Character Death Thread

Let's not beat around the bush — us writers have body counts and it's always fun to share the ways your characters die, get ideas for death scenes, or get help determining if someone should live or not. We haven't had a thread dedicated to this, so I decided to make one. Share your favorite death scenes, get advice, and just discuss how you're planning on killing your darlings.

should be easy to do in Death Is Cheap settings...

A recent one I did is a scenario where the protagonists end up consumed by a bog standard Grey Goo scenario, dissolving into the silver ocean as they futility attempt to surface. Slowly losing conscious as they witness their bodies dissolve like a kool-aid packet.

Edited by MorningStar1337 on Aug 21st 2023 at 5:26:32 AM

In my creative writing class in highschool my friend joked that I killed a character in every story. In one (a flash fiction based on the Winchester House where the character died and became the 41th strike mark on the house, indicating a supernatural body count keeping) she yelled out the fact that I killed 40 characters in a single story (skipping the context of most of it being pre-story deaths) and the rest of the class looked at me like "O_O"

Edited by WarJay77 on Aug 21st 2023 at 2:45:50 PM

In the WIP I intend to publish, literally three out of the four main characters end up dead by the end of things (well, two end up dead and one of them pulled an Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence). That being said, this is a setting where Anyone Can Die and their deaths are meaningful and greatly related to their respective character arcs.

Edited by Swordofknowledge on Aug 22nd 2023 at 11:02:12 AM

Honestly, when I start read topics here, I was sruprised, how easy is killing characters for other people.

I strong empathise with my characters, usualy create happy ends and kill only villians or nameless characters.

I know about points in my works, where kill character would better choice for story, but I cant.

I mean I do the same thing for some stories but then other times it's fun to kill characters off, especially if they're the bad guys or go out in a Dying Moment of Awesome. Still though, totally get why it may be hard to do, if I get attached to a character I get really attached.

FWIW, I had a setting where Death Is Cheap and yet despite that, I haven't killed off the protags as often as that implies...yet.

I'm generally uncertain and reluctant to kill off my characters because i've seen others do it badly. I think "what if it's a mistake?", "what if it cuts something off?", "what if the timing is wrong?", and the like.

For Red Revenge, the idea is that all the supervillains except Marchegiano die eventually. But i think maybe i should also kill of at least one of the superheroes, but there's just 5 of them.

I don't want to kill Louisa because i like her and if i did it'd be Vasquez Always Dies, and i don't want to kill off either Miyako or Tadpole because they're together and they're the main lesbian couple. Orville is introduced very late so if i killed him off he'd barely be there at all, and, well, there isn't a specific reason to not kill Noah though i also generally don't know where to go with him.

Maybe it'd be interesting if Byron (one of the villains) succeeded in killing Noah in revenge for killing his father? There's a whole family drama behind this because Noah is Byron's uncle^note  (Noah and his estranged brother were spies/commandos on opposing sides and fought several times without recognizing each other, and decades later Noah found out his brother had been that guy, then Noah accidentally killed him in a later fight and his brother recognized him just before dying (Byron was there, also fighting Noah, but escaped). But on the other hand there's the interesting angle of the government forcing Noah to continue working for them for decades because you can't really hide your immortality in the modern world without government being in on it and giving you all the papers. Though there's propably also no actual escape from that sort of blackmail except death (defection propably wouldn't change anything).

Edited by Nukeli on Sep 8th 2023 at 1:54:39 PM

In Shadows Of Sandfield, Dubai gets nuked by cyborg villain Justin Henderson.

Yes - in my RP, the entirety of Dubai is slain.

Edited by NickTheSwing on Sep 9th 2023 at 11:05:55 AM

Advice on how to kill a character off well and avoid the concerns mentioned above?

I have a new character idea for Red Revenge. Artyom is a sympathetic soviet who's stationed in Germany right after WWII, and befriends and protects the major character Detlev who used to be a communist resistance fighter. Detlev has a very rose-tinted view of the USSR, was a member of the soviet-controlled KPD pre-war, and believes soviet/KPD propaganda about all the other german leftist groups being evil fascists (though his belief in the last part has already faded a lot). While part of Germany is being occupied and incorporated into the USSR, Detlev is increasingly confronted by the fact that USSR isn't the good guy. The last straw would be Artyom being somehow killed by his own government.

