Auron: a fanfic writer's biggest dilemma

[auronlu]

Spoilers to end of game follow.

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SO. Auron. Lulu is only loved by some, but by most accounts Auron is the best-loved character of FFX, and rightly so: he carries the archetype of ronin, wise elder, and tragic figure so well.

Almost any Auron fan wishes he weren't dead, or at least that he weren't Sent at the end of the story. It's a natural instinct to want to pen a story bringing him back, giving him a second chance, raging against that horrible moment when Yunalesca robbed him of his life. He was only what, 25?

Here is the dilemma. It is so tempting to want to give him that second chance, bring him back from the dead. We hate it when good characters die.

Yet part of the appeal of Sir Auron is that he's doomed and faces his fate calmly. "That is my story." "Don't stop. It's been long enough. This is your world now." Would we find him interesting if he weren't Unsent, if he survived the quest and retired to open a swordsmanship training school for disaffected monks? Probably we'd still like him, but it loses much of the tragic and romantic aspect of the character. It's like Boromir coming back in book three and saying, "psyche, it was only a flesh wound!"

Or, to put it in more general terms: one of the most common moves in fanfic is to resurrect well-loved characters who died in canon. Does that ever work? Or is it one of those mistakes like Mary Sue that one should resist?

Comments

[wired-lizard.livejournal.com]

As I don't know FF and you don't know the example I'd make, I'll just say in general: if the death was well-done, well-timed, and well-characterized, then it's disrespectful, as it were, to make an end run around it. (Particularly in a resurrection fic per se; AU's are more free to play around without messing things up, as it's not really canon as we know it anyway.) But if, in canon, it was kinda botched, not done particularly well, or especially if the death reeked of the writers getting a character out of the way for one reason or the other that had nothing to do with the actual story...then go for it. I say this because I've written a resurrection fic myself, albeit with some guilt--started writing it because the idea came insistently to me, because that's how I worked, but continued writing it (still haven't finished -.-;;;) because I realized that it allowed me to get right at the heart of a moral and characterization dilemma that the writers had chickened out of by killing off the character, which they did for a combination of story/continuity reasons and a moment of rather badly played tragedy.