One of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to fiction series is when the writers try to raise tension early on by killing one of the main characters in the first or second episode… but, because it happens so fast, they’ve given you no reason to actually give a shit about the character or their death. It’s often extremely obvious they were just created for dramatic effect and their character as a whole comes off as flat and uninspired, like not even the writers could be bothered to care about them.
In Our Wars Have Ended, though, Jon Ware did this so beautifully and it’s one of the only times I’ve seen it pulled off successfully. Despite only being in two episodes, Dogged Morel had so much life to her already, and her character was so important to the story. She was the only thing keeping her father from flying off the handle, and in many ways was holding the company together. She was shown to be important and loved by other characters, especially Timmer. Not only was she one of the three main characters, but she was arguably the most important of the three, being the barrier that kept the other two from killing each other. And then her death was so genuinely tragic. It felt so real because the story genuinely seemed to be going in one direction, and then was forced to change course when she died and the company fell apart.
Dogged isn’t a loss that the other character will grieve and then move on from, continuing on with their life as it was before. The story would be entirely different if she hadn’t died. Her death wasn’t a plot device to raise tensions, her death was the plot.
Anyway I haven’t stopped thinking about this for weeks.
