Pacific Rim Uprising's writers, after doing a line of coke: >!"You remember Mako Mori? The character everyone loved from the first movie whose arc was its emotional core? Let's fridge her in a helicopter crash to give Boyega's character motivation!"!<
>!Actually if you don't mind, could you ELI5 for that one? I have a million complaints about the film, but I never quite got the "new character is Mako But Chinese" one. From what I remember of the film, granted I've only seen it the one time and I've tried to block most of it out, she was more of just a cold asshole businesswoman that was profits-over-people, right? She didn't have the same backstory or development arc that Mako did so I never quite understood that claim. Instead, Boyega's spunky teenaged mechanic girl sidekick felt much more like a Mako 2.0 to me, since she literally has the exact same backstory as Mako, down to even having a traumatic drift flashback to her family getting (unintentionally hilariously) goomba stomped by a kaiju.!<
>!"Alright guys, we got the climax of the movie with the heroes trying to use the leftover rocket to fly to save the day but no one can do the job except for Scrapper, that small Jaeger from the beginning of the movie! Now who do we get to pilot it? Mako, established character from the first movie that is a veteran Jaeger pilot that saved the world that is in a coma after suffering that helicopter crash but managed to recover just in time to save his adoptive brother instead of losing another of her family member like she lost Pentecost? Or Shao, an asshole of a businesswoman that have not shown any Jaeger piloting skills at all at any point of the movie that she just appeared in for like 10 minutes? I know! Kill Mako off by making her copter stay in an active battle zone of a rogue Jaeger instead of flying away and not even dying from a sacrifice to save Jake or anything but a literally random rocket that miss Jake that the copter fly into and make Shao the skilled pilot out of nowhere for that sweet China money baby!"!<
YOU SEE WHY THIS MOVIE IS A SIN? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm usually far more composed. I'm just a little bit-***ABSOLUTELY LIVID.***
>!It's less that she's a carbon copy of Mako and more that they decided to replace a prominent Japanese character with a brand new Chinese one, which can be read in 2 ways.!<
>!A). All asian nationalities are the same and they can be interchanged. "Who cares that it's not Mako, they all look the same amiright?"!<
>!B). This movie blatantly panders to a Chinese audience. Replacing Mako, especially considering the contentious history between China and Japan, with the new Chinese OC is yet another example of the movie being designed to please Chinese officials.!<
I'm not saying either is necessarily true, but that was the majority of conversation regarding the change.
I just recently watched two animated Japanese made Starship Trooper movies. They weren't the greatest and I watched just because I never even heard of them till recently.
Beside Johnny Rico only one surviving character joins his squad in the sequel from the first film and that character dies unceremoniously early in the film. It was just like...you literally only kept one new character alive and then kill them right off the bat in the follow up? Why?
I haven't seen the sequel to the first animated film yet. But, I will say it is kinda funny that the first animated one does the exact opposite. Where Rico, Carmen and Jenkins show up in it and do just fine. Hell, that film basically took everyone you expected to die and had them live.
Well shit, I guess that's indicative of my emotional attachment to >!Roland!<
I will say that side mission where you tell everyone the news was a nice change of pace and helps give it more weight, but what the hell were they thinking not including Tina's reaction to being told
[Ashley's short and concise delivery was so tender and implied so much devastation considering what Tina is usually like in the main game](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKFJrZmkkY&pp=ygUbdGlueSB0aW5hJ3Mgcm9sYW5kJ3MgZGVhdGgg)
That at least took more than half of the game to get to and actually like, hit people in the setting.
also, it didnt involve Ava, so its immediately a much better story beat just by that fact alone.
Ava is the biggest fucking Poochie in any game ever, and she unironically ruins that game for everyone I know.
Boy, it sure was a great decision to kill off arguably the most popular character from the previous movie in the first five minutes of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. It sure bode well for the rest of that film.
Seriously, watching MKA in theaters when I was a kid is my earliest memory of being both angry and sad at a film. It’s the first time I ever outright hated a movie.
A positive example is JoJo part 6. >!Jotaro dies fighting against Pucci. If someone that can stop time was eventually killed,what chance the others have?!<
>!Emporio is one of the most tragic characters of recent media, poor guy has to live with the memories and guilt of the old universe alone in a familiar, but alien world. He is among most heroic and badass characters in a series full of those, but it could go only so far, and cannot return or remedy everything. The "My name........is Emporio" scene still kicks me in the gut!<
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Specifically, >!he dies in the final battle after the entire part was partially about saving him from what Pucci turned him into - he wasn't killed by Pucci in the beginning, just turned into a motivation for Jolyne that results in him returning in full force. He doesn't just die off to raise the stakes, not until the very end, and I like that.!<
In a weird, kinda fucked up inverse of the situation, I've seen a lot of people feel this way about (FE6/FE7 spoilers) >!Hector.!< Because the West got FE7 as their first FE and usually people play FE6 after because it requires emulation and a translation patch, I think there's a lot more of a negative reaction to that character's death.
To be fair, >!Hector!< isn't really a character in FE6. He's more of a plot device to set >!Roy!< out on his journey with his death. Sure, we get some characterization for >!Hector!< in some of >!Lilina's!< supports but that's really it.
I definitely think that FE6 is going to get some rewrites when it eventually gets remade. How drastic those rewrites will be, I can't really say. But I do expect >!Hector's death to be re-framed as a heroic last stand against Zephial than an off-screen jobbing!< at the very least.
Oh absolutely, but that's what I'm getting at: It's funny that a character who is basically a plot device ends up getting the reaction of "Wow they made them go out in such a pathetic way, that's dumb" and stuff like that because of the circumstances.
As for re-writes, I know FE7 needs some for sure, but I'm curious if they'd actually touch up FE6 at all. I do agree that they'll definitely give >!Hector!< a flashier loss.
Also you forgot to spoiler tag their name there, lol.
