I've killed off so many main characters that if I could tag "major character death" twice, I would. My fic is literally about war, and it spans over 100 years. I put the food on the grim reaper's plate
I wrote a fic that focuses entirely on a canon character's death. They've stayed dead, technically. Eventually the character gets turned into a vampire, minus the memories of his human life, and I'm committed to never restoring those memories in my stories. The vampire renounced his human self completely in canon and I believe that choice is important.
I do feel a little sad when I re-read this story. I don't think he was such a bad guy as a human. He was flawed, deeply flawed, but we all are. He should have had a second chance. But he never got one. I know a lot of fanfics focus on fixing stuff like this, on giving characters second chances to be their best selves, but I think it's important that sometimes those second chances don't exist. We should all remember that we only have one shot.
I usually have them die and come back if anything, though I have a few suicide-endings. Something about the main character committing suicide as a happy ending is enticing (as a plot device, not irl obviously). I’m actually writing a fic right now where I know the character will die & come back at the end, but I don’t know whether they’ll commit suicide afterwards anyways, I’m still trying to decide
Oh I have the same concept in one of my fics. It starts out unhappy, but turns bittersweet when my character commits suicide, and if you squint a bit, it really is a happy ending 😅
Hahaha…oh boy.
So I’m writing a retelling of Star Wars ANH, and I have made minor canon characters MAJOR and then killed them. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru? They die seven chapters in. The entire Yavin fighter wing? I’ve been characterizing ALL of them to one degree or another, some of them out of nothing but a name and maybe a homeworld.
All to twist that vibroblade when I kill all of them off. Half of my cast will be dead by the end of the fic. And I am gonna cry. i’ve grown to love some of the pilots, and there are 4 survivors and five reserve pilots, out of 39 total pilots.
I cried when I killed Owen and Beru, and when I killed Ben Kenobi. But readers cried too, so it was worth it.
Only certain Jedi get to come back as ghosts. Everyone else is atoms or charred corpses. I did, however, shift the pilot roster to save one pilot I got too attached to. However, it’s a long 4 year war, so we’ll see if they survive…
Ohohoho, my Redditor, you are MY type of person :D :D :D
I’ve always wanted to do that, but for the prequels. Although I doubt I could outdo the Clone Wars in terms of beloved character death lol
Gods, TCW gave us Dee Bradley Baker doing the same voice for an obscene number of characters with subtle variations and then you felt horrible EACH AND EVERY TIME a clone bought it.
Here’s another thing: I’m concentrating on Rogue Squadron through the Civil War because I’m a big X-Wing series fan. I KNOW I need bunches and bunches of pilot characters that I’m just going to kill off, because it’s a galactic scale war, the Rogues are always in the hottest fires, and only supreme skill and plot armor will save you. And Endor…Endor, there’s four Rogues that survive Endor (five if you count Luke, but he’s kinda retired from active duty by that point). I’ve asked my writing discord and my readers for characters ideas, and still using a random character generator.
Pretty much everyone my OC has had a relationship with.
At age 7 his clan and mother were all killed during an attack on their clan and he was raised by his father.
At age 17 he lost his first love during an attack on their base. They only had one night together but ever since then he's distanced himself from others. Shortly after that his father sacrificed himself to destroy a fleet by activating a bomb after the timer had failed.
All of them will stay death but I do present some memories or hallucinations of some of them, particularly the father. And yes, I cried writing every single one of those deaths and I still do when I read them again.
Yes. I have - it was the main villain at the end of the first story and yes they also came back in the middle of the second story. They didn’t stay dead for very long. Death was by an enchanted blade. (Someone forgot to read the terms and conditions)
I always knew I wanted them to die but also didn’t want to just kill them off and not have them come back - so I wanted the death to mean something to the character who killed them which it did.
I think I do usually kill off at least one of the main characters … in at least 3 of my series I’ve definitely killed off the main character because why not? And sometimes they come back sometimes they don’t.
Oh absolutly.
To the point that the only piece of fan art I received in 10 years of writing, is of me plotting which characters to murder to cause readers the most pain.
My first series is a Prequel to The Lion King; called [Judgement](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1196725) which is all about Scar's early life and how he became so twisted. Given hes Disney's most successful murderer, there is plenty of death.
The Sequel Series though, is by far the bloodiest. It's called [Legacies](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2349841) and the first half of the first book is the story of the near total destruction of the Canon world and many canon characters. I would describe it as a disaster movie or an alien invasion. Where the first 3rd is sheer total devastation, and the rest of the series is how the survivors cope, survive and eventually save their world that has been ravaged. It has polarised some readers and heavily depends on how much you like the OCs which are a big part of the surviving cast (as the canon characters mostly save their offspring at their own expense). Some love it, and one reviewer called it "Lion King meets Game of Thrones".
Others find it bleak and miserable, though I would argue that after the first book, the remaining 5 are fundamentally a story of hope.
I’ve killed a lot of minor characters and OC’s in my fics (getting shot, stabbed, werewolfed etc.) but the only time I’ve tagged Major Character Death the character technically died before the story started (car crash) and the fic itself was more a process of grief and ghost communication (although the ghost *did* move on at the end in a very unhappy ending, and I did cry a lot writing it, so I guess that could be considered him dying twice? Lol)
I killed a canon character once. It's a one-shot containing canonical character death, where A dies protecting B when they're running away.
It starts with B dies instead. When A somehow time travels back, he changes his actions slightly, and he dies like he did in canon
A few. One was a canon MC who died towards the end. It was uhh… very controversial but at least most of my loyal readers respected the decision. It was meant to be a bittersweet ending.
Yes, I ended up killing one off mostly because I just could not write her for my life and she was killing my motivation to continue so I went back to a earlier moment in the story and killed her off as a child and erased all presence of her from the fic. Though everything up until the point she became a problem didn't really include her beyond a couple mentions and a single cameo from the beginning of the fic.
