What makes a good death scene?
I'm looking specifically into the written medium (NOT screenwriting) and the death of an important friendly character.
It's supposed to be a scene to make the reader scream "please, don't", not "yes, die, idiot!"
Are there any known tricks for writing such a scene?
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As is the case with any scene intended to evoke strong emotion from the reader, 90% of the effect is achieved via the setup. If the reader is going to scream "please don't", it will not be because of how the death scene itself is written. It will be because of how they have come to feel about the character over the entire arc of the story prior to their death. Dickens inspired international mourning with the death of Little Nell without actually describing the deathbed scene at all. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Curiosity_Shop)
This is part of a more general principle which I would describe like this: The power of story is far stronger than the power of words. Indeed, if words have any power at all, it is only because they invoke stories. The emotional moments in your story will get their emotional punch from the shape of the story, not the words you choose to describe them.
Indeed, the struggle to describe an emotional moment is really just a symptom of not having set it up properly. If the moment had been set up properly by the shape of the story, pulling the emotional trigger would be simple and straightforward. If you pull the trigger and nothing happens, it is because you failed to load the gun.
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We scream "please don't" because of about half a book's worth of endearments, and making the character like somebody we would like in our own life, or at least in our life if WE were a character in this book (like the protagonist, or somebody else we identify with).
There are some "automatic" endearments for most readers; particularly children. Because they are presumed loved, innocent, weak, less comprehending, and with a whole life ahead of them so they lose so much more: first romances, accomplishments, marriage and/or children, and so on.
Beyond the automatic, what endears us to characters? Humor, bravery, daring, altruism, cleverness (not necessarily brilliance, which can be off-putting or even villianous), and most importantly that they are loved by the main character with whom we identify. By "loved" I mean all forms of it: Parental (and parent-like for grandparents, aunts, uncles, teachers), non-romantic friendly love (with sub-categories of sibling, peer, mentor, mentee, student, teacher, favorite co-worker or teammate), romantic sexualized love (consummated or not, e.g. a spouse, a sexual partner, or a love interest that has not yet progressed to sex, or perhaps sexual congress is terminated (a divorce or illness or frailty prevents it, but the MC is still in love)).
We scream "please don't!" when the loss of the character is a huge loss to another main character we identify with; or if the reader imagines themselves as a friend of the dying character in their world, and loves that character in some fashion.
But that loss has to be built up in the book. The death scene itself can be a few lines: Our beloved character's last words can be "I'm hit." and then he falls down. Or nothing: Many people IRL die without ever realizing they are about to die, they get no last words or gestures, and hear nothing that anybody says to them.
Don't try to write a "death scene." Write a regular scene in which the character dies, and portray as accurately as you can the emotions and actions of those around them, and with them, especially anybody that loved them. Most often, due to human nature, this is NOT instant grief, but shock and denial. Or anger if the death can be blamed on somebody else. Follow the seven stages of grief, it takes TIME for people to realize that death is really death and permanent, and TIME for all the ramifications of not having this person around to come to light in their mind. We cry, both for the loss to the world of a positive force, and the loss to ourselves, including the loss of all future opportunity to share life with the one lost, to vicariously enjoy their successes and joys, to have new adventures and experiences with our friend or our love.
That is real life, and fiction needs to emulate that: If you want us to love and mourn the character death, give us a lot of good reasons to do that, spread out over a hundred or two hundred pages. (You can't do it all in one lump right before you kill them.)
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