Imaginary Worlds - Imaginary Deaths

Episode Date: July 12, 2018

Have you ever mourned the loss of a fictional character? It can be tough to get over, and difficult to convince people not caught up in that fictional world that your sense of mourning is valid. I talk with Tim Burke, Dawn Fancher, Maria Clara Santarosa, Megan Knox, Stephanie Billman, Leigh Foster and Daniel Skorka about how they've grieved the loss of their favorite characters from video games, novels, TV shows and movies. Plus Professor Jennifer Barnes explains the psychology behind why we feel a deep connection to make believe people. To hear more of Leigh Foster discussing the death of Tara and other LGBT characters on her podcast: https://lezhangoutpod.com/blog/2018/4/2/episode-15-bury-your-gaysTo watch Jennifer Barnes give a TEDx Talk on parasocial relationships: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=22yoaiLYb7MLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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I'm Eric Malinsky. I recently got an email from a listener named Elizabeth Simineau, and she was wondering if I would ever consider doing an episode on how we grieve the loss of fictional characters. She was actually inspired by a Facebook discussion that she was involved in where people were talking about which fictional characters they were still grieving over. And she couldn't believe how passionate they were about their opinions. And I thought this was really interesting because it really tied into something that I had been thinking about for months, since I saw the movie Avengers Infinity War. And by the way, I'm about to spoil the ending of Avengers Infinity War. Now, if you haven't seen the movie, but don't care about spoilers,

the villain, Thanos, is trying to acquire these Infinity Stones, which will give him godlike powers. And his goal is to erase half the living beings in the universe because they're a drain on the total supply of natural resources. He's basically a very cold and calculating environmentalist. Now, shockingly, the heroes fail to stop him. Thanos acquires these godlike powers. He snaps his fingers, and half of the characters crumble into dust.

Now, a lot of people were bothered by the ending because they felt like it was a cheap trick. I mean, we saw characters like Black Panther, Spider-Man, and most of the Guardians of the Galaxy die. But we know, first of all, this is part one of a two-part story. And secondly, those actors are all signed up for sequels. If anything, we're in a holding pattern until the next movie when we learn how the surviving Avengers will bring everybody back, and the fans have been scrutinizing which actors' contracts will be up in 2019 and trying to predict who will die in the next movie. For real, no backsies. But that really didn't change the way I felt about all those deaths in Infinity War, because they were real for the characters. And there's one scene that I just have not been able to get out of my head.

I've thought about it at least once a day since I saw the movie. It's the scene where Peter Parker dies in Tony Stark's arms. Now, Peter, in the Avengers movies, is just a 15-year-old kid who wants to impress his hero and mentor, Mr. Stark. And for Tony, Peter is not just a mentee. He's kind of like the son that Tony never had. And so I found Peter's death heartbreaking. I don't feel so good. You're all right. I don't know. I don't know what's happening. I don't want to go. I don't want to go, sir, please. Please, I don't want to go. I don't want to go. Sir, please. I don't want to go. I don't want to go.

In the world of it, it's desperately sad. That is Daniel Skorka, who is a listener to this podcast. Tony's broken up about this kid that he realized is going to be better than him, you know. And, you know, Aunt May is now back in New York, you know, perhaps maybe she's disappeared as well. But she might be now looking for her Peter and he's not coming home. Daniel was one of many listeners that I got in touch with for this episode because I put a posting on social media to see if anyone else had difficulty getting over the loss of a fictional character. And hundreds of people responded. I mean, it got to the point where they were consoling each other

over characters that I hate to admit I'd never even heard of from books I'd never read. But there were a half dozen characters that cropped up over and over again. And so I wanted to hear those stories, what it's like to grieve the loss of somebody who never existed. Now, as you remember, I gave a spoiler alert earlier about Infinity War, and somebody joked that I should just call this episode 30 Years of Spoilers, because if I ever mention a show or a book or a movie, I'm going to spoil the ending. Although some of these deaths are pretty famous and well-known in pop culture,

and because this is fantasy and sci-fi, many of these characters were later brought back to life. Although one of the most common experiences people had was with a game that I hadn't played, Final Fantasy VII. So I watched some of the gameplay online, and it had this blocky 1990s computer graphic look with text appearing on screen instead of spoken dialogue. But it's still beautiful to watch, and it really captures the feeling of hand-drawn anime. Now, when Tim Burke was a kid and first learned about the game, it was still pretty new.

