History Main / NeverSayDie

* In ''Franchise/{{Halo}}'', Spartans are persistently rumored to be immortal as a form of psychological warfare against the Covenant, and to boost morale in the UNSC. Thus, even when they really do die, they are never listed as "KIA", only "MIA" or "WIA".

*** The Deadpool episode parodys this as Deadpool cannot say "the k-word" and prefers the term "unaliving" his enemies.

* Played for laughs in ''Mario Super Sluggers'', where a Magikoopa who Bowser charged with guarding a lighthouse confuses sayings each time you challenge it. (For example "Early to bed and early to rise makes a man angry and hungry for pies."). If you fail his challenge and talk to him he'll attempt to use the expressions "Never say die" and "live and let die" only replacing the word 'die' with 'bye.' When a Lakitu attempts to correct him, he interrupts the correction and the challenge begins.

* ''VideoGame/NewSuperMarioBrosWii'''s instruction manual quite glaringly refers to "blunder" and "make a mistake" rather than death. It still says you "lose a life" though.
** And now it's gotten worse: ''VideoGame/SonicColors'' manual refers to "losing a try." The earliest Sonic games referred to Lives as Chances, though, so this may be a case of returning to its roots.
*** The ''VideoGame/{{Sonic Advance|Trilogy}}'' manual referred to lives as "tries" as well. For example: "Gain an extra try".
*** Averted in ''VideoGame/SonicJump''; certain missions require Sonic to get ''killed'' by a Badnik or falling object.

* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'': "She's- She's- [[TearJerker She's sleeping under the tree on top of the hill!]]" ({{Justified|Trope}} seeing as how Rosalina, still being a child, didn't quite understand the concept of death)
** Also, before you even fight him, {{B|igBad}}owser will actually say "I'm gonna smash you to space bits!"

** In general, well-defined and intuitive technical terms are more important than [[NeverSayDie]].

* In ''TabletopGame/MagicTheGathering'', creatures are "destroyed", even though the amount of damage is "lethal" and they go to a discard pile called a "graveyard". Likewise, players with no life left just "lose the game".
** This is because "destroy" is the term for sending a card from play to the graveyard via damage or "destroy" effects, and includes things that aren't alive such as enchantments and lands. There's no reason to create a separate term for the same game mechanic when it's applied to creatures. Traditional Planeswalkers meanwhile are incredibly difficult to actually kill, their physical bodies simply being a [[FightingAShadow projection of their will.]]
** Changed in the Magic 2012 expansion; while cards still "destroy" creatures, the creatures themselves are referred to as dying.

** In ''VideoGame/PokemonMysteryDungeon'', rated [[GettingCrapPastTheRadar E for Extreme Technicality]], this seems to be part of an overall pattern of very thinly veiling all manner of terrible, terrible things. This could actually make the game ''more'' disturbing, since it ends up reading like the characters are too innocent to come to terms with what's happening to them enough to talk about it straight-forwardly.
*** Hell, two of the characters seriously contemplate ''committing suicide'' without ever stating it out loud.

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* One of the most painful examples (at least to {{Anime}} fans), is in ''[[Manga/DragonBall DragonBall Z]]''. Dialogue was arbitrarily changed to turn "kill" into "send to another dimension". This could get quite unwieldy: "My next attack is so powerful, it will destroy this planet and send everyone on it to another dimension!" or "Yeah, Frieza's attack sent me to another dimension, and I need you to wish me back with the Dragon Balls!" The censors initially didn't even allow the use of the next most common euphemism, "destroy". The afterlife was also referred to only as "another dimension" for a sizable chunk of the series. Since the series' {{uncancel|ed}}ling, the censorship was lessened. Often a good source of comedy in any case because the replacement words are so ridiculous.

** The original dub of ''Manga/DragonBall Z'' changed "HELL" (which was on the T-shirts of the people who worked there) to "HFIL" -- "Home For Infinite Losers." This resulted in an odd in-congruence later on, when the [=DVDs=]' subtitles and closed captioning often referred to Hell, while the dialogue did not.

*** The censoring of the Hell staff's t-shirts resulted in the phrase "what the HFIL" among the ''DragonBallZ'' fandom.

** {{Parod|y}}ied in the TrappedInTVLand episode of ''WesternAnimation/TheFairlyOddParents''. Timmy tells Vicky in the ''[[Manga/DragonBall DBZ]]'' parody that she can have the magic remote "over my cold, non-moving, limited-animation body!"

