Character Death in the MSQ

[Cleretic]

You're still not really making any meaningful point here. You're just saying things and asserting there's some greater pattern to this, when... yeah, all I see here is you continuing to dismiss exceptions with things like 'well I don't care about Papalymo, ergo'.

I suggested that maybe you want to say something more personal and emotional, but I feel like you instead want to go quantitative on this: to be able to say 'all FFXIV deaths fit into these four and a half categories'. If that's what you want to say, then I suggest you do the legwork: prove that this is in fact true, by making a whole project of the categorization. Categorize every single death to show that you've actually come up with a worthwhile categorization system! I've got no idea what end that would serve, but you could do it!

If you're doing that, at least redefine 'the guy nobody cared about', because that's an extremely subjective category that kinda just acts as a bin for you to throw any character that you happen to personally dismiss. I don't think that's what you intend, I think what you're actually trying to do here is to declare these to be characters that primarily exist to die; whose entire purpose in the story is to, sooner or later, cark it. These are your Conrads, your Tesleens, and any number of literally nameless characters. It is not a box to throw in characters you personally don't care about, it's a recognizable habit (in a lot of stories, not just FFXIV) to make characters primarily for the purposes of dying for plot furtherance, stakes-raising or tone-setting.

[StormChase]

You're still not really making any meaningful point here. You're just saying things and asserting there's some greater pattern to this, when... yeah, all I see here is you continuing to dismiss exceptions with things like 'well I don't care about Papalymo, ergo'.

I suggested that maybe you want to say something more personal and emotional, but I feel like you instead want to go quantitative on this: to be able to say 'all FFXIV deaths fit into these four and a half categories'. If that's what you want to say, then I suggest you do the legwork: prove that this is in fact true, by making a whole project of the categorization. Categorize every single death to show that you've actually come up with a worthwhile categorization system! I've got no idea what end that would serve, but you could do it!

If you're doing that, at least redefine 'the guy nobody cared about', because that's an extremely subjective category that kinda just acts as a bin for you to throw any character that you happen to personally dismiss. I don't think that's what you intend, I think what you're actually trying to do here is to declare these to be characters that primarily exist to die; whose entire purpose in the story is to, sooner or later, cark it. These are your Conrads, your Tesleens, and any number of literally nameless characters. It is not a box to throw in characters you personally don't care about, it's a recognizable habit (in a lot of stories, not just FFXIV) to make characters primarily for the purposes of dying for plot furtherance, stakes-raising or tone-setting.

Yeah, I know it's a personal observation because a lot of these are pretty subjective. I think, like you said, what I was trying to put into words was characters I'm guessing were made to die or killed to clear space. "The Guy Nobody Cared About" is more of a hyperbolic title. Also the quantitative route is doable but not really an option for the forums since there's a 3000-character limit.

[Shistar]

Also the quantitative route is doable but not really an option for the forums since there's a 3000-character limit.

You can edit your posts to add more stuff, cutting down on the number of posts needed to make your entire point.

[Cleretic]

You can edit your posts to add more stuff, cutting down on the number of posts needed to make your entire point.

I'd also put forward that if you really want to do this, the optimal angle might be 'Google spreadsheet'. Chart every death by category and expansion, start graphing the results, you'll probably start to see patterns and conclusions you both will and won't expect, like an expansion having a higher or lower bodycount than expected, or like, an unnoticed spike in villain fake-out deaths.