Community as a Protagonist

Main characters dying in books or movies or video games is usually shocking. Some authors (like George RR Martin) kill characters more frequently than most - and become known for it simply because it’s so rare.

There are real benefits to killing main characters.

A dark sentence, I know, but I think it’s true in some ways. For one, I think the fact that much our media doesn’t address real death (e.g. only the evil or the unimportant guys die) makes death seem “fake.” In my real life, I haven’t had too many people I care about die - but when it happened, the people who did die with neither evil nor unimportant. And, to be honest, I really didn’t get what was going on.

It’s not that our media has an obligation to explain the world to us. But I think people like media that does seem to reflect the world in some way. And I also don’t think that media will be able to explain death to us (because what does it mean to get it). But I think it could help, a bit.

So, taking that we want to have main characters die (to have our stories be real), how can we make this work? Characters rock because the longer they exist, the more complex and interesting and real they can get. So how can we get away with killing them off?

One option is to have a group of main characters, and kill them off at about the same rate you introduce them. I think this is generally the strategy that GRRM follows - although I’ve only read the first book, so I’m not really qualified to say. More generally, it seems maybe possible to tell a story where the protagonist isn’t a character (or even a group of characters), but instead a community of people.

How to get people to connect to a community of people like it’s a real protagonist is an open question. And whether people in the community dying is the same (aka as real) as protagonists dying is open either. The answer to the latter seems to be no.