How should Artyom die and how do i make sure it's shocking but things/arcs aren't left hanging and it doesn't feel like an Ass Pull or like it's done for shock value or otherwise shittily?

Edited by Nukeli on Sep 27th 2023 at 12:22:37 PM

Anybody?

It's kinda hard since how well a death wraps up the plot and stuff is context-dependent. We can give you options for how he can die, but the actual circumstances surrounding it is up to you.

General advice about my concerns?

I'm not sure what exactly is going on while Artyom is there, because this is alternate history with low-key magic, Diesel Punk-y tech, and 8 supersoldiers. I haven't done the military research yet let alone started writing, i'm just developing central concepts and characters.

Of note is that the nazi supervillain Aryan Maiden has defected to the USSR who care more about her powers than her crimes and who officially pretend that she isn't the same woman. But that may be a separate plot thread from Detlev's and Artyom's relationship.

In that case wouldn't it make more sense to do the research first to get an idea? You could very well get inspiration from it.

I basically have to write out and concretize everything else from the beginning to get to the point Artyom shows up at in order to do that.

And this story starts in 1940, covering more than 5 years. And i'm actually intending to account for every day's events, keeping track of which character is where and how many days any part lasts and accounting for travel times and perhaps even the weather (relevant in a war story), so that's a lot of shit to get done.

Edited by Nukeli on Sep 27th 2023 at 1:42:52 PM

Probably one of the more Cruel and Unusual Deaths in my story is one in the (still to-be-published 4th episode) where someone gets killed with a vacuum cleaner. I guess you could say that sucks.

In all seriousness, though, it's a pretty nasty way to die. The fact that it's given a Gory Discretion Shot just makes it a case of Nothing Is Scarier, unfortunately...

Okay, what about this?

One of the nazi villains in Red Revenge is Müller, some kind of a beefsteak nazi and a former SA man who stole an indestructible nazi Power Armor that locked into his fingerprints meaning only he could use it, and joined the resistance to kill Hitler and get revenge for the Night of The Long Knives. After several years of bushwhacking and somehow not dying or getting caught, he betrays the resistance when the nazi supersoldiers' leader overthrows and kills Hitler and convinces Müller to join him.

After Germany gets nuked twice in 1945, and the nazis' most powerful supersoldier dies in the second nuking, their leader dies in battle not long after. Out of the five remaining members; one deserts and tries to go home, one defects to the western Allies, one might be blackmailed into defecting back to Britain, and Aryan Maiden and propably also Müller defect to the soviets.

Or try to anyway, because if he does they just kill him and take the armor (Maiden's powers are innate, so she's accepted).

How should i make sure Müller's death doesn't come off as an Ass Pull of a Shocking Twist™, and that nothing feels like it's left hanging with Müller?

The primary villain of (at least "Part I of" maybe, but that's not important) my gigantic dumb Battle Harem webnovel I'm currently working on is planned to die in a giant colorful explosion, where the explosion being colorful is tied to the story. To make a very long story "short," she is a Villainous Princess and one of the very few people on the planet who can touch these dangerous gemstone-looking artifacts and draw mass amounts of energy from them without being vaporized, as these artifacts otherwise kill any living being that doesn't have one of two special bloodlines. (Other characters use machines to draw energy from them, which also takes less energy out from them.) Once she has all of the artifacts and this special sword that can stabalize her powers, she grinds the artifacts in to dust and absorbs them in to her skin to ensure that nobody steals them from her, and goes off to try taking over the world. This includes incinerating most of the planet; this princess is an absolutely awful person, far worse than most of the other, lesser antagonists of the story. It's supposed to be a Vile Villain, Saccharine Show-type of deal, almost. Anyway, the hero team destroys the sword and defeats her One-Winged Angel form. As she's about to be arrested (a second time, again long story), she tries to kill one of the main characters out of spite in a last-ditch effort. The other main character, in a panic, blasts a very powerful beam of pure energy at her, a dangerous technique that can pretty much only be pulled off if you have 100% kill intent on the target. The thing is a huge part of the story is that the princess had been manipulating this MC for years, being a false friend and trying to nudge him slightly to eventually supporting her plans for world domination (which failed in the end). Him pulling this attack off is meant to represent that he's completely gotten over seeing her as some Jerk with a Heart of Gold or capable of being "fixed."

