You know, one of the pieces of writing advice
I never really liked was this:
"If you're stuck, kill a character!"
Now, part of this was because I love all my characters and refuse to murder any of them,
but the more widely applicable problem is that killing off characters is actually really hard.
Well, I mean, it's not hard to kill a character because you're the writer and you can do anything.
What I mean is it's hard to convincingly kill off a major character.
See, major character death is an insanely powerful trope for all kinds of reasons...
it annihilates the status quo, hurts your audience and your surviving characters,
and is almost guaranteed to have long-standing character repercussions.
Not only that, but the death of a loved one is one of those things that almost
everyone has a personal experience with sooner or later.
Morbid though it may be, this is a trope that people can relate to,
which only adds to its overall power and widespread usefulness.
But because of this, there's a dark reflection of this trope that sees equal, if not greater, use,
the fake-out major character death.
This trope has all the benefits of the true character death trope
with the added bonus that the character's not actually dead.
You get to reap all the benefits of the emotional impact of the death, and keep the character,
and get the emotional impact of the character's triumphant return from the grave.
It's almost literally having your cake and eating it too, and also getting a better cake on the side.
But what that means is that it can be almost impossible
for an audience to tell the difference between a fake-out death and a real death.
It's in the writer's best interest to make a fake-out death as realistic as possible
because that's how they convince the audience that it's not really a fake-out death,
and therefore get to use all the benefits of the real death trope.
But thanks to the widespread usage of the fake-out death trope,
it's also in a writer's best interest to make a real character death
even more convincing than fake out deaths,
because otherwise you run the risk of an audience that straight-up doesn't buy that the character's really dead.
What's basically happened is a fictional arms race of narrative tricks between the real and fake death tropes,
each one trying to be more convincing than the other.
So right now, it takes a lot of work to convince your readers that your character is dead.
And this is a problem for writers using both the real and the fake out death tropes.
Certain audiences have gotten so used to fake out deaths that they almost assume that any and all
potential deaths will be corrected within the space of a few minutes.
Unfortunately it strips a lot of the potential drama
out of what logically should be one of the most dramatic tropes in existence.
I'd say that Shonen anime is probably the biggest offender here.
How many times have we seen our hero annihilated by an attack and pronounced almost certainly dead,
only to have some danger-induced super mode activate and make them even cooler than they were before,
or a last minute rescue that pulled them out of the suspiciously opaque dust cloud before they got hit?
Or in the absolute worst case scenario, to show up swaddled in skin tight bandages in the very next scene?
The only drama gained from a Shonen fake-out death is how much damage
the other characters might take in their absence.
It's nearly impossible to convincingly kill a Shonen protagonist.
Which is okay, because it basically never happens anyway.
One step up from that is most superhero media,
because while some characters do actually manage to die,
there are just way too many ways for them to come back.
My personal favorite example is X-Men's Nightcrawler,
who managed to be dead for a whole year before he escaped death by teleporting back to life.
That's next level.
But even outside of serendipitous superpowers, you've got Lazarus pits, questing into Hell,
literal magic, robot duplicates, clones, totally unexplained revivals,
and way too many other ways to resurrect characters.
This is a problem that transcends superhero stuff.
Any universe with even one way to resurrect someone is going to have some serious problems
convincing the audience that anyone dead is gonna stay that way.
Or even worse, justifying to the audience why they aren't using that established method of resurrection
to resurrect their favorite character.
But even beyond that, sometimes the thing that makes your audience unwilling to buy a character death is
just how important that character is.
It doesn't matter if they're only mostly dead, or all the way dead,
or dead and definitely gonna stay that way-- if they're a central character,
or even worse, a central character with unresolved subplots,
a lot of your audience is just gonna refuse to believe they're dead,
because it doesn't make sense from a meta perspective to kill off such a useful source of plot.
This entire section is going to be a Game of Thrones spoiler,
so if you've somehow managed to avoid those, skip ahead.
Consider the now infamous death of John Snow from Game of Thrones.
Now George R.R. Martin's spent a considerable amount of effort creating a universe in which anyone could die,
no matter how much we liked him.
There was magic, but it wasn't your standard D&D spend-a-diamond-to-res-your-friend kind of magic.
People only ever came back from the dead as zombies,
or, in the best case scenario, as screwed-up diminished versions of their former selves.
Most people just died, and it didn't matter how central they were to the narrative,
or how unfinished their personal arcs were.
Life isn't fair, and neither is death.
There was almost a running gag that every character you loved would inevitably end up dying horribly
because this is Game of Thrones.
But despite all of that, when Jon Snow got super murdered,
about half the fanbase just kind of straight-up didn't buy it.
I saw theories ranging from "He'll come back as an ice zombie," to "That one witch lady can revive him,"
to "Hey, it's not guaranteed that he's bled out yet, maybe he'll just be fine," to
"Obviously Jon Snow just keeps a lot of jam jars under that cloak."
and about a million others.