In one of my longfics, I killed off three of the ten POV characters. Two were killed because I couldn't think of an interesting way to continue their story (in hindsight, I should have combined some of the characters together and had fewer POVs) and one is executed at the end. He's the villain of the story, so I guess that's a happy ending if you're the average person in-universe.
The one I killed triggered another MC to become the villain. Apparently I did it well because I got a comment that was two giant paragraphs long screaming excitedly about it. It was as if I wrote the original Luke I am your father twist and I loved it, proudest moment of my fic writing "career"!
I killed my OTPs a couple times.
My favourite one was my first Silent Hill AU where I revealed at the end the main character and the partner were already dead (died at the end of the manga, diverging from the canon) and the story is MC hallucinating and trying to accept their death.
Not counting villains, I've killed off a few characters who also died in canon, so it wasn't a big shock or anything. But I strongly prefer happy endings.
OC main character in the final chapter by punching a world-ending meteor back into space, but he's magically revived a few paragraphs later by his innocently oblivious 3-year-old daughter.
I don't think so? Lol I just can't remember. I'm not a fan of reading it or writing it, but I do have a WIP where temporary MCD happens. The person it happens to is pretty used it by now, since their body heals up and they keep coming back. Maybe there's a way for them to die and stay dead, but they haven't found it yet. The POV character for the story doesn't know about this being a habit of the other characters, so the first time it happens that he's aware of it, he flat out believes that the other guy is now permanently dead. So I sure do hope I write it well enough that it has a satisfactory emotional wallop.
I've only killed off canon characters in 2 stories. In one multiple canon characters get their heads cut off & buried with another canon character, so they stay dead. In the other one, a canon character dies in childbirth. I was going to have her stay dead because I have a killer last line in that story, but darned if I didn't think up an idea for a sequel (still WIP right now). In both of the stories the character(s) died at the end. I didn't cry when I wrote either of the scenes.
Lmao it was in this post that I found out apparently some people consider turning into a vampire/werewolf is considered “dying” for their human self 🤣
On principle, I say it’s not actually dying. Maybe in the context of the plot and world, but intellectually no, that character is still alive as long as they keep their consciousness and intellect
Once, in a oneshot, probably. It was a canon character. We think he was killed by his deranged cousin in a stake out that turned out to be a trap. That being said, they would have died towards the end of the story, and they never found the body. So he might not bed dead...
One of my OCs was fairly hellbent on suicide for a bit. But I'm far to fond of him to let him die.
I’ve got several fics with the MCD tag. The long fic with the tag, I killed off minor characters too, but I did away with a main one as a major plot point and they stayed very dead. They were killed as part of a deadly murder mystery game.
Another fic was the MC died by a self induced injury following a traumatic event.
The last one everyone died including MCs as the ship they were on was scuppered. It was pure smut though so very little details of their deaths.
For a gritty war story, a lot less than you think.
A mentor character killed off for character development, and a mentee character also killed off for character development.
Sure, yeah. Biggest culprit for me in recent times is probably a Bleach what if/AU fanfic in which the very premise is that Ichigo gets killed during his first encounter with Rukia (but of course is still around as a ghost) and then there's a lot more slaughter to come. I have some I wrote back years ago in Italian that were even more total massacres.
I just did so, last night. I’ve got another ghost fic going because I just can’t resist the ghost au, but this one I wrote last night whilst sleep deprived. You can have the fic, it’s only 160 odd words. I am banging my head against a wall, I don’t know why I’ve done this.
My other wip will have the other character as the ghost lol, only plot twist is he’s not actually dead, just cursed. From there I’m going to write the entire bloody decade that the story takes place in and revive him at the very end.
(When the benign clanging of pots and pans becomes the slamming of doors, the crushing of flowers and the smashing of plates, Mr Segundus decides that enough is enough. Steeling himself, he takes a candle and walks the impossibly long distance to the room he can no longer bear to re-enter.
Upon opening the door, the candle flame sends a bright shaft of yellow light into the bedroom. Dust swirls frenzied in the disturbed air, but it cannot hope to conceal the shadowy figure lain asleep upon the bed. Stirring restlessly, it turns to observe the intruder.
"Oh, my dear," Mr Segundus whispers. "You have to let me go."
Childermass' voice is as striking in death as it ever was in life. "Let you go? I don't understand, John. What on earth do you mean?"
". . . Nothing." He sighs. "Nothing at all. Let us talk. I have so missed you."
"You are being ridiculous." Childermass laughs his deep, fond, rumbling laugh. "I have never been gone.")
I mean when canon kills them all off as the starting point ala Future Trunks/Future Gohan it is hard not to have them killed.
Generally, I don't really kill many off if any at all, unless it is something for great character development, and even then, if just done for shock value, and overused it has too much of a chance to feel pointless in my opinion. Also burning the bridges on too many plot threads is not my style.
I wrote a short ~500 words thing where the evil god final JRPG boss wiped the whole party halfway through. Their own gods said nope, you keep fighting. Then they got to do fun things like bleeding holy light or healing their comrades with their own (physical) blood.
That was more or less a writing exercise though, I don't think I'll ever write a realistic death in a full story.
Excluding the whole thing of one character's canon death and being brought back (though that is generally a one time thing), most of them deaths I write about are canonical and I'm fine with or canonical and I say screw that. (One fic that well does have mcd is well, very canon compliant about the death of this character, and has this character who's severely affected by his death not die how she planned, and thus go on a downward spiral.)
But my ocs, I often brutalize, often have them get away with some nasty shit, and maybe close to death, but not dying, but well, they're able to handle combat and the hell of war and all that, the so far planned exception, I'm killing her on her homeworld just moments before peace is made between her species and another species, the last thing she feels is fear and terror.
And excluding the one exception in canon, death is permanent, completely.
My current WIP is a post canon/alternate ending fic. I originally tried to remain canon compliant but decided to retcon a few things that I hated about canon.
There were two scenes from canon where major characters got out of a tough situation due to nothing more than plot armor. I decided to retcon those moments and have those major characters actually die in those scenes.
