: Re: MC’s emotional underpinning and grounding come from elder sister - her death would change him. Should she die? MC is an assassin who was raised with and by his sister after the death of

@Jessie137

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It doesn't matter if she lives or dies because she is just a prop for the MC. She has no character of her own. You didn't even give her a description, an age, or a name. Your question would have read exactly the same if she were a toy dog, an ancestral home, or an heirloom given to him by his mother.

I say she dies since she isn't contributing anything to the story. No need to wait for volume 3. Kill her right at the start.

EDIT

You have made your question longer, and you added an age and name and a list of people she is related to, but you still haven't created a CHARACTER with their OWN motives and their OWN agency. It honestly doesn't matter if your paid murderer is upset because he got a taste of his own methods, that actually seems expected – I guess he's never once considered the children of the people he's assassinated. Aren't they also forever changed as per the rules of your universe? Or it's different somehow because now it's happened to him? Uh, ok. I didn't like this guy already, and now that I know he has different rules for himself than his victims, I like him even less.

The only reason anyone reading your story will care that you kill a generically disposable girlfriend/wife/sister/child is if you first make her a real character with her own motives and her own character arc (not just a list of people she is related to, genealogy is not building a character). The readers must invest in her emotionally. If you can't make her 3-dimensional kill her off before your story even starts, as I said before she appears to contribute NOTHING to your story.

Red shirts and girlfriends in refrigerators are such obvious cliches they telegraph their purpose from the start. You've made this situation worse by having your universe be about a murderer, so why is one more murder suppose to be important or life changing to the reader?

Rather than some emotional turning point it is an overused trope of shallow hero stories that have no coherent in-universe morality:

"I've killed hundreds of people, but this time it touched meeee!"

or character progression:

"I'm an orphan living outside society's laws and am literally a paid murderer with a secret identity, but dammit now where am I going to go for Thanksgiving? I am so upset about this I will go and murder some MORE and be an outsider even MORE!!!"

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