On Bringing Back Dead Characters

By the time you read this, I expect I’ll have finished another Redwall book, and moved on to a mythology text. I’m still playing LEGO Star Wars and watching Leviathan on Netflix.

The official National Novel Writing Month organization is dead; but the month still exists, so jury’s still out on if I’ll do anything for it? November also has YALLFest’s 15th anniversary, but I will not be able to attend this year as I’ll be busy.

On Bringing Back Dead Characters

Oh, hey, I feel that’s a fitting Note topic for All Saints Day, sort of? If you squint?

So, Adam Driver recently revealed that Lucasfilm started to develop a Ben Solo movie, only for Disney’s management, including Bob Iger, to shut it down on the basis that the character was definitively dead. The online outcry has been loud–fans declared that other Star Wars characters have been brought back, after all. If the Emperor can be brought back with vague lines, and “Somehow, Palpatine returned,” why can’t they make a movie explaining how Ben Solo is back work? 

I’ll confess that this entire thing is confusing to me. Why, out of everyone in the Star Wars Sequel Trilogy, do you people want to bring back Ben Solo? Even if you liked his character, his sacrifice at the end of the story seemed to be important enough that it should be left alone. And I didn’t like his character, because of how directionless the writing was for him and every other figure. Yes, other characters were brought back from the dead, but the explanations were always BS. Nothing about this idea sounds good.

So it led me to think about bringing back dead characters. The short and skinny of it is: don’t do it.

Look, very rarely is it a good idea to bring characters back from the dead. If you absolutely must do it, make it something like the Force ghosts in Star Wars: they can have a limited interaction with the protagonist, but no actual power to do anything to affect the physical world. It makes character deaths feel very cheap if you can find a way to undo it. It’s like time travel: you’re opening a can of worms in your story that is very hard to close again.

I remember that after the Arrowverse brought back Sara Lance, and then killed off her sister, Laurel, they had to come up with awkward handwaves as to why they couldn’t bring back Laurel in the same way, or use time travel or something. All of the explanations were unconvincing. Or in God of War, in the original trilogy Kratos keeps getting killed, only for him to fight his way out of the Underworld. That makes great gameplay, but it doesn’t answer the question of why none of the other Greek gods that he murders throughout the story don’t do the exact same thing he does.

If characters can be brought back, why aren’t they coming back and changing the narrative from what it is right now? What’s stopping them?

[If you can answer that, well, then maybe you’re cooking. But most writers don’t.]

And in the category of ‘bringing back dead characters’ I’m also placing ‘using doppelgangers or alternate versions of characters’. BIONICLE and the Arrowverse did this sometimes: where technically, a character was dead, but the writers brought in a version from a parallel dimension to fill the role. It’s a cheap technicality to try to get around it, and I don’t think it usually works because it’s a transparent attempt to get around the rules while generally accomplishing the same thing.

Star Wars has never been good at bringing back characters from the dead. Okay, yes, Maul had a great story in Clone Wars and bits of Rebels, so he’s often given a pass. But that doesn’t change that the explanation as to how he didn’t die in Phantom Menace was complete nonsense. I’m still on the fence over whether or not I like it in the end, because the method feels very silly. I do understand the reason that he was brought back–his character has a really cool design and yet gets killed off before he has time to be developed or really do anything other than act as a silent final boss to the two Jedi.

[I don’t count Boba Fett as a ‘brought back’ character, really, though maybe I should…?]

Let characters stay dead! It gives weight to the story! If characters don’t stay dead, your audience is going to wonder if it means anything at all. Look at superhero comics, for instance, where superheroes are killed for drama and immediately brought back. When Superman was killed by Doomsday back in the day, it was a big deal; now, we expect characters to be brought back eventually anyway, so if a major hero dies, we barely even care.

If you kill off a major character, and the audience does not care, that’s a problem.

—