So...about dead children

[PaulDevers]

I feel like you should be cool with, while not necessarily showing anything graphic, (and here's their ribcage open with gore and guts) you should be able to cool with something as simple as showing their body in a coffin, or implied at a distance with an artistic flair. I don't think you can, or should for that matter, go the same amount of gore you can go with for adults for children.
I didn't know this was an issue of Tapas, actually!

[Zhengo]

Really just depends on the tone you want to set for your comic. If it's dark and people know it's dark then I feel like it's probably fine. I wasn't even aware that dead kids was a no-no in fiction. Lots of stories I've read where the main characters are kids put kids in danger because, well, it usually works for both/either a thematic statement and a stakes setter. Of course, people will always have their limits but that's what demographics are for.

Otherwise, I think the only thing truly taboo about dead kids is if someone pushed a positive message about dead kids lol

[carloswebcomic]

Well, to be honest, there's little I find more off-putting than depictions of dead children.
I found that the older you get, specially if you have children of your own, seeing a dead child, whether fiction or not, crosses the boundary into revolting territory.
But hey, that's just me.

[vfinnigan]

Heck, even though I write about war, I'm very careful about showing corpses of full grown adults. I might show a part of the corpse and the living people around reacting to make it clear that the leg hanging from a tree or a hand dangling over a bedside belongs to somebody who's died.

As for children, yeah. I will never go there. In one (unfortunately unpublished) work, I wrote a story about a child who was wounded in an IED attack and died, but not before wrapping everyone in the field hospital around his little finger. In that case, in my writing, I had the artist focus on reactions, like a mother howling in grief, held up by hospital personnel who are also in tears.

But I also write about real people, so in depicting their deaths, I have to be especially sensitive.

I learned in EMS that emergencies involving children usually are critical stress incidents. Because most of us have children of our own. Losing a patient is hard enough. When the patient is a child, especially a baby, it especially hurts, because adults having to bury children is fundamentally out of order. It should be the other way around.

I've been known to have a gift for helping pediatric patients. I've helped calm a combative patient, I've splinted sprains and broken bones, I helped revive a blue baby (and blue baby calls are the stuff of nightmares, because they're usually DOA), and I've even held a tiny body in my hands and handling it relatively well... which still isn't good. I still cry when thinking about them, especially the last case.

However, I think you could do this well depending on how you write the kids and deal with the subject of death. Are you going for dark comedy? Are the kids written (as they often are) like they're miniature adults? Is the Grim Reaper a character, perhaps the butt of jokes?

In that case, go for it.

.

[vfinnigan]

Putting a kid in danger is a common dramatic trope. If the the scene is dramatic (say, the T-Rex's first appearance in Jurassic Park), they amp up the drama to 11 by having it go after the kids. When the movie lulls, cut to a scene of the kids trying to get away from the velociraptors hunting them, and again the suspense is turned up to 11.

This is because it's most people's natural instinct to protect children.

[Zhengo]

Yeah, that's why I said it was a good stakes setter. Kids in danger are also good tools in stories where the themes revolve around adolescence, innocence in the face of corruption, making a statement about something in society, etc. etc. Kids themselves are usually quite powerful as a method of symbolism (especially if the main characters are kids).

[N1ghtm4r3]

if you put heavy shadows over the remains shows the point, but not as descriptive,for me its going to be a pivotal part of the comic story, in my comic i did show an attempted rape on one of the main heroes,,shes no child but is childish in behavior

[CodeMonkeyArts]

Considering how much I love the earlier 90s and late 80 movies that were dark, violent, and stared kids as the main characters or part of the main cast, there is definitely something there about the stakes. The kids are inventive, innocent, optimistic and we, the audience want to protect them. When you throw in a world where you know other children have been lost, you feel for them more and desperately what them to win and can feel for how much the adults want to help them too.

[Lyric]

In art nothing is off limits.

[indagold]

I think dead children make interesting writing tools because it explores a taboo subject no one else touches on making it a subject rarely explored and their blood can be just as effective as ink on paper. Ba dum tsk

[DiegoPalacios]

I think it is important to take into account that a dark story involving children suffering horrible fates makes it darker than adults suffering said horrible fates.

So, to "balance out the level of darkness", you would need to be less graphic about it. I have an example, but it involves a spoiler>

(spoilers) in Madoka Magica, children die, but they dont show gore or corpses. But the character reactions to their fate, silouettes and noise effects to imply the horror, gave the same impact a gory death could give without the imagery, because it involved children and that made the burden heavier.

If you wanna write about it, go for it. It can be an interesting story involving a taboo subject, but take into account it raises the level of darkness of your story.

[liann]

I just want to add something to this Madoka example (spoiler) where teenagers died.

First, the show let you know what they care about. Their friends. Their families. etc. A lot of their downfall was caused by their own mistakes and the show owned it up. It wasn't "oh bad things happen to good people. now you gotta feel bad for them." Their demise was caused by their own foolishness and realising it. But you feel for them because the show presented you the things they love. You are hopeful for them because you know they care about something. It's a great and effective story telling... instead of just piling up rape and abuse here and there. You are generally gonna be more sympathetic to a character who make mistakes like us real people do. Because there's a certain point where misfortunes start looking like "ok this is just made by a sick writer."

