Grave of the Fireflies is that movie that I honestly find incredibly haunting and moving and...wow, I could never watch that film twice. It was such a powerful film, but I just couldn't do that to myself again.

~I never really thought about trains and boats and spaceships as symbols for death in fiction before (or at least to symbolize pretty big changes in someone's existence), but after reading your post I went back and thought about other examples and was surprised by how I really just overlooked them in my media viewing. I definitely remember some of the ones you talked about, like the FF ones. The Millennium Actress spaceship example seems like such an interesting symbolic take, and what you wrote reminded me about how in the X-Men: Phoenix comic storyline they did that Jean died piloting a spaceship (being "reborn" as the Phoenix after it crashed). I wonder if that was symbolism for the "death as transportation" trope too since they kind of really played up the tropes in that story.

Large train depots in the middle of a city have the hustle and bustle of life, but a train in a small town is often just a tiny one-room building next to a track that comes out of barren wilderness and leads back into barren wilderness. A small train station can feel like you're standing on the edge of civilization or the known world, right up where it touches against the (non-euphemistic) great beyond.
~This is so true! Some of the trains I went on while in Japan definitely had rural stops like that, and it was such a strange feeling compared to the busier/more urban ones I often went to for my work commutes. I can also definitely see how trains schedules and the sounds associated with them could easily become metaphors for death. This was a really impressive trope think piece! ♥