What are your thoughts on the common trope of killing off a characters close to the protagonist( Such as a Girlfriend, Family member, close friend)? Do you think that this trope is overused? Is there a way of doing this that isn't so cliché? Do you think t

I only have one thought on any trope, which is that it’s all about execution.

The not-super-astute people who freak out about Women In Refrigerators and think I was saying bad things should never happen to female characters are as clueless as they are incorrect. That was never the point.

Even tropes that SOUND horrid can be executed and inverted and pulled inside out. 

You can kill a sidekick or a girlfriend and make it meaningful and moving. You can take the easy path and make it the hard path, by doing something new and useful and important with it. 

I never asked for a sanitized fictional world. I asked people to look and see if this was a trend, and if it was, what it meant. 

When something is so lazily reproduced that it DOES become a cliche, or simply misuses the characters in a shoddy, short-sighted way, that’s the flipside of the coin, it’s bad execution. The cliche aspect simply means the difficulty rating to do something worthwhile is much harder.

I write stories where women get kicked around all the time. Mostly because the heroes I love best are the ones that take a beating, and find a way to survive, find a way to get back up.  That’s the Batman I loved best, the guy who got outgunned sometimes. That’s the Spirit. That’s Deadpool, even. Those are the kinds of characters that seem most heroic to be because their victories COST them something.

When I am writing characters who are meant to be heroic, I want them to have skin in the game. So when I write Red Sonja, when I write Superman, when I write Black Canary, they have the possibility of failure, of getting their asses kicked. Not everyone likes this, I still have people mad that Batwoman beat the crap out of Batgirl in Batgirl’s own book. 

It’s not just physical, either, it’s emotional. It’s mental. It’s what hits the character in the gut.

Yes, you will get an emotional response if you kill a character’s family or girlfriend or whatever. But without craft, thought, and execution, it’s like a hack comedian going for cheap applause. It doesn’t sustain, it’s a finger-tapping from a guy who can’t play guitar.

You can make almost any trope into something powerful and good. But most people using these cliche things don’t aim that high, they don’t know how.