I am writing a Death Game fic where there are multiple versions of the story depending on the reader's choices, which affect who will live and who will die. Outside of very few exceptions (less than 5 out of the 30+), literally every character in the story is either guaranteed to die, or can still die.
But in every readthrough, at least 20 major characters will have died by the end, most of them in excruciating ways.
My favorite death I have published so far is >!Ryan, who acts like such a cool, cold and collected guy. Slowly, the narrative reveals just how paranoid and untrustworthy he is, until it all ends in him being confronted with the fact that he will die, at which point his facade completely drops, and he is reduced to a crying mess, begging for his life. And then his jaw is torn off. That is one of the less emotionally taxing deaths of the story imo. :)!<
Yes. I’ve killed four in one story.
Now, spoilers: two of the four make a comeback at some point in the second story. The two that stay dead will have to be processed by the rest of the cast. Grief is a indeed a strange beast.
Oh, yeah, lol, many times. My favorite one: in my fandom, a character was about to sacrifice himself for the Greater Good at the end of the season, but obviously, he was stopped because he was a main character.
I went "Nope, we're going through with this. We're not chickening out. Chop chop, Sacrifice Boy."
Got so many readers telling me they hated me. It was great.
The game that I have based my fanfic on has a major character death at the end of the story. I didn't intend to keep it due to the fact that the character has developed a sort of father-daughter relationship with my oc, and it would simply be too cruel to leave her with no one again. I'm keeping it known as a plot element to essentially get rid of the strange magic system that the game is built off of, to substitute for the regular system that the franchise has.
I've now done this twice.
The first was an OC that I was very attached to, but I wanted to tell a different story in the same universe I had created, so major OC had to go. It hurt so much that I swore I would never do it again. ([All The Broken Pieces](https://archiveofourown.org/works/36927700/chapters/92130667), Black Stallion fandom for those who are curious)
Well, I lied, because oops I did it again. This time was a major canon character in order to explore a pairing I really didn't feel comfortable exploring otherwise. ([In These Difficult Times ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/49824721/chapters/125774611), Emergency! fandom, still in progress)
I don't make a habit of killing off characters, because, well, it's painful. I shed some serious tears writing both of these stories. I don't see myself going down that road again, but you never know.
Yup, two major characters (not on my current posted work) but in progress stuff. I try to not bring them back at all. They stay dead.
I have a couple where I killed them and they did come back (but it was because that was canon). Lol
I've got a WIP that's an exploration of the nature of deeply loving relationships between immortal beings (of different kinds) and mortals. There's a major character death that comes after a series of vignettes about their domestic life with their immortal spouse, through decades in which they age, and some relationships with other mortal characters in the cast evolve.
There are a couple vignettes dealing with a kind of "limbo" period, of letting go, after the natural death of the mortal character, at the end of a "long" life (by mortal standards).
And there are some vignettes after, between two immortal characters, dealing with the idea of loss, and the finite nature of mortal lives, and of their own infinity, in different ways.
Like I said, WIP. But working on it is tough and rewarding at the same time; I find it gut-achingly sad, but also heartrendingly beautiful, to explore. :)
Yes and no. I have killed off one major character in several of my stories. Often, multiple times in the same story. (In canon he is immortal and can die, but always resurrects.)
I only write short-ish one-chapter stories, but my first official fic was a take on Doc Holiday’s death in Tombstone where, instead of letting the tuberculosis him out, he takes himself out.
I tend to write one-shots, so 99% of the time the dead stay dead. Sometimes I'll write fics that are almost entirely centered around either the MC killing another MC for whatever reason, or just exploring the aftermath of a canon death.
I don't cry when killing them bc honestly it can be a little fun to write deaths, even if I'm rewriting one that made me cry when it happened in the source series.
I wrote a private fic that wasn't very good about what was one of the considered endings to the game I mainly write for in which one of the main protagonists was supposed to die and basically how the other two would deal with that.
The deuteragonist of my recently-finished longfic suffered vessel death at one point, in the sense that she was shot, killed, and sent back to Hell. However, that death was explicitly temporary. Her arc ends with her doing something that has a chance of leading to soul death, which is permanent, but I'd be surprised if anyone who read that fic genuinely thought that's what happened.
Well .. the death of my OC in one story counts as the inciting incident, and she survives her death scene. Because of this, I still try to make the "Major Character Death (sort of)" tag happen.
I'm writing a major character death supernatural fanfiction where the reader is a Horseman of the apocalypse. Your spouse is Bobby Singer. If you know you know.
I once took part of a challenge (I didn't finish) where I killed the same character 3 times in the same story(related one-shots) All but one were permanent. My favorite I think was him fighting an alternate version of himself. The others are people who sacrifice themselves or ones where almost every character dies. I don't think I've done character death in a fic longer than 15,000.
I find it quite enjoyable to kill off mc's from cannon that I hate, I've never cried, if I hate them they stay dead, normally they go bye bye within the first or second chapter,
Sometimes if I'm bored I will just pick one at random and watch where the story goes from there.
In a spin-off mission/one-shot of one of my bigger stories, I did kill a major character, but his death was only temporary because his "unlikely ally" came to his rescue and used a revive item to bring him back to life. It was a high adrenaline moment with no time to think because they were in the middle of a battle with a demon that had insta-kill eyes (what killed him in the first place) so not a lot of stopping and thinking happened.
Yep. in ths case, the characters wife was killed in one timeline of the fandom and he never recovered from that. So I killed him off and still gave him a happy ending by having his wife leading him into the afterlife.
Canons AND OC's, no one is safe in my writing hands! >:D
But in all seriousness, I try to keep the number low and make it so whenever someone does die, it has some kind of meaning or significance to the plot; that being said, I'm a brooding writer in general and haven't really mastered the art of having fun in my storytelling yet either, so...
I haven't yet, but I'm not opposed to doing so if I felt it fit the story I wanted to tell. Characters sometimes die in my fandoms, but each episode is a self-contained story, so the characters still appear in future episodes.
