When and how does killing off a character add value to the narrative?

[Naruzeldamaster]

So I had an experience with a game (I still like the game to continue playing it) that soured my opinion of the game's writers.
They went and killed off a popular character, that did next to nothing in the story, who many resonated with, for little reason beyond shock value.
Personally I think killing off a character should only be done if it fits the story. The character dying off should have lasting affects on the rest of the plot than 'welp, that happened' I think.

I've seen other games kill off characters who have had the same or even less screen time, but those ones had more impact as a player.
Unless I'm writing the kind of plot moment where it makes sense for a character to die, I probably won't find myself writing these kind of moments. At least, not for the sake of shock value alone.

 

[Genly]

As a reader, I totally agree with you. Death of a popular character really has to lead somewhere and mean something for the rest of the plot. For instance, it might be a "sacrificial death" that is necessary for the completion of the quest.

 

[pmmg]

Well...no opinion on various game plots. But I think you are right, killing the character needs to be part of the story, and not just a random event...

Unless, showing the randomness of the world is part of it, I guess.

In my own stories, I have killed off plenty of characters. Most, I knew were coming a long way off, some....they just kind of ended up where their death was the only likely outcome. I think, if you do kill off characters, its important to show what it means to other characters that they are gone. Specially if they are important or beloved characters.

Sometimes, I have the opposite problem. I have a character who is not making the story better, yet they keep surviving. It happens.

 

[Queshire]

What game and/or character?

 

[Penpilot]

I think this goes along with the thought that everything in the story should be there for a reason. It just doesn't have to be with death. It can be with someone not dying or whatever. Ideally, you should be able to point to anything in a story and be able to state the reason for its inclusion.

Also, sometimes, things like what you experienced is because someone didn't think things through. Other times, it can be because of someone above made the decision to cut something from the story that would have given that death more weight and a reason to be there. Things can be a lot simpler when there's only one person making the decisions. But, when you have a team collaborating on a project, there are a lot more voices and lot more people with different visions and different things at stake tugging things this way and that, and it can be easy for things to be neglected or forgotten.

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

What game and/or character?

Star Rail, there's a minor recruit-able character who was really popular. They killed her off two patches into the game for little to no reason. Apparently it's a common occurrence in stories written by those devs. This is a character who had maybe 10 minutes of screen time in the story total. (and yes, she was very popular) It happens so suddenly that even the shock value of it wears off moments later.

Well...no opinion on various game plots. But I think you are right, killing the character needs to be part of the story, and not just a random event...

Unless, showing the randomness of the world is part of it, I guess.

In my own stories, I have killed off plenty of characters. Most, I knew were coming a long way off, some....they just kind of ended up where their death was the only likely outcome. I think, if you do kill off characters, its important to show what it means to other characters that they are gone. Specially if they are important or beloved characters.

Sometimes, I have the opposite problem. I have a character who is not making the story better, yet they keep surviving. It happens.

Yeah, killing the character, especially a main character needs to have some kind of purpose, preferred to forward the plot (I am the evil villain, let me show the reader how evil I am murdering this nameless nobody) or to forward character growth. Potentially even both, it's a thing that bugs me in other mediums too (not just video games, I will say it bugs me even more in video games though) I especially hate when they introduce a new character and everything about them is signaling 'yup, they're going to die in a few chapters huh'

Things like Obi Wan dying in Star wars don't bother me. That had a narrative purpose.
Things like Aeirith in FF7 Dying didn't bother me, that one also served a purpose narratively.
Shock value to me, unless it's horror, isn't really the best purpose to axe off a character, even if they are a minor one with little screen time.

 

[JBCrowson]

Well...no opinion on various game plots. But I think you are right, killing the character needs to be part of the story, and not just a random event...

Unless, showing the randomness of the world is part of it, I guess.

In my own stories, I have killed off plenty of characters. Most, I knew were coming a long way off, some....they just kind of ended up where their death was the only likely outcome. I think, if you do kill off characters, its important to show what it means to other characters that they are gone. Specially if they are important or beloved characters.

Sometimes, I have the opposite problem. I have a character who is not making the story better, yet they keep surviving. It happens.

"I have a character who is not making the story better, yet they keep surviving." - is it a politician?

 

[JBCrowson]

I think it's OK to have occasional "Star Trek red shirts" - the ones who join the landing party in order to be killed by whatever aliens are there this episode. Too much use of them gets boring - like too much of anything in a story. Some deaths read like the writer was "I'm too lazy to bother wrapping this character arc up properly, so I'm going to kill them". That's not cool.