Yeah, it was sixth grade. A friend of mine who I sat next to in school about the game, it was still pretty new. Yeah, it was sixth grade. A friend of mine who I sat next to in school had the game. And Tim was really intrigued when that kid lent him the strategy guide for the game. So he started playing. And he quickly felt a very strong attachment to a character called Ares. They build her up as this very loving, caring person, when you first meet her, you bump into her on the street. She is handing out flowers to people that she picks from a church. You know, I could see maybe my grandmother in her, because my grandmother, very loving individual.

In fact, she's kneeling in prayer when all of a sudden, the villain leaps down and plunges his sword through her back. The weird thing was, I knew this moment was coming. I had seen it in the strategy guide. My friend who had beaten the game had told me about it and all. So I was well prepared for it but this moment comes and you're just sitting there and you're like completely I guess in shock that this happens and it is to me at 11 years old was probably one of the most emotional things that i had i had witnessed yeah it's funny i mean with a character that well developed typically if they

are to die it's always sort of the noble death, the only way that we'll save all these people is if one of us stays in the ship or you go without me. I feel like those are sad, but we're willing to accept them. But when she's just killed so horribly and cruelly like that, it sounds like that's part of what was just so hard to wrap your head around. absolutely i mean her her death ultimately serves a major purpose because you find out she was praying to help save the planet from the meteor that was coming but at the moment you don't realize there's really any heroic nature to it and i go every year or so every year every other year i go back and I play through the game again because it is my favorite game of all time. I mean, when I get to that part, it's never easy because, again, a fantastic character and you're just taken from you.

Now, most people I talked with said that they experienced their first fictional death around the same age, when they were on the verge of moving from childhood to adolescence. That's when Don Fancher saw The NeverEnding Story. I'm pretty sure I missed it in theaters and then would have watched it on VHS at home. And if you're not familiar with that movie, it's basically a story within a story. It's about a boy in the real world who is reading about a boy in a fantasy world. And the boy in the real world is mourning the loss of his mother. And there are echoes of his emotional turmoil in the journey of the boy that he's reading about in the fairy tale. Like at one point, the boy in the fantasy story who's called Atreyu

is leading his horse, Atrax, through the Swamp of Sadness. The deal with the swamp is that if you let the sadness overtake you, then the swamp will swallow you up. I understand. The boy is able to control his emotions, but the horse can't. And Atreyu goes from, like, reassuring the horse to, like, being more and more desperate to get his horse to come out and is like you have to move or you die he is full of sadness and the horse just starts sinking further and further down and so like the movie shows a real horse sinking in muddy water they don't show the horse go all the way under, but like, you know,

you see it up to like the horses, like the horse is like craning its neck. And then it cuts to like Atreyu sitting there staring at the spot in the swamp where the horse went down. And it seems like an unfair death because the swamp makes you sad, but then if the sadness overtakes you, you die. And it seems like it's, it seems like a bit of a trap and it seems very unfair. But for me, it was one of the first movies that I remember seeing treating death that seriously. And that was important to her as a kid because... I had a sister with a lot of disabilities who we didn't know how long she would live. And so like the idea that she could die early early and she did die in her late 20s, but she did make it through childhood.

Like that was like always with me. And that's something that she keeps in mind now as a parent whenever she sees her daughter dealing with the loss of a fictional character. I take that hurt seriously. So I just try to support her through it. Like, just let her be sad. It's important for kids to, you know, because I felt like some of my big feelings and my grief when I was a kid wasn't taken seriously.

I was always very careful to make sure I was always taking her grief and feelings seriously. But parents are not immune from grief when they watch movies with their kids. Like when Dawn and her daughter watch the Pixar movie Inside Out, which tells the story of the emotions that are living inside the subconscious mind of an 11-year-old girl. And at one point, the girl's imaginary friend from childhood, Bing Bong, has a kind of death when he literally fades from her memory. Take her to the moon for me, okay? I'll try, Bing Bong.

