“Wait a minute…”
While reading the latest issue of a certain popular comic book, I realized that one of the things that make mainstream superhero comics so fun is how often you find yourself saying “Hey! I thought he/she was dead!” This used to be fairly common in anime as well, but in some of the more recent series I’ve seen, the current trend seems to be “Let’s kill off beloved characters completely out of the blue and not bringing them back except in the angst-filled memories of other characters that will drive them to suicidal behavior.” And that isn’t nearly as much fun. True, killing off characters unexpectedly creates buckets of tension, but it is of the one-note variety. Bringing people back from the dead, literally or figuratively, instigates all sorts of interesting chaos.