: Re: Death as person - A funny part of the story? Or serious stuff? Death as a person is commonly known to any reader of the "Discworld" series from Terry Pratchett. Also death appears in the

@Martha805

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I think in order to incorporate Death as a character into your story, you will need to decide how your story views death as a concept in itself. Terry Pratchett created Death to act in a humorous way, and it feels as if dying is merely an inconvenience for most of the characters.

However, if you take for example Hades, Keeper of the Underworld in Greek mythology, he is generally portrayed as passive rather than evil; his role was often maintaining relative balance, and he was also depicted as cold and stern. In the same way, death was viewed as a natural part of the order of life. Whilst people still resisted death, it was also accepted as inevitable, and everyone respected it equally (which is why it was such a grave insult when Achilles mutilated Hector's body).

So Death can potentially be written for laughs, or it could be evil, or even a sulky teenager, but the personification of Death must match the concept of death within the story. It would not work to have Death as an evil tyrant that wants to kill everyone in order to have dominion over them if those same people don't view dying with any sort of fear.

Death as a character is always just a personification of how people within the story view dying. Different concepts can be done in exactly the same way, such as the scariness and uncertainty of puberty being represented by a Hormone Monster; as long as the character reflects how people in the story view whatever it represents, I can't see why it wouldn't work.

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