User blog comment:IamJakuhoRaikoben/Chapter 333: Man and Man, Dragon and Dragon, Man and Dragon, Review./@comment-5580383-20130605185931/@comment-4829046-20130606030320

Not piss off, more like make them sad. Many good series have such developments but have never lost their popularity for it.

For the next para let me say this, the series will fail the moment Erza dies XD

On a serious note. If the story is well written and not done in the stereotypical way then it would work, but a story following a set stereotype will fail. For instance, a first person narrative. In those, you never find a moment where the central character dies. Third person narratives might result in it, but a story that is built up by just one or two characters is ruined or broken when said characters die with no hope of coming back to life.

In any tragedy series you will notice that out of the main cast, usually the hero or heroine dies and the other is forced to lead a life of emptiness but not before he avenges the one who died and saves the world or something similar. I can give you a list of such tragedies that didn't get cancelled despite the characters dying.

Like I mentioned, the killing off of a character affects the story depending on the author. In a series that deals with say... 3 protagonists that have been together since episode one and now are about to reach their 200th episode, the permanent death of just one of those characters will result in the crashing of the series. Like how in power rangers, the original rangers never die.