The blast itself doesn't kill her though. What it does do is "overcharge" the remaining dust of the artifacts, in the same way that her using the artifacts for a prolonged period of time without the magic sword or without cooldown periods would do, where colorful glowing lines/cracks appear on her skin and slowly spread through her body the more she uses them without rest. Anyway, this "overcharging" makes the glowing lines spread all over, and she knows she's going to die, so she spends her last moments taunting MC. Telling him in so many words that he wanted to be a pacifist superhero unlike many other mages of his profession, but would forever have a kill on his record, and accuses the attack of being done out of a personal, emotional grudge rather than a rational method to save people considering the long history between the two. Several large explosions then go off from inside her, each a different color, one per artifact. Her last words before the explosions are "See You in Hell," which is significant because this is a Constructed World that doesn't seem to have a concept of "hell" for the most part — religions are different and the closest equivalent to "hell" is consistently called "the Void." I was thinking she'll say this at least once much earlier in the story, when siccing a monster on a Big Bad Wannabe that kills him soon after, and it would be a sort of mystery as to how the princess knew of a "hell" that nobody else did. A mystery I'm still not sure if I even want to come up with a definitive answer for.

In case anybody is curious about the character herself, I've been writing a profile for the Villain Critique Thread (and profiles on the two main characters for the Hero Critique Thread), although that's been paused for a while. I might get back to that soon.

That's a lot to take in, hey it shows how much you care for your universe.

I'm trying to think up a realistic ish way that an eldritch abomination (one of many) could be killed by humanity after the apocalypse. To clarify, weapons and technology still exist and the effects are inconsistent across the board but generally, the biggest issue isn't working technology and weaponry but the ability to power them or manufacture more

What kind of EA is it?

Physical? Meta-physical? Conceptual?

If physical, does it have a healing factor? Is it made of solid matter? Liquid? Vaporous? Does it come in to existence due to astronomy? A magic artifact? Or was it just here waiting all this time?

More details would help in regards to how to deal with it.

They physically exist, problem is that any weaponry would have to leave Earth, as they're above it, or close to it. They do have a healing factor but not one a couple of nuclear weaponry repeatedly thrown at vitals (they still heave heads, they still need those to survive) won't outdo, or lesser weaponry, you're not exactly gonna be able to beat one to death however even if you keep your sanity and was right next to you

How big are they?

Also, what shape do they have? Moons?

Because if they are the size of a bus then the easiest would be to lure them down to Earth and beat them on the ground there.

And if they are insanity-inducing, then would that only be through normal vision?

A blur on the radar would not have the same effect, correct? or seen through UV-filter and something similar.

Also, why not use space-artillery (aka "the debris hovering around the planet like a layer of junk aka LEO") and send it right at them like a hailstorm of razor-sharp projectiles traveling at insane speeds.

Probably that is the reason those things haven't even tried to approach Earth yet...

Do they still have eyes?

How about firing lasers at them from the Earth's surface, far away from visual contact.

If it can be done with the moon then it can be done with these things...

Ok so the most realistic option seems to be the debris

They aren't moons, they are things that sorta have comprehensive shapes, they're smaller than moons but larger than any known animal

They can induce Insanity just by being around the same planet, so they have a wide area of effect, if not actively wanting to cause insanity you still have a shot at keeping your mind wholly or somewhat intact, especially if someone else nearby did

I had an idea for the death of a major villain (still a ways out but it's worth mentioning so I can get some ideas on paper).

She manages to track the heroes to the site of the MacGuffin needed to resurrect her Dark Messiah God Empress, and after a long fight and an Agonizing Stomach Wound she manages to grab the MacGuffin and the MacGuffin Girl needed to complete the ritual and teleports away (the heroes momentarily distracted by a third-party enemy arriving). The other villains complete the ritual while our viewpoint villain bleeds out, the Dark Messiah is resurrected... and barely acknowledges the viewpoint villain on her way out the door, leaving her to die alone and unfulfilled.

That's so, sad

Are you planning on making the viewpoint villain like real despicable or something or trying to make the dark god an asshole