Wow, I was thinking about this recently. Well actually it was about five years ago....

There are few things more frustrating about movies or books than having a favorite character killed off. I loathe stories that make you care about a character, only to have something horrible happen to them. "Pay It Forward" is a good example of this emotional manipulation, trying to make a tragedy seem deep and poignant in it's irony. I just found it uneccesary and laboring the point, really.

I'm trying to remember my English classes from high school....I think we were taught that a true tragedy is a story of a person who has a fatal flaw, which ultimately leads to his/her demise. I wrote a paper about how "Romeo and Juliet" was not a *true* tragedy, it was just a story about "s--- happens."

Maybe that's what bothers me about stories where bad things happen to innocent people. We don't need reminding of how unfair life can be. I'd rather see/read a tragedy where the demise can be foreseen and explained because of the character's actions, or "fatal flaw."

"Gone With The Wind" is my favorite tragedy (though it is a romance novel). The book could not have ended any other way. If anything had been changed, the personalities of the characters would have been compromised, and the story would have been stupid. That type of tragedy doesn't drag my emotions through the mud just to make me cry, it makes me think and appreciate a well-crafted story.

I guess it comes down to senselessness, either happy endings or sad. "Pay It Forward" was a senseless tragedy, and I was left feeling resentful.

--Jez"Snow White married her prince, and then they were MAULED by the big bad wolf"zika