Lilies on the grave... (HW-spoiler ahead!)

[Fenral]

His death is more powerful because it's someone you will never get back.

Death of a character should be a serious thing and stay dead, not a cheap drama card to pull out of your butt for drama's sake.

Yeah, but as it stands now, most "costs" we've paid have been human lives, but nonetheless handled like one-time charges to our bank account to be made and then forgotten. If death is supposed to be meaningful, then death should matter. Death by itself is not meaningful. When a meaningful death occurs, the story is forced to change in order to account for the loss of one of its players, and that change in course is then felt by the characters that remain, even, rather, especially when the lasting implications aren't immediately apparent.

Lots of people made George R. R. Martin comparisons to FFXIV's handling of characters since 2.5, but the fact of the matter is, the (surviving) characters in A Song of Ice and Fire are still feeling the effects of certain deaths from as early as book one, and the places where even a minor character's death becomes important after the fact are almost as dramatic as the deaths themselves.

Getting possessed by an Ascian or getting turned into a primal would both be story-altering consequences to a death that has so far served no purpose besides being a "meaningful cost" with no consequence beyond "waah, Haurchefant's dead." (That sounds sarcastic, but I'm crying, too.)