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heyclickadee · 2 years ago

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Tech’s Alive, Part 6: The Matter of Weight (cw for discussions of death, suicide mention, genocide mention)

AKA, why “Tech should stay dead for the stakes” and “Tech should stay dead so the moment he sacrifices himself retains its weight” are arguments I will not be entertaining in this household. And by this household, I mean my blog. But also probably my actual apartment here in real space.

So, this isn’t really an argument for why Tech is alive, per se. It’s more just me trying to counter the two most common arguments I see people making for why he should be dead, whether the person making the argument thinks he’s dead or not.

Stakes:

The first argument, that Tech should stay dead for the sake of the “stakes” is, to me, the most nebulous. On this here interwebs we tend to talk about “stakes” purely in the negative; everyone’s going to die, the villains are going to win, everything is going to be sad forever, etc. But stakes in a story are really just about potential consequences—what could happen if the characters succeed, and what could happen if they fail. And while it’s true that killing a character can raise the stakes in a story, it’s best accomplished by killing off a secondary character, and it can really only raise them in a story in which death was never a potential consequence.

Death has always been a potential consequence for these characters, not just for failure, but just for existing in the world in which they live. Scratch that, dying is quite literally what they were made to do. This is a series in which two genocides have already taken place—that of the Jedi, then of the Kaminoans—and which has us watching a third ongoing—that of the clones themselves. Almost every new named clone we’ve met has died, and died violently. The clone force 99 characters have all almost died about once an episode so far, and every time they do, the show tends to treat it as a serious close call.

So killing off Tech doesn’t raise the potential consequences of failure to “death” because that potential was always there. Killing off a secondary but known clone character like, say, Howser could have made heightened that risk more effectively. Heck, Mayday’s death does a better job of raising that risk for Crosshair, for example; the only reason Crosshair wasn’t the one who died in the avalanche was was because Mayday noticed the rock and pushed Crosshair out of the way. Killing off Tech and leaving him dead, by contrast, would actually, in a way, lower the stakes—because, again, the risk of “potential consequences” is gone (it’s just reality now), AND stakes are also about what could happen if the characters succeed and get what they want. Meaning that if Tech’s gone for good, the potential positive consequences are much, much lower. The positive consequence of the clone force 99 family reuniting—the thing the story keeps making us want—would just be gone. There’s only so far you can ratchet the spring of tension before it snaps.

That said, when some people argue for Tech’s death in favor of raised stakes, I don’t think the above is really what they’re talking about. They’re mostly making a somewhat edgelordy argument about death needing to feel real in the star war and darkness being the “mature” option. Let’s say I bought that argument. Let’s say I actually thought “the reality of death” and “maturity” were valid reasons to kill off a main character. Let’s even push aside all the reasons why I think killing off any one of the bad batchers permanently would break the story. Let’s do this thought experiment. Killing off Tech in this season and leaving him dead still doesn’t work, specifically because so much time this season was spent on developing and helping the other characters to understand him better.

You can spend time building up a character and developing them for the sole purpose of killing them and giving them a send-off if your show has an unserialized format. Think Gray’s Anatomy or Bones; unserialized shows are just taking the characters and putting them in different combinations or scenarios until the end of time without really worrying about arcs or narrative threads, so in that format spending time with a character before killing them off makes sense. Spending an entire season of a serialized show building up a character and their relationships, using them to develop certain themes and narrative threads, using them to push certain parts of the plot forward, and then killing them off in which a way which does nothing to resolve any of those arcs, themes, or narrative threads, though? That’s just a waste of time. Of limited time—because fully serialized shows have an ending. I’d be more willing to buy into this line of argument if it was Wrecker, not Tech, simply because he hasn’t had the kind of development Tech has.

Don’t get me wrong, I’d still absolutely hate it and would see perma-deathing Wrecker as just as story breaking as perma-deathing Tech. But if we’re doing the thought experiment where I’m talking about stakes the way some people seem to be doing, I could see it working better in that context than perma-deathing Tech. People can make that argument about Tech’s “death,” sure, but what they’re really advocating for is bad writing. And hey! Maybe we’ll get to the end of the show and it will turn out to have been badly written! I just…don’t really buy that right now.

