[Off-politics: arts and literature]
Long running comic books, television shows and even film franchises, since the late 1990's, been treating audiences to a recurring trope that one can easily identify as "The Reboot Cycle". This is most common in comics, and entails a main character being killed off, only to be brought back through means magical, miraculous, or through fringe science (sci-fi, really). It tends to be used as a gimmick to try and revitalize an intellectual property, or in the case of things like the show "Supernatural", it serves as a means of kicking off a whole new story arc and introducing numerous new characters and elements that otherwise had no logical point of introduction.
This is a big part of why storytellers like George R.R. Martin and Stephen Erickson get a reputation for being 'brutal' or 'bloodthirsty' when they kill off major characters in vicious fashions and never bring them back. We've become accustomed to protagonists either being saved via some Deus Ex Machina, or reborn/reincarnated through work-arounds and plot armor.
This unfortunately makes dealing with killing off major characters as a storyteller oneself a little tricky, especially when the character who will die is one that the writer has come to enjoy working with. I find myself in this conundrum presently, you see, and not without precedent. I've already hinted in the last completed work that this character is ill with a terminal condition- at least, where he hails from, there is no cure for what he has. I've worked out scenes where he attempts to impart some of his wisdom to his closest companions, who are a sort of ersatz family to him, since he never took a wife or had children of his own. Perhaps most worryingly, for three novels now he has served as the sort of moral compass for this group.
Without him to act as the kind of moral/ethical weathervane, how will the others behave down the line? I have future stories for them in mind, but being without this one character could serve to compromise them in those stories, one fellow especially.
It's going to be a challenge, that's for sure. It would be easy enough to use a Deus Ex to spare the life of this character and simplify the ethical dilemmas the others will face later on, but the easy thing to do is not always the right thing to do.
Cheers
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