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Karmic Death / Anime & Manga

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  • The death of Bertholdt in Attack on Titan. Being majorly responsible for the first Titan invasion, which resulted in a large chunk of humanity (actually a large chunk of the isolated Eldians) being devoured by Titans, as well as directly feeding one of his own comrades to a Titan, Bertholdt's final moments are to being Eaten Alive by a Titan-ized Armin that he had almost killed moments before, all the while screaming and begging for everyone to save him.
  • In Blood-C, Nono gets a brutal one. After shoving her twin sister, Nene, down so she could get her brains splattered out of her head and get eaten, she gets an even worse death than the one she consigned her sister to when she's caught by another Elder Bairn. While being held upside down, her legs are spread apart so fast and hard that there's a cracking/crunching sound, probably either her hips dislocating or her groin being torn to shreds. After a few moments of agonizing screaming, she's ripped in half at her crotch and privates.
  • Brutal: Satsujin Keisatsukan no Kokuhaku: The manga follows Serial-Killer Killer Dan Hiroki who makes ironic, inventive ways to murder the people who escaped the justice system in his opinion, with references to The Exorcist, due to being his favorite movie. An example includes fucking a rapist to death with a spiked crucifix dildo (both an ironic punishment for his crime and a reference of a scene from the aforementioned movie).
  • In The Castle of Cagliostro, the villain acquires Clarisse's ring in exchange for sparing Lupin's life (a deal he never intended to honor anyway) and uses it to unlock a valuable treasure. Unfortunately for him, the mechanism to unlock the treasure involves the hands of a large clock moving to the twelve o'clock position, and he gets crushed (and possibly decapitated) as a result. The camera cuts to a long Gory Discretion Shot but you can still hear a nasty crunching sound.
  • Code Geass:
    • The agents and soldiers whom Lelouch vi Britannia orders to die with his Geass always hope and expect to kill him.
    • V.V., after stooping to any possible low imaginable (including being the one behind the murder of Marianne and lying to Charles about it) and giving Lelouch hell throughout the series from afar, is finally defeated by Lelouch (with an assist from Cornelia). Now bleeding and crawling towards his brother Charles, he hopes for the latter's help. However, noticing that V.V. has been acting behind his back once again, Charles declares he has had enough and takes away his code, leaving the former immortal to die.
    • After proudly confessing to serving in the military just so he could publicly kill people, Luciano Bradley is brutally killed in battle. His killer, Kallen Kozuki, whom he threatened with rape and torture, even tossed his own sadistic Pre Ass Kicking One Liner back in his face right before doing him in. And no one misses him after he dies.
      Luciano: My life...?! My life is taken... BY A LOWLY ELEVEN?!? GAAAAAH...!
    • Emperor Charles' attempts at getting his children killed and/or letting his children get killed, which are described under and essentially the same as Offing the Offspring (aside from the fact that he'd let them die rather than actively try to kill them), are eventually repaid in kind by his son after he nears his life goal of slaying God during Episode 21 of R2; it's doubly karmic when you take into account the fact that (according to Suzaku) he could've saved Euphemia.
  • Combat Mecha Xabungle, the Big Bad Kashim King and his follower Biram Key who turn the series for the worse, are killed by having a huge missile dropped right at their faces.
  • A Cruel God Reigns: Greg is killed after getting into a car accident in the car that he raped Jeremy in.

  • Daltanious: Dr. Namil groomed Kloppen into being a wrathful warlord; it is the wrath-filled Kloppen that blows up his ship and causes his demise, even though by then he has defected from the Zaal Empire.
  • In Death Note, users of the titular notes have a nasty tendency to end up killed by one. Ryuk even states in the very first episode that he will write Light's name into his Death Note one day, which he does when Light is defeated in the very end of the series. It's especially fitting in the manga, where Light spends his remaining seconds lying on the ground, crying about how he doesn't want to die, appropriate for someone who inflicted the exact same fear on the world for years.
  • Moyuru from DEVILMAN crybaby sides with the demons because he thinks he'll have better chances of survival this way following the revelation of the existence of demons. When the final showdown between humans, demons and Devilmen comes, Akira rips him apart before the battle really starts.
  • Kurata meets his demise this way in Digimon Data Squad as the climax of a very well-deserved Humiliation Conga. His final plan to destroy the Digimon sets off a chain reaction, triggering an energy blast that vaporizes him.
  • Dragon Ball is another prime example. Protagonist Goku seldom kills anyone. Many bad guys throughout the series are either killed by a superior bad guy, reform and join Team Good, or end up killing themselves through Karmic Death.
