Who lives and who dies

[siriusgirl]

Have any of you when writing a fanfic had to make a decision on who dies?

It's a tough one. I was thinking of having one of my OCs die when he surrenders himself but then decided I jsut can't kill him off.

What about the deaths in the final battle of TDH? I don't think Ernie or Parvati or any other of the characters Harry knew other than Lupin, Fred, Colin Creevey and Tonks died, because it would have been mentioned.

How do you decide which characters die?

[MWPP]

The chief difference between Fiction and Reality is that Fiction has to make sense. There are very few genres where truly random events can be accepted (yeah, even Douglas Adams had a framework of believability). So, killing off a character has to have a reason. It is a tool to advance the story.

It can be a statement of unfairness, retribution, something to move another character's actions, colouring for the overall feel, etc., but it has to make sense to/for your readers. They may despise you for it; you may cut your own throat doing so and alienate them; they may even cheer (poor old misunderstood Voldie), but it has to make sense within the story.

Why do you want to kill off the character? You can't unless you know the answer to that question.

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[siriusgirl]

I think that's a good point. Cedric's death hit me hardest, as pointless as it seemed it had a reason: Evil cares for no one and has no mercy. It marked the end of the innocence of the series, before that all Harry had to do was go back in time or ask Dumbledore or whatever to fix it. Those days ended with Goblet of Fire, after that we had death which was permanent.

Death for the sake of death just doesn't cut it.

[queenie]

This is an interesting question. Recently I got an idea for a character - and just about everything about this fellow was built from his death: he commits suicide for a particular reason; what kind of a man would kill himself for this sort of reason, and what kind of life would he have lived?

Now, however, I've grown rather attached to the fellow, and worse, I've given him a family and parishioners (he was supposed to be an antagonist!). Now the question becomes more like, can I picture what is to become of him if he doesn't kill himself? If I kill him, do I have to kill members of his family, too? When does it become believable and at what point is your reader going "Oh, come ON!"

[siriusgirl]

It's a good question, too. When you look at all the significant deaths they are all said but they all make sense in one way or another, sometimes people die for no good reason in real life and in fiction and other times death is brought on by their own flaws. Exhibit A: Sirius Black. I admit I burst into dears when he died, as he was one of my favourites. But he did throw self-preservation out the window and was just plain reckless towards the end. (heck it even made JKR cry when she wrote his death)
Sometimes death is hinted like but the WAY it happens is a shock like the end of HBP, but then at the end it all comes together like it did with Dumbledore's death. I remember all through Deathly Hallows having this horrible feeling Lupin would die. Dang, I wish I was wrong!

I think another thing is not to make someone's death way over the top and bizarre. For example Mr Eko's death in the show Lost I found way to out of the blue and unnecessarily strange even for a somewhat abstract show. Death should be plausible and serve a purpose. Of course, getting attached to characters gets in the way if we plan to kill them off, even if it is a villain

Plus, there's also the stages. I think in OOTP we do see Harry go through all five: Denial when Lupin tells him Sirius is gone, anger in Dumbledore's office when he was wrecking everything. Bargaining with the mirror and Sirius coming back as a ghost, depression when none of the above can happen, and in book six he's at acceptance.

[vegablack]

Sometimes it would be implausible for characters not to die. If I were writing a story about British soldiers fighting in the first world war and none of the characters died I would have set up a highly implausible scenario however much I liked the characters or the plot of my story didn't seem to require one of them to die. The death would seem pointless and might even come out of the blue but it would be necessary. Indeed if I was writing a story about a group of British boys who left school in 1914 and I didn't have several of them die, I would be setting up an implausible situation for anyone familiar with the fate of that generation.

But when desigining a story I agree the death has to serve a purpose within the story, it can't be there just because you think a death might be interesting. Of course in a story about suicide death would be required.

(As a quick aside Suicides run in families. If you have a parent who has commited suicide you are far more likely than the general population to do so. So it would not be implausible to write a story with more than one. Though you would have to explain why.)


Have you seen the movie Stranger Than Fiction? It deals with this question.

Personally I prefer a character who dies to be imporatant to a reader and beloved. The death has no point if the readers don't feel it. Ofcourse if the death isn't important to the story but you still need a bomb to go off and someone to die, than killing a random unimportant character makes sense, but doing it to spare the readers feelings is pointless to me.

[siriusgirl]

Good point, Vegablack. Even fiction does need some sense or realism. Especially if you are writing about war, maybe the deaths are pointless but it's war. Things are never fair or neat and logical. If you make some nice prettied-up version you lose the quality of writing.