Death of a Character

Yeah yeah... it's been more than a year since I updated my blog. This is the second or third time I've neglected it; that's just how I do things, I guess. I'll tell my story in the next entry or whenever I get to it.

And yes, this isn't one of my typical entries. So what brought up this topic? Well, I watched the Tenjo Tenge anime in two days then spent the next two days reading the first 88 chapters of the manga. I found a particular death to be... touching. Then I got to thinking about the death, how it related to me as a writer, and what lessons I could draw from it. Maybe I thought a bit too much about it...

I've been a big fan of Tenjou Tenge a long time before I even knew that there was going to be an anime. Corpse pointed it out the manga to me in June 2003 and I was quick to devour any chapters that I could find. Sure, he was quick to talk about how there was nudity and sex, and he snagged me with that part. But finding stuff with sex and nudity is a dime a dozen these days; put in "cherry tree" on Google and you'll eventually find a porn link if you look down far enough in the results. What kept me reeled in was the action, characters, and storyline. I'd try summarizing the manga, but I'd only spend the next thousand words describing the numerous character relationships and then getting through maybe a few lines of the actual story before I got tired. It's no Romance of the Three Kingdoms, but it's still pretty damn intricate.

However, allow me to shift tracks for a bit.

Back in my junior year of college, I took a fiction writing class. I may not have finished with an A, but that was one of my favorite classes in college. It was rather simple: you write. Okay, there may have been occasional restrictions like page limits, incorporation of themes, and instructions on how to start out, but we were pretty much given free reign on every assignment. Give a writer a blank piece of paper and what more can they ask for? Other than a pen or pencil? Not much. And you got graded for your stories, but that part was never really on my mind.

Anyways, my professor was a hardcore drama guy; I could summarize his thoughts on fiction with this statement from my Kimi ga Nozomu Eien review: "more drama happens at the dinner table than physical violence can create". Oh, I definitely do agree with him, but I always found that he seemed to limit himself in that respect. He gave us a rather simple equation when it came to storytelling: drama = desire + danger. In mundane situations, there's arguably more desire than danger, and this is what he liked; to him, it was more interesting to read about a boyfriend-girlfriend relationship breaking down with their words than one resorting to physical violence. However, in the latter, there's arguably more danger than desire, thus there's still drama.

Another point my professor once made (and more aimed at this entry's topic) was how killing a character is generally little more than a plea for pity. I believe he said this because, despite it being a fiction class, he wanted us to focus on realistic situations (my theory was proved when, on the last day of class, he stated that he was glad no one wrote any science fiction stories during the semester) that were believable; and death isn't commonplace in real life.

But in cases that involve death, the character needs to reach out and connect with the audience. There's only so far that the character can go before they have nothing else to be revealed, at which point, the only thing left is for the reader to begin caring about them. How the character in question dies isn't of so much concern; whether they die of old age or in a fire generally won't allow the reader to not want them to die. Once they reach the point of death, the reader has either cared about them or not.

This is the essence of successfully killing a character: whether or not the reader cares. And this intrigues me.

Think of it like this: it's easy to just kill off character A. Who cares? Who is character A? If you have no idea, then why should anyone else care? Even if you give character A a name, any fool can do the same thing with an easy "Al died". Once again, who is Al? Successfully killing a character requires more than just a character; it requires time and gradually evolving them into a human being. Humans have personalities, pasts, quirks, likes, dislikes, beliefs, etc. So rather than "Al died", Al needs to have a life to begin with; in order for the reader to care, Al needs to be more than just a name.

Bringing Tenjo Tenge back into focus, one of the main characters is named Natsume Maya (she's at the top of the linked page; family name first, given name last). I was reading up on the latest chapters when I found that Maya had died in chapter 87. And it saddened me. I read the chapter and then spent the next 4 1/2 hours at work thinking about her death. Maya may be "just" a character, but to me, she had evolved to a point where I became concerned about her well-being. She had strong bonds and convictions which, to me, allowed her to transcend paper and become alive in her own respect.

