Coping With The Death Of Your Favorite Character

Harry Potter fans, Hobbit fans, and others have needed/will need a lot of grief counseling because writers, for reasons of their own, often choose to become heartless killers and consequently cast a vast cloud of misery and despair over their readers.

I mention Harry Potter and The Hobbit for obvious reasons, but none of the main characters of Narnia die (until The Last Battle) and I'm not even going to talk about Sherlock because nobody who dies in that show is actually dead. Doctor Who is a little cruel because it's one character dying over and over and over again. I'm not a Game of Thrones fan (I wish I was, but I couldn't get past the nudity), but apparently every single character and his dog dies in blood, doom, and general wretchedness, except for the sassy blonde Malfoy kid, who, I gather, is the only one people want dead. I'm not much of a Star Wars fan either; again, I wish I was, but I tried it was a little too political for my insufficient brains.

What I'm getting at is that being a fanman/fangirl comes with the occupational hazard of drowning in tears every time you read your favorite books or watch your favorite movies, and what we need, in some form or another, is Grief Couseling For Sad Nerds.

Here's what I recommend:

[and I know I just finished complaining about things written in list-form, but it's an easy way of writing things and I don't have all night. Actually I do have all night, but I'd rather spend it sleeping]

1. Ask yourself, "would I like this character as much if he hadn't died? would he be as heroic?" most often (I think, I'm totally speculating here) the answer will be NO.
2. Ask, "did my character die well, or did he die in disgrace and despair?" most often, the answer will be YES, and when it is, you can remind yourself that now there is no possibility of the character dying in disgrace and despair in the fictional future.
3. Go back to the beginning of the book/movie and watch your character being carefree and happy. This will probably make you cry even more, but as Gandalf said, "not all tears are an evil."
4. Drink a lot of alcohol and pretend your character is alive and you're getting married and living long and happy lives away from the torments of reality.
5. Actually, nothing works, you'll just be sad forever. Sorry about that. I have been a sad fangirl since I was about seven years old.

That wouldn't be saying much if I was eight years old now. But I'm twenty-one, so I'm allowed to say that I've been a sad fangirl for a long time. When the time comes, I'm going to set up a bar especially for sad fanmen/fangirls so that they can come and drink and cry and sing "The Parting Glass" when they need to without suffering the mockery of people who actually "live" in the "real" world.