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So you want Cancer's death to matter to Leon. One way to accomplish this is for the characters to have some shared struggles. Maybe Leon really cares about Cancer's death because Cancer at some poi...
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#3: Attribution notice added
Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/29141 License name: CC BY-SA 3.0 License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/
#2: Initial revision
So you want Cancer's death to matter to Leon. One way to accomplish this is for the characters to have some shared struggles. Maybe Leon really cares about Cancer's death because Cancer at some point saved Leon's life. I can easily imagine Leon being torn up if he subsequently failed to save Cancer's life in a later situation. This leads me to another thought. You plan for Cancer to die to advance the overall story. That's fine. But his death just happening out of the blue seems much less engaging than his death being a consequence of the story action.