1. Cap Stewart says:

    An excellent perspective, Stephen! I am also reminded of when Jesus wept over Lazarus, even with the full knowledge that He would raise him from the dead in a matter of minutes. Suffering and death can and should cause grief, even though we know these things will one day be eradicated.

  2. Ironically, in Infinity War, it wasn’t really a tear jerker for me. I guess maybe because I didn’t interpret everyone fading away into dust as a death, exactly. And I watch things that are infinitely more tragic (Fate Zero. Fate Zero will tear your heart out and rip it to shreds if you let it)

    But, I agree on the idea of grieving even when we know the characters will live. There’s so many reasons to be sad about something even aside from permanent death. I’m not one to cry in movies, but in a well made show, it’s often easy to get caught up in the characters’ lives and grieve with them(even if only inwardly, in my case), because we get to know them. We see bits of ourselves or our family in them, so it hurts to watch them suffer or lose things that are important to them.

    Killing off and resurrecting characters multiple times DOES run the risk of lessening the tragedy, though. If a writer wants to do this and have it be serious and heartbreaking nearly every time, there should be a lot of consequence to it. Steins Gate does a decent job of this. Every time Mayuri dies and Okabe time travels to try and rescue her, it really is heartbreaking because each death is basically another emotional weight piled onto Okabe’s shoulders. It gives the audience a sense of desperation, and a window to understanding how much Okabe is hurting at that point.

  3. […] reasoning it makes no sense to grieve fictional characters whether or not they’re perma-dead. Yet we do grieve, because our imaginations help us reckon even a little with beautiful and terrible …. And here on real Earth, biblical Christians believe that our beloved friends who trusted Jesus, […]

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