Some history: Maya is a martial arts expert, the captain of the Jyuukenbu club at Toudou Academy, and the eldest surviving member of the Natsume family (she's only 17; her younger sister, Aya, is 15). 2 years prior in the story, Maya's older brother, Shin, was killed by one of his closest friends; however, Shin was driven crazy by his family's power, the Dragon Eye, which allowed him to see into the past and future. Maya doesn't possess the same ability, but Aya does. To keep this reasonably short, Maya was fighting Kagiroi Tetsuhito when she called upon her brother's sword, "Ceremonial Sword" Reiki, to give her the edge to win the fight; she promised it her life. Aya used her power to activate Reiki and help Maya win the fight, but Maya had already been beaten up pretty badly even before the fight began. Reiki subsequently consumed her life and Maya's heart exploded.

And yes, I'm quite aware that what I just said probably blew by most people. Like I said before, it would require far more explanation than what I want to put down.


Part of Natsume Maya's death scene. The frames are meant to be seen from right to left; the Japanese is written from right to left, top to bottom. A rough translation of what is written: "I... see... so relentless... in the end... the scabbard is just a scabbard".
Okay, I definitely skimped out on Maya's background. C'est la vie; there's so much more I would have to say just to get across the understanding that Maya is a pivotal character in the story and that I believe that her death was well done.

Focusing on the picture for a moment, Maya's heart had begun exploding a few frames before the one on the right, but the three that I chose were the most graphic. If you look at the left frame, Maya can be seen still holding onto the hilt of her brother's sword, Reiki. If you look at the right frame, you can see her left eye swollen shut from her fight with Kagiroi Tetsuhito and (I've got to at least point it out lest someone thinks that things don't look quite right) her sizeable breasts. The kanji and katakana in the middle and left frames (translation is above in caption) refers to 3 things: 1) Reiki activated by unsheathing itself and showing its true blade, 2) Maya had said previously that she was merely a scabbard for Reiki, holding onto it until it was needed because she couldn't use its power and didn't want Aya to get it for fear of her going crazy, 3) a scabbard isn't incredibly vital for a sword because it's just something to hold onto it, hence Reiki did not hesitate to consume her body and power after her victory.

Coming back to Maya's death, I believe it was done pretty well. In my eyes, Maya had developed to the point where I cared about her well-being. She had seen so much death, felt so much pain, and still had so much life left in her. And just a few pages before the picture above, she had begun speaking about how she felt that she'd "degraded" to the likes of her older brother, a psychotic murderer, because she had just taken someone else's life. In seeing all of this (the random reader may not agree, but I'd argue that it's due more to ignorance), I do agree that Maya's death was well done by the manga-ka, Oh! Great, and I'm not sure how it could've been done any better.

At a point like this, there's really only one way to regress a character (and possibly the story): deus ex machina. By using such a storytelling method, the character is usually eroded in some way to the reader; there's always a certain leap of faith that everyone has to take when they read fiction, and this would be shattered by the use of such a device. For instance, if Maya were to be resurrected, you've completely removed all meaning and impact of her death as well as making the story jump an absurdly high obstacle that it really shouldn't. Now, I'm not saying that deus ex machina is bad; in some stories, settings, and series, it's a perfectly normal and acceptable method that's used so things can be bent more towards what the author wants. But in a story like Tenjou Tenge? It doesn't work no matter how hard even I want the character to live.

And just so I make things more clear, an example of unsuccessfully killing a character would be Wolf's Rain OVA. Why? Because (spoiler!) everyone dies. Yes, everyone. But this needs a bit more of an explanation. When the main characters are all yawn-inducing stereotypes that never grow, there is no attachment that the audience can make to them. Without any such connections, even one death is trivial and nothing more than a cheesy "Oh... so what if they died?" And when every other character after the first is killed? I'm not sure it can get any more anti-climatic than that nor could there be any bigger sign from the writers which says, "I have no imagination and can't think of anything better".

So now, why did I say all of that? Well, because I'm a writer, but I'm not a great writer. Great writers can successfully kill characters with the methods I described already, and I still need to get to that point in my development. Maybe I can accomplish that sooner rather than later. Only time will tell.

And here some people thought my blog was a bunch of angsty bullshit and pictures. :P