Warning: This article contains MAJOR spoilers from the February 6, 2017 episode of “Jane the Virgin.”

There are a lot of things to love about The CW’s telenovela-parody series, “Jane the Virgin.” It’s one of the few shows anchored by a woman of color (Gina Rodriguez, who won a Golden Globe for her work on the show in its first season, plays the titular Jane.). The show’s narrator (Anthony Mendez) is hilarious and interrupts the dialogue for some of the snappiest omniscient lines since Ron Howard’s narrator on “Arrested Development.” And, to top it all off, most of the relationships on the show are sweet, loving, and just plain fun to watch.

Among those relationships was the courtship and eventual marriage between Jane and Michael Cordero (Brett Dier). As a character, Michael was patient, brave, silly, and completely dismissed misogynistic concepts like the nice guy in the friend zone. After a brief love triangle with Jane and Rafael (the biological father of Jane’s son, Mateo, played by Justin Baldoni), Jane eventually chose Michael. She said no to the “bad boy” and chose the sweet, dependable man who had always supported and believed in her.

Fans were pretty happy about the Jane and Michael marriage for those reasons. And then, in the February 6, 2017 episode of season three, Michael Cordero died as a result of an old gunshot wound.

Fans are not pretty happy about that. I’m among that group.

The problem with killing Michael is not that he was a good man. It is not that this maneuver seems to “make way” for Jane to ultimately be with Rafael. Rather, the problem is that fans really, really, really didn’t want Michael to die, but the writers and producers of “Jane the Virgin” didn’t listen.

Serialization is a democracy. The tradition goes back to Victorian England. For a few decades in the nineteenth century, it was fashionable to release novels in weekly installments. Writing a novel this way made it possible to increase the relationship between the author and the audience. If a character died, and a good number of readers wrote in and complained about it, there was a pretty decent chance the author would resurrect that character. Now, more than a century later, television has inherited the same format, fortified by actors/producers/writers and their social media pages.

So, if you’re wondering if maybe the people behind “Jane the Virgin” just didn’t know that Michael was a fan favorite, the answer is no.

Since the episode aired, many fans have compared Michael’s death to the series finale of “How I Met Your Mother” (How is this the second time in a row I’ve referenced that show? I’m hardly even a fan.) For nine years, audiences watched Ted Mosby (Josh Radnor) search for his future wife and mother of his children (Cristin Milioti), learning more about this woman little by little. Even before she had a face, audiences grew attached to the character of The Mother. In those nine years, the dysfunctional-yet-idealized romance between Ted and Robin Scherbatsky (Cobie Smulders) had finally been put to bed. The entire final season centered on Robin’s wedding to Barney Stinson (Neil Patrick Harris). It seemed like the characters (and, more importantly, the fans) were getting the exact happy ending they wanted so badly.

But in the final hour, Robin and Barney divorced after only three years of marriage, the audience learns that Ted’s wife, Tracy, has been dead for six years of a clichéd, unknown illness, and this whole story has supposedly been about Ted trying to ask his son and daughter if it’s OK for him to ask out their honorary Aunt Robin.

Audiences were furious. Audiences are still furious. If creators and primary writers, Carter Bays and Craig Thomas, knew that the majority of fans didn’t want Ted and Robin to end up together, why did they do it?

Simple. They’d filmed their desired ending in 2005, at the beginning of the first season, before they had any idea how the story would develop and how the audience might respond to it.

“Jane the Virgin” backed itself into the same corner. Michael’s character arc was conceived by developer Jennie Urman Snyder at least two years before his death actually took place. His death was what Snyder wanted—what she always planned. She held onto the idea so tightly that she even embedded a line into the first season, in which the narrator told the audience that Michael would love Jane with his last breath.

But two whole seasons passed, and Michael never died. He was gunned down in the last minute of the season-two finale, and in the season-three premiere, he lived. Suddenly, that line from the first season seemed a little out of place. Maybe, we thought, Snyder and her crew realized how beloved Michael was, so they decided to let him live. That’s the democracy of television.

Wrong. In case 2017 hasn’t made you question it enough, democracy, even that of entertainment, is corrupt.

If you’re a writer, you’re probably able to see Snyder’s point very clearly. You have a story that you want to tell. Why should it matter what your audience thinks? You know that this piece of conflict, even if it’s the death of a fan favorite and one half of one of TV’s healthiest romances, is what’s best for the narrative. Ultimately, you think, the writers and networks control the story.

That’s… not wrong. But when you anger your audience to the point of desertion, you don’t have an audience anymore. And your audience, entertainers, is your paycheck.

Diverting from your original story to please an audience isn’t selling out. Pleasing an audience means better ratings and more money. There’s a reason your parents don’t want you to be starving artists. While I’m not saying that killing off Michael means the end of “Jane the Virgin” and the beginning of hungry writers, I am saying that’s a possible consequence of forgetting that your audience is a character in the story.

And sometimes, changing the original course of your story to agree with the audience’s desires makes for an even better story. On “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” creator Joss Whedon always planned for the vampire Spike (James Marsters) to die a villain. Instead, the audience was met with a deeply complex character and quite the interesting “redemption” arc.

Some years later, Kevin Williamson returned to pen the series finale of “Dawson’s Creek,” and although he planned to have characters Dawson Leery (James Van Der Beek) and Joey Potter (Katie Holmes) ride off to soul mate paradise together, that’s not what happened. Audience preferred Joey’s romantic relationship with Pacey (Joshua Jackson), so in the final minutes of the episode, it was Joey and Pacey forever.

Finally, Rob Thomas of “Veronica Mars” never planned for his eponymous character (Kristen Bell) and Logan Echolls (Jason Dohring) to end up together. Logan wasn’t supposed to be anywhere near as dynamic as he turned out to be. I’m pretty sure no fan of “Veronica Mars” could even imagine the story without the Logan character.

And all of these stories are held in high esteem, nostalgia, or both.

So, what will be said of “Jane the Virgin” now that it’s killed off one of its most beloved characters? Of course we can’t know. But what’s happening now is that viewers aren’t happy, and perhaps they should be. A writing staff as clever as the one on “Jane the Virgin” could have written themselves out of the original plan (If “DAWSON’S CREEK” could do it, “Jane the Virgin” could certainly do it.), but they just didn’t. Your fans are part of this story. They’re the ones who keep asking for more of it.

We’ll miss you, Michael. Here’s one of your favorite songs, but I hope this didn’t actually happen to you.