tags are confusing.

[amalnahurriyeh]

Would you tag a story where a character has a terminal illness, has stopped treatment, and is discussing their mortality and end-of-life decisions with a friend or family member with "major character death" if they don't actually die in the course of the story? I can see arguments on both sides; on the one hand, nobody dies. Everybody alive when the story starts is alive when the story ends. On the other hand, there's no ambivalence here: the character is going to die, and everybody is fully aware of it, so it's not, precisely, a story with no character death in it--the character death is simply in the story's future.

(I know that 'terminal illness' is a canonical AO3 tag, so there's that, if nothing else.)

Comments

[amalnahurriyeh]

dear reader: death in this story follows the rules of death in life

not the magical fictional rules we make up for our magical fictional universes

sorry bout that