Mods, if this should belong in General, please move it. But I feel that it belongs here.
Minor Spoilers for Robert J. Crane's Out of the Box and Girl in the Box series'
As the title really.
So, I've read A Song of Ice and Fire, and I read The Girl in the Box and Out of the Box series' by Robert J. Crane (superhero fantasy? urban fantasy?)
Those series have a significant number of main character deaths in them. To put it simply, I don't like it. It feels like my investment in those characters was for nothing.
I understand the whole 'there should be consequences!' argument, but I don't feel character deaths are consequences. I feel they can make the story seem lazy if the author relies too heavily of eliminating characters as opposed to resolving their storylines in other ways.
May people here have wanted something similar to happen in the Magic storylines (maybe not to the same level of ASOIAF), and I'm left here scratching my head.
Why do you want characters to die? Do you find it a satisfying storytelling mechanism?
I think the idea that main characters have to die in order for their to be stakes in a story is a very recent one. I think it's fine but not necessary.
I believe it originates from William Faulkner who told writers to "kill your darlings" - the idea that a writer's favourite word, character, prose, action etc would be repeatedly followed/focused on for the writer's benefit, something which readers would cotton on to and get tired of. For want of a better turn of phrase, writer for your readers, not yourself.
Also, to quote Alfred from Batman - you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Sometimes readers get really tired of following a character. Readers growing to hate your protagonist is not ideal.
I killed the protagonist at the end of my first book and left a secondary character at the forefront of future stories.
I think character deaths are tricky because as you said it can make it hard for you to invest in them. Most often I'm find with a characters death if it has a good (writing) reason to happen, such as showing stakes, the power/evilness of a character or diving the plot forward and (like any tropes really) is executed well. ASOIAF for example uses death to show the stakes of the story, reflects real life and used to subvert elements of fantasy tropes, as well as many of the deaths of the story driving the plot or development of the remaining characters.
TBH I think most people who are wanting character deaths in magic are the ones who simply don't like the story/plot and lazily think that it would improve the magic story.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
“There are no weak Jews. I am descended from those who wrestle angels and kill giants. We were chosen by God. You were chosen by a pathetic little man who can't seem to grow a full mustache"
"You can tell how dumb someone is by how they use Mary Sue"
Here, for a while, people just wanted characters they didnt like to die. Jace was a prominent target of this for quite some time when people felt like he was being overrepresented. It also had particular weight during BFZ because apparently thousands or millions of unnamed dead isn't enough to demonatrate consequence or stake.
Personally if it enhances the story and adds drama its fine but if, like someone in the IXN thread said that Tishana or Vona could be killed just by falling into the portal when Tezz took the Sun... Well that would just be bad writing. Their deaths wouldn't contribute anything to the story.
Too many character deaths cheapen the deaths.
No character deaths whatsoever removes certain tensions from the story.
To use a no-longer canon example, let's look at the old Star Wars novels. Book after book after book, the heroes always prevailed. No matter the odds, no matter the situation. It was never a question of "Will they survive?" but rather of "How do they escape this one?". And then they killed Chewbacca. And all of a sudden, death was a real possibility.
An important note here is that death is not and should not ever be the only way to raise the stakes. There are so many things worse than death, and those are almost always more interesting, so long as the consequences are real (i.e. irreversible, with lasting impact). That's part of the problem with Magic's current storyline - Jace loses his memories, which is interesting ground, fertile with possibilities and a chance for something new. And just like that, he remembers everything. Moment passed, back to the status quo. It's a problem inherent in iconic characters (the type who don't really change or experience character arcs) over long series. You can only go through so many stories with the same character before you run out of new ways to challenge them.
I'll admit that I used to be one of the Magic players calling for Jace's death. He was boring, uninspired, and very over-represented (he had like seven different versions while everyone else was at maybe three). And then they made the gatewatch and the planeswalker decks and over-represented way too many planeswalkers. The problem I have with these characters is that I don't really care whether they live or die. I'm fatigued by them and want more variety. To be fair, I've also read series where I got so fatigued that I wished the author would just kill everyone so it would end, but that had more to do with constant fate of the world situations and action that just plateaued the tension for me. Sometimes you need to break it up, go smaller and dig deeper, or choose a new character to follow. I find that deeply personal stakes are far more interesting to explore than shallow end-of-the-world stakes. Variety is the spice of life.
And just like that, he remembers everything. Moment passed, back to the status quo.
If by "back to the status quo", you mean Jace has a newfound understand of someone he didn't care lived or died a few months ago, having more proficiency with his magic than before because he also remembered he has a home plane that isn't Ravnica, actually standing his ground for a change, and also decided that he needs to try to be better at the Living Guildpact thing, then I suppose that is the case.
Jace may have gotten his memories back, but unless something jarring happens, this isn't the same Jace as the one before Ixalan.
I understand the overall point you're making in the post, but I don't think Jace getting his memories back is the best example you could have chosen about the reluctance of a story to change things up.
Game of Thrones does it very well, but they’ve never killed my 3 favorite characters - Tyrion, Arya, and Danaeries.
My favorite magic storyline was that of Gerrard, which ended in him dying, but then I hated the story in odyssey.
With all the battles in Magic, people should die. Otherwise, what is really happening? In Amonkhet they had gods dying, and in the story in Ravnica they could kill off guild leaders, or Ral Zarek, Tezseret, or Bolas, or a member of the guildpact, but it would be lame if there’s a huge showdown and no major character dies. It would also be lame if no one from the Gatewatch ever dies.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Modern
JundBGR
RW Blood MoonRW
Pauper
Delver U
Elves G
Control B
Commander
Edgar Markov BRW
Captain Sisay GW
Niv-Mizzet, Parun UR
Tymna and Ravos WB
I think it's Game of Thrones that set this trend. Look at Gotham, the turnover rate of that absurd show is ridiculous. I think it's a cheap, quick jab at shock value to just kill off characters and not bother with more challenging ways of inducing anxiety in the reader and invest them in the peril of any given situation.