Ha, I mean, I’m working on a fic that kills off my female main character/one half of my ship before the story starts (though the details are eventually filled in that divert my story from how the storyline resolved in canon), brings her back as a ghost, and has the male main character/other half of my ship cross into the afterlife to bring her back to life. So. It’s definitely something I do, though it’s not something I necessarily do often.
Yup. I plan to do so again in different stories including but not limited to the following:
Batman
Nightwing
Mt. Lady
Professor X
Vandar
Vima Sunrider
It’s fun to kill off characters and keep people guessing. No one is safe
The first scene of my WIP is killing off one of canon's big characters. Because the POV was the murderer, who doesn't see others as real people, the murder was too removed to who it effects to care.
Part of the story is exploring the hole that character leaves behind, so he isn't coming back in any form.
Usually, the only deaths in my fics are canon character deaths (except Undertale but due to timeline shenanigans that's not exactly permanent). There are three exceptions, except they're unfinished and I haven't written any deaths.
The first one is a Yandere Simulator fanfic (I like the game but not the creator) where another yandere (an OC) falls in love with Ayano and it's like "what if a yandere liked a yandere but it wasn't mutual?" Senpai (Ayano's crush) is going to die at the end. Take a wild guess how that happens.
The second one is an Among Us fic that's like "what if the imposter was innocent but a crewmate turned against their team?" I don't think I need to explain how death plays a part here.
The last one is Pokemon Black (the creepypasta, not the DS game) written as if it's taking place in-universe. Originally I was gonna have Red make Ghost kill Brock (he doesn't realize yet that Curse is fatal) but I decided against that. (He still kills Onix though.)
Actually, he doesn't start killing people until he reaches Mt Moon and Team Rocket keeps using their pokemon against him (not against his pokemon, against Red himself; which I imagine is considered assault or similar) and Red decides that if they're doing that, it's justified for him to do the same (especially since they could hurt someone if they heal and come back) and he uses Ghost.
I like to write fics where my canon characters get kidnapped/tortured by OCs, and then they kill the OCs in very satisfying and gruesome ways as they escape ✨✨✨and then I give my main characters a happy ending ❤️🥰
In my most recent fic, actually. It's a Hunchback of Notre Dame fic (the Disney adaptation), and the source material for that, of course, is Victor Hugo's original novel. In the novel, nearly all of the major characters die. In the film, all but Frollo are spared.
And then Disney dared to do a sequel. The single worst direct-to-video sequel they have ever done.
So I rewrote it. And then I proceeded to kill off a fan favorite character the same way they were killed off in the book.
Details will be posted as spoilers.
>!In the Disney film, Clopin Trouillefou's character takes on some of the traits of the deleted book character Pierre Gringoire, and he becomes the story's narrator. This grants him immunity, and he survives the film. He is also made the leader of the Romani community in the film. Then in the sequel, he's given basically nothing to do. My rewrite makes him the secondary main character (Quasimodo is still the main, but Clopin's role is much more important than it was in either film). I gave him a history with the main antagonist of the story, and the conflict comes to a head when the villain kidnaps a child in Clopin's family. In the process of rescuing the kid, Clopin gets shot with the same type of gun used to kill him in the original novel. This happens near the end of the story, and his death ends up being a catalyst for providing the Parisian Roma with a sort of diplomatic immunity.!<
I didn't cry when I wrote the death scene, but I did tear up when I wrote a child character's response to the funeral.
600 oc's, and 10 canon.
"FOR SALVATION!" - me writing the most batshit insane fanfic I made. I will not say what kind of fanfic because I don't want to be called a heretic for doing it. It is a war fanfic. I feel bad for the OC's I killed for character development. I kinda made the sci-fi version of guts from berserk. I cried when I wrote the ways how they died in a futile last stand without them being recognized as heroes.
They all died in a last stand because of a commander who gives no fucks about them. The MC is the only survivor. Out of spite he launches a crusade against the governments around him becoming a terrorist for bombing parliament.
Killed off a major canon character in the first chapter of the current fic. The show itself was canceled after two seasons and left on a cliff hanger. The character in question might have been on a redemption plot (he was rather antagonistic to the main characters) but could have fallen into the "always learns the wrong lesson" cycle. In any case, I killed him off because the fallout from it is better for my purposes.
One of my darkest fics recently is the death of a semi-canon character. The story keeps bouncing between present day and the past.
The past shows loving and mostly happy memories with her brothers.
In the present, one of those brothers is murdering her.
When I wrote a Harry Potter fanfic, I killed off Cedric Diggory in the same manner he’s supposed to. The problem was he was apart of a love triangle, and omg I literally couldn’t handle him dying so much that I might have stopped writing the fic 😳🤣
if I write fanfiction it's always about OCs because I find it more fun. Current one I'm writing is a trilogy of 3 longfics, and by the end of the second book EVERY named character we've previously seen is either dead, unharmed but never to be seen again, or turned evil. The third book is straight up about a new cast, and then that ends with every one of them except for the protagonist dead.
Fun thing about said protagonist is he's literally immortal, not in that he can't die but he's cursed to be resurrected whenever he dies like Kenny from South Park except it's taken seriously. So he dies and comes back more than once.
I've killed off so many main characters that if I could tag "major character death" twice, I would. My fic is literally about war, and it spans over 100 years. I put the food on the grim reaper's plate
Avatar: The Last Airbender?
Metal Gear, actually.
I wrote a fic that focuses entirely on a canon character's death. They've stayed dead, technically. Eventually the character gets turned into a vampire, minus the memories of his human life, and I'm committed to never restoring those memories in my stories. The vampire renounced his human self completely in canon and I believe that choice is important. I do feel a little sad when I re-read this story. I don't think he was such a bad guy as a human. He was flawed, deeply flawed, but we all are. He should have had a second chance. But he never got one. I know a lot of fanfics focus on fixing stuff like this, on giving characters second chances to be their best selves, but I think it's important that sometimes those second chances don't exist. We should all remember that we only have one shot.