** After [=FUNimation=] took over, all this fear of using these words ceased. However, in Canada, Ocean took over again from Episode 168 onward. In this case, the words "kill", "dead", and "die" are never mentioned, being replaced with "hurt" (which gets ridiculous in many situations, but "destroy" is used in some cases), "gone", and "leave". The exception is a figure of speech used by Krillin near the end of the World Tournament Saga. However, in Episode 236, when Gotenks races off to fight Buu, Piccolo says "If he gets killed now, all our efforts are in vain." From here, the words "kill", "die", "dead", and "death" are used as frequently as in the FUNimation dub, and are never replaced again.
*** And now the [=CW4Kids=] [[EditedForSyndication version]] is playing this straight for the remake, ''Anime/DragonBallKai''. The Nicktoons version also seems to play it semi-straight -- you can say "die", but you can't say "kill/murder/etc". It seems to be random in which it occurs, even kill has been used a few times. No murder, though, yet.

** The ''Naruto: Shippuden'' broadcast version on DisneyXD has shown that this is in full effect for the most part; for example, they changed Itachi's line in the first episode into "You must DEFEAT your best friend. You must DESTROY him."

* In the Lion Version of ''Anime/{{Voltron}}'', the main characters had a nearly clairvoyant ability to tell whether or not the citizens of a destroyed city or planet had evacuated, just by looking at the burned and blasted out remains of said city or planet. Just about every other NeverSayDie rule was in effect for this series (although the censors did let at least ''one'' "peasants being eaten whole by monsters" scene slip past them.)

** The Vehicle Force Voltron also had to NeverSayDie. (Example: one of the villains is actually killed in an early episode, but in his death scene, an image of him saying "[[WeWillMeetAgain I'll be back]]" is spliced in) Look up Voltron on Wikipedia and you'll see how different the American and Japanese versions really are.

** ''PokemonDiamondAndPearlAdventure'' plays this straight too, to an extent. A character ''attempts suicide'' but they still refer to it as "going" (as in "We don't want you to go") rather than "die". It's not as apparent as other examples as people often do use that euphemism, but it still counts.
* ''Anime/DigimonAdventure'' starts with it being an ironclad rule: the first die-related word uttered is Myotismon saying of the Eighth Child, "and when we do find him, then he must die!" The fandom was in total shock at it. Each successive season gets a little more comfortable with it - by the last arc of Tamers and the first arc of Frontier, hearing death words (in an ''actual end-of-life context,'' not "Mom's gonna kill me if I don't get home in time for dinner!") ceases to be remarkable, only for it to return full force in ''DigimonDataSquad.''

** ''[[Anime/DigimonSavers Data Squad]]'' plays the trope very straight -- the word "die" is used twice, maybe three times throughout the whole series, and only to say that Digimon-don't-die. Every other death, Digimon or human, is euphemisized.

*** ''DigimonDataSquad'' is a notable exception for this, though.

* ''[[Anime/UchuuSenkanYamato Star Blazers]]'' is ''aggressive'' about removing deaths from the original ''Yamato' series. The series was edited so that people "had time to evacuate", "were covered by avalanches", "were actually robots", "got out just behind you", ad nauseum, instead of being killed.

** Played straight with Applebloom with a [[{{Bowdlerise}} Bowdlerised]] version of the "I'm To Young to Die" stock phrase

** There ''are,'' however, cases of religious terms being used, most notably during the famous Hellfire sequence in Disney/TheHunchbackOfNotreDame.

** As for sexuality, though... [[Disney/TheHunchbackOfNotreDame Let's not crack that bottle]]...

* In ''BugsyMalone'', pie takes the place of guns and bullets. Characters who get pied are said to be "finished," and never show up again.

* PlayedForDrama in ''ATreeGrowsInBrooklyn'', where Francie is made by her mother to cross out every instance of the word "drunk" (a frequent condition of her father) in her diary and replace it with "sick."
* The ''{{Green-Sky Trilogy}}'' doesn't have issues describing something as dead, but as pacifists, they replaced with word "Kill" with "dead", and stigmatize the usage as a verb.

* ''Series/TheATeam''. Since it was classified as a children's show, you have the ridiculous premise in which the A Team amasses a massive arsenal of machine guns and weaponry, faces off against a similarly armed force, exchange thousands of retorts of gunfire - '''and no one dies'''. [[ATeamFiring Man, their aim sucked]].
** Parodied in ''WesternAnimation/FamilyGuy'' when Peter and company, dressed as the A-Team, attempt to stop a construction crew from demolishing a park using guns and ramming into things with their vans. The main characters are surprised when the construction crew assumes Peter and friends are trying to kill them.

** The worst one is in a recent series: "I will destroy you or be destroyed trying!"

* Soap Operas are notorious for having couples "make love" instead of "have sex"; perhaps the most egregious example was when ''GeneralHospital'''s Laura Webber recalled her ''rape'' by Luke Spencer as "the first time we made love". Pregnant women also seem to be fond of referring to themselves not as "pregnant" but as "carrying [baby's father's name]'s child," although this is starting to change.

