Get attached

Getting back to the Hobbit, in the process of this post I am going to reveal that two of the characters die in the book, therefore I assume they will in the movie. Actually, make it three. So, if you don’t want to know this, skip the next two paragraphs.

I had admitted that I was crushing on two of the characters, and I am not the only one. Cathy, who went with us, is very fond of Richard Armitage, but he usually plays nasty characters, and usually dies. I could confirm for her that Thorin is not a villain, but he will die, along with Fili and Kili.

Yesterday on Twitter, one girl was angry and lamenting because after seeing the movie she cannot bear that Kili dies, which she knows from the book. I could not provide much comfort there. She has about six hours spread out over two years, I guess, before it happens, but it will happen. Jackson may be making some changes from the book, but I don’t think he will alter that. (Cathy is simply not going to see the third movie.)

Finally today another was saying how it is awful to get attached to people in books because there is no one like that in real life.

I have been thinking about this in general. Let me backtrack a little. I am often interviewed in my mind. I have thought this was an embarrassing sign of vanity and thinking of myself as special, but apparently this is common, and I think I understand it now. Sometimes it is helpful to sort out your own thoughts in the form of a dialogue, because it can create the structure that you need. You are getting to where you could explain it to someone else, which is important, but you are doing it for yourself. So if you do this too, don’t feel bad.

I do this a lot with my writing, because often to make something come right you need to understand it on different levels. The comic book has been such a huge part of my life that I have given a lot of interviews about it.

Without giving too much away, some (mental) interviewer was saying that they loved a certain character, and my initial response was to cringe a little and warm him not to get too attached, and then I stopped myself because the whole point is to get attached.

I mean, if you’ve been following along, I’ve made no secret of the fact that the death count is fairly high. This was unexpected, because I started writing it specifically because I could not leave four people dead, and then I just ended up killing a bunch more, including three of the original four.

That wasn’t an accident. The video hit me the way it did because of things I was already feeling and needed to work out, and some of that is that this is a harsh world, and bad things happen (a lot) and the mortality rate of life is 100%. That’s just how it turned out, and it hurts and it should hurt. (I guess my mental interviewers love my characters because I love them.)

And it is still no reason to not get attached. What makes the hard and painful moments worthwhile are the relationships and the love that come before and after. When someone dies, it doesn’t mean that you didn’t love them or they didn’t love you or that you didn’t have some of your best times with them. That not only was real; it still is real. Rejecting that because it is temporary sucks all the beauty and joy out of life.

I admit that it is easier for me to feel that way because I have complete faith that it does not end here, and that we will all see each other again. It doesn’t remove the initial pain of separation, but it does comfort me, and it infuses everything.

Still, not everyone believes that, and so I tried to think, if you believed this life was it, how would that change it? I don’t know the answer, but I believe that holding onto people—enjoying them, loving them, getting attached to them—would still result in a more satisfying life. I think it’s at least worth a shot.

When literary characters die, well, they’re alive again whenever you open the book back up, and probably in death they are helping you feel and know things that will relate to life, so there’s something to that.

As for literary characters not being real, the fact that someone could conceive of them makes them possible. I was surprised sometimes at who turned up in my writing, as I realized that elements of them had come from people I already knew. If nothing else, the author is real, and their mind created something that yours responded to. That’s not bad.