For this week’s Five Things Friday, I’m reposting a piece I wrote for Ramen, the lovely Caro’s zine. Enjoy!

5) Tara McClay – Buffy the Vampire Slayer
You know what? I just really hate Kennedy. If Oz is going to go off and be a werewolf in Tibet or something, then there’s only one person I want to give Willow sweet lovin’, and she’s not a bratty, brunette vampire slayer.

4) Denny Duquette – Grey’s Anatomy
When you’ve watched nearly every character played by Jeffrey Dean Morgan die, you start to think “who did he piss off?” And you laugh, because he’s basically a poor man’s Sean Bean. Then Izzie walks into his hospital room, dressed for the prom, and it’s not funny anymore. Suddenly he’s not Jeffrey Dean Morgan, he’s Denny. Denny, who played dirty Scrabble and flirted with Izzie and asked her to spend the rest of her life with him, only he spent the rest of his life with her instead.

3) Primrose Everdeen – The Hunger Games
The greatest tragedy of Prim’s death is that she was only thirteen. That she was blown up in an accident caused by a man she had known her entire life. That she died while her sister watched. Or maybe the greatest tragedy of all was that Prim never knew a world outside of the totalitarian regime under which she was raised. She never knew a life without fear, without violence, without the Hunger Games. She never got a chance to grow up. Become a doctor. Fall in love. She was a pointless sacrifice in a bloody war.

2) Fred Weasley – Harry Potter
I have long believed that it’s a sin to kill a sibling, but it’s even worse to kill a twin. When Fred died, half of George died with him. The half that laughed, that invented magical candy, that schemed and plotted and played Quidditch. And what’s left? Just a broken, scarred man remembering a distant time when his life made sense. Perhaps it would have been kinder to let George die alongside his brother in the final battle, because his world ended that night anyway.

1) Remus Lupin – Harry Potter
There comes a moment when you’re crying and someone asks you why, so you tell them that Remus Lupin died. They look at you strangely, because you’ve had four years to mourn, but four years will never be enough. Sometimes you wish J. K. Rowling killed Arthur Weasley in “Order of the Phoenix,” but only if it means that Lupin and Tonks would survive, and raise their son, and go to Sunday dinners at the Potter’s. Maybe someday Lupin would go back to teaching. Maybe someday they’d have another son (and name him Sirius), and he’d get Sorted into Gryffindor (or Hufflepuff). Then, finally, when Remus is old and even more grey, he would become the only Marauder to die at a ripe old age. Because his life was filled with too much tragedy to die at 38.