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Sarah-Marie Smith

Fictional Characters Who Deaths I Mourned In Real Life

(Warning! Spoilers for Glee, Downton Abbey and Spider Man)

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I really love Fiction. TV, movies, or books. I like to get lost in worlds where they are different problems, heroes in real people, and resolutions at the end. I really get into them too, and laugh aloud or cry when the time appropriates. Longer movies or series affect me even more since there’s more time to get invested in them. With books, I finish a series and can’t pick another book for a day or two while I go through “book mourning,” but in television or movies, my recovery time is usually just the end of the movie while the credits roll, while I peruse the trivia on IMDB. Sometimes though, when there is a truly devastating end, or a death of someone important, I can’t move on.

There are three instances where those deaths moved me so much, that it felt like mourning for a real person. I found myself thinking about them all of the time, tearing up whenever I thought of it, and not wanting to watch anything else until I could get over it.


The first one is saddest, because it came about because of a real death. I’ve watched Glee since the pilot, months before the season 1 came out. I love music and dancing, and the characters in the show have become so real. I know this next season is the last one, and I feel like I’ll be saying goodbye to my friends! When Cory Monteith died last year, and subsequently his character Finn Hudson on Glee, I was broken up for months! Every time I would try to watch another episode I would cry, and every time I read or saw anything about his death, or his girlfriend both on Glee and in real life, I would cry some more. Senseless death is hard to swallow because we always want to know the why, and death from an overdose right after rehab treatment is just sad and dumb. It’s really the left behind that I mourn the most, but in any case, this death still makes me sad every time I think about it.


Uhg!! Seriously?! Stupid Dan Stephens. We watched on Downton Abbey for three seasons as Matthew and Mary try and fail over and over again to find happiness. It’s just a beautiful and haunted love story (one of my all-time favorites), and because the actor who played Matthew had no loyalty to the fans that made him famous, we couldn’t even have a satisfying ending. It ended in just a few minutes, with no warning whatsoever, and after such a happy event, it was the ultimate betrayal. I mourned for weeks, watching youtube tributes, crying all season four long, and hating anyone that Mary even smiled at. Plus, when a husband dies, I can’t help but think of how devastated I would be if Jason died, so I cry even more. This one made everyone mad, so I know I’m not alone in this, but man, it was a very hard pill to swallow.


I remember the first time Jason and I heard that they were re-doing the Spider-Man movies. We were like “What? Really?” We liked the original ones, and it was only a few years in between the two series, so it seemed completely silly. Even when we saw all of the original trailers, we were unimpressed, and didn’t plan to see it. Our mind was changed when we saw the very last trailer, and we ended up LOVING the new movies! Spider-Man is so much better, and so is his lady interest. I always knew from the comics that Gwen Stacy was supposed to die (go ahead, I know you’re shocked, but yes, I did used to read the comics), but after Emma Stone was so incredibly popular, I thought they would put it off inevitably. I’d heard all the speculation about her in her “death outfit” but I still hung on to the hope that she wouldn’t die. When she did I was in so much denial! I hate to cry in front of people, and I was at the theater, so I couldn’t properly mourn, which made it even harder. I ended up just thinking about it constantly, reading up about it and getting other people’s reactions. It stunk 🙁 Emma Stone is one of my favorite actresses, so to have her gone from the series just makes me sad. I’ve only seen the movie that one time, but I know my reaction the second time will be just as forceful.

What about you? Any character deaths that put you into mourning?

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