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

[cathexys]

personally, I'd want it to be tagged. There are too many last minute rescues with terminal illness to have that be a certain death...

[azurelunatic]

Yeah, either death & terminal illness, or terminal illness & no-last-minute-rescue or the like.

Well...

[ysabetwordsmith]

I would probably tag it "major character death" for the reason that people who don't want to read about a character dying onscreen probably will not want to read about a character preparing to die offscreen either. I'd include tags for "terminal illness" and "offscreen or implied death."