How willing are you to kill off your characters?

My heart is a bit of the fragile type, and I usually can't stand my favourite characters dying. This may not seem much when I am reading other stories — I can simply avoid them by not reading the story. However, when I am starting to write a story, I am really struggling to put a few major characters to death. So I hope someone can give me a thought on whether I should put the character to death, if not, would it make my major characters look like having plot armor and the readers will slowly not care about their danger since they know the major characters would come back anyway?

Also, I tend to have a habit of pairing up the characters (in any way). Does it make a supposingly adventure like story to become a romantic story?

Scenario of a Standard Fantasy story: The protagonist is the God of Destruction, with infinite lifespan. She suffers from amnesia and becomes a normal little girl who is picked up by a teenage orphan boy (whom she called "brother"). They live on the hillside in the outskirts of a small town. However, one day her brother is kidnapped by a necromancer. (After like 500 years) When she finally finds her brother, she finds out that he is brainwashed by the necromancer and becomes a puppet. There are different choices available, I hope everyone can help me to pick some:

• A: She kills her brother, and kills the necromancer. Thereby freeing her brother's soul.
• B: She directly kills the necromancer, but her brother is soulless forever.
• C(Makes the most sense): She directly kills the necromancer, but without the support of the necromancer and being an ordinary human, he dies (as humans have only 100 years lifespan at most).
• D(I like this one the most): She immobilizes her brother and directly kills the necromancer, and her brother is freed of the control, but his soul shatters. After collecting the soul fragments, her brother is revived. They embark on another journey for adventures.
• E(Somehow makes Death is Cheap): Same as C, but later when the protagonist is about to be killed during a mission, she is saved by her supposingly dead brother. It is revealed that her brother is chosen to be the servant of the Creator of the world under a contract for XX years. Now the contract is fulfilled, the Creator allows her brother to go and find the protagonist.

Hmm, well, as you already noted option C makes the most sense, and it is the one I would choose.

Option D sounds mildly cheap and option E cheesy cheap, and I have to admit I don't particularly care for cheap endings. I've only ever done something that could be called "cheap" once as an ending, and it's only cheap relative to the overall tone of the world of the story, a world in which to cast magic one has to use their own blood and which actually did make one of the main characters lose consciousness on occasions and have to be carried and then tended to (and only in that sequence because it happened during battles or other encounters where there simply was no way to stop and waste time on it). That said, of course, my stories' world is not really lighthearted at all and I do like showing the notion that everything has consequences and everything has a cost, so if a lighthearted setting is what you strive for then you might actually want to consider those options (D sounds better to me than E, but that I believe is just a matter of personal preference).

Options A and B I cannot really comment about as I do not know enough about your story (reason A) or its world and lore (option B) . They do seem a bit ... I don't know, senseless, I guess, what with the first one making her kill the very person she is doing it for and the second one seeming to lack finality, but then again I do not know whether they truly are as that would require knowing more.

As for romance, I will tell you this: well-written, romance can be fit into almost anything.

I very rarely kill off my characters unless they're supposed to be PostHumousCharacters from the start. I, too, am a softy when it comes to the main story.

Plus I don't really like the flood of Anyone Can Die books in fantasy lately—Game Of Thrones pulled it off, but now a lot of people are desperate to prove how EDGY AND REALISTIC they are by killing off half their characters... and forgetting that Game Of Thrones works so well because George RR Martin WRITES GOOD CHARACTERS to kill off.

Very true, I say. Killing off characters just to show how grim and dark and grimdark and other things 40k-ish the story is does more often than not just end up being edgy and bleech. And the Game of Thrones is actually a good example of how to do it, an example that the people who looked at the series and decided "geim of tronz be kill characterz so i can be kill characterz to and be bestest" (poor writing quality intentional) did not seem to care about noticing whatsoever: in Game of Thrones the characters died by both sword (combat) and pen (intrigue), but when that happened you could always see the sword or the pen moving a long time before that, and you could always take a look at the dead character and then at their killer and say "yeah, I can see that happening". In other words, the deaths were foreshadowed and the situations that led to deaths used characters' personalities and goals as a catalyst.

@Luic: if you like D the most, do it. Don't assume that just because one character gets ressurected after many hardships and a high cost that removes all risk and drama in a story. Not only ressurection in your setting is probably very rare and/or costly (otherwise "Yes, ressurect him!" would be tge only answer), but death isn't the only source if drama a story can have, far from it. And it is fantasy, the possibility of centering whole plotlines on concepts not possible in this world (at least currently?) is a big draw of Speculative Fiction. Just treat it as a big, character and plot-defining arc if you don't want to risk the drama.

I hesitate to kill my characters unless it was planned from the very start and the character has been given a enough amount of screen time and opportunity to shape the plot to be memorable before abandoning their mortal coil.

What binds me to a story are characters I can relate to and/or admire, and the fastest way of making me abandon it is not having, or removing, the few characters who held me. And before you ask, yes that means I am absolutely uninsterested in A Song of Ice and Fire or the TV series based on it, and annoyed by the praise it gets, even if I won't deny it is well-written.

That does not mean I am never willing to kill my characters, or make them suffer in other ways (like poverty, exile, maiming, psychological trauma, etc), but even then I avoid thinking I have a "misery quota" to fill, and permanently removing from a story a well-crafted character is never to be done lightly.

i more or less rarely kill characters. heck, i don't even kill off most of my villains. i like tormenting them but that doesn't mean I'll full on kill them off. i have to have a reason to do so. is it to show how dangerous a villain is? is it for the sake of sympathy points? or you're just doing it to shock your audience?

either way, i rarely do it. i guess they're too precious that seeing them go away just makes feel dead inside.

