Saga, Chapter Forty-Two

[laughing_tree]

People are always like 'George R.R. Martin or Joss Whedon – these guys are monsters.' But it used to be when people would read fiction, characters would die all the time. I think we’ve grown up in a sort of culture where a lot of our storytelling is controlled by a big corporation – that means we can’t let these characters die, we have to keep them alive. And that’s just a terrible way for fiction to approach things. We read this stuff to prepare us for the worst things that are going to happen to us, and death is the worst. -- Brian K. Vaughan

Comments

[locuatico]

I think there is some truth to that quote.
I once read Hokuto No Ken and was surprised by how many supporting characters were quick to drop the bucket.
Likewise, depsite writing childrens book, Roald Dahl was never afraid to downright kill childrens in his books.

But, at the same time, I don't know how much of that is big corporations (who, honestly, have shown that they don't care if a character is killed, they will go ahead anyways and even reboot the work) and how much is it due to the fact we live in a culture that favors happy stories were everyone gets a happy ending.

[janegray]

Stories reflect the reality they are written in as filtered through the lenses of the story's own setting.

Hokuto No Ken was set in a post-apocalyptic world where the premise is that humanity is barely struggling its way from the brink of extinction, and it was written by a guy born in 1947, just a couple of years after Japan lost WWII and got nuked twice. You can see that influence all over his work, like a cloud shadowing the whole world. In fact, you can see that same influence in the works of Osamu Tezuka, who lived through WWII as an adult, and which were often extremely tragic.

Roald Dahl lived at at time where, even in Great Britain, child mortality rates were very high. Things were rapidly getting much better than they had been (just a few decades before, one child in five died), but losing a child was still extremely common. For Dahl, writing about dead children was simply writing about everyday life.

These days we live in a society where we, personally, see survival as the expected outcome. Sure tons of people die every day in horrible conditions in war-torn countries, but we don't see that.

I think that's why these days a lot of fiction has a somewhat gentler approach to death.

I say "somewhat" because, frankly, I really don't see this purpoted obsession with happy endings that he talks about. Characters die in all sort of stories all the time. If it's not a Disney movie or a straight comedy, it's all but guaranteed that somebody will die (heck, sometimes characters die in Disney movies too. Li Shang's father in Mulan, which is appropriate for the setting because they are at war. More recently, Ray in The Princess And The Frog).

I certainly don't see it as the result of corporation influence either. If anything, corporations are the ones usually pushing to kill off characters to replace them with (theoretically) more marketable ones (see Abbie in Sleepy Hollow. Heck, the entire reason the 80s Transformers movie killed off so many characters was that the producers wanted to sell toys of new characters because kids had already bought all the toys of the old characters, and they figured that killing off the old cast was the quickest way to replace it with a new cast).

[captainbellman]

I don't recall any child dying in a Roald Dahl book.

[q99]

Offscreen, lots of children's bones were found in the BFG, but yea, he didn't off *character* children.

[leoboiko]

I agree with the quote in principle, but Saga in particular seems to have gone overboard and killed lots of characters with little narrative payback (in stark contrast to, say, the deaths in A Song of Ice and Fire). It's as if they're killing characters just to make a point.

[caivu]

I don't read Saga, but I thumb through the odd issue here and there. One of these happened to be the issue where Izabel was killed. I didn't know the character well, of course, but I recognized her and knew she was a major and popular character, so even I was still a bit stunned.

And then I flipped to the backmatter, where BKV started off by basically going "Welp, guess that beloved character's dead! Doot-do-doo."

Even for fiction, it just hit me as pretty ghoulish and mean. And basically solidified that I don't really want to read anything he writes again. If the writer has that kind of attitude about what they create, why should *I* care about it?

[q99]

Or killing off characters to make a minor point, but at the cost of a character more valuable and interesting than that point.

[cyberghostface]

I personally think people overexaggerate GRRM's propensity to kill off characters. Before starting the series I thought, based on people's reactions, that GRRM would wipe out 90% of the cast in one go.

[miramira]

I think he's started bringing more characters back to life than he's killed.

[leoboiko]

He's not that bad, really. It's just that he pulls on people's legs by having a couple characters that feel like they have plot armour, and then they die. Many of us had become so inured to the clichés of fantasy, that these few deaths came as a real shock.

