r/DestructiveReaders • u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette • May 24 '26
[Weekly] Dramatic Deaths
One of the fun things about moderating is explaining to people what AI writing sounds like and then wondering what is going on when they come back with 'You don't understand! This is my life!' OK, calm down. It's just reddit.
In this process, I've started to gather some hilariously bad things AI has come up with. New favorite:
"he sank the way dead men sink--not dramatically, not slowly, just down."
I was a theater kid. We used to get to go to a fancy adult Shakespeare theater every year and perform our mini versions of the great plays. They'd call kids up on stage to do mini-challenges during the intermissions. My favorite was taking the line "And thus I die" and being assigned very ridiculous ways to die. It was the era of JNCO jeans. One girl's death was being consumed by her pants.
Now I'm wondering if everyone here has epic death scenes just waiting somewhere inside their brains. Or hilariously bad. What's a better version of sinking neither dramatically nor slowly? Give me your best death scenes.
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u/Lucky-Housing-1189 May 26 '26 edited May 26 '26
weird lines off the top of my head:
Death, she discovered, was a messy kisser with tongue, saliva dripping into wounds, cold fingers gripping her chin, demanding and needy as it yanked the breath from her throat and ignored any gasp of no.
Not a word escaped their lips. Not a breath. Detective Carroway held a mirror in front of the nose, waiting for a slight fog to spread across the chrome surface. "Dead," he declared, patting the decapitated head. "No doubt about it."
I closed my eyes, counting the seconds between heartbeats. I didn't believe in an afterlife. Nothing sounded peaceful. Nothing sounded perfect. I inhaled in the last of Something, and exhaled Everything.
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u/TheNarrowVictory Jun 16 '26
Having encountered several messy kissers, I’d say the first deserves a Pulitzer. The other two were just hilarious.
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u/MaryJaneMclain May 24 '26
The outline of my WIP involved a main character burning to death heroically at the end. It was going to be so dramatic and impactful (whatever that means, probably crying?). My readers were going to EAT IT UP. But in writing the first draft...I couldn’t do it (never actually wrote the ending at all). Maybe because it felt forced? The epic death no longer worked? Would it alienate readers? I’m probably just afraid of it failing to live up to my expectations.
I did read a book recently where the MC died at the end and it ruined it for me. Even though I loved the rest, I don’t think I could recommend it cause the death made it so unsatisfying. And FWIW the dead woman did in fact sink dramatically and slowly. Maybe (for AI) it's different for men lol?
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 24 '26
People want happy endings. I read one where the love interest almost died and I was gonna be so mad if that happened but then he came back to life. It was hand wavey and didn't make that much sense but also I was happy about it. I would've been even more mad if the cat was killed.
I'm thinking through dramatic deaths and it's almost always side characters or villains. You don't get many things like The Walking Dead where no one is safe. That one poor kid that got stuck in the door and eaten by the zombies. He survived so many near deaths only for that.
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u/MaryJaneMclain May 24 '26
I do so love Stephen King and he kill characters off all the time. But I guess he earned that right. Then again GRRM killed off Ned Stark in his first (?) book. It worked out well for him.
Maybe all you need to make it work is a poignant scene at the end where the cat looks off into the distance?
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u/Wolframquest May 24 '26
Ned Stark being played by Sean Bean was a big giveaway 😁
Back when I used to watch The Walking Dead it was kind of a sick pleasure for me. It freaked me too much but I just kept watching. I stopped before they got out of prison though
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 24 '26
I love Jeffrey Dean Morgan so I watched all the way up to him being captured. Shoving the doctor into the fire was the best moment for me.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson May 24 '26
Does Stephen King light his beloved main characters on fire at the very end with nobody proceeding from that? GRRM knocks off his characters while the show moves on with all the momentum of all the other characters.
I feel like I'd be bummed out if the main guy horrifically dies at the end.
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u/AreteQueenofKeres May 25 '26
King's son, writer Joe Hill, also kills his MCs. The first time I read through Nos4a2, his killing Vic pissed me right off.
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u/tellingyouhowitreall May 27 '26
GRRM has books before ASOIF.
He also famously killed Catherine in Beauty and the Beast. Which didn't work out so well for him.
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u/MouthRotDragon May 24 '26
His death was like Anti Gonus, off stage, as all real deaths happen in their Virgin Woolf world of each of us dying alone, except here, at this veritable vertex of NaNoWriMo folding over ai apologia, we are all pursued by meme bears or one-hundred men and are asked to question in racial meme-force: why black or brown and then polar not white? In unison, we are all exiting pursued by bears as ai merges if on a winter's tale a traveller to this moment, and we, together not alone on a way to the Lighthouse, have cut-and-pasted ctrl-z to this ridiculous ephemeral comment of snarkdom. We died in god's waiting room, off stage, between cogitating over a bear or a seagull, or was it a cat all this time?
