Your characters neither can nor need to control the length of their own lives. You give them time, they find uses for it.
Here I offer general advice for entertainers on what you should do yourself and what is best left to your characters or audience.
My recurring bad example, the Comic Five, knew an inexplicable amount about me and my readers. Worse, a lot of it just gave them even more reasons not to do something. For example, they would not reference a canon thing about Pirates of the Caribbean if they were not certain my entire audience would get it. They could easily be wrong about that, too, as their default assumption was that the readers would not remember anything about the films that you would not know from the LEGO game (except that Bootstrap Bill was the father of Will). They were right about this often enough, but when it turned out at least one of my readers recognized the relevance of sailing eternally, that did it. The Five never parodied again.
My good example, the Black Pearl Crew, know and care absolutely nothing about said individual readers and are not even sure they exist, and I find they work better that way. After all, there is a reason why the vast majority of fictional characters are unaware of their real-world creators. Difficulty explaining how they know that is one thing, but another is that most of the things you know are not beneficial for your characters to know. If they know exactly who you are entertaining, that just lets them pander. If they know you will not let certain things happen, that just kills the suspense.
There are a lot of things my song pages do not tell you about a particular song, especially when it comes to things that have to do with me. One reason for this is the excessive concern the Five had for things being ideal for me, which led them to do things such as avoid parodying a song just because I only gave it 3 stars. They only did a song I rated such once, and that was only because my friend came up with the parody title The Worst of Times.
But, as I have said in other advice pages, how much you like a song has nothing whatsoever to do with how well suited it is for you to work with. For this reason, the Crew only know that if I have let them hear a song, I like it at least well enough. They need not know or care exactly how many stars I give it. (And even for that particular example of Best of Times getting turned down for slowness, years later, when I had my music library transferred to another computer and had to redo my ratings, I managed to click 4 stars on that song instead of 3, and decided it could stay that way. After all, there are points to be made about these things not being so bad.)
Most of my parody albums leave out one or more tracks from the original album, either because I did not like them, my friends and I did not listen to them for some reason, they were ill-suited for parodying, or were just instrumentals. Usually my whole site simply contains no mention of the songs I skipped, as they are beside all the points I make. Each individual song page lists the track number the song has on the album I got it from, however, so that will give away that omissions have been made if you visit an album page and read every song page in its list.
I will use American Idiot as an example. Songs number 5 and 11 do not have pages on my site. The former, Are We the Waiting, is simply not rocky enough for my tastes (a trend in the songs I skipped due to not liking them is that most of them are slow). The latter, Wake Me Up When September Ends, is only part rock, the remainder of it being an acoustic guitar ballad. But that is the least of my concerns, as it is just a hopelessly sad song in which he who wrote and sang it tells the true story of the death of his father and how every September reminds him of it. These are not the words used, but basically it says Put me to sleep for the whole month. That is the best way I can spend it, as I will not forget the pain.
In my opinion there are essentially no redeeming (or at least no likable - I do not mean the song is poorly done) qualities to those lyrics. (And if you followed the link I placed on relevance of sailing eternally
further up the page, you know I have no need for When September Ends from a parodying perspective, either.)
My point is, there is a reason I am explaining all this to you in my own voice, not that of a character. Had the Five still been in my employ, they might have given a speech like The cartoonist dislikes Wake Me Up When September Ends because (insert a 3rd person version of what I said above here).
But that would raise the questions, how would they know, and why would they care? So the Crew simply do not know that song, as I, not caring for it, did not introduce it to them. There is no way your characters can know something you do not, and the less you like a song, the less you want to know about it, so unless you want to make a joke about how unappealing it is, it is useless to make your characters know a song you do not like.
A crippling flaw of the Comic Five was that they were not people unto themselves, but rather lived off of me. They could not form an opinion on anything without knowing what I thought of it. They always needed to turn to me for ideas of what to do. What passed for their assessment of how well suited a song was to work with was how willing I was, based simply on how much I liked the song, and their inability to have original thoughts doomed them to sing about the same things over and over (and force those things into songs that did not suit the topic).
I have a much better relationship with the Crew because I am working with them, not for them. It is they who tell me if I should parody a song, having their own frame of reference to which the song may or may not be relevant. They have their own lives, their own opinions, their own reasons why things are happening, such that they are the source of my ideas, not just a way to execute them. And that is true of every decent character.
This does not imply that the creator and distributor need to be separate, but they each have a set of concerns that should not be felt simultaneously. Although what certain general types of people will think of your work is worth thinking about as you create, to ensure you will have an audience, you should not worry about what any individual will think of your work until after you have made it, lest you pander. If you know someone who does not know a given song, that does not mean you cannot parody it. If you know someone who you know will dislike or fail to recognize something, that does not mean it cannot appear in your parody. In either of those cases, just do not show that person that parody.
So long as I deemed it publishable, I have nothing but praise for my own work. I generally say my parodies are just hilarious. Sometimes I have goals other than being funny with them, but I am very strong with those, too, and say it is great to not be so narrowly focused. You may disagree with me and have complaints, and you have the right to dislike my work - but if I say anything negative about it, I will reduce everyone to liking it less and looking at it from the wrong angle. (One of the important things I had to clarify about my fodder ratings is that they are not intended to measure the quality of my parodies. Just mentioning that I prefer one parody to another could make my readers start needlessly thinking about why the other one may be inferior, and no two people have the same opinions, so nobody would completely agree with my stack-up anyway.)
A quote from one of the Comic Five strips. It was not a parody, but it presented a good (or bad) example of something no entertainer should ever do:
This is supposed to be funny?
Relax, Will. We have done funnier strips, but I’m sure the readers are as glad as we are that stealth attacks work!
Never mind that that did not make the strip funnier or do anything else other than set the readers off on a counterproductive search for a reason why this may not have been their best work. Or that they did not even wait to find out what the readers thought of that strip before they complained. Please remember, the important thing is amusing the audience, not just keeping the characters in existence. If the characters are doing nothing for the people in the real world, they should be retired.
The Comic Five had entirely too much awarenesses of the fact that they existed as characters in a comic strip - or at least thought about it too much, or read too much as being implied by it. Whatever the case, they determined that they would basically be unconscious if I took a break from the strip, and dead if I ended the strip. So they came up with all kinds of ways to keep themselves in our (my readers and my) sight and in our minds, and where did that get them? To annoying me to the point of snuffing them out.
Let us learn from this. Characters can save themselves from things inside the fourth wall, but forces outside that wall are a different matter. The fact that characters cannot worry about things they are unaware of seems to be one of the advantages of leaving the fourth wall intact. At least have it be like the Black Pearl Crew, who know I will keep them as long as I have use for them - and, unlike the Five, they understand what I want with them. What is critical in this regard is that they can live and just be alive, not have their entire continued existence be an increasingly tiresome struggle.