Thursday, August 24, 2006

No more Ishmaels

The End is a shivery spoiler of an article about the new trend of no-survivors endings. Abandon all hope ye who enter here, and I mean ALL ye.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hey Nell,

It seems the 'killing off characters' thing is getting more than its due share of attention these days... Be it leading authors urging J.K.Rowling to spare Harry Potter's life(actually spare millions of children the shock of such an end to their fantasy ride), or the horror movies making the deaths more and more gruesome... And your blog having 2 of the last 5 entries on people dying in movies.... Well, after reading your last post about characters dying in movies, I could think of a few cliches too, especially in monster movies.. These people are definitely doomed to death - the dollar-eyed (like in cartoons) businessman who can either be the media mogul who wants the monster to be his million dollar show or the industrialist whose experiments with genetic mutations led to the monster in the first place, also the military general who takes pride in the latest advances in technology and has firm belief in 'We gotta nuke 'em', the lonesome drunk guy roaming around lonely streets at night for some action, and the person sitting/standing/having coffee next to the lead hero when the monster attacks. The bottom line always being, as you had said, we either dont know them properly, and if we do, we don't like them.
What do you think killing off characters is more - really neccessary for the plot, venting out of the author's frustration or just showing that one with the pen has an upper hand over all the readers?

Anonymous said...

Hey Nell,

It seems the 'killing off characters' thing is getting more than its due share of attention these days... Be it leading authors urging J.K.Rowling to spare Harry Potter's life(actually spare millions of children the shock of such an end to their fantasy ride), or the horror movies making the deaths more and more gruesome... And your blog having 2 of the last 5 entries on people dying in movies.... Well, after reading your last post about characters dying in movies, I could think of a few cliches too, especially in monster movies.. These people are definitely doomed to death - the dollar-eyed (like in cartoons) businessman who can either be the media mogul who wants the monster to be his million dollar show or the industrialist whose experiments with genetic mutations led to the monster in the first place, also the military general who takes pride in the latest advances in technology and has firm belief in 'We gotta nuke 'em', the lonesome drunk guy roaming around lonely streets at night for some action, and the person sitting/standing/having coffee next to the lead hero when the monster attacks. The bottom line always being, as you had said, we either dont know them properly, and if we do, we don't like them.
What do you think killing off characters is more - really neccessary for the plot, venting out of the author's frustration or just showing that one with the pen has an upper hand over all the readers?