Nope, not even the guy in the wheelchair is safe — and neither are the later additions to the main cast who aren't pictured.
Arya Stark: They say he rides into battle on the back of a giant direwolf. They say he can turn into a wolf himself when he wants. They say he can't be killed.
Tywin Lannister: And do you believe them?
Arya Stark: No, my lord. (Beat) Anyone can be killed.
Tywin Lannister: And do you believe them?
Arya Stark: No, my lord. (Beat) Anyone can be killed.
Most of the time when you finally grasp who the main characters of the story are, you can expect that these characters will survive through the end of the story (or at least until the last episode). Like, c'mon, there's no way the writers would actually have the young and innocent Tagalong Kid actually die without being saved at the last second, let the loyal team dog be mauled to death by wolves, or allow a sweet ol' granny to be run over by a speeding truck. Hell, the narrator's technically not even a part of the story, so surely they must be safe. Right?
This is very common in Darker and Edgier works. When the writers want to impress you with their ruthlessness, they may trumpet that Tonight, Someone Dies, then kill off a random second-stringer that nobody cares about much. They might even kill off a major character because their actor was leaving anyway, or because they needed a good cliffhanger to convince people to watch the next season. That is also not this trope (although it's merely pretending to be).
Anyone Can Die is where the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality is thrown out the window from eight stories high, then further tenderized with a lead pipe; no one is exempt from being killed, including pets, children, the elderly, even the main characters (maybe even the hero!). The Sacrificial Lamb is often used to establish the writer's willingness to kill off important characters early on. To really be the Anyone Can Die trope, the work must include multiple deaths of named characters, happening at different points in the story. Bonus points if the death is unnecessary and devoid of Heroic Sacrifice.
This trope is very helpful in keeping fans from being Spoiled by the Format. War shows like Mobile Suit Gundam benefit from having a larger cast since there are so many people to kill off. The frequent deaths within a wide cast make the storyline unpredictable, forcing you to wonder who'll be left standing once the dust settles.
Still, even if all characters are allegedly up for the possibility of a dance with the reaper, the general laws of storytelling (and, more importantly, how actors are contracted) tells us that you can expect the chances of main-character death to increase as you approach the climax of an arc, the final episodes of a season, the final chapters of a book, or the final instalment of a series, even if the work averts Death Is Dramatic. A creator needs to be quite committed to the concept to kill off an important character in a completely plot-irrelevant way.
When used poorly or too frequently, this trope can cause Too Bleak, Stopped Caring, possibly with audiences uttering the Eight Deadly Words, as the audience won't see any point in getting attached to characters that they expect to die sooner or later.
Note that the character needs to be Killed Off for Real for the trope to have the desired effect; it does not work if the writers cheat and bring back the guy later (see Not Quite Dead, Disney Death, Negative Continuity, and Climactic Battle Resurrection). As such Super Hero Comic Books as a medium have gained a reputation of "Anyone Can Die... until someone wants to use the character in a later story."
Compare Survived the Beginning, when the story begins with a cast massacre, and the few who survive get some Plot Armor.
A good way to check if this trope applies is to see if who survives is an important plot point, rather than only how they survive.
Contrast with Tonight, Someone Dies, Sorting Algorithm of Mortality and Contractual Immortality. Compare Second Law of Metafictional Thermodynamics, Survived the Beginning, and Characters Dropping Like Flies.
Opposite of Nobody Can Die and Plot Armor, where not even situations that should kill people manage to. See also Dwindling Party, where the deaths are evenly spaced rather than near the end. Easier to do in works with large casts. Can be expected in a Tragedy. Red Shirt is (usually) when the deaths are reserved for nameless extras. This trope tries to upgrade them to Mauve Shirt first.
This is easily defined as definite Truth in Television, because all living organisms are mortal and are bound to, by statistics at least, eventually die for any number of reasons, with no fiction writers to determine how it happens, so No Real Life Examples, Please!
As this is a Death Trope, all spoilers will be unmarked ahead. Beware!
Examples
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Film
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Video Games
- Web Original
- Western Animation
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Music
- The franchise for the Evillious Chronicles has got a huge death toll, not only because the series spans for a thousand years and so almost everyone will die of old age by the time of the next arc, but because it's got multiple main characters to choose from and isn't picky about which ones they kill off. One of the plot points is everyone dying near the series' climax.
