History Main / BetterToDieThanBeKilled

* ''{{Lois and Clark}}'' had Lex Luthor jump from a building rather than face jail. It seemed to be a point with him, because later he tried to electrocute himself but Superman stopped him. This might be the only time where a villain was effectively KilledOffForReal by being captured.

->''Man's way of telling God: 'You can't fire me, I quit!' ''
-->-- '''[[MemeticMutation Demotivational Poster]]'''

->''Man's way of telling life: 'You can't fire me, I quit!' ''

->''Man's way of telling life: 'You can't fire me! I quit!' ''

->''This is no time for suicide! We're about to be killed!''
-->-- '''Uncle Gabby''', ''TheDrinkyCrowShow''

* HBO's ''{{Rome}}'' has several of these, but YouShouldKnowThisAlready.

* In ''{{Warcraft}} III'', upon death, Demon Hunter heroes will stab themselves with their own blades as they die, provided they are still in Night Elf form.
* After you defeat Colonel Radec in ''{{Killzone}} 2'', he and his men commit suicide, preferring death to being prisoners of the ISA.

* Puccini's ''Tosca''. After killing the villain, the heroine is cornered by the villain's lackeys; she jumps off a high balcony to her death, rather than let the lackeys execute her.

** This predates Nero by centuries. The Roman religion did not see suicide as a sin, and in fact held up suicide as a noble form of death second only to death in battle. Free men and women who had been convicted or who were likely to be convicted of capital crimes were allowed to kill themselves before they could be executed; under Roman law before Nero, this meant their heirs would then be allowed to inherit their property rather than having it confiscated by the state. Nero's main innovation was that if the accused committed suicide, Nero would take his property but let the accused's family live. If he refused to commit suicide, Nero would order the execution of the entire family, including children. Even worse, because the law prohibited execution of a female virgin, any daughters in the family (even infants) would be raped by the executioner before being strangled and thrown down the Tarpeian Rocks into the Tiber. Nero also executed men solely to get their estates, manufacturing charges that no jury would disagree with lest they become his next victims.

* Erwin Rommel. Given the choice from Fieldmarshall Keitel. He could face the People's Court and potential persecution of his family, or choose to commit suicide quietly, and in the latter place the government would assure his family pension payments and a state funeral claiming he had died a hero.
* Most of the higher-level Nazis had a cyanide pill in their possession. If they saw capture as imminent, they would bite into their cheek and open the pill, thus killing themselves. It happened at least once during the Nuremberg trials, to Hermann Göring, whose capsule was in his luggage when he was captured. He had to convince a friendly guard to bring it to him before he was executed; he ended his life two hours before he would have gone to the gallows (where he was to be the first of the condemned to hang).
** Another Nazi held at Nuremberg, Robert Ley, hung himself with his bedsheets before the trial began.

** At least one other Nazi smuggled the pill in between his... ah... ''other'' cheeks.

*** Not to defend Hitler, but: As far as I know evil is pretty hard to quantify. There are only general ballparks and many people through history were in the same as him.

* During WorldWarII, Japanese propaganda was used to convince Japanese soldiers and the natives of the islands they occupied that the Americans were savages who would torture them if they ever captured them. This often led to mass suicides among Japanese soldiers and native civilians whenever the Americans landed on an island.

* A World War II German soldier told an account of being overrun by the Russians at Stalingrad. The soldier next to him took [[FatalFamilyPhoto a small picture of his significant other]] from his pocket, had a last look, tore it into tiny shreds and subsequently shot himself. The survivor was captured and spent more than a decade in a Gulag before returning home. And he was one of the lucky ones.
** He was ''very'' lucky. Roughly 100,000 German soldiers (originally, there were more than 300,000 in the army) were taken prisoner during the Battle of Stalingrad. Only 5,000 returned home.

** The same went for another of his co-conspirators, Nedeljko ?abrinovi?. The man behind the first assassination attempt, a grenade tossed at Franz Ferdinand's car, ?abrinovi? swallowed a cyanide pill from the same batch as Princip, and jumped in the nearby river to ensure he died. Unfortunately, his cyanide also failed to kill him, and the water was only five inches deep.

* In ''{{Legend of Galactic Heroes}}'', Ansbach bites a [[CyanidePill poison capsule]] rather than be taken alive after attempting to assassinate Reinhard, and succeeding in killing Kircheis, during his fake surrender.

Here's the situation. You're all alone and you're faced with capture, imminent death, [[MadeASlave enslavement]], [[ComeToGawk public humiliation]] followed by execution, or [[FateWorseThanDeath something even worse]]. You know what the monsters or bad guys do to you if they get their hands on you, and you do not want that to be your fate, but you have no chance to survive -- either there are too many of them, or you're out of bullets (or down to your final bullet). So what do you do?

* In the fifth episode of the [[DragonAge Warden's Fall]] machinima, Cyril — who was working for [[HumanoidAbomination the Mother]] and had led numerous refugees to their deaths — opts to leap off a roof rather than be interrogated by Kristoff, the main character. His terror at meeting one of The Mother's servants in an earlier episode suggests he was afraid of what the Mother would do to him.

* Subverted in ''ResidentEvil: Apocalypse'', where the CorruptCorporateExecutive villain is cornered by zombies -- he tries to shoot his way out, and when that fails, he puts his gun to his head...to find that it's empty. Cue ghastliness.
** Also subverted in the first ''ResidentEvil'' movie, where one of the soldiers is trapped by the zombies and considers killing himself to avoid becoming a zombie. However, he instead decides to keep fighting, escapes, and eventually saves the rest of the group.

This trope may originally derive from Real Life. Many cultures, including that of classical Rome, held that suicide was an acceptable form of death: to a Roman, suicide was not just a way to avoid a fate worse than death but a noble deed meant to demonstrate one's own stoicism and honour in the face of adversity. Emperor Otho was considered a weak, luxury-loving sybarite until he committed suicide shortly before a plot to assassinate him could be put into effect; his self-inflicted death changed Romans' minds, leading them to see Otho as a greater man than he perhaps really was. The Christians were seen as depraved and disgusting by Romans such as Tacitus in part because they would not commit suicide, which the Romans interpreted as cowardly and almost obscene.

* ''The Murder of Roger Ackroyd'' by AgathaChristie: [[HerculePoirot Poirot]] ''offers'' the revealed murderer a day before he contacts the authorities, in order to kill himself and prevent family disgrace.
** He also allows the suicide of murderer in ''Death on the Nile'', but prevents it in ''The A.B.C. Murders''.