History Main / ForcedEuthanasia

Since this is a DeathTrope, expect unmarked spoilers below.

* ''VisualNovel/DanganronpaV3KillingHarmony'': Kokichi and Gonta see a flashback light revealing Earth has become an apocalyptic wasteland. Kokichi then convinces the other boy to help make a Trial where everyone will fail to find the killer, allowing them to MercyKill the students so no one will have to learn the AwfulTruth. Unfortunately, the students refuse to die and Gonta is executed for killing Miu. However, Kokichi later reveals he wasn't invested in the MercyKill plan and actually has a larger scheme to end the Killing Game.

* ''VideoGame/{{Everhood}}'': The first act of the game involves Red -- the PlayerCharacter -- on a quest to retrieve their stolen arm. Once that goal is accomplished, however, Frog reveals to Red their true mission and purpose for coming to the titular Everhood: [[spoiler:[[KillEmAll euthanizing every single member of the remaining population]], who are prevented from entering the cycle of reincarnation and have been [[WhoWantsToLiveForever slowly driven mad by the millions of years spent living with immortality]], but are too afraid of death to end their suffering via suicide.]]

In order to [[Administrivia/RuleOfCautiousEditingJudgment prevent]] FlameBait, this trope is restricted to cases in which the person killed actively objects to the act in some form or has the fact that a MercyKill is coming actively hidden from them. This is a controversial topic in Real Life and fiction, and a MercyKill may be portrayed sympathetically by the author even without consent in some cases if the person's Fate Worse Than Death involves making them an EmptyShell and the person doing the MercyKill gets there too late to prevent the action. For that reason and the manifold others for which this topic is controversial in Real Life, in cases where consent is disputable and the author portrays the action to be morally ambiguous or negative, the example falls under QuestionableConsent instead. Also, to qualify for this trope, a character must actually die. Failed attempts do not count.

* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'': This is SerialKiller Oola Blint's, aka "The Angel of Mercy", entire ''modus operandi'', often with the assistance of her weak-willed husband, Homer Blint. She would frequently incapacitate unwitting victims with gas before administering a lethal injection. Her actions were seemingly motivated by a genuine belief that she was performing acts of mercy by freeing people from the madness of [[MegaCity Mega-City One]]. At one point, Oola and Homer escape capture and flee to Brit-Cit, where they'd open up a perfectly legal euthanasia clinic, but Oola found that killing people gave her no satisfaction if they actually ''wanted'' to die, so she began murdering people again. This causes Homer to finally see through her deluded self-justification for her actions ([[NotSoWellIntentionedExtremist Oola actually killed because she liked killing]]) and finally inform the judges about her.

* ''Fanfic/MikesNewGhostlyFamily'': It was revealed that the true reason why Evan Afton, a.k.a. [[VideoGame/FiveNightsAtFreddys4 the Bite of '83 victim]] died was ''not'' due to passing away from his injuries, but because his father, William Afton, had his life support unplugged. He presented his case as a MercyKill, despite the doctors stating that he could've survived were his injury treated sufficiently, claiming that he doesn't want to leave him broken for the rest of his life. In truth, however, William simply [[TheSociopath didn't want to waste his time raising a disabled child]], [[spoiler:and wanted to [[HeKnowsTooMuch keep Evan silent]] about Elizabeth's death at Circus Baby's hands.]] This act cemented the ire he got from Shadow Freddy, a.k.a. [[spoiler:Evan Afton's ghost]], who was furious that his father would kill him for such petty reasons.

* ''Film/MeMyselfAndIrene'': Early during the road trip to transfer Irene Waters to federal custody, she and Officer Charlie Baileygates encounter a cow that was hit by a car and Charlie, thinking the cow is a goner, shoots her with his sidearm to give her a MercyKill. The cow turns out to be MadeOfIron, though, and [[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MX7Yo0tWDgk keeps struggling to get up]] even after Charlie empties his sidearm's entire magazine on the poor thing and tries to choke her to death, all the while yelling to stop making it difficult and just die already. During the end credits, [[BrickJoke we even get to see the cow grazing in a field all bandaged up]]. A deleted scene took it even further, where shortly after the incident Charlie and Irene encounter a farmer who warns them to keep an eye out for his prize cow who escaped from his pasture, adding that she has a bad habit of napping in the road.

* ''Literature/{{Misery}}'': Downplayed due to Annie's clear insanity. She started off "mercy-killing" people when she worked as a nurse to take people out of their "poor, unfortunate" circumstances. It's clear that, due to her God complex, "they were all poor unfortunate souls."

