This post originally went live on January 22, 2024.

I guess the quote above is what a literal death wish is.  That would be an acceptance that life has an ending and you’re okay with that eventuality.  Doesn’t sound like you’re wishing for death, which is how fiction tends to portray the term.  Certainly sounds like a big shift in mentality.

So, I started thinking about this after watching an anime called ‘Bungo Stray Dogs’.  The plot doesn’t matter for this topic since I want to focus on a character named Dazai.  This guy is highly intelligent, fairly charming, and can negate the powers of others.  He’s almost like a mentor to who I think is the main character.  One of his biggest character traits is that he is a ‘suicide junkie’ and routinely tries to kill himself, which has others accusing him of having a death wish.  They aren’t wrong.

Before I go further, I will explain why Dazai is like this.  He is a character who wonders if there is any point in living.  So, he tries to find a purpose, which started as an efficient killer for a mafia when he was younger.  Now, he does this other thing where he wants to discover and experience the perfect death.  Usually with a pretty girl who is willing to die as well and mean it.  Always sounds like he would never go through with it because he doesn’t try to get himself killed in battle.  I never really managed to fully wrap my head around this, which is why the death wish fascinated me.

Authors and readers have a lot of trouble with a character who wants to die.  When writing it, we tend to make them highly depressed or even deranged.  Living things have that built in fear of death, so we see the desire to die as a symptom of mental illness.  An author may want readers to avoid connecting with these characters and see them as broken, so they try to push the personality to the dismal side of human nature. This can be done to the point where the character’s reasons for wanting to die are either lost in their actions or never revealed at all.

I would say that there’s a fear of going all in on a death wish character too.  It’s fine if this translates to high action feats of heroism, which has the character survive or sacrifice themselves.  The type of hero who ‘doesn’t care if they die as long as they save others or get the mission done’.  This actually sounds closer to the real world death wish (acceptance) than the fiction one (desire for it) we tend to think of.  Maybe this is why we find it easier to write this type of hero than the ones that truly want to do for no other reason than to cease living.

This might be why I found Dazai rather interesting.  He kind of straddled the whole concept.  He was okay with dying, but fought against it whenever it was forced upon him by an enemy.  It was like the death wish was his way of controlling his existence. Maybe he was living the quote where he accepted death, but he was kind of going out of his way to find it during his downtime.  There were moments where it really was played for dark comedy too, so that might have been a key factor.  Still, it’s a staple of the character to try to die in his off-time, which is strange and seems unnatural.

Have I figured out how to write a death wish character?  I don’t know.  The version that has accepted that death is inevitable, but won’t go out of their way to die appeals to me.  They will still fight to survive when their lives are threatened, but they know that their time will come.  It sounds like a challenging balance to strike.  One that many people might even relate to.  I think I have a few characters in future books that I want to try this with too, so I should look more into it.

So, what do you think about the death wish concept?  Both reality and fiction.