Gettin' angry about character deaths & grief in visual media

[juushika]

TW for dead dad talk, mental health


I've noticed that I've become way more sensitive to character deaths, particularly in visual media, which may be the most predictable result of grief—seeing grief echoed everywhere, until even media becomes a reminder rather than an escape.

I find this funny because I usually struggle to invest in character death. It feels like an absence rather than an event—I don't miss things when they're gone, including fictional characters, and deaths have weight only when processed by remaining characters. Because I myself don't process, don't miss, don't feel bereft of anything except narrative potential.

And some of that lingers. My sad emotions are easily accessed now because that's my new, ever-enjoyable default, but under the tearjerker-sad I mostly see character death through a narrative lens, and it's rarely flattering. The three major narrative categories of character death: 1) We decided to kill off this character, probably because the actor is leaving, and the entire foreshadowing of/build up to that event will occur in the episode where they die. 2) It's midway through an arc/season/series, and this secondary character is likable but not core to the story's premise, and so their death can ramp up tension without creating narrative difficulties. 3) It's the end of the arc/season/series, so we can kill off this major character for drama without needing to follow through on the effect it would have on the story's core premise.

When my sad feels stick around past that immediate tearjerk, it's probably because some attempt is being made to depict the remaining characters's grieving process, and my sad feels are almost always angry-sad because so many grief narratives are about forcing the protagonist to grieve correctly. They're burying their grief under anger/alcohol! They need to make peace and let go in order to continue the ongoing plot! They need to be bullied into an appropriate emotional response, then into a ceremonial farewell, after which they'll naturally shift their focus to other narrative elements. Inappropriate grief is unhealthy for the protagonist and harmful to the supporting cast.

Is this because most of the shows I watch are SF/F and have episodic or action elements, so there's probably a Grief Episode and after that only occasional callbacks? Are depictions of the grieving process in non-speculative/drama shows more diverse, or just the same but belabored? And does it matter, when everything in fiction—from the plot justifications for needing to move on now to the antihero-esque protagonists with legitimately asocial/damaging forms of grief—is a construct?

I hate feelings these feelings, so I begrudge that all tearjerks suddenly effect me, but the archetype of Correct and Healthy Grief (that should be forced on you for everyone's benefit) is proactively harmful. I am just now, 10 months in, moving from frantic and effective repression and towards unprompted crying jags and flashbacks. It is in every moment miserable, but it's worse for seeing my family process at more rapid rates and in more conventional forms, and worse still for second-guessing myself. A lot of my trauma comes from other people's active refusal to recognize my "inappropriate" or "antisocial" feelings, which took baby's burgeoning depressive disorder and turned it into emotional abuse via gaslighting, so I'm hypersensitive to this and excessively mad about it. But I'm still right: these archetypes for grief, the idea that someone can force breakthroughs in another person's suffering, make it difficult to process grief organically, healthfully, individually.

Anyway this has been a vagueblog about Wynonna Earp s3, but fuckin' every show does it and I will see it everywhere forever from now on.

Comments

[starshipfox]

Grief is a really hard thing to depict on TV -- it's slow, messy, endless, has no satisfactory conclusion. I think SF/F shows and American TV shows are both particularly guilty of trying to make grief solvable in one 40-minute episode, and of depicting one particular emotional response as "correct." It's certainly bad storytelling, but it's also misleading and invalidating.

[juushika]

I've been thinking about alternative archetypes for depicting grief in an episodic format, and both that come to mind are Buffy, specifically: a) Put a lot of the grief offscreen/over a season break, like lead the lead-up to season 5, because it can be extended and messy there, and addressing it on-screen later shows that the process can be long/out of the Correct Order I bitched about above. b) Delay the confrontation/"breakthrough" episode in a way that makes it clear that everything up to that has been grief, and don't allow the episode to resolve the grief so much as acknowledge and embody it, like in "Once More, with Feeling."

Buffy absolutely had poorly-handled character deaths of various forms and also used a) less successfully in the breaks between seasons 2 and 3—this may surprise you, but the show wasn't perfect—but I find that my thoughts keep coming back to it as I reference fictional frameworks for my own grief.

Anyway, thank you for the commiseration/validation. <3

[starshipfox]

That's true: there are complaints about S6 of Buffy, but I have always found it to be an excellent trauma framework, and an excellent way of looking at emotion and grief. I think S5 of Buffy also does some good work with the death of Buffy's mom. S02-03 is much less successful, and it's interesting to think about those in context of one another. Another show I remember dealing with grief well, at least some of the time, was Six Feet Under -- but I suppose it would want to, given the premise.