This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
moved from misspelled version
I want to add The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings. It did not win the Newbery for 1939, but was that year's recipient of the Pulitzer Prize. The protagonist, Jody, adopts a fawn which he calls Flag and —spoiler— at the end of the book, yes, has to shoot it.
Vifetoile: Yearling works. It works. (OH good heavens the ending.)
Tanto: Would Lord of the Flies go here?
Alexandra Erin: I'd say no. It's an award-winning book for children wherein people die, but it's a different trope in operation...it's teaching the audience something about humanity and civilization, rather than the protagonist learning something about life and growing up. The tone of the story is markedly different, as well. I'd say the defining characteristic that ties together the books that do fall under this is that they're all both sad and saccharine, like a thin little slice of diet cheesecake.
Lale: Lord of the Flies is a children's book? I mean, yes, it's about children, but...
Alexandra Erin: I always assumed, as a direct subversion of "boys' own adventure" stories, it was aimed at a younger audience... perhaps an older one than Bridge or some of the other ones no this list, but I've certainly never seen anybody at the age of majority or older reading it. Granted, that may be because it's all but impossible to make it through secondary education in the U.S. without having read it...
Mister Six: Yeah, we read this one at school. Still, it doesn't seem to fit the rest of the trope (ie. coming of age story, jumping to adulthood etc); Lord Of The Flies is about the thin line between civilisation and barbarity.
Duckluck: Besides, Lord of the Flies is really only for people high school age and older. Younger characters can read it, but they'll miss a lot of the symbolism and may not get the point at all. Also, it doesn't really fit the trope, because even after they're stranded and kids start dying left and right, they don't really grow up. The point is that they're still children, with all the cruelty and selfishness that entails. The book's a bit bleak, but I always thought it was a lot more honest than those wish-fulfillment stories where a bunch of unsupervised children somehow manage to build a thriving Bamboo Technology utopia and only go home at all because they miss their families. Just my two cents.
Nlpnt:I'm curious just what on this page makes the Google ad for the Conservative Book Club come up. I'm a semi-regular visitor to Huffington Post and Move On.org, so I doubt it's any of my cookies...
Susan Davis: removed the following two examples, which really don't fit:
- Videogame Example: Fable 2 Interviewers with the game's developers indicate that the dog, your only party member and virtual pet, was specifically put into the game so that the player would love it and then be sad when it dies it's plotline death.
- In a bizarre subversion, Portal features the Weighted Companion Cube, which the player must keep for the entirety of a level to solve a series of puzzles. While in the level, the player is constantly reminded that the companion cube has no feelings, cannot speak, etc... and is then instructed to drop the companion cube in an incinerator. While the level seems to be mocking the idea of creating a character for the sole purpose to taking it away, many players felt terrible about "killing" their companion cube!
- That said, "killing" the cube gives you an achievement so it's all good.
- The commentary explains that too many people would try to solve that level without using a cube, so they had GLADoS talk specifically about the cube and made it more unique in appearance. However, that caused players to try to bring the cube with them to future levels, so they added the "murder" bit, which had the nice side effect of making GLADoS even more of a sociopath.
Susan Davis: Portal in particular is nothing remotely like the sort of kid's literature aimed at the Newbery Medal. Isn't there another trope somewhere for cute sympathetic characters meeting grisly demises? (ISTR one that also includes Floyd from Planetfall, among others.)
Removed The Black Cauldron; the death of Prince Ellidyr is a tragedy, but not of this kind.
Shouldn't White Fang be listed as averting the trope? Or does it not count since White Fang actually is the main character of the book?
What about this
and the next few strips from Questionable Content?
Lord Seth: I'm not sure Harry Potter is really an example; this trope is when a character is killed off for probably no purpose other than to make it look dramatic and win an award. The killing off of most of the characters in Harry Potter (except for maybe the seventh book) tended to have an important effect on the plot.
theorc: I'm not sure half the examples here belong. The trope itself seems to be about gratuitous death or tragedy added to a book. In quite a few cases here, the plot justifies it or you can see it coming. Then again, I'm a strong Tropes Are Not Bad person here, and using death as a coming of age moment is such a common theme in literature I don't think it's usually bad.
Try as I might, I just can't justify the Figure17 entry. Shou's death doesn't count, because it had completely the opposite effect - it brought out every childish, negative aspect in Tsubasa and gave them free reign, whilst at the same time undermining and generally making a mess of all the hard work Hikaru had put into raising Tsubasa's self-confidence. As for Hikaru, I suppose her death holds some elements of this trope, but certainly not enough to justify an entry on its own. All the good she does, she does while she's alive. Her death is a Heroic Sacrifice that everyone, the characters and the audience, see as a very real possibility long before it happens and dread right up to the point, as the possibility of her surviving becomes more and more remote. Her death simply leaves Tsubasa with what she already learned. Tsubasa gets no defining tragedy from it, she does not in any way grow up, and the very little effect from Hikaru's death is to leave her as a poignant memory that gives Tsubasa a far better childhood than she would have had had they never come to be sisters. So yeah, Hikaru's death is a Heroic Sacrifice by a character that has about as much claim to 'main character' as Tsubasa, leading into a Bittersweet Ending, with very faint Death by Newbery Medal elements that simply aren't enough to properly justify an entry on the page if you try to write more than 'Hikaru dies'. As such, I've removed the entry, but left a little note under Bittersweet Ending on the Figure17 page. - Chibi-Kibou
Vifetoile: Deleted this example:
- I hate Bridge to Terabithia. Call me heartless, but the book sucks. I had to read it, and it's awful. I am now off to Hell, to roast for eternity with all the other soulless.
You're not a soulless freak for hating the book. But you should not have Complained on the Main Wiki without at least relating your rant to the topic at hand!
Indefatigable: This seems like a really watered-down list of all kinds of kids' books with death in them. Given the title of the trope, I thought it was going to be about deaths that are central to the plot or to a character's growth. But there's a lot of other stuff in there. I agree with Lord Seth about the Harry Potter example, which seemed gratuitous to me considering that the books had already done the big treatment of the hero facing the death of loved ones and growing up because of it. The Reader's Digest examples (I read these avidly as a kid) were often real life stories about someone's experiences with a pet, which naturally ended with the pet's death; they're not examples of award-chasing authors dropping death into a book to make it a more important work of literature. We need to figure out what this trope is really about, and weed out the examples that don't fit.
Prfnoff: I also think that this trope's meaning has drifted considerably. I removed Star Wars Episode IV from the examples, because "jump[ing] pretty much overnight from being a Farm Boy to being a war hero" is very much not what the protagonists of award-winning YA books are supposed to be like. The standard scenario is more like the book I once read (and don't want to read again) where the girl's grandfather dies in the last few pages; she cries; end of story. Right now, this trope seems to be about any work of literature with a child protagonist and some dramatic death. This needs to be fixed.
Rebochan: Since Jiji the Cat doesn't die and Kiki and him have a happy ending (Kiki just can't talk to him anymore), that's a pretty poor example. I pulled it out.
Jewelled Dragon (9/22/09): I made a separate section at the top for actual Newbery winners. I just went by what people had mentioned in the entries; a more ambitious person can check the remaining examples under Literature for ones that are Newbery winners but don't say so, and can add years to the entries that don't have them. Hopefully this will somewhat minimize the problem of this becoming a blanket page about children's/young adult books with deaths in them (although there's a minor danger of it becoming a comprehensive list of Newbery winners, with the deathless ones listed as "aversions").
Prfnoff: Removed My Dog Skip from the Film section. As I recall, Skip is only wounded in the course of the actual story, and only dies in the Deadly Distant Finale.
