On Grief in Fiction

 Alright it’s the weekend! I will be off of Tumblr so my last movie review on the blog will be Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, a movie which is still on my mind after a week. Which is not something I thought I’d be saying about a Shrek spin-off but here we are.

I’m getting kind of annoyed because my PS4 will sometimes, of its own accord, decides to uninstall games. It means I have to go back and reinstall them--which, with games as big as Assassin's Creed: Valhalla or Horizon Forbidden West, sometimes takes quite a while!

Not thrilled with what The Flash did with one of its characters for this season...

On Grief in Fiction

So I’ve been watching Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood. Something that struck me while watching this show was that there are two characters who die pretty early in the series’s run, and yet I’m forty episodes in, and those deaths haven’t been forgotten. Not just in the sense of vague references–they’re explicitly mentioned, and one of them has his grave regularly visited by characters.

The characters grieve, and it’s important. But it’s not as if the characters are completely obsessed with these losses, either. Avenging these deaths are not the entire sum of the conflict in the story. They have other motivations–but they don’t forget the ones they’ve lost along the way.

That’s not the way most fiction covers it. It tends to go one of two ways: either characters forget about all those people that died so that they can move on with the Plot, or those deaths are what drive the character motivations.

Something that bugs my sister is how often movies will have mass casualties, and then the characters move on, and the audience is expected to, as if it’s not a big deal, because we’re meant to care about something else. A New Hope, for instance, does not dwell too much on the destruction of an entire planet–it’s obviously devastating to Leia, but for others it’s played more along the lines of horror and astonishment that the Empire has a weapon that can blow up planets, and Alderaan’s destruction isn’t really brought up a lot after that movie. Probably worse is how in The Force Awakens, the First Order destroys an entire star system with the Uber Death Star and despite there definitely being people our characters know in that system. It’s never really brought up again. Then the next movie kills most of the Resistance, but in the end it’s more vaguely about hope for the future. Rose is the only character who is especially affected by grief there.

And you also have fiction where characters are just consumed by grief. Which is realistic in some cases, but in other cases doesn’t make sense. In Doctor Strange: Multiverse of Madness, Wanda’s entire motivation is the grief for her lost children. Never mind that they never really existed to begin with, and that she also lost her brother Pietro and her lover Vision–her grief has turned her strangely homicidal. That, and an evil book.

[Can we agree that’s bad writing? When you explain the horrible sketchy character writing by ‘The evil book made her do it!’, that’s bad writing.]

That’s an extreme ‘bad’ example, but revenge stories are full of characters who have grief (and rage) as the entire driving force. That’s not bad, but it’s a bit weird that fiction almost always goes to two different kinds of grief: the all-consuming one, or the one that is instantly forgotten so the audience moves to other things.

Is there no balance in this? I’m sure it exists out there, but I can only come up with a couple of examples off the top of my head: Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, as I said, and the Greatcoats books. In those, our protagonist’s grief is what kicks off the Plot, and he never forgets it (he sometimes hallucinates his wife in tense moments), but that’s not the entire character’s arc. It’s ever present, but it isn’t everything. I’m sure other examples exist, but those are the ones that jump at me.

In stories that aren’t explicitly about grief, there should be some if these kinds of things happen. If we want to feel like the characters care about the drama going on around them, well, they have to actually care–that means remembering the fallen people they know. It can work if it’s all-consuming, but you have to make sure that makes sense and isn’t stupid, like grieving for people who don’t exist or that they only knew for a few minutes.

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