#2: Jun 9th 2020 at 8:29:49 AM
From the update I infer that ~Troper48 does no longer want to do this so declining the thread. Please re-post if folks want a repair effort here.
"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled." - Richard Feynman
Total posts: 2
(Update: I've decided to abandon this project as I don't care enough about it anymore, it would take too much time, and the lines between the different categories I'm talking about are too blurry. If anyone else wants to pick this up feel free to but I have decided to leave it.)
I think the Dead All Along page should either be split into multiple tropes or have the examples be split into multiple sections (I've seen this done on some pages but I currently can't find any examples). This is because the trope seems to come in at least 3 distinct enough variations:
- Undead All Along
: Character is revealed to be a literal supernatural entity such as a ghost.
- Never Really There
: Character is revealed to be a hallucination of another character, or the narrative was hiding the fact that the character was dead via nonlinear storytelling or something similar.
- Title TBD, maybe something like "Secretly Dead": character is revealed to have been killed and replaced by someone else a while ago, or an illusion has been set up this whole time to intentionally hide the character's death.
I don't see any downsides to dividing this page's examples up in some way, especially since there are so many examples. I think the three versions are distinct enough and all mean different enough things for the characters involved. If it was split into three separate pages I think the original Dead All Along page could still be kept and house the examples that don't easily fit into one of these categories.Below I've organized some of the examples on the page into each of the categories. To see the full example of a work, look for it on the Dead All Along page. Unmarked spoilers as it's an ending/death trope.
Undead All Along:
Never Really There:
Secretly Dead: (this could be the one to keep the Dead All Along title)
My one concern is the final category. While Undead All Along and Never Really There are pretty clear cut and easy to distinguish most of the time, the third category is a bit less specific. Originally I thought it would just be the simple category of basically "Kill and Replace/Dead Person Impersonation but past tense and as a reveal", but as I looked through more examples I realized there were also situations of characters seeming as if they were alive because of the framing of it or the story structure, such as Torchwood: The Lost Files or Captain America: Civil War, while there are many others where a character is not necessarily "replaced" but their life is kept up as an illusion. Well to be fair I suppose you could count that as "using a dead person's identity for your own benefits, whether you were the one to kill them or not". So maybe that should be the criteria for the third trope. But still, what do we do about ones like Captain America Civil War?
Edited by Troper48 on Jun 3rd 2020 at 5:21:38 AM