I think the idea that main characters have to die in order for their to be stakes in a story is a very recent one. I think it's fine but not necessary.
True. I'd say a bigger problem is death not being given the respect it deserves.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
True. I'd say a bigger problem is death not being given the respect it deserves.
Especially in long-form serialized storytelling.
Death is meaningless in comics now. It's a couple year break. I don't want Magic to be like that. Magic has been really good about making character deaths meaningful, with less than a handful of 'true' resurrections (most of which are obviously seeded in advance for a return, like Bolas was or Elspeth seems to have been). Even if they come back, they're usually permanently changed.
But at the same time, people need to recognize Magic is still a card game product that needs to be sold, and the game's story can't be divorced from that.
I pretty much never find character deaths satisfying unless they're villains, but I do think that some of them are handled worse than others. As the original poster said, it tends to make me feel like I can never get invested in characters because they'll just die, and a lot of the time, it comes off as the author just killing them off for shock value or toying with the readers. The timing can affect it a lot, too (*looks accusingly at the Animorphs series*). A couple of deaths I can think of that were actually reasonable were Yahenni's (because they were doomed anyway, lived their life to the fullest, and died peacefully) and
Crow
in The Seventh Tower. Overall, though, they have a marked tendency to rub me the wrong way.
Mods, if this should belong in General, please move it. But I feel that it belongs here.
Minor Spoilers for Robert J. Crane's Out of the Box and Girl in the Box series'
As the title really.
So, I've read A Song of Ice and Fire, and I read The Girl in the Box and Out of the Box series' by Robert J. Crane (superhero fantasy? urban fantasy?)
Those series have a significant number of main character deaths in them. To put it simply, I don't like it. It feels like my investment in those characters was for nothing.
I understand the whole 'there should be consequences!' argument, but I don't feel character deaths are consequences. I feel they can make the story seem lazy if the author relies too heavily of eliminating characters as opposed to resolving their storylines in other ways.
May people here have wanted something similar to happen in the Magic storylines (maybe not to the same level of ASOIAF), and I'm left here scratching my head.
Why do you want characters to die? Do you find it a satisfying storytelling mechanism?
Sometimes I think the difference in perceiving character deaths comes from different ways to get pulled into a story. Some (I'd wager a guess most) people who read a story want to know about the characters, what drives them, what they feel, how they cope with certain situations. These people tend to get attached to certain characters and killing off such a character usually breaks the story in a way because for those people, the character's story was the story.
Then there are others, like me, who are more interested in the world as a whole. Characters are important as they are usually the agents of change, but for me the story is the story of the world, not that of a single character. Even if a character dies, even if I liked them, the story still continues for me.
I think this is the main point of contention. Different people read stories for different reasons and as such have different reactions to certain events. And because both types focus on different things, there's usually plenty in confusion why these people want this and the others want that.
Having all that said I want to echo the sentiment some here have already given: I don't want characters to die for the sake of seeing people die, but if everyone survives everything all the time, it simply breaks me out of the immersion, because I will involuntarily start to analyse every situation from a meta perspective. (I know this character is going to survive, how did the author pull this off?) Conversely killing people off left and right just kind of numbs you down. Like the saying goes, a death is a tragedy, a hundred deaths a statistic.
A proper balance is key, but I suppose what qualifies as the right balance differs from person to person.
True. I'd say a bigger problem is death not being given the respect it deserves.
Especially in long-form serialized storytelling.
Death is meaningless in comics now. It's a couple year break. I don't want Magic to be like that. Magic has been really good about making character deaths meaningful, with less than a handful of 'true' resurrections (most of which are obviously seeded in advance for a return, like Bolas was or Elspeth seems to have been). Even if they come back, they're usually permanently changed.
But at the same time, people need to recognize Magic is still a card game product that needs to be sold, and the game's story can't be divorced from that.
And there's the other problem: Gotham Syndrome. Right now I'm reading a series called Twenty-Sided Sorceress. Book V suffers a bit because so many comic relief characters die so quickly. And it's not even like the books are that long.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Card advantage is not the same thing as card draw. Something for 2B cannot be strictly worse than something for BBB or 3BB. If you're taking out Swords to Plowshares for Plummet, you're a fool. Stop doing these things!
I don't think people necessarily want death, exactly, but rather lasting and impactful consequences for character actions. Far too often in media characters experience horrific situations, trauma and/or injuries... that ultimately mean nothing, and come next week/book/episode/installment they're not only completely recovered, but it's as if the past events never happened. No scars, no anxieties, nothing to indicate anything was ever anything but sunshine and roses. That's simply not realistic, and while yes, fantasy settings can get away with a certain degree of that, it all too often becomes immersion breaking.
Khaladesh was frankly terrible for this. Literally NONE of the protagonists suffered any sort of appreciable harm or risk of harm that wasn't magic'd away by next chapter during an armed insurrection with an oppressive totalitarian government. That's just laughably kid-gloved.
Killing off all your characters leads to people not investing in them, because they're just going to die.
Plot armoring them leads to people not investing in them because they're not "real." There's no tension, and even in situations that readers could plausibly find themselves in, those characters don't act/react/experience it in reasonable or realistic ways, so you still can't relate to them.
I think the idea that main characters have to die in order for their to be stakes in a story is a very recent one. I think it's fine but not necessary.
