Character Shield!

Know what I hate? Character shield. Whats that? Well you've probably seem it in a movie and thought about it without knowing the fancy name but Character Shield (also known as Plot Shield) is when a writer is too clingy to let somebody in their story die and lets them miraculously survive against impossible odds.

Plot Shield has gained a lot of attention (unfortunately) in hollywood and the gaming industry recently. A great example of this is Luke Skywalker in Star Wars. Zooming around in his spaceship to destroy the deathstar ships are getting blown apart left and right but his miraculously manages to not burst into flames and crash in a fiery, screaming wreckage. A more recent example of Character Shield is in Avatar when Jake Sully survives being repeatedly torn apart by beasts, shot, blown up, crushed under undeterminably large amounts of wood, or otherwise killed in a variety of ways that stretched the entire length of the film.

The more times a character is put into a dangerous scenario and they come out unscathed, the less the audience associates that character being in actual danger. After a main character survives the velociraptors the 18th time the audience stops seeing the dinosaurs as a threat and more of a boring interlude to the next scene.

It's not a good idea to kill off characters too quickly either. Doing that gives the audience the idea that those characters are meaningless, expendable, and don't matter in the overall plot of the story. Especially in horror movies there is a cast of blatantly expendable people such as:

-Nerdy Guy with glasses
-"I'll punch the serial killer" Jock
- Unintelligent and Physically Attractive Blond Girl
-Ethnic Minority Kid
-Generic "We must study the monster!" Scientist/Doctor
-Obese ADD kid who wanders off for no apparent reason
-Whiny Girl who screams at every little thing

Though I can't vouch for every director or all of these stereotypes, much of this grief of repeat cast comes from unimaginative script writers and character designers. Yes it's fun to be able to anticipate with surgical precision who the next bloke's face to become tangent with the aliens claws will be but seriously, unnamed/minor characters being swatted down like flies gets old. Fast.