So I play this mobile game.  It’s a “gacha” (gachapon) game; by means of a lottery-style mechanic, you acquire characters to serve in your stable of magical fighters, as though they were Pokemon or something. 

There’s one particular character whom I like a lot, who’s reasonably popular with the fanbase and who plays an important role in the plot.  I expected, as many people did, that at some point he was going to become acquirable through the gacha.  Instead, at a critical plot juncture, he died.  The manner of his death is complicated, but it essentially amounts to the game jumping up and down and yelling, “THIS IS A REAL SACRIFICE, NO BACKSIES, HE IS GONE FOREVER, YOU SHOULD FEEL VERY VERY SAD.” 

And it’s funny – I find myself really wanting the game to bring him back.  I want his sacrifice to be cheapened, I want the permanence of death to be made narratively meaningless, so that I can roll him in the gacha and have him on my team of dudes. 

Which feels a little strange.  This is not normally how I feel about death in media, as you can probably tell from the kind of language I used in the preceding paragraph. 

Maybe this is me losing hold of my artistic integrity, or something.  But I’m not the artist here, I’m the audience, and honestly there’s something that seems very right about this feeling.  A character died, and I’m not looking at it from a critical distance, nodding sagely and noting that it’s all very meaningful and dramatically-appropriate.  I want him back.  This is much closer to how death feels in the real world. 

It is, I suppose, a testament to the ways that the structures of different artistic media – even structural components that seem entirely commercial, or technical, rather than artistic in their origin – can be exploited for remarkable effects.

A book, or a movie, or even a normal-type video game, is fundamentally timeless in some important way.  The work is what it is, and it’s always there.  Aerith dies at the end of Disc I, but it’s more truthful to say that Aerith will be alive until the end of time.  We have perfect access to her essence and her narrative.  We can go back and play Disc I whenever we want.  Writing Aerith fanfic, or getting dolled up in Aerith cosplay, doesn’t feel any less meaningful because she’s dead; she’s already been written into the Akashic Wikipedia.  And while it’s true that she could have done other things within the FFVII plot had she survived, there’s a clear sense in which she died “at the right time,” her story was given meaning by the circumstances of her death, etc.

But this stupid mobile game advances with time, and has random events constantly cropping up.  The dead guy isn’t there to engage with them.  That’s a real loss.  And it’s especially a loss because the game has a “made permanently available for narrative communion” status (having the character in your stable), and this guy is excluded from it, so…it’s a tragic loss of potential, or so it seems.