so getting shocked at a comic character's "death" in most mediums is pointless
When did "shocked" come into this? That's the exact opposite of what I'm saying, that character resurrections have become so routine and predictable that deaths have no emotional impact on the audience anymore and are just seen as minor obstacles to be reversed.
And I don't understand arguments like "we're not fooled." I mean, we all
know this is imaginary, that these characters and their crises don't really exist. It's called
willing suspension of disbelief. We
choose to set aside our knowledge of the unreality and let ourselves believe in the world as the characters experience it. The characters don't know it's fictional, they don't know if a death will be reversed, and if a story is well enough told, we let ourselves get pulled along with its flow and feel it as the characters do. Experiencing fiction is about
wanting to be fooled, wanting the illusion to be so compelling that we're happy to forget its artificiality.
So you're making my point for me. Overusing resurrection makes the illusion of a character death less compelling, harder for the audience to get drawn into.
Besides, comics and television/movies are two different things. Comics run for decades and need to keep churning out content, so eventually old characters and ideas get brought back even if they've been gone for decades. But TV and movie series have shorter runs, so it's more feasible to make a change permanent. There's no logic in assuming an adaptation
has to do things exactly the same way as its source, the bad with the good. Adapting something to a new form is an opportunity to distill its best parts and leave out its bad habits. So you may be right that '97 was setting up a Gambit resurrection with that mid-credit scene, but that doesn't mean they
had to. Not unless there's a genuinely worthwhile story there rather than just a formulaic reset button.
