Tropes I Don't Like

Too Afraid to Kill off Characters

Imagine you are reading or watching some epic fantasy, dystopian, Sci-Fi, etc. battle between the main characters and their enemies. The fight goes on for a long period of time. Once the battle is over, there is an unusual visual about the battlefield:

No one is dead.
Or, if people are dead, they played no significant part in the story. Heck, some of them remain nameless.

Too many times, it seems that authors are too scared to kill off their characters. This is especially true for characters that are significant in the story. There can be several reasons why:

"But they're my favorite!"
"But they're the love interest!"
"What if my fan base hates me afterwards?"
"What if people stop liking the story?"

You get the point.
(Looking at you Sarah J. Maas).

No, you do not need to go full-on George R. R. Martin and kill off so many characters, whether important or not. However, if you're working on a story that involves some of war/battle/intense conflict, characters should die, and some of them should be impactful deaths on the other characters around them.

Just look at history. Every battle documented has had many, many casualties, and these deaths play a significant part of someone's life. They could've been a friend, a lover, a son or daughter, and so on.

It's unrealistic to have an epic battle that results in no casualties, even in fantasy's standards. If you want the battle to have a lasting impact on the characters, someone has to die, and they need to have played an important part in their lives. Yes, it's sad to see a favorite character die (looking at you J. K Rowling and Koyoharu Gotouge), but it also thickens the plot, creating a story that is more suspense-driven and intense. This will help readers want to come back and find out how the rest of the characters will make it through the hardships.

• • •

There is another variant of this trope that I don't like, and that is resurrection.

Not every instance is the use of resurrection bad. Take stories that involve any undead creature brought back to life, zombies especially. There are consequences them coming back from the dead, and the story focuses on those consequences.
I'd also consider how J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis dealt with resurrection as a good example of its use. Both men were Christian, and they incorporated such elements into their writing. They used this trope to act as a parallel to their beliefs, not just as a simple way to bring back a loved character. Now, they were also writers from an earlier time period of the epic fantasy genre, so this trope wasn't used as much then as it is now. Even then, there was intent to why they used the trope.

Say an author does succeed in killing off a character, but they are too afraid to keep them dead. So, when the living characters are dealing with conflict, all of a sudden they barge in like, "Hey! I'm not dead anymore, so now I'm here for the sake of plot convenience!"
Sometimes this resurrection happens in a story that isn't even in the fantasy genre (looking at you Clannad After Story). It's just trying to make everything all happy and perfect again.

No!

Once a character is dead, they should stay dead. Very rarely is a resurrection of a named character bringing anything new to the story. More often than not, it just makes people confused and/or upset.

The death of characters should move forward the story to the end goal. By not killing off characters, it makes it seem that these huge goals are easy to attain. By bringing characters back to life, it makes it seem that death can be reversed every time; it is no longer a fear for the characters or the people reading the story.

Just be realistic, even in terms of a fantastical setting.