An Open Letter to Collateral Damage Characters

Dear collateral damage characters,

You know who you are.

I’m not talking about “characters from Collateral Damage.” Sorry, Arnold.

Collateral damage characters, you span all genres, touch almost every audience. You’re blue collar and white collar. Old and young. Manufacturers. Journalists. Architects. Politicians. Students. You’re everywhere.

While we watch the drama of a story’s central characters with bated breath, you get murdered by the bad guy or smashed under falling buildings or stricken with the plague of the zombie apocalypse. You’re collateral damage.

And we don’t really care.

Oh, we mourn for some characters who die, all right. The hero’s dad, say, or the best friend or the girlfriend or whoever else we’ve been led to care about.

But we’re not supposed to mourn for you, collateral damage characters. We don’t even know you.

We watch you be flung from bridges or crushed by crumbling architecture or exploded into flame—only to see the vastness of the story’s conflict. Only to come to respect, if we can, the awesome power of the villain, whether he’s a character himself or a faceless force set to overwhelm the protagonist.

And I can’t apologize for that.

We can’t mourn for you, collateral damage characters. Not really. Those of us on the sensitive side may be saddened to watch you go; or if your demise is particularly gory or cruel or disturbing, you may impress some of us with the intensity of it. But we can’t actually grieve for all of you. We’d go insane if we did.

So I’m not apologizing.

But the fact is, collateral damage characters, the stories that employ you wouldn’t be anything without you. A serial killer isn’t a serial killer unless he kills serially. A zombie apocalypse isn’t a zombie apocalypse unless it zombifies multitudes of unfortunate humans. An invading alien force is laughable unless it can use its freakish alien technology to wipe out heavy percentages of the human population.

You’re the nameless characters who fall to the serial killer, the zombie apocalypse, the alien invasion. And that killer, that apocalypse, that invasion is the force that drives the story. It’s the conflict, the story’s most vital element.

Collateral damage characters, you hold up stories’ conflicts.

So then, however unmourned or little noted, you are crucial to the stories in which you suffer. You’re the reason we fear the conflict and wonder if the hero will make it to the end. In essence, you’re the reason we keep watching or reading or listening. You make the story matter.

So I guess what I’m trying to say is thanks.

Thanks for, you know, dying and stuff.

Sincerely,

A Fangirl