A pastime of grad school (Okay, it was a requirement), we hopeful future degree -holders had to be able to read a book and write a 600-900 word paper on it (that wasn't a book report) all in one week. Called "annotations" by our advisors, they were something that none of us really enjoyed, primarily because we'd have to do 20-40 of these a semester. It did, however, hone our talents for reviewing and criticism, whether we care to admit it or not. :)
So, needing something to do/post on the weekends, I decided to revisit some of the books on my shelves, and see if I can still do it.
I started with War For the Oaks, a seminal work of urban fantasy, by Emma Bull. :)
War For the Oaks and Script Immunity
Something I’m familiar with as a writer and as a “gamer” is the concept of Script Immunity; the practice of having characters survive situations where death would normally be a given for no greater merit that they’re main characters with names and backstories and (hopefully) emotional investment from the reader. Granted, this doesn’t mean that said characters are going to live forever, but it’s almost a certainty that when a main character does finally meet their end, it going to be a scene of Shakespearean proportions, or at the very least a grand sacrifice that will soothe the loss of the character because they died for something greater than themselves. Perhaps this concept has been overused to the point where a reader or viewer or gamer simply “knows” that despite the massive explosion that occurred in the scene that killed everyone in a six-block radius, the main character will crawl out of the rubble dirty and sooty and a little bloody, but still well enough to ride off into the sunset.
Emma Bull’s War for the Oaks certainly doesn’t disappoint fans of script immunity or happy endings, for the most part, but its deviations are what caused me to question the practice of script immunity. The character Willy Silver, a sidhe guitarist firmly in the “Supporting Cast” camp of the novel shouldn’t really be considered to have script immunity at all: He comes in late in the story, he’s more of a tryst for the female lead than a romantic attachment, and once his identity as a sidhe is revealed, his personality becomes rather grating, save for slouching toward real emotional maturation as he approaches his eventual death scene.
Still though, it’s difficult to not consider him part of the main cast: he’s in the band, he’s forming real social connections, he’s even the subject of a search and rescue operation that has two chapters worth of planning. But within 20 minutes of that daring and impressive rescue, he’s dead.
It’s the manner of death that reminds me of the character Tara’s death on the show Buffy the Vampire Slayer. This scene is still debated by the fandom not for its pathos, but how Tara dies, namely catching a stray bullet intended for someone else and dying in less than a minute. Willy dies the same way, being shot and killed by a largely forgettable character and having a line or two before he dies in the arms of a main character (even as other main characters are shot as well, but receive shoulder wounds, a rather cliché means of employing script immunity). With Tara, the character had very recently reconciled with her lover, a main character, with the possibilities of a renewed relationship stretching off right before she dies abruptly. With Willy, he dies almost as soon as his usefulness to the plot is up.
I can understand the arguments for these “stupid deaths”, which don’t have any real sense or sacrifice: They happen all the time. People die every day for no real discernible reason or explanation, and this is one way of underlining that uncomfortable fact about the world we live in, a way to jolt us from the escape we find in such works of fantasy. But on the other hand, isn’t this why we escape into works of fantasy? You can be presented with a world where morality is a lot less muddy, where good will, if not now, eventually triumph over evil, where anything is possible, and where love doesn’t just conquer all, it can also stand the test of time.
When it comes down to it, I don’t really feel that Willy’s death was handled right. While I would usually ask whether a character’s death scene was truly organic and earned, with Willy, and with character deaths like his, I often wonder if the scene was deserved. Give him a sacrifice, give him a better last few lines, give him a dying strike against someone to save a life, but give him something more than just suddenly taking two to the chest and dying shortly afterward. Despite his difficulties, the story establishes him as a hero, so at the very least, you expect him to have a hero’s death.
See you all next Saturday! :)