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Part 2: Potential Solutions

So: Is it possible to portray fun action sequences and such without cheapening the value of human life?

The short answer is: I don’t know. Because of how stories work, and how humans work, certain deaths will always matter more to us than others. I certainly wouldn’t advocate cutting violence completely out of stories, or to go in the opposite direction and rhapsodize constantly about killing and violence and its horrible effects on everyone and everything. Neither of those options would make for good storytelling, and neither is emotionally satisfying.

But I do believe it is possible to treat the pain and death of minor and unnamed characters with dignity, even if they are not given the same spotlight as main characters. One example of this that particularly struck me is from E. Jade Lomax’s Beanstalk series. Lomax intersperses the main narrative (of the adventures of a group of friends in a school for mythical heroes) with short obituaries for those who die over the course of the story. These range from a sentence fragment to a few pages in length, and humanize the casualties that would go completely ignored in most narratives. Most of these deaths are people we saw only as bystanders, or who were not even visible in the main narrative.

One of these “obituaries”, taken at random (from the shorter ones, for space reasons):

Aoshi Sado, the man selling chestnuts on the street outside. An ogre halfling, he played chess competitions in a tavern on weekends and enjoyed beating the socks off people who thought they were smarter than him.

I first read this series in high school, and was struck by the humanity of the writing. I had never really grappled with the possibility that so many people could exist in a fictional world. In previous books I’d read, mass casualties (whether because of war or fights or other disasters) had always been, well, set dressing. I knew that they were bad, but I didn’t feel much emotional resonance in the writing. In addition to adding some emotional depth and complexity to the story, this technique fleshed out the world, and made it so much more real.

I was so struck by this concept that I made my mother read several of the fake obituaries. (My mother is a saint who has patiently and actively read and listened to my various obsessions over the years.) She said that they reminded her of a series of obituaries done by The New York Times in the wake of 9/11. I’d been too young to read them when they originally came out, so she dug up the book collecting them all and we read them together. It was a profoundly moving experience. Obviously, those deaths were real, and the deaths I’m talking about are fictional, but I believe we do some honor to the reality of grief and death if we treat it with respect in the fiction we create.

The Beanstalk example is not to say that Lomax’s writing is perfect (it is not), or that this style of writing is better than any of the examples listed above. This solution is not for all media, obviously. Sometimes a girl just wants a lot of mayhem and wanton destruction. And the obituary-style focus is definitely not the only way to impart some measure of respect upon the fictional dead. But Lomax succeeds in treating her characters, and her world as a whole, with dignity. By acknowledging the personhood of her characters, large and small, she allows her world and her story more nuance and depth. And that is worth praising.  

Although I previously called out Avatar: The Last Airbender in Part I for falling into this trope towards the end, I actually feel that the show as a whole did a good job of treating death with the gravity it deserves. They achieved this, like in Beanstalk, by humanizing many of the background characters, including the villains and otherwise disposable enemies. Some of the most memorable exchanges in the series are between random fire nation soldiers, such as this one when Sokka, Suki, and Toph have successfully taken control of a fire nation airship:

Sokka (over the intercom): Attention, crew, this is your captain speaking. Everyone please report to the bomb bay immediately for hot cakes and sweet cream. We have a very special birthday to celebrate.

[cut to the bomb bay]

Crew member: [To a nearby engineer.] Hey, I'm Qin Lee. I work up in communications.

Engineer: Oh, hi. I work down in the engine room. That's probably why we never met before. Big airship, you know?

Qin Lee: Yep.

Engineer: So, do you know whose birthday it is?

Random crew member: “I can't believe the captain remembered my birthday! He really does care.”

[The bomb bay doors open and all the crew members fall into the ocean. They bob on the surface of the water.]

Engineer: Happy Birthday. [Frowns.]

-Season 3, Episode 20 “Sozin’s Comet, Part 3: Into the Inferno

 

In this way, even if some of the individuals who die on- or off-screen do not have much (or any) characterization, we as the viewers have a greater sense that their lives have meaning and value. We see both how death personally affects the main characters (e.g., through Aang discovering his mentor monk Gyatso’s body, or the death of Sokka and Katara’s mother), but also have a profound sense throughout the series that deaths that do not affect the main characters are also important (even though this is sometimes ignored for the sake of a good action scene or to keep the violence on the show kid-appropriate).

