Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="EzekielRaiden" data-source="post: 8707347" data-attributes="member: 6790260">For my part, all the "anyone can die, stories don't always get resolved, that's just how life is" rhetoric kinda collapsed when Jon Snow didn't die in the TV show. (Which, to be clear, I didn't watch.) Jon Snow was too important to actually die, so a pretty out-of-left-field excuse for his ability to survive being repeatedly stabbed was thrown in. It's clear that Martin actually has a central narrative to tell and characters that are important to telling it, which makes all those "anyone can die" things feel disingenuous and manipulative, revealing the hand of the author. Further, at least some of the early so-called random deaths really aren't random at all--yes, they cut short an individual character's plausible story arc, but that being-cut-short element is critical to several other characters' arcs. The death of Ned Stark, for example, was very much an intentional narrative device, scattering his children to the wind. (He was secretly a mentor character disguised as a main hero, which is an interesting subversion of expectations...unfortunately most of the other deaths are pretty random and don't go much of anywhere.)For my part, the main issue with having such a heavy emphasis on the emergent story is the same as the issue I have as an outsider hearing about Game of Thrones: if I know most of the characters I'm interested in are gonna die with unresolved arcs and dull, uninteresting deaths, all investment and interest I have in the story drains away (and this is replaced with negative interest upon learning that actually plot-critical characters will be saved from death, as noted above.)If your character dies unceremoniously, with no resolution, you're left pining for what could have been, and for me (and, I strongly suspect, for my players) that would poison the potential enjoyment of any replacement character. As W.S. Merwin wrote: "Your absence has gone through me/Like thread through a needle/Everything I do is stitched with its color." I'll be pining for what could have been, dwelling on the loss, wondering what the point of getting invested into this character is when it's just going to be taken from me like the one before it, etc.This is why so much of the stuff about "I can't get invested unless I know death is an option" stuff just...doesn't work for me, just falls completely flat. Because for me, if I'm constantly fearing that I'm going to lose my character or dreading the loss of yet another effort, I'm going to disconnect. Why invest into something that, mathematically, you're going to lose eventually?Essentially, when death has no meaning, then life has no value.</blockquote>

Verification