Imagine that you are reading Book With Story™, or TV Show™, or even Moving Picture Show™ at one of these new fangled moving picture theatres, and the main character who you have invested emotional energy into, either dies, or worse is killed and dies. Owing to the fact that you are a human who is a pattern seeking machine, who more than likely expects satisfying outcomes to your selected storytelling, unless the death of those characters seems like a reasonable payoff, then the piece of media which you have just been witnessing, will be rated D - for disappointment.
This is a problem for writers of storytelling media. The meatbag pattern seeking machines which read, watch, or listen, live in a kosmos where unless you get taken away on a chariot of fire coming for to carry you home, or at one instance are and then are not, then Hades, Sheol, Abaddon, and their agents Grimaldi Mietro and The Destroying Angel, will always come to collect. The old adage that those who die with the most toys win, is very much tempered with the grave corollary that even if you die with the most toys you still die.
Alexander, Catherine, Alfred, were all 'great' but now they're all dead. Likewise, histories greatest monsters of Genghis Khan, Caligula, Napoleon, Hitler, Pol Pot, and Jimmy Carter, are also all dead. The grave visits all and sundry without fear or favour.
So how this relates to Book With Story™, or TV Show™, or even Moving Picture Show™ is that unless the piece of media wants to abandon the common experience of all (which might be useful for narrative purposes), then killing off a character means that they do not come back.
There is a caveat to this in that they might have developed some kind of plot armor, or because narrative sometimes relies on flashbacks (arguably all of the discipline of History as an academic subject is nothing more than a flashback), then you might be able to tell a story in the past relative to the now in the narrative.
So how do you get around this? Either you kill off your main characters with sufficiently enough of a heroic/sacrificial/redemptive ending to make the payoff worth it, or you make their deaths so tragic that it spawns a revenge plot.
As a writer, this is a classic problem. Arthur Conan Doyle hated Sherlock Holmes so much that he tried to have him killed off and then because of the outcry, the immediate retcon to bring him back (in a classic "he wasn't really dead plot"), the subsequent story and explanation is actually kind of a bit naff.
There are many cases of deaths in TV which echoed onwards. When Lt. Colonel Henry Blake died in M*A*S*H* this was the result of a deliberate narrative decision made to create a, realistic portrayal of loss.. Likewise the final episode of Blackadder Goes Forth which has the entire lead cast die at the end, is one of the most poignant moments which nicely serves the idea of the entire futility of war.
Of particular note was when Mr Hooper died in Sesame Street. This was a TV Show death which was necessitated by an existence failure of the actor Will Lee. The episode which explained Mr Hooper's death, eventually was put on air eleven months after Will Lee had died.
Of course all of this comes back full circle. Real life deaths are always rated D unless the person who died is so universally reviled and hated by all, that it is seen as just. A fictional character though, however loved they might be by the author or the audience, is still only a puppet or a simulacrum; which means that in theory, they should be easier to kill off. The complication comes because of the weight of narrative. A successful narrative makes the author and the audience care about puppets who aren't even real people. Of all the things that matter in the world, it is the things that don't matter at all that ironically matter the most.
That's also why nobody cares if a Red Shirt, or a Storm Trooper, or the Villain/Monster Of The Week dies, but if the protagonist dies without a satisfying outcome, then the D rating is never far away.
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