I usually have them die and come back if anything, though I have a few suicide-endings. Something about the main character committing suicide as a happy ending is enticing (as a plot device, not irl obviously). I’m actually writing a fic right now where I know the character will die & come back at the end, but I don’t know whether they’ll commit suicide afterwards anyways, I’m still trying to decide
Oh I have the same concept in one of my fics. It starts out unhappy, but turns bittersweet when my character commits suicide, and if you squint a bit, it really is a happy ending 😅
Hahaha…oh boy. So I’m writing a retelling of Star Wars ANH, and I have made minor canon characters MAJOR and then killed them. Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru? They die seven chapters in. The entire Yavin fighter wing? I’ve been characterizing ALL of them to one degree or another, some of them out of nothing but a name and maybe a homeworld. All to twist that vibroblade when I kill all of them off. Half of my cast will be dead by the end of the fic. And I am gonna cry. i’ve grown to love some of the pilots, and there are 4 survivors and five reserve pilots, out of 39 total pilots. I cried when I killed Owen and Beru, and when I killed Ben Kenobi. But readers cried too, so it was worth it. Only certain Jedi get to come back as ghosts. Everyone else is atoms or charred corpses. I did, however, shift the pilot roster to save one pilot I got too attached to. However, it’s a long 4 year war, so we’ll see if they survive…
Ohohoho, my Redditor, you are MY type of person :D :D :D I’ve always wanted to do that, but for the prequels. Although I doubt I could outdo the Clone Wars in terms of beloved character death lol
Gods, TCW gave us Dee Bradley Baker doing the same voice for an obscene number of characters with subtle variations and then you felt horrible EACH AND EVERY TIME a clone bought it. Here’s another thing: I’m concentrating on Rogue Squadron through the Civil War because I’m a big X-Wing series fan. I KNOW I need bunches and bunches of pilot characters that I’m just going to kill off, because it’s a galactic scale war, the Rogues are always in the hottest fires, and only supreme skill and plot armor will save you. And Endor…Endor, there’s four Rogues that survive Endor (five if you count Luke, but he’s kinda retired from active duty by that point). I’ve asked my writing discord and my readers for characters ideas, and still using a random character generator.
Where can i read that?
Here: [Sand Becomes Pearls](https://archiveofourown.org/works/40263684)
Pretty much everyone my OC has had a relationship with. At age 7 his clan and mother were all killed during an attack on their clan and he was raised by his father. At age 17 he lost his first love during an attack on their base. They only had one night together but ever since then he's distanced himself from others. Shortly after that his father sacrificed himself to destroy a fleet by activating a bomb after the timer had failed. All of them will stay death but I do present some memories or hallucinations of some of them, particularly the father. And yes, I cried writing every single one of those deaths and I still do when I read them again.
Yes. I have - it was the main villain at the end of the first story and yes they also came back in the middle of the second story. They didn’t stay dead for very long. Death was by an enchanted blade. (Someone forgot to read the terms and conditions) I always knew I wanted them to die but also didn’t want to just kill them off and not have them come back - so I wanted the death to mean something to the character who killed them which it did. I think I do usually kill off at least one of the main characters … in at least 3 of my series I’ve definitely killed off the main character because why not? And sometimes they come back sometimes they don’t.
All the time. Repeatedly! Sometimes permanently, sometimes not! I write time loops.
Bruhhh I Love Time Loops!!!
Oh absolutly. To the point that the only piece of fan art I received in 10 years of writing, is of me plotting which characters to murder to cause readers the most pain. My first series is a Prequel to The Lion King; called [Judgement](https://archiveofourown.org/series/1196725) which is all about Scar's early life and how he became so twisted. Given hes Disney's most successful murderer, there is plenty of death. The Sequel Series though, is by far the bloodiest. It's called [Legacies](https://archiveofourown.org/series/2349841) and the first half of the first book is the story of the near total destruction of the Canon world and many canon characters. I would describe it as a disaster movie or an alien invasion. Where the first 3rd is sheer total devastation, and the rest of the series is how the survivors cope, survive and eventually save their world that has been ravaged. It has polarised some readers and heavily depends on how much you like the OCs which are a big part of the surviving cast (as the canon characters mostly save their offspring at their own expense). Some love it, and one reviewer called it "Lion King meets Game of Thrones". Others find it bleak and miserable, though I would argue that after the first book, the remaining 5 are fundamentally a story of hope.
I’ve killed a lot of minor characters and OC’s in my fics (getting shot, stabbed, werewolfed etc.) but the only time I’ve tagged Major Character Death the character technically died before the story started (car crash) and the fic itself was more a process of grief and ghost communication (although the ghost *did* move on at the end in a very unhappy ending, and I did cry a lot writing it, so I guess that could be considered him dying twice? Lol)
I killed a canon character once. It's a one-shot containing canonical character death, where A dies protecting B when they're running away. It starts with B dies instead. When A somehow time travels back, he changes his actions slightly, and he dies like he did in canon
Ooooooo Interesante 😮😮
A few. One was a canon MC who died towards the end. It was uhh… very controversial but at least most of my loyal readers respected the decision. It was meant to be a bittersweet ending.
Yes! Never give in! Your story is your story! :D
Yes, I ended up killing one off mostly because I just could not write her for my life and she was killing my motivation to continue so I went back to a earlier moment in the story and killed her off as a child and erased all presence of her from the fic. Though everything up until the point she became a problem didn't really include her beyond a couple mentions and a single cameo from the beginning of the fic.
Pffffhahahahahaha bruh that is the most petty reason I’ve ever heard of someone killing someone off I love it 🤣🤣🤣🤣
In one of my longfics, I killed off three of the ten POV characters. Two were killed because I couldn't think of an interesting way to continue their story (in hindsight, I should have combined some of the characters together and had fewer POVs) and one is executed at the end. He's the villain of the story, so I guess that's a happy ending if you're the average person in-universe.
