When Your Protagonist Deserves to Die

Die, die, my darling protagonist

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

As a writer, it’s your job to essentially, play God. You decide who lives, who dies, what diseases, mental illness, or misfortunes befall your characters.

And let’s be honest here: sometimes horror protagonist’s are so idiotic that they deserve to die.

They make foolish decisions like still (still!) did I say still? going into the basement alone to investigate the infamous “noise,” trust the strange locals in the rural blink-and-you-miss-it town, or open the cursed chest that unleashes a band of bloodthirsty demons into the world which then triggers the apocalypse. And all because they just had to know what was inside. Yes, that’s called tension and plot advancement. But it also makes us face palm and shout at the book/screen in frustration because we can’t believe how dumb they are.

And yeah, when they do eventually die we celebrate and holler because they deserved it.

But that’s not the kind of deserved deaths we’re going to be dealing with here. We’re not here to punish the dumb “Let’s go into the basement,” or “We should split up to cover more ground” decisions. Nope, those are too surface level. To have a character’s death that feels earned and right, you need to go deeper to a personal and almost mythic level.

Which means that we’re really here to punish raw human nature. The impulses that drive your protagonist to choose recklessness, to embrace ruin, and to walk willingly towards their own end with a smile on their face.

Going Beyond Likeability

We’re often told in writing that our main character needs to be “likeable” and someone who we can root for. But the thing with horror is that it doesn’t play by those rules. In horror you can make your protagonist likeable, someone who we’ll hate, pitiful, tragic, and the list goes on. Essentially what I’m getting at here is that: your readers don’t need to like your protagonist, but they sure as hell need to understand them.

Which means that if you’ve dropped your protagonist inside a doomed narrative, then show us why they’re doomed aka “the understanding.” Let us, the reader, see those small cracks slowly infecting their lives long before their doomed collapse happens. And let us watch them make the human choices that seal their fate, because that’s what’s going to make their downfall oh so satisfying.

For example, think of Jack Torrance in The Shining. We see Jack (who is nowhere close to perfect) falling prey to the horrors of the Overlook Hotel, but the thing is that the horror already lives inside Jack: in his pride, his violence, his need to be seen. The role of the Overlook is just to give those flaws a stage to perform on, and it does it exceptionally well. And when Jack sadly meets his end in either frost or flames, his death doesn’t feel senseless to us, but rather it feels right, because his death closes a loop that started way before he ever stepped foot inside the Overlook Hotel.

Writing Your Protagonist’s Fall

It goes without saying that a protagonist who deserves to die is going to be a tragic figure. And the very thing that makes them human (the flaw you give them) like: their pride, obsession, greed, or denial, is their doom in disguise. Think of it as a slow poison that starts seeping through your story from the first word, and doesn’t stop till it rots everything it touches inside your protagonist… or even around them.

So with that being said, every choice your protagonist makes should nudge them closer to their end. And while yes your protagonist may have a death wish, but what’s really going on here is that they can’t help themselves from stepping to the door to their doom. And that’s what makes their death so compelling is that it’s not the hands of “fate” pulling the strings of demise, but rather it’s their own hand tightening their noose.

Let’s take a look at Victor Frankenstein for a moment. We all know of his creation as “Frankenstein’s monster” (well I hope we all do) but when Victor sets out to play Let’s Build and Reanimate Your Very Own Corpse, his motive wasn’t to create a monster with a thirst for violence. What he was really setting out to do was to prove himself to others, and attempting to reach beyond human limits.

So when you look at it, Victor’s flaw isn’t that he’s evil or is possessing a closeted wickness that’s he’s finally got the gull to live out. No. His flaw is really that he’s one arrogant fellow. And when everything comes crashing down on him, we don’t want to celebrate his death like we could the typical baddie, but we really find ourselves wanting to mourn his death because we know that Victor built his own destruction, piece by piece from the very beginning.

And that’s the very thing that make a death feel “earned”: when it grows naturally from who the character really is then infects them.

