Oh, the heavy burden of killing fictional characters!
Some writers love it, others hate it (ehi, that’s me!).
Some are willing to do whatever it takes to bring their story to the next level, and, sometimes, killing a character is exactly what you need.
However, it can really easily become unnecessary if the path to it isn’t prepared properly.
If I asked you what you think about Mufasa’s death in The Lion King, I am sure that the emotional response you’d first have would be strong. And if you don’t… what is wrong with you?
This death had been traumatising people for over 30 years, and an array of things happens to make it so.
When Mufasa dies, he is killed by his brother Scar.
This is the first emotional checkpoint: Scar’s betrayal burns! From the very beginning of the movie, the viewer isn’t encouraged to like Scar, we are suspicious of him, but we don’t expect him to do THAT!
But the worst part, the painfully, heart-shredding second emotional checkpoint arrives when we realise that little Simba, Mufasa’s son, thinks his father died because of him. The grief, the pain, the shame he feels, eventually, drive him to leave and disappear.
And here’s the viewer, hooked to the fate of this poor little cub, wandering around the wilderness on his own, believing that he killed his father.
Mufasa’s death matters because:
- It changes the course of the story.
- It causes an emotional, deep wound in the other characters.
Now, how do you that in practice, with your own characters, and write a tragic death scene worth to be remembered?
The first point is pretty easy to understand: to make a character’s death matter, it has to change the course of the story.
Ask yourself: if I don’t kill the character, would the story’s outcome change? If the answer is yes, you are up to a very good start.
For example, if you kill the healer of the group, does it mean that someone else will die later on because no one can heal them?
The second point is a bit trickier.
We usually care about fictional characters because we relate to them, we feel bad for them, we just feel empathy towards them and whatever they have been through. We are humans and we cannot help but put ourselves in other people’s shoes, at least for a bit, if we are not psychopaths and actually carry some empathy.
Now, if the character you kill is a main character, probably you’ll be able to give them enough space for your readers to fall in love with them, know them and, eventually, get attached to them and be absolutely devastated once they die.
But if the character you want to kill is a secondary character, that can be a bit riskier.
What you have to manage doing is to show how this character matters to other characters.
Mufasa’s death is tragic because of what it does to Simba. If Simba didn’t care, the audience wouldn’t have cared that much either.
I actually once had to help a writer through this specific predicament. They had a character who died at the end of the book, but this character wasn’t given enough space in the narrative for the reader to learn things about them.
Also, it was a side character, and besides just being there, there wasn’t much else that suggested any kind of relation or link between them and the main character besides being told that they went way back.
When, eventually, this character died, it didn’t feel like much had changed. And this came from a writer who had the absolutely magical gift of making even the smallest character shine, and made me completely fall in love with one character who existed only for a chapter. So, yeah, this is a hard thing to do.
You have to build up the relationships between characters, and develop them fully, and show them on the page, to make sure that a character’s death will be impactful and heart-shattering in the best way possible.
Have them share memories and moments, trauma-bonding… turn even the smallest character into an active part of the story by making them an active part of other characters’ lives.
Little example to help you frame this better: Rue’s death in the Hunger Games matters because of who Katniss sees in her, and because her sister Prim could’ve actually been the one fighting at her place.
Writing novels is a manipulative endeavour, you have to guide your readers into the emotions you want them to feel, and if you do the right kind of prep work and get a character’s death to truly matter, the devastating emotional impact it will have on your characters will be spectacular.