- In Paul Shapera's Ballad of Lost Hollow trilogy of albums, it starts with four main characters, two of whom are dead by the end of the story.
Podcasts
- In the Cool Kids Table game Creepy Town. Who survives each scene and who doesn't is dependent on the luck of the draw, which means at any moment a victim could meet their fate, no matter how much their player likes them.
- The first season of Dark Dice begins with a party of six people, and ends with three just barely escaping with their lives and sanity.
Professional Wrestling
- Whilst reality-based rather than in a storyline, sadly Professional Wrestlers seem to have very short life spans. Prior to drug testing (which was implemented after one such death), wrestling has had a number of high-profile deaths that seem to come out of nowhere, most notably Chris Benoit and Eddie Guerrero. Certainly fans are now conditioned to expect any wrestler to die at any time.
- You also never know when an accident may happen, such as the one that claimed the life of Owen Hart in 1999, and another that claimed the life of Jay Briscoe in 2023.
- And of course accidents can occur outside the ring, as what had happened to Randy Savage.
- This can also apply to wrestling families, the Von Erich Family being a noteworthy and tragic example (with Kevin being the only son to outlive father Fritz).
- Due to Lucha Underground being more of a TV show about Wrestling then a Wrestling TV show, They aren't afraid to kill off characters. While some characters come Back from the Dead, others are Killed Off for Real.
Roleplay
- In Einsteinian Roulette, the convicts the game focuses on are very, very likely to have either tame, temporary deaths with the loss of a few limbs and organs or a full-blown perma-death.
- Fate/Nuovo Guerra, a RPG forum based on Fate/stay night. This trope applies to every Master or Servant, whether it be the most evil Jerkass or the Cheerful Child.
- In The Gamer's Alliance, a number of heroes and villains, including very prominent ones, have been killed off for real, some more dramatically than others.
- GET THAT PIZZA!: The tropers frequently kill each other to get the pizza. However, since players can do anything, anyone can also come Back from the Dead so they can keep playing.
- JoJo's OC Tournament: Before Urban Uprising, it was considered a given that if two Stand users fought it was to the death if not stated otherwise before or after, regardless of their role in the narrative or within a team: for example, The Grand Tour saw Ken Nard, who had gradually been built up as a protagonist-like figure, be the first one killed of Babylon By Bus. Since Fortune's Reach, deaths have become a lot more rare, but it's impossible to predict who will see things through to the end or who will bite the dust at any point.
- Survival of the Fittest exemplifies this trope, being based off of Battle Royale. This is doubly true in that the vast majority of deaths (or at least, when they are to occur) are determined randomly.
Tabletop Games
- The Call of Cthulhu games are known for being ruthlessly brutal. A player in Cthulhu should always keep spare character sheets to hand, and never get too attached to their hapless adventurer.
- A rules-light Lovecraftian game called Cthulhu Dark
suggests you might instead just bring a stack of index cards or a sticky-note pad instead of character sheets, your characters are so disposable.
- A rules-light Lovecraftian game called Cthulhu Dark
- Daggerheart zigzags this by being very customizable; while narrative structure of the game allows for variable lethality, there is only one explicit means of resurrecting a dead character, and it's only available at level 10 (the maximum level of play), and only to a class with the Splendor domain (of which there are only 2 in the base game). Add to that the option for players to choose a Do Not Go Gentle end or risk a 50/50 chance of coming Back from the Brink rather than just falling unconscious at 0 HP, and characters with a flair for drama have a good chance of ending up permanently dead.
- Dark Heresy, Rogue Trader, Deathwatch, Black Crusade, and Only War of the Warhammer 40,000 RPG series certainly qualify. With only a limited amount of Wounds per character in comparison to the damage weapons can inflict, characters quickly burn through their health in fights. Though the game attempts to alleviate the problem by granting Fate Points, which can be used to avoid certain death, these too tend to get used up quickly.
- The same applies to its fantasy predecessor, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.
- Dungeons & Dragons has zig-zagged through this trope over its lifetime. As a rule the older the edition of the game the more lethal it becomes.
- 1st edition, ran as written, is quite lethal. It's entirely possible to start play with a character who has 1 hit point. The adventure modules of the day were written with this trope in mind and some are legendary for their body counts, particularly Tomb of Horrors.
