Inspired by a twitter post about how some have a distaste of “shock value” drama, or rather any kind of drama in a story, I was thinking about something within my comic.
A thing is, I have a lot of ideas that is considered “negative” by a lot of people and critics because it is inspired by older stories which would do things “cheap tricks” to keep the reader turning pages to find out how things work out.
Honestly I had a boyfriend that told me he does not like dark stories, and I understand, telling him that I will just stop sharing the comic I make because it will have a lot of more dark parts in the future, but it kind of upset me a bit because I love showing off my work to my friends and getting their opinions and try to improve the future arcs but I also have a ton of ideas I want to try out.
one idea I did had was killing Rex's wife so he can get bummed, spend some time healing and find a new love interest, but I pushed that one on the side. Not because I can hear critics complaining about “fridging” but it wouldn't work out storywise.

Instead I am figuring on either having them in an open relationship or have them break up due to Rex's overprotective nature becoming smothering.

I honestly don't know how to keep going on the topic other than it feels kind of wrong that so many of the loudest critics/tvtropers seems to get pretty upset when there is some kind of tragedy, death or trauma in a comic that pushes the main character into action, I mean my favorite character in Unnatural dies in the first couple of issues and while it saddens me I recognize it was needed for the story, and I can also make fanfiction for fun where lives and move on, but lately it feels like that some people get very upset at the idea of a non-main character dying to push the story forward calling it “shock value” on level of Cross.

Honestly if “fridging” is right for you then do it.

Personally I'm not a fan of it, but it's your story so you do what yo like :)

My preference would be to go a different way with your motivating tragedy- have the protagonist lose their fave hat, pen, pet, jacket, car… get audited by the tax office :)
There are a LOT of ways to introduce personal disaster and tragedy to a protagonist without killing their partner or child.


You could even just have their wife just leave them. A breakup is a nasty tragedy.

Ozone's right, do what feels good to you. And yeah, there are lot of ways to push tragedy into the story and push it forward. It needs to feel significant, but depending on the context of the story, a lot of things can feel significant. Even subtle things that impact the character's life in a way it wouldn't impact others' because it personally means something to them. My comic is about therapy, so both the psychological issues and their origins in it will have a lot to do with childhood traumas, abuse, sexual abuse, etc, but the ways the issues manifest in their everyday life are usually subtle. Like their habits and fantasies related to sex, only through unpacking these do we get down to the roots of the issues and traumatic events in connection to them. Perhaps you also can introduce something seemingly unimportant that has a traumatic effect because of something else that it reminds your character of.

Ozoneocean wrote:
You could even just have their wife just leave them. A breakup is a nasty tragedy.

There are some break-ups that are especially disheartening. Imagine a long term relationship going back years and so much shared and the protagonist thinks there's a lot there and the partner just turns around and says “I don't think I ever, really loved you. Good-bye”

Just like that the whole world falls in. It happens. Truly traumatic change and it's very, very cold but there is no refrigerator.

A lot good advice here, I talked myself out of killing the character because it honestly did not fit the story at all and would be a bad idea.

I came up with a solution that will lead to a lot of character fun, and I have other characters to deal with right now too.