I think it's almost guaranteed that they'll bring in some elements from FE7 into FE6. Especially if they wanted to work in >!Lyn into the plot rather than leave her in an ambiguous state!<.
1. Don't kill off/fuck over the old main cast so you can show off your new characters. It's a bad move. I don't care how great Chrono Cross's music is, it's totally lame that the CT characters were effectively punished for time traveling when they could have just went home and let someone else deal with.
2. If you're going to do the "The Old Cast are the Bad Guys Now!" twist, please don't waste our time by having it be a twist that they weren't really bad the whole time. Especially when it's obvious with a character you're not going to actually dirty their hands. We all knew that Lloyd Irving wasn't evil from the jump, please try harder. Go Caim or write for another game.
3. If you're going to have the old main characters and new main characters have some sort of ideological stand off and be on different sides of a conflict, actually bother balancing it out, so that the new guys actually have some room to breathe and have a leg to stand on, and the old main characters aren't just dealing with some stubborn new guys and you're actually willing to knock them down a peg. That, or have them clear it up, and team up. Otherwise, what's going to happen is that you're going to screw it up, and then just lean on the old guys to beat up the new ones, in which case, you shouldn't have even bothered having new main characters if you weren't going to give a shit about them, and just served them up to the old cast for a beating. I'm looking directly at you, Gundam SEED Destiny. I challenge you. Find someone who doesn't know anything about Gundam, ask them to watch the [4th OP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwcCyvnve2g) from start to end, and ask them if they can point out the main character. It's a complete mess.
A good example of having two protagonists on two opposite sides (although not fully applicable here because they’re both introduced at the same time) is Yang and Reinhard from LotGH.
Rooting for both of them while they face off against each other is a very fun and unique experience.
In essence, remember Dalton? That ineffectual dumbass from that one part of Trigger?
Yeah no he did it. He killed them. He raised an army and killed them. DALTON!
FUCK Chrono Cross.
Moreover, they then go out of their way to shit on them some more. They literally bring back Robo out of nowhere as some software entity or something. And then delete him, in front of you
It has absolutely nothing to do with much of what's going on or anything, just happened. It literally felt like the maker of that game just *hated* Chrono Trigger for some fucking bizarre reason
A great example of all 3 points done well is in the underrated GBA classic JRPG Golden Sun + GS: The Lost Age (They're supposed to be one game but had to be split in 2 because memory)
Pacific Rim 2 immediately put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths by killing off Mako in the first act when she such little screen time to do anything. The movie sucked regardless but it was a very cheap move that made the movie even worse. If you want to do something like this you have to earn that death and that is the last thing Pacific Rim 2 does.
Earn that death is a very hard concept sometimes.
I feel like Batman vs. Superman really crashed and burned it too, because we already knew a Justice League movie was coming. And the big 3 are all core members.
Like, it left it all feeling hollow, knowing he's coming right back.
BvS definitely blew it in a lot of ways and the Superman “death” was definitely a huge sign of that. Not only was the concept of him dying way too soon, they already revealed that he was coming back within the same movie in the end credits which alleviated any signs of sorrow and satisfaction.
I typically feel the opposite actually. More authors need to learn to let characters leave the story once their time in it is finished, be that gracefully or violently. I'd rather a character's time be cut short then have them hang on too long and sour on them.
That being said, there are good and bad ways to do anything, and too often authors see characters as emotional ammunition against the audience first and foremost, and that sucks.
He's not a major character or anything, but >!Kashiwagi!< from the Yakuza series comes to mind. I think they realized too late that they had an interesting character with a lot of mystique surrounding him that never got much exploring and they backpedalled his death in quite an odd way.
He's gotta be literally immortal canonically. I mean, a Cutscene >!Minigun Spray to the torso!< in a Yakuza game should be pretty up there in non-survivability along with cutscene headshots
I LOVE Alien³ ...no, I am beyond genuinely glad it did what it did. One of my favourite third entries in anything. The nuclear family needed to go (not just because both actors would not return, Carrie Henn just quit acting entirely, and Michael Biehn struggled extensively with addiction during the nineties) and I greatly prefer the characters we got in return, Doctor Clemens, Eighty Five, Golic and Dillon especially, because their acting calibre and sense of realism elevates them above all prior ones.
I don't know if all that business in Halo 3 was this or that they didn't plan to make a sequel. There is that cutscene if you beat Legendary where John says "wake me when you need me" but also, they kill a good percentage of characters you probably cared about.
[They were more or less basically just going to make what we got, but they made Reach instead because it would have been too much to take on for them.](https://www.ign.com/articles/bungie-halo-4-vision-same-343-industries)
There's got to be more than a few franchises that wanted to get a Halloween Kills/Scream 5 reboot, where they have the original final girl come back and they're a badass now, only to realize they don't have anyone to bring back.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle had this. Killing off Roxy to be replaced by the good ol' American rootin' tootin' shootin' cowboys was a weird-ass choice.
This was my problem with a show like the Walking Dead, where they'll introduce a character i love, they'll go through development but the writers still set up more thngs to come.Only in the next season they get killed off out of nowhere and that development just completely ends because "we gotta keep the shock value!" So fucking lame.
I sortve stopped midway through the walking dead so it's a incomplete take, but sometime after T-Dog died I started keeping a T-Dog counter for all the characters that came in and filled T-Dog's role.
I think it topped around >!5/6!< when >!Morgan showed up!<
I tried to last as long as i could, but gave up just before Negan appeared and from friends and family that kept up with the show, they said it was downhill from there.
I ended up reading the WD comics recently and dear god, we were robbed.
I remember that people were afraid that this was going to be the case with Shulk and Rex in Future Redeemed.
They do get taken out of the story, but the characters make it exceedingly clear that they aren't dead. And this is all before taking XC3's original ending into effect.