- 2nd edition began the trend to a more character driven game and made some common house rules that made the game less lethal into core rules. The edition still has save or die spells that can drop even a high level character on a single bad die roll, and 2nd edition also saw the introduction of the Dark Sun setting, considered one of the more brutal of all D&D campaigns.
- 3rd edition further increased player character survival - characters start with the maximum hit points they could have rolled at first level which when combined with the -10 rule meant that characters were unlikely to die from a single hit barring very unlucky die rolls.
- 4th edition was the furthest from this trope D&D has moved. It has rules on what encounters the DM should use with the goal of preventing unwinnable encounters (at least by accident). Spells have been restructured so that a character's fate no longer hinges on a single cast of the die.
- 5th edition moves the pendulum back the other way. While careful players characters are usually safe, it's not unknown for them to be done in by a series of bad rolls if they don't back out and run away first. The Dungeon Master's Guide of this edition includes rules for making the game more or less lethal according the the tastes of the group.
- Forsooth!: The game ends when all the main characters are either wed or dead. Tragedy games will tend to favor the latter — and often it's at the hands of other player characters.
- Kill Sector is very lethal as a one-shot game, with at least one player character usually dying per session. This is partially Subverted with multiple means of resurrection and death prevention, though many of those only work once or have some other stipulation.
- The Legend of the Five Rings RPG is notorious for its lethality, and with good reason: with a dice pool task resolution system that allows you to keep the highest dice rolled in the pool, and the fact that rolling a ten (the highest number on a d10, the die type used by the game) on a die allows it to re-rolled and added onto the previous total in addition to the ten previously rolled allows for rolls (and in particular damage rolls) to become very high, often causing even the toughest character to die in one or two hits.
- Magic: The Gathering normally keeps characters around in the plot, if only so they can keep making cards out of them. But with the coming of New Phyrexia, the creative team has shown an increasing willingness to have characters either die or suffer compleation. Even the Gatewatch, much-hated by the fans for their Plot Armor, isn't safe - as of the end of Phyrexia: All Will Be One, only two members of the group aren't either dead or compleated, including such long-time stalwarts as Jace and Ajani. More surprisingly, the majority of the characters who die or get compleated stay that way; the only two who are restored from compleation are Ajani and Nissa, and Nissa is Brought Down to Normal in the process.
- Evident from the beginning of Rotted Capes, which is about a Zombie Apocalypse in a Superhero world, where the world's best heroes have already failed to contain the undead plague and most have joined it. The game's pretty frank that most of the bottom-rung superbeings still around, like the kind the players control, end up making a mistake eventually and getting killed too.
- Damage rolls in Savage Worlds are open ended in a manner similar to Legend of the Five Rings. It is not unknown for even experienced characters to go from healthy to dead in one hit.
- Shadowrun, like most post modern settings with guns, can be very lethal - this is the game system that is the trope namer for the Chunky Salsa Rule after all. Most editions give the Game master a choice of lethality levels, and at the most realistic / "hardest" setting anyone aiming a gun at your samurai war troll is a threat if they land a hit.
- Stars Without Number doesn't quite go that far, but it's still a very deadly game where first level characters need to be careful about not getting shot at because a standard firearm will very likely kill them. There are suggestions for making it a bit less brutal, such as implementing a "dead at -10 instead of 0HP" rule, but ultimately the recommendation of bringing along a spare character sheet or two is in the corebook for a reason.
- Warhammer: Age of Sigmar has seen a lot of fluctuation in the setting since its beginning, and this has resulted in quite a few named characters, some even with actively playable models less than a decade old, dying permanently. Notably, this has even happened to Stormcast, whose whole thing is that they're immortals who resurrect after death. On tabletop, meanwhile, it doesn't matter if you're a lowly conscript or Archaon the Everchosen, Grand Marshal of the Apocalypse: if you take enough damage, you die.
- This has taken effect with Warhammer: The End Times. Named characters who have died in the fiction include:
- Nagash: the Fay Enchantress, Thorek Ironbrow, Eltharion the Grim, the Grey Seer, Volkmar the Grim, Elector Count Aldebrand Ludenhof, the Nehekharan god Usirian, King Phar, Heinrich Kemmler, Zacharias the Everliving, and Crom the Conqueror. Krell, Mortarch of Despair, is an undead wight who was decapitated by a Tomb Scorpion but brought back by Nagash.
