A lot of what I'm looking at isn't people being sad or experiencing grief, but formalized mourning ritual -- i.e., memorials, wakes, charity funds, tattooing, cutting off the hair, not shaving, rites of some kind.
And there seems to be a lot less impulse to do that when a character is going to come back and also when the character is mourned in the source material. Whedon tends to include lots of mourning activity in his work, so no matter how angry people get (i.e., Tara), there are way, way less examples of this type of ritualized behavior when compared with pieces that don't show mourning. Additionally, fans tend to mourn for characters who would not be mourned in the source material -- the biggest displays have been for characters who are estranged from or without friends or family (which is something else that changes the nature of mourning response for Whedon's characters; people may be pissed, but they know the friends in canon will mourn). There are bunch of other criteria too, but these are two of the biggies.
The people you know that mourned for Buffy after "The Gift" -- can you tell me what they did?
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Date: 2010-09-08 08:02 pm (UTC)And there seems to be a lot less impulse to do that when a character is going to come back and also when the character is mourned in the source material. Whedon tends to include lots of mourning activity in his work, so no matter how angry people get (i.e., Tara), there are way, way less examples of this type of ritualized behavior when compared with pieces that don't show mourning. Additionally, fans tend to mourn for characters who would not be mourned in the source material -- the biggest displays have been for characters who are estranged from or without friends or family (which is something else that changes the nature of mourning response for Whedon's characters; people may be pissed, but they know the friends in canon will mourn). There are bunch of other criteria too, but these are two of the biggies.
The people you know that mourned for Buffy after "The Gift" -- can you tell me what they did?