On Protagonists Killing People They Know

 As I said before, I am seriously considering making a sort of online set of annotations for books (through Blogger, perhaps). Then again, I seriously consider many ideas that tend not to go anywhere because of melancholy. Or something. I don’t know. Maybe World War III is starting and there’s no point to anything.

Anyhow, this week I read another Brandon Sanderson book, which was quite fun, and I suspect the next book will be The Lost Years of Merlin (which would also be fun to annotate).

On Protagonists Killing People They Know

That’s a morbid title, but I really didn’t know what else to call this.

I don’t know why this comes up often as it does in the fiction I’ve been reading/watching lately. I suppose because the stories I read and watch have a lot of violence in them? But in fiction where the protagonist has to kill people, a betrayal or two happens and the protagonists are forced to kill those people.

In the recently-released first season of Castlevania: Nocturne for instance (and one day we will have Words about this show), when the local monastery of Knights Hospitaller join forces with the vampires (I know), and our heroes have to fight them, aside from the one named monk who used to be one of them, none of the heroes have any qualms about killing them. Richter even cracks a joke about a pile of dead monks or something when he confronts their leader. To be clear, I’m not saying that the heroes should have held back against enemies trying to kill them, who had declared allegiance to the forces of Evil–but considering that they’re on familiar terms with this monastery, you would think that there would be some hesitation or regret about having to kill these monks. They’re not friends, but in the first episode they go to this monastery, whose Abbot they know, hoping to get some help. But the second they’re evil? Welp, gotta kill ‘em all!

[The answer to this is because the writers of these shows think, rather bluntly, that Christians are almost to a man all foaming-at-the-mouth rapid maniacs who you shouldn’t feel bad about killing, because otherwise they’ll empower the forces of Hell. But that’s a rant for another day. I did say we would have Words, didn’t I?]

I also had similar thoughts about when I re-read one of the Skulduggery Pleasant. The protagonist Valkyrie Cain started cheating on her boyfriend with Caelan, a vampire. Because he is a not-so-subtle jab at a specific vampire from pop culture (while I knew this from the get-go, it took me an embarrassingly long time to realize that ‘Caelan’ sounds a bit like ‘Cullen’), he becomes creepily obsessed with the heroine and won’t leave her alone. At the end of Book 6, when she fully rejects him, he vamps out, and Valkyrie and her ex are forced to kill him. This is… not played for as much drama as you would think, considering Val was happy to make out with this guy a week before. And again, I’m not saying that she shouldn’t have killed him–he had it coming, and it’s not like she had much other choice as he was actively trying to rip her throat out at the time.

Unless their relationship had always been antagonistic, if the lead characters have to kill someone who was once a friend, ally, partner, or acquaintance, they should have strong feelings about it. Especially in the case of Castlevania: Nocturne, where it’s unlikely that our lead hero, Richter, had ever killed a human being before. Heck, I don’t know if Valkyrie had ever killed anyone she knew the name of at that point either–only feral undead she’d never met before.

Part of the reason this is on my mind is that I just finished reading Mistborn: The Well of Ascension by Brandon Sanderson, and (spoiler alert) there’s a scene in which Elend faces one of his former friends and kills him for his role in making things worse. Elend, having never killed, and certainly never thinking himself capable of doing such a thing, immediately feels sick and horrible, but recognizes it as something he felt he had to do. It’s not a large part of the story, but it is prominent in his character development. He cares about having to kill someone he knew, even if that someone had become a monster.

You can also write it so that the lack of emotional reaction to that sort of thing is a notable character beat. Season Ten of Red vs. Blue has one of the Freelancers, C.T. defect to the enemy, and the others are sent to go get her back. Agent Tex (yes, they’re all code-named after states) points out that they don’t actually need to get C.T. back, they’re just required to bring back her armor with classified technology. Tex then proceeds to kill C.T., much to Agent Carolina’s shock and horror. Agent Carolina is upset about C.T.’s betrayal, but killing a former coworker is a line she will not cross, and she’s disturbed that Tex leaps over that line so quickly.

If you want to make your audience believe that the characters aren’t sociopaths, then they should have noticeable reactions to killing people they know. If you want to make sure the audience know that they’re sociopaths, then that’s fine–but that has to be the intended reaction, and it has to be framed as such in the story. Otherwise, having protagonists casually kill people they know and have no emotional reaction to it feels as if the writers don’t feel like doing the work of developing how a real person would react to these situations.

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