I don't think character death warnings should be required forever and ever throughout fandom (though, er, ironically I require them on my mailing list) but I'm very leery of reading things without them if there's any indication of possible darkness, and I'd certainly love it if authors *chose* to use them. (Someone did a rather neat thing in a post yesterday, where they had a link that you could click to find out if there was character death in the story or not. The link was a completely separate page, so those who opened the story without wanting to know ahead of time wouldn't be spoiled. Obviously if one *only* used that when there was character death, people would catch on quickly and it would be the same as just blatantly saying it in the header, but if it became a general practice, that would be rather nifty.

And as a BtVS-verse sidenote, I can handle vamped characters, though if they go from good to evil, I have to detach greatly from the story. Sometimes completely (meaning hitting delete), depending on how evil.