* ''Series/TheBlacklist'': Reddington does this to Elizabeth's adoptive father, Sam, via VorpalPillow. While he partially does it because Sam is dying of cancer, he's also motivated to do so to keep Sam from revealing his true identity.
* ''Series/CriminalMinds'': Unsurprisingly for a show that deals with the broad spectrum of types of SerialKiller, there has been a few examples of "angels of death" (also occasionally called "angels of mercy"):
** In "Broken Wing", the killer was a recovered drug addict who targeted fellow addicts in rehab centers believing that he was helping them prevent the inevitable relapse.
** In "Children of the Dark", one member of the foster-brother tag-team of family annihilators poisons the children to give them peaceful deaths, in direct comparison to his brother who [[NoHoldsBarredBeatdown bludgeons the parents to death with anything he can get his hands on]]. They targeted families that they believed to be abusive ([[FreudianExcuse as theirs were]], [[FosteringForProfit both of them]]), the murdered children were going to a better place.
** In "Closing Time", the killer was a bartender who targeted customers who were on a downward spiral because their wives had become unfaithful and they were unable to find good work, just like it had happened to him. He claimed that he was helping them take "the way out? that said spiral was not letting them choose.
** In the episode "A Higher Power", the criminal of the week is targeting the grieving families of fourteen children that died in a fire, thinking that he is helping them move on from their grief and be TogetherInDeath with their children. Ironically, the "[[MakeItLookLikeASuicide suicide]]" that put the BAU on his trail was an actual suicide he was totally uninvolved with, and the agents had to inform this to the detective brother of the dead man, who spent the whole episode hoping that ThereAreNoCoincidences.
** In "Miasma", the killer was a man who murdered sick people (with symptoms similar to the sickness [[FreudianExcuse his own mother had]]) believing that he was doing them a favor by giving them a quicker and less humiliating death. Of course, he also decided that he had to do something about preventing the disease from spreading, namely [[KillItWithFire setting their homes on fire]].
* ''Series/{{Dexter}}'': The titular SerialKillerKiller's first victim was an "Angel of Death" nurse who overdosed sick and elderly patients with morphine to "take their pain away", whether or not they actually happened to be terminally ill.
* ''Series/{{Elementary}}'': {{Exploited}} in [[Recap/ElementaryS01E05LesserEvils "Lesser Evils"]]. A custodian at a hospital had been a doctor in his native country and started {{Mercy Kill}}ing terminally ill patients on his own initiative. [[spoiler:The actual MonsterOfTheWeek is a surgeon who was in danger of losing his job over errors, and tried to cover up his latest flub, leaving a clamp in a thoracic surgery patient's chest, by altering her chart to show terminal cardiac cancer so the "angel of death" whom he'd realized was active at the hospital would kill her for him.]]
* ''Series/KillingEve'': Villanelle meets Gabriel, who is maimed in the car accident that killed his parents. He hasn't yet seen his burns, but she sees them and concedes that they are bad. She then immediately gives him a NeckSnap without further discussion.
* In ''Series/{{Ratched}}'', we are told a DarkSecret of Mildred Ratched: that she was kicked out of the Army for euthanizing injured soldiers when she served as a nurse in the Korean War. She commits further murder and mayhem [[OriginsEpisode on the road]] to becoming the BattleaxeNurse of the Oregon psychiatric hospital she runs with an iron fist in ''Film/OneFlewOverTheCuckoosNest''.

* ''Series/WhyWomenKill'': When he was a kid, Bertram Filcott performed a MercyKill on his mother at her request. This set him on the path to become an "Angel of Death", a SerialKiller of people who are incredibly sick and in pain, reasoning that it's better than letting them suffer. [[AntiVillain He does this with truly altruistic intentions in mind]], viewing it as a sad but ultimately merciful act. The problem is, he never ''asks'' if people want this "kindness", and it genuinely doesn't occur to him that he should.

-->'''Ranger:''' What's she saying?
-->'''Dwarf:''' She says we should leave her down there and be on our way.
-->'''Elf:''' Get me out of here, it's all sticky!
-->'''Dwarf:''' She says we should drop big rocks on her head to finish her off.

* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'': This is SerialKiller Oola Blint's, aka "The Angel of Mercy", entire ''modus operandi'', often with the assistance of her weak-willed husband, Homer Blint. She would frequently incapacitate unwitting victims with gas before administering a lethal injection. Her actions were seemingly motivated by a genuine belief that she was performing acts of mercy by freeing people from the madness of [[MegaCity Mega-City One]]. At one point, Oola and Homer escape capture and flee to Brit-Cit, where they'd open up a perfectly legal euthanasia clinic, but Oola found that killing people gave her no satisfaction if they actually ''wanted'' to die, so she began murdering people again. This causes Homer to finally see through her deluded self-justification for her actions (Oola actually killed because she liked killing) and finally informed the judges about her.

* ''AudioPlay/LeDonjonDeNaheulbeuk'': At one point the elf falls in a PitTrap and yells at the rest of the party to rescue her. [[https://lacomtedugeek.fr/repliques/humour/le-donjon-de-naheulbeuk/elle-dit-quon-devrait-lui-balancer-des-rochers-sur-la-gueule-pour-lachever/ The dwarf has different ideas.]]

