The relationship between death and digital games is strangely paradoxical. While death is considered to be a ubiquitous and pervasive feature of videogames, it rarely carries the same finality that exists in the offline world. However, this has also allowed digital games to become an interesting site for the discussion and exploration of death and mortality. The genre of Roguelikes, for instance, distinguishes itself by incorporating the permanence of death (i.e. perma-death) as an integral gameplay feature. In other cases, games such as A Mortician’s Tale and That Dragon Cancer center on death as a central theme in the game’s narrative. This article seeks to contribute to current knowledge by exploring player experiences of death in games through the case of Red Dead Redemption 2 by Rockstar Games, and the death of the game’s protagonist Arthur Morgan. Concretely, this article explores how the game’s epilogue emulates grief-work and bereavement by intermittently engaging players in both loss- and restoration-oriented activities. Aside from providing a discussion of how the game’s epilogue emulates grief-work, the article draws upon Alexander Galloway’s model of gamic action to discuss the various ways in which digital games strive to enforce death, and the strategies that players employ to resist it. However, concluding the article, I note how despite a range of creative strategies to resist death, players are caught up in a paratextual web of playthroughs, highlighting how there is no escaping the death of Red Dead Redemption 2’s protagonist, Arthur Morgan. Please note this article has images of diagrams that you can access via the PDF.

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This article explores thanatological themes in the CW drama Riverdale with attention to how the series employs death and its signifiers to construct a metaphor for patriarchal violence and its traumatic imprints. Focusing on three central female characters, it considers how Riverdale explores patriarchal violence and the trauma it produces both at the level of narrative and through experimentation with Gothic trappings, generic conventions, aesthetic sensibilities, non-diegetic effects, and allusions to other narratives of patriarchal violence. This analysis underscores how Riverdale discloses and navigates one of trauma's central paradoxes: the impossibility and the imperative of its representation. It considers also how the female body in Riverdale acts as a vehicle of resistance: a site where patriarchal violence is inscribed but might also be mobilized toward alternative forms of identity negotiation and interconnection, and toward arousing in the audience a desire to participate in the radical work of participatory witnessing.

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Throughout India, particularly northern India, the chudail or the demon-woman is a dominant figure in popular mythical imagination. Depicted as a woman with scruffy long hair and backwards-turned feet, the chudail is the archetypal femme fatale. She is the ‘monstrous-feminine’, to borrow Barbara Creed’s (2007) term, the embodiment of death and evil. Opposed to popular belief, however, the construction of the chudail in Anvita Dutt’s movie Bulbbul (2020) permits the existence of ‘good’ chudails. Dutt’s movie, while adapting the chudail myth for a contemporary audience, explores the manner in which the female body becomes a site of patriarchal oppression. With close reference to the movie, this paper explores how death becomes the medium through which the oppressed woman finds a way to regain her social agency. The paper claims that the chudail’s act of inflicting death on its prey functions as a folkloric system of justice whereby evil is punished and the destitute offered divine sanctuary. The study will undertake an in-depth analysis of the death scenes in Bulbbul to show how the event of death translates into a metaphor for the consumption of evil.

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In psychological and therapeutic literature, the death of a twin is considered to be particularly traumatic and devastating for the surviving sibling, theorised variously as a unique form of sorrow, a ‘halving’, and a loss akin to the death of the self. Although the death of a twin is a recurrent narrative trope in literature and, subsequently, on screen, relatively few films are preoccupied with the aftermath of the twin’s death and the grieving process undergone by the surviving twin. Taking an interdisciplinary perspective, uniting film analysis with psychoanalysis, death studies and sibling psychology, this article explores one such representation of twin bereavement in Olivier Assayas’s 2016 Palme d’Or-winning film Personal Shopper. Assayas’s work frequently explores the complications of death, grief, and memory, and Personal Shopper offers a rare but compelling representation of twin bereavement in its depiction of the apparent haunting of protagonist Maureen (Kristen Stewart) by the spirit of her dead twin brother, Lewis. The article contends that through its use of mirrors, screens and reflections, the film offers a complex and thoughtful representation of grief, not least in its active refusal to offer either its protagonist or the audience a sense of closure or certainty. In doing so, the film seeks to capture not only the complexities and contradictions of grief, but the particular and under-explored experience of twin bereavement and the shattering of self that ensues from this loss.

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This article explores how death is represented, negotiated, and framed in the seven season television series Pretty Little Liars. The series is positioned as an example of a hybridised television format aimed at young audiences and as Gothic television. Avoiding positioning any popular cultural text as ‘good’ or ‘bad’ in terms of its engagement with death, this article instead utilises one popular television series to examine a range of debates about the representation of death in contemporary popular culture. Television as a medium and television aimed at young female audiences are often considered trivial. Consequently, television’s representation of death is often seen to be trivialising. However, Pretty Little Liars, and television more broadly, can function to convey several complex and ambivalent meanings about death. The analysis here focuses on the series capacity to engage with ideas about loss in the context of young people’s lives, the ways in which the series is emblematic of debates about the gendered glamorisation of death in popular culture, and the identity politics of death in the series, which can be seen to discriminate in terms of who it ‘kills off’. The article argues that Pretty Little Liars can be read as both reiterating and challenging problematic perceptions of girlhood, womanhood, glamour, and death, straddling both complicity and critique in its representations. Please note this article has images that you can access via the PDF.

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