The ensemble farewell

Grief as a product with a marketing budget. The eleventh film in a series was sold on the deaths it contained, and the audience bought tickets to be sad in a cinema with other people, which is the whole apparatus working as designed.

Manipulation. One-sided attachment engineered for somebody else's benefit. Paid intimacy, parasocial persuasion, sasaeng, grief extraction, the streak. The lane that pays the bills and the lane that causes the most harm, frequently at the same time.