Cover by Alison Hunt

(Enjoy another partial entry of Do I Need to Use a Dragon?)

There are many schools of thought when it comes to killing in fiction. I’m only going to go over four of the most common to give you an idea of the basic arguments you can run into out there:

1. All Necks on the Line– Readers and authors who believe this is the best way to write a story feel that every character is fair game. If the main hero dies then that’s where the story was meant to go and someone will take the mantle. These books tend to create a rather large body count in order to drive the point home, which could lead to plenty of fodder figures. People who argue for this method don’t have a big problem with this because it’s what they want. The only criticism would be to make sure the deaths mean something, but that’s not a deal breaker. There can be a maintained distance from every character since it’s expected that any of them can die at any moment.
2. Selective Deaths– This is probably where I fall most of the time because I feel that a character death needs to have a big impact. The argument here is that one shouldn’t kill heroes and villains with such ease. Each one is important to the adventure, which will be altered once they are gone. Eliminating someone early means the plot can’t reach where the author wants it to go. Stories like this can have a high risk of ‘plot armor’, but this can be minimized by having some deaths. Once the audience realizes that the author is being selective instead of avoiding killing entirely, they will be less likely to get annoyed at heroes surviving multiple encounters. Of course, this still requires that you kill characters or, if you can’t do that, make them fall back in their evolution at times.
3. Only Villains Die– This school of thought can be seen as naïve and uninteresting, but it’s common and fairly simplistic. Readers who gravitate towards these stories don’t want to see good people die while evil ones continue to thrive. Older stories work this way too because there was a period when it was believed heroes shouldn’t even bleed. There are legitimate reasons for doing this. Authors with very few or a single protagonist facing many villains don’t have the option of killing their hero, unless the adventure is set to end that way. The target audience could be children, which is a demographic typically given stories where good triumphs over evil without question. So, don’t think that this simplest of styles should be tossed out immediately.
4. Nobody Dies– There isn’t a single death in these stories, which one would assume is for very little children. Adults may be exposed to these types of adventures as well if the author refuses to kill a character. Even the villains survive after their plans are foiled. This does work in some stories where the heroes can’t take the life of a villain without being arrested for murder. Establishing that it’s illegal to kill someone in a fictional society does limit the amount of death you can include in an adventure. Those who do kill are clearly villains, but if the bad guys are not the murdering types then that leaves you with accidents to take anyone out. It’s when nobody dies in a story where there are constant death-dodging situations that it comes off as everyone having ‘plot armor’. At this point, it’s not even plot relevant, but simply that the author is refusing to take a fictional life.

As you can tell, each school works in specific situations, so there’s no right or wrong way to handle character deaths. It comes down to how well you set it up and the reason for why it happens in the story.