 

[Queshire]

Star Rail, there's a minor recruit-able character who was really popular. They killed her off two patches into the game for little to no reason. Apparently it's a common occurrence in stories written by those devs. This is a character who had maybe 10 minutes of screen time in the story total. (and yes, she was very popular) It happens so suddenly that even the shock value of it wears off moments later.

Yeah, killing the character, especially a main character needs to have some kind of purpose, preferred to forward the plot (I am the evil villain, let me show the reader how evil I am murdering this nameless nobody) or to forward character growth. Potentially even both, it's a thing that bugs me in other mediums too (not just video games, I will say it bugs me even more in video games though) I especially hate when they introduce a new character and everything about them is signaling 'yup, they're going to die in a few chapters huh'

Things like Obi Wan dying in Star wars don't bother me. That had a narrative purpose.
Things like Aeirith in FF7 Dying didn't bother me, that one also served a purpose narratively.
Shock value to me, unless it's horror, isn't really the best purpose to axe off a character, even if they are a minor one with little screen time.

Oh hey, I pulled her. Man, I really need to go back to playing Star Rail.

 

[Rexenm]

It’s like when Nihilus was killed by Saren in Mass Effect, and try to see The Beast Kill The Hag in Disney.

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

Oh hey, I pulled her. Man, I really need to go back to playing Star Rail.

Heh, I've got every (available) 4 * unit unfortunately my 5 * unit luck is terrible. And yes, you should, the story aint half bad other than random character death.

I think it's OK to have occasional "Star Trek red shirts" - the ones who join the landing party in order to be killed by whatever aliens are there this episode. Too much use of them gets boring - like too much of anything in a story. Some deaths read like the writer was "I'm too lazy to bother wrapping this character arc up properly, so I'm going to kill them". That's not cool.

Yeah, 'red shirts' are fine because they are nameless usually. But when you take a character who seems to have more importance than that and off them very early in the story without warning. yeah. it's annoying.

 

[pmmg]

My rule to this is just dont kill the pretty ones.

Well, every story death should serve a purpose. I said already, I've killed a lot of characters (so many in fact, I am having to make new ones for book 4), but I feel they served several purposes. At the very least, the reader can know the stakes are high.

There is an opposite to this. If none of the characters die, there is a risk it will not seem dangerous enough. Some stories will suffer if the characters seem to all have plot armor.

 

[Queshire]

Mind you, I'm only going off of spoilers, but that death in Star Rail isn't the worse example of this sort of thing.

Having the big bad of the arc close to the main characters is useful and introducing a third faction neatly (if a bit cowardly) sidesteps having to definitively say whether the followers of Abundance are in the right or the followers of the Hunt.

It also makes Destruction much more of an active, personal threat. Previously the followers of Destruction were kinda like space mordor by tossing out artifacts of doom in the form of the Stellarons and with their whole massive evil army. This shows that they'll come in an specifically fuck shit up.

 

[The Dark One]

I think this goes along with the thought that everything in the story should be there for a reason. It just doesn't have to be with death. It can be with someone not dying or whatever. Ideally, you should be able to point to anything in a story and be able to state the reason for its inclusion.

I can't stress this enough. Everything that happens/doesn't happen affects your story and death ought to be a huge part of that. In fact I once wrote an article on my blog that queried why readers were happy enough to read about death/murder/mass murder/massacre, but would go berserk and want to cancel some writers dealing with crimes that leave people alive, such as assault/sexual assault.

I guess it's possibly because the victims of those crimes are still alive and therefore have triggers for appalling memories, but death - especially violent death IRL - has profoundly dark impacts on the survivors, families, communities etc.

There was a very poignant bit in one of Bernard Cornwell's novels - he is the doyen of historical fiction storytellers and his books can be bloodthirsty in the extreme. One of his books, towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars described a noticeboard in a pub in France full of personal messages hoping to reconnect with people who may or may not have been alive. It was enough to show that the author was aware of the petit drama that every one of the countless deaths in his novels had caused.

 

[Rexenm]

In most of my high fantasy renditions, I could only find family members in the thick of things, but not really being effected by the upheaval. I expected rival gangs, but not even rival dynasties - they kind of gathered around one mastermind, who was a little ridiculous, and made their way through with comic vice.

 

[Ned Marcus]

Not for shock value, no. But even if it's a part of the story, some readers will stop reading because of this. That's happened to me, but if it really is part of the story, then I don't see what else you can do.

 

[Devor]

So, it's more than about having "meaning," or "narrative purpose," whatever that means. The question is about having grief.