- Glottkin: Everyone in the cities of Marienburg, Talabheim, and Carroburg, Taurox the Brass Bull, Louen Leoncour, Kurt Helborg and Karl Franz. Ku'gath Plaguefather and Festus are daemons, so they can return eventually, Elector Count Vlad von Carstein is both a vampire and has a ring of regeneration and so doesn't stay down very long, and Sigmar possessed Emperor Karl Franz's body after he fell in battle.
- Khaine: Malus Darkblade, Kouran, Tullaris, Finubar the Seafarer, Korhil, Orion and Tyrion along with the realms of Naggaroth and Ulthuan. Morathi and Caledor were taken by Slaanesh him/herself to his/her realm.
- Thanquol: Belegar Ironhammer, Lords Kroak and Mazdamundi, Boris Todbringer, Khazrak One-Eye, Malagor the Dark Omen, Gregor Martak, Queek Headtaker, Thorgrim Grudgebearer, the cities of Nuln, Middenheim, and Altdorf, the dwarf hold Karak Kadrin, the regions of Lustria and the Southlands, the god of winter Ulric, and Valten, Herald of Sigmar. Skaven Lord Skrolk of Clan Pestilens was killed by Kroq-Gar and brought back from the dead by a Verminlord.
- Archaon: The entire world and everybody left, most notably Kairos Fateweaver, Vilitch the Curseling (though he swapped so his brother Thomin took control while Vitlich became the slave), Ludwig Schwarzhelm, Valkia the Bloody, Scyla, Ungrim Ironfist, the city of Averheim (and the Empire with it), Luthor Harkon, the Nameless, Luthor Huss, Egrimm van Horstmann, Shadowblade, the elven goddess Lileath, Sigvald the Magnificent, Mannfred von Carstein, Hellebron, Durthu, Caradryan, Ka'Bandha, Grimgor Ironhide, Teclis, Nagash, and Malekith. Krell and Arkhan were killed in the battle for the Black Pyramid (Krell was eaten by a Great Unclean One and Arkhan was hit with magic and a Nurglite curse by Isabella) but both were brought back by Nagash; Krell was later killed by Sigvald and that death stuck. Vlad was killed by Isabella's power, but was regenerated thanks to his ring. He gave it to Isabella and killed them both, knowing the death was the only way to free her from Nurgle's clutches and the ring would bring her back. The fiction ends with a human figure sparking the beginning of a new world after the Chaos Gods abandon the Old World in search of a new playing field.
- In the first edition of Science Fiction RPG Traveller, it's possible for characters to die during character generation if the player rolls badly enough. Later editions removed this from the main character generation rules, but kept it as an optional one because it had become such an iconic part of Traveller player lore.
- The Witcher: Game of Imagination is a hard punch for anyone used to Player Characters being Made of Iron. You. Will. Die. A lot. Most basic weapons in the hands of average enemies can deal enough damage to take a quarter of your hit points with a single blow. In the hands of professionals, the same weapons can kill you on the spot. And that's without even mentioning monsters - they deal enough damage to kill a character even with a mediocre roll.
Theatre
- In The Insect Play, several insects meet untimely demises, not counting the ant war of the third act which ends in a general massacre. In the epilogue, the Audience Surrogate sees the moths happily dying one by one, and then finds that it's his turn to die.
- Even the Narrator in Into the Woods.
- Many of the tragedies of William Shakespeare:
- Macbeth has Macbeth himself kick the bucket many years earlier than the real Macbeth did historically. For Elizabethan audiences, this would be like a 21st century person watching a movie where Abraham Lincoln dies before the American Civil War even began.
- Othello contains death both by murder and by suicide.
- Romeo and Juliet is about a deadly feud between two families, which of course means that nobody is safe. The very beginning of the play spoils the coming deaths of Romeo and Juliet, but they're far from the only ones who buy the farm.
- Hamlet is legendary for this, being the go-to example for "Everybody Dies" Ending comparisons.
- Titus Andronicus has the largest number of deaths in any Shakespeare tragedy — fourteen humans and one fly.
- In 'Tis Pity She's a Whore nobody goes safe. That's partly because the cast features several would-be murderers, and partly because only some of them manage to avoid accidentally murdering the wrong person by pure incompetence.
