Of course I do.
Most cinematic, literary or video game-related deaths are carefully staged, and you acutely feel that the actor playing the now-dead individual is actually still alive. Things as simple as seeing Willem Dafoe keep breathing after being gunned down in "John Wick", for instance, make even the goriest of set-ups easily watchable.
In the case of games, the added distance goes even further. You might not even play as a human being, for starters, and death isn't much more than a transitory failure state. Even the Souls series considers death as more of an annoyance or a punishment doled out to impatient players, to the point where I don't really get the whole "Oh no, I died in this super-hard game because of one mistake on my part!" aspect of the genre.
When I die in a Souls game, I shrug it off and elect to pick up the pieces. End of story.
In the real world, though, I've seen my share of dead bodies. Here lies a person, filled with dreams and hopes and fears and human foibles and proclivities - and that person suddenly stops breathing. Where once was a person now lies a sack of meat, the kind you could almost eat if it wasn't so pumped full of carcinogens and antibiotics. Things immediately and subtly change, with muscles that had almost never relaxed before suddenly sagging completely. Eyeballs sink into their sockets by a tiny degree and skin soon starts sagging in places and hugging the bones in others.
That suicide video that's been mentioned before? What's really creepy to me is the lack of self-consciousness. Most people fuss over the tiniest stains on their suits and then here's this guy, probably irremediably staining that white shirt of his with a torrent of blood pouring from the mouth and nose. It's that lack of anything resembling "Oh, fuck, that's going to be hard on the dry-cleaning bill..." passing through nonverbal cues that chills me. Human concerns being entirely vacated.
And then there's my idiot cousin who shows me a video of a guy hitting an explosive-laden car with a baseball bat - on his cell phone, no less... The car explodes and there's nothing left. Freeze-frame in the right places and you can see an arm going in one direction and a leg in the other. My cousin's laughing his ass off and I'm just sitting there, silently mortified. I remember seeing a few ISIS videos and wondering how the Hell someone goes from being a decent person to being "Jihadi John", who caps freelance reporters or beheads them like it's a lazy walk in the park.
It's not so much the act of death that really leaves me feeling cold at my very core - it's the way it always involves a complete lack of normal human responses, either from the victim's part or the killer's.
