I know. I recently totally went off another WIP I'd been following because of an unwarned character death, and even though it was an OC, it still really upset me. So far as I could tell there was no good reason except to make the canon character suffer.

There has to be more reason to it than that. The first time I killed off a character, I agonized over it for months, before I finally realized it was necessary. And I went out of my way to warn people. I telegraphed it in every way imaginable, so no one would be shocked. And I put it in a side story, and not in my main WIP at the time, so readers who did not want to read about it would not have to.