- Westeros: An American Musical is faithful to the death toll of A Song of Ice and Fire, resulting in quite a few characters dying in the play:
- "Plot development": Robert.
- Ned Stark dies between the end of "Plot development" and the beginning of "Stannis Refuted".
- "Crownless": Renly.
- "Hisstorically Inaccurate": The raven serving as narrator for Act I.
- "Stark to Finish": Robb and Catelyn.
- "The Groom When It Happened": Joffrey and Dontos.
- "Talk Less, Stab More": Oberyn.
- Shae and Tywin little after the end of "Congratshaelations".
Toys
- BIONICLE has begun to show traits of this trope. Ever since the web-serial chapters arrived (though mostly from 2008), former main and side characters have been dying left and right. Now that the happenings of the Matoran Universe have to be restricted to a web-serial, since non of the characters are part of the main line of toys, everyone who survived the story's first 8 years can begin to worry. Don't think of Heroic Sacrifice, rather blowing up or being pulled beneath the ground for just the heck of it. Or simply eaten. Exceptions are, of course, some of the main heroes and the invulnerable Big Bad. And if a side-story happens to take place in an Alternate Universe, absolutely no one is safe, save for those who don't belong there and will eventually return to their own world... Although, that isn't guaranteed either.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa:
- In Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc, the plot revolves around 15 students with special talents that are required to murder to escape the school. Although it is obvious that a lot of them will die, the trailers for both the game and the anime based on it heavily promoted the characters who died earliest, which made this trope come into effect even harder. The game seems to take great pleasure throughout in subverting Sorting Algorithm of Mortality, in fact, with the protagonist's Implied Love Interest with signs of a fascinating Dark and Troubled Past as the Sacrificial Lamb, the less focused-on victim of the third chapter being the one who was in the middle of his Character Development, and most of the survivors besides the protagonist seeming like walking death flags. Of note of the six survivors and the tropes that a first impression makes them look built for, there's the idiotic, superstitious, held-back-repeatedly clairvoyant, the unsociable obsessive novelist and her extremely snobbish, hostile crush, and the detective Deuteragonist who teaches many hard lessons to the others. Obviously, all death tropes listed here end up not being the case for them at all.
- The same applies to the sequel, Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair. Played with however as all the dead students are merely revealed to have gone into a coma by the end, hope is given they can be brought back, and the Grand Finale anime, Danganronpa 3: The End of Hope's Peak High School ultimately confirms that the only one who doesn't come back is the one who was actually dead the entire time.
- Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls completely subverts this. All but two of the "dead" characters are revealed as alive in the credits.
- This trope is back with a vengeance in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, though, with the first two characters to die being the cool, collected, and competent-seeming holder of the mystery talent and the much-promoted "protagonist", when both of these positions had consistently come with Plot Armor in other installments of the series. From there, the game proceeds to have the lowest survivor count in the series, and only three of the five students at the final trial actually survive to reach The Stinger.
- Dead End Aegis: Until the midway point, the only deaths are those of nameless extras and fellow Special Warfare Troopers that don't appear on-screen. Come the "Stay" route and all male officers drop like flies and get replaced by mindless C.C. in human shape, Ilyusha gets killed as an alien, Nana kills herself and both Circe and Lisette die in the final battle. The only characters left alive in the end are Minori, Mitsuomi, their child and Canxue.
- In Fate/stay night, all the Masters and Servants can die. The only ones who are guaranteed to survive the non-bad endings are Rin and Sakura. The Bad Ends kick it up a notch, with several of them dooming everyone in Shirou's highschool or the entire city.
- Full Metal Daemon Muramasa has an absolutely massive cast and that is just as well given just how high the mortality rate is in this story. By the end of each route, the number of characters left alive can be easily counted on one hand. Not even young children are safe, with them often dying just as gruesome deaths as the adults. This holds equally true for the main characters with most being either dead or dying by the end, some of which can die midway through with little warning depending on the route.
- All of the main characters in The Letter can potentially die. The True End even requires some of them to die.
