One often overlooked aspect of movies with serious battles or loss of life is the casualties and aftermath. I'm thinking about what to do to not gloss over serious tragedy and how it would affect a small community.

Take for example, the movie Outbreak with Dustin Hoffman. Here, we have a small town which is infected with a virus that is airborne, highly contagious, and has a 100% mortality rate. The movie centers around the threat this disease has to the world at large, and ultimately, they contain it by coming up with a cure and presumably inoculating everyone who is still alive.

The movie pulls hard at the heartstrings when it shows the bloody dead. It's massive loss. And to add to this emotional tsunami, the story briefly tracks with a young mother who begins to show symptoms. She is taken away and leaves her family with the belief that she will only be gone for a little while. They show her being taken in and having the blood test done and being put in quarantine. A few scenes later, we see the end of that mini-arc come with the zipping of a body bag and the bloody face of this mother.

However, the story does not visit this family again. It leaves the aftermath to the viewer's imagination. Probably because the viewers are not emotionally invested in her family as they only feature for a few seconds. Similarly, when the story's climax comes down to a race between implementing a cure and bombing the hell out of the infected town, the cure is brought in at the last second and we get to see one of the main characters who ended up getting infected begin recovery in the very last scene. The movie ends with a quip of all things. It never visits the aftermath of the tragedy which was not prevented, instead, focusing on the fact that they found a cure and saved one of the main characters.

So here's my question. In writing a story where a similar situation occurs and a large percentage of a relatively small population is violently killed, how much of the aftermath of the tragedy ought to be put into view? I know this is author's discretion and all, given the level of sadness that is intended. For me, I'm definitely wanting to pull on those heartstrings, but I don't want it to dominate the story. I've taken the time to build up the familiarity and relatability of the characters who will end up suffering the loss, but the more personal I make those characters the more the reader is going to care about them and want to see what they have to go through after the tragedy comes. I feel like if I didn't depict it strong enough, it might seem like I am being flippant with their loss. On the other hand, if I dwell on their aftermath too much, it becomes the focus of the story more than it should. This feels like a fine balancing act. Anyone have any thoughts?

I thin you hit on the core idea here:

The movie ends with a quip of all things. It never visits the aftermath of the tragedy which was not prevented, instead, focusing on the fact that they found a cure and saved one of the main characters.

First, the emotional tone of the ending goes a long way to setting the tone for the entire story, because it stands out in the reader's mind. What you describe here, I'd imagine, comes off as dishonest or even disrespectful because the end -- "Time to be happy now!" -- is trying to override the sadness of the other scenes. It feels like a lie of omission. So if you want to remedy this, just look for ways of keeping the ending in line with the tone of the whole story -- something bittersweet would work better than unreserved cheer.

Second, at the risk of being glib, if you want to show two sides, then show two sides. Give us parallel stories. One person survives. One person dies -- or loses a loved one, or something like that. And don't short change either -- have them play off one another.

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Good observations, thanks.

To further complicate things, the tragedy I'm speaking of is just a precursor to further instances of this which won't necessarily be covered in as much detail later in the story. The first one details some pretty horrific deaths of loved ones who end up surviving or being rescued. But this is just the climax of act one. There's a cooldown before transitioning to act two where the characters will need to move on to other settings in the story as well as deal with deeper mysteries. This climax is still a few chapters away from being written, so there's time for me to think over how to approach it.

I'm thinking of taking what you said in regards to survivors and having that be the silver lining, so to speak, to underscore the fact that it wasn't a complete loss after all. Yeah, some of the characters who the reader would grow to care about will have had families devastated, but the backdrop of the story is an international war anyway, so tragedy and loss are already widespread. This kind of thing happens in real life too. The world watched in horror with the 9/11 tragedy all those years ago, and relatively quickly, nobody heard about the families of the dead or how they are doing. Maybe abbreviating that kind of aftermath is preferred.