Not true, the idea is not recent. The stories of Magic pre-mending have a lot of impactful deaths and many important characters die just like that.
I don't remember worrying for any character in Ixalan.
They really, really don't. If they die, it's almost always at the end of a novel or during one of the 'cleaning house' stories like Invasion or Time Spiral. And most of the time those deaths are for characters created for that story. There are almost no examples of important characters dying mid-narrative.
I don't see what Game of Thrones has to do with anything...MtG Story has been killing characters for ages. Even the previous leads in Urza and Gerrard have been killed off. The Nine Titans all dead? Most of the Weatherlight dead. Even more recently Venser and Elspeth have packed their bags to the afterlife although Elspeth does have a chance of coming back.
I think the issue is people don't like Gatewatch and they Gatewatch don't tend to pay any prices for their screwups and I am sorry Jace temporarily losing his memories only to come back more powerful is not really paying a price for screwups. Then there is oversaturation of too many Gatewatch cards and their overall dominance in storylines compared to native walkers.
I've been meaning the comment on this thread, since I've been outspoken about the story not having enough death. But I want to be clear on what exactly my personal expectations are, because I don't think that they're all that unreasonable.
I think the idea that main characters have to die in order for their to be stakes in a story is a very recent one. I think it's fine but not necessary.
Not true, the idea is not recent. The stories of Magic pre-mending have a lot of impactful deaths and many important characters die just like that.
I don't remember worrying for any character in Ixalan.
They really, really don't. If they die, it's almost always at the end of a novel or during one of the 'cleaning house' stories like Invasion or Time Spiral. And most of the time those deaths are for characters created for that story. There are almost no examples of important characters dying mid-narrative.
I don't want or expect important characters to die mid-narrative, but it wouldn't kill them to let minor characters occasionally die mid-narrative or kill off major characters at the end of their respective story arcs. Anyone who thought that Gideon was going to drown in a puddle in the middle of BFZ's storyline was kidding themselves - that was never going to happen for numerous reasons. But when you fail to show the death of a single named character during an entire story arc about violent conflict, it's hard to remain invested. No one expected Chandra to die in the middle of Kaladesh block, but having a 70 year old woman survive not one but two near death experiences - the second being after she had done everything she needed to do in the story - is just ridiculous. Amonkhet block was much better in this regard (and arguably had too MUCH death for once), but Ixalan slipped back into bloodless conflict despite evidence to the contrary being all over the cards. Once again, they taunt us by almost killing off minor characters like Vona and Kumena, after their usefulness in the story has already been more or less used up (Kumena's still had potential at that point but they didn't do anything with him afterward, and Vona was a generic villain who could have easily been replaced by any other vampire for a more interesting story). The cards depict a violent war for control of the city between giant armies, but the story itself is a handful of people who, despite allegedly wanting to control the city and hating the other factions, are more content to act like Bond villains than make an actual effort to kill each other.
And then there's the larger issue of more prominent characters (i.e. planeswalkers) virtually never dying. Killing them off unceremoniously in the middle of a story arc when all signs point to them surviving for longer is not good storytelling, unless you're going for shock value and you have a good direction to take the story after that. But in general, it's a bad idea. There's a reason why even Game of Thrones, the go-to example of this trope, stopped killing off its main characters that way in later seasons. However, using death as a fitting conclusion to a character's narrative arc is not something Magic's writers should shy away from as much as they do. Elspeth's death was a good example of this, but it's been years since she (and Xenagos) died, and it's starting to give the impression the planeswalkers (at least the ones with cards - sorry, Vronos) don't die anymore. It has the potential to turn what could be interesting story arcs into endless sagas that drag on and on and stay way past their welcome with the audience. Killing off a planeswalker every once in a while would be healthy for the story because it reminds people that there are still stakes. It doesn't have to be in the middle of a storyline, it doesn't have to completely unexpected, it doesn't have to be all the time, and it doesn't even have to be one of the most prominent planeswalkers. But they need to die on occasion, if for no other reason than so that the audience can't automatically and safely assume that all planeswalkers in a story will survive.
So my advice to the creative team would be:
DON'T kill off a main character in the middle of their story arc.
DON'T kill off characters when it makes no sense in the larger story just for shock value.
DON'T overuse death as a narrative tool.
DO kill off a named character or two if you're trying to portray a violent conflict.
DO kill off planeswalkers occasionally so that the story has some stakes.
People can't get invested in a story where everyone dies all the time, but they can't be invested in one where no one dies either. The key is striking a balance.
In my opinion, Stories should always serve to inspire the reader and motivate them to live more, not depress them or mock them with the futility of things.
Because of this, conflicts must *not* resemble what real world challenges *look like*. There must be some outside-the-conflict perspective.
In Original STAR WARS, the surface conflict was the Empire vs. the Rebellion. The Jedi had all but been exterminated. Obi-Wan Kenobi not only gave Luke Skywalker a new weapon to tip the scales of the battles, but a new purpose and meaning to his life, so that winning and losing meant different things.
Darth Vader. Darth Vader is the example I would lift up as what fictional character deaths should look like. People who find ways to make some kind of partial amends for what they've done or failed to do, have completed a character growth arc, have grown as wise as they can--(which you don't have to gain omniscience to accomplish. You just have to fairly reasonably hit the limits of your opportunity), and because they are in a state of sympathy or grace from the perspective of the reader-- before they make any more grand mistakes with terrible consequences spawning ad nauseum stories, it would be better if the just, "ya know, not" as the writer of the article put it today on the Mothership about whether Urza should have created Karn or not.
