Favorite way to Kill your character

[whimsicaldreamer]

My highest body count goes to the traveling shovel of death because I have a tendency to go wild with the killing during NaNoWriMo so statistically speaking death by shovel would be my favorite, I also get the most creative and contrived deaths here.

My favorite way to kill my characters off though is in a blink and you miss it line while the story is focused on something else. They also tend to be very simple deaths and almost always for characters I intended to die from their creation.

One of my characters was busy getting his eyeball an inside look at a magic spell (he lives)and I use one sentence to casually mention that the other one just got ran through with a sword.

Another character was going to get a kind of bad injury and when the healing magic took over fall face down in a pond and drown. (one of the few things that can actually kill him) But then I did not kill him. He is going to die at some point in the future though.



And this thread is very entertaining to read.

[1st Name Change]

There is no favorite... They all work

[the king come down]

My favorite way to kill a character is in such a way that it adds something to the plot, character development, or really just is important in some way, even if it's to showcase a theme of the story that I'm trying to get across. I don't kill off characters so willy nilly that I have a favorite method of killing them. Though, I guess you could say that because my characters are generally very withdrawn and have general problems that they cannot hope to overcome, that I will generally kill them off by either suicide or in a martyr like fashion.

[Sathael]

Corrie Wazlib

I don't like killing my characters, but if I had to pick it would be suddenly.
Example: Character gets shot.
It doesn't really sink in that they died and they don't have a lot of time to think about it (and I hate writing death scenes).

This is pretty much exactly what I would have responded with, except I would have probably rambled on a bit.

[ArrowOfZen]

Hm... I would say, the MC killed himself by jumping off the cliff or by being killed by his own lover. 4laugh

[Altair-Mercer]

I have many favorite ways of killing off my characters.. But the ones I use the most are headshots, slit throats, stab wounds, snapped necks, disenbowlment or a short blade through the spine.... Or a dog ripping out necks...

[malscrung]

I once killed a character by having him fall drunk out of a tree. That was my favorite to write, so far.

Death by stupid mistake can be so fun. Describing someone choking on string cheese, or twisting their ankle on the sidewalk and falling into the path of a taxi... /wistfulsigh 4laugh

[Airship Canon]

Free Birds in the Sky...!
Please Give us the Truth..!
Is there Humanity on Mother Earth?!

Varies wildly.
I've killed a few characters off in my writing, and none of them too similar.
Thracia has one guy get shot in the eye by an arrow. That... doesn't kill him. It does however knock him off his dragon, sending him careening into a castle wall... he then, with just about every bone in his body broken, manages to impale himself on his own spear.
Another character avoids a Tornado spell... or so he thinks and takes a large branch of a tree to the back of his head.

My upcoming AC/ML(A) Cross over "Ignition" is going to be rather similar to how a lot of the characters die: Eaten by aliens. Painfully ripped apart and eaten. How they end up in that scenario (aka, how their NEXT got disabled) is going to vary.

If you keep on holding,
Holding dying flowers..!
A soft answer turns away the Wrath!!

RAIN IN VAIN!!

[whimsicaldreamer]

Airship Canon

Thracia has one guy get shot in the eye by an arrow. That... doesn't kill him. It does however knock him off his dragon, sending him careening into a castle wall... he then, with just about every bone in his body broken, manages to impale himself on his own spear.

That sounds like a lovely way to die. rofl

And a whole lot of fun to write.

[Airship Canon]

whimsicaldreamer

Airship Canon

Thracia has one guy get shot in the eye by an arrow. That... doesn't kill him. It does however knock him off his dragon, sending him careening into a castle wall... he then, with just about every bone in his body broken, manages to impale himself on his own spear.

That sounds like a lovely way to die. rofl

And a whole lot of fun to write.

Free Birds in the Sky...!
Please Give us the Truth..!
Is there Humanity on Mother Earth?!

I had to do something spectacular for that guy's death. I only deathflagged him 5 times in his introductory scene... and he's an "enemy" redshirt mook. And his death kicked off a major battle... (Outside of "THEY KILLED MY DAUGHTER!" guy and one certain mage later, none of the other deaths in that are even remotely as vivid.)

And yes, it was indeed a fun write.

It's gonna be similar with Ignition too-- whoever the first unlucky NEXT pilot to go try to solo a BETA swarm is... I'm going to be very descriptive. It'll probably end with someone in a base yelling "KILL THE FEEDS! KILL THE FEEDS!" though, because, really... no one is going to want to see that... (But it'll drag on anyways, because I'm a cold, heartless b*****d)
(*shhh... don't tell anyone, but I'm planning heavily on that unlucky Lynx being the ACfA fan-favorite, May "Merrygate" Greenfield.)

If you keep on holding,
Holding dying flowers..!
A soft answer turns away the Wrath!!

RAIN IN VAIN!!

[whimsicaldreamer]

Airship Canon

whimsicaldreamer

That sounds like a lovely way to die. rofl

And a whole lot of fun to write.

I had to do something spectacular for that guy's death. I only deathflagged him 5 times in his introductory scene... and he's an "enemy" redshirt mook. And his death kicked off a major battle... (Outside of "THEY KILLED MY DAUGHTER!" guy and one certain mage later, none of the other deaths in that are even remotely as vivid.)

And yes, it was indeed a fun write.

It's gonna be similar with Ignition too-- whoever the first unlucky NEXT pilot to go try to solo a BETA swarm is... I'm going to be very descriptive. It'll probably end with someone in a base yelling "KILL THE FEEDS! KILL THE FEEDS!" though, because, really... no one is going to want to see that... (But it'll drag on anyways, because I'm a cold, heartless b*****d)
(*shhh... don't tell anyone, but I'm planning heavily on that unlucky Lynx being the ACfA fan-favorite, May "Merrygate" Greenfield.

Well at least the red shirt got a notable death though I don't suppose that is much consolation, then again maybe in red shirt after life it is.

That sounds unpleasant and it ramps up the percieved danger level! It's a win win.

I had a group get killed by sandworms (because you have to have them in magic deserts). I debated writing out the attack, but realized one survivor wasn't going to be plausible, so I just had her see the aftermath. Describing the scene afterwards was interesting. Everyone ended up buried in the same grave because they were just little pieces of body parts and she couldn't tell them apart.

[Dakota Peace]

I like killing off any character in an honorable way, like throwing himself at a barrage of arrows so the other person in the scene may escape unscathed. smile ,
But I only kill characters that I could write thousands of pages on because I like the reader to feel that sense of "What if they didn't do that? Where would they go from this scene? How would the story have progressed otherwise?".

[Fireweed_honey]

It depends on the situation and the story. To date, I've killed characters off by stabbing, dropping into space, poison, dragged into the realm of the dead, mortality spells, staking and death by holy wafer (vampires), and shooting.

[Harbinger of Badass]

My latest character, a doucher known to me as Alaric, is dying of the plague.

[Phantasm1313]

The Fanfiction Nymph

What is your favorite way to kill your characters off? Personally I like a bit of decapitation or a shot to the heart. I also only kill off characters that I like for some reason, go figure.

Yeah, I like drunken suicide the most. And, heck, I loved the character I killed too. XD Does that make me a bad person? LOL