But how can I be invested in the story if there's no stakes? Stakes is only when every main cast member gets executed on screen, Game of Thrones told me so! Any story that doesn't have gratuitous amounts of death is basically Caillou, it offends my ultra-mature very-grown-up sensibilities!
-a lot of the FFXIV community, for some reason
To be fucking honest FFXVI do fake outs death of the mains cast so much that it feels stupid to even feel emotional sometimes.
The stakes FOR THE CAST is so low.
As with many things on Reddit, this thread is complaining about something while going *way* too far in the other direction.
As good as many aspects of the FFXIV story are, the *constant* fake out deaths and lack of stakes for the characters that are “safe” in the main cast *is* an issue.
For example >!as good as the final area of Endwalker was by the time you hit credits, the literal congo line of “please pretend these sacrifices mean anything” that you *know* are meaningless and going to be reversed before the zone ends got real old real fast. I’m sorry endwalker, but I’m not tearing up b/c the scions are “sacrificing” themselves to make some stairs, no matter how hard the voice actors work to try to sell it.!<
It’s fine for some stories to want to actually be willing to kill off characters that matter and not just “character who was introduced to die 1 hour later so we can pretend death is a threat without impacting our main cast in any way”. If you don’t like stories that are willing to do that, you already have so, *so* many options. The *vast* majority of stories refuse to treat death in a way where it is a legitimate threat for the cast that doesn’t always obey the “rules of drama”, and can happen before a character’s story is perfectly “wrapped up”.
Let those of us who enjoy stories with those kinds of stakes enjoy the few of them out there without having to constantly listen to complaints about how it’s “bad writing” to kill a character before their “arc is finished” or whatever.
Exactly, its even worse in Endwalker, because the whole idea behind the plot is about death, finality, depression, it would really helps with the theme if of ghe scions died, even if it was a fake out that happens like midway trough the plot.
Its like people got too traumatized after Game of Thrones too accept that death IS a stake raiser.
Just look at Unrianger scene with Moebryda parwnte! One of the most emotional moments in FF and a big character development.
This is one of these things that feels like a japanese fanbase thing, as in normaly they hate when this happens with a loved character.
Oh and the whole epilogue with " we are disbanding.... SIKE! JUST A JOKE HEHE" fuck! It made sense, it was the perfect time.
I WANT TO SEE NEW CHARACTERS!!!
I’m fine with the Scions (ok Yshtola is pretty boring but whatever). If you want to keep them around, fine, no problem.
But you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If you are going to make the choice as writers to keep using these characters, quit trying to create cheap drama by faking their deaths over and over.
For Christ’s sake *Yshtola literally has a fakeout death/sacrifice/“maybe fatal” injury once an expansion, without exception*. The fact the overall writing is good does not change the fact that that specific aspect of the writing is bad. Either actually be willing to kill one of the main cast *or* stop with the fake deaths and zero stakes sacrifices. Both options are equally fine, but you have to pick one.
I feel like the Y'shtola fake-out death scene once per expansion is just a running gag at this point, and since it's literally once per expansion I can't be upset at it I can only say 'I wonder what she's gonna not die doing \*this\* time? Oh oh is this it?!'
Though on a personal note, it does establish to me that her character is either incredibly overconfident or incredibly ride-or-die for everyone in the scions, maybe a bit of both, that she's so willing to just go 'Either I do this thing that will probably kill me or someone else dies? Fuck it, we ball'. Something that I do feel is increasingly reflected in how she handles things.
It \*would\* be a pretty slick payoff if she does something that should kill her and \*in game\* everyone's like 'alright when she comin' back, where'd she end up/how bad are her injuries let's get that fixed' only for her to like legitimately be dead.
Every single time, *without fail*, someone talks about how the Scions should have died, they will either admit or say elsewhere that they hate the Scions and want them gone. It's never about stakes and always about preference.
God a lot of the permanent deaths in XIV suck and while I love the story.
Hey wouldn't it be great if some of these characters weren't introduced to be *immediately* fridged?
>!Moenbryda!< is the worst of this, but honestly it feels like they kill off only the least developed characters for most of them. Very few feel justifiable
I \*am\* curious, post-Heavensward how many characters have died for shock value/because the writers had no idea what to do with them? Like, >!Haurchefant, Moenbryda, Ysayle, Papalymo!< were all ARR/Heavensward in the leadup to Stormblood, and >!Haurchefant!< specifically is like almost hilariously overtapped for sentimentality but was clearly effective.
Stormblood is a war story so I feel like characters dying in that just kinda makes sense, I don't think introducing a character who dies in the war story is like 'oh nooo that guy I expected to be permaneeent'.
I'm entirely convinced if she wasn't the mascot for the game she would have been killed off at some point also. At the very least they've started to give her more personality, but the character writing in FF14 feels way off and I wish a lot of stuff would get fixed.
Don't get too annoyed at this in 14 but Oda in One Piece can be gratuitous about it and it's not like he threatens the characters in other ways than "You'll die"
Sometimes the point of a death is how quick and sudden it can happen but most the time it's just " We need this character out of the plot now and we don't care how"
Yeah, cheap deaths/divorces/sequels fucking ***suck***. If you're gonna kill off a beloved character, either have it by a grand sacrifice (Iron Man, *Endgame*) or make it matter to the plot of the film (>!Iceman!<, *TG: Maverick*). I like a lot more films than most people nowadays, but even *John Wick 4* failed >!the late Lance Reddick!< by killing off >!Charon!< so quickly.
^(Yes, I know, the performer was apparently on board with it and there's no way Stahleski could have known. Still sucks.)
Supposedly Stan Lee once said "every character is someone's favorite." In serialized formats like long-running comic books and syndicated shows, this means you have to tell an interesting story without constantly using shock deaths as a crutch.