You go on your adventure, you get messy, you learn a few new secrets and tricks, make some unusual friends, have a big climactic finish-- and then you should die, having fulfilled the purpose of your existence. Fictional wars have meanings and fictional characters *should* all die as a matter of keeping the moral compass of the story pointed right. This is opposite to reality where the conflicts seem meaningless but, if you asked me about *should*, I would say everyone *should* live forever.
The deaths of characters in story are supposed to motivate and guide people to immortality in real life. If you define that as a dynastic legacy, or an architectural or cultural legacy, that's fine. If you define it more literally as medicine and miracle and personal immortality that's fine, too. The important thing is that characters are supposed to chase immortality.
Liliana Vess is a protagonist who is against her nature finding a hero's role and path to the same purpose as Nicol Bolas. She freed Innistrad from Griselbrand who likely would have destroyed the Church of Avacyn that much sooner. She killed Kothoped with the same artifact he sent her to retrieve and who knows which planes he was terrorizing. She eliminated Razaketh on Amonkhet fulfilling prophecies that may have been by the Amonkhet Gods and may have been whitewashed history by Nicol Bolas, who knew of her contracts and could predict something then manipulate it to happen. She is going on a quest that will apparently end in achieving Immortality.
I would very surprised if, after killing Belzenlok, Liliana Vess survived Nicol Bolas' attention to Dominaria and the Gatewatch.
She's old, pre-Mending, and getting to be a too-powerful character for the confines of the story. She solves problems the other planeswalkers can't by her presence and willingness to use Black magic and Black mindset. She's nowhere near Superman levels of game-breaking, but after she frees herself from the 4 contracts, her next order of business would be to discard the Chain Veil or hack and master it more and then she'd really be a problematic character to write for.
I never wanted Jace to be killed off because I hadn't seen him grow as a character. I hadn't seen a path or a journey that resonated emotionally with me for him to *earn* a hero's sacrifice, bow-out scene. Jace just doesn't scream ''oh the humanity'' to me. Therefore I really see Jace more as a recurring Villain, someone who always has to be around to mess things up to keep the story going that way. Jace is obviously like URZA in that way, except without a lot of super-powers. (Urza was special even for a planeswalker-- Jace has mind reading powers which seem to be more a flavor of magic than a really overpowered skill. He doesn't use them to win Magic Battles nearly as well as Eragon did, for example. In Eragon Mind Magic is REALLY important and special. It doesn't feel that way in Magic.)
But now that Jace has the full weight of wrecking Alhammaret's mind bearing on his soul, and he has an actual side day job as the Living Guildpact he should be getting back to-- there's an out for Jace to leave the story in a dignified way that would be almost like a character death effectively without actually gruesomely killing him off. He should simply retire and be the Guildpact full time and quit the Gatewatch except for promising to watch Ravnica.
Jace could then become something like Ben Kenobi, actually, training and teaching a new Ravnican planeswalker to take his place on the Watch (Vraska, anyone?)
People can definitely get invested in a story where everyone dies at the end--- but the trick is to have some of the deaths be written particularly to be surprises. It's when you can SEE all the deaths coming miles and miles and miles away, like in comic books, that it just doesn't work anymore.
Vagueness also helps. someone named Animorphs. in both Animorphs and Lord of the Rings, there's a decent sized list of characters that almost certainly "die" but the exact way it happens is more off screen or uncertain so it's just very very different than absurdities like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, or Final Crisis. the ones in space are in the middle of a mission and it seems guaranteed there's a moment after the explosion where things happen to the survivors-- the ones left behind have whole lives ahead of them before they clearly die normal deaths because they're retired and not gods. Hobbits all die because they're not elves, except Bilbo and Frodo and Sam. Every descendent of Aragorn dies, but they obviously all have royal funerals implied so that's cool. I mean even though Tolkien decided evil was still in the world in the Fourth Age, we're not assuming there'd actually be any crazy Denethors. the remaining evil is much smaller than the Evil that had been defeated before.
I can't quite say exactly why I'm strongly opposed to the tone of most of the posts above me but I think it comes down to--- death is something you should hope for characters *because you have to see how the character handles their own death*. Death is part of character arc. I can't get invested in a character that can never die and is also never learning anything. I just don't see the point of Chandra Nalaar. Pia Nalaar, with a 100th the screen time, is much cooler.
To talk about characters they just killed off and I think might really not be coming back-- Kozilek and Ulamog. Emrakul might come back but that's a long shot.
I am probably every color-combination it is possible to be, though it's really hard to figure out what it would mean to be 4-colored....it doesn't seem logical to be 4-colored without being 5-colored.
I think the idea that main characters have to die in order for their to be stakes in a story is a very recent one. I think it's fine but not necessary.
Not true, the idea is not recent. The stories of Magic pre-mending have a lot of impactful deaths and many important characters die just like that.
I don't remember worrying for any character in Ixalan.
They really, really don't. If they die, it's almost always at the end of a novel or during one of the 'cleaning house' stories like Invasion or Time Spiral. And most of the time those deaths are for characters created for that story. There are almost no examples of important characters dying mid-narrative.
Rofellos, Hanna, Mirri, Rayne, Starke, Volrath etc all died way before the Weatherlight Saga ended.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Thanks to SpiderBoy4 @ High-Light Studio's for the awesome banner
“I once had an entire race killed just to listen to the rattling of their dried bones as I waded through them.” —Volrath
I back up the sentiment that I have seen a lot of posts floating around implying the feeling of "Wizards will never kill these characters and I see this as a negative for some reason". If there is any reason why Wizards would not want to kill their main characters it's because the majority of the fans wouldn't like it, and, ipso facto, if it would only serve to anger/sadden people, why on earth would they ever want to? This is a body of work that's meant to be FUN - it's not a serious literary work or striving for some high-level storytelling genius. There's no gold star in it for them for taking a bold move just for the sake of it.