* ''ComicBook/JudgeDredd'': This is SerialKiller Oola Blint's, aka "The Angel of Mercy", entire ''modus operandi'', often with the assistance of her weak-willed husband, Homer Blint. She would frequently incapacitate unwitting victims with gas before administering a lethal injection. Her actions were seemingly motivated by a genuine belief that she was performing acts of mercy by freeing people from the madness of [[MegaCity Mega-City One]]. At one point, Oola and Homer escape capture and flee to Brit-Cit, where they'd open up a perfectly legal euthanasia clinic, but Oola found that killing people gave her no satisfaction if they actually ''wanted'' to die, so she began murdering people again. This caused Homer to finally see through her deluded self-justification for her actions (Oola actually killed because she liked killing) and finally informed the judges on her.

* ''ComicBook/TheTransformersMarvel'': The Deathbringers are mechanoids tasked with travelling through space and offering the release of death to those who seek it. However, a damaged and dying Deathbringer comes into contact with the damaged Matrix of Leadership, which corrupts its programming into concluding ''all'' life is suffering. The corrupted Deathbringer makes its way to Earth, raining destruction on a human city and killing a healthy Autobot reconaissance team. The battle with it is complicated by the fact Optimus Prime desperately wants to keep the Deathbringer in one piece so they can try to find out where it came into contact with the Matrix.

* In the Creator/AgathaChristie novel ''By the Pricking of my Thumbs'', Literature/TommyAndTuppence [[VillainOfAnotherStory remember the case of an "angel of mercy"]] as they try to figure the mystery of the disappearance of a friend of theirs:
-->"A French woman. A woman who?d suffered terribly from the loss of her husband and her child. She was brokenhearted and she was an angel of mercy." "That?s right," said Tuppence, "I remember. They called her the angel of whatever the village was. Given or something like that. She went to all the neighbours and nursed them when they were ill. Particularly she used to go to children when they were ill. She nursed them devotedly. But sooner or later, after apparently a slight recovery, they grew much worse and died. She spent hours crying and went to the funeral crying and everybody said they wouldn't know what they'd have done without the angel who'd nursed their darlings and done everything she could."

** In "Miasma", the killer was a man who murdered sick people (with symptoms similar to the sickness [[FreudianExcuse his own mother had]]) believing that he was doing them a favor by giving them a quicker and less humiliating death? of course, he also decided that he had to do something about preventing the disease from spreading, namely [[KillItWithFire setting their homes on fire]].

* ''Series/{{Elementary}}'': {{Exploited}} in [[Recap/ElementaryS01E05LesserEvils "Lesser Evils"]]. A custodian at a hospital had been a doctor in his native country, and started {{Mercy Kill}}ing terminally ill patients on his own initiative. [[spoiler:The actual MonsterOfTheWeek is a surgeon who was in danger of losing his job over errors, and tried to cover up his latest flub, leaving a clamp in a thoracic surgery patient's chest, by altering her chart to show terminal cardiac cancer so the "angel of death" whom he'd realized was active at the hospital would kill her for him.]]

* ''Theatre/ArsenicAndOldLace'': The majority of the plot hinges on Mortimer Brewster discovering that his elderly aunts are serial killers who [[KillThePoor poison homeless men]] who arrive to their house looking for the room they have for rent. They believe that they are doing them a kindness after they noticed the tenant who died from a heart attack (and became their stressor) looked so peaceful once he passed away and they want to help other "poor, lonely men" find the same peace.

[[/folder]]

* ''Film/MeMyselfAndIrene'': Early during the road trip to transfer Irene Waters to federal custody, she and Officer Charlie Baileygates encounter a cow that was hit by a car and Charlie, thinking the cow is a goner, shoots her with his sidearm to give her a MercyKill. The cow turns out to be MadeOfIron, though, and [[https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=MX7Yo0tWDgk keeps struggling to get up]] even after Charlie empties his sidearm's entire magazine on the poor thing and tries to choke her to death, all the while yelling to stop making it difficult and just die already. Several scenes later, [[BrickJoke we even get to see the cow grazing in a field all bandaged up]].

[[folder:Visual Novels]]
* ''VisualNovel/DanganronpaV3KillingHarmony'': Kokichi and Gonta see a flashback light revealing Earth has become an apocalyptic wasteland. Kokichi then convinces the other boy to help make a Trial where everyone will fail to find the killer, allowing them to MercyKill the students so no one will have to learn the AwfulTruth. Unfortunately, the students refuse to die and Gonta is executed for killing Miu. However, Kokichi later reveals he wasn't invested in the MercyKill plan and actually has a larger scheme to end the Killing Game.
[[/folder]]

* ''Series/TheBlacklist'': Reddington does this to Elizabeth's adoptive father, Scott, via VorpalPillow. While he partially does it because Scott is dying of cancer, he's also motivated to do so to keep Scott from revealing his true identity.

[[/folder]]
----
Indexes: MurderTropes