* ''Series/TheSarahJaneAdventures'', normally a show with a low body-count, has Sarah Jane encounter Oddbob, source of the Pied Piper myth. Naturally, when he disappears children, they don't "die", but are sent to another dimension. Since his powers have NoOntologicalInertia, his defeat frees them. But as it would be a storytelling inconvenience to deal with the reappearance of the ''hundreds'' of children he's abducted over 700 years with only three minutes of show left. So this possibility is ruled out with the explanation that the abducted children do not ''die'' but "fade away" over time. Frankly, the idea of the abducted children "fading away" seems a bit more NightmareFuel than to just explain Oddbob as a prolific alien serial killer. Especially since it wasn't afraid of using the word die in ''Whatever Happened to Sarah Jane?'' when Maria tells Andrea she was meant to die and Andrea repeats the line back to her in disgust.

* ''KamenRiderDragonKnight'' uses being "vented" to explain that the defeated riders are sent to the "Advent Void," the nexus point between the mirror world and the real one, and will not be able to ever return. This seems to be one more case of replacing death with a FateWorseThanDeath.

** JD has rattles off a quick list of variations on the word "die" that can be used while trying to teach intern Keith how to break news to a terminal patient including such gems as "deadsies" and "{{Deadwood}}" (did you know Cowboys used to curse?)

* In the ''TabletopGame/MageKnight'' miniatures game, a critter is explicitly dead when its dial is turned and three skulls appear in its stat slot. In HeroClix, by the same company, there are no skulls -- instead, three big red 'KO's appear, and the rules specifically refer to such as state as being 'defeated'.

* ''Lycee TCG'' has an interesting take on this trope. Characters that left the field due to losing battle or hit by certain effects is said to be 'discarded', as though they are merely cards in your hands or decks. There is no clear border between 'a character' and 'a character card', unlike ''Magic'' or similar competitive card games. Which helps the players in [[NightmareFuel not imagining what logically happens]]: it doesn't matter if your [[VisualNovel/{{CLANNAD}} Ibuki Fuuko]] is knocked out by [[SteinsGate Shiina Mayuri]], [[{{Tsukihime}} Serpent of Akasha]], or ''[[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill the frickin]] VisualNovel/{{Demonbane}}'', she's only 'discarded' into your 'dustbox'.

* An JustForFun/{{egregious}} if little known example is ''Manga/DragonBall Z Legendary Super Warriors'' on the GameboyColor. It appears that at some point the translators did a find/replace on the words 'die', 'died', 'death', 'kill' and 'killed' and switched them all for 'lost', regardless of sentence structure. So while things like "I can't believe Piccollo lost!" make sense, more or less, you also get dialogue like "Lost, Vegeta! Lost!" and [[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ymuczR7oZH4 "I guess you DO want to lost!"]]

** ''VideoGame/TeenageMutantNinjaTurtles'' don't die, they "get caught".
*** Justified at least in the NES version since they DO get caught if defeated and can be found tied up in a chair and rescued in later levels.

** The ''Stadium'' games also mention how a Pokemon is "about to die" if you send it out while their HP is low. [[NightmareFuel Take that as you will]].

* ''VideoGame/XMenLegends II'' turns all villains defeated (except for the giant bugs, which splatter) into a NonLethalKO, which isn't always plausible (tossing someone into lava, for example.) Discussion of death isn't toned down, though.
** This is the ''Franchise/MarvelUniverse''. It is a [[DeathIsCheap physical impossibility for a person to stay dead]] there, so it's not as lunatic as it might first seem.

*** The theme song that appears in the movie actually says that the Joes "NeverSayDie". Mind you, they don't have to, because nobody ever does.

** [[{{Morbius}} Morbius the Living Vampire]] drank "[[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blood_plasma plasma]]", not blood (he was also modified to use suckers in his hands rather than biting people). (But in the Swedish dub, it was "blood plasma", so [[NightmareFuel he was sucking blood through suckers in his hands]].) Interestingly, he's sorta censor-''flipped'' from the original comics. Due to the ComicsCode's prohibition of such things at the time, Morbius had to wear a bright red and blue suit and not have anything like a vampire theme beyond the fact that he sucked blood. The cartoon was able to make him much more vampirey, dressing in black and having the expected accent.

** This was possibly a bit of a TakeThat to the censors at Creator/WarnerBros In the DVD commentaries, both Creator/BruceTimm and Creator/PaulDini state that since they were not allowed to kill off any humans, they frequently tried to come up with things that were inherently more disturbing than outright death. In this case, the bad guys essentially [[NightmareFuel lobotomized themselves]].

*** Likewise with SelfDemonstrating/TheJoker's laughing gas. Also a certified source of NightmareFuel.

-->'''Vicky (as Goldfinger)''': No, Mister Twerp; I expect you to [[NeverSayDie CRY!]]