- Lux-Pain is a dark visual novel game where the main character outright states that if his mission fails, many people will die. While it's very easy to save the main cast, it's just as easy to lose them. Only eight people are killed canonically and half of them are villains. Mako, Takano, Naoto and Kyosuke are examples of the good guys. Also, if you mess up during a certain portion of the game, the number of people that die in the normal ending is higher. The most prominent example is Hibiki who is killed by Honoka (and she too is killed by getting gunned down) when you fail to remove the Silent from Honoka that prevents her from going crazy. Oh yeah, and when Hibiki dies, Shinji dies too (or at least never wakes up from his coma), and Mika and Nami go missing. In fact, out of all of your friends, the ones that are safe at this portion of the game are Akira, Rui, Yayoi and Ryo. The latter, however, is to be questioned because after Hibiki is killed, you can't talk to him.
- Played with in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors: The 9th Man's early and brutal death by Zero's explosives sets the tone for the game, but contrary to Zero's threats, none of the rest of the 9 have a bomb in them, none of them are actually on a sinking ship, and Zero actually intends to avoid harming anyone besides those responsible for running the previous Nonary Game. There are bad endings in which one of the 9 kills the rest either because they'd been Evil All Along or because certain events in the game had broken them, but each ending is really one potential timeline that Zero can see, and Zero is capable of guiding the protagonist's decisions to result in exactly what was planned (i.e. the True Ending).
- Its sequels Virtue's Last Reward and Zero Time Dilemma kill off characters more often, to the point that some endings result in a Total Party Kill (even including the Big Bad).
- Rose Guns Days has it the usual way in the first 2 Seasons, with only nameless mooks dying (but they are seldom explicitly stated as dead) and Wang Yuanhong implied to breathe his last breath off-screen. Then at the very end of Season 3 Stella Maiougi, a fairly important character, actually dies in very graphic detail. In the Last Season, named characters suddenly start to drop like flies starting with Yuuji Maiougi (a 2 year old kid), and continuing with Oliver Oribe (who may or may not be 20 years old at that point), Lee Meixue (one of the arc's main characters' girlfriend), James Tomitake, Maurice Monobe, Cyrus Saimura, Richard Maiougi (Stella's brother and Yuuji's uncle), Alan Aramaki (Meixue's boyfriend) and Gabriel Kaburaya. To these deaths we might as well add Keith Kisaragi, who lost his best friend Alan and his entire new family (the Maiougis) in the span of a single season.
- In Sickness, a reader may begin to realize this upon the death of Sara, if she indeed dies in your route. If Suoh gets killed, you'll definitely realize this.
- There are rather few characters in The Shell who make it to the endings reliably. For example, Mizuhara, Tojiko and Orihime always die and Toko dies in every route except one in which she lives on as a torso.
- As the name implies, Your Turn to Die — Death Game By Majority — has several fatalities — and in certain cases, it's effectively up to the player who gets to live past that point.
- Literally every character in The Many Deaths of Lily Kosen can be killed depending upon the player's choices - including the player character, which will lead to a game over.
Web Animation
- Battle for Dream Island, as shocking as it seems, in this care free world of sentient objects, anyone is capable of being killed. Wether it’s from natural hazards, dangerous challenges, or developing the insanity to kill eachother. This is later averted, as the world revolves around recovery centers, so characters can just come back with ease.
- This show would later lead to a whole fan base of many Object Shows to follow this same trope.
- The Debbie and Carrie Show: The series evolves into a full blown saga stretching over several decades, resulting in even the Central Characters starting to die off and young characters growing older (and often dying as well).
- Happy Tree Friends is one of the most infamous cases of this - almost everyone had died at one point in the series.
- As is Wolf Song: The Movie to an extent. Half the cast end up dying horribly, yet unlike the former example, death here is permanent
Webcomics
- Breakfast of the Gods: Let's just say the first death occurs on page 3 of the first book.
- Counting: Not just anyone but everyone in the town of Thirston. Including a bird in a bird bath.
- Dark Carnival: Five out of the six main characters die before the comic is even half over, although at least one of them seems to be coming back as a ghost.
- Seen in Dead of Summer, being that it's a Zombie Apocalypse story.
- Game Destroyers has killed off or otherwise incapacitated a number of main characters to date, namely Bojangles, Ace, Cedris, and the Nintendo Otaku. Only a small handful of main characters will likely never be considered when it's time to kill someone off.
- A Game of Roleplay attempts to set a record for major character deaths with four unexpected deaths by the end of the first chapter.
- These include one of only three players character (twice), the heir to the throne (another PC) and the quest giver for the main campaign.
- This is even more impressive when you consider that the strip is based on Game of Thrones and so follows an already set out plot. This is of course changed to suit the author's new plot.