But he doesn't kill characters just for the sake of killing; he's not deconstructing things just for the sake of deconstructing. He's in fact reconstructing them. The deaths may feel meaningless but, in the words of the best book in the series, "their lives have meaning". In particular, the sudden deaths of heroic characters serve to emphasize that being heroic does not necessarily bring rewards, a kingdom and a princess at the end of the journey; being virtuous is hard and dangerous and can make you an easy target. Virtue is nonetheless worth it. It's interesting to compare the families of a certain two fallen characters, one heroic and one villainous; the values that they instilled in their children, and how these values are protecting the realm / imploding in a dysfunctional whirlwind, respectively, when calamity strikes.

[informationgeek]

"People are always like 'George R.R. Martin or Joss Whedon – these guys are monsters.' But it used to be when people would read fiction, characters would die all the time. I think we’ve grown up in a sort of culture where a lot of our storytelling is controlled by a big corporation – that means we can’t let these characters die, we have to keep them alive. And that’s just a terrible way for fiction to approach things. We read this stuff to prepare us for the worst things that are going to happen to us, and death is the worst."

I'm reading My Hero Academia right now. So far, only one character has died, but you know what? That moment was sooooooooo much more effective than almost any character death in Saga. Same goes with One Piece and that recent moment in the Big Mom arc. Why? Because the creator gets moderation and knows how to make an impactful moment without resorting to kill kill kill. Vaughan doesn't grasp that and to a certain extent, Kirkman as well. Death is shocking, its horrible, but when you go sooooo overboard with it, then it becomes meaningless and boring. It becomes another plot device, like Vaughan's reliance on shock and Adam Sandler humor. It's a meat grinder, like a crappy slasher movie. It makes us indifferent and prevents us from getting attached to these people, less the fickle hand of writer punishes us for our interest. Saga is a comic that doesn't get how to wield death as a plot point and by the end of 42, nothing it'll ever pull will move or effect me. Saga is dead, just like The Walking Dead.

[q99]

Yes. Every death tends to lessen the value of death and be like a sonar pulse showing readers who you are and aren't willing to kill with increasing precision.

Saga's not dead to me... but it's much harder to care about side characters now.

[reveen]

AAUUUUUUGH... I really wish writers wouldn't get defensive over their creative decisions in interviews. Because to me defensiveness usually signals a lack of confidence, like they need to rationalize it to themselves not just the audience. And if you're not feel fully confident in your creative choices after two years (this interview is from 2014) of writing a comic then what are you even doing?

And... well... miscarriages as angst devices are kind of cheap. Like, you're not even killing off a character, it's more like walking back on the pregnancy as a story changer and adding some extra angst on top of that.

Also, I could probably rattle off every single significant character death including their supporting characters from ASOIAF from memory, it really isn't all that much in the grand scheme of things compared to the length of the story. And I'm not counting minor or bit characters killing those kinds of characters isn't special.

GRRM's reputation comes more from the impact he's had on the fantasy genre than, and has kind of snowballed from the actual content of his work.

Also, having three pages of nothing to make an artsy point about death is kinda... bad. Even with decompressed storytelling you can do that in one page. EDIT: The site is having an ideological disagreement with the concept of line breaks, apparently.

[locuatico]

I would also point that, while there are plenty of death in the books, ASOIAF also has A TON of characters (around 2,000 named), so how many characters are killed is not that big a number.

[full_metal_ox]

Also, having three pages of nothing to make an artsy point about death is kinda... bad.

Didn't Stephenie Meyer pull exactly that at some point in the Twilight saga?

[tcampbell1000]

I'm going to have to disagree strongly about the dramatic impact and interest of miscarriages. And I'd also disagree that this quote is defensive by nature; I'd need to see the context, but it seems like it's simply explaining his thinking about his approach to death, which is interesting.

That said... I'm a lot more invested in Marko, Alana, and Hazel than any other characters at this point, and the Waco Weasels seemed especially likely to check out early. I'm not so heartless that I can't pity Kurti at the end there, but it's not hard to see the pattern at this point.

Y: The Last Man and Ex Machina, to my recollection, were a lot more sparing in their use of death, which helped imbue the deaths of 355 and Kremlin with real shock.

[laughing_tree]

I'll echo tcampbell's comment about not seeing how the quote comes off as defensive instead of as simply a creator elaborating on their perspective.

Also, the blank black pages (of which there were seven in the full comic, not three) were *extra* pages added to the regular page count, at no extra cost. Decompression doesn't enter into it.