(Of course, this is all moot anyway, because I fundamentally disagree with the definition of stakes being used by some people making this argument and see this line of thinking as somewhat edgelordy bologna anyway. But! Moving on.)

Wanting Tech’s Sacrifice to Have Weight:

So, I’m more sympathetic to this line of thinking. I don’t agree with it, but I can kind of respect where it’s coming from. I’ve mostly seen this from people who really hate the idea that Tech is dead, but don’t see a way for the moment in which Tech sacrifices himself to maintain its emotional weight if it turns out he’s alive, and who want the writers to respect Tech’s choice. And I get that. I’ve watched more than one show that had some big emotional moment that got completely ruined by being undone or having some other development come up later on. So it’s not that I think this argument is invalid; I just don’t think it applies in this specific case.

Because…okay, first, when it comes to the writers respecting Tech’s choice, I want us to think really hard about what he’s choosing to do. Because he’s not choosing to die. Not exactly. He’s choosing to do something extremely risky that will probably get him killed, and he knows it, in order to save his family. And I know it maybe doesn’t seem like there’s a distinction there, but there is one, and it’s important, because—I mean—listen to that last heavy sigh he gives before his last line. He doesn’t want to do it. He doesn’t want to die. He just doesn’t see any way out for the others if he doesn’t risk it. (Also I feel like the “the writers need to respect his choice argument” really kind of…not…real great bad, actually, it’s real bad guys, even if he was choosing to die, specifically, because that’s way too close to advocating for suicide for comfort. I don’t think that’s what anyone is intending by this argument but….)

Second, I don’t agree that Tech’s “death” is what gives that moment its emotional weight. Let’s say that Tech does die here. Let’s say he really isn’t coming back. In that case, his death is kind of meaningless, because he was going to die anyway. If we’re saying he died, then it was either all of them die, or just him. Which means that the thing that gives that moment weight can’t be his death, because he had no way out of dying, if we’re looking at it that way and accepting that he’s just gone for good.

The thing that gives that moment weight—just a warning, I’m about to get tooth-achingly schmaltzy here, and I’m not sorry—is love. It’s everyone in the batch’s love for Tech shattering into a million little pieces of grief and horror as they watch him fall. It’s Tech loving his family so damn much he refuses to even consider letting them fall with him. It’s Tech, not knowing that he’s a character in a story, looking at the situation, knowing what he’s about to do will probably kill him—because if he wasn’t a character in a story, it probably would—knowing that if he does it he’ll probably never see Crosshair again, never see Echo or Hunter at peace, never get to hear Wrecker laugh again, never get to see Omega grow up, and still choosing to take the fall for them because there’s no chance he’d let them take the same risk. That’s why that moment has meaning. And because that’s where the meaning comes from, I can’t see how that meaning or weight would evaporate if he came back.

I mean—let’s say you were waking down the street with a friend. You step out in front of a bus, purely by accident. Your friend notices and pushes you out of the way, and in so doing steps in front of the bus, gets hit, and miraculously survives. Does their survival do anything to decrease the fact that they were willing to get hit by a bus for you? Are we really going to argue “death, or it doesn’t count” when it comes to self-sacrifice?

Furthermore, the “Tech has to stay dead for his sacrifice to have weight” argument seems to be made at least partly from the point of view that “dead” and “fully abled” are the only two options. They’re not. Other people have covered the possibility that Tech will come back with a physical disability that he has to adjust to way better than I ever could, but that’s a very real consequence the show could deal with.

I don’t really have a conclusion to this. Basically, while I have seen the stakes and weight arguments floating around, I don’t really see either of them as valid narrative arguments for keeping Tech dead, and I wanted to explain why.

#the bad batch #tbb spoilers #the bad batch speculation #sort of #tech’salive #tech’saliveseries #ya thought you were rid of me #something something bad penny #if this reads #like it was typed in a frenzy during my lunch break #that’s because it was #cw death #cw suicide mention #cw genocide mention

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