean I could say Optimus Prime in Transformers the Movie but he was brought back later on.  You could say Captain Kirk in Generations or Han Solo in The Force Awakens or Luke Skywalker in The Last Jedi or something but they were all kinda old so they had a good run.  You might want to think of someone whose life was cut tragically short or short-ish.  Like Tony Stark or Wash in Firefly or Bambi's mom or Mufasa in The Lion King or something.

Thinking of Star Wars it'd be nice to rescue Amidala just so she could not die such a stupid death.  I mean the prequels weren't great but I think she deserves a little better than some ambiguous death during childbirth.  Though it'd be kind of dumb to save her just to kill her some other way.  But I suppose she wouldn't have to die again right away, right?

It would actually be really easy to do.  Just say that the droid medics gave her something to simulate death so Obi-Wan, the Emperor, and especially Vader would think she's dead.  And say that some other young woman who had died (or maybe even one of her bodyguards) was sent to Naboo to be buried.  In reality someone took her somewhere else for some reason to be determined.  Maybe do that for a season 2 of Obi-Wan Kenobi or something.  If Natalie Portman doesn't want to come back you could even recast it and just say she got some surgery to change her face.

All of TV, movie, and books is pretty broad.  I got thinking of my own stories.  What characters did I regret killing who I might want to bring back from the underworld? 

Plenty of characters died in Where You Belong.  Probably the most tragic was Frost's roommate Peter who got HIV from a tainted blood transfusion and killed himself when he found out.  That was pretty tragic.  It's not really one I regret.

There are a few deaths in the Scarlet Knight series.  Ian MacGregor dies at the end of the first book after the guilt of what he'd done caught up to him.  Aunt Gladys dies at the start of the first book after an early bout of Alzheimer's.  Percival Graves, the previous Scarlet Knight, dies in the third book to save Emma from the Black Dragoon.  

WOMBO AI drawing of young Sylvia

But probably the one I wound up regretting the most was killing off Sylvia Joubert, a witch who was a hairdresser and arms dealer.  In the first couple of books she was just sort of a foil to her sister Agnes who was a wise seamstress with some ability to see the future.  Sylvia was the gruff one better at fighting.  

It was in the fifth book where her character really took some turns and came into her own.  I developed a whole backstory of how she'd had an affair with Agnes's husband in the 18th Century, which had led to her having a daughter she gave away.  I eventually spun that into a prequel called Sisterhood.

But by then Sylvia had died at the end of the fifth one when she took an exploding reactor into space.  It was a tragic death and technically she was young at the time, though she had lived for centuries.  I did miss her in the next two stories, though her daughter Cecelia sort of filled in for her and she does appear after a fashion in a flashback to the 1940s in the sixth book, though she uses a different name so readers might not know who she is until near the end.  I brought back an alternate universe version of her in the eighth book who goes back to her world in the end.  So you can see how much I missed her that I kept using versions of her even after her death.  

Anyway, if she had survived I probably could have done more with her.  Maybe given her a spinoff series or something.  If anyone cared I could write a story to somehow bring her back.  Time travel or another alternate universe or something.  There are plenty of things to choose from in a superhero universe.

So there.  Who would you save?  Put it in the comments or write your own blog entry, why not?  That would be a good topic for one of those old-fashioned blogfest thingies.