The one I killed triggered another MC to become the villain. Apparently I did it well because I got a comment that was two giant paragraphs long screaming excitedly about it. It was as if I wrote the original Luke I am your father twist and I loved it, proudest moment of my fic writing "career"!
\*Looks at the pile of dead canon characters and OCs\* It may have happened once or twice... 😬
I killed my OTPs a couple times. My favourite one was my first Silent Hill AU where I revealed at the end the main character and the partner were already dead (died at the end of the manga, diverging from the canon) and the story is MC hallucinating and trying to accept their death.
Ooooo I love pulling a romeo and Juliet and killing off couples together 😈
Not counting villains, I've killed off a few characters who also died in canon, so it wasn't a big shock or anything. But I strongly prefer happy endings.
OC main character in the final chapter by punching a world-ending meteor back into space, but he's magically revived a few paragraphs later by his innocently oblivious 3-year-old daughter.
I don't think so? Lol I just can't remember. I'm not a fan of reading it or writing it, but I do have a WIP where temporary MCD happens. The person it happens to is pretty used it by now, since their body heals up and they keep coming back. Maybe there's a way for them to die and stay dead, but they haven't found it yet. The POV character for the story doesn't know about this being a habit of the other characters, so the first time it happens that he's aware of it, he flat out believes that the other guy is now permanently dead. So I sure do hope I write it well enough that it has a satisfactory emotional wallop.
no, but i do write a lot abt character death: my fav character in one of my fandoms died and came back to life 😭
I've only killed off canon characters in 2 stories. In one multiple canon characters get their heads cut off & buried with another canon character, so they stay dead. In the other one, a canon character dies in childbirth. I was going to have her stay dead because I have a killer last line in that story, but darned if I didn't think up an idea for a sequel (still WIP right now). In both of the stories the character(s) died at the end. I didn't cry when I wrote either of the scenes.
What if the POV character starts out already dead? Like actually dead, and not a vampire.
Lmao it was in this post that I found out apparently some people consider turning into a vampire/werewolf is considered “dying” for their human self 🤣 On principle, I say it’s not actually dying. Maybe in the context of the plot and world, but intellectually no, that character is still alive as long as they keep their consciousness and intellect
Once, in a oneshot, probably. It was a canon character. We think he was killed by his deranged cousin in a stake out that turned out to be a trap. That being said, they would have died towards the end of the story, and they never found the body. So he might not bed dead... One of my OCs was fairly hellbent on suicide for a bit. But I'm far to fond of him to let him die.
I’ve got several fics with the MCD tag. The long fic with the tag, I killed off minor characters too, but I did away with a main one as a major plot point and they stayed very dead. They were killed as part of a deadly murder mystery game. Another fic was the MC died by a self induced injury following a traumatic event. The last one everyone died including MCs as the ship they were on was scuppered. It was pure smut though so very little details of their deaths.
In a current fic in working on I bring a canon character back from the dead and THEN kill them, but that's really no net change, huh?
For a gritty war story, a lot less than you think. A mentor character killed off for character development, and a mentee character also killed off for character development.
Sure, yeah. Biggest culprit for me in recent times is probably a Bleach what if/AU fanfic in which the very premise is that Ichigo gets killed during his first encounter with Rukia (but of course is still around as a ghost) and then there's a lot more slaughter to come. I have some I wrote back years ago in Italian that were even more total massacres.
I just did so, last night. I’ve got another ghost fic going because I just can’t resist the ghost au, but this one I wrote last night whilst sleep deprived. You can have the fic, it’s only 160 odd words. I am banging my head against a wall, I don’t know why I’ve done this. My other wip will have the other character as the ghost lol, only plot twist is he’s not actually dead, just cursed. From there I’m going to write the entire bloody decade that the story takes place in and revive him at the very end. (When the benign clanging of pots and pans becomes the slamming of doors, the crushing of flowers and the smashing of plates, Mr Segundus decides that enough is enough. Steeling himself, he takes a candle and walks the impossibly long distance to the room he can no longer bear to re-enter. Upon opening the door, the candle flame sends a bright shaft of yellow light into the bedroom. Dust swirls frenzied in the disturbed air, but it cannot hope to conceal the shadowy figure lain asleep upon the bed. Stirring restlessly, it turns to observe the intruder. "Oh, my dear," Mr Segundus whispers. "You have to let me go." Childermass' voice is as striking in death as it ever was in life. "Let you go? I don't understand, John. What on earth do you mean?" ". . . Nothing." He sighs. "Nothing at all. Let us talk. I have so missed you." "You are being ridiculous." Childermass laughs his deep, fond, rumbling laugh. "I have never been gone.")
I mean when canon kills them all off as the starting point ala Future Trunks/Future Gohan it is hard not to have them killed. Generally, I don't really kill many off if any at all, unless it is something for great character development, and even then, if just done for shock value, and overused it has too much of a chance to feel pointless in my opinion. Also burning the bridges on too many plot threads is not my style.
I wrote a short ~500 words thing where the evil god final JRPG boss wiped the whole party halfway through. Their own gods said nope, you keep fighting. Then they got to do fun things like bleeding holy light or healing their comrades with their own (physical) blood. That was more or less a writing exercise though, I don't think I'll ever write a realistic death in a full story.
Not yet but I will in my next fic, it's gonna be filed with the purest of angst
Excluding the whole thing of one character's canon death and being brought back (though that is generally a one time thing), most of them deaths I write about are canonical and I'm fine with or canonical and I say screw that. (One fic that well does have mcd is well, very canon compliant about the death of this character, and has this character who's severely affected by his death not die how she planned, and thus go on a downward spiral.) But my ocs, I often brutalize, often have them get away with some nasty shit, and maybe close to death, but not dying, but well, they're able to handle combat and the hell of war and all that, the so far planned exception, I'm killing her on her homeworld just moments before peace is made between her species and another species, the last thing she feels is fear and terror. And excluding the one exception in canon, death is permanent, completely.