I'm personally of the opinion that I don't want any of the main 5 to die. I happen to like that they've set up some clear protagonists. I think it gives the story order. As someone who hasn't been in on this for the past 20 years, they're like rocks in the midst of a multitude of block-specific characters and now a whole slew of old magic nostalgia characters as well. I like to feel that by continuing to read the lore every block I'm being rewarded with more insights about them.
Some people have mentioned that old magic lore was not nearly so planeswalker focused. I feel like that only would have worked back when the story took place almost entirely on one plane. I like that we get new planes all the time and so we need planeswalker main characters. If the story had no mains from block to block honestly I wouldn't be reading it.
Maybe that's a bit off-topic from whether or not a death would make the story objectively better, but that's how I feel.
The problem is its a bit too late to change the rules. Prior to the Gatewatch Era, Heroes and Main Characters died all the time.
You could do everything right and still die ala Elspeth. The face of franchise Urza and Gerrard both met their ends. In the Gatewatch Era even when they are utterly incomptent...they suffer no consequences for their actions and no Jace losing his memory for a few months only to come back with powerup is not really a long term consequences compared to previous heroes who lost whole planes, family and friends.
So you don't need death as consequence true but you need some consequences and the Gatewatch aren't paying them.
Stories being realistic (besides obvious fantasy elements) is good. Extremely positive endings are unrealistic. So harsh results can make sense, but can be overdone, unrealistic in its own way, and George R.R. Martin is a prime example.
When expecting main characters to survive, something else has to do be done to make it interesting - perhaps developments in the main characters' lives, secondary characters, or backstory. Star Trek TOS was limited by the return to the status quo at the end of each episode and it's something TNG improved on. A major character died late Season 1 and stayed dead (unlike someone promptly resurrected in the TOS movies), adding to the suspense later in the series, yet not overdone.
You don't need to kill main characters, but you have to have that be a real possibility, because otherwise there are no stakes. It's more important for ongoing series because readers will catch on and become disinterested if characters keep facing deadly threats and making it out fine. One shot story, or a trilogy? All major characters surviving is fine, because all action stories begin with high stakes and they don't erode until they all survive multiple life threatening catastrophes and its clear that all power has been directed to the character shields.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
The Meaning of Life: "M-hmm. Well, it's nothing very special. Uh, try and be nice to people, avoid eating fat, read a good book every now and then, get some walking in, and try and live together in peace and harmony with people of all creeds and nations"
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Whether its blue players countering your spells, red players burning you out, or combo, if you have a problem with an aspect of Magic's gameplay, you can fix it!
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!
Not going to lie, I was seriously disappointed with how Bolas vs the Gatewatch was handled on Amonkhet. The cliche "villain underestimates the heroes so much he is bored of them and lets them all live" thing was such a cop-out. Surely at least one of them should have died there to emphasize the point of what they were dealing with. How much more dramatic the story would have been if, say, Giddeon had died and Jace's mind never fully recovered (say, bouts of mental instability). I just feel like the Gatewatch is a bad comic book or a children's story where the heroes always win. To an extent, it's okay, but it really makes for a dull story when you don't fear for any of them when things go sideways. When Elspeth died, you still didn't feel like she was really gone because of that chance for her to return. I don't need people to die left and right, but maybe one and some serious consequences to others to really drive the point home that they don't always win and that missteps can cost them just like any other protagonist.
Private Mod Note
():
Rollback Post to RevisionRollBack
Sig/Avatar by DarkNightCavalier
To post a comment, please login or register a new account.
Minor Spoilers for Robert J. Crane's Out of the Box and Girl in the Box series'
As the title really.
So, I've read A Song of Ice and Fire, and I read The Girl in the Box and Out of the Box series' by Robert J. Crane (superhero fantasy? urban fantasy?)
Those series have a significant number of main character deaths in them. To put it simply, I don't like it. It feels like my investment in those characters was for nothing.
I understand the whole 'there should be consequences!' argument, but I don't feel character deaths are consequences. I feel they can make the story seem lazy if the author relies too heavily of eliminating characters as opposed to resolving their storylines in other ways.
May people here have wanted something similar to happen in the Magic storylines (maybe not to the same level of ASOIAF), and I'm left here scratching my head.
Why do you want characters to die? Do you find it a satisfying storytelling mechanism?
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
Also, to quote Alfred from Batman - you either die a hero or live long enough to become the villain. Sometimes readers get really tired of following a character. Readers growing to hate your protagonist is not ideal.
Modern:R 8Whack R|W White Knights W
TBH I think most people who are wanting character deaths in magic are the ones who simply don't like the story/plot and lazily think that it would improve the magic story.
"You can tell how dumb someone is by how they use Mary Sue"
Personally if it enhances the story and adds drama its fine but if, like someone in the IXN thread said that Tishana or Vona could be killed just by falling into the portal when Tezz took the Sun... Well that would just be bad writing. Their deaths wouldn't contribute anything to the story.
No character deaths whatsoever removes certain tensions from the story.
To use a no-longer canon example, let's look at the old Star Wars novels. Book after book after book, the heroes always prevailed. No matter the odds, no matter the situation. It was never a question of "Will they survive?" but rather of "How do they escape this one?". And then they killed Chewbacca. And all of a sudden, death was a real possibility.