[DiegoPalacios]

Good point, they get you to be emotionally invested in the characters and that is why it hit extra hard.

[Azifri]

I haven't watched Madoka but another anime/manga where children die is Bokurano. It's about a groups of kids who get tricked into playing a game...

Spoilers

Only it wasn't a game. They became involved into a sort of battle royale to save their world by destroying other worlds. They became linked to a robot that every child can use only once because it consumes their lives. They are forced to fight agains people from other worlds in the same situation, and the loser gets their world destroyed.
They show you the lives and dreams of the characters, only to watch them die in the most emotionally painful way. No physical violence happens to them.

I recommend the manga over the anime.

[HGohwell]

Even Madoka, heralded as one of the darker animes that totally twisted the series, didn't show much of the bodies. Which in many ways what made it effective. Mami's fate could have been hideously gorey (as the homage to it in Kazumi Magica was) but was done with discretion, one shot and little more. And to make matter worse, and add to the horror, her body and many of the others like Kyouka, will never be found. Most the deaths in the series are done with this kind if discretion except in the mangas aimed at the older audience Kazumi, which went for dark gorey humour, and Suzane, which went for older teens in a more action assassin magical girl way. Which is where I think anime that tries to follow, for instant Daybreak Illusion and Magical Girl Rising Project (is it really necessary to see a girl wet herself as she hung herself???), descend into angst for the sake of angst and gorn, showing us how awful the injuries and deaths are and in many ways making it meh. It losing all the impact. So many shows that try to copy something "dark" don't understand what makes it so and just go for gore and angst and it ends up looking like a hammer horror flick rather than something that hits you hard. It's not about what you do but how.

And it should be noted killing off characters, even magical girls, has always been possible if done carefully. Sailor Moon killed off the girls quite a lot, after all, even if to bring them back but did it without gore so it passed.

One of the more amusing tales of this kind of this was from the behind the scenes of a show called Harper's Island, which was your typical bunch of people with connected pasts stuck on a isolated island with a murderer running around show. What was interesting was that they filmed in chronological order and the actors weren't aware who was going to die or who the murderer was either, they were given their scripts for each scene only the night before filming it. One of the behind the scene pieces for the final episode was that the writers considered killing off the young girl character as the final victim, but decided that even for a show like this they probably couldn't get away with killing off the girl. So she survived. Even a super murdery late night show felt like killing the creepy kid wouldn't be acceptable.

[liann]

This was also my problem with mahou shoujo site. Gore for the sake of gore. The mc was just a piece of log no personality who had every misfortune fall upon her because the writer is an edgelord. Like yeah I feel bad for her... but jesus. Why would I care about a character who doesn't care about anything? No end goals. No nothing. Even sick and twisted villains can have the ugliest goal and they'd be more interesting.

It's also one of the reasons why despite all its issues, Kaneki from tokyo ghoul worked for me as an edgy character... because Kaneki cared so much about connection and it's been stated multiple times that he feels lonely and wants to protect his friends. It's like.. yeah at least the mangaka treats him like a human being.

[CodeMonkeyArts]

I think that what makes a story effective. When a story, any story, dark or light, is about a child, we instantly sense the innocence, the wonder! Everything to a child is NEW and EXCITING.

Even when the story is dark, there is an element of optimism and determination that only a child has because the morals are so black and white. Stranger Things and Pans Labyrinth is super effective on contrasting the mindset of the children with that of the adults. The Party in Strange Things consists of pre-teens who play DnD and thus relate everything around them to a Fantasy Quest. This contrasts with the terror felt by the older teens and the adults when kids are going missing or found dead and the police are trying to solve a mystery. We contrast the Fantasy Quest adventure taken seriously by the kids with the very heavy stakes carried by the adults.

Note that while the main party survive mostly (mostly) unscathed, multiple people, young and old, do die throughout all three seasons. Season 3 especially ups the stakes and it's pretty freaking graphic.

In Pans Labyrinth, the little girl is trying to solve a Fairy Tale quest (maybe real, maybe not) in order to become a princess and reunite with her 'real' family. She is also juggling saving her mom and then later, faces a true lesson in selflessness with her baby brother. The black and white fable of her quest is contrasted very heavily and effectively with the very real horror of WW2 and a sadistic colonel (general? can't remember) who tortures rebels and treats his heavily pregnant wife more like an incubator than a human being. While we can definitely say that he is the BAD BAD guy, the rebels do make questionable decisions a child can't really comprehend and some people on the BAD side of the war are not monsters like the evil evil colonel.

Oh and

Spoilers

The MC, the little girl, dies on screen

These are effective and strong characters who are definitely not just fodder, or just exist for the author to torment relentlessy (Justine by Marquis De Sade, anyone?). Honestly, I'm happy to see more stories, even dark stories, starring children. Why?

Because in the face of ultimate darkness, children shine brightly and show hope. We want to protect that hope, even as those kids run head-first into danger.

[Freemints30]

Marquis De Sade work was just his personal porn stash with pretentiousness attached on to it.

[CodeMonkeyArts]

I don't disagree!

[albuswraith363]

I don't mind more realism the better and it's more interesting