Fatal Family Photo / Anime & Manga

• The manga of Black Cat has an accountant for the mafia show off a picture of his family to Train and Sven. Being, well, a runaway from the mafia, he gets killed by an assassin shortly after.
• In the backstory of Case Closed, this happened many years ago to Superintendent Matsumoto's partner and best friend, Morimura. He was about to marry and once he showed Matsumoto a picture of his sweetheart... and few later he was fatally hit by a Serial Killer's car, bleeding to death in Matsumoto's arms. The trope is sort-of discussed as well, since Matsumoto and other policemen talk about how, whenever a member of the police talks openly about his/her beloved or make them a promise, they tend to become more reckless and often end up injured or dead. Which almost happens to Takagi at the end of the case: trying to impress his girlfriend Sato, he ultimately gets involved in an Alone with the Psycho situation that almost kills him.
• Played with on Digimon Tamers. During the final arc, we see a scene where one of the computer programmers none-too-subtly looks at a framed picture of him and his son and granddaughter, which is actually used to cement the implication that his granddaughter, who appeared a few episodes earlier, was really Dead All Along. Nothing happens to the programmer in question.
• Dragon Ball Super: Gohan faces Obni, another warrior from an entirely different universe. Both are forced to battle each other in the Top God's Deadly Game. And as it turns out, Obni's just as much of a Family Man as Gohan is: he accidentally drops a framed photo of his wife and child in their fight. When Obni loses, he's erased from existence. The photo quickly follows him into nothingness, in front of Gohan's shaken eyes.
• In the Excel♡Saga anime, the titular main character is working part time at a construction site where her co-worker Pedro weeps passionately about being separated from his adoring family. Naturally, he provides us with a photograph as well as some lampshaded flash back footage. Later on, the construction site catches fire and he dies horribly when he runs back into the inferno to retrieve his family photo. That doesn't stop him from becoming a major character, though.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Lt. Colonel Hughes carries a photo of his fiancée with him during the Ishbalan war. Genre Savvy Colonel Mustang then points out that if they were in a war story, carrying a photo of her around and showing it off so proudly would be a sure-fire way to die ironically on the battlefield. It's subverted as this is a flashback and the audience knows that he does make it back to his girlfriend and marries her and has a kid. This is a reference to the fact that all through the series, he's showing off pictures of his daughter and occasionally of his wife. Double Subverted as he is the first important character to die. Plus, the family picture partially causes Hughes's death: he drops it in the phone booth, Envy sees it and is able to transform into his wife, and poor Hughes can't stab him to save his own life.
  • Played with in manga Hohenheim's case: he chats about his family picture with a young mother on a coach, the coach gets attacked by thugs, Hohenheim gets shot while defending the other passengers... Turns out that he's putting his near-invincibility to good use and that the thugs don't manage to kill or even wound him no matter how many times they shoot him. " How cruel... Shooting so many times. Oh good, the picture has nothing."
• Miaka takes a happy picture with her True Companions in the middle of Fushigi Yuugi. Four episodes later, Nuriko dies and triggers the death domino.
• In Heavy Object, Kevin, an older member of the 37th Maintenance Battalion, carries around a photograph of his wife and child which he happily shows off and talks about. The other soldiers are Genre Savvy enough to see he's all but asking to be killed, eventually opting to order him to seek safety while they take on a unit of elite soldiers. At this Kevin breaks down and admits the photo wasn't his family, he just didn't want to look lame for being a bachelor at his age. The others promptly load him down with armor and two guns before sending him to fight the enemy solo, because there's no way somebody so pathetic will die.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Happens picture-perfectly in Battle Tendency. Joseph and Caesar accompany Mark, a young Nazi soldier and friend of Caesar to witness The Pillar Men, and he shows them a picture of his girlfriend. Guess who's among the first victims when they awaken?
  • Diamond is Unbreakable: Shigechi casually showed a picture of his own mom in his introduction... and ends up getting killed by Yoshikage Kira.
• Done ridiculously fast in an early episode from Legend of the Galactic Heroes, where you can't count to 6 before the two Alliance gunners die after one shows the Fatal Family Photo to his friend.
