Talk:Emerald Sustrai/@comment-124.197.12.116-20200110185750/@comment-27144409-20200110193939

Well the bodies sometimes have to be characters that people care about, otherwise there's no point. We need to empathize with the loss. Writers need to show why we should care, why the heroes are actually facing their personal darkest hours.

An audience needs context to see the loss as anything more than a statistic, which is why it's often individual characters we really cry over, or the writers have to demonstrate the scale in a way besides numbers. A real life example is the moat around the Tower of London being  filled with a poppy flower for every life lost in WWI. A superb fictional example (in my own not too humble opinion) is

SPOILERS FOR THE NETFLIX VOLTRON!

SPOILERS FOR THE NETFLIX VOLTRON!

SPOILERS FOR THE NETFLIX VOLTRON!

When Pidge is looking for her brother Matt, we see her follow the trail to a barren world, where she finds a grave yard memorial commemorating a battle where over 800,000 died fighting tyranny... with no survivors, or deserters. Matt's name is on a grave marker with a red light, with an identical one for each who died there.Through a main character's pain, we have context for one example, that can be exprapolated for hundreds of thousands.