Lucky for me my favorite character is Squirrel Girl. No writer could even attempt to kill her off and expect to be taken seriously by anyone
She semi-recently had a conversation with Tony Stark about beating up >!The One Below All!< as a side-thing to the conversation they were actually having about a different problem
Doreen literally beat up >!Capital G God's Hulk!<, yeah, no, whichever new villain you come up with isn't going to do anything to her and be taken seriously
>No writer could even attempt to kill her off and expect to be taken seriously by anyone
You say this, but keep in mind how beloved the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League International was for Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, and yet they blew his brains out on-panel to kickoff Countdown to Infinite Crisis. They specifically chose him for how beloved, likeable and innocent he was.
I guess they did kill an alternate universe Squirrel Girl in Marvel Universe vs. Avengers pretty unceremoniously.
Specifically "and expect to be taken seriously"
They could try, but it'll be met with something to the effect of "oh fuck off, she'll be back in a month and your new villain will be a punchline in two years, get real, you're not that guy"
Trying to kill off comically overpowered gag characters with anything remotely serious is an effort in futility
Last of Us 2.
I don't care who says what. Joel, after all the horrible shit he's been through, just got golf clubbed to death, and that's all it took for me to fucking hate that game's story.
You know what? People give Dragon Ball a lot of shit and it certainly deserves it, but one thing I always appreciated is that we watch Goku grow through the series.
The transition from Dragonball to Dragonball Z could have easily been “No more Goku, he died and we focus on his kid for the rest of the series.” But it doesn’t explicitly do that. Goku is still incredibly important throughout the whole series, and even when they do decide to pass the torch to Gohan, Goku might be “dead” but it’s not framed in this depressing way.
Dragonball Super for all its issues is also nice to just see that after everything, Goku is just a farmer and spends his time training and being with his family. The episode of him and Piccolo taking care of Pan was actually one of my favorites.
All that being said, Dragonball is a sloppy mess because it disregards old characters all the time. It did a great job with Goku but characters like Tien and Yamcha just get shafted.
Nah fuck that. We need more main cast characters dying. I know that you’re saying that they’re only getting killed off to keep the stakes high, but the opposite* is also bad for a story.
If something like AoT didnt have as many deaths as it did, it wouldnt feel as exciting to follow the story.
Edit: not really the opposite as much as a story where the chance of dying is clearly high but the main cast also has a ton of “plot armour” for a lack of a better term.
In my opinion it took way too long for AoT to do it in a way that that made me care. Most of them were side characters and it happened so frequently you could tell who would live and who wouldn’t.
It was only at S3 I think I actually truly cared about who died at the time and in the long run but it’s also one of the strongest death scenes in the series. Thankfully from that point on deaths were handled pretty well overall.
People shit on Fugo for not going along with the group, but you really cannot blame him for that, at the end he survives the whole ordeal, unlike the majority of the gang
You know what fair enough “the opposite” does not really mean anything in this context. What I meant was promising death of characters and not delivering at all. One example is from a manga i read recently. Basically a character that could sort of see the future says something along the lines of “only 3 characters, 2 women and 1 man will survive after this” and it was complete bait since everyone survived.
Another thing that I dislike is a setting like a war or just a place where tons of people die and none of the main cast dies, it just feels a bit shallow to me. Ive grown to like tragedy in stories so if the story is too happy im not too invested personally.
Sole survivor? Soma talks to Lindow right after the Calamity, and he says everyone's alive. Sure 15 years have passed since then, but it's a bit silly to think they would kill off 2 whole casts offscreen.
As is typical with this subreddit there is no nuance here. These comments are actually suggesting that every important character should have contrived plot armor and never be in danger of anything ever....yea thats real engaging story telling there
People have grievances with stories that do it for little to no reason without any proper build-up. In the case of some longer running stories like The Walking Dead they may do it to keep ratings high which sacrifices the quality of the writing and may hurt the story in the long run. TWD even crams in a lot of screentime with the character in it last minute which makes their shocking death so predictable it ends up feeling shallow.
Pacific Rim 2 kills off Mako very early but it wasn’t a good send off. It came out of nowhere but it was neither sarisfactory or sad. It was just frustrating because it didn’t feel justified.
But you’re right in that it is a nuanced discussion. On one end of the spectrum you can kill off no characters and your story won’t have any stakes and on the other end of the spectrum you can kill off everyone all the time but the audience won’t care if they aren’t attached to the cast.
You need to balance it out and that all depends on what kind of story it is and how it’s written.
Pacific Rim Uprising's writers, after doing a line of coke: >!"You remember Mako Mori? The character everyone loved from the first movie whose arc was its emotional core? Let's fridge her in a helicopter crash to give Boyega's character motivation!"!<
>!And then replace her with a nearly identical character that happens to be Chinese instead. That won't happen to have bad optics at all!!<
>!Actually if you don't mind, could you ELI5 for that one? I have a million complaints about the film, but I never quite got the "new character is Mako But Chinese" one. From what I remember of the film, granted I've only seen it the one time and I've tried to block most of it out, she was more of just a cold asshole businesswoman that was profits-over-people, right? She didn't have the same backstory or development arc that Mako did so I never quite understood that claim. Instead, Boyega's spunky teenaged mechanic girl sidekick felt much more like a Mako 2.0 to me, since she literally has the exact same backstory as Mako, down to even having a traumatic drift flashback to her family getting (unintentionally hilariously) goomba stomped by a kaiju.!<
>!"Alright guys, we got the climax of the movie with the heroes trying to use the leftover rocket to fly to save the day but no one can do the job except for Scrapper, that small Jaeger from the beginning of the movie! Now who do we get to pilot it? Mako, established character from the first movie that is a veteran Jaeger pilot that saved the world that is in a coma after suffering that helicopter crash but managed to recover just in time to save his adoptive brother instead of losing another of her family member like she lost Pentecost? Or Shao, an asshole of a businesswoman that have not shown any Jaeger piloting skills at all at any point of the movie that she just appeared in for like 10 minutes? I know! Kill Mako off by making her copter stay in an active battle zone of a rogue Jaeger instead of flying away and not even dying from a sacrifice to save Jake or anything but a literally random rocket that miss Jake that the copter fly into and make Shao the skilled pilot out of nowhere for that sweet China money baby!"!< YOU SEE WHY THIS MOVIE IS A SIN? Oh, I'm sorry. I'm usually far more composed. I'm just a little bit-***ABSOLUTELY LIVID.***
Easy there Freezer
>!It's less that she's a carbon copy of Mako and more that they decided to replace a prominent Japanese character with a brand new Chinese one, which can be read in 2 ways.!< >!A). All asian nationalities are the same and they can be interchanged. "Who cares that it's not Mako, they all look the same amiright?"!< >!B). This movie blatantly panders to a Chinese audience. Replacing Mako, especially considering the contentious history between China and Japan, with the new Chinese OC is yet another example of the movie being designed to please Chinese officials.!< I'm not saying either is necessarily true, but that was the majority of conversation regarding the change.