An important note here is that death is not and should not ever be the only way to raise the stakes. There are so many things worse than death, and those are almost always more interesting, so long as the consequences are real (i.e. irreversible, with lasting impact). That's part of the problem with Magic's current storyline - Jace loses his memories, which is interesting ground, fertile with possibilities and a chance for something new. And just like that, he remembers everything. Moment passed, back to the status quo. It's a problem inherent in iconic characters (the type who don't really change or experience character arcs) over long series. You can only go through so many stories with the same character before you run out of new ways to challenge them.
I'll admit that I used to be one of the Magic players calling for Jace's death. He was boring, uninspired, and very over-represented (he had like seven different versions while everyone else was at maybe three). And then they made the gatewatch and the planeswalker decks and over-represented way too many planeswalkers. The problem I have with these characters is that I don't really care whether they live or die. I'm fatigued by them and want more variety. To be fair, I've also read series where I got so fatigued that I wished the author would just kill everyone so it would end, but that had more to do with constant fate of the world situations and action that just plateaued the tension for me. Sometimes you need to break it up, go smaller and dig deeper, or choose a new character to follow. I find that deeply personal stakes are far more interesting to explore than shallow end-of-the-world stakes. Variety is the spice of life.
2023 Average Peasant Cube|and Discussion
Because I have more decks than fit in a signature
Useful Resources:
MTGSalvation tags
EDHREC
ManabaseCrafter
If by "back to the status quo", you mean Jace has a newfound understand of someone he didn't care lived or died a few months ago, having more proficiency with his magic than before because he also remembered he has a home plane that isn't Ravnica, actually standing his ground for a change, and also decided that he needs to try to be better at the Living Guildpact thing, then I suppose that is the case.
Jace may have gotten his memories back, but unless something jarring happens, this isn't the same Jace as the one before Ixalan.
I understand the overall point you're making in the post, but I don't think Jace getting his memories back is the best example you could have chosen about the reluctance of a story to change things up.
My favorite magic storyline was that of Gerrard, which ended in him dying, but then I hated the story in odyssey.
With all the battles in Magic, people should die. Otherwise, what is really happening? In Amonkhet they had gods dying, and in the story in Ravnica they could kill off guild leaders, or Ral Zarek, Tezseret, or Bolas, or a member of the guildpact, but it would be lame if there’s a huge showdown and no major character dies. It would also be lame if no one from the Gatewatch ever dies.
JundBGR
RW Blood MoonRW
Pauper
Delver U
Elves G
Control B
Commander
Edgar Markov BRW
Captain Sisay GW
Niv-Mizzet, Parun UR
Tymna and Ravos WB
|| UW Jace, Vyn's Prodigy UW || UG Kenessos, Priest of Thassa (feat. Arixmethes) UG ||
Cards I still want to see created:
|| Olantin, Lost City || Pavios and Thanasis || Choryu ||
True. I'd say a bigger problem is death not being given the respect it deserves.
On phasing:
Death is meaningless in comics now. It's a couple year break. I don't want Magic to be like that. Magic has been really good about making character deaths meaningful, with less than a handful of 'true' resurrections (most of which are obviously seeded in advance for a return, like Bolas was or Elspeth seems to have been). Even if they come back, they're usually permanently changed.
But at the same time, people need to recognize Magic is still a card game product that needs to be sold, and the game's story can't be divorced from that.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
Sometimes I think the difference in perceiving character deaths comes from different ways to get pulled into a story. Some (I'd wager a guess most) people who read a story want to know about the characters, what drives them, what they feel, how they cope with certain situations. These people tend to get attached to certain characters and killing off such a character usually breaks the story in a way because for those people, the character's story was the story.
Then there are others, like me, who are more interested in the world as a whole. Characters are important as they are usually the agents of change, but for me the story is the story of the world, not that of a single character. Even if a character dies, even if I liked them, the story still continues for me.
I think this is the main point of contention. Different people read stories for different reasons and as such have different reactions to certain events. And because both types focus on different things, there's usually plenty in confusion why these people want this and the others want that.
Having all that said I want to echo the sentiment some here have already given: I don't want characters to die for the sake of seeing people die, but if everyone survives everything all the time, it simply breaks me out of the immersion, because I will involuntarily start to analyse every situation from a meta perspective. (I know this character is going to survive, how did the author pull this off?) Conversely killing people off left and right just kind of numbs you down. Like the saying goes, a death is a tragedy, a hundred deaths a statistic.
A proper balance is key, but I suppose what qualifies as the right balance differs from person to person.
And there's the other problem: Gotham Syndrome. Right now I'm reading a series called Twenty-Sided Sorceress. Book V suffers a bit because so many comic relief characters die so quickly. And it's not even like the books are that long.
On phasing:
I don't think people necessarily want death, exactly, but rather lasting and impactful consequences for character actions. Far too often in media characters experience horrific situations, trauma and/or injuries... that ultimately mean nothing, and come next week/book/episode/installment they're not only completely recovered, but it's as if the past events never happened. No scars, no anxieties, nothing to indicate anything was ever anything but sunshine and roses. That's simply not realistic, and while yes, fantasy settings can get away with a certain degree of that, it all too often becomes immersion breaking.
Khaladesh was frankly terrible for this. Literally NONE of the protagonists suffered any sort of appreciable harm or risk of harm that wasn't magic'd away by next chapter during an armed insurrection with an oppressive totalitarian government. That's just laughably kid-gloved.
Killing off all your characters leads to people not investing in them, because they're just going to die.
Plot armoring them leads to people not investing in them because they're not "real." There's no tension, and even in situations that readers could plausibly find themselves in, those characters don't act/react/experience it in reasonable or realistic ways, so you still can't relate to them.
