I’m watching a sci-fi movie in which two astronauts have to do a spacewalk to repair their damaged ship. One of them is a Black woman who made a point of saying it’d be her first spacewalk.

I literally said out loud, “Girl, that means you finna die.”

Guess what happened.

I need more Black characters to listen to me when I yell and my TV and warn them not to do the thing that they’re about to do.

What I’m really saying is, you don’t need your characters to telegraph their impending deaths. Nobody ever has to announce, “I’m about to do this very dangerous thing that I’ve never done before and it’s gonna be awesome!” You could just...let it be a plot twist.

So now I’m thinking about character deaths in movies, how they function as part of the plot.

I’m a firm believer that if a character’s death doesn’t alter the plot in any material way, you probably didn’t need it. And you might never have needed the character at all.

Obviously “in any material way” is subjective, but you probably don’t need a character death just to point out that space travel or war or police work is inherently dangerous. We already know that.

But if a character dies just so the main character can go, “Damn, that was my dawg” and then proceed to do whatever they were going to do anyway, I’m like, “Why did I just sit through that?”

So if you’re writing a heist movie and the safecracker or the getaway driver dies, that should throw a clear monkey wrench into the story. If it doesn’t, guess what? Your story never really needed that character.

Take ALIEN. There are seven characters (eight if you count the alien, nine if you count Mother) in the movie and

*SPOILER ALERT*

all but one of them dies. But each death impacts the story and forces the remaining characters to do things they might not otherwise have had to.

So my purely unsolicited advice is to take a look at the character you’re killing off and ask, “If I cut them from the story entirely, and give a few of cool their lines to other characters, will it make much difference?”

If not:

Anyway, your mileage may vary. Just thinking out loud.

/rant

Oh, wait! One more thing.

Just so I’m clear, none of this is to suggest that Black characters shouldn’t be killed off or should be treated with kid gloves. Nope. That’s not it at all.

But no movie exists in a vacuum. Every one is part of a long continuum of other movies in which Black (and/or female) characters have served as cannon fodder so the protagonist can learn some Important Life Lesson. And they’re frequently killed off first. It’s a trope.

That means the audience likely is going to bring a certain set of expectations with them when they watch your movie. It’s how I was able to call out a specific character death long before it happened. And looking at my mentions, other people easily called it, too.

As the writer, you may not consider the audience’s expectations your concern. But do you really want people sitting there 15 minutes ahead of the story you worked so hard to create? Or do you want them fully engaged, not guessing what’s gonna happen next? That IS your concern.

Okay, that’s it for real.

And Black people, stay inside the fucking spaceship. Ain’t nothing out there for you.