Instant Closure! Going Out With A Bang (and then some)!

I'm not sold on this idea yet. I'm not sold on anything, that's why it's up for discussion, but this one in particular.

Have you ever been annoyed when a character seems to come back from the dead to save the day? I know I have. Especially if they were just playing 'possum or something. Usually there's some explanation for the occurrence, like they took some poison that mimics the state of death, but I still feel like it's a pretty cheap trick.

It's a little better if they were in an extremely perilous situation when we last saw them; we never saw them bleeding on the ground or had any real reason to presume they were dead. I can handle that. But when the author intentionally implies they're a corpse, but omg jk not really!, I feel like I've been nut-punted.

Rest well, sweet Concord. I'm sure he didn't forget.

So I'm thinking of taking that option away from myself. I'm playing with an idea I think I got from South Park, of all places. In the Walmart episode, Cartman posits that people always crap themselves when they die. Sure enough, everyone that dies in this episode (quite violently) craps themselves upon death.

Though the above execution is obviously crass, I think the technique is sound. I'm playing with the idea of 'to live is to use magic' I've cited a couple of times in the elemental profiles; the body is made up of all the different elements, thereby, our spirit (or our individual life element) is constantly wielding magic by keeping these elements together.

If we think of it that way, what might happen if we're killed, or perhaps even wounded? Say a warrior is sliced by a sword, what if the shock to the 'spell' that maintains our bodies causes a spray of sand (flesh to earth) and water (blood to water) instead of blood? And perhaps when a person dies, we see a more tangible passing; sparks of electricity might flicker from the eyes, vapor may rise from the flesh, air evacuates from the lungs and gut; there are many possibilities to showcase their 'soul's' loss of control over the body's elements, and these symptoms could help the reader be certain the character had died.

While I'm not writing specifically to (older) kids, I doubt I want to exclude them, so might this be a way to get around gore, too? I mean, we can't have a corpse immediately turn into sand and water; people eat meat in this world, which would be impossible if beasts disintegrated into mud immediately upon death. People will still bleed from wounds (only the initial cut involves a small amount of water and sand, because MAGIC!), a person will still leave a skeleton if they're left to rot. I just wonder if this might be a less-cheap (but still cheap, perhaps) way of using blades without having my Foot clan become robots. I mean, books have already gotten away with more violence anyway, so maybe I don't even need to worry about this factor.

All the same, what do we think? This is a gimmick, to be sure, but do we like it? Does it serve enough of a function (you'll know someone just died, so unless it was a look-alike, then Kenny just ate it) to warrant its inclusion? What famous 'dead-but-not-really!' moments caused you to ache in your nethers? If ya like the idea, how might the eight different elements (light, electricity, water, life, darkness, earth, air, and heat) flare up during somebody's death-throe?