Character Death: when to warn?

[runespoor]

Okay, 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.

Comments

[runespoor7.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but generally the death is a major part of the plot, if not the plot in itself. After all, why kill a character if you can avoid it?

When you say main character, do you mean in the book or in the fic? (And particularly for "already dead", do you mean the other part of the pairing, assuming there's one?)

[quivo.livejournal.com]

In the book OR in the fic. And if it's the other part of the pairing, assuming there's one, if it's just part of the character's life and not a major part of say, an angsty one-shot, I may not. Basically, if Harry is angsting about Ginny's death for about one or two thousand words, I'll warn, because people interested in one-shots like that likely won't care about it. If not, then I won't warn. An example is one of my monstrous Slytherin!Harry AUs - if, say, I'm going to kill off Sirius as it happens in the books, I'll keep it to myself because even though you have the sneaking suspicion that his days might be numbered, you don't know, and part of the fun of reading AUs is seeing what happens, how it happens and so on.