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Schrodinger Dead Characters
Writing my Pinocchio canon promo and writing about Lampwick reminded me that I need to finish a mini fandom meta piece I've been meaning to write up for a really long time.
Basically, late in high school and during college, I got into three things: (1) I played Soulcalibur for the first time (Soulcalibur II), (2) I finished playing Sword of Mana, and (3) I watched Pinocchio for the first time (at least, at an age old enough that I actually watched/remembered the whole thing).
These three canons actually share something in common, which is that, well, I got unreasonably attached to a particular character who made it to the end of the story alive, but who I later found out died in a different version of canon!
Let me go through these one by one:
Sword of Mana: The first time this happened to me was with Sword of Mana -- in this game, I got really attached to Willy, the main hero's gladiator buddy, who is also (in this game) the main heroine's childhood friend (they grew up in the same Mana Clan village). (Kind of predictable -- monk characters in video games are always my faves for some reason!) In the hero's opening, Willy shows the hero a way out of the gladiator cells, thereby helping the hero escape, although he himself gets caught. He's also one of the support characters the heroine gets over the course of the game. He takes part in the final battles and ends up living on after the heroine becomes the new Mana Tree (in the epilogue that ends the game, he's shown freeing the other Mana Clan women from Count Lee's manor).
Sword of Mana is a remake of the Gameboy game Final Fantasy Adventure, so after finishing Sword of Mana, I wanted to play Final Fantasy Adventure and see how it was different or the same. The experience was basically:
(One minute after the opening crawl)
Willy: (dies)
Me: Wait... WHAT?!
So yeah, uh... in the original game (after a short boss battle), the story basically opens with a mortally injured Willy urging the hero to restore Mana to the world or something, before he dies and traumatizes the hero...
Pinocchio: So during/after college, when I got really into Pinocchio and was writing fanfiction for it, I thought, "Hey! Maybe I should try reading the original book to get some ideas about how to write this fic." I thought that maybe the book might say something interesting about Lampwick. In the movie, Lampwick transforms into a donkey and runs off, and then you never hear anything else about him. It was something that always bothered me -- I always wanted to know what happened to Lampwick and the other boys, and was curious if, in the book, Pinocchio ever ended up encountering Lampwick again.
Well uh... the good news is yes, he does! In the book, after Pinocchio rescues Gepetto from the belly of the whale (shark), Gepetto is very weak and Pinocchio spends some time tending to him. He goes begging for food at a nearby farm and sees a dying donkey and recognizes him. Pinocchio asks who he is and the donkey replies that he is Lampwick... and then dies.
Um... Well I guess I know what happened to Lampwick now! The bad news is that, well, he died.
This case is a bit less clear-cut than in the Sword of Mana case, where Willy definitively survives in one version of canon but dies in the original; here, Lampwick is fate unknown in one adaptation (although alive the last time you see him, albeit a donkey) and dead in the original.
Soulcalibur: Finally, Soulcalibur: one of my favorite characters in this game series is Maxi. It's hard to pick a favorite because the cast is so big, but I definitely have a soft spot for him. (Unsurprisingly, his weapon type (nunchaku) is also very monk-like, so he's a monk character in my heart. ♥)
Maxi's ending in the first game I played (Soulcalibur II) is pretty normal -- a happy ending where he gets everything he wants: he avenges his crew and gets his memories back (yeah, he's an amnesiac in this game, for some reason, who has forgotten his two BFFs, Kilik and Xianghua).
But then in 2005, I played Soulcalibur III where all characters are given two endings: a no-input "bad" ending and a successful-input "good" ending (based on a mechanic from Soul Edge). In one of Maxi's two endings, he just, like, unceremoniously dies (lol); in the other, he survives and then the adventure continues. Of course, this made me go back to look at his ending from Soulcalibur I, which is the game where he first appeared (he did not appear in Soul Edge). And then I discovered that his ending is VERY similar to his SCIII "bad end": he dies in Kilik's arms and then Kilik throws his nunchuks into the sea. WTF! He just dies in his own ending in the game that introduced him?! In line with his other endings, Maxi's SCIV ending also isn't particularly promising, and what happens to him in the end is left rather ambiguous (but strongly mirrors the "he died" language from SCI). But then in SCV, which takes place 17 years after SCIV, Maxi is alive and kicking (albeit somewhat corrupted by evil energy that slows his aging). (SCVI takes place at an earlier point in the timeline, well before the main traumatizing events that kick off Maxi's friendship with Kilik and his "journey to the West" with Kilik and Xianghua, so I'm not counting that game as having an "ending" for Maxi in it.)