- Girl Genius: While for the most part the comic merely averts Nominal Importance very hard a couple of the protagonists have died while part of the main party and the tie in material includes a timeline in which everyone in Europe besides Tarvek and Othar ends up killed off, which Othar was then sent back to try and prevent with a copious amount of murder.
- Goblins: Many characters die as soon as you start getting attached to them. The tagline for Book Four's climax was "EVEN MAIN CHARACTERS CAN'T LIVE FOREVER."
- Hitmen for Destiny killed off a character who was explained to be extremely important quite early on. Recently another major character was unexpectedly killed off. Both of these characters were very popular among the fanbase. It looks like nobody is safe at this point.
- Played with in Homestuck. Several times the narrative develops characters over the course of time, then kills them off, before using Time Travel or Cosmic Retcon to send a sole survivor to a different timeline to avert that Bad Future. Problem is, changing the timeline changes how each character develops, and with enough time, their personality entirely. The characters attempt to gloss over this uncomfortable fact, but sometimes they can't help but be taken aback.
i mean, it's ok if you're gay now! that's totally cool, if true. i just think... you turning gay would be kind of a weird consequence of me changing the time line around?
- Juathuur has lot of death in it, and no way shown to resurrect people. The trope is established with Bivv's death and comes into full force with the Battle of Erab Adur.
- In a comic called Kill Six Billion Demons, is it really surprising that a lot of people tend to die, violently and unceremoniously?
- Lackadaisy's author has stated that one of the main characters will die.
- MS Paint Masterpieces uses this. Even Mega Man gets it.
- For a webcomic about walking, talking snowmen, Nixvir really doesn't mess around:
- First is the death of Gormenmhyre, the Uncivil Serpent, in chapter one.
- During chapter eleven, Oriel grants the suffering wizard Vaizros a Mercy Kill, which causes his head to explode.
- A wizard is depicted being decapitated rather messily via a bolt of magic in chapter sixteen during a Wizards' War.
- During chapter seventeen, a Magonian is seen against a wall with blood coming from its back.
- During chapter twenty-two, the Gnome President dies when he eats a cursed bittermint which causes him to swell up and explode.
- During chapter twenty-six, the Faerie Redmane kills the Inquisitor by using the mannickus explosius spell
- During the Battle of Conevstall Saga, the heaviest chapter, Erik kills a Vunfraen by cutting off his head, cuts a Bond clone in half and kills a warrior woman by slicing off her legs.
- Viktor Hemmerich, the Saucepan Man, is killed by Lord Nix who uses magic to wipe him from existence without destroying people's memories of him.
- Nuzlocke Comics, being a comic adaptation of a Permadeath run of Pokémon, spare no party member. In season 1, Ruby's entire team dies, and in the second, only his Charizard survives (maybe).
- Although set in a world with functional resurrection magic, The Order of the Stick has featured a number of shocking deaths. It uses the interesting loophole in all Dungeons & Dragons resurrection spells: the dead person's spirit has to be willing to return.
- Lord Shojo, and Therkla would, for various reasons, rather stay dead than face their lives again.
- Miko Miyazaki wasn't exactly well-liked, and was cut in half.
- Roy Greenhilt, himself, who is the main protagonist of the comic. Only his death has been reversed, and doing so was the goal of an arc.
- Then Durkon Thundershield bit it, though he got better... eventually, after spending a lengthy stint as a vampire.
- Strip #913 sees the death of major antagonist and Elan's evil twin, Nale, with his body being zapped to dust and scattered to the winds. By D&D standards, his death stuck, but this is a setting where devils are of mortal origin. Normally, the process would take too long for him to come back, but the IFCC needed a powerful henchman to fulfill their plans, so they sped it up.
- Our Little Adventure has had three fairly important protagonist characters die since it started. The first two of those will not be coming back with the first one not wanting to, and the second turning out to be a Meat Puppet traitor. The third is the main protagonist's sister, so she was eventually resurrected (as the comic uses D&D mechanics and coming back to life isn't that hard).
- Despite being a fancomic and using characters from TV shows, Powerpuff Girls Doujinshi doesn't skimp on this. Deedee is shown killed during a flashback, taking a laser blast for Dexter. Mandark, in his attempt to kill Dexter, lets himself be blown up during his base self detonation. Blossom is temporally drowned while being held captive but brought back to life. During the side story, Atomic Betty's crew (Sparky and X-5) are killed after stumbling upon one of the big bad's bases. Betty nearly killed herself if not for Amazo finding her.
