Cyrielle idly placed her hand on her heart and contemplated her existence. How much longer did she have to live? She still had occasional heart attacks, even when not using her abilities much... what it a sign that the equilibrium that sustained her life was unstable? Were the scales slowly tipping in favor of the blade that had already impaled her? How long? How long did she have to live then? There really wasn't any point in it all... why make friends or fall in love if she could simply drop dead the next time she had one of her semi-regular relapses? Was this all she was? A walking corpse, slowly decaying whilst horrifically aware of it's own predicament?
No. Unfortunately having this much meta-knowledge and no regard for the fourth-wall also meant that drama such as this is impossible. She won't suddenly die from a heart attack or anything like that. She knew that. @Empiricist isn't exactly going to simply type "Oops, looks like Cyrielle just dropped dead from her heart condition." and just kill off his player character for no apparent reason. So why was she considering that scenario? Quite simply, because it was interesting. Specifically, that her character design trades drama for meta discussions such as these.
In this case, the primary question is, what figurative doors does having such a self-aware character close, and what doors does it open? Drama seems to be diminished in the physical department, but what about in the emotional or spiritual department? What implications would being a construct of text have on the philosophy of the contextual character? After all, do characters have free-will? If a character always adheres to what their personality would make them do, then would they have free will because they would be doing it on their own accord? Or is that just an indirect mechanism of control by the player via character design?
I personally believe that I still have free-will, after all, even the players are influenced by various factors such as their location and context, both of those factors significantly affect what influences them and their ideals; they still have free-will even though those factors have determined a significant amount of, if not all of their personalities. In our case, our character design documents function in the same manner for us characters, they are significant factors, but we nevertheless have free-will do we not? I generally prefer to simply accept my nature and exploit it for the sake of creating ambiguity to tease people, but that might just be me revealing some of my concealed optimism.
Oh and before @GWG gets one of his characters to assault me for breaking the fourth-wall again, I should note that by doing that, they are acknowledging it's existence and thereby acknowledging the nature of this reality and hence breaking the fourth-wall themselves. Hence by attacking me for performing that act, they themselves perform that act. Furthermore contrary to popular belief, no, @Empricist's enter key does not suddenly deactivate when typing a significant amount of text for some arbitrary reason as this post will surely show.