TerribleBad at Magic since 1998.A Vorthos Guide to Magic Story | Twitter | Tumblr
[Primer] Krenko | Azor | Kess | Zacama | Kumena | Sram | The Ur-Dragon | Edgar Markov | Daretti | Marath
I think the issue is people don't like Gatewatch and they Gatewatch don't tend to pay any prices for their screwups and I am sorry Jace temporarily losing his memories only to come back more powerful is not really paying a price for screwups. Then there is oversaturation of too many Gatewatch cards and their overall dominance in storylines compared to native walkers.
I don't want or expect important characters to die mid-narrative, but it wouldn't kill them to let minor characters occasionally die mid-narrative or kill off major characters at the end of their respective story arcs. Anyone who thought that Gideon was going to drown in a puddle in the middle of BFZ's storyline was kidding themselves - that was never going to happen for numerous reasons. But when you fail to show the death of a single named character during an entire story arc about violent conflict, it's hard to remain invested. No one expected Chandra to die in the middle of Kaladesh block, but having a 70 year old woman survive not one but two near death experiences - the second being after she had done everything she needed to do in the story - is just ridiculous. Amonkhet block was much better in this regard (and arguably had too MUCH death for once), but Ixalan slipped back into bloodless conflict despite evidence to the contrary being all over the cards. Once again, they taunt us by almost killing off minor characters like Vona and Kumena, after their usefulness in the story has already been more or less used up (Kumena's still had potential at that point but they didn't do anything with him afterward, and Vona was a generic villain who could have easily been replaced by any other vampire for a more interesting story). The cards depict a violent war for control of the city between giant armies, but the story itself is a handful of people who, despite allegedly wanting to control the city and hating the other factions, are more content to act like Bond villains than make an actual effort to kill each other.
And then there's the larger issue of more prominent characters (i.e. planeswalkers) virtually never dying. Killing them off unceremoniously in the middle of a story arc when all signs point to them surviving for longer is not good storytelling, unless you're going for shock value and you have a good direction to take the story after that. But in general, it's a bad idea. There's a reason why even Game of Thrones, the go-to example of this trope, stopped killing off its main characters that way in later seasons. However, using death as a fitting conclusion to a character's narrative arc is not something Magic's writers should shy away from as much as they do. Elspeth's death was a good example of this, but it's been years since she (and Xenagos) died, and it's starting to give the impression the planeswalkers (at least the ones with cards - sorry, Vronos) don't die anymore. It has the potential to turn what could be interesting story arcs into endless sagas that drag on and on and stay way past their welcome with the audience. Killing off a planeswalker every once in a while would be healthy for the story because it reminds people that there are still stakes. It doesn't have to be in the middle of a storyline, it doesn't have to completely unexpected, it doesn't have to be all the time, and it doesn't even have to be one of the most prominent planeswalkers. But they need to die on occasion, if for no other reason than so that the audience can't automatically and safely assume that all planeswalkers in a story will survive.
So my advice to the creative team would be:
People can't get invested in a story where everyone dies all the time, but they can't be invested in one where no one dies either. The key is striking a balance.
Because of this, conflicts must *not* resemble what real world challenges *look like*. There must be some outside-the-conflict perspective.
In Original STAR WARS, the surface conflict was the Empire vs. the Rebellion. The Jedi had all but been exterminated. Obi-Wan Kenobi not only gave Luke Skywalker a new weapon to tip the scales of the battles, but a new purpose and meaning to his life, so that winning and losing meant different things.
Darth Vader. Darth Vader is the example I would lift up as what fictional character deaths should look like. People who find ways to make some kind of partial amends for what they've done or failed to do, have completed a character growth arc, have grown as wise as they can--(which you don't have to gain omniscience to accomplish. You just have to fairly reasonably hit the limits of your opportunity), and because they are in a state of sympathy or grace from the perspective of the reader-- before they make any more grand mistakes with terrible consequences spawning ad nauseum stories, it would be better if the just, "ya know, not" as the writer of the article put it today on the Mothership about whether Urza should have created Karn or not.
You go on your adventure, you get messy, you learn a few new secrets and tricks, make some unusual friends, have a big climactic finish-- and then you should die, having fulfilled the purpose of your existence. Fictional wars have meanings and fictional characters *should* all die as a matter of keeping the moral compass of the story pointed right. This is opposite to reality where the conflicts seem meaningless but, if you asked me about *should*, I would say everyone *should* live forever.
The deaths of characters in story are supposed to motivate and guide people to immortality in real life. If you define that as a dynastic legacy, or an architectural or cultural legacy, that's fine. If you define it more literally as medicine and miracle and personal immortality that's fine, too. The important thing is that characters are supposed to chase immortality.
Liliana Vess is a protagonist who is against her nature finding a hero's role and path to the same purpose as Nicol Bolas. She freed Innistrad from Griselbrand who likely would have destroyed the Church of Avacyn that much sooner. She killed Kothoped with the same artifact he sent her to retrieve and who knows which planes he was terrorizing. She eliminated Razaketh on Amonkhet fulfilling prophecies that may have been by the Amonkhet Gods and may have been whitewashed history by Nicol Bolas, who knew of her contracts and could predict something then manipulate it to happen. She is going on a quest that will apparently end in achieving Immortality.
I would very surprised if, after killing Belzenlok, Liliana Vess survived Nicol Bolas' attention to Dominaria and the Gatewatch.
She's old, pre-Mending, and getting to be a too-powerful character for the confines of the story. She solves problems the other planeswalkers can't by her presence and willingness to use Black magic and Black mindset. She's nowhere near Superman levels of game-breaking, but after she frees herself from the 4 contracts, her next order of business would be to discard the Chain Veil or hack and master it more and then she'd really be a problematic character to write for.
