What REALLY bugs me. is that characters like Pyrrha, Madoka, etc can never get the happy ending, characters like them are only sacrificial lambs to progress and world safety as if its some virgin sacrifice to a dark pagan god, otherwise would ‘contaminate’ them.
Like there’s no story about a hero trying to save the heroes
Like nobody tries to fix the world so the people who live in it, civilians AND those who protect them can have happy endings, just one or the other
As if statues and tombstones of heroes are more important than their lives
I mean Rouge One I understood, because it made the happy endings of the main cast feel more valuable, and feel more for the rebel soldiers who aided them. Though personally I thought if anyone should have lived it should have been K2SO like a ‘living relic’ of sorts kinda like R2 is a relic of the the Clone Wars that remembered everything
I mean, people want heroes to return and be live themselves because they know heroes are people as well. These heroes don’t just protect us, they are us.
Look at Justice League Unlimted: Patriot Act
Civilians gathered around Shining Knight and Vigilante when General Elis was on his paranoid blind crusading with an old woman calling him out on his obsessions of a ‘greater good’
“Just how many of us do you have to kill to keep us safe?”
In Spider Man 2
Corny as the movie was the citizens on the train reached out our exhausted hero and tried to help him, even risked their own lives against Doc Ock, there is a sense of community here, interconnection
Harry Potter
Harry is no more different than Madoka, Ruby, Luke, anybody else and because he lives to be a writer and a dad along with his friends, his practical brother and sister figures. Makes him him contaminated? No.
I mean thats what saving the world in stories have come to, throwing Heroes to into the jaws of Ceberus the second they risk their lives,
a friend of mine on another website kinda stated the problem which is a fault in modern audiences and writers
“They know they don’t have to develop characters when the popular trend is to treat their cast as cattle to the slaughter, they KNOW they don’t have to try any harder to keep an already hooked audience. And admittedly, part of it is blowback from the idea that no character deaths takes out all dramatic tension, that death has become cheap in certain genres, and that character resurrection is always a bad thing. Thing is, death and revival as literary tools are BOTH “handle with care” concepts, but we’ve over-corrected to the idea that cast is expendable, doling out death in greater quantities than Glenn Quagmire’s DNA.”
"The other big problem is that the audience, as part of the blowback I mentioned, is all to ready to accept TOO MUCH reality subtext, to the point where writers don’t bother resolving character arcs to satisfaction before killing them, because “reality is cruel like that sometimes” (I have actually been responded to with this). I find that disagreeable to the point of genuine offense. My objective points on that are above in detail. As for the subjective, I understand that fiction, by its very nature, is NOT real life. As such, I have several basic expectations of any work of fiction, one of those being the satisfactory conclusion of a character arc (and Pyrrha’s most certainly wasn’t). In addition, I see examples of people’s “stories” being cut off without satisfactory conclusion every day. All I have to do is tune into my Facebook news feed to get that reality text (not really subtext if it’s actually real life), and we’ve had some VICIOUS examples of that lately. This is not a level of reality subtext I am willing to accept, and if I was, I wouldn’t be reading fiction, I’d be reading things like autobiographies and historical texts…or just going outside. In general, there is ALWAYS a degree of escapism, no matter how small, and regardless of the reader’s awareness of it.
In short, we are asking for the effective de-fictionalization of fiction writing, and authors are well aware of that. Since part of an author’s job is to appeal to their audience (although that shouldn’t come at the expense of the story they intend to write), they should be aware of what will keep an audience hooked. "
I don’t want to get in to Pyrrha’s fate but it seems to apply to most characters today
