I’m curious — why do people want warnings for character death in fanfic? I mean, if I write a story and I’m going to kill one of the characters, I would want it to be a secret … until it happened.
Are people delicate and cannot take the plot-related death of a fictional…
Hate to say it, but I am one of these delicate flowers. 😛 It does seem very silly, I’ll agree, but reading deathfic is fucking depressing. A well written fic where one of the main characters dies has the capacity to fucking destroy me- I am not being entirely metaphorical here, either. I mean it has been known to trigger a depressive episode that can last for days and interfere with my enjoyment of my life and the work I need to accomplish. My brain is fucked up, what can I say. The pleasure I get from reading an extremely well-crafted piece of fiction will not usually outweigh the risk of exacerbating my mental issues, so I like to be warned for major character death so I can avoid those fics.
Well, first off we’re talking about fandom, which collectively has a reputation for ravenous consumption of spoilers, so the assumption that the value of character death is in the surprise is inherently questionable.
But yeah, I don’t think it’s weirdly delicate. I’ve met very few people who think it’s a good time to be caught off-guard by a character’s death. If a story is good, then it pulls readers in and makes them identify with the characters. We love those characters—hell, sometimes we are those characters—and when you read a story where the character you’ve been hearting all over SURPRISE! BUYS THE FARM, not everybody thinks that horrible grief-stricken bottoming-out feeling in their stomach is a good time.
I detest the initial drop on roller coasters too, for the record. The visceral feeling of being about to do a face-plant into the ground at 75 mph? My body doesn’t think that’s fun. It thinks that’s dying.
For myself, I’ll read character death, but yeah, slap me with that warning first. I don’t care about surprises. I want to brace for that stuff. And frankly, the vast majority of the time, a story should not need to depend on shock value to carry the impact of the character’s death. I’ve made the acquaintance of only a handful of stories (literally, fewer than five) where the story in any way suffered for the character’s death not being a surprise.
I’m Not Bitter, Just Unsweetened: Just curious