Livre d'Or

The suffering of a fictional individual can hardly be as important as the suffering of a real person, can it?

I'm trying to think of a place where they would actually be qualitatively comparable.
I think that's what I was trying to get at: not so much that flesh people [now I'm trying to avoid 'real' and getting into difficulties. You know what I mean] are 'more important' than fictional people, but they just aren't reasonably comparable.

Is killing a character necessarily a bad thing ? Given that humans are mortal, is providing a human character with a clean ending, giving resolution to what matters to them, necessarily a bad way of aving them remembered ?
I'm very fascinated by the way you seem to be regarding characters as moral entities in the course of this discussion. I think this comment encapsulates partly the lack of moral equivalence; killing a person is necessarily a bad thing.

But you are painting a picture of having some moral obligations towards characters, a sense of what is good for them. That actually makes sense, but it isn't terribly intuitive to me. Clearly events within the story are good or bad for the characters (otherwise they wouldn't be human in any reasonable sense), but the question of events external to the story (at the level of you the author and the people you interact with) is a very interesting one.