When a TV show kills off one of the few characters I loved and had a real emotional investment in- Breaking my one-day-long moratorium on nerdy fan-boy talk, here is today's article on characters that I have loved on TV shows I have liked who have met untimely demises. I'm sure I'm leaving one or two potential favorites out, but here is, as far as I can remember, a complete list of characters whose deaths have upset me: Mr. Echo (Lost), Franklin (True Blood), and "Tugboat" Kenley Collins (Project Runway). That is all. Mr. Echo may have been a drug-smuggling war lord at one point, but if I remember Lost correctly (and I probably don't) he was one of the few characters who was totally bad-ass and got shit done without overstaying his welcome by getting obtusely metaphorical or having daddy issues. By the same token, Franklin may have been, at best, a schizophrenic rapist, but seriously, did you see how fast he could text "motherfucker?" If you ask real nice, he would probably have deleted it and started over again just to show you. I know neither of these characters were main plot focal points destined for a long, happy story arc ("violent lives meet violent ends, wah wah wah") but god damn do I like crazy people who get shit done. 
While Project Runway was a "reality" show in the sense that Kenley Collins is not a fictional character, she still fits in with "crazy people who get shit done." She also did not win her season, and therefore might as well be dead. But stepping back to the sexier two of the three for a second, I think maybe I liked them so much becauseI actually don't hate...
When a TV show has the common decency to kill off a character before they become a repetitive prat- Judging by the slow, rambling path of dwindling sympathy I felt for every other character on Lost who wasn't Ben (xoxoxo), I'm actually somewhat thankful Mr. Echo got smoke-exorcised before I wound up hating him for crying over why he was on the island and how those fucking magnets work. If there's one thing I think we can learn from centuries of written fiction it's that 99% of the time a brutal, timely death is a much prouder fate then a dull, plodding, soul-crushing life. Something to think about come my inevitable mid-life crisis. While I will piss and moan with the best of them that Mr. Echo is dead and Franklin never got that rapey wedding he wanted, I'm perfectly content to watch them go out in an entertaining blaze of glory. I think it all comes down to my deep-seated desire to have faith in authors to shape their creations correctly, knowing that even upsetting things can happen for a reason. Because you gotta have faith( a-faith a-faith).
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