This article contains spoilers for Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League.
It isn’t surprising at this point that fans get mad when franchises they like do things they don’t expect. More than six years have passed sinceThe Last Jedihit theaters, and arguments about the movie still break out on social media every month. When a new entry in an established franchise takes risks, the majority of fans may be willing to go with the flow (see: The Last Jedi’s box office), but a vocal subset will always dig their heels in and refuse to let the characters they know and the worlds they inhabit grow and change.
Gamers are frequently guilty of this, which we can see once again in the predictable online response to the anti-heroes ofSuicide Squad: Kill the Justice Leaguedoing exactly what the title explicitly said they were going to do. As the game arrivedin a week long ‘early access’ period, it was revealed that the Suicide Squad unceremoniously dispatches Batman and The Flash in the campaign. Harley Quinn shoots Batman in the head, and Captain Boomerang urinates on The Flash’s corpse. Fans have been complaining that this is disrespectful to the characters, and one popular post attempted to frame this story decision as a culture war issue, juxtaposing Batman’s death at Harley’s hands with Joel’s death at Abby’s hands inThe Last of Us Part 2.
I don’t take this too seriously because I know that a subset of gamers will whine about anything and everything. When you’ve seen people get mad because a puddle in a game was slightly smaller than a puddle in an E3 presentation, this stuff can’t take you by surprise anymore.
But rejecting any plot detail or character moment because it doesn’t make us feel nice is such a boring way to approach art.
Players who are still mad that Joel died seem to be confused about the function or purpose of stories in general and, specifically, about what kind of story The Last of Us was telling. Is The Last of Us a story about how Joel is an uncomplicated, heroic man who unambiguously does the right thing even though it’s hard? Obviously not. The first game frames Joel, at best, as complicated and, at worst, as villainous. He tortures Robert in the opening act, kills a bunch of innocent people at the climax, and does plenty of other selfish things in the ten hours in between. We may root for Joel because we like complicated characters, but he’s not all that different from Walter White (a character who spoiler alert dies in his show’s finale).
There were a lot of ways that The Last of Us Part 2 could have played out, and having Abby track down and kill Joel makes plenty of sense. The people Joel killed would, in many cases, have family or people who cared about them, and he didn’t have superpowers, so there’s no reason a group of young people out for revenge couldn’t get the drop on him. You may not like it, and it’s understandable to get attached to a well-written character, but stories are not machines to give you exactly what you want. AI does that. Real storytellers won’t.
But — and this shouldn’t be lost in this discussion — the characters we’re talking about aren’t real. Joel isn’t real. Batman isn’t real. The Flash isn’t real. So, when gamers talk about characters being “disrespected”, I mostly just wonder who they think should be taking offense.
Joel, Batman, and The Flash don’t have real-world family members to mourn them. Why should characters in a story who hate Batman and The Flash consider the respect they deserve or whether their actions are tarnishing their legacy? Good writing mostly involves paying attention to the characters in your story and trying to faithfully translate what they would do. I don’t know if the Suicide Squad game is good because I haven’t played it, but there’s nothing wrong with a writer having a character do something that the character would believably want to do, even if that thing is bad.
A beloved character dying is sad, but that sadness is a testament to the work the artists behind the scenes did to make them real and vivid. Those feelings shouldn’t be rejected. They should be embraced. Making you feel things, pleasant or unpleasant, is one of the great gifts that art can give us, and you’re robbing yourself of powerful experiences if you may’t stand to see your favs get hurt. Or, you know, peed on.
