I dislike not being able to look and see who will live and who won’t. I guess I could, but I don’t want to risk spoilers for things other than whether or not the character is going to live through this or that. I was always checking as I read through A Song of Ice and Fire, just because the wondering and not knowing sucks so much.
And I don’t have any feeling for whether or not Hussie likes to kill characters. I have the feeling that he likes high stakes, but also that for him high stakes might not equal permadeath for everyone, like, say, GRRM. Which I think is awesome–right now there’s such a trend of increasing the stakes by letting any character get killed, and sometimes that’s valid, but sometimes it just makes me more wary of getting attached to characters because fuck, I liked them and now they’re gone, and sometimes it makes the deaths less significant, because well who cares if a main character dies if main characters are dropping like flies? *cough*AttackonTitan*cough* Even with Harry Potter, the fact that the last book ended with a lot of deaths didn’t have much effect on me, because we never saw the characters really deal with what being a child soldier would do, and fighting for your life would mean for everything that happens after, even if I loved a bunch of the characters who died, I just don’t much care.
I get the feeling that Hussie won’t be doing that sort of thing, going forward. So I’m not sure if Feferi, Eridan, Nepeta, Gamzee, Equius, Tavros, and Vriska are permadead, and I figure some of them definitely aren’t (I believe Vriska said that Gamzee isn’t dead at all, at least?), but I also feel like Hussie can raise the stakes for the characters without bringing mortality into it all the time. Raising the stakes via breaking relationships, changing characters’ perceptions of themselves, and generally just causing suffering are, to me, way more interesting than just seeing characters die off. I’d rather see two characters suffer emotionally because of something that they did, than see one character suffer because another died. So when I hope that someone doesn’t die or doesn’t stay dead, it’s as much just that not dying can be more painful than dying than that I like the character.
I mean, I’d really like to see Tavros deal with the fact that he is cowardly and spineless and let Vriska does by failing to kill her when by all means that was the absolute right thing to do. I’d like to see Vriska come back and deal with the fact that Terezi killed her.