There is nothing wrong with not killing characters, in fact there are many types of story that don't lead naturally to multiple deaths, it is just that the more deadly plots like violent crime or wars are often given more attention than other kinds when discussing character deaths in the internet. Maybe it is because because they can provide "cheaper" drama, as death is a very potent drama-inducer, or maybe because the kind of people who likes discussing character deaths does so because they prefer genres in which death is to be expected.

I second Eterna Memoria: If you like D the most, I'd find ways for D to make the most sense. Heck, I could even see E work with enough foreshadowing.

The way I understand it Plot Armor only becomes egregiously apparent when people don't die in circumstances where they normally could/would, without proper explanation. Imagine somebody unloading a machine gun into a massive crowd and our protagonist is among the unharmed. Coincidence, right? Have something like this happen ten times though and it might start annoying people.

I also second Kazeto's statement that good romance fits into (I guess almost) any story. I have countless and wildly different story ideas and all of them feature romance in some form or another. What ends up making the whole thing either a romance or adventure story (or both) probably depends on what you end up focusing on more in your writing.

I believe finding a beautiful, meaningful death for your characters is a wonderful thing, as is finding a horrifying, meaningless and utterly saddening one. I would not want to deprive myself of that, and thus I plan to kill my characters, even if I haven't gotten around to it yet. Who knows, maybe I won't have the heart for it in the end .

EDIT: So far I've managed to kill off one important character, and it simply felt great to have their book close in a way befitting them (It was the beautiful, meaningful kind).

edited 31st Mar '17 11:46:15 AM by ilili

Kazeto: Another problem is that for a lot of the knockoffs, I don't care about the characters like I do with the Game Of Thrones ensemble. If they were clearly set up as a Red Shirt with basic (if any) characterization, why should we care when they die?

Well, I ... kind of thought that one obvious. But of course it isn't, considering how many people make that mistake.

Thanks everyone... I guess I might stick to option D, since I really like the protagonist's brother.

However, I am really confused what makes a death beautiful and meaningful now...Considering there are many plot armour and Death is Cheap.

I can't say what makes a death "beautiful," but a meaningful death is often one that embodies the theme of the story. The difference between Heroic Sacrifice and Senseless Sacrifice mean really different things, for example.

Heroic Sacrifice functions like a Bittersweet Ending (for a character) because while it hurts that the character dies, it's ultimately to fuel the story. Senseless Sacrifice is often a Gut Punch for the readers, because it doesn't have a purpose in the plot (aside from the cases where Reality Ensues). And if we think it's a Heroic Sacrifice at first, but find out LATER that the heroic part got undone or the character died for nothing, it just twists the knife even further.

edited 1st Apr '17 12:16:06 AM by Sharysa

As Sharysa said, it is all about how it affects the story and how the story affects it. A truly meaningful death is one that accomplishes something that would not be accomplished without, just like any meaningful sacrifice is one that does the same thing. As for the beauty, well, that is quite a subjective thing so everyone sees it differently but personally I it as something stemming from the reason for their sacrifice and from how they approached it.

Let's use a few examples, shall we:

The death of Zero from the Mega Man Zero series was both meaningful and beautiful. It was meaningful because it allowed the survivors of the whole thing to actually start doing something about the cruddy world they were in and start living rather than just surviving. And it was beautiful because of how Zero approached it (he rejected the plea to port away and live of the person who most likely fell in love with him to save that person and the people around her) and because of all the history that led to this (his never-ending fight, and his past conviction that his presence only makes things worse no matter what).

Another example, X from the Mega Man X, his death in the Zero series was both ugly and ultimately meaningless. He didn't choose to die, he used his own body as an eternal prison for something that had to be sealed away, and he was killed by someone who neither appreciated X as a hero from the past that he was nor actually knew the meaning of sacrifice, and this makes his death ugly. His death is also meaningless because ultimately it brought nothing good.

I could give more examples but I think those two are enough to get a basic idea.

edited 1st Apr '17 8:19:01 AM by Kazeto

I'm a safe type, meaning that I can kill someone, but not someone too important, or someone I just like too much. So I have been taking steps to change that. Like you guys said though, just killing for the heck of it, i.e. without meaning, isn't that useful to a plot.

If I may add my personal example: Alice and Bob work inside a corrupt assassination syndicate (it's extra info but pretty much the heads of the organization are very controlling of the grunt workers' lives, lying about keeping their anonymity safe, and all that etc. Essentially, Alice, Bb, and coworkers are played like fiddles). Alice is a very callous and unfeeling fatalist without any self-will or determination other than what she is told to do, similar to a robot. Bob however is very strong of feeling and tries pushing her into discovering her "humanity". Later on Bob tries to expose the organization, but it ends up going horribly wrong. In life, Bob was able to form an emotional bond with Alice. In death, Bob's death forces Alice to rebel against the organization herself, and her actions are also something akin to "finishing his work". This is thanks to Bob's death acting as an emotional push.

edited 1st Apr '17 11:14:29 PM by SkullySnot

Another question that I am currently facing, it is a really bad habit of mine:

I tend to link up many characters, very frequently. While I selfishly believe it to be a part of the Fridge Brilliance, but in reality, is it the case? Or having some completely unrelated (in any ways) characters in the main cast to balance the portion is much better?

I am not sure having too much linking would be a good thing, or that people may think it is just a big coincidence.

Whether or not it makes things better depends on how much it makes sense in the story. In my stuff, the characters aren't really related in any way with the exception of two of them which are kind-of-but-not-really (they are basically related by fostering, but it really doesn't quite work that way in their world so they kind of are family but not really related). If it works better for you to have them all related, go for it.

That said, I have no idea how would it in any way be Fridge Brilliance, really.