Be careful whom you kill

Gah.  Warning -- another rant ahead.  I just finished streaming Season 4 of 'The Magicians' on Netflix.  If you haven't seen it and may want to someday, STOP READING NOW.  Spoilers await ye.

I do not understand the desire of storytellers (books, TV, movies, etc.) to kill off main characters.  If there's a justified story-dependent reason why it NEEDS to happen, then I sorta get it.  But often writers kill off a person for the dramatic impact, aka shock value.  This tactic is cheap and gaudy, and the sign of a bad storyteller.  

Or, as in the case of The Magicians, writers kill off a person because they believe the character has reached the end of their growth.  They can't think of anything else for the character to do or contribute.  This is also bullocks.  Saying a character has no further potential is lazy thinking, another sign of a bad storyteller.  

The absolute worst character to kill is the anchor.  What's an anchor charactor?  The anchor is what I call the first main person that the audience meets and connects to.  It's the character that introduces the audience to the story and the world they live in.  The audience first sees the world through that person's eyes, and develops their perspective from that view.  That person provides the main connection between the reader/viewer and the story. 

When the anchor character is killed, this link is broken.  And this is what The Magicians did by killing off Quentin.  I feel disconnected, adrift.  I feel no real desire to keep watching.  Quentin wasn't even my favorite character, but he was what tethered me to the show.  

I distinctly remember the first time a favorite character of mine was killed off.  It was in 1982, and I was a reclusive eleven-year-old nerd who loved Dr. Who.  I didn't just like the show, I LOVED it.  I watched it religiously, read the books, went to the conventions.  (I still love it, but I'm not best pleased with the current series.)  My favorite character at that time was Adric.  I'm not sure why - he wasn't a particularly pleasant person.  I don't think I had a crush on him or anything.  But for whatever reason, Adric was my favorite.

I was sitting on the plaid couch of my parent's family room watching the episode Earthshock.  Near the end of the episode Adric dies on a spaceship as it crashes into planet Earth.  I remember seeing Adric's death, staring wide-eyed at the credits that rolled after the final scene, numb with disbelief.  I was as devastated as an eleven-year-old could be over a TV show.  I even wrote about it in my diary.  It took days for me to recover.  But I continued to watch Dr. Who -- Adric may have been my favorite but he wasn't the anchor character. 

So, for any aspiring storytellers out there, be careful whom you kill off.  And rest assured, I won't kill off any main characters in this blog.  Maybe a couple of side kicks, but no main ones.