Another story I feel did this well was The Adventure Zone: Balance. “What?” you say, “But, Candle, isn’t this the series that had the protagonists deal with all their problems through reckless murder, and constantly joked about about how horny all the killing made them? You’re going to pivot from 9/11 and respect and gravitas to that?”

...Yes. Yes, I am. Hear me out: even though our heroes make their way across the planar system cheerfully murdering most of the people unfortunate enough to cross their paths, the narrative never seeks to minimize the lives of characters who died because of the heroes’ actions. The best example of this, of course, comes early in the series with the destruction of Phandalin. Our heroes, Magnus, Merle, and Taako, inadvertently cause the complete annihilation of an entire town. Oops.

But this fuck-up is never minimized. Yes, the boys joke about Phandalin all the time throughout the narrative, but a) a lot of that joking can be seen as a type of coping mechanism that doesn’t necessarily diminish the loss, and b) the loss of that town is never abstracted away into ‘welp, we’re the good guys, so it’s ok, i guess.’ The introduction of Noelle/No.3113 (a robot encasing the soul of one of the victims) later in the series really serves to solidify the real and human cost of the protagonists’ failures, as does the moment when the temporal chalice makes them watch the deaths of everyone who died in the explosion.

In Episode 30 of TAZ, we meet Boyland (pronounced Boy-land). He is a fairly minor character, and dies soon after his introduction. The boys make all sorts of jokes at his expense, and at his death. The entire function of his character is to be the butt of a joke. Then, in Episode 41, we see Boyland’s Rites of Remembrance, where his memory is erased from the outside world (secret society, complicated plot stuff, etc.). And, except for our protagonists, everyone is really sad. Everyone liked Boyland. He always brought in donuts to the office, and he had a lot of fun jokes that were not offensive. He had about four hundred wives and husbands and children. Part of the comedy of the scene is how over-the-top the rest of the mourning is, while our protagonists don’t care and keep insisting he was secretly a dick. But, our heroes’ problematic attitude in treating Boyland as solely a joke, not a person, is highlighted. For example, this exchange:

Merle: [Boyland’s comically large family have] already forgotten him.

Taako: Think about it, maybe the Voidfish created for them a brand new dad.

Magnus: A better dad.

Merle: Who wasn’t a giant dick!

Johann [side character]: Yeah. Really, if you think about it, his family has it easy, ‘cause the rest of us have to go on knowing what a great dude we lost. [tearful moaning]

Taako: As I’ve always said in every situation, I’m the one hurt most by this.

Here’s the thing: we as the audience find Taako’s last comment funny because it’s obviously not true. In this moment, Merle, Magnus, and Taako are the ones being dicks. They’re making it all about them, trying to force a world with protagonist-centered morality. And it doesn’t work. Because we as the audience know that it isn’t all about them. It’s a funny scene, but it also forces us to grapple with the idea that our heroes are not always right or good or the center of everything.

There was another moment in Episode 51, when Magnus went rogue and broke into the Bureau of Balance prison. He didn’t want to kill his coworkers (character development!), and so knocked them out and stuffed them into his pocket workshop (long story). He then tried to send them back to the base, alive, only to see them killed in the sky by a raging chimera. These characters were unnamed and had almost no lines. They did not matter to the plot. After this scene (and some brief regret from Magnus), they were never brought up again. And yet, I still think about these nameless guards. I wonder who missed them back at the base. If they had loved ones at home. I think this is because TAZ had already done such a good job of establishing its side characters as fully established human beings with their own lives outside of the heroes. Because I already had the base sense that even the most minor characters in the series had value and their deaths held meaning, I felt something even when these seemingly meaningless characters with no distinguishing features were killed off. Even though those particular deaths were not very highlighted in the narrative.  

I believe this actually went all the way back to Episode 1. The boys have just made their first kill, a goblin who attacked them on the road. They are celebrating this fact with some...less than tasteful jokes:

Griffin [narrator/DM]: “It’s your first kill!”

