Blogging A to Z Challenge: K is for Killing

The A to Z challenge is a challenge in which bloggers post every day during the entire month, and each day has a post starting with a different letter of the alphabet. The first day, the post features “A”, the second day “B”, and so on. It’s much better explained on the Blogging from A to Z website, so I’ll just refer you there.

Today’s post is about killing. Well, I needed a word with a ‘K’, and the first one that popped to mind was ‘killing’, so…I may be a little disturbed. I’ll leave that for you to find out.

Either way, I’m going to write about killing today. Killing in literature. First, the discrepancy between how it’s all right to kill off monsters, no matter how human they appear, and how it’s not all right to kill humans, no matter how monstrous they are. And secondly, I’ll talk about killing characters.

No TV show has ever made me think more about how apparently killing monsters is okay, even if they’re relatively human, and killing humans is wrong, even if they act like monsters, than Supernatural. Sam and Dean have no problem killing monsters in all shapes and sizes, but when Dean starts killing regular humans, everyone starts complaining. And I get it – those humans are innocents. But aren’t monsters innocent too, in some way? If for example, a vampire needs blood to feed, and thus kills humans in order to stay alive, is that much different from what we do killing animals to stay alive? I’m just saying that in these series and books, people are all too eager to finish off monsters, just because they’re monsters. They might not necessarily be bad, they might be nice to their fellow monsters, but still they get killed without much hesitation.

The second topic, killing characters in books. George R.R. Martin (and yay! Game of Thrones is starting again) is the absolute best at this. I love how unpredictable the Game of Thrones books are because of that. You never know who might die next. It might be anyone (but if it’s Tyrion, I’ll go berserk). I don’t kill characters often in my own book, but George R.R. Martin has inspired me to at least give it a shot.