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Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35864
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/35864
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Because **maintaining suspense over who will live and who will die is only one of a story's many goals.** And in most stories, it's not even a very important one.

The fact that The Protagonist Survives is the flip side of the truism that We're Telling The Protagonist's Story. _Since_ what we're telling is the story of one person, or a small group of people, it naturally follows that we need those protagonists alive to carry the story through. (There are, of course, some creative exceptions.) If a writer has a choice between giving a particular character Plot Armor, and having him actually be able to execute the plot, vs. _not_ giving him Plot Armor, and having him die midway, he'll generally prefer a story with less suspense over lots of suspense but no story.

(There are absolutely exceptions. This can absolutely be played with. But as a general guideline, it's much, _much_ easier to not mess around with the concept of "My story has clearly-defined protagonists.")

Other elements here have similar considerations:

- Building up a substantial character, only to have him gakked out a few scenes later, would often feel incongruous and unsatisfying. It would be _less predictable_, yes, but it wouldn't be very satisfying as a story (or, a lot of work would need to be done for such a maneuver to be satisfying).
- Conversely, establishing a lowly henchmen who subverts the trope by _not_ dying, would leave him just hanging around uselessly, doing nothing constructive for your story.
- Using the device of a memoir or a recounting may be a tradeoff between the possibility of protagonist death, vs. the powerful technique of being able to offer foreshadowing, contrast and juxtaposition, an older and more experienced voice. That tradeoff is frequently worth taking.

There is an exception to all this: **Stories where uncertainty and tension are the primary goals.** If the story is genuinely trying to evoke a sense of "Who will die next?" or "Nobody is safe!", then yes, they need to be aware of savvy readers, and they can't lean on "important" characters because they can't grant "important" characters any safety.

**These stories are rarer than you might think.** Even horror stories generally have a protagonist or two; you want to see them survive and succeed, more than you want the real possibility that maybe they _will_ die in the second act. Action-adventure stories and thrillers may make much of the risk to life and limb, but generally, the audience is there to see _how_ the heroes win, how they inch back even from bleakest catastrophe, more than they actually want authenticity in the hero's chance of being killed. (Even something like GRRM's _Song of Ice and Fire_ can be described more as offering some fake-outs as to its protagonists are, than as not having protagonists.)

But they do exist, and they need to use a lot of tricks, like multiple protagonists (so some kind die), or a non-protagonist viewpoint (so no one character is protected); or maybe they concern themselves with setting or social systems or some other focus that _doesn't_ require a particular cast of characters to survive from start to finish.

This kind of story is fairly rare, and takes a _lot_ of thought. Perhaps comparable to a mystery story, where it's crucial to keep up a fair amount of suspicion on almost everyone for the length of a story. And even there, savvy readers start looking out for whatever character is _least_ suspicious, or played by a well-known actor... Mystery stories, indeed, are _entirely_ focused on the question of who is the murder; much like a hypothetical story entirely focused on the question of who will die next. They exist, but most stories aren't really about that.

TL;DR: Yes, a lot of things in a story work against tension of whether important characters die. That's because most stories have a whole lot of things going on _besides_ that one specific tension. It's a tradeoff that's often worth making, because it serves the story's most crucial goals.

Original score: 12