I wish there was a better way to distinguish between a warning for "character death" that means one of the main guys in the fic gets killed and "character death" that refers to, say, Boromir or Sirius getting knocked off in canon.

Yeah, you know, I hate it when conventions break down, or else when really useful ones don't catch on fully. When I used to see the character death warning, I used to be able to assume it meant non-canon character death. But people warn for everything anymore, and half of them become meaningless. Agh.