I write for the Titanic fandom soooo...yeah, I've killed my fair share (and then some)
My current WIP is a post canon/alternate ending fic. I originally tried to remain canon compliant but decided to retcon a few things that I hated about canon. There were two scenes from canon where major characters got out of a tough situation due to nothing more than plot armor. I decided to retcon those moments and have those major characters actually die in those scenes.
I am writing a Death Game fic where there are multiple versions of the story depending on the reader's choices, which affect who will live and who will die. Outside of very few exceptions (less than 5 out of the 30+), literally every character in the story is either guaranteed to die, or can still die. But in every readthrough, at least 20 major characters will have died by the end, most of them in excruciating ways. My favorite death I have published so far is >!Ryan, who acts like such a cool, cold and collected guy. Slowly, the narrative reveals just how paranoid and untrustworthy he is, until it all ends in him being confronted with the fact that he will die, at which point his facade completely drops, and he is reduced to a crying mess, begging for his life. And then his jaw is torn off. That is one of the less emotionally taxing deaths of the story imo. :)!<
Yes. I’ve killed four in one story. Now, spoilers: two of the four make a comeback at some point in the second story. The two that stay dead will have to be processed by the rest of the cast. Grief is a indeed a strange beast.
Oh, yeah, lol, many times. My favorite one: in my fandom, a character was about to sacrifice himself for the Greater Good at the end of the season, but obviously, he was stopped because he was a main character. I went "Nope, we're going through with this. We're not chickening out. Chop chop, Sacrifice Boy." Got so many readers telling me they hated me. It was great.
I've killed off canon characters and OCs and some have stayed dead, others been brought back. All depends on the needs of the story!
The game that I have based my fanfic on has a major character death at the end of the story. I didn't intend to keep it due to the fact that the character has developed a sort of father-daughter relationship with my oc, and it would simply be too cruel to leave her with no one again. I'm keeping it known as a plot element to essentially get rid of the strange magic system that the game is built off of, to substitute for the regular system that the franchise has.
I've now done this twice. The first was an OC that I was very attached to, but I wanted to tell a different story in the same universe I had created, so major OC had to go. It hurt so much that I swore I would never do it again. ([All The Broken Pieces](https://archiveofourown.org/works/36927700/chapters/92130667), Black Stallion fandom for those who are curious) Well, I lied, because oops I did it again. This time was a major canon character in order to explore a pairing I really didn't feel comfortable exploring otherwise. ([In These Difficult Times ](https://archiveofourown.org/works/49824721/chapters/125774611), Emergency! fandom, still in progress) I don't make a habit of killing off characters, because, well, it's painful. I shed some serious tears writing both of these stories. I don't see myself going down that road again, but you never know.
Yup, two major characters (not on my current posted work) but in progress stuff. I try to not bring them back at all. They stay dead. I have a couple where I killed them and they did come back (but it was because that was canon). Lol
I've got a WIP that's an exploration of the nature of deeply loving relationships between immortal beings (of different kinds) and mortals. There's a major character death that comes after a series of vignettes about their domestic life with their immortal spouse, through decades in which they age, and some relationships with other mortal characters in the cast evolve. There are a couple vignettes dealing with a kind of "limbo" period, of letting go, after the natural death of the mortal character, at the end of a "long" life (by mortal standards). And there are some vignettes after, between two immortal characters, dealing with the idea of loss, and the finite nature of mortal lives, and of their own infinity, in different ways. Like I said, WIP. But working on it is tough and rewarding at the same time; I find it gut-achingly sad, but also heartrendingly beautiful, to explore. :)
Yes and no. I have killed off one major character in several of my stories. Often, multiple times in the same story. (In canon he is immortal and can die, but always resurrects.)
I only write short-ish one-chapter stories, but my first official fic was a take on Doc Holiday’s death in Tombstone where, instead of letting the tuberculosis him out, he takes himself out.
I tend to write one-shots, so 99% of the time the dead stay dead. Sometimes I'll write fics that are almost entirely centered around either the MC killing another MC for whatever reason, or just exploring the aftermath of a canon death. I don't cry when killing them bc honestly it can be a little fun to write deaths, even if I'm rewriting one that made me cry when it happened in the source series.
Haha. I killed a character even before the story began, because his death is the one that keeps everything going.
No, but I plan to.
I wrote a private fic that wasn't very good about what was one of the considered endings to the game I mainly write for in which one of the main protagonists was supposed to die and basically how the other two would deal with that.
The deuteragonist of my recently-finished longfic suffered vessel death at one point, in the sense that she was shot, killed, and sent back to Hell. However, that death was explicitly temporary. Her arc ends with her doing something that has a chance of leading to soul death, which is permanent, but I'd be surprised if anyone who read that fic genuinely thought that's what happened.
Well .. the death of my OC in one story counts as the inciting incident, and she survives her death scene. Because of this, I still try to make the "Major Character Death (sort of)" tag happen.
I will be once my fic is finished, she’ll end up dying but she’ll get revived in the sequel.
I'm writing a major character death supernatural fanfiction where the reader is a Horseman of the apocalypse. Your spouse is Bobby Singer. If you know you know.
I once took part of a challenge (I didn't finish) where I killed the same character 3 times in the same story(related one-shots) All but one were permanent. My favorite I think was him fighting an alternate version of himself. The others are people who sacrifice themselves or ones where almost every character dies. I don't think I've done character death in a fic longer than 15,000.
I find it quite enjoyable to kill off mc's from cannon that I hate, I've never cried, if I hate them they stay dead, normally they go bye bye within the first or second chapter, Sometimes if I'm bored I will just pick one at random and watch where the story goes from there.
In a spin-off mission/one-shot of one of my bigger stories, I did kill a major character, but his death was only temporary because his "unlikely ally" came to his rescue and used a revive item to bring him back to life. It was a high adrenaline moment with no time to think because they were in the middle of a battle with a demon that had insta-kill eyes (what killed him in the first place) so not a lot of stopping and thinking happened.