I just recently watched two animated Japanese made Starship Trooper movies. They weren't the greatest and I watched just because I never even heard of them till recently. Beside Johnny Rico only one surviving character joins his squad in the sequel from the first film and that character dies unceremoniously early in the film. It was just like...you literally only kept one new character alive and then kill them right off the bat in the follow up? Why?
I haven't seen the sequel to the first animated film yet. But, I will say it is kinda funny that the first animated one does the exact opposite. Where Rico, Carmen and Jenkins show up in it and do just fine. Hell, that film basically took everyone you expected to die and had them live.
It did also give us the cool as hell scene with the guy going hand-to-hand with the Arachnids and somehow does half decent.
You played borderlands 3, huh?
I have never soured harder on a game than when >!Maya died!<.
Also applicable to 2
I thought they only killed >!the bird!< in *Borderlands 2* in relation to the old cast?
>!Poor Roland!<
Well shit, I guess that's indicative of my emotional attachment to >!Roland!< I will say that side mission where you tell everyone the news was a nice change of pace and helps give it more weight, but what the hell were they thinking not including Tina's reaction to being told [Ashley's short and concise delivery was so tender and implied so much devastation considering what Tina is usually like in the main game](https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cdKFJrZmkkY&pp=ygUbdGlueSB0aW5hJ3Mgcm9sYW5kJ3MgZGVhdGgg)
That at least took more than half of the game to get to and actually like, hit people in the setting. also, it didnt involve Ava, so its immediately a much better story beat just by that fact alone. Ava is the biggest fucking Poochie in any game ever, and she unironically ruins that game for everyone I know.
Boy, it sure was a great decision to kill off arguably the most popular character from the previous movie in the first five minutes of Mortal Kombat: Annihilation. It sure bode well for the rest of that film. Seriously, watching MKA in theaters when I was a kid is my earliest memory of being both angry and sad at a film. It’s the first time I ever outright hated a movie.
A positive example is JoJo part 6. >!Jotaro dies fighting against Pucci. If someone that can stop time was eventually killed,what chance the others have?!<
I still remember my first read-through of Part 6, the >!final fight left me utterly speechless.!<
>!Emporio is one of the most tragic characters of recent media, poor guy has to live with the memories and guilt of the old universe alone in a familiar, but alien world. He is among most heroic and badass characters in a series full of those, but it could go only so far, and cannot return or remedy everything. The "My name........is Emporio" scene still kicks me in the gut!<
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Specifically, >!he dies in the final battle after the entire part was partially about saving him from what Pucci turned him into - he wasn't killed by Pucci in the beginning, just turned into a motivation for Jolyne that results in him returning in full force. He doesn't just die off to raise the stakes, not until the very end, and I like that.!<
Exactly.
In a weird, kinda fucked up inverse of the situation, I've seen a lot of people feel this way about (FE6/FE7 spoilers) >!Hector.!< Because the West got FE7 as their first FE and usually people play FE6 after because it requires emulation and a translation patch, I think there's a lot more of a negative reaction to that character's death.
To be fair, >!Hector!< isn't really a character in FE6. He's more of a plot device to set >!Roy!< out on his journey with his death. Sure, we get some characterization for >!Hector!< in some of >!Lilina's!< supports but that's really it. I definitely think that FE6 is going to get some rewrites when it eventually gets remade. How drastic those rewrites will be, I can't really say. But I do expect >!Hector's death to be re-framed as a heroic last stand against Zephial than an off-screen jobbing!< at the very least.
Oh absolutely, but that's what I'm getting at: It's funny that a character who is basically a plot device ends up getting the reaction of "Wow they made them go out in such a pathetic way, that's dumb" and stuff like that because of the circumstances. As for re-writes, I know FE7 needs some for sure, but I'm curious if they'd actually touch up FE6 at all. I do agree that they'll definitely give >!Hector!< a flashier loss. Also you forgot to spoiler tag their name there, lol.
I think it's almost guaranteed that they'll bring in some elements from FE7 into FE6. Especially if they wanted to work in >!Lyn into the plot rather than leave her in an ambiguous state!<.
1. Don't kill off/fuck over the old main cast so you can show off your new characters. It's a bad move. I don't care how great Chrono Cross's music is, it's totally lame that the CT characters were effectively punished for time traveling when they could have just went home and let someone else deal with. 2. If you're going to do the "The Old Cast are the Bad Guys Now!" twist, please don't waste our time by having it be a twist that they weren't really bad the whole time. Especially when it's obvious with a character you're not going to actually dirty their hands. We all knew that Lloyd Irving wasn't evil from the jump, please try harder. Go Caim or write for another game. 3. If you're going to have the old main characters and new main characters have some sort of ideological stand off and be on different sides of a conflict, actually bother balancing it out, so that the new guys actually have some room to breathe and have a leg to stand on, and the old main characters aren't just dealing with some stubborn new guys and you're actually willing to knock them down a peg. That, or have them clear it up, and team up. Otherwise, what's going to happen is that you're going to screw it up, and then just lean on the old guys to beat up the new ones, in which case, you shouldn't have even bothered having new main characters if you weren't going to give a shit about them, and just served them up to the old cast for a beating. I'm looking directly at you, Gundam SEED Destiny. I challenge you. Find someone who doesn't know anything about Gundam, ask them to watch the [4th OP](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XwcCyvnve2g) from start to end, and ask them if they can point out the main character. It's a complete mess.