So yeah, it's a bit of a mixed bag here. I didn't realize this initially, but Maxi has a history of it being teased that he might get killed off between games. I mean, I doubt the game-makers will actually kill Maxi off, because this is a fighting game series, and people who main that character will come after you with pitchforks if you dare cut them from the roster in the next game... But still, given the types of endings he gets in these games, I do fear a little bit that a new Soulcalibur game will come out and reveal in its in-game biographies that Maxi died several years ago or something, for the sake of drama. XD
Again, this case is not as clear-cut as the other two examples as you can never really trust fighting game story mode endings until the next game comes out, but I consider this case close enough to count as a character being Schrodinger dead (and me only finding out about this by playing a game *after* the one I first played).
So yeah, this keeps happening to me: If I had a nickel for every time I got unreasonably attached to the hero's male, devil-may-care, best friend who went through traumatizing experiences along with the hero, only to find that in another version of canon, said best friend did NOT make it through the story but rather died in the hero's arms... Well, I would have three nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that's happened so many times...
Anyway, I was wondering if you know of any characters like this, where it's possible to go through the whole story under the belief the character survived, only to find they died in another version of the story -- characters who live in one version of canon but die in another. And if you consumed the one where they lived *first* and then got blindsided by their fate in a different version. I wonder if the experience is very different when the order is swapped (you're expecting the character to die and are like "huh, interesting choice" when they survive); I feel like I must have experience with that too, but for some reason, these three examples always stick out in my mind when it comes to these "Schrodinger dead" characters, maybe because it's more memorable that way. Do you find you tend to latch onto these characters who have a habit of maybe-dying in canon, or that those kinds of characters don't really stand out to you?
EDIT: Oh man, I kept feeling there was another example of me knowing a character should die and being surprised when they didn't, but I couldn't think of it. But I finally remembered -- it's actually the opposite: Mild spoiler warning for Magic Knight Rayearth, but I read the manga first, and then I watched the anime. In the anime, Presea dies once she gives the main trio their new weapons/armor. Having read the full manga, though, I was like "Mm, well, that's an... interesting choice..." because I knew Presea would be plot-relevant later. And then I later read that the anime dealt with this problem by... introducing Presea's twin sister, Sierra! Lmao, amazing. Great save.
Basically, late in high school and during college, I got into three things: (1) I played Soulcalibur for the first time (Soulcalibur II), (2) I finished playing Sword of Mana, and (3) I watched Pinocchio for the first time (at least, at an age old enough that I actually watched/remembered the whole thing).
These three canons actually share something in common, which is that, well, I got unreasonably attached to a particular character who made it to the end of the story alive, but who I later found out died in a different version of canon!
Let me go through these one by one:
Sword of Mana: The first time this happened to me was with Sword of Mana -- in this game, I got really attached to Willy, the main hero's gladiator buddy, who is also (in this game) the main heroine's childhood friend (they grew up in the same Mana Clan village). (Kind of predictable -- monk characters in video games are always my faves for some reason!) In the hero's opening, Willy shows the hero a way out of the gladiator cells, thereby helping the hero escape, although he himself gets caught. He's also one of the support characters the heroine gets over the course of the game. He takes part in the final battles and ends up living on after the heroine becomes the new Mana Tree (in the epilogue that ends the game, he's shown freeing the other Mana Clan women from Count Lee's manor).
Sword of Mana is a remake of the Gameboy game Final Fantasy Adventure, so after finishing Sword of Mana, I wanted to play Final Fantasy Adventure and see how it was different or the same. The experience was basically:
(One minute after the opening crawl)
Willy: (dies)
Me: Wait... WHAT?!
So yeah, uh... in the original game (after a short boss battle), the story basically opens with a mortally injured Willy urging the hero to restore Mana to the world or something, before he dies and traumatizes the hero...
Pinocchio: So during/after college, when I got really into Pinocchio and was writing fanfiction for it, I thought, "Hey! Maybe I should try reading the original book to get some ideas about how to write this fic." I thought that maybe the book might say something interesting about Lampwick. In the movie, Lampwick transforms into a donkey and runs off, and then you never hear anything else about him. It was something that always bothered me -- I always wanted to know what happened to Lampwick and the other boys, and was curious if, in the book, Pinocchio ever ended up encountering Lampwick again.
