What makes a popular story? I don’t mean a great one, although many are both, but rather a story where the setting, the characters, the events become legends?
Actually, I think my question is: what makes a legendary story?
I wonder about this a lot because that is the kind of story I want to tell. In trying to describe this to a friend, I used examples like Game of Thrones and Harry Potter, just to be topical, and she took it to mean that I want to be famous like GRR Martin or JKR.
Which…no. No, it is not the same thing at all. If a devil promised me the ability to create a legendary story but only if it was done anonymously and no one ever knew I wrote it, I would take that deal. It might grate on me a little bit, sure, but in the end, the story would be a legend and that’s what matters to me.
This has hit home for me recently as I’ve fallen down the rabbit hole of Chinese drama fandom, consisting mostly for me of Guardian, Nirvana in Fire, and The Untamed although I have been watching some others along the way. But these three dramas are, like GoT and HP, legendary. They are all not coincidentally based on novels (which sadly are only partially translated into English, and unofficially). The Untamed, in particular, has swept the world, creating a massive and obsessed fanbase. The bestselling Chinese novel (Mo Dao Zu Shi, or The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation) has been adapted into the online (‘TV’) drama (the aforementioned The Untamed), a Chinese audio drama, a manhua (comic), and a donghua (animated series). A Japanese audio drama has just been released, and the book has been officially translated into several languages. I have no doubt at all that the main characters of Lan Wangji and Wei Wuxian will be immortalized for generations, even if the original source material falls out of mainstream favor — much as what has happened to Lord of the Rings, which still has many rabid fans of the books but also has a much larger fanbase of people who have never read (or never finished reading) the series. MDZS/Untamed is definitely a legendary story.
I have been looking at these dramas and novels from the perspective of trying to figure out what makes them tick, a.k.a. reverse engineering their popularity. There are tropes and character types that are easy to pick apart, but one thing that I’ve found, which if not disheartening for me is at least problematic, is that they all trade in tragedy.
Yes, all stories thrive on conflict. A story without conflict is maybe Swann’s Way and few of us are Proust, so yes, conflict and bad things must happen to our beloved characters or nothing happens at all.
In The Untamed (sticking with that, as I have not read the novel, obviously, but be aware there are some major differences between the two!), the lead character Wei Wuxian makes a series of devastating life choices, most done with the best of intentions and from a place of love and/or righteousness, but backs himself and his family into a corner in a society already ripped apart by war. His adopted parents are killed, his brother is turned against him, and, in the last heartbreaking moments of his downward spiral, his beloved sister dies trying to protect him. I mean, that’s the short list. Also, Lan Wangji, the man who loves him desperately, is simply unable to save him and in his grief nearly destroys his own life. Wei Wuxian is immortalized in death as the evil and vile Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation but the irony is that he was actually a pure and compassionate soul trying to save the people he loves every step of the way.
Anyway, he gets a second chance (of sorts) and that’s the other half of the drama. I highly recommend it, as it is a great story!
…if, as I have mentioned, also a fairly damn tragic and heartbreaking one.
The tragedies and deaths, though, are unavoidable in telling this story. Wei Wuxian would not be the Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation if everything went well. He would not throw himself off a cliff in despair if his sister wasn’t killed. He would never have a falling out with his brother if he did not sacrifice part of himself in secret to save his brother’s life (deal with the devil and all that).
But that is the perspective of the storyteller. It’s logical. “Shit happens” is what makes a story like this, especially one as long and complex as it is.
But is it what makes it legendary?
In part I think the answer is yes. Fans tend to glom onto tragedy in a story as it invests them emotionally in it like nothing else.
But critically: not always. In a convo on twitter, some of us were talking about the death of Sirius Black in the Harry Potter series, and how instead of simply compounding the tragedy of Harry’s life (as it was meant to do) it completely threw us, the readers, out of the story due to feeling betrayed. Not all readers felt this way — his death was traumatic for the fandom overall, but the majority obviously were able to come to terms with it.