It didn't matter that it was a show that had never brought anyone back as
more than a shambling corpsified monster,
Jon Snow is important enough that people weren't convinced
that getting stabbed a dozen times in the chest would be enough to kill him.
Personally, I had a meta-reason to not buy that he was gone for good.
At the time, they hadn't yet resolved the mystery of his true parentage.
Such a big deal had been made over the meaning of R+L=J, and there were so many conspiracy theories,
and in-universe, his heritage and parentage were explicitly suspicious.
But if he was dead, there would be no point in resolving that subplot,
because it wouldn't matter to any of the characters left alive.
I didn't think George R.R. Martin would let such an important mystery suddenly lose all momentum,
so I figured they'd bring him back somehow.
And they did, obviously, but the point is, even if you've carefully crafted a universe
in which death is pretty much irreversible and you're not afraid to use it,
it doesn't mean you can actually pull off every character death without
losing your audience's suspension of disbelief.
Now in order to counterbalance this kind of problem,
there are a lot of frequently used writer strategies, both for fake and real deaths,
that theoretically help make them feel more convincing.
Unfortunately a lot of those strategies no longer work,
because they've been used so much for fake out deaths and nobody buys them as real deaths.
For example, logically, a character falling from an enormous height
or getting disintegrated should make them well and truly dead.
But, thanks to the number of conveniently soft rivers at the bottom of cliffs,
conveniently placed branches to grab on to,
and a frequent tendency for major villains to fall from high places
and then inexplicably show up again later with no justification,
the general rule is the falling off a cliff is no longer considered a viable threat.
The disintegration thing is a little subtler,
but the main thing is that a weapon that makes your character vanish entirely
might not actually disintegrate them at all,
since a lot of sci-fi weapons like that are secretly teleporters or time machines.
Once one writer uses the disintegration/teleporter switcheroo trick, it ruins disintegration for the audience,
although you can still make it convincing if it, like, shows their skeleton, or they dissolve into sand, or something.
But the general rule is if you can't show your audience a body, they can't pass for dead,
since there are way too many ways for them to just show up again.
It barely even requires an explanation anymore.
So show your audience a body.
Even better, show them a body and have someone confirm that that body is super dead.
This still isn't a guarantee that they're actually dead,
since sometimes that someone is tricking you into thinking they're dead for whatever reason.
And any fictional universe with healing mojo, or magic bloodlines, or the power of friendship,
or the power of love, or super-advanced tech,
or even just kinda-advanced tech,
will be able to fix a corpsified character with a little bit of hand waving,
but still, if you don't show a body, they won't buy the death.
Next up--you've got to make it sufficiently tragic.
This is another one that's important for fake out deaths,
because it can be easy to make a fake death happen uncharacteristically quickly and easily,
regardless of how tough the character is,
since it's just a matter of getting the death out of the way so the plot can progress.
When you're leading up to the character death, put us inside that character's head.
Show us their fear, the last thing they think of, whatever flashbacks are running through their head.
Do they believe they're about to die, or was it a surprise? Are they okay with it? Have they come to terms with it?
And how hard are they willing to fight against it? If they're not the type to give up easily, don't let them.
Although, be warned, sometimes stories will go way too far in this direction
and indirectly convince the audience that the character's gonna be okay
because no real death scene would ever be this overblown.
This is the reaction I had to a latish episode of Fairy Tail,
where a supposed suicide mission was preceded by about five minutes of flashbacks of all the good times,
and conversations about how maybe this wasn't such a bad way for our story to end, and at least we're together,
and after spending nearly half the episode convincing us that they were super gonna die, you guys,
they got saved at the last second by a guy with teleportation powers.
It's a very fine line between just the right amount of pre-dying angst and ham-fisted knife twisting
as we recall that one time in season one where I said I'd always be by your side but now I won't be able to.
In contrast, one of the best examples I've seen recently, with just the right amount of knife twisting,
was actually fairly understated and didn't even include any flashbacks.
I won't give story specifics about which show or character I'm talking about,
because it's a fantastic scene that hasn't made it to the show yet.
And I absolutely refuse to be the one to spoil it for anyone watching it, like my brother,
who watches these videos, watches that show, and never listens to spoiler warnings.
But basically this character is fighting someone way outside of his league in order to protect someone else,
and is pretty much absolutely convinced that he's literally seconds from death.
Now, he's a very clever fighter and his brain usually goes a mile a minute during battles,
But his inner monologue, in the most desperate brutal panel of that battle,
is just him, barely coherent, mentally apologizing to his mentor and his mom.
He stopped trying to think of a way to win, or even survive,
and it drives home, incredibly effectively, just how dead he thinks he is.
Anyway, the bottom line is for your character death to feel convincing, there needs to be some kind of fanfare,
and by fanfare, I don't mean, like, high drama, necessarily,
it just needs sufficient stuff happening.
Whether that's internal or external, before or after the dying happens, doesn't matter.
