#also btw I’m not presenting this as like groundbreaking media analysis I’m just thinkin about shit yknow

[fearlessjournalism]

it’s like. I think if you’re dead at the center of the narrative you are the body or the ghost or the black hole.

1. you are the body. you are there, maybe physically, maybe in reference, but although you are there, the story will never be about who you are, or who you were. maybe the protagonist does feel vaguely bad about your death, or maybe we learn in passing about a trait or two you once had, but neither the protagonist nor the story really care about you personally; in every other way you are a vehicle for plot and themes and projection and the development of others. sometimes you are inhabited by the ghost, even if it isn’t a literal inhabiting within the world of the story.

2. you are the ghost. you are seen, to a degree. generally speaking, we as the audience know the kind of person you were, and your most defining interests, and enough other details about the life you lived to prove you were living a life. it’s a version of you at partial opacity, but it’s visible. sometimes we physically see you onscreen through flashbacks, or you’re present through someone else telling your story, or we see your perfectly preserved room with all your posters intact. you are missed as a person, or at least as the idea of one, and your character (in both senses of the word, your person and your personality) now has an effect on the plot.

3. the black hole. we as the audience cannot see you, but the plot orbits your gravity, and we know that there was once a star in your position. you are identifiable solely by your effects on the people who knew you. you are more than the body, in that you—you as a person—mattered to the protagonist, but we don’t know enough about you for you to be the ghost. we don’t get scenes with you. we know a few of your traits, or a line or two of a story, all picked up through the things you left behind as they relate to the main characters, but it’s not enough to reconstruct the image of who you once were. as an audience we may not see you, because we do not have enough to envision a whole person through just those pieces, but in the story you are inescapable for those who come too close.