• Physica from Macross 7, has to be the master of this trope. Not only does he show us a picture of his wife and daughter before he's killed in combat, but he's about to be re-united with his family a day late for his daughter's birthday, and the photo he shows us is in a handmade music box for the daughter's birthday. He tugs more at our heart strings by telling us that his daughter doesn't recognize his face... What's more, after he dies a senseless death and his team mate (one of the Love Triangle) goes to deliver the birthday gift/family photo to his wife and child, it's implied that his wife was cheating on him. This series doesn't kill very often so they make sure to get their millage. The only other death of note is the Heroic Sacrifice.
• Mobile Suit Gundam 00:
  • The moment Kinue Crossroad was seen looking at the picture of her family, it was obvious her time was up. Didn't take long.
  • Season 2 has the same thing happen to Barack Zinin.
  • Sergei Smirnov is arguably killed by at least five family photos on his mantelpiece at home.
• Strangely subverted in the second OVA of Mobile Suit Gundam Unicorn, where Mr. Gilboa looks at at a folded piece of paper that the audience views from the back side, only for it to be revealed to be just written orders
• In Naruto Shippuden, a picture of Gaara and his siblings falls off the bedside table, and the crack in the frame is mostly over Gaara. This is a Foreshadowing that something very bad is about to happen to him. He gets better, though.
• Jessie's mother in Pokémon: The Series carried around a photo of her daughter. When she went looking for Mew in the Andes mountains and ended up lost in a blizzard. Prior to that she showed Mew the picture of her daughter in hopes it would let her capture it. Of course Miyamoto didn't die, though no one else knows that.
• Averted in Robotech: The New Generation (aka Genesis Climber MOSPEADA) and The Shadow Chronicles, where Scott/Stick and Marcus carry the locket showing Marlene around - and survive, often just as one of a few in their group.
• Rurouni Kenshin: While he doesn't have a photo to show off, Tomoe's fiance Akira begins talking to his comrades about how the two of them were childhood sweethearts and that he was going to marry her once the war was over (a war he got himself involved in in order to impress her though she actually liked him the way he was but could never properly show her affection ).... right when Battousai shows up. Later on, the events that took place would turn into a Personal Effects Reveal for Kenshin aka the aforementioned Battousai, since he overheard Akira saying Tomoe's name - who would end up marrying Kenshin and later die for him - right before he killed him, though he never thought anything of it at the time. He'd only realise who he was and how important Akira was to Tomoe much later.
• In Sailor Moon: Sailor Stars, when Mamoru is on a flight to America, he looks back at the photo of him with Usagi and Chibiusa before Galaxia attacks and kills him. He is revived at the final episode, however.
• In Saikano, all of the characters that carry the photos of their loved ones to war die horribly. Their loved ones die too.
• Spriggan. A post-mortem version appears in the Noah's Ark story when an ARCAM Red Shirt (Kevin in the ONA version) talks of how he's going to get married, only to be sliced up by Little Boy. Yu is shown angrily looking at the Red Shirt's phot lying in a pool of blood (The ONA shows the smartphone, which has his fiance's photo as the phone's background image.
• Happen in early episode of Tekkaman Blade, a professor is killed after he shows Takaya/D-Boy his families photo before his Heroic Sacrifice. While D-Boy's anger against the military because of said events is normal for well... Normal person, it feels REALLY out of character if we considers how D-Boy acts up to this point, and the fact that his rage is against the millitary member. That is until you see what happens to D-Boy's later on the series.
• The first episode of The Tower of Druaga: The Aegis of Uruk lampoons this trope heavily.
• Subverted in Zipang. The American pilot of the Dauntless divebomber keeps looking at the picture of his wife just as it looks like he's about to ram his plane into the Mirai. However, he jumps off and parachutes to safety just before impact, carefully keeping his wife's photo before he does.
• Voltes V: After his parents are abducted, Nakamura gazes at a childhood photo◊ of them together, hoping they'll be alright. Because Aliens Are Bastards, they aren't.