I don’t know how some authors do it.<\/p>\n
At some point in all the most popular fantasy narratives, one of the characters that the audience has grown to (or grows to) love has died: Boromir in Lord of the Rings, Dumbledore, Snape, the one\u00a0Weasley twin, etc.,\u00a0in Harry Potter, everyone<\/em> in Game of Thrones.\u00a0 At some point, the author had to stop and say to themselves, “Well, this is it.\u00a0 This is the last time that I’m ever going to see this character operate under their own volition.\u00a0 We might hear about them again through passing, or discover some of their unmentioned deeds, but they will never have a meaningful, growing relationship from this point on.”<\/p>\n It’s got to be a painful experience.\u00a0 The characters we create are kind of like our children, in some regards… little brain babies left to their own devices, going out into the world.\u00a0 If you’ve ever lost a loved one, you know that the most horrifying result is the knowledge that you’ll never be able to hear their voice again.\u00a0 When my father passed away, it didn’t really hit me until a few months later.\u00a0 Sure, I was emotionally damaged because I had lost my dad, but the reality<\/em> of the situtation wasn’t clear.\u00a0 I had a house repair to make, and I remember getting my phone and scrolling through the contacts, intentionally landing it on his name.\u00a0 And then I realized that if I had called, he wouldn’t have answered.<\/p>\n These characters are gone, even if they’re not forgotten.\u00a0 Unless you’ve got some clever way to bring someone back from the dead, the only time you’re going to experience their personality is in flashbacks or prequels.\u00a0 It has got to be a tough call to make, even if you’ve been preparing yourself for it for ages.<\/p>\n George Martin is a mass murderer, yet I refuse to believe that when *SPOILERS*<\/strong> Ned Stark made his unfortunate exit at the end of his first book in the Game of Thrones series, he wasn’t a little dissapoitned that it was the true experience he would ever develop with that character *END SPOILERS*<\/strong>.<\/p>\n I can’t imagine how J. K. Rowling felt at the end of the Harry Potter series.\u00a0 In one way, it’s difficult to leave one character so that your story can proceed.\u00a0 It must be a completely liberating yet tragic feeling to come to terms with the finality of an entire world you’ve created.\u00a0 I’m dreading the final moments of this trilogy, because I know that it will probably be one or two years before I ever “see” many of the characters again.\u00a0 If I ever determined that I was done with the Tellest universe, it would have to be because I knew I was dying, and I had given it the logical, fair closing point it deserved to have.\u00a0 And even then, I’m sure I’d be more miserable about the fact that it was the last time I would ever venture into my little made up world than I was to be leaving this <\/em>one.<\/p>\n The beginning of the final episode of “season three” of Tellest is wrapping up.\u00a0 I’m nearing a moment of respite for some characters, and I’m bowing my head one last time for others.\u00a0 While it’s a great feeling to know you’ve finished a mental task such as this, it’s almost depressing at the same time.\u00a0 While the words themselves may be immortal, the lives of the characters, in some ways, are not.<\/p>\n The long goodbye is cruel and cold.<\/p>\n 13th Hour Edit:<\/strong>\u00a0<\/em>I, of course, should mention that one way around the death of certain characters is redacting that with later storyline.\u00a0 Gandalf the Grey became Gandalf the White.\u00a0 All of R. A. Salvatore’s characters have been snatched from the jaws of death at some point.\u00a0 Even Martin lets some of his characters live after the reader believes they have shed their mortal coil.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t know how some authors do it. At some point in all the most popular fantasy narratives, one of the characters that the audience has grown to (or grows to) love has died: Boromir in Lord of the Rings, Dumbledore, Snape, the one\u00a0Weasley twin, etc.,\u00a0in Harry Potter, everyone in Game of Thrones.\u00a0 At some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"spay_email":"","footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false},"categories":[57],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1UVey-3b","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":271,"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/271"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tellest.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}