The writers of Stranger Things recently talked about this. Some people were hoping to see characters killed off "Game of Thrones" style, and the writers said no. They're not writing in a hardened society like Westeros. Anytime they kill a character they have to give the survivors and the audience a chance to grieve. And there's only so much grief they can properly handle in the show.

Grief is a powerful emotion, so it's easy to find meaning from it. But it's also difficult to sit through. That's why a lot of character deaths happen at the end of a story. They get that action shock value, and a glimpse at grief, and all that glorious purpose, but the audience and the story don't have to sit through all that sadness. The story ends before it gets too heavy.

Of course, some of us are writing a hardened Game of Thrones type society, or at least some in-between place that's not 80s America but not quite as bad as Westeros. We may not need to spend quite as much time reaching a 10-star handling of grief that Stranger Things does. But how we handle that grief in the narrative, I believe, is still the main question. How much of it can your story handle before your story either collapses under its weight or starts to ignore it and short-change the impact on your readers? That's what you need to figure out.

 

[Mad Swede]

As Penpilot wrote, everything in a story has to be there for a reason. It's why editors (and writing teachers/coaches) say that authors must kill their darlings. If it doesn't add to the story you should consider removing it.

So why kill off a character? This can be because it is a necessary part of some other character's development, it can be because the style of story requires it (e.g. the bad guy gets killed at the end in some climatic battle) or it can be needed to kick-off the story (as in a murder mystery thriller). It can also be done in order to maintain the credibility of the story, by which I mean that if the the story takes place in a setting which is supposedly very dangerous then at least one of the characters must get killed or badly hurt otherwise the readers won't accept the story.

Character deaths should have consequences. Devor mentioned grief, but there can also be other reactions such as guilt, anger, a sense of helplessness and later a desire for revenge. Most stories don't deal with these emotional reactions very well, sometimes because the authors just don't know what those reactions might be. Broader consequences too need to be thought about (e.g. what happens to a family where the main bread winner dies?) and these, together with emotional reactions, can be used to develop other characters or to provide some form of background (maybe told in flashback or similar) to explain why a character is the way they are.

The Dark One mentioned that scene from one of Bernard Cornwell's novels. When you use descriptions and scenes like that you can really convey the tragedy, the sense of loss and the consequences of deaths. I've seen that sort of scene in real life (in a former European state), and it was both heart rending and very depressing - as an officer I felt a real sense of failure about our peace enforcement mission when I saw that, it made me wonder what we had really achieved. That sort of situation can lead a character to question themselves, their actions and can have an impact on their self-confidence as well as imparting a sense of guilt and shame. And those sorts of feelings can in turn result in other things like PTSD.

But you don't have to kill a character off. A serious injury or an assault like rape may incapacitate them for some time, could leave them with a permanent handicap and will leave scars (mental and/or physical), and that in itself can cause emotional reactions as the character comes to terms with what has happened. That too can be used to drive character development and the plot.

With all that written, the deaths and/or injuries must be appropriate to the sort of story you're writing and the sort of readers you have in mind. Otherwise the readers won't buy it, literally or metaphorically.

 

[The Dark One]

The Dark One mentioned that scene from one of Bernard Cornwell's novels. When you use descriptions and scenes like that you can really convey the tragedy, the sense of loss and the consequences of deaths. I've seen that sort of scene in real life (in a former European state), and it was both heart rending and very depressing - as an officer I felt a real sense of failure about our peace enforcement mission when I saw that, it made me wonder what we had really achieved. That sort of situation can lead a character to question themselves, their actions and can have an impact on their self-confidence as well as imparting a sense of guilt and shame. And those sorts of feelings can in turn result in other things like PTSD.

I'm reminded also of a super-powerful moment in The Silence of the Lambs (movie) when a young woman is abducted at her front door, just before she opens it. The scene was partly portrayed via the POV of her cat who is watching through the front window and is clearly distressed. The tragic disruption of simple, innocent domesticity is brilliantly portrayed.

And do murderers ever pause in their ghastly business to consider how many cats may go hungry?

 

[Naruzeldamaster]

I do think bad things happening to a character can be useful for a story. If I think a character needs that kind of thing to happen to grow I will write it.
But personally unless I need to show how serious of a threat the villains are (by killing one of the 'main' party) I think I'm satisfied with major injuries like losing a limb or something. Something that can hinder them and provide growth, but also not kill them.

If the narrative calls for it I would absolutely do it. Just most of my stories tend to be on the lighthearted side where very few deaths occur (unless I'm writing an Ace Attorney story, can't have murder trials without victims)