Well uh... the good news is yes, he does! In the book, after Pinocchio rescues Gepetto from the belly of the whale (shark), Gepetto is very weak and Pinocchio spends some time tending to him. He goes begging for food at a nearby farm and sees a dying donkey and recognizes him. Pinocchio asks who he is and the donkey replies that he is Lampwick... and then dies.
Um... Well I guess I know what happened to Lampwick now! The bad news is that, well, he died.
This case is a bit less clear-cut than in the Sword of Mana case, where Willy definitively survives in one version of canon but dies in the original; here, Lampwick is fate unknown in one adaptation (although alive the last time you see him, albeit a donkey) and dead in the original.
Soulcalibur: Finally, Soulcalibur: one of my favorite characters in this game series is Maxi. It's hard to pick a favorite because the cast is so big, but I definitely have a soft spot for him. (Unsurprisingly, his weapon type (nunchaku) is also very monk-like, so he's a monk character in my heart. ♥)
Maxi's ending in the first game I played (Soulcalibur II) is pretty normal -- a happy ending where he gets everything he wants: he avenges his crew and gets his memories back (yeah, he's an amnesiac in this game, for some reason, who has forgotten his two BFFs, Kilik and Xianghua).
But then in 2005, I played Soulcalibur III where all characters are given two endings: a no-input "bad" ending and a successful-input "good" ending (based on a mechanic from Soul Edge). In one of Maxi's two endings, he just, like, unceremoniously dies (lol); in the other, he survives and then the adventure continues. Of course, this made me go back to look at his ending from Soulcalibur I, which is the game where he first appeared (he did not appear in Soul Edge). And then I discovered that his ending is VERY similar to his SCIII "bad end": he dies in Kilik's arms and then Kilik throws his nunchuks into the sea. WTF! He just dies in his own ending in the game that introduced him?! In line with his other endings, Maxi's SCIV ending also isn't particularly promising, and what happens to him in the end is left rather ambiguous (but strongly mirrors the "he died" language from SCI). But then in SCV, which takes place 17 years after SCIV, Maxi is alive and kicking (albeit somewhat corrupted by evil energy that slows his aging). (SCVI takes place at an earlier point in the timeline, well before the main traumatizing events that kick off Maxi's friendship with Kilik and his "journey to the West" with Kilik and Xianghua, so I'm not counting that game as having an "ending" for Maxi in it.)
So yeah, it's a bit of a mixed bag here. I didn't realize this initially, but Maxi has a history of it being teased that he might get killed off between games. I mean, I doubt the game-makers will actually kill Maxi off, because this is a fighting game series, and people who main that character will come after you with pitchforks if you dare cut them from the roster in the next game... But still, given the types of endings he gets in these games, I do fear a little bit that a new Soulcalibur game will come out and reveal in its in-game biographies that Maxi died several years ago or something, for the sake of drama. XD
Again, this case is not as clear-cut as the other two examples as you can never really trust fighting game story mode endings until the next game comes out, but I consider this case close enough to count as a character being Schrodinger dead (and me only finding out about this by playing a game *after* the one I first played).
So yeah, this keeps happening to me: If I had a nickel for every time I got unreasonably attached to the hero's male, devil-may-care, best friend who went through traumatizing experiences along with the hero, only to find that in another version of canon, said best friend did NOT make it through the story but rather died in the hero's arms... Well, I would have three nickels, which isn't a lot but it's weird that's happened so many times...
Anyway, I was wondering if you know of any characters like this, where it's possible to go through the whole story under the belief the character survived, only to find they died in another version of the story -- characters who live in one version of canon but die in another. And if you consumed the one where they lived *first* and then got blindsided by their fate in a different version. I wonder if the experience is very different when the order is swapped (you're expecting the character to die and are like "huh, interesting choice" when they survive); I feel like I must have experience with that too, but for some reason, these three examples always stick out in my mind when it comes to these "Schrodinger dead" characters, maybe because it's more memorable that way. Do you find you tend to latch onto these characters who have a habit of maybe-dying in canon, or that those kinds of characters don't really stand out to you?
EDIT: Oh man, I kept feeling there was another example of me knowing a character should die and being surprised when they didn't, but I couldn't think of it. But I finally remembered -- it's actually the opposite: Mild spoiler warning for Magic Knight Rayearth, but I read the manga first, and then I watched the anime. In the anime, Presea dies once she gives the main trio their new weapons/armor. Having read the full manga, though, I was like "Mm, well, that's an... interesting choice..." because I knew Presea would be plot-relevant later. And then I later read that the anime dealt with this problem by... introducing Presea's twin sister, Sierra! Lmao, amazing. Great save.