I promise. I was watching that as a parent of like a kid getting older I was crying the entire movie like just tears down my face the entire movie and so she thought it was sad but like it was definitely because of like her age it was definitely hitting me a lot more but then like she was very nice and she made sure to like reminisce with me about Big Al, the Allosaurus, her imaginary friend. When she was a kid, like the next day or for a couple of days, we told old Big Al stories. Now, as I mentioned earlier, there are certain universal experiences people had when mourning characters. Game of Thrones came up a lot. The Walking Dead is basically a sadistic storytelling machine that gets you attached to characters before killing them off in horrible ways.

And then there's the Harry Potter books, which a lot of kids didn't expect to have a high death toll when they started reading them early on in life. When Maria Clara Santorosa was a kid, she cried inconsolably after she read about the death of Dumbledore. And looking back, she thinks it may be because Dumbledore reminded her of her father. My dad, he's a little older, so, I mean, he had gray hair, and people asked me all the time if he was my grandfather, and I always thought of my dad as this, you know, really wise man and whatever. So I guess I did associate, was a little bit, oh, my God, maybe. I mean, my dad is going to die someday. Her mother tried to comfort her, but nothing really helped until

she read the next book, where Harry meets Dumbledore in a kind of purgatory vision. It felt really satisfying to see Dumbledore again there. Much like when a real person dies and you're grieving and then you go to sleep and you dream with them and it's very comforting to see them again in that dream. It was like, oh, I get to see Dumbledore once again and he's like,

Do not pity the dead, Harry. Pity the living. And above all, all those who live without love. I think in some way, J.K. Rowling with that scene or that writing made me feel better. Because when my mom told me, like, everything's going to be okay, I was like, okay, sure, but you don't understand it. You don't, you know, you don't get it. You don't know how I'm feeling. But even adults have struggled with the death of characters in the Harry Potter books. I've had people react to me when I've been very upset about Sirius Black or Fred Weasley or Dumbledore. And I get these looks like, really?

If your pet died, I'd understand that more. And I'm not a pet person. But you really care about these characters. They're real for you. But the character that Megan Knox identified with the most was Fred Weasley. In the books, Fred had a twin brother named George. In real life, Megan has a twin sister named Meredith. And Megan always appreciated the way J.K. Rowling depicted the Weasley twins. Their rapport felt very authentic to her. So when she got to the last book, when Fred Weasley was killed...

It's one of the few times in my life where I actually dropped a book on the floor. I was like, I can't read this anymore right now. And when my sister and I talked about it, we both had the same feeling of that it was especially cruel because we figured we're not going to make it through with all the Weasleys, but you're going to break up the set and that we felt the same way about it, that it was you take both of them or you save both of them. You don't take one. It's not like there's a spare. And what really bothers Megan is the way JK Rowling went about deciding who would live and who would die. When she decided not to kill Mr. Weasley,

I think that was the end of book five, she said, well, there was no way all of the Weasleys were making it. So it felt like an even more of a choice of, well, I just felt like I couldn't kill this character, so I'm taking that one instead. Megan was also upset about the characters that she liked whose deaths we didn't get to witness. They were just mentioned as part of the body count in the final battle. When you're reading it, you're at least you're there with it. You're with the characters who are witnessing it and experiencing it and you're getting to experience it with them. And when it happens off page, it almost feels like you're a little bit robbed of the experience of going through this. Yeah. I mean, death as exposition is kind of a cruel way to experience the loss of a character.

Yeah. And real life, death is usually exposition. It's usually somebody calls you and tells you, or you find out because of a newspaper article or a Facebook status update. You're not there with somebody usually when they pass. But in books, you can be there with it. Now, of the five stages of grief, the last stage is supposed to be acceptance. But it's hard to get to acceptance when you know it wasn't fate or an act of God that killed off your favorite character. It was just a writer. And if the explanation from that writer doesn't feel satisfying... You get stuck in that anger phase.

And I'm very angry at him still to this day. stuck in that anger phase. And I'm very angry at him still to this day. The him that my assistant producer Stephanie Billman is referring to is Joss Whedon. Now, Stephanie was a huge fan of Firefly, a TV show that was canceled by Fox after one season. Joss Whedon managed to raise the funds to create a movie version, which was called Serenity. And like a lot of fans, Stephanie was really excited to see the movie. She particularly loved the characters of Wash and Zoe, who were a married couple. Here lies my beloved Zoe, my autumn flower. Somewhat less attractive now that she's all corpsified and gross. all corpse-ified and gross.

