Sunday 17 February 2008

Killed By Your Own Non-Canon

Looking at the Don Rosa drawing of Scrooge's grave and the cosplayers staging Aeris' death got me to thinking about canonical and non-canonical deaths within fictional worlds. It seems to me that the primary motivations behind writers of fan fiction are sex and death - either they want to get two characters together who never got it on in the 'official' universe, or they want to kill someone off. Killing off a character is the ultimate act of authorial control - it gives you the last word on who they were, in a way that resonates back through everything that came before.
Don Rosa went through a lot of pay disputes as a cartoonist. I think the Scrooge's grave picture was his way of asserting his ownership over Scrooge, a kind of two fingered salute at Disney and their greedily litigious licensing arm. A lot of FFVII fan fiction centres on the return of Aeris - indeed, for all the creators' insistence that she's actually dead, the movie, Advent Children, brings her back as a ghost, with American Beauty's Mena Suvari providing her voice.
Oh, and as a slightly weird coda to this whole digression, Aeris and Scrooge McDuck appear together in the hugely popular Disney-SquareEnix collaboration, Kingdom Hearts II.

I include here for your perusal a piece of particularly moving piece of fan fiction based on the death-heavy first-person shooter Doom, entitled: Doom - Repercussions of Evil. Watch out for the twist at the end.


John Stalvern waited. The lights above him blinked and sparked out of the air. There were demons in the base. He didn't see them, but had expected them now for years. His warnings to Cernel Joson were not listenend to and now it was too late. Far too late for now, anyway.
John was a space marine for fourteen years. When he was young he watched the spaceships and he said to dad "I want to be on the ships daddy."
Dad said "No! You will BE KILL BY DEMONS"
There was a time when he believed him. Then as he got oldered he stopped. But now in the space station base of the UAC he knew there were demons.
"This is Joson" the radio crackered. "You must fight the demons!"
So John gotted his palsma rifle and blew up the wall.
"HE GOING TO KILL US" said the demons
"I will shoot at him" said the cyberdemon and he fired the rocket missiles. John plasmaed at him and tried to blew him up. But then the ceiling fell and they were trapped and not able to kill.
"No! I must kill the demons" he shouted
The radio said "No, John. You are the demons"
And then John was a zombie.

1 comment:

Ross Sutherland said...

Great idea- anyone want to write a piece of fan fiction where they kill off an existing fictional character?