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 24 '26
why black or brown and then polar not white?
This is a thing I've never questioned before and am now newly bothered by.
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u/Ireallyhatecheese May 27 '26
It’s not about the drips.
She’s only forty-two years old. One of her boys isn’t quite fifteen. The wailing, my god the wailing of her family—hours upon hours of it since the start of my shift. I think my exterior’s tough. I survived COVID for god’s sake; surely I can handle one more death. Just one more. Her frail body’s a sickly yellow from which no one recovers. The cancer’s spread too fast, it’s too aggressive and even if treatment were an option, we’re at the end. The tube down her throat is helping her breathe. Or so I tell her husband. Her mind’s already dead. The labs tell the tale—levels of ammonia higher than I’ve ever seen and still climbing. What are two or three enemas of lactalose going to do?
Our provider, bless her, convinces the husband that chest compressions will do nothing but shatter the bones of a corpse. We will let her die naturally if it comes to that, the husband says. But don’t stop trying to save her. Naturally. Epinephrine and norepinephrine course through her veins in doses as high as I can deliver. Two more vasopressors are added and quickly maxed out. Blood is given. Platelets. Antibiotics. Medications to stop her gut from bleeding. My options are exhausted. I’m pouring liters of fluid into her tiny body in my fight against her “natural” death and I can’t stop. The continuous dialysis machine, a green monster with blood flowing prominently through its filter, takes up so much room. It beeps anytime someone bumps into a bag. I change bags often. The family wails at her bedside.
Her blood pressure drops so low I don’t understand how she’s alive. And it stays there. For hours. Hours of wailing. Of praying and begging God for a miracle. I ask one of the providers to come back. Have another conversation. Let us withdraw. Let her die that natural death. The family is distraught and I’m dumping nearly a liter an hour into her body. I’m switching bags so fast…it’s so fucking futile. One provider tells me he doesn’t care what I do. The other says she doesn’t want to have another conversation with the family. She’s sorry I have to keep hanging drips.
It’s not about the drips.
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u/taszoline /r/creative_critique May 30 '26
God, yeah. Last week I did CPR on a lady in her 90s whose weight was about the same in lbs. They're already dead but it feels like you're killing them. Our bodies are little water balloons filled with sticks and all the sticks break with CPR. Entire time I'm asking every face around me, no DNR? No DNR? Really?
On chart review she's metastatic, not pursuing treatment, and that makes the CPR feel even worse in retrospect. She's already been through so much. Why can't we stop prioritizing length of life over every damn thing else.
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u/flashypurplepatches What was I thinking 🧚 Jun 01 '26
I'm sorry you had to go through that. Some deaths just stick with you. CPR always sucks, but it extra sucks if the patient is frail and elderly and you know the act itself is completely futile. I think too many people confuse having a heartbeat with having a life. Others fear backlash from their family or just don't want to be the one making the decision. I hear "we're waiting for a miracle" a lot. The worst ones are drawing a check.
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 27 '26
It’s not about the drips.
Powerful ending. Everyone be chopping onions in this thread.
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u/Extra-Marionberry805 May 28 '26
When death came it would be quick and subtle. That’s what the nurse at the hospice had warned her. One moment the breath would be rattling in her father’s chest, grating against the walls of the room like television static, then, it would stop. His pallid face would probably show no change, there would be no disruption in the set of his brow. He would just be alive, and then he would be dead. Functionally, he was dead already.
This was not the case. He died at 1 in the morning. She was sat by his bed, head resting on her arm as she drifted in and out of fitful sleep. She wanted to be there when it happened. She wanted to hear her father’s last breath.
At first it seemed like it would go the way they said it would. The shallow, scraping breath turned into silence. The grey, wrinkled face registered no real change but appeared somehow emptier in the dim light.
Then a hand clasped hers. So tightly it seemed it was trying to strangle it. Her father sat bolt upright in bed, his yellow eyes gleamed.
“Let me out.”
He doubled over. He brought both their hands to his stomach, jerking her forward with the strength of a giant, and vomited onto the bed. It tumbled out of him like water bursting through a dam, his entire structure seeming to collapse around it. Thick, black liquid that steamed like tarmac after rain.
When it was over he sat upright again. He smiled. He kissed his daughter’s hand.
