Discussion How do you properly kill off a character?

[Okkeus Dainlei]

It seems that the longer I write here on Chaos the more and more characters I start to lose interest in.

Whether it be from their current narratives being finished, or I just start to lose the value I had from writing them originally. I’d like to keep writing them, but it seems like I’m always falling back to the old reliable Okkeus for telling stories.

Same thing goes for me with cresting new characters. I’ll make them, write about three to four posts with them, and then suddenly the interest is go. I just don’t know what to do.

So I ask this, how do y’all kill off/ end your characters? I don’t want to delete mine, as they all have backstories and arcs behind them. But it doesn’t seem right just to leave my alts sitting there, which is what they are currently doing.

Any tips/ideas/suggestions/discussion is more than welcome.

 

[Katella]

I don't know if this will help or not, but I always found joy in this situation, by using my character to further the story. Let someone of an enemy faction kill them for instance. It becomes a stepping stone for a new story. Or perhaps a bounty hunter etc....OR, to have them sacrifice themselves at a critical moment in a thread with others, giving their lives to protect another. Make it so that while your story stops, the story they were part of continues on through another. Okkeus Dainlei

 

[Hailyn]

So I ask this, how do y’all kill off/ end your characters?

I think it depends on the character's story trajectory, and I guess how much it matters to you that you actually reach the point where their story ends. I have the end of one of my current characters in mind, at least a general idea of how it'll go, but I don't necessarily write that character the same way I might write another one, or how someone else approaches writing their own. My characters are usually smaller than the stories I write for them, in that the story they're a part of is meant to say something bigger than the rise and fall of a Sith lord or the successes and failures of a Jedi. As an example; If I want to tell a story about how powerless people are to dictate their own lives, I tell it from the perspective of a person that tries to get as powerful as the setting allows, and then finds that they are no more in control than they were when they started their journey.

I want the character I write to be learning a lesson, basically, and I end their lives as they figure things out.

That's not how I always approach a character, but it's usually how I write the ones that aren't good (in the good vs evil sense). The ones that aren't being made to go through that kind of tribulation usually just don't die, or they die off-screen, and just get shelved for whenever I feel like writing them again because dying doesn't need to be the point where you set the character down and move on. For the slice-of-life sort of characters I just set them aside and pick up a new or different character, and maybe when I pick them up again they'll turn into the previously mentioned kind of character that I write out of circumstance. Usually setting one of those characters aside comes in the form of hitting that narrative point where they're doing something different/have grown from where they were initially and I feel comfortable in just leaving things there.

Edit: the tl;dr is that if you write a character to tell an overarching story, then the way to properly kill off/write off a character is to end that story; if you write a character that has self-contained stories in each thread with no overarching narrative goal for them then just look at them from the perspective of using your writing as a window into a snapshot of that character's life and write a thread that closes that window on it.

 

[Jsc]

Deleting alts is fine. Creativity is infinite.

Yeah. I'd recommend focusing on watering new seeds. Not burning empty dirt. But that's just me.

 

[Mercy]

​

Jokes aside, I haven't ever been great at letting characters go. Even if I don't wanna write them right now I like to keep my options open. Because who knows what the future might bring!

I think that no matter how you do it... don't be afraid to fall back in love with them all over again. Some people might try an' shame ya for bringing them back, if you want to after having them killed, but you should ignore that noise. These are your characters, your energy and creativity poured into them.

No wrong answers.

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

Okkeus Dainlei

A few contradictory points of advice from someone who's killed off and resurrected A LOT of characters:

• Part of the charm of Star Wars is that there's a dozen viable ways to come back from being dead. That's especially true on Chaos, where the Netherworld is very much A Thing That Millions Of Currently Living People Have Experienced.
• Permanent character death can be awesome. If you feel a character is played out, leveled up, more of a hassle than an opportunity for fun, a great death — a great sendoff — is a strong option. I did that for Velok the Elder and for Rave Merrill, and I have no regrets there.
• For characters I've shelved without a massive, satisfying sendoff, what I do is I set myself conditions for their possible return — conditions that would make them interesting to write again, conditions with major stakes attached. Ashin only came back because her wife was trapped in the nastiest part of the Netherworld, for example. Someone torturing or killing Spencer was the trigger I'd always set. Otherwise she was going to stay permanently shelved.
• There are other great holding patterns for main characters who've lost their spark. Consider stranding them or sending them to prison. Done that a couple of times and it's great.
• Don't be afraid to delete characters who could have been main faces but just never took off right, even if you or others still have some affection for them. You'll make more.
• Don't be afraid to recognize that many of the characters you make will be supporting characters, who might be worth keeping around for cameos or are deletable without guilt. You'll make more.
• Don't rename/recycle accounts. It will save you MUCH hassle in future years. I still cringe that I renamed Rave's old account into Velok the Younger, so all her stuff got mixed up with his and she doesn't have an account to look back on. At the time the goal was to avoid the temptation of resurrection, but there are better ways. Just keep the dead (main) character's account with a 'dead' label.
• Instead of any of the above, just have them lose everything. Bust them back to Padawan, lose their company, lose the Force, get fired, get impeached, whatever. I've done it a couple of times with main characters and it's turned out wonderfully.

Hope some of those mutually exclusive bits and pieces spart viable ideas for you.

 

[Cassus Akovin]

One of the better methods that I've personally found (though it doesn't fit every character concept), is to write the next generation of your character. In this case, after floundering with Triam Akovin towards the end, I eventually decided that her son would succeed her. Now, Cassus has an entirely fresh concept that still respects the continuation of a beloved character, and can take their "twilight years" into unexpected new arcs.