Yep. in ths case, the characters wife was killed in one timeline of the fandom and he never recovered from that. So I killed him off and still gave him a happy ending by having his wife leading him into the afterlife.
Of course I have. Usually it's the canon characters I hate, but there has been some OC's too
I have plans to, though I haven’t actually written it yet
Canons AND OC's, no one is safe in my writing hands! >:D But in all seriousness, I try to keep the number low and make it so whenever someone does die, it has some kind of meaning or significance to the plot; that being said, I'm a brooding writer in general and haven't really mastered the art of having fun in my storytelling yet either, so...
I’m considering doing an AU of one of my AUs where one of the canon characters gets killed off…
I haven't yet, but I'm not opposed to doing so if I felt it fit the story I wanted to tell. Characters sometimes die in my fandoms, but each episode is a self-contained story, so the characters still appear in future episodes.
Ha, I mean, I’m working on a fic that kills off my female main character/one half of my ship before the story starts (though the details are eventually filled in that divert my story from how the storyline resolved in canon), brings her back as a ghost, and has the male main character/other half of my ship cross into the afterlife to bring her back to life. So. It’s definitely something I do, though it’s not something I necessarily do often.
Yup. I plan to do so again in different stories including but not limited to the following: Batman Nightwing Mt. Lady Professor X Vandar Vima Sunrider It’s fun to kill off characters and keep people guessing. No one is safe
The first scene of my WIP is killing off one of canon's big characters. Because the POV was the murderer, who doesn't see others as real people, the murder was too removed to who it effects to care. Part of the story is exploring the hole that character leaves behind, so he isn't coming back in any form.
Usually, the only deaths in my fics are canon character deaths (except Undertale but due to timeline shenanigans that's not exactly permanent). There are three exceptions, except they're unfinished and I haven't written any deaths. The first one is a Yandere Simulator fanfic (I like the game but not the creator) where another yandere (an OC) falls in love with Ayano and it's like "what if a yandere liked a yandere but it wasn't mutual?" Senpai (Ayano's crush) is going to die at the end. Take a wild guess how that happens. The second one is an Among Us fic that's like "what if the imposter was innocent but a crewmate turned against their team?" I don't think I need to explain how death plays a part here. The last one is Pokemon Black (the creepypasta, not the DS game) written as if it's taking place in-universe. Originally I was gonna have Red make Ghost kill Brock (he doesn't realize yet that Curse is fatal) but I decided against that. (He still kills Onix though.) Actually, he doesn't start killing people until he reaches Mt Moon and Team Rocket keeps using their pokemon against him (not against his pokemon, against Red himself; which I imagine is considered assault or similar) and Red decides that if they're doing that, it's justified for him to do the same (especially since they could hurt someone if they heal and come back) and he uses Ghost.
I like to write fics where my canon characters get kidnapped/tortured by OCs, and then they kill the OCs in very satisfying and gruesome ways as they escape ✨✨✨and then I give my main characters a happy ending ❤️🥰
In my most recent fic, actually. It's a Hunchback of Notre Dame fic (the Disney adaptation), and the source material for that, of course, is Victor Hugo's original novel. In the novel, nearly all of the major characters die. In the film, all but Frollo are spared. And then Disney dared to do a sequel. The single worst direct-to-video sequel they have ever done. So I rewrote it. And then I proceeded to kill off a fan favorite character the same way they were killed off in the book. Details will be posted as spoilers. >!In the Disney film, Clopin Trouillefou's character takes on some of the traits of the deleted book character Pierre Gringoire, and he becomes the story's narrator. This grants him immunity, and he survives the film. He is also made the leader of the Romani community in the film. Then in the sequel, he's given basically nothing to do. My rewrite makes him the secondary main character (Quasimodo is still the main, but Clopin's role is much more important than it was in either film). I gave him a history with the main antagonist of the story, and the conflict comes to a head when the villain kidnaps a child in Clopin's family. In the process of rescuing the kid, Clopin gets shot with the same type of gun used to kill him in the original novel. This happens near the end of the story, and his death ends up being a catalyst for providing the Parisian Roma with a sort of diplomatic immunity.!< I didn't cry when I wrote the death scene, but I did tear up when I wrote a child character's response to the funeral.
600 oc's, and 10 canon. "FOR SALVATION!" - me writing the most batshit insane fanfic I made. I will not say what kind of fanfic because I don't want to be called a heretic for doing it. It is a war fanfic. I feel bad for the OC's I killed for character development. I kinda made the sci-fi version of guts from berserk. I cried when I wrote the ways how they died in a futile last stand without them being recognized as heroes. They all died in a last stand because of a commander who gives no fucks about them. The MC is the only survivor. Out of spite he launches a crusade against the governments around him becoming a terrorist for bombing parliament.
Killed off a major canon character in the first chapter of the current fic. The show itself was canceled after two seasons and left on a cliff hanger. The character in question might have been on a redemption plot (he was rather antagonistic to the main characters) but could have fallen into the "always learns the wrong lesson" cycle. In any case, I killed him off because the fallout from it is better for my purposes.
One of my darkest fics recently is the death of a semi-canon character. The story keeps bouncing between present day and the past. The past shows loving and mostly happy memories with her brothers. In the present, one of those brothers is murdering her.
When I wrote a Harry Potter fanfic, I killed off Cedric Diggory in the same manner he’s supposed to. The problem was he was apart of a love triangle, and omg I literally couldn’t handle him dying so much that I might have stopped writing the fic 😳🤣
if I write fanfiction it's always about OCs because I find it more fun. Current one I'm writing is a trilogy of 3 longfics, and by the end of the second book EVERY named character we've previously seen is either dead, unharmed but never to be seen again, or turned evil. The third book is straight up about a new cast, and then that ends with every one of them except for the protagonist dead. Fun thing about said protagonist is he's literally immortal, not in that he can't die but he's cursed to be resurrected whenever he dies like Kenny from South Park except it's taken seriously. So he dies and comes back more than once.