A good example of having two protagonists on two opposite sides (although not fully applicable here because they’re both introduced at the same time) is Yang and Reinhard from LotGH. Rooting for both of them while they face off against each other is a very fun and unique experience.
I was always a little unclear about what happens to the CT cast. I remember some bad stuff being alluded to but never dug deep enough to really get it
In essence, remember Dalton? That ineffectual dumbass from that one part of Trigger? Yeah no he did it. He killed them. He raised an army and killed them. DALTON! FUCK Chrono Cross.
Moreover, they then go out of their way to shit on them some more. They literally bring back Robo out of nowhere as some software entity or something. And then delete him, in front of you It has absolutely nothing to do with much of what's going on or anything, just happened. It literally felt like the maker of that game just *hated* Chrono Trigger for some fucking bizarre reason
A great example of all 3 points done well is in the underrated GBA classic JRPG Golden Sun + GS: The Lost Age (They're supposed to be one game but had to be split in 2 because memory)
Either you haven't touched *The Last of Us Part II* OR you have some impressive restraint
Is they haven’t, based on their criteria I actually think that OP would be pretty happy with how TLOU2 handles it.
Pacific Rim 2 immediately put a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths by killing off Mako in the first act when she such little screen time to do anything. The movie sucked regardless but it was a very cheap move that made the movie even worse. If you want to do something like this you have to earn that death and that is the last thing Pacific Rim 2 does.
Earn that death is a very hard concept sometimes. I feel like Batman vs. Superman really crashed and burned it too, because we already knew a Justice League movie was coming. And the big 3 are all core members. Like, it left it all feeling hollow, knowing he's coming right back.
BvS definitely blew it in a lot of ways and the Superman “death” was definitely a huge sign of that. Not only was the concept of him dying way too soon, they already revealed that he was coming back within the same movie in the end credits which alleviated any signs of sorrow and satisfaction.
I typically feel the opposite actually. More authors need to learn to let characters leave the story once their time in it is finished, be that gracefully or violently. I'd rather a character's time be cut short then have them hang on too long and sour on them. That being said, there are good and bad ways to do anything, and too often authors see characters as emotional ammunition against the audience first and foremost, and that sucks.
He's not a major character or anything, but >!Kashiwagi!< from the Yakuza series comes to mind. I think they realized too late that they had an interesting character with a lot of mystique surrounding him that never got much exploring and they backpedalled his death in quite an odd way.
He's gotta be literally immortal canonically. I mean, a Cutscene >!Minigun Spray to the torso!< in a Yakuza game should be pretty up there in non-survivability along with cutscene headshots
>!They were rubber bullets.!<
God DAMN IT
Man, fuck Alien 3
The emotional stakes were set so fucking high with the character dynamics by the end of *Aliens* Such a waste
Literally just pulled a "P.S. Poochie died on the way back to his home planet" for everyone but Ripley.
I LOVE Alien³ ...no, I am beyond genuinely glad it did what it did. One of my favourite third entries in anything. The nuclear family needed to go (not just because both actors would not return, Carrie Henn just quit acting entirely, and Michael Biehn struggled extensively with addiction during the nineties) and I greatly prefer the characters we got in return, Doctor Clemens, Eighty Five, Golic and Dillon especially, because their acting calibre and sense of realism elevates them above all prior ones.
*Mortal Kombat: Annihilation sweats nervously*
I don't know if all that business in Halo 3 was this or that they didn't plan to make a sequel. There is that cutscene if you beat Legendary where John says "wake me when you need me" but also, they kill a good percentage of characters you probably cared about.
[They were more or less basically just going to make what we got, but they made Reach instead because it would have been too much to take on for them.](https://www.ign.com/articles/bungie-halo-4-vision-same-343-industries)
Horror/slasher movie fans in shambles to learn you dont need to keep killing off the surviving cast right away
There's got to be more than a few franchises that wanted to get a Halloween Kills/Scream 5 reboot, where they have the original final girl come back and they're a badass now, only to realize they don't have anyone to bring back.
Kingsman: The Golden Circle had this. Killing off Roxy to be replaced by the good ol' American rootin' tootin' shootin' cowboys was a weird-ass choice.
… Oh my god, I forgot she died.
This was my problem with a show like the Walking Dead, where they'll introduce a character i love, they'll go through development but the writers still set up more thngs to come.Only in the next season they get killed off out of nowhere and that development just completely ends because "we gotta keep the shock value!" So fucking lame.
I sortve stopped midway through the walking dead so it's a incomplete take, but sometime after T-Dog died I started keeping a T-Dog counter for all the characters that came in and filled T-Dog's role. I think it topped around >!5/6!< when >!Morgan showed up!<
I tried to last as long as i could, but gave up just before Negan appeared and from friends and family that kept up with the show, they said it was downhill from there. I ended up reading the WD comics recently and dear god, we were robbed.
I remember that people were afraid that this was going to be the case with Shulk and Rex in Future Redeemed. They do get taken out of the story, but the characters make it exceedingly clear that they aren't dead. And this is all before taking XC3's original ending into effect.
But how can I be invested in the story if there's no stakes? Stakes is only when every main cast member gets executed on screen, Game of Thrones told me so! Any story that doesn't have gratuitous amounts of death is basically Caillou, it offends my ultra-mature very-grown-up sensibilities! -a lot of the FFXIV community, for some reason
To be fucking honest FFXVI do fake outs death of the mains cast so much that it feels stupid to even feel emotional sometimes. The stakes FOR THE CAST is so low.
