What purposes does a characters death serve in your story?
Do you ever create a character with the thought that you will kill him off?
Have you ever made a character likable only so that his death would have an impact on the reader?
I don't believe that the main good characters have to die either. Sometimes I'll be reading and a character randomly does and I am like, "wait what?" You know what I mean; when a character dies and there was no real reason for them to? I can't stand that.
I take Joss Whedon's view of character death: Give a well-liked character a traumatic story arc, and then just when things are getting back to normal, kill them off. (See: Tara, Wash.)
Again, I haven't read your writing, and you may well approach character death better than Whedon, but I don't think he's a good reference point to use--he basically utilizes the smaller-scale equivalent of "The dog wasn't that shaggy."
Like I said, the "what would logically happen" sort of death fits really well with stories like All Quiet on the Western Front, so if you're writing that sort of story, it makes sense. I guess it fits with Joss Whedon's style if Whedon is much, much more serious than I give him credit for. (I always took Buffy as inherently ridiculous, but that might be a mistake on my part.)
What purposes does a characters death serve in your story?
Do you ever create a character with the thought that you will kill him off?
Have you ever made a character likable only so that his death would have an impact on the reader?
Have you ever made a character likable only so that his death would have an impact on the reader?
No. I don't try to have an impact on the reader. Rather, I make the events have an impact on the characters and hope the reader relates to what the characters are going through. It's similar but done in a roundabout way. Trying to make a character likeable just to make his end tragic or poignant isn't my style. I need it to be more organic and genuine. Besides, I'd need to make a new character because I don't change their personalities on a whim.
that's what would logically happen
[...]rather than because the character has Achieved A Story Point.
[Lecture]You could make a lot of categories for deaths, but two of the most satisfying are the tragic (a term I know) and the triumphant (a term I'm making up because I don't know the formal one.) In the tragic death, a character is brought low because of his or her flaws. In the triumphant death, a character passes on as the price of their success in a worthy goal. These terms can easily be muddled (what do you call it if a cowardly character eventually becomes brave enough to sacrifice himself for the group?), but both imply death as a fitting conclusion to an arc.