* In ''Franchise/TransformersGeneration1,'' death words are used frequently, but death happens infrequently (outside the movie, which is nearly a KillEmAll so [[MerchandiseDriven new toys can replace the old]]. The season following the movie didn't kill off any known characters, though one disastrous battle saw the destruction of several ships known to be manned.) Later series use them less, preferring 'scrapped,' 'taken offline,' etc but are more likely to have a death [[KilledOffForReal stick]]. Rattrap's CatchPhrase is a sardonic "we're all gonna die," but when someone's actually believed to be dead, "scrapped" or "destroyed" is ''much'' more likely to be used when referring to their condition. However, when it comes to the presence of death, the Beast era takes AnyoneCanDie to a higher level than even ''Series/TwentyFour'' or ''{{Torchwood}}.''

* [[AvertedTrope Averted]] in ''WesternAnimation/StarTrekTheAnimatedSeries'', which was not afraid to mention or show death. This became a rather large source of controversy in the episode "Yesteryear", which featured [[spoiler: the death of Spock's childhood pet and the sadness that comes with it]] in a surprisingly realistic manner.

* Parodied in an episode of ''BatmanTheBraveAndTheBold'' adapting one of the "Bat-Manga!" comics. The short ends with villain Lord Death Man's helicopter crashing and the villain dying right there, but Robin makes mention of seeing a parachute. When the short ends, Bat-Mite mentions how silly American dubbers are.

* Generally averted in GreenLanternTheAnimatedSeries. Perhaps most heart enchantingly when Razer ''tries'' to use this trope.
--> Hal: Where is [[spoiler: Aia]]?
--> Razer: She's gone.
--> Hal: Where is she?
--> Razer: She's ''gone''.
--> Hal: What do you mean she's gone?
--> Razer: She's '''''dead'''''! That thing '''''killed her'''''!
* Averted in WesternAnimation/MightyMax, big time. The villains are not at all afraid to say they're going to kill the heroes (one of which is [[WouldHurtAChild a preteen boy]] no less). Some of them, most notably the BigBad Skullmaster, even give graphic descriptions of what they plan on doing to the main characters.

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* ''VideoGame/SuperMarioGalaxy'': "She's- She's- [[TearJerker She's sleeping under the tree on top of the hill!]]" ({{Justified|Trope}} seeing as how Rosalind didn't quite understand the concept of death)

** There ''are,'' however, cases of religious terms being used, most notably during the famous Hellfire sequence/

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* The only time this is played straight in the ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda'' series is whenever someone mentions Tai Lung after Po uses the "Wuxi Finger Hold" on him, which seemingly causes him to blow up in a golden burst of chi, and yet all we hear of him at the end of the movie is that Po "defeated" him. During the [[ChristmasSpecial holiday special]], however, Tai Lung shows up in a dream and Po states, "I thought you were d--" before he gets clobbered, unable to finish his sentence; then again, the one having this dream didn't even witness Tai Lung's fate. Other than that, this trope is averted, especially in ''WesternAnimation/KungFuPanda2'', which outright states whenever characters are KilledOffForReal.
** Of course, there's not much of an excuse to use this trope when you have ''genocide'' as a major plot point.

For one reason or another, children's shows also shy away from using "God." Whenever religion comes into play, it is generally replaced with [[LowestCosmicDenominator something along the lines of "the big guy"]]. This one also has its roots in ancient tradition: in Judaism, it is considered blasphemous to use any of God's various actual ''names'' except in specific prayers, so His titles ("God" is considered a title; also "the Lord", "the Name", etc) are used instead, and over time even these have become somewhat taboo, to the point where very observant Jews will write "G-d". Words such as Damn and Hell will likely be replaced by [[GoshDangItToHeck "Dang it!"]] while Hell is replaced by underworld or [[EverybodyHatesHades Hades]] and so on , even though many people claim that anything in the Bible isn't a swear.

** Ironically, averted by two of Nintendo's own titles in the [[SuperNintendoEntertainmentSystem SNES era]]. ''{{VideoGame/F-Zero}}'' got to keep its Death Wind courses, and ''VideoGame/TheLegendofZeldaALinktoThePast'' retained Death Mountain even in the American version.

** Ironically, averted by two of Nintendo's own titles in the [[SuperNintendoEntertainmentSystem SNES era]]. ''{{F-Zero}}'' got to keep its Death Wind courses, and ''TheLegendofZeldaALinktoThePast'' retained Death Mountain even in the American version.

* Averted in the 1995 Australian film ''Napoelon'', where the characters often fling around words like 'die' and 'kill'. In particular, the villain of the piece (an AxCrazy black cat), often makes death threats against protagonists Napoleon and Birdo (a labrador puppy and a rose-breasted cockatoo respectively), and at one point Birdo sings about ''how Napoleon has to kill in order to survive''.

*** The ''Stadium'' games also mention how a Pokemon is "about to die" if you send it out while their HP is low. [[NightmareFuel Take that as you will]].