Yuffie's Writing How-To's

TV to Books: Attack on Titan

I just joined the Attack on Titan bandwagon and watched the entire series in two days. And my reaction: Wow. So here's a TV to Books on it!

Attack on Titan is about the human race barricading themselves inside three 50-meter-tall, concentric walls, hiding from giants called titans whose only goal seems to be to eat humans. For 100 years, there's been peace and no titan has gotten through the wall. Until now! A 60-meter titan appears out of thin air and breaks a hole in the wall, letting the titans into the city. A massacre ensues where the titans eat everyone, traumatizing the three protagonists Eren, Mikasa, and Armin who manage to escape with about 100 others. Eren watches his mother get bitten in half by a titan, and at that moment, he vows to kill every single titan. Skip ahead a few years, and he's joined the military. The series shows their struggle against the titans.

This how-to will focus on how to rip away all the happiness from your readers and leave them in a state that mixes: O_________O ;_______;. Basically, this how-to addresses every author's favorite plot device: killing off characters.

If you want to make your readers fear for your MC's life, really FEAR for it, you have to make them believe they really aren't safe from your authorly ax. The moment you start killing off protagonists or really close friends of the MC, the readers realize no one is safe from your authorly wrath. the MC might really die. This is even more effective if your story is told from multiple povs, because if one MC dies, another is around to tell the story. That's a terrifying feeling.

In Attack on Titan, you have people dying left and right. People we thought were going to play an important role in the story suddenly get swallowed whole or smashed into a building. So how do you manipulate your reader into thinking a character will be important?

You have to give that character something important to say or do for the MC or another character. I'll give one death spoiler to exemplify this: Eren and his squad are running from a titan, and another squad is fighting the titan to slow it down so Eren can escape. Eren watches that squad get squashed, and he's about to turn around and fight the titan himself. His squad members yell at him not to break formation, to trust them and let them handle it. Then there's a flashback where we see all of them bonding. Basically, they accused Eren of not being on their side, and when Eren proved otherewise, they bit themselves as punishment (makes sense in context, I promise). Then we return to the present and watch these guys kick some major titan butt. And Eren is all happy and glad he chose to leave it to them. And then.

HULK SMASH.

This is the kind of evil manipulation master authors are famous for. Make the readers really believe a certain character(s) will really affect the MC, have them be a huge impact for a few minutes, and then watch them get slammed into a tree and have their neck broken. Attack on Titan does this ALL OVER the place, so it's known as "an emotional rollercoaster that only goes up."

Get your readers to care about a character, then dramatically kill them off at their high point.

If your story features a lot of death, one thing to be careful of is to make the deaths unique. Give the deaths their own personality, so to speak, otherwise the impact of each death will become watered down and the reader will start to predict when and how someone dies.

For example, in Attack on Titan, some humans get eaten (okay, a LOT of humans get eaten), some get stomped on, some get crushed. Some are hiding and get eaten, some are running and get eaten, some are fighting back and get eaten, some let themselves get eaten in place of another character. Even the same "get eaten" death can be varied depending on the character we're looking at. Each character should die in their own way that's meaningful and relevant to what their character represented.

Another meaningful death in the series was of a character who was found dead way after the battle, and no one even saw how he died. Just a few episodes ago, he was talking to one of the main characters, who was feeling really scared and down on himself. This dead guy had said something really touching and motivational to raise his friend's spirits. And then the friend finds him dead at the side of the street, and no one even saw how he'd lost his life. His death was so insignificant--as in, it wasn't some huge blow-out dramatic death bards write songs about. He just got ripped in half at some inconsequential point. Everyone dreams of an epic death, a death that meant something, and when you find this guy who'd just motivated another character to survive now lying dead in the street, it hits you that he didn't get the death he deserved. And that warrents a few tears.

And now switching gears a little from how characters die to how the people left alive deal with the deaths. Attack on Titan did a beautiful and heart-wrenching job at showing the absolute terror of everyone in the face of death by titan. There wasn't a single person who, when looking at a titan for the first time, didn't feel like pissing their pants. When they start seeing their friends and family getting eaten, almost no character has any resolve left. They go mad with grief for a little while. Everyone is crying and screaming and ranting. One person went and shot themselves because they didn't want to get eaten. Right up to the end of the series, main characters are crying--absolutely bawling--because they don't want to die. You see them in zombie-mode just sitting there with a dead look in their eyes after their friends died. You see them break down sobbing hours later when it finally sinks in. You see trained soldiers hiding under tables and crying because they don't know what to do anymore.

Everyone grieves and deals with death and fear of their own death differently. Show that through your characters!

One prominent example of the "sinking in" factor is with Mikasa. She's the perfect, badass goddess of the series. Seemingly no flaws. Almost a Mary Sue, but not quite. She shows no fear in face of the titans and doesn't even flinch when people die around her. Then she learns through word-of-mouth that someone she really cares about is dead, and she flinches. Her eyes go wide. She quickly shakes it off and keeps moving forward. You think for a moment that she really doesn't care, but then you see her fight the titans, and she goes ham on them. She's furious, and just watching her is breathtaking and terrifying at the same time.

Then she finds her friend's body, and this chick who previously showed no emotion grabs him and starts bawling. The camera zooms out to show the full scene, and you can hear her crying from really far away. That's how much she snapped when everything finally sunk in.

The "sinking in" factor is really important to have for some characters, because it shows a lasting impact of the death. If they're crying and sobbing the moment they find someone dead, it's sad. If they're crying hours later, it's really sad, because we can see that this death has been gnawing away at them from the inside for hours. These characters have been suffering for hours, but they held it in until a more appropriate time, either because they had another objective (like a giant titan was stomping over and about to eat more people) or to protect another person from emotional turmoil (like character A holds in their tears so character B doesn't break down too).

A lot of writing resources tell you not to kill off a character for the sake of death, that every character's death should further the plot. If you're writing a story about war or something where masses of people are dying left and right, you need some deaths that happened for no reason. That's the point: people don't always die epic deaths. Some people die for no reason, their deaths were worthless. If you make the protagonists realize this, you've got a powerful death. So by a pointless death, you still make a point.

So here's my advice: if you want to kill off a character, do it! :) Just make sure you do it at a proper time for that character. A common mistake is to kill off a character too early, before we become attached to them, so their death doesn't leave a lasting impression on us. And when the protagonists are bawling over the death, they seem almost melodramatic because we don't know why they cared about this person. Sometimes the bawling after a death can MAKE us care about the person who died, too. If you care about the MC, and you see them break down at someone's death, you can see just how much they cared about the person. So actually, it can work either way. It's up to you as the writer to pull it off. ;)

So put on your gloves and get out your authorly ax, and let the maiming of our beloved characters begin!