It wasn’t necessary, though, not in the way Wei Wuxian’s sister’s death was necessary. The deaths of Harry Potter’s parents, on the other hand, were necessary, and so was (sadly) Cedric Diggory’s murder, which while awful served to show just how evil Voldemort was. I would argue that Dobby’s death was not as necessary, but still heroic and self-sacrificing in a very satisfactory way. The deaths of beloved characters in the final battle were terrible but it was a full on war, so their deaths showed the cost of war for a generation. I could go on, but you get the point. In this context, Sirius Black’s death at that point in time was mostly inconsequential to the story — he could have been easily sidelined in various other ways, if the goal was just to get him out of the way of Harry’s journey.*
Quite frankly, I believe too many stories told these days kill off characters for nothing more than shock value (I honestly think GRR Martin’s main goal is to undermine genre expectations by basically killing off or destroying every character that would normally be the/a protagonist in an extended and repeated grasp for shock value). But it loses its power over time as people just become accustomed to it. The phenomenon of fridging female leads fits in here: kill off the woman to give the male hero an emotional arc, because that is easier. It’s almost expected.
The line between gratuitous character death and necessary character death is a gray one, to be sure, and specific deaths in literature are open to various opinions. In some stories, such as The Untamed and, yes, Harry Potter, some deaths are absolutely critical to the plot. The pain of those deaths is in direct correlation to how important they are to creating a legendary story. If you go back further to, say, King Arthur, then his own death is necessary for the legend to become a legend.
Okay, fine, that is not news. But it is a problem for me, because I really do not want to kill characters off. Just…in general. I hate it.
I hate it because for me, character death can be triggering for my cPTSD. It is unfortunate that the idea of “triggering content” has been so belittled, because for me and many others it is a very real thing.**
To be sad, even grief stricken, about a character’s death is understandable, but for instance the unexpected death of Levitas in His Majesty’s Dragon actually destroyed me so hard I could not leave my bed for two days and spent that time mostly sobbing. That is admittedly an over-reaction but it is also not something I can control. That is what “triggered” means, in practice.
It is not something I want to cause to myself and, even if writing it is not the same as reading/watching it, it still plumbs the depths of my experiences with grief which are highly unpleasant.
Some authors take their tragedies and use them for fodder, and do so brilliantly. I could try, I’m sure, but I am wary of the damage it would cause me and I’m fairly confident the results would be far from brilliant. In other words, my motivation for doing so is very low indeed.
And, to reiterate, I’m not aiming for literary brilliance anyway. It’s out of my grasp in the same way an Olympic Gold Medal is out of my grasp. There are natural limits to talent, and this is mine.
My goal is to be a storyteller who creates legendary stories.
Can I do that, without the kind of gut wrenching trauma of character death?
I’ve realized sadly that the answer is, in a word: No.
You cannot have Wei Wuxian finally giving up on life without the death of his beloved sister Jiang Yanli — so that many years later he can be brought back from death — any more than you could have Wei Wuxian as a character in the first place without the death of his parents years before the main story arc even begins (deaths that are, on the whole, shrouded in mystery).
As I pondered the death of Jiang Yanli, I wondered: could I do that? Could I kill off a character so beloved, so kind, so necessary to the mental health and happiness of others?***
Am I capable of killing Jiang Yanli? Sirius Black? Obi Wan Kenobi? Levitas?
I don’t know. I really don’t know.
I fear my own emotional backlash of doing that to a character, and to the characters who love them. While I’m at peace with the fact that I will never ever kill off a main lead (‘temporary’ deaths notwithstanding!) I am very legitimately worried that I cannot write legendary stories without a willingness to kill off secondary characters I treasure.
I don’t have a solution for this as yet. It is something I am putting on the table to examine and analyze at how I feel about it. I can push myself, and I should, but I also need to respect my own boundaries. I’ve killed off minor characters, to be sure, and put main characters through hell.
But I want to write legendary stories and I think I need to be ready and willing to do so much worse.
* I have argued repeatedly that Sirius Black being carted back to Azkaban would have been easily just as traumatic but not as permanent, and him dying in the final battle would have been far more heroic and emotionally satisfying for readers. But I’m weekend quarterbacking here, I know it. 😛
** People kid me about my demand for spoilers but it comes from a very necessary place of self-defense. I have a very hard line about it now; anyone who won’t give me spoilers when I ask is someone I will not continue to watch movies with or accept book recommendations from.
*** I do not consider her death an act of fridging, b/c it is not used as the reason WWX went ‘darkside’ as it were. He did that years before. Her death was not even the reason for his suicide even if it was the triggering event; it was basically the last straw in a whole host of reasons. Again: it’s a great story and you should watch it. 🙂