In condemnation of trivia, and other discourses

I was reading through a copy of the Metro this morning, and for some reason page 3 was occupied by a report on the death of Captain America, the superhero from Marvel comics. I actually can’t believe that nothing more newsworthy has happened in the last couple of days. Not to mention it’s a comic, the odds that he’ll remain dead are vanishingly slim. The moment Marvel comics sales start to slip, they’ll announce the triumphant return of Captain America by the unlikeliest of means and sell a whole bunch of comics.

Hooray for the death of artistic integrity too, I guess. The problem with bringing characters back from the dead is that it makes death meaningless. Stories thrive on conflict and how characters behave when hemmed in by strong narrative barriers. If death is something that you can take in your stride, then death becomes meaningless.

You may wish to skip the next paragraph entirely.

On “Buffy” the eponymous character snuffed it at the end of the 5th series only to be brought back to life at the start of the 6th. What made it different was that bringing her back had serious consequences on the people who took part in the act and most of all upon Buffy herself, who sank into a depression after it was revealed that she had been torn out of an afterlife that was very much like heaven. We’re also told it could have been worse – Buffy could have come back wrong. So wrong it might have been necessary to kill her. It was also only possible to bring her back because her death was due to mystical forces – in her case, a big swirly portal-thing. A season later, Tara is killed by a stray bullet to the heart, and Willow attempts to bring her back just like she did Buffy, only to be told that it was impossible.

Anyhoo, the point is that cheapening death in fiction is bad. To do it properly, death has to be permanent. Also, spoilerific coverage of said permanent deaths in the media is both bafflingly irrelevant and kinda evil.