Tuesday 30 January 2018

Why Do The Good People Always Die?

I've just been reading a Lady Mechanika story called La Dama de la Muerte, in which our heroine heads off for a holiday after a difficult time in which she has lost someone she loved.
She turns up, almost at random, at an inn in a small village near Mexico City, where she is welcomed, and invited to join the Day of the Dead celebrations. The family is kind; the little kid is cute - and then the bad guys arrive, and Lady Mechanika steps up to defend the village.
So far, so good.
While Lady Mechanika is following the trail of the bad guys back to their base, they double back, burn the village, and kill everyone in it.

In the film Logan, Logan and Professor X are on the run when they are taken in by a good, wholesome family. Some time is spent showing what nice people they are, with hopes and dreams for the future. Then the bad guys arrive and slaughter them all.

It happened in the film of the Punisher, too - wonderful, happy beach party with hero's extended family, and then everyone is slaughtered.

The message to take away from this is surely - if you are a good, nice person, with a loving family and a superhero turns up on your doorstep, DON'T LET THEM IN!

The message is also, of course, if you identify with the superhero, you can never have a normal family life, but must live burdened with guilt because you couldn't save that nice ordinary family that helped you when you needed it.

I get that the hero is supposed to be motivated by the deaths to go out and kill all the bad guys - but in the Lady Mechanika case, she was already motivated by the kindness of her hosts to defend them. Also, they took refuge in the church when she went off after the bad guys, and churches are usually built solidly enough that they can survive a siege of more than half an hour, even if the rest of the village burned. They shouldn't all have died.

I don't know if this is happening more in stories, or whether I'm just noticing it more - but I wish writers would stop doing it - or at least, let some good, ordinary people survive!

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