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Fictional character death: Why do we care?

I’d be willing to bet a very large sum that you have watched a movie or TV show or read a book in which one of the characters met an untimely end. I would also wager that at least one of those deaths caused a significant emotional reaction. (cougheddiekaspbrackcoughstanleyuriscough) Did you cry? Did you leave the theatre with that hollow, sinking feeling in your chest? Did you immediately go on Tumblr and wail about your loss? These reactions are of course common, BUT! Have you ever wondered why? They are just fictional characters; someone made them up and decided their fate for an audience to experience, and yet their deaths feel deeply upsetting and real. IN THIS ESSAY I would like to explore what causes this emotional response, how different circumstances can result in different reactions, and what this says about human nature!

In order to fully understand why a fictional death affects us, one must understand why ACTUAL death scares us so much. I have considered this many times and tried to explain it to myself, here are some of my thoughts:

- We fear permanence and the unknown. (Cause like, beyond personal and religious beliefs, nobody actually knows what happens after we die. It’s not like you can just ASK a dead person). This is the most basic reason I guess- if someone dies they will never “be” in your presence again, which is obviously very upsetting. And we fear our own death because of course your earthly existence is over and you can’t experience life anymore, but also because it’s very hard to conceptualize or understand the lack of life and what that would mean for you when all you’ve ever known is living (obviously). And that’s scary!

- But isn’t it kinda weird that, say, when someone moves away, while we might be sad, but never have the same depth of pain as when somebody dies. I mean obviously that’s normal and reasonable, but when you really strip it down to a purely logical sense, it’s a little contradictory or at least fascinating that someone moving away could have exactly the same net end result from your bubble of existence as someone dying, yet we don’t get (or at least are less likely to get) that horrible sinking feeling or wake up and cry or whatever. This is more noticeable and a little less sociopathic sounding if you consider a scenario where don’t really know the person as well (for example if somebody in your school you didn’t know moved away you probably wouldn’t care, but if somebody in your school DIED you would most likely be upset or at least just feel weird or uneasy about it- although in that case I think it might come down more to a point of empathy and feeling bad not for yourself, but for the people who know the gone person. Again proving that humans have empathy. Hot damn. (I find it kind of sad that we need a thought experiment to prove that though)

Getting back to the fictional character thing, on the most surface level, logical sense, a reason to be sad when a character dies is that if they are dead, they can no longer have an active role in the story. You will no longer hear their “voice” in the story, they can no longer interact with the other characters, and all that jazz that made you fall in love with them in the first place.

So why is it that when characters die at the end of a narrative, we still have just as much of an emotional response? You aren’t technically missing out on anything, as the story is over, done, nothing else has been written about any of the characters- so why is it that we only mourn the ones that died in the story?

I guess people really do be having empathy!!! Sorry lord of the flies author, we aren’t all horrible savages that will turn our backs on each other the moment we’re taken away from society (probably). If I can be emotionally destroyed by a chunk of words on a page, alone in my room, with nobody watching or expecting anything of me, then certainly I, and a whole heck load of other people, can be ACTUALLY EMPATHETIC towards- and want what’s best for- other actual humans with real consciousness!

There are way too many things to talk about in this discussion and uhhhh I definitely can’t get to all of them. The point of fiction??? The fine line that differentiates logic and emotion, and why we end up using one or the other???????Human nature!!?!???? Someone help me. I don’t have time for this.

I’ve come to realize that writing this essay may be a coping mechanism for myself to try to objectively pick apart the emotions that fictional world cause me. But really, while I can try to rationalize it all to try to take away some of the pain (and no, I refuse to believe I’m being overly dramatic about a fictional universe), what really is the point of my ramblings? I don’t know! GOD. CAN I NOT JUST LET MYSELF EXPERIENCE THINGS?

It is nice to understand stuff though. I keep ending up with the question of what is the point, which is mildly distressing, but I mean what can you do. I guess I won’t stop asking myself questions any time soon. (I just hope I end up with more answers than questions as I progress through life!)