I keep meaning to write a post about the importance of consequences in storytelling. The topic received some attention in my post on “Real Fiction,” but not in the dedicated way it merits. Modulating the intensity and finality of the consequences of characters’ actions, decisions, and exposures is one of the most potent tools an author possesses to control the impact of story events on the reader; getting this modulation wrong can deeply undermine a story’s emotional core and is a rapid route to reader betrayal. If the consequences are too severe, too capricious, too irreversible, without the story being built to support and imply such levels, the reader will find the book to be too heavy for what they thought they were getting. Alternatively, if the consequences are too light, too controlled, too impermanent, the story sheds its significance and impact. Of course, there is perhaps no starker consequence a character can face than death, and no consequence more difficult for authors, especially authors of genre fiction, to handle.
It’s a bad habit of genre fiction authors to treat character death too casually, which can happen in one of two ways: characters face circumstances in which they miraculously escape death over and over again thanks to the durability of their plot armor, essentially isolating them from facing the reader’s perceived “proper” consequences of their actions, or death loses its finality. We can all agree there are fates worse than death, but death can still be considered the “ultimate” consequence because it is, at least under normal circumstances, final. If a character dies, they are no longer in the story. Their silhouette might be, the echoes of their actions and presence in the story and on the other characters, but they themselves are no longer an acting part of the story. Except, of course, this is genre fiction, and everyone who reads genre fiction knows that, depending on the author and the story in question, death can have some wiggle room.
This tendency is not, in and of itself, a bad thing – there are famous and infamous examples we can probably all identify. However, it produces a certain effect on the storytelling and on the reader which must be acknowledged, understood, and controlled if it is to be done well. Foreshadowing is key to this, in many cases, as readers will be much less upset at the “cheat” of undoing a character’s death if there is a supporting framework suggesting the possibility prior to the actual occurrence (just like trying to solve any other story problem using the magic system). To better understand what I mean by this, let’s look at a few examples. Fair warning: these examples will in most cases include major spoilers for the stories we examine, which I will not name here because just naming them in a list of stories we will be considering with regards to the treatment of character death would constitute a spoiler.
Example 1: The One-Off
CS Lewis wrote The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe with a pretty heavy Christian allegory, and most readers familiar with that tradition are not surprised by Aslan’s resurrection, although the resurrection also works if you’re not expecting it. It works because this is clearly a ritualistic, one-off event which could not be replicated for just any character – in fact, it can only happen because Aslan is Aslan. That makes it a true one-off, and this approach does not cheapen death and its consequence for the other characters. Lewis treats Aslan’s death seriously, especially showing the gravitas and horror of the event through Lucy’s perspective, which gives additional power to his eventual return. This is probably one of the best examples of a well-done character resurrection, though the lessons and circumstances are perhaps not broadly applicable to other stories, excepting those which have strong religious or mythological dimensions. Gandalf’s return as Gandalf the White fits in this category, too.
Example 2: The Rube-Goldberg Resurrection
If you’re not familiar, a Rube-Goldberg machine is an enormously complex mechanical contraption designed to perform a simple task. I designed a few of these in various engineering and robotics classes – they can be a lot of fun (and incredibly frustrating at times) to build, and if you’re not familiar with them, I suggest you look up a few videos to see what I’m referencing. In terms of character death and resurrection, this refers to a character who can return from the dead, or otherwise cheat death, due to some peculiar set of circumstances which would, in theory, apply to anyone, but which are exceptionally difficult or unlikely to implement – in other words, it’s not something that’s going to happen at scale. Harry Potter is a perfect example of this, both his initial survival in the attack on his parents, and his return to life in Deathly Hallows. This approach is highly situational – some authors and stories can support it, while others can’t – and it’s very easy to fumble in execution. Rowling handles it adequately in Deathly Hallows, at least in my opinion. It’s not great, but it sort of works for the story. If it were a different kind of fantasy story with a less youth-focused feel, I don’t think it would have been effective.
Another example that fits in this category is Kelsier’s survival in Mistborn: Secret History. As I understand it, through a combination of being highly Invested when he died, temporarily taking up a Shard, and being stubborn, Kelsier managed to cling to a kind of half-life as a cognitive shadow, and all implications up through Wind and Truth are that he either has or is on his way to having a physical form again. He certainly achieves significant influence over the physical world after his death. This, for me, is not a well-executed example. Sanderson was famous before Secret History for lamenting the cavalier deployment of character resurrection in genre fiction, and there was no real foreshadowing for the event (yes, there are a couple hints in books which came out before Secret History if you know what to look for, but you kind of have to know Kelsier is still around to understand what’s happening, so it’s not really foreshadowing). Plus, the (partial) resurrection doesn’t fit the tone of the Mistborn trilogy. I consider this an example of how not to do a character resurrection. Since then, I believe Sanderson has done something similar in a few other instances, like whatever happened with Szeth.
Here’s a less mainstream example: The Wandering Inn. There have been a few instances of character resurrection up through the current volume. However, categorizing this one is tricky because the “death” which the characters experience isn’t really “death” – it’s more like travelling to another planet from which it’s really, really difficult to return, but not impossible or unprecedented. There are two additional levels of death in the story which have been established so far, one of which, consumption by the gods, is apparently reversible under very specific circumstances, and one of which appears to be simply erasure from existence, and has not been reversed. It doesn’t fit perfectly in this category; at least, not anymore. During Volume 9, I would say Erin and Teriarch’s resurrections fit nicely into this category, and the fact that anyone who died afterwards would be immediately consumed lent death back its consequential weight. Events in Volume 10 change that dynamic, which is all I want to say here because otherwise this example will become far too messy.
Example 3: Ubiquitous Resurrection
This is pretty rare to see, and it happens more often in science fiction than fantasy, I think for a few reasons: science fiction is more apt to deploy a technology at scale, science fiction likes to explore consequences at the scale of societies along with individuals, and science fiction can, ironically, more readily and realistically implement this than fantasy can. By far the best example of this way of addressing character death and return, and indeed one of the best treatments of death as a concept in the human condition, is in Schlock Mercenary.
Surprised? I am every time I think of it, but it’s true. Taylor’s military science fiction comic strip manages to address the consequences of mass-scale death and resurrection in a thoughtful, dignified way that does not detract from death’s finality or consequences (much). This is especially true after Tagon’s self-sacrifice and subsequent resurrection, which allows Taylor to explore the notion on both individual and societal levels. It works because it acknowledges that the consequences of death aren’t really death – they’re all the attendant side effects on everyone who’s still alive. It is the example I would point to of a piece of genre fiction which makes resurrection easy and broadly accessible while still maintaining meaningful stakes and the weight of consequence. In fact, the immortality which the characters gain in some ways makes the consequences more profound, in a vein parallel to the one I plumbed in Terror of Age.
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The lesson from these examples of character apoptosis and anastasis ties back to consequence, on which I’ve dwelt extensively in this post, but it also connects to tone. Tone is a key enabler of the successful implementations of resurrection included in the examples, and a source of tension in the examples where such efforts are less than successful. That can be said of much of what we do as authors in our books, but it is especially true of matters pertaining to life and death, mortality being so fundamental and influential a part of the human condition.
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