I often hear the argument that having major characters die is more
realistic than having them always come through unscathed. Of course it
is. But I personally don’t want my fiction to necessarily be “realistic”
– I want my fiction to be entertaining. For me, that means watching
engaging characters I care about get into and out of dangerous
predicaments, working and thinking together in order to defeat the bad
guys. While some authors (and readers) like the tension of wondering who
will live and who will die, I prefer the tension of seeing how the
heroes are going to think or work their ways out of each difficult or
impossible situation they find themselves in. If I want realism and the
deaths of people I care about, I can turn on the news.
–Timothy Zahn, interviewed by TheForce.Net, 2008
Tim Zahn just summed up my entire issue with adult movies and fiction
I do not want to get invested in a character just to have them die or be violated or whatever, I don’t care that it’s dramatic. It’s not fun, it just leaves me angry and frustrated that I wasted my time on this media.
Why I got so bored of ASOIAF.
“Oh, cool, a new character was introduced who is competent and engaging and that I actually enjoy reading about.” Dead 200 pages later.
Jordan Peele’s rebooting The Twilight Zone, which is awesome, but there is going to be a bunch of fake/racist sci-fi fans probably getting angry at him if he decides to do episodes about social issues specifically about race.
And let me just tell you as a HUGE Twilight Zone fan, the original show is 90% commentary on subjects like race, war, and even mental health.
Make Sci-Fi Political And Specifically Radically Liberal Again