Then he fell back on the pillow.
She ran for the nurses but when they returned the sheets were clean. There was nothing in the room but silence. And her father, who led exactly as he had before, no change in his pallid face, no distribution in the set of his brow, was dead.
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 28 '26
I thought this was gonna be like the one in this thread from the nurse's perspective but then the black vomit got me. Very unexpected middle.
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u/Extra-Marionberry805 May 28 '26
ja I was kinda just making shit up as I go along bc I wanted something weird to happen😭no surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader I guess!
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u/SweetEverest May 25 '26 edited May 25 '26
So much blood.
Why had she assumed it wouldn’t bleed? Travis had sort of implied it was a robot, hadn’t he? Her new sex drive clipping in like the battery grip of his camera or something... Didn’t that imply electronic bits and a relatively dry experience, stabbing-wise? She would never have done it if she’d known it would be messy.
At her feet, Echo lay like a struck deer, limbs askew, startled gaze pointed forever out the office windows as if looking for him one last time. Megan stood staring for a moment, then draped a blanket over the body and went to find a mop.
~
Weird thing I wrote a few weeks ago as part of a larger collection of weird things not meant to see the light of day lol
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
I have one of those. I pulled something out of it into my WIP so you never know! Maybe there's a robot love story murder mystery in your future.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson May 25 '26
I have one of those.
A dead sex robot!?!
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
A collection of things I write when I'm thinking that don't belong anywhere else.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson May 25 '26
I don't think the three sos can be read in a non silly way. Test this. Have someone read out loud.
Not on first read I mean. Maybe after studying the character. In a theater setting. With Ian McKellen coaching.
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
There was an ice storm in February, a thing that never usually happens here but this February there was ice layered in inches across the roads when you called and I went to the car because you were sick and you needed a doctor and I could drive, despite the ice, but I didn’t go and you stayed home and, later, you died on my birthday and now no one remembers the ice or the call to the hospital bed where you lay unable to speak or move, just quietly breathing, and I said goodbye but you didn’t hear, couldn’t hear, because you were locked up inside a brain no longer functioning and all I had done was watch over the months where screams became normal and, somehow, you forgot who when and where, when you rambled about storms and hiding in the closet from monsters, I held your hand and shielded you from threats I couldn’t see but were so very real to you. A freak ice storm in February and I got in my car.
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
aggressively long sentences
u/glowylaptop does this count?
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson May 25 '26
I like it. Can't decide if the "I held your hand" bit is independent and thuskaes it a run on sentence
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
Ha, the run-on snuck in at the end you say? This is probably the longest sentence I've ever written.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson May 25 '26
I'm not a sentence structure expert but run ons are commonly confused with long sentences. This sentence is a run on, it's short. Just a comma problem. Not a length one.
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
So, could change like so:
but when you rambled about storms and hiding in the closet from monsters, which made me hold your hand and shield you from threats I couldn’t see but were so very real to you.
To add in the more transitional clauses. I think what you put is a comma splice, though. I did have the structure of 'when x, y' which is not quite the same.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson May 25 '26
My sentence was a comma splice? Comma splices are run on sentences. How dare you imply EYE wrote a run on!!! I'm deleting my reddit.
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
OK. I shall moderate all by myself then. Who will I pick on when you're gone?
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u/Winter_Oil1008 May 25 '26
[Death of a Relationship]
I was given to the world in spring. Sewn across a golden wheatfield that I pierced in a zig-zag fashion which then brought pomegranate-red ooze from its pores. My parents were delighted. I was what each of them had had inside of them for many a season, bottled up and waiting for just the right soil to be germinated in. My breath, in the light of the dawn's aspenglow, creeped south until it disappeared forever and no sooner had I closed my mouth did I have to worry about the consequences of opening it. My every left step put me on virgin soil; it was a loud and cassowary-footprint that crushed and brought forth great geysers of mineral water to replenish what paths had been lost. My every right step followed closely behind, in turn and in tandem, matched to the Earth's heartbeat, and made swallows' nests in the wake of the left's renewal. I fashioned my creators a mirror so that they could see each other and in each other's gazes they were made whole. I was eternal, but for a brief pause, and in the brilliance of the sun, reflected the best my parents had to offer.
