When you kill off a character be very careful. If you can avoid it, consider it if you know the character has a lot of fans. Just ask Hasbro. Resurrecting a character is also tricky to the point where death has become meaningless to superheroes…and Optimus Prime, who has seldom gone through a continuity WITHOUT dying and coming back to life. I can’t even think of one off-hand. This cheapens death as a dramatic storytelling tool. This may be why author James Harrington makes the case for leaving the dead…dead.
Well… kind of. I would actually add one caveat. If the character has a lot of fans, having said character die, and remain dead, would be profound. This is why I loved the Phoenix Saga. Jean, arguably the damsel in distress character, had one last epic hurrah as she exited.
Too bad Bob Layton ruined it six or seven years later.
In one of my books, a character dies that people absolutely loved and I still get fan mail about her. It caused an uproar with my readers when she died, but IMHO it had to happen as part of the plot. She was a great character who died an honorable and memorable death trying to save everyone. It doesn’t get much more epic than that. Everyone has to die at some point, even heroes.
Someone once said that “Even immortality has its limits.”
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Sometimes the plot just goes that way and there’s no way out of it. What bugs me is when a minor character is killed just as cannon fodder because the writer wanted to kill a hero to show how dangerous it is, as if we didn’t know behind the main character armor. It’s worse when nothing was done with the character for years and they came back just to be bumped off. (Heroes In Crisis comes to mind.) Or they can’t figure out what to do with a character but they’re part of a shared universe and don’t ask if maybe someone else may be able to use them currently or in the future. Then you lose a perfectly good character for a body count.
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