Character Death: when to warn?
Nov. 6th, 2005 07:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
runespoorOkay, so I was thinking about the Andromeda Table and I wondered... What does "Character Death" means, exactly? So yes, someone dies. But when do you warn for character death?... All of this is, of course, purely hypothetical.
Say it's a Blaise/Pansy fic in which Sirius falls through the veil. He's not important to the main pairing, but he matters to the reader of the books, so do you mark character death? Say the fic is Remus/Sirius - do you warn for character death or do you assumes the reader knew what he was in from?
Do you warn for death if it's canon death? If it's AU but the character died in canon anyway? For any character - disregarding his or her importance in the fic and/or the original material? Do you take the "character death" warning to means only the mains characters of the fic?
Do you warn for death if the character comes back, for instance as a ghost? Is it any different if he or she is somehow brought back to life, or if they appear as an Inferi, or as a vampire, or as a portrait, or as something like Riddle's diary?
Personally, I take "character death" to mean that I'd better not get too attached to the main characters of the piece, because one of them is going to eat it. Then again, I like a warning if the SO of the main character of the fic is already dead. And I think "character death" is not too much to ask when half the wizarding world as we know it bites it in a final battle of any sort. It's all very relative, I suppose.
Please comment, I'd love to read your input.
Say it's a Blaise/Pansy fic in which Sirius falls through the veil. He's not important to the main pairing, but he matters to the reader of the books, so do you mark character death? Say the fic is Remus/Sirius - do you warn for character death or do you assumes the reader knew what he was in from?
Do you warn for death if it's canon death? If it's AU but the character died in canon anyway? For any character - disregarding his or her importance in the fic and/or the original material? Do you take the "character death" warning to means only the mains characters of the fic?
Do you warn for death if the character comes back, for instance as a ghost? Is it any different if he or she is somehow brought back to life, or if they appear as an Inferi, or as a vampire, or as a portrait, or as something like Riddle's diary?
Personally, I take "character death" to mean that I'd better not get too attached to the main characters of the piece, because one of them is going to eat it. Then again, I like a warning if the SO of the main character of the fic is already dead. And I think "character death" is not too much to ask when half the wizarding world as we know it bites it in a final battle of any sort. It's all very relative, I suppose.
Please comment, I'd love to read your input.
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no subject
Date: 2005-11-07 06:38 am (UTC)I was originally going to post something that essentially said, Bah! Warnings? Who needs them! But after thinking about it a little more, I decided that I'm ambivalent about the issue.
On the one hand, I firmly believe that fandom is far too indulgent in regards to warnings (all warnings, not just character death). When we read published fiction we don't get this kind of hand-holding. We might be able to glean some information from a synopsis or review, but no one puts explicit warnings on their title page. It would just be...weird. Instead we're sort of left to muddle through the book on our own and we are forced to either take whatever the author gives us or stop reading. Hence, it sort of galls me a bit when people get so upset over not being warned about a particular thing in fan fiction (and I've seen it with situations other than character death as well).
On the other hand, fandom isn't professionally published fiction and, like
In conclusion... meh. *shrugs*