User blog comment:Maslab/On the subject of Noble Six/@comment-138261-20130708061632/@comment-1009967-20130708072514

Heh, you can see how my personal bias is interfering with my reasoning. But then, I think you'd have to agree the same is going for you here. Think about if someone tried to defy as much leading up to the death of another canon character, like Sergeant Johnson, or Cortana in Halo 4 (I'm looking at you, Rejibrad). There's no way you or anyone else would let a user get away with those, but with the latter as an example, if enough unlikely logic was applied, there might be enough left of Cortana for ONI to reconstruct her and spirit her away in secret. Looking at minor characters, however, we could take Sheila who was killed in the Battle of Miridem, but our only canon support for that is Dr. Halsey saying she saw Sheila die, which could lead to all sorts of explanations about illusions affecting her sight, or what she didn't see that made her somehow survive. This doesn't go for all minor characters, however, like Grace-093. In First Strike, John confirmed she was dead when she was hit by three Brute Shot grenades, and then proceeded to activate her suit reactor's self-destruct. There's absolutely no way to say the character lived. What I'm saying is there's a point where so many circumstances point to a character's death that having them survive entails so much handwaving that it's unbelievable and uncool. If it's just to apply a fleshed-out characterization, why not just have Amelia die at the end of Reach instead of bringing her back to command a unit so many decades later? Especially when B312's big deal is being a lone wolf.

In practice on the rules side of things, I believe saying our current canon rules inherently mean B312 is dead also precludes the creation of canon-expansions where a character who may have died is brought back to life plausibly. A specific rule for B312, or more generally, characters who would take an act of god to save, would allow for expansions of minor canons who aren't undeniably dead, while avoiding problems that come into play with this character.