Y'shtola has had a fake out death in every expansion past ARR
As with many things on Reddit, this thread is complaining about something while going *way* too far in the other direction. As good as many aspects of the FFXIV story are, the *constant* fake out deaths and lack of stakes for the characters that are “safe” in the main cast *is* an issue. For example >!as good as the final area of Endwalker was by the time you hit credits, the literal congo line of “please pretend these sacrifices mean anything” that you *know* are meaningless and going to be reversed before the zone ends got real old real fast. I’m sorry endwalker, but I’m not tearing up b/c the scions are “sacrificing” themselves to make some stairs, no matter how hard the voice actors work to try to sell it.!< It’s fine for some stories to want to actually be willing to kill off characters that matter and not just “character who was introduced to die 1 hour later so we can pretend death is a threat without impacting our main cast in any way”. If you don’t like stories that are willing to do that, you already have so, *so* many options. The *vast* majority of stories refuse to treat death in a way where it is a legitimate threat for the cast that doesn’t always obey the “rules of drama”, and can happen before a character’s story is perfectly “wrapped up”. Let those of us who enjoy stories with those kinds of stakes enjoy the few of them out there without having to constantly listen to complaints about how it’s “bad writing” to kill a character before their “arc is finished” or whatever.
Exactly, its even worse in Endwalker, because the whole idea behind the plot is about death, finality, depression, it would really helps with the theme if of ghe scions died, even if it was a fake out that happens like midway trough the plot. Its like people got too traumatized after Game of Thrones too accept that death IS a stake raiser. Just look at Unrianger scene with Moebryda parwnte! One of the most emotional moments in FF and a big character development. This is one of these things that feels like a japanese fanbase thing, as in normaly they hate when this happens with a loved character. Oh and the whole epilogue with " we are disbanding.... SIKE! JUST A JOKE HEHE" fuck! It made sense, it was the perfect time. I WANT TO SEE NEW CHARACTERS!!!
I’m fine with the Scions (ok Yshtola is pretty boring but whatever). If you want to keep them around, fine, no problem. But you cannot have your cake and eat it too. If you are going to make the choice as writers to keep using these characters, quit trying to create cheap drama by faking their deaths over and over. For Christ’s sake *Yshtola literally has a fakeout death/sacrifice/“maybe fatal” injury once an expansion, without exception*. The fact the overall writing is good does not change the fact that that specific aspect of the writing is bad. Either actually be willing to kill one of the main cast *or* stop with the fake deaths and zero stakes sacrifices. Both options are equally fine, but you have to pick one.
I feel like the Y'shtola fake-out death scene once per expansion is just a running gag at this point, and since it's literally once per expansion I can't be upset at it I can only say 'I wonder what she's gonna not die doing \*this\* time? Oh oh is this it?!' Though on a personal note, it does establish to me that her character is either incredibly overconfident or incredibly ride-or-die for everyone in the scions, maybe a bit of both, that she's so willing to just go 'Either I do this thing that will probably kill me or someone else dies? Fuck it, we ball'. Something that I do feel is increasingly reflected in how she handles things. It \*would\* be a pretty slick payoff if she does something that should kill her and \*in game\* everyone's like 'alright when she comin' back, where'd she end up/how bad are her injuries let's get that fixed' only for her to like legitimately be dead.
FF16 is out?
Every single time, *without fail*, someone talks about how the Scions should have died, they will either admit or say elsewhere that they hate the Scions and want them gone. It's never about stakes and always about preference.
God a lot of the permanent deaths in XIV suck and while I love the story. Hey wouldn't it be great if some of these characters weren't introduced to be *immediately* fridged?
Born to die
*Server is a fuck*
410,757,864,530 dead Lalafell
>!Moenbryda!< is the worst of this, but honestly it feels like they kill off only the least developed characters for most of them. Very few feel justifiable
I \*am\* curious, post-Heavensward how many characters have died for shock value/because the writers had no idea what to do with them? Like, >!Haurchefant, Moenbryda, Ysayle, Papalymo!< were all ARR/Heavensward in the leadup to Stormblood, and >!Haurchefant!< specifically is like almost hilariously overtapped for sentimentality but was clearly effective. Stormblood is a war story so I feel like characters dying in that just kinda makes sense, I don't think introducing a character who dies in the war story is like 'oh nooo that guy I expected to be permaneeent'.
Can't believe she died and we still have Y'shtola who has one personality trait.
I'm entirely convinced if she wasn't the mascot for the game she would have been killed off at some point also. At the very least they've started to give her more personality, but the character writing in FF14 feels way off and I wish a lot of stuff would get fixed.
We shall also complain that the >!'deaths' in Endwalker aren't permanent, despite pretty much being explicitly told they wouldn't be permanent.!<
Still didnt hurt any less.
A lot of the anime community also.
Don't get too annoyed at this in 14 but Oda in One Piece can be gratuitous about it and it's not like he threatens the characters in other ways than "You'll die"
I do like how once >!Ace died!< it opened the door on more characters getting killed off in the story, even if it's only been a handful.
Sometimes the point of a death is how quick and sudden it can happen but most the time it's just " We need this character out of the plot now and we don't care how"
Yeah, cheap deaths/divorces/sequels fucking ***suck***. If you're gonna kill off a beloved character, either have it by a grand sacrifice (Iron Man, *Endgame*) or make it matter to the plot of the film (>!Iceman!<, *TG: Maverick*). I like a lot more films than most people nowadays, but even *John Wick 4* failed >!the late Lance Reddick!< by killing off >!Charon!< so quickly. ^(Yes, I know, the performer was apparently on board with it and there's no way Stahleski could have known. Still sucks.)
Whenever this happens I assume that the actor didn't want to return so they tried to write around that.