And so she was shocked when towards the end of the movie, the character of Wash was impaled to death by this zombie-like creature. Watch out. Wash, baby? Baby, no. I was so numb,

and it hurt me so much. It might as well have been someone I know personally having died. And what really bothers her is that she thinks that Wash's death was not really motivated by the story. It was a narrative device to heighten the stakes. After all, this is a movie, not just a TV episode. But because of the movie, now she feels like she can't go back and rewatch the TV show and enjoy it all over again. Especially any scenes where him and Zoe are talking about their future together. It really

breaks my heart because you get to see the softness that he brought out in her. And you get to see the strength that she gave him. And for me, too, especially at the time, I was engaged to a white guy. And so they're an interracial couple on the screen. And you see that on, for me, I was like, oh, that's like my relationship. And Wash kind of reminds me of my ideal guy, like that personality of my ideal guy, that goofy but sweet and caring person and watching him die I was like this just hurts this is this hurts and this hurts for no reason and that's I think it's it's hurts and it hurts for no reason it did not have to happen the way

that she deals with her mourning is to keep watching the actor Alan Tudyk in any other role. Because I get to still see his face and it's always to me going to be Wash, but I see him in these different situations. So I'm better now. I'm like, oh, I'll go. You know, he was in, you know, he was the voice of the robot in Rogue One. Did you feel him in there too? Yeah, no, totally. There's elements of Wash in him. It's clear that he put a lot of Wash's personality, his sense of humor, his sarcasm. It's Alan Tudyk. So when I see him in other things, it makes me feel like, okay, Wash has just been reincarnated and now he's a robot in you know, in Rogue One. Or, you know, now he's doing, you know, something else. Now, when Lee Foster was a teenager, she was also drawn into a world that was created by

Joss Whedon, Buffy the Vampire Slayer. And she was also really interested in one particular couple on that show, Willow and Tara. Willow and Tara were witches and one of the few lesbian couples on television back then. I remember when Willow came out because Willow came out before I did. And a lot of actually I think a lot of Willow and Tara together happened before I sort of consciously came out. In fact, watching the Willow and Tara storyline helped Lee come to terms with her own sexuality. And so she was really shocked when Tara was eventually hit by a bullet

that was meant for Buffy. And Tara's death sends Willow down a dark path to the point where she becomes the supernatural villain that Buffy has to fight. I do think it's necessary. I really like Willow's arc after that. I think it's important for where she gets in the series, but that moment of just, you know, they've come so far, they've had the whole betrayal, they've,

they just jump past everything, they're happy, they're together, they're in bed, you're just, you feel so good, and then with the back to the window and no reason to think anything's gonna happen. Think again. Your shirt. That scene, when you watch it, it just, it feels so unimportant to have her die and have her die like that. The aftermath is eventful, Willow's response is eventful. But the death itself is almost nothing. Oh, look, a tiny little bullet and a couple blood spatters on her face. And then that's it. And then you're just gone.

When a writer kills off a character, and that decision feels unjustified, that character's death can actually destroy our suspension of disbelief to the point where we're not only mourning the loss of that character, but the loss of the fictional world that we used to love but no longer believe in. Now, a lot of psychologists and academics have been interested in this phenomenon. In fact, there's actually a term for when people feel deep emotional connections to fictional characters. They're called parasocial relationships. Because for most of human evolution, if you saw somebody on a regular basis and you knew intimate details about them, you knew them. I mean, the idea of fictional characters or celebrities that we only know through the media, I mean, that's a relatively recent phenomenon. So there is a primordial part of our brains that can't quite distinguish between Harry Potter being a fictional boy and not a real boy that we went to school with. Jennifer Barnes is a professor at the University of Oklahoma who studies parasocial relationships.

