It’s so weird to me that we consider it more acceptable to show violence to children if it doesn’t have consequences.
The next time you watch a PG or PG-13 action movie, notice how many “minor henchman” bad guys get shot or beaten and they just fall down with maybe a little grunt. No blood, no real pain, no slow messy death, no awful little twitch that makes you realize oh god they’re still alive, no other henchmen rushing to their side and trying to do CPR and screaming for a henchmedic. Murder in those movies is nothing but a quick, convenient departure from the story.
Gory violence isn’t good; it’s horribly unpleasant to watch and can be extremely upsetting or frightening for children. But goreless violence teaches kids that shooting someone or hitting them on the head is an easy, regret-free way to remove whatever obstacle they represent.
That’s much, much scarier.
I think about this a lot.
There are so many stories where death is just a convenient way to get rid of characters. They don’t even have to be henchmen or villains, sometimes they’re just characters who have outlived their usefulness to the main character, so the writer kills them off. And it seems like it trivializes death.
I remember reading Fablehaven, where some people the main characters knew died, and the way the author treated it was so surreal and graceless. It’s like he wanted to show that their death wasn’t okay, but he couldn’t hide the fact that he didn’t actually care and just wanted the story move on. So the characters got these awkward, emotionless lines, like, “It’s sad that ___ died but we need to do something now,” and there’d be the same sort of detached attempts at portraying grieving sprinkled throughout a few times after that.
Like, if you’re not going to put in the work to show the impact death has on characters, why kill them off? It was obvious the author just wanted those characters dead and out of the way, but knew that if the characters he cared about didn’t react in some way that the readers would think they were cold and no longer believe they were the good guys. (I still ended up thinking that, though, because it’s obvious when you treat your main characters like the only human beings that matter in their universe.)
The author could have had them imprisoned, or stripped of their powers, or sent away to a different realm, or something, but he picked ‘killing them off’ and handled it so badly.
@livebloggingandreblogging this is what i complained about re: implications of death of huge amounts of people YES i didn't think about it articulated quite like that but it absolutely bothers me in this exact way death is not more okay when you don't pay attention to it
anime and cartoons do this a lot, and i just... pay attention, every time