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Radium

JCF Éminence Grise

Joined: Jul 2002

Posts: 12,275

Radium is an asset to this forum

Jan 25, 2007, 05:50 PM
Radium is offline
Quote:
Originally Posted by Coppertop
Semi-immortality makes a character boring. No matter how much peril he or she is in, we yawn through it, because we already know they're not going to get killed.
I disagree here; in any story narrated in the first-person past-tense you know the main character won't get killed*. Heck, there's even been tons of interesting stories with immortal main characters. The webcomic Black Tapestries is narrated in the past tense by an immortal character. That makes her, like, double immortal.

For the story to be interesting, here simply has to be something threatened, whether another character, an idea, a feeling, a world, etc. Somewhere there needs to be the risk of loss or failure. If the reader already knows how the story will end, and how that end will come about, then there's no point in reading.

*The exception being ToU, where everyone dies all the time.
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