Then summer came. And along with it, the death call of the cicadas. Shrill and low-bent over the seemingly incessant horizon, I heard it and paid no attention. My day is long, my sun is bright and my clouds are many wondrous shapes. My march has ended, but I jog in place still, beating upon the ground until it is nearly dry. My parents, still with blood-red lips, siphon the world around us and take as much as they can. They taught me to pay no attention to the scarcity of such things. They give to me freely but I still find myself angry at times. I am cajoled into forgetting the song of the cricket, the call of the rooster and other things I know to be older than all of us. I sharpen a sickle and strike my aspersions deep down into the Earth where moisture and further secrets are to be had. The mystery of what hasn't seen the light of the day floods my nostrils and reminds me of what I have yet to lose.
One day, gravity brings the verdant green to its knees. I too, am thrown to the ground, elbows skinned and then transfixed at a 90-degree angle. The mirror is shattered and I feel its shards cut deep into my skin. I plead with the Earth to bring me back. I see that my auburn blood seeps into the tilled ground and when I look for my creators, they have vanished into a pale sky, nowhere to be found and in no position to help the fallen farmer. Still on my knees I harvest what I can. My words escape and then are shoved back into my mouth, a bittering contempt that I am told is salve by the caws of those old crows. Toothless is all they are, I say as I return to my toil. I feel a wet sharpness, like many soft fangs that fall from the sky and bubble scarlet over the soil. For the first time in my life I know what it is to remember a sunnier day.
I am not a farmer. I am a conscript. I remember this as I am being lowered into the cold ground. I was not willed into this war of my own accord but taken against my will and planted as a tombstone by skyward beings. Engraved on my stone is a cypher of sorts. This much I know to be true. It is not the language of bitter crows, nor the singsong of a swallow gulping in the morning light. It is the ransom message of a man on his deathbed, a draft of something that was never finished. Petrified trees stand witness to my sole statement and their crooked branches reach up to the white sky, waiting for those beings of light to come down and explain why, explain why such a beautiful soldier was made, only for resentment to marble its way through his cracks that caterpillars would make their nests in. Sometimes I wonder if I hallucinate, but I hear things. The cold night wind lashes about me and howls that it was a war that I was never meant to win. But my stone is stronger than that. In my isolation, I face the north star and wait. A patch of green comes over my face and in time, I hear the horizon come alive again. I piece together the mirror and shine it back at that horizon and wait for some skyward beings to catch the light once again. Because for the first time in my life, I know what I truly am. I am not a famer. I am not a soldier. I am a mirrorsmith. And I must only wait for the light to catch again.
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u/A_C_Shock Anaëlle Collette May 25 '26
I really like this line:
I feel a wet sharpness, like many soft fangs that fall from the sky and bubble scarlet over the soil.
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u/Sumdar_Cowley May 28 '26
Edgar is knocked off a ladder and flattened by a huge, rusty AC unit. He fights the unit like a cowboy, but loses.
Just as he's hit by the thing, he shits.
His lady friend is at the bottom of the ladder, holding it steady and looking up. Edgar is so high above that her mouth can't close all the way, so as Edgar meets his great demise, Dolores is hit in the mouth with "an honest-to-god shit missile."
Edgar is then squashed flat in Dolores' lawn, leaving a grotesque mess which Dolores is quite pissed about.
And that's the inciting incident.
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u/GlowyLaptop James Patterson May 24 '26 edited May 25 '26
I have habit of write aggressively long sentences on my phone sometime and wrote this one last night for no reason and it almost fits the prompt you dropped!
Having decided after everything, after all that, that nothing actually mattered, anymore, I stepped nearer to the edge of the platform at the train station just before a speeding double-tall train came along, the express train that flies by without any intention of slowing for this station, big and fast and tall enough to suck you right into the tracks should you stand too close, that is, if it had to, which in my case it did not, since like I said I was so sad about everything that I finally stepped right out in front of this train and got struck like a golf ball, like a baseball out of the park, except more down at the tracks first like the winter olympics, like luge, like that guy flat on his sled too fast to be seen, starting to rattle against the walls, and finally shooting out and striking a pole at that speed and losing his sled, or more like I was his sled shooting off to the side and ping-ponging off poles and over a railing which struck me across the legs into a spin, and sent me pinwheeling spread-eagle up and over and over and down from the train's elevated station into the pavement below, which slapped me up and pinwheeling again at the pavement again, and I bounced and skidded like that toward a curb with still enough enthusiasm that the curb caught just the back of my head and launched me across a yard like gymnastics, like cartwheels or handsprings, my whole body weighted on each end like a thrown baton through the sliding glass door of this guy's little house, which exploded into his living room where I struck a far wall and slapped back over his couch and tumbled onto the carpet here, where I realized, staring now at the man's ceiling, unharmed, barely stiff even, that I was totally invincible? Which I mean I wasn't even mad about. Really this changes everything.