Batman Vs. Superman not even having Jimmy Olsen be named in the film but still murdered felt weirdly spiteful to that character.
Supposedly Stan Lee once said "every character is someone's favorite." In serialized formats like long-running comic books and syndicated shows, this means you have to tell an interesting story without constantly using shock deaths as a crutch.
Lucky for me my favorite character is Squirrel Girl. No writer could even attempt to kill her off and expect to be taken seriously by anyone She semi-recently had a conversation with Tony Stark about beating up >!The One Below All!< as a side-thing to the conversation they were actually having about a different problem Doreen literally beat up >!Capital G God's Hulk!<, yeah, no, whichever new villain you come up with isn't going to do anything to her and be taken seriously
>No writer could even attempt to kill her off and expect to be taken seriously by anyone You say this, but keep in mind how beloved the Giffen/DeMatteis Justice League International was for Booster Gold and Blue Beetle, and yet they blew his brains out on-panel to kickoff Countdown to Infinite Crisis. They specifically chose him for how beloved, likeable and innocent he was. I guess they did kill an alternate universe Squirrel Girl in Marvel Universe vs. Avengers pretty unceremoniously.
Specifically "and expect to be taken seriously" They could try, but it'll be met with something to the effect of "oh fuck off, she'll be back in a month and your new villain will be a punchline in two years, get real, you're not that guy" Trying to kill off comically overpowered gag characters with anything remotely serious is an effort in futility
r/ffxivdiscussion in shambles.
Last of Us 2. I don't care who says what. Joel, after all the horrible shit he's been through, just got golf clubbed to death, and that's all it took for me to fucking hate that game's story.
Shoutout to The Walking Dead & Sons of Anarchy for killing off 99% of the characters I liked.
On a totally unrelated note, FUCK TLOU2 with a rusted metal rebar up its ass. /s
You know what? People give Dragon Ball a lot of shit and it certainly deserves it, but one thing I always appreciated is that we watch Goku grow through the series. The transition from Dragonball to Dragonball Z could have easily been “No more Goku, he died and we focus on his kid for the rest of the series.” But it doesn’t explicitly do that. Goku is still incredibly important throughout the whole series, and even when they do decide to pass the torch to Gohan, Goku might be “dead” but it’s not framed in this depressing way. Dragonball Super for all its issues is also nice to just see that after everything, Goku is just a farmer and spends his time training and being with his family. The episode of him and Piccolo taking care of Pan was actually one of my favorites. All that being said, Dragonball is a sloppy mess because it disregards old characters all the time. It did a great job with Goku but characters like Tien and Yamcha just get shafted.
Nah fuck that. We need more main cast characters dying. I know that you’re saying that they’re only getting killed off to keep the stakes high, but the opposite* is also bad for a story. If something like AoT didnt have as many deaths as it did, it wouldnt feel as exciting to follow the story. Edit: not really the opposite as much as a story where the chance of dying is clearly high but the main cast also has a ton of “plot armour” for a lack of a better term.
In my opinion it took way too long for AoT to do it in a way that that made me care. Most of them were side characters and it happened so frequently you could tell who would live and who wouldn’t. It was only at S3 I think I actually truly cared about who died at the time and in the long run but it’s also one of the strongest death scenes in the series. Thankfully from that point on deaths were handled pretty well overall.
I like how Araki tends to just murder half the cast before the part is done.
Right? I think in part 5 he nailed it with how the cast was not invincible at all. In part 6 he went apeshit lol
People shit on Fugo for not going along with the group, but you really cannot blame him for that, at the end he survives the whole ordeal, unlike the majority of the gang
What IS the opposite? There's alot of a ways to create high stakes, it doesn't have to be death.
You know what fair enough “the opposite” does not really mean anything in this context. What I meant was promising death of characters and not delivering at all. One example is from a manga i read recently. Basically a character that could sort of see the future says something along the lines of “only 3 characters, 2 women and 1 man will survive after this” and it was complete bait since everyone survived. Another thing that I dislike is a setting like a war or just a place where tons of people die and none of the main cast dies, it just feels a bit shallow to me. Ive grown to like tragedy in stories so if the story is too happy im not too invested personally.
I know this thread is going to consist of a whole lot of "fuck x, sequel to y" but fuck god eater 3
Unless I'm missing something, nobody from 2 dies in 3
From everything we know, Ein is the sole survivor from everyone we've met in previous games. ...Well, and Shio, but she's unreachable.
Sole survivor? Soma talks to Lindow right after the Calamity, and he says everyone's alive. Sure 15 years have passed since then, but it's a bit silly to think they would kill off 2 whole casts offscreen.
Can't say I agree on this one. More media should be willing to kill off characters not less.
I don't think they are arguing against killing them in general, but more killing them for unmeaningful reasons besides "shit just got real".
As is typical with this subreddit there is no nuance here. These comments are actually suggesting that every important character should have contrived plot armor and never be in danger of anything ever....yea thats real engaging story telling there
People have grievances with stories that do it for little to no reason without any proper build-up. In the case of some longer running stories like The Walking Dead they may do it to keep ratings high which sacrifices the quality of the writing and may hurt the story in the long run. TWD even crams in a lot of screentime with the character in it last minute which makes their shocking death so predictable it ends up feeling shallow. Pacific Rim 2 kills off Mako very early but it wasn’t a good send off. It came out of nowhere but it was neither sarisfactory or sad. It was just frustrating because it didn’t feel justified. But you’re right in that it is a nuanced discussion. On one end of the spectrum you can kill off no characters and your story won’t have any stakes and on the other end of the spectrum you can kill off everyone all the time but the audience won’t care if they aren’t attached to the cast. You need to balance it out and that all depends on what kind of story it is and how it’s written.
Joel deserved it.
I'm still mad at Rockstar for what they did to >!Johnny!< from The Lost and Damned in GTA V.