However, there was something that I learned reading comics that I felt was a unique lesson more writers should take to heart. Generally speaking, death is the end. If you are planning on circumventing death (and especially if you're installing a revolving door in the afterlife) then you have to do a lot of work to keep your readers invested, as you just drastically altered the stakes of your conflicts in a manner that can make life-and-death struggles seem pretty trivial when all is said and done.
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| Welcome to hell... oh... getting resurrected? Nevermind, I guess. |
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It's All About Cost and Consequences
If you've ever played the fantasy roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons (or any of the other games that pattern themselves after it), then you're likely familiar with the concept of resurrection spells. The general idea is that, once you reach a certain level of power in the game, you should be able to bring back a fallen comrade to continue the quest. The cost for such an action tends to be quite high (thousands of gold pieces in diamond dust, and either being or finding a spellcaster powerful enough to invoke the rite), but there will come a point where it's almost a joke to the players because their characters die and come back so often. Some players might even start a session with, "What happened last game? I was dead at the time."
This is one end of the Resurrection Scale, where death has been rendered relatively trivial (at least by a certain point in the story), and it's the opposite of the other end where death is permanent and irrevocable. And while stories and properties might move back and forth on this scale, it's important for you to ask why resurrection is happening in your storyline. It's also important for you to ask what the cost for such a resurrection is, because the cost (and the difficulty that comes with it) is what is going to maintain the threat and challenge in your story going forward.
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| Rise my son... today is not the day you die! |
For example, let's say a character dies in your story. Tragic. You want to resurrect them, but you don't want it to feel cheap, or to undermine that emotional resonance you built with that death scene. The key here is to think about both how difficult resurrection is, how rare it is, and what it actually costs one to perform... or what it might cost to have it done to you.
Let's return to the fantasy gaming example. Making it essentially a financial and time cost makes reversing death functional as a game mechanic, but it can be pretty underwhelming as a story element. So how do you move the scale a little closer to the less trivial side of things? Well, perhaps a person can only be resurrected once, and if death comes again there is nothing that can bring them back. Alternatively, someone might have to make a deal with an outsider, giving up a part of their body, or a piece of their soul, to return (and if one does this often enough they might end up with the monstrous trope Came Back Wrong). It might even require performing some dire rite, and sacrificing something (or someone) in order to pay the cost; death for death, and life for life.
It's important to remember that cheating death (or just flat-out reversing it) should be its own element of drama and danger. And sometimes the reversing of death can be even more interesting than the death itself.
As a different example, consider The Widowmaker; a heinously corrupt six gun found in my recently-published supplement The Blade Itself for the game Hunter: The Vigil. A cursed weapon, the Widowmaker seeks to wipe the corrupt and the wicked from the face of the earth. However, it tends to be wielded by the desperate, and the mad. Why? Because if the one bound to the gun dies they spend 1 day in hell before being resurrected in the burned out ghost town where the gun was given to its first bearer. However, in exchange for this dark resurrection, the gun takes the life of someone close to the wielder; a mother, a brother, a lover, a friend... and only when they have lost everyone and everything can they truly die.
This is an example of a dear resurrection price... and it still has the stakes of death; it's just the death of others, rather than the character.
This Applies To Villains As Well
It's important to look at the other side of the coin, because resurrection for villains is extremely common as a tactic. Maybe it's that they made a deal with the devil to get out of hell, they were blessed by a dark god with a terrible form of immortality, or they have vat-grown clones of themselves that are updated to make sure they have all the memories and abilities of the last version of themselves that died a horrible death.
Villains get some latitude here, because their ability to cheat death increases the stakes when that is not a power that the protagonists have. However, your villains also have to have some kind of scale and cost for this power in order for it to not become eye-rolling and predictable.
In other words, make sure Palpatine doesn't just return for no reason.
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| Through the Mirror of Death Sight, all things are possible! |
If your antagonists are resurrected there should either be a great cost to them (Darth Vader's cybernetic existence of pain and rage is a good example), or if it's treated as a power then that power needs to come with some kind of weakness (they must maintain the favor of a malevolent force, it requires a costly technology, etc.). Being able to endlessly respawn can lead to some short-term scares if you know that a foe cannot be permanently killed, but if that's the case then it needs to become part of their mythos.
Put another way, killing Jason Voorhees permanently may not be possible, but it's tense as hell as we wait to see whether the kids on the campground manage to get him under the waters of Crystal Lake. But when they take him into space, and that containment is no longer an option, things get ridiculous in a big, big hurry.
Final Thoughts: Match The Scale To Your Tone
The important thing to remember is that resurrection (or the lack thereof) is a mechanic in a story, and you can use it however you want. However, it's important to ask what it means for challenge, for the stakes, and for how interested your readers are going to be.
In a story like The Crow, where a character comes back from the dead as a nearly-unkillable revenant, the very invulnerability of their resurrection is a power fantasy that makes them akin to a slasher. In a story where people can die and resurrect over and over again, death may have become meaningless... but what takes its place if that's the case? And if someone knows they can die and return, but not how often they can do that, it leaves us wondering if this is going to be the death that really matters.
Your setup means a lot here... don't just bring characters back because you didn't want them to be dead for too long.
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