Bwah?

[piplover]

Have you ever been reading a really good fic, good plot, well written, when all the sudden it goes off into WTF-land?  Yeah, that's where I'm at now.  I can't even stop reading it because it sucked me in and now I have to find out how it ends.  But - where did that great story go? 

Comments

[dreamflower]

Even worse. Saruman tricked Merry into killing him!

Of course the whole idea was just to give Merry maximum angst. As if poor Merry could ever remain sane after something like that!

It literally made me want to throw up when I realized it wasn't just another trick on Saruman's part.

[piplover.livejournal.com]

Ick! That's horrible. I'm so glad I missed that one. Sometimes, I think authors just don't get it. Less really can be more. You're right, I don't think Merry could have remained sane after doing something like that. The only reason Merry and Pippin managed to get through their ordeal, during and after, was because they had each other. Sheesh.

[dreamflower]

I know. I recently totally went off another WIP I'd been following because of an unwarned character death, and even though it was an OC, it still really upset me. So far as I could tell there was no good reason except to make the canon character suffer.

There has to be more reason to it than that. The first time I killed off a character, I agonized over it for months, before I finally realized it was necessary. And I went out of my way to warn people. I telegraphed it in every way imaginable, so no one would be shocked. And I put it in a side story, and not in my main WIP at the time, so readers who did not want to read about it would not have to.