I am always grateful to hear more personal tales of mourning for the fictional.
When I was fifteen, the character I'd thought most like me in all fiction, Henry Blake on M*A*S*H (for his wishy-washy manner, not his adultery and drinking), died on tv. He was definitely mourned by the characters. He was also mourned by me, by then familiar through Star Trek with fanfiction, with a story that took a year to complete about what happened to Henry after he died, which did not turn out to be discovered not to have been killed. The story remains one of my readers' favorites to this day, and seems to have served the purpose of mourning and acceptance because I must have been quite affected (even though the death had been spoiled for me a week early by People magazine) but now I don't remember how I felt. I have stronger memories of my feelings about the series' end, though that'll be at least partially because I wrote specifically about them at the time.
The fictional death that stands out to me in memory is rather that of Gary on twentysomething. I'd never watched that show when I saw the news that he was going to be killed off in an upcoming episode, and I never did again. But the night that episode aired, I tuned in on a lark about forty minutes after the hour just in time for Ken Olin to get the phone call. The way the episode played from then on affected me as if I'd been following the series and the character all along, and I've never known whether the scripting was just that good or my background in loved character loss (by then I'd also lost Nick Yemana, Adric, Spock [with initially no certain knowledge that he'd be back], Supergirl and Barry Allen) instinctively took up the slack.
no subject
Followed the link from![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-community.gif)
su_herald.
I am always grateful to hear more personal tales of mourning for the fictional.
When I was fifteen, the character I'd thought most like me in all fiction, Henry Blake on M*A*S*H (for his wishy-washy manner, not his adultery and drinking), died on tv. He was definitely mourned by the characters. He was also mourned by me, by then familiar through Star Trek with fanfiction, with a story that took a year to complete about what happened to Henry after he died, which did not turn out to be discovered not to have been killed. The story remains one of my readers' favorites to this day, and seems to have served the purpose of mourning and acceptance because I must have been quite affected (even though the death had been spoiled for me a week early by People magazine) but now I don't remember how I felt. I have stronger memories of my feelings about the series' end, though that'll be at least partially because I wrote specifically about them at the time.
The fictional death that stands out to me in memory is rather that of Gary on twentysomething. I'd never watched that show when I saw the news that he was going to be killed off in an upcoming episode, and I never did again. But the night that episode aired, I tuned in on a lark about forty minutes after the hour just in time for Ken Olin to get the phone call. The way the episode played from then on affected me as if I'd been following the series and the character all along, and I've never known whether the scripting was just that good or my background in loved character loss (by then I'd also lost Nick Yemana, Adric, Spock [with initially no certain knowledge that he'd be back], Supergirl and Barry Allen) instinctively took up the slack.