And she says there's nothing wrong with them. In fact, they're actually kind of healthy. The research says that a lot of the benefits of parasocial relationships look a lot like the benefits of real-world relationships. There is research, for instance, that suggests that in the presence of a favorite fictional character, so if you're thinking about them or looking at their picture or some things along these lines, doing things like that can help your self-esteem. If you're sort of feeling isolated, there's research that suggests

that you might actually perform better on some tasks in the presence of those fictional characters, just like you would in the presence of a real friend. And her research has shown that a lot of the characters that we feel a strong kinship with have one thing in common. A lot of favorite fictional characters have what's called an avoidant attachment style, so meaning that they themselves find it hard to form close relationships. But I think the thing that might be kind of attractive about characters who have a close relationship with only one other character,

and then have difficulty sort of relating to people outside of that, is that when we form a parasocial relationship with them, maybe we just feel very high in their hierarchy of who matters to them. And so the example that came up some in our data set was the BBC show Sherlock, right? So Sherlock has a close relationship with John Watson on the show. But as a viewer, you might on some subconscious level be thinking, yeah, Sherlock's best friends are Watson and me. And for a lot of Star Trek fans, the same thing is true with Spock, And for a lot of Star Trek fans, the same thing is true with Spock, who has one true friend, Captain Kirk. Now, growing up in Ireland, Daniel Skorka had always been aware of Spock as a pop culture figure,

but he hadn't really watched the movies or the TV show until he was in college, and he immediately felt a strong kinship with Spock. I feel kind of detached from a lot of people who love social things. And I've just felt like this my entire life. And Spock seemed like a friend in that regard. Now, when Daniel got to the movie The Wrath of Khan, he knew that Spock was going to die. And he also knew Spock would eventually come back to life. I mean, the following movie is called The Search for Spock.

So he was surprised by how devastated he felt by that scene, especially the way that Spock sacrificed himself to save the rest of the crew. Though he made it look like it was a logical choice, it was obviously based on emotions. You know, Scotty almost tries to stop him saying look you can't go in there you'll die and you know he vulcan pinches scotty to the floor he's helping all of his friends by making the ultimate sacrifice and it's it i think it's because i i like being logical that's a leap beyond logic that's a leap towards you know wanting to protect and save your family and friends.

I have been, and always shall be, your friend. It's almost like he indulged himself a little bit in, you know, that last moment. Trying to hide, saying, oh no, look, this is for the greater good you know the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few but him cracking in those last few moments telling kirk how you know you're my friend you know i'll always be your friend which you know in the logical spectrum of things not really that important but obviously there was that bit of humanity that

spock had that's still kind of shown through and even now kind of makes me a bit emotional you might hear my voice of my friend i can only say this of all the souls i have encountered in my travels his was the most human All the souls I have encountered in my travels, his was the most... human. Of course, not every character that dies gets a proper funeral. But then again, no one was really sure if Leonard Nimoy was going to come back. And Daniel has always found that scene very comforting,

especially the way they used Amazing Grace. Yeah, like Amazing Grace is all about faith. It's about grace and faith and reaching for something that goes beyond logic. It just, every time it gets me and hits me at my core. When a character that we love dies, even if we think that character has been killed unjustly, I still think there's value to that feeling of grief and the healing process that comes afterward. Because the vicarious experiences that we get from fiction are often valuable in the real world, either as preparation for what could happen to us in life or as reflection on what's already happened. to us in life, or is reflection on what's already happened. And learning to deal with loss is a skill that will always come in handy, unfortunately.

Well, that is it for this week. Thank you for listening. Special thanks to Elizabeth Simino, Daniel Skorka, Megan Knox, Don Fancher, Tim Burke, Maria Clara Santarosa, Lee Foster, Jennifer Barnes, and my assistant producer, Stephanie Billman. By the way, Lee Foster also talked about Willow and Tara on her podcast, which is called Les Hangout, where she and her co-host discuss the much bigger problem of LGBT characters who are often getting killed off as martyrs, or their death is just a plot device to help the development of a different character.

It does start to get to you to just realize how many of the characters that you identify with that you get to see yourself on screen kind of end that way, you know? Just end with these sort of, oh, and I guess you've run your course. The end. You should definitely check

out their episode on this subject. I'll include a link in my show notes. And thanks to everybody else who shared your stories online. There are so many more characters that I didn't get to, so feel free to share them on my Facebook page. I tweeted Emalinski and Imagine Worlds Pod. Imaginary Worlds is part of the PandaPlay Network, and our Patreon page is now connected to our merchandise store. So if you pledge at certain levels, you get a coupon for a free sticker, mug, or t-shirt. Learn more by clicking the Donate button at my site, imaginaryworldspodcast.org.