The Greeks, masters at storytelling, had a concept, catharsis. It's like a process, where pity and fear are stirred up in the audience. The story carries them toward resolution. What remains is not merely sadness remembered, but a greater capacity to hold suffering without fleeing from it.1 I think that residue is one beginning of empathy.
The mechanism matters because sadness alone is not the point. A story can hurt you emotionally without doing cathartic work. Catharsis requires consequence and resolution together, and the lingering effects of tragedy. Something loved must be endangered or lost, and the story must carry that loss through to a settled form. The audience is not protected from pain. It is led through it.
Older children's stories understood this whether or not they used the vocabulary. Bambi's mother dies and it drives the story. Mufasa falls, dies and there's consequences to it. Charlotte dies beside her egg sac. Old Yeller is shot by the boy who loves him. Charmander nearly gets his flame shut. These stories marked our childhood, and made us feel the sadness and sorrow of these events. We rooted for the protagonist and felt their pain, shaping us and helping us understand the consequences of it.
Again, Marvel and DC
I already ranted in another discussion about Marvel and DC, but they make a joke out of storytelling. Is not just that theire stories are not sad enough, it is that many large franchises removed final consequence while keeping the emotional staging. They have deaths, but they're reversible. They have life changing events, but they minimize the consequences. The MCU is the obvious example. Death scenes are still performed with swelling music, grief faces, and sacrificial framing, but audiences learn to doubt the finality of the event because the franchise has repeatedly reversed or softened death.2 Once consequence becomes negotiable, the arc weakens and there's no lesson, no catharsis. If you make death such a light consequence by making it reversible, if you can travel in time to kill Thanos and try again, then the public doesn't get the heavy weight of tragedy. Doesn't grow, and in fact, gets a subconscious feeling that life is not that precious anyway. You don't turn into a psycho, ofc, but after years of seeing death and tragedy being taken so lightly, you don't really grasp the weight of it. Fear cannot fully form because loss doesn't get to show. Pity cannot fully settle because grief is not a big deal.
Aristotle, Poetics, chapter 6. The exact meaning of catharsis remains debated in classical scholarship, but the core point here is the functional one: tragedy was understood to do something to the audience, not merely entertain it.
The MCU's pattern of reversible or unstable death, including characters such as Loki, Vision, and Gamora in different forms, trained the audience to discount apparent finality. The argument here is structural and does not depend on any single example.