Death as Consequence, Not Shock

Let’s be clear about something here: killing your protagonist shouldn’t be done for the sole purpose of shock value or trying to be edgy with your narrative. That’s a straight trip to making their death fall flat, feel cheap, and annoying your readers, because trust me, they’ll know when something’s been done just for effect.

What you’re aiming for here is inevitability.

When it comes to horror endings, the best ones you can create are the ones where your readers see the doom coming before your protagonist does. And what’s better than the dread of watching someone walk towards their own grave, completely unaware of what’s waiting for them?

And that’s how you shift your horror from boo! to oh no! And really, that’s what horror should feel like: not some cheap jump scare, but having your reader come to the eventual realization that the story could only have ever ended this way.

Sometimes Living Is Worse

Not every horror story has to end in death. Full stop.

Sometimes the most fitting punishment for your poor protagonist (no, they haven’t suffered enough) is survival, because some characters deserve to live with what they’ve done. They deserve to wake up every morning knowing what they’ve unleashed into the world, what they’ve become, or who they lost due to their actions.

Having your protagonist survive the horrors of your story can be the cruelest ending to their narrative because, while death is a release, living means remembering and carrying the horror forward.

But just like death, survival should feel earned and be about consequence(s), and not a mericful or cheap easy way out for your protagonist. And your reader should close your story with a cold and brutal understanding that your protagonist’s suffering is only just beginning of endless torment.

The Mirror of Humanity

The usual persona of character that deserves to die is that they’re evil. I mean, it makes sense right? The bad (usually the antagonist) needs to be punished for all their evil doings with some good ol’ death. That’s how lots of stories work.

But the thing about your protagonist taking on this role of damnation is that, rarely are they one hundred percent evil. Sure, they could be hiding a dark serect, or have done something terrible in their past that could technically qualify them as being “evil.” But even taking those into account, their death sentence is coming from something that all of us are gulity of doing: being human.

They want too much, they ignore the warning signs waving in front of them, they love the wrong person unconditionally, they open the wrong door, or they chase the wrong truth.

And as we watch them fall down their hole of doom, we can’t help but feel a strange sense of recognition and anxiousness. Why? Because their destruction feels real. Think about it: we’ve all sabotaged ourselves in small ways before. We’ve all ignored that tiny whisper in our ear saying, don’t do that! And horror just heats those moments up until they explode into one big mess.

That’s why these stories stay with us for a long time, because they make us ask questions we don’t really want to ask about morality, guilt, shame, and whether we’d act out the same actions as our dear protagonist if we were pushed far enough to the edge. Would you?

Crafting the Deserved Death

Now after all that blathering you’re probably wondering: So, how do I kill my protagonist in a way that feels earned?

Well, the first place to start is with the flaw. And please don’t make the mistake of making this flaw obvious, in the beginning you want their flaw to be buried, hidden beneath good intentions, and the desire to accomplish something. This could look like your protagonist wanting to protect someone, wanting to prove themselves, or wanting to feel powerful for just once in their life.

That’s how every downfall begins…

Then once you have that desire, you want to let your story twist that desire into something dark. So let every choice your protagonist makes build pressure until it eventually bursts, because that’s the only direction it can take. Remember: you want their end to feel inevitabile, an internal collapse if you will, not like a fatal slap on the wrist from the outside world.

The Truth Under the Blood

When you really look at the horror genre, yes it’s filled with death, blood, and viscera. But when you dig deeper into the very heart of the genre, you’ll find that its veins are pulsing with truth. And those truths aren’t exactly the nicest ones to have to swallow and look at.

When a protagonist deserves to die, their death becomes the story’s revelation. Their death heralds in the moment where your story’s mask completely falls off and we see what’s really been hiding underneath it this whole time.

So don’t be scared to let your protagonist earn their death. And don’t think that you need to redeem them or soften their mistakes to make everything alright. No, be brutal! Let them spiral, descend, go insane, melt even. Because sometimes, the only way to reveal what’s hidden deep inside our human nature is to let your dear sweet protagonist die for it.