- Rimworld Tales heavily enforces this rule. The only major characters who even live to the end are Andrew and the child, who doesn't even count as the main cast takes on a Suicide Mission to resurrect them... which is also the reason Tynan and Huntsman die.
- Roomies!, It's Walky!, Joyce and Walky!: Before It's Walky, Roomies featured the (then) shocking death of Ruth. Her death marked a Cerebus Syndrome moment in the strip's history (the strip started the transition to It's Walky in the immediate aftermath) and served to show that the gang's wacky hijinks were no longer consequence-free. It also set the "No warning" tone for many of the deaths to come (Dina's in particular).
- Ruby Quest: Although the situation was averted, one of the main characters came very close of dying. Weaver said he was prepared to kill him off had the players made any harsh decisions. It is likely that such situations might arise once again in the future.
- Sarilho: If the first chapters are any measure, this is where the story seems to be headed.
- Schlock Mercenary has its fair share of this, frequently killing off supporting cast members. Although anything short of a headshot can be healed thanks to Applied Phlebetonium, and major characters were brought back through Time Travel.
- Being the demolitions tech for the Toughs is pretty much a one-way ticket out of the strip...
- To wit: The strip has killed, since the beginning, six major characters just among the Toughs, including two who could easily be billed as main characters, and so many supporting Toughs it's hard to count. And these are just the ones who HAVEN'T come back. To be fair, however, that's spread out over twelve years. You can certainly start reading any given arc and assume that no Toughs will have died by the end of it (not even any redshirts).
- Tagon himself died several times. (In fact, the time travel had "Bring Tagon back" as part of its goals, but partially because of an event that would have made any other efforts a bit pointless.note ) And one version of Tagon was down in the dumps for a bit because he was receiving a bit of hero worship due to the motivation behind the actions that lead to "his" death.
- And Schlock- the amorph that the comic is named after- usually survives anything thrown his way... including the plasma grenade that he swallowed. Except for one instance where, due to circumstances (which, to be fair, would have been a bit tough for anyone to survive if they were wearing the same suit), the best result after several hours of attempts would have been a useless Medical officer still making attempts at recovery, and maybe a braindead Schlock. Luckily, Petey was able to help out with a sample that could be used in the efforts.
- Sluggy Freelance: For a long time it seemed clear main characters were safe, though more minor characters could die both dramatically (rarely, except for Oasis who kept doing it and coming back) and humorously (more common), or even kind of both ways at the same time. Then a long-foreshadowed extremely dramatic storyline, "bROKEN", turned the whole thing upside down with two main characters appearing to die and one much more definitely so than the other. The following storyline basically Zig-Zagged with whether the other one could survive, or for that matter whether they would end up in And I Must Scream or as a Soulless Shell, but ultimately subverted the trope and in the end left the readers gasping for breath but pretty secure with the knowledge that Plot Armor is still in place for the most central characters.
- Something*Positive. The author, Randy Milholland, has made it quite clear that nobody - beloved or despised — is immune from the Grim Reaper. And if you tell him he can't, for whatever reason, kill off a character, Randy will kill said character anyway out of spite, even if they weren't supposed to die.
- Swageon and Glacigeon: Ass Ketchup, Swagle, Cyndaquil, Treecko, and Growlithe all dead. Also, The Hero Dies. Swageon/Sylveon and Glacigeon/Glaceon are dead by the end of season 3.
- Tails Gets Trolled is probably one of the best examples. After chapter 2, both the main cast and the secondary characters start dying at a real fast pace. Also, The Hero Dies, if you considered Sonic to be the protagonist; later, it's clear that the hero is Tails.
- Unsounded: Secondary and background characters start dying in droves once the Silver Weapon was formed, but those traveling with Sette and Duane were safe until chapter 16, where Sara was crushed and Duane lost his head.
- Wrongside: Beginning has not been hesitant to kill characters off, and has even parodied it in a joke strip, although it does take the Hero Killer to show up.
- Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic has main characters die quite often, and with little drama. It helps that there are quite a few main characters in each arc. Only one of them, Glon, has ever been brought back.