There are four (technically, five) characters in fiction whose death made me cry. And I mean ugly crying - fat tears freely flowing out. It was a mercy that no one was around to see it - they would’ve been seriously freaked out! (But now that it’s out there - now you know)
The four were: Ove (from A Man Called Ove). Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore (Harry Potter). Coltaine, from Malazan Book of the Fallen. And Fitz and the Fool, from Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings.
A grumpy Swedish widower - who can’t believe how the new generation lives and acts. A whimsical, all-powerful wizard who seems content to be a school headmaster. A Wickan war-chief leading thirty thousand refugees across a continent that’s trying to kill them in horrific ways. And two people - a royal assassin and a gender-fluid prophet - whose bond is so deep it transcends every category we have for relationships.
I’ve been trying to figure out what connects them - they’re such different characters in such different contexts. I want to understand why they got such a strong reaction from me.
The easiest explanation is that the writing was good - yet so differently portrayed.
Backman builds Ove over three hundred pages of flashbacks - you understand what drives him internally, and how it appears externally. By the time you understand who he is - you can’t help but be sad but insanely proud of how he lived his life. Erikson barely shows Coltaine’s thoughts or feelings - you watch the Chain of Dogs almost entirely from the outside, through the other characters’ awe and horror. The restraint makes it all the more enigmatic and devastating. Rowling spent six books making Dumbledore feel permanent, then took him away when it mattered most. Hobb spent nine books on Fitz and the Fool - out of a series total of fifteen. Nine books - spent developing these two characters in a series that has some of the best character redemption arcs I’ve read. She earned every tear.
But I’ve read lots of books - and the others did not evoke this visceral response from me. Characters died all the time. What else was going on with these?
I think the common thread is these characters people are men who hold the line - but in very different ways.
Ove believes the world should work a certain way. Snow should be shovelled in straight lines. Cars should be Saabs. Work should be done with utmost earnestness. When you make a promise, you keep it. When something is broken, you fix it. When someone needs help, you help, and you don’t make a fuss about it.
But the world has a different idea. His one joy in life - his wife Sonja - dies. His job disappears. His neighbourhood fills with people who park incorrectly and chain-smoke on balconies and let their children run unsupervised. And Ove responds to all of this not by adapting, but by digging in - doubling down on his principles until he appears to become an impossible, unpleasant, absurd old man.
Except, he isn’t a grouchy old man. He just expresses his worldview as irritation - in a world that’s fast changing around him, he’s fighting to hold on to his self. Ove is the most decent person in every room he enters. His decency comes from a place full of heart, that he learnt from his own father, and by building up an earnest, honest life full of work and principles. He shows love through repairs, and showing up very quietly when needed. He shows care through rules and following them strictly. He keeps postponing his own grief, just to care for people he has grown to love in his own, quiet way.
One of the most telling things about Ove is his relationship with Rune - one of his oldest friends. A man almost exactly like Ove (just replace “Saab” with “Volvo”). They were thick as thieves, until the point when the realities of a changing world broke Rune (something that Ove resisted with all his might) - and he bought a BMW instead of a Volvo (sounds absurd, I know. But trust me - read the book to find out). This “straw that broke the camel’s back” turned them into the staunchest of enemies for years, yet Ove flipped back to being a quiet pillar of support when Rune was under threat of being put in a state-funded care home.
Coltaine is completely different.
In the Malazan series, Coltaine is a war-chief of a conquered clan who is given an impossible task: lead the Chain of Dogs, a column of thirty thousand refugees - civilians, children, the wounded and the dying - across hundreds of leagues of hostile territory, while an army several times his size tries to obliterate them. He is not asked whether he wants to do this. He is not given adequate resources or enough soldiers (in fact, his only source of help is poisoned and turned).
Erikson does something extraordinary with Coltaine: he almost never lets you inside the man’s head. You see him through the historian Duiker’s eyes, through his soldiers’ loyalty, through the enemy’s grudging respect. Only once do you see him break his facade - and that too only in front of his most trusted circle - when he laughs hard enough to make his eyes water. He laughs at the twists and turns of fate, and the shenanigans of his own soldiers - some of who are crazier than even him.
The story plays out beautifully - the actions of the rearguard, the insanity of the sappers, the feints, the sacrifices, the relentless forward movement, rivers running red - but you hear almost nothing of what he thinks about any of it. Coltaine is just shown as the ruthless, brilliant leader who cannot afford to stop - because the people of one third of a continent depends on him to not stop.
What got me was that final scene. The backdrop of High Fist Pormqual’s betrayal, a thousand soldiers begging and raging to be let out to rescue him. Then - Squint, the archer, crying as he draws his bow to pierce Coltaine’s head. The swarm of crows trying to gather his soul, to let him Ascend and reincarnate, and the hateful mage shooting them in swarms - not even allowing him dignity in death.
I remember putting the book down and just sitting there.
Dumbledore’s arc is actually revealed after his death.
For six books, Dumbledore is the most powerful person in Harry’s world and also the most reassuring. He’s the one who always knows a little more than he lets on, who has a plan behind the plan, who makes you feel that no matter what happens, he’ll be there, “always”. Even when terrible things happen, there’s Dumbledore, with his half-moon glasses and twinkling eyes and his maddening calm, and you trust that he sees the full picture.
Then, he dies.
It is only in the last two books that you see just how much Dumbledore was doing behind the scenes - and largely by himself - to ensure Voldemort never comes back. Hunting Horcruxes, ensuring former Death Eaters were tamed (one way or another) - all at great personal cost to himself. The backstory then emerges in Deathly Hallows - Grindelwald, Ariana, the guilt, the decades of guilt and penance . The twinkling eyes weren’t serenity - they were hiding power, a true purpose, and a heart deep with sorrow.
What broke me was the funeral. Fawkes’ lament. All the students. The centaurs. The merpeople. The whole world showing up to acknowledge what he had been.
I started this essay wanting to write about manhood. About what these characters say about how to be a “good man” - the stern-but-caring archetype, the burden-bearer, the custodian.
These are all characters who express themselves obliquely. They express love through duty. Ove through thoughtful presence. Dumbledore through caring restraint. Coltaine through brutal endurance. They are hard without being hollow. They carry weight without asking for applause.
In a world that increasingly defines goodness as performative warmth, there’s something that pulls at me about men whose warmth is invisible to anyone who isn’t paying close attention.
Sonja, Ove’s wife, says to him: “You’re dancing on the inside, Ove, when no one’s watching. And I’ll always love you for that. Whether you like it or not.”
That’s what I want - to be the kind of person where what’s happening on the inside is worth seeing, if someone cares enough to look. Where the standards one holds up, the stubbornness and the care are a core part of what one is, not to show an audience.
I don’t know if I’m that person yet.
My internal scaffolding is still getting built up - and will keep getting built. I hold my identity loosely across five or six roles - consultant, writer, builder, collector, father - and I tell myself this is wisdom, that I can be all I want to be. But perhaps there’s a version of that story where I find out that holding everything loosely is just another way of never gripping anything hard enough to find out whether you can hold it?
PS: I left out Fitz and the Fool deliberately, because they belong to a different essay. They represent something else - a love that defies every category. They are two people who are genuinely incomplete without each other. Together, they make a strong yet vulnerable character that changed the world they lived in - yet endured some of the most barbaric acts that same world could inflict. Perhaps I will find it in me to write that essay some day, but this is not it.