I never wanted Jace to be killed off because I hadn't seen him grow as a character. I hadn't seen a path or a journey that resonated emotionally with me for him to *earn* a hero's sacrifice, bow-out scene. Jace just doesn't scream ''oh the humanity'' to me. Therefore I really see Jace more as a recurring Villain, someone who always has to be around to mess things up to keep the story going that way. Jace is obviously like URZA in that way, except without a lot of super-powers. (Urza was special even for a planeswalker-- Jace has mind reading powers which seem to be more a flavor of magic than a really overpowered skill. He doesn't use them to win Magic Battles nearly as well as Eragon did, for example. In Eragon Mind Magic is REALLY important and special. It doesn't feel that way in Magic.)
But now that Jace has the full weight of wrecking Alhammaret's mind bearing on his soul, and he has an actual side day job as the Living Guildpact he should be getting back to-- there's an out for Jace to leave the story in a dignified way that would be almost like a character death effectively without actually gruesomely killing him off. He should simply retire and be the Guildpact full time and quit the Gatewatch except for promising to watch Ravnica.
Jace could then become something like Ben Kenobi, actually, training and teaching a new Ravnican planeswalker to take his place on the Watch (Vraska, anyone?)
People can definitely get invested in a story where everyone dies at the end--- but the trick is to have some of the deaths be written particularly to be surprises. It's when you can SEE all the deaths coming miles and miles and miles away, like in comic books, that it just doesn't work anymore.
Vagueness also helps. someone named Animorphs. in both Animorphs and Lord of the Rings, there's a decent sized list of characters that almost certainly "die" but the exact way it happens is more off screen or uncertain so it's just very very different than absurdities like Crisis on Infinite Earths, Infinite Crisis, or Final Crisis. the ones in space are in the middle of a mission and it seems guaranteed there's a moment after the explosion where things happen to the survivors-- the ones left behind have whole lives ahead of them before they clearly die normal deaths because they're retired and not gods. Hobbits all die because they're not elves, except Bilbo and Frodo and Sam. Every descendent of Aragorn dies, but they obviously all have royal funerals implied so that's cool. I mean even though Tolkien decided evil was still in the world in the Fourth Age, we're not assuming there'd actually be any crazy Denethors. the remaining evil is much smaller than the Evil that had been defeated before.
I can't quite say exactly why I'm strongly opposed to the tone of most of the posts above me but I think it comes down to--- death is something you should hope for characters *because you have to see how the character handles their own death*. Death is part of character arc. I can't get invested in a character that can never die and is also never learning anything. I just don't see the point of Chandra Nalaar. Pia Nalaar, with a 100th the screen time, is much cooler.
To talk about characters they just killed off and I think might really not be coming back-- Kozilek and Ulamog. Emrakul might come back but that's a long shot.
People need to read this fanfiction, though:
www.hpmor.com
I am probably every color-combination it is possible to be, though it's really hard to figure out what it would mean to be 4-colored....it doesn't seem logical to be 4-colored without being 5-colored.
Rofellos, Hanna, Mirri, Rayne, Starke, Volrath etc all died way before the Weatherlight Saga ended.
“I once had an entire race killed just to listen to the rattling of their dried bones as I waded through them.”
—Volrath
I'm personally of the opinion that I don't want any of the main 5 to die. I happen to like that they've set up some clear protagonists. I think it gives the story order. As someone who hasn't been in on this for the past 20 years, they're like rocks in the midst of a multitude of block-specific characters and now a whole slew of old magic nostalgia characters as well. I like to feel that by continuing to read the lore every block I'm being rewarded with more insights about them.
Some people have mentioned that old magic lore was not nearly so planeswalker focused. I feel like that only would have worked back when the story took place almost entirely on one plane. I like that we get new planes all the time and so we need planeswalker main characters. If the story had no mains from block to block honestly I wouldn't be reading it.
Maybe that's a bit off-topic from whether or not a death would make the story objectively better, but that's how I feel.
You could do everything right and still die ala Elspeth. The face of franchise Urza and Gerrard both met their ends. In the Gatewatch Era even when they are utterly incomptent...they suffer no consequences for their actions and no Jace losing his memory for a few months only to come back with powerup is not really a long term consequences compared to previous heroes who lost whole planes, family and friends.
So you don't need death as consequence true but you need some consequences and the Gatewatch aren't paying them.
When expecting main characters to survive, something else has to do be done to make it interesting - perhaps developments in the main characters' lives, secondary characters, or backstory. Star Trek TOS was limited by the return to the status quo at the end of each episode and it's something TNG improved on. A major character died late Season 1 and stayed dead (unlike someone promptly resurrected in the TOS movies), adding to the suspense later in the series, yet not overdone.
Vintage: Dredge | Legacy: Burn, Goblins, Soldier | Standard: Mono-Red Aggro
Commander: Nicol Bolas, Sliver Overlord, Rafiq
Casual: Selesnya Saproling Smackdown, Izzet Labs, Rebel
Played since June 2004, mostly inactive June 2011 to March 2018
Other usernames include AlanFromRochester, homerthebeerbaron
MTG checklists from Alpha to Ravnica Allegiance - https://www.mtgsalvation.com/forums/magic-fundamentals/other-magic-products/third-party-products/805324-checklists-for-everything-from-alpha-to-ravnica
Onering's 4 simple steps that let you solve any problem with Magic's gameplay
Step 1: Identify the problem. What aspect of Magic don't you like? Step 2: Find out how others deal with the problem. How do players deal with this aspect of the game when they run into it? Step 3: Do what those players do. Step 4: No more problem. Bonus: You are now better at Magic. Enjoy those extra wins!