Taako: “So, why am I so horny?”

Griffin: “It’s the horrible thing, if you had talked to them you would have realised that they’re part of a Hug Committee. They were running forward to hug you, to give you a hug-”

It’s a joke, for sure (the goblins were not part of a Hug Committee), but it does acknowledge that the goblins they had been gleefully mowing down probably have their own stuff going on. And it makes us stop and think, oh yeah, that’s murder. Our boys are doing murder. We support them of course, because they’re the protagonists and they’re delightful and they’re (mostly?) doing good, but even in this stupid joke we are forced to confront the idea that our heroes are not always the be-all-end-all and that even minor characters can have their own motivations.

Again, The Adventure Zone is not a perfect story. It has all sorts of problems. But the way it believes in its characters, and not just the player characters, enhances the story as a whole. And it shows that it is possible to create a narrative that includes lots of gratuitous ass-kicking and jokes and quipping while also allowing all of its characters to have personhood, even in death.

Bibliography (For Parts 1 & 2)

The Adventure Zone, creat. Clint McElroy, Griffin McElroy, Justin McElroy, and Travis McElroy. Maximum Fun Network (2014-2017). Podcast. 

Avatar: The Last Airbender, creat. Michael Dante DiMartino and Bryan Konietzko. Nickelodeon (2005-2008). 

Avengers: Infinity War, dir. Anthony Russo and Joe Russo, perf. Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth, Mark Ruffalo, Chris Evans. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (2018). 

Iron Man, dir. Jon Favreau, perf. Robert Downey Jr., Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, Jeff Bridges. Paramount Pictures (2008). 

Kill Bill Vol. 1, dir. Quentin Tarantino, perf. Uma Thurman, Lucy Liu, David Carradine. Miramax (2003). 

The Lion King, dir. Roger Allers and Rob Minkoff, Perf. Matthew Broderick, Jeremy Irons, James Earl Jones, Whoopi Goldberg. Walt Disney Studios Motion Pictures (1994). 

Lomax, E. J., Beanstalk: The Adventures of a Jack of All Tales. Publisher: Author (2013). 

• Available for FREE from the author’s website or for purchase here.

Man of Steel, dir. Zack Snyder, perf. Henry Cavill, Amy Adams, Michael Shannon, Diane Lane. Warner Bros. Pictures (2013). 

The New York Times Staff, Portraits: 9/11/01: The Collected "Portraits of Grief" from The New York Times. Times Books (2002). 

• Available on the NYT Website here

Serenity, dir. Joss Whedon, perf. Nathan Fillion, Gina Torres, Chiwetel Ejiofor, Alan Tudyk. Universal Pictures (2005). 

Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, dir. George Lucas, perf. Hayden Christensen, Ewan McGregor, Natalie Portman, Ian McDiarmid. 20th Century Fox (2002). 

Tolkein, J.R.R., The Fellowship of the Ring. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company (1994). 

Tolkein, J.R.R., The Two Towers. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company (1994). 

Tolkein, J.R.R., The Return of the King. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company (1994). 

Further Discussion:

Chang, Justin and Peter Dubruge, ‘Does ‘Man of Steel’ Exploit Disasters Like 9/11?,’ VARIETY (June 17, 2013) https://variety.com/2013/film/columns/does-man-of-steel-exploit-disasters-like-911-1200497860 

Dargis, Manohla, ‘Bang, Boom: Terrorism as a Game,’ THE NEW YORK TIMES (May 2, 2013)
https://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/03/movies/iron-man-3-with-robert-downey-jr.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 

Fattal, Isabel, ‘Why Do Cartoon Villains Speak in Foreign Accents?,’ THE ATLANTIC (Jan. 4, 2018) https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/01/why-do-cartoon-villains-speak-in-foreign-accents/549527/ 

Ibata, David, ‘'Lord' of racism? Critics view trilogy as discriminatory,’ CHICAGO TRIBUNE (Jan. 12, 2003) https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/chi-030112epringsrace-story.html 

• See also the follow-up discussion here: https://www.chicagotribune.com/lifestyles/chi-030127eptolkienlinks-story.html