It just needs to be addressed, because if it's not, the death will feel too cheap,
and while that works fine for side characters,
if you're killing or pretending to kill a main character, the last thing you want to feel like is cheap.
This also means you have to make sure the other characters react properly in the aftermath,
and again, this is true whether or not the character's really permanently dead.
One of the more subtle tells that a character will likely be coming back is that the other characters
stall in the grieving process.
If someone dies and the writer intends to have them not be dead,
but wants to play up the sad as much as possible,
then they can have the other characters totally falling apart and unable to handle themselves
without the totally dead character.
This is because as soon as that character comes back,
they can all go back to normal, no problem.
So from a plot perspective, the writer loses nothing by making them all fall apart completely in the meantime.
But this can clue your reader in that the character has to come back,
because the feeling is that the only way for things to get fixed is for that character to come back.
Now as a result, this can actually be a very useful trick if the character really is dead,
or if they're alive but not coming back for a long while in plot time,
because this lets you discuss, in-universe, the grieving process,
and the internal hope that maybe the character is not dead after all.
If your characters stall in the grieving process and then have to pull themselves out
because the person they're missing isn't coming back,
you get some seriously quality sad and some cool character strengthening moments.
Now, all of these difficulties basically happen when you're trying to kill off a central protagonist.
Killing off secondary protagonists is a lot easier to pull off, since it's not as implausible for them to die.
But conveniently, minor character deaths can be just as tragic as a main character death if you play it right.
For a well-worn example,
--spoilers for every version of Full Metal Alchemist are about to happen, so heads up--
the death of Maes Hughes is convincing, tragic,
and the consequences are felt right up until the end of the series.
Hughes is by far the most lovable character in the early series.
He's got a lovely wife, an adorable daughter that means the world to him,
and has taken in the two main characters for the duration of their time in Central
and treats them almost like they're his own kids.
He's great friends with the otherwise hard-edged Colonel Roy Mustang,
and overall adds a feeling of levity to every scene he's in.
But despite being overall a totally wacky, friendly dude,
he's also very smart, and underneath all the silliness, is surprisingly competent in a straight fight.
If you look carefully in the early episodes,
you can actually see that he's got at least one throwing knife on his belt at all times,
which becomes relevant when he gets attacked in the lead-up to his death scene, and turns out to be an absolute beast at throwing knives.
The lead-up to his death scene is long and tense,
since he's just used those charming smarts of his to uncover a huge, country spanning conspiracy that ends up being the plot of the entire show.
In an attempt to silence him before he can get the word out,
he's been attacked and injured by two immortal homunculi,
and he's trying to reach a phone where he can call Mustang,
the only guy he trusts, without it being overheard by the very people behind the conspiracy.
It looks like he's made it, and then it turns out the person escorting him isn't a trusted co-worker,
but instead a shape-shifting homunculus about to murder him.
The homunculus transforms into his beloved wife, and Maes, true to his character,
can't even bring himself to fight back to save his own life if it means hurting her, and subsequently gets shot.
He dies, there's a funeral, his wife is devastated, his daughter doesn't understand the concept of death yet,
and keeps asking how he's supposed to get any work done if they bury him,
everyone in the military is shaken,
the Elric brothers freak out and mourn,
and Roy Mustang sets off on a four-season quest for revenge on whoever or whatever it was that murdered his best friend.
Nothing is the same after Maes Hughes dies.
Now another thing that makes Maes Hughes's death very interesting is the way it's handled when
Mustang finally does track down his shape-shifting murderer.
Now, obviously, Mustang's entire motivation is revenge,
But over the course of their confrontation, it becomes clear that Mustang has long since come to terms with Hughes's death,
But it's done nothing to diminish his desire for revenge.
While he's chasing down the homunculus and setting 'em on fire a whole bunch,
They try their old trick of shape-shifting into a loved one, and take the form of none other than Mustang's old bestie, Maes Hughes,
in the hopes that it'll stop Mustang from setting them on fire so much.
When Mustang sees his old friend miraculously hale and healthy again, he actually sets him on fire more,
because he knows Maes Hughes is dead and his killer wearing his image is the ultimate insult.
This is cool because Roy recognizes the fact that Hughes is dead and that murdering this guy won't bring him back,
but it doesn't matter to him at this point.
All that matters is the revenge itself, not the reason for the revenge.
It takes a lot of work to cool him down and get him off the murder train so he can actually process his grief properly.
This is actually very important.
Once you've got your character convincingly dead, you have to properly address the consequences.
A lot of the time, character deaths, especially relatively minor ones, are kind of glossed over.
Sure, tragic and all that, but within a week or two everyone's moved on with their lives.
But that is still a dead character, who isn't coming back.
Anyone who liked them, or even knew them, is gonna be affected.
They don't have to be affected that much, but there should still be something.
Or if they're not affected, maybe specifically address why that is,
and whether they feel like they should be affected, but aren't.
It can be easy to forget it in the age of grimdark,
but death is still like a really major thing, and it should always have a consequence for the characters in proximity.
So, yeah.