It’s tragic! It’s deep! It’s a looming threat to your heroes in every dangerous endeavor! And for some reason it’s weirdly hard to convince your audience you really MEAN it!
One example I didn’t think to include in the video is Eren Jeagar from the early episodes of Attack On Titan. Sure, this show hadn’t shied away from murdering main-ISH characters, and a lot of the early appeal of the show was how brutal, bleak and desolate the reality of the situation was – but when the ACTUAL PROTAGONIST loses an arm and a leg and gets eaten on his first major mission, the resounding response from the fanbase was “ha, bullshit” and lo and behold, he was one confusing superpower away from being fine again. It kind of took a lot of the stakes away from a show that had gotten BIG on how high those stakes were.
At the risk of making the comment section too depressing, comment your favorite well-executed character death and, if you have one, a fakeout death that actually had you convinced!
And bro, if you’re reading this, YOU’D BETTER CLICK “SHOW LESS” ON THIS DESCRIPTION BEFORE YOU SPOIL YOURSELF.
EXAMPLES USED, ROUGHLY IN ORDER: InuYasha episode 43, Fairy Tail episode 47, Berserk, assorted X-Men comics, Lazarus pits, Damien Wayne’s resurrection, Elektra’s resurrection in Netflix’s Daredevil, old-school Marvel goodness, Gwen Stacy’s clone Joyce Delaney, The Joker, Jean Grey (Phoenix mode), Game of Thrones, Lord of the Rings, Elfquest, old-school DC goodness, Justice League (Hereafter part 1), Doctor Who (Season 8 Episode 5), Destroy All Humans, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, Avatar: The Last Airbender, Yu Yu Hakusho, Yu-Gi-Oh!, The Matrix, Ghost In The Shell, Robocop, Fairy Tail episode 244, [SUPER SECRET EXAMPLE], Rurouni Kenshin, Fullmetal Alchemist (all versions)
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SUPER SECRET EXAMPLE: My Hero Academia manga, chapter 76
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Drinking game take a shot evry time red says death😂
Troupe about Partners
In HTTYD2 it wasn't the death that got me but the send off.
FUK you and your "not spoiler"
Wait Jon Snow died. THAT MEANS I CAN'T USE MY LAST NAME TO MAKE LAUGHTER! Nooooooo.
i wish RWBY was a fakeout death!
WOW there is NOT enough warning time for all these spoilers.
I'm writing a series right now where there's a fake-out death. However, by the time the protagonists realize that it was a fake-out death, they have died for real.
What did you expect? Fairy Tail is fairly terrible.
RWBY DID IT RIGHT!!!!!!!!
On the other hand, the Game of Thrones approach can work too. GoT doesn't really make much of an effort to "sell" character deaths, real or fake, it just has enough "anyone can die" cred that it usually doesn't have to. Of course, that only works in a very dark story which is willing to kill enough people to get that cred, and it can't have substantial use of meaningful resurrection or the realism of arbitrary death will contrast with the unrealism of not always using those forms of resurrection.
ehem akame ga kill ehem
I'm having serious flashbacks of the death of Dinobot from Beast Wars.
Neji!!!!!!
cough cough Supernatural cough
I loathe overused fake out deaths. I regularly watch the show One Upon a Time and a lot of the writing has bothered me as the show has gone on, but the biggest problem for me was when they would do a fake out death. I could live with some of the fake outs if they took the time to actually make their characters learn from the grieving process, but it's like you said where the character can't seem to progress in their grieving and immediately go to get the character back. The show creates all these opportunities for interesting character growth and self reflection but just throws it away every time. It just feels like, what was the point of this whole thing if we're just right back to where we started?
One of the best subversions of this trope was in an episode of young justice. An alien race invaded and basically disinitigrated everyone in the justice league and one main character. Midway through they came to the conclusion that it was actually a teleportation beam and they went on a desperate mission to rescue their comrades. Robin, the leader, even sent a member to a mission with no chance of success, and the member was immediately blasted. THE TWIST occurs when they are mid way through the layer. They find it WASNT a teleport beam and they were essentially just in denial with one exception: robin. He realised that it was indeed a disintigration beam and knew saying that it wasnt was the only way to convince the team to push through and destroy the alien base.
While it turns out to all have been a simulation, the consequences are intense, especially with robin who thought he was sending his close friend to his death. Ive always wondered what this would be like if followed through
ooo my god lemme tell you everytime a character in spn "dies" and then comes back
destroy all humans was the shit. and death had no meaning, in canon even since the furons had cloning technology, you just respawn as a clone with perfect memory. and all the humans are just nameless cannon fodder except a handful. death is meaningless so the world is your playground.
FMA spoiler below:
Nina Tucker and Maes Hughes' deaths were probably the first anime deaths to really fuck me up.