So what does 'death' mean in BtVS & AtS?

[beccaelizabeth]

Fanfic is big with the warnings. People put little templates at the start of the story with ratings and summaries and a little list of things that people might find objectionable, so they wont waste their time or need to bleach their brain. I understand that. Reading voraciously like I did for a few months when I just started in this fandom you can find a lot of things that really arent to your taste. Personally I stopped seeing them so much as 'warnings' and more as an ingredients list, because a lot of what people warn about is, to me, the good stuff. Like m/m or BDSM. But there is still stuff I'll skip.

Another thing that gets in the warnings is if it is a death fic.

That makes sense. We love our favourite characters, enough to spend huge portions of our lives reading & writing about them. BtVS and AtS had some pretty huge things happen to everyone, including character deaths, and sometimes we want fanfic specifically to get away from that, so warning that a particular fic is going to kick you where it hurts is fair.

A lot of fic is big with the hurting characters too. Personally I'm okay with the hurt, as long as eventually there is sufficient comfort to balance it out. But death makes eventual anything a problem.

Normal death anyway.

In BtVS and AtS, the usual kind of death is in a severe minority. Sometimes characters die and stay dead, which makes calling that 'death' pretty simple. But sometimes characters die and come back as a vampire, revenant, messenger, zombie, higher power and/or ghost. Or potentially are replaced by an exact duplicate from another dimension / a copy of themselves from some moment in time before their death. In *canon* they do all of that. What we can imagine happening to them gets pretty much boundless.

So what I'm wondering is, do any of those situations count as death? I mean if you were warned something was a death fic and the 'dead' character got back up again further down the page, would you feel the warning was unnecessary? Or would you want to be warned even if a canonically alive character turned up from the first in some more exotic state, say if Xander starts the story as a vampire?

In Highlander fandom it would be pretty straightforward. Every single Immortal has to die sometime. Temporary deaths are no big. Death of a character who turns out to be an Immortal is not death. So, no warning.

But if you take a character who in canon is living, breathing, regular human people, and then kill them, and have them come back as something very different, does that count as death fic?

The trouble with warnings is that they can take all the suspense, twists and stings out of a story. The helpful thing is that they take they help you not wander into more sting than you are up to. But a misleading label can lose readers who would otherwise like your story. So I'm wondering.

Comments

[47-trek-47.livejournal.com]

To me, I think, warning for "death" only applies if it's permanent, real, gone-forever death. So, I wouldn't include characters who come back as vampires, unless they were subsequently staked (or if the vampire really is absolutely nothing like the character, maybe, but that, I think, would take a great deal of talent to pull off convincingly...) So, for me, I guess the death fic warning is more a "the character is *gone*" warning.

[beccaelizabeth]

so if they are themselves, like not demon shells or actually the First, and they are talking and present, not dead?
Thats pretty much what I figure.

[47-trek-47.livejournal.com]

yup. cause, like, Harmony? Very much not "dead". Hee.