On "Realism"

This is part of a review of a fic I'm reading. I felt my views important to back up elsewhere.

It's important to ignore a desire for realism. You don't have to kill off named characters and make us feel bad just because you want to write maturely. Maturity in writing can be done by having certain themes, technical skill, and producing compound or stacked emotions. Anyone Can Die isn't a mature writing trope, it's a cerebus trope, and feeds into Darkness Induced Audience Apathy. Now, I may have been apathetic for only part of an arc, but if I hadn't made further character deaths meaningless by investing against that, this whole chapter could have been spoiled. Stories are written to produce values and happiness. If they don't, then what good are they?

Comments

[Alex Warlorn]

I've sadly fallen into "someone died, now take me seriously!" at times. :-(

[Panther Passing Across]

As it turned out, I loved the snot out of most of that fic, and there was only one death that I would have felt sad about.