For example, her son's desperation to save his mom from Sickness leads him down some really sketchy paths, and his interaction with Darkwire leads to tragedy for Triam, assumed dead. However, that "death" allowed me to trigger a character concept for her I hadn't had an opportunity for, and now she lives as a resurrected rogue Omni drone currently palling around with Primeval Cults because she doesn't remember who she was ( Koh Su )

So that leads me to my second method: memory loss. There is a lot of baggage sometimes writing established characters that you have to consider with every post you make. Sometimes the best way to continue on with a beloved character without killing or shelving them is to give them an entirely new perspective. They don't remember any of that old baggage, all they remember is five minutes before a rancor or whatever is trying to eat them. They don't know about their uber-telekinesis or ultra-lightsaber-rifle. They just know it has teeth, and they want to live. The new relationships will effectively transform your old character into a new one.

Sometimes though, the above concepts just don't work for the type of character you've written that you can't bring yourselves to actually kill off. In that case, just send them Far-Away TM. For my character Darth Voracitos , he is the top form of incomprehensible evil and power, so killing him would be a rather big to-do and honestly bothersome. So I "ascend" his interests too far removed places that don't often enough bring him into direct conflict with anything, by giving him a tiny private fiefdom in the Netherworld.

However, if you are really done with a concept like I was after a year of writing the horrifically disgusting Zambrano the Hutt killing him in an unavoidably permanent way (like obliterating the soul) is The Way. Keep in mind though, even this did not stop me from bringing back the idea of the character. Some years later after his literally permanent unalterable death, I had a Mirror-Dimensional version of Zambrano the Hutt come back as Zambrano the Starweird , because Alternate Realities are just as valid as "the main timeline" and have been canonized here on Chaos.

Probably the best way to end a character, IMO, is the simple mundane death. They were doing whatever they were doing, and by circumstances encountered an unavoidably deadly scenario, that reasonably resulted in death, either by someone else's well-coordinated hands or by their own sacrifice. For example, I mentioned Voracitos earlier as this incomprehensible evil and power, but his first death when he was assassinated as the sitting Emperor, his assassin Caulder Dune chemically blocked his force connection and caused cardiac arrest, killing him with a heart attack.

So really, ending a character is almost identical to starting one. You have to take the concept in mind, and figure out what the best scenario is to represent that concept effectively.

Have fun!

 

[Jorus Q. Merrill]

One of the better methods that I've personally found (though it doesn't fit every character concept), is to write the next generation of your character.

This is a great one. It's a major reason I've started writing Skeevi Merrill , Rave's grandkid. Invest now in the heroes and villains of 890 ABY.

 

[Percival Io]

I'm one of those people who really doesn't like the idea of resurrecting someone after I've killed them off. It feels like a cop-out and tends to cheapen the stakes of a story, IMO, especially if I could just make a new character who is similar to the dead one, or a legacy character, or something along those lines rather than bringing a dead PC back to life. I know a lot of people on Chaos come from a D&D background where character death happens all the time, the dice decides your fate and you can always resurrect your character from one session to the next, but that's not my thing. I like for death to be... if not significant, then at least final.

So far I've only killed off one major active character, Alyosha Drutin. In that case, I put him in an invasion/battle thread with the express goal of killing him off. It helped that at the time I was also writing his brother Val, so I could structure the ensuing storyline around the idea of Alyosha losing contact with his brother on the battlefield, and Val desperately trying to reach him... only to arrive too late. Alyosha didn't sacrifice his life for his friends or anything particularly noble or spectacular, but he died fighting and took some Bryn'adul down with him.

I guess my takeaway from the experience is that the manner in which you kill off a character doesn't matter, just as long as you are satisfied with it. If you're happy with the ending of their story, the temptation to bring them back should be pretty low to none.

You should also not be afraid to just retire, shelf, or turn characters into NPCs if you're not that sure about killing them off. I went through a whole song and dance where I was going to kill off Jacen Nimdok in the Lao-mon invasion thread, only to immediately regret it and have my next post be him emerging from the smoke alive after all. But now he's retired.

 

[Siobhan Kerrigan]

One of the better methods that I've personally found (though it doesn't fit every character concept), is to write the next generation of your character.

Sorta did the same a long while ago. Back in 2020, to be precise. Siobhan is still alive, but in coma since I wrote her fighting and being fatally wounded by an NPC Sith Lord I'd made a while ago.

The torch has been passed to her daughter Elpsis. And sort of Kyriaki (Elpsis' clone) and Sio's clone Enyo.

I have some broad ideas for what I can still do with Siobhan, but for the time being she's on ice until the plot requires her to wake up.

 

[Tegan Starfall]

Dont kill off your characters unless it's for a meaningful end. If you lost creative interest in a character and you think well one day a spark might arise it's okay to let the character fade into the background by deleting or changing the alt to something you are interested in for the moment.

It's also star wars with many built I resurrection features and path ways. I generally dont kill off characters I lose interest in I just let fade away.

 

[Onrai]

Put them in a death situation that is irrecoverable where you can’t reach back and justify the character surviving and returning in any way. That’s my recommendation.

 

[KitKatt]

I was once so frustrated with this character I held a funeral for her. How did she die? She drank some blue milk that went bad and died from it.

I always liked the thought that accidents happen and people die, even in the Star Wars universe. I'm sure there is some guy somewhere that tripped down an open lift shaft or fell asleep on the toilet and got a blood clot in their legs that traveled to their heart. Sure that probably isn't the ending to a good story you want to tell, but my point is you don't have to make some epic death scene. If you want a character dead my advice would be just don't overthink it.

However I generally like the "don't burn empty dirt" metaphor. Just letting characters fade for a while until you want to pick them up is pretty helpful.