    • Keep in mind with the examples of the Red Ribbon Army, Goku did not know how to pull his punches, and from his perspective, evil deeds make you an evil person. He actually explained his straightforward reasoning to Bulma (after he killed those Red Ribbon Army soldiers). If you survive, well, at least you're not moving, so Goku would leave you alone. Basically, if you're a bad guy, Kami must have a good reason to keep you alive when facing Goku (possibly for more punishment). Goku notably mellowed out when he was 18-19, with the years spent with Kami. After that, he couldn't stop sparing the bad guys (ironically, to his friends' surprise, even Bulma).
    • A sort of twisting of this trope comes with Frieza. It follows the trope at first, with Goku refusing to kill Frieza and Frieza lashing out at him behind his back, but the Karmic Death occurs when Goku turns around and destroys Frieza in his rage, no remorse. Though Frieza doesn't actually die. He later returns as a cyborg, and goes to Earth to kill Goku's friends in vengeance. It is then where he meets his actual death, in the form of Trunks, the son of Vegeta, whom he'd also killed, and it's really brutal. Trunks slices Frieza in half, then proceeds to slice those halves into even tinier bits, and he blows him to ashes with a ki blast. A rather expanded Karmic Death.
    • This trope actually fits Frieza more than one would be led to believe. Think about it. He does all he can to destroy the Saiyan race for fear that one day a Super Saiyan will emerge and destroy him. So what happens? He kills Krillin and threatens to kill an already defeated and injured Gohan, causing Goku to finally transform into a Super Saiyan before tearing Frieza a new hole. That's right. Frieza created the very being he spent such a long time trying to destroy.
  • Gendo Ikari's death in End of Evangelion fits this: It's confirmed to be a hallucination, but what we see is that Eva-01, which has his dead wife Yui's soul in it, picks Gendo up and bites his head off. He spends the entire series safeguarding EVA-01 at the expense of the rest of the cast, particularly the pilots. Yui was the reason he was trying to initiate Instrumentality, and why he treated others (especially their child, Shinji) like shit. Gendo is even said by Word of God to have wanted this to happen:
    "So, this is my retribution? I'm sorry, Shinji." *Crunch*
    • The manga plays this straighter; Gendo is finally killed when Ritsuko, the woman he manipulated, humiliated, and discarded without a thought, shoots him in the neck before she dies.
  • In Fullmetal Alchemist nearly all of the ways that the Homunculi are killed are either clearly ironic or a reference to Dante (Alighieri, not to be confused with the character of the same name from Fullmetal Alchemist (2003)) who made punishments that were more subtly or symbolically ironic.
    • The first Greed was impaled face down (as per Dante) then melted down for his most valuable part, Lust was incinerated (as per Dante), Gluttony was eaten alive by Pride, Envy pulled out his own heart out of self-hatred rather than live as a Homunculus, Sloth died after expending all his energy in a long and grueling fight, atheistic Wrath was killed by the rageful but religious Scar who survived the genocidal war that Wrath instigated (who got the opening when the sun (the symbol of God, which one of Wrath's victims said would fall on him) blinded Wrath), Pride unsuccessfully tried to take over the body of an "inferior being" (i.e. a human) and then was ultimately stripped of his power, the second Greed died performing a selfless act while saying that he'd gotten all he could ever want, and finally, Father, whose horrible deeds came about only because he wanted freedom and all the knowledge in the world, was dragged back into the darkness whence he came.
    • Shou Tucker, the infamous alchemist who transmuted his own daughter Nina and their dog Alexander into a chimera for his experiments so he could keep his State Alchemist title, gets fried from the inside out by Scar, who specifically targets State Alchemists gone bad.
    • In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Dante is presumed eaten alive by the mindless monster she turned Gluttony into.
      • Also from the 2003 anime, Sloth, the Homunculus who spends her time trying to kill the children of the woman she was based on (to prove she isn't that woman) ends up trapped in place (and thus easily dispatched by these children) because she developed a maternal relationship with a child-like Homunculus.
  • In Fushigi Yuugi, Suboshi tries to kill Tamahome and Miaka, but his own weapon rebounds and plunges through his chest while the ghosts of Tamahome's family hold him in place. Suboshi had brutally murdered the family earlier in the series, making this doubly karmic.
  • Gundam:
  • Hellsing
    • Zorin Blitz is killed by Seras Victoria, the very person she sought to target and kill. It becomes even more karmic as her wasting time gloating after having mutilated Seras and killed Pip gave her the opportunity to drink his (whom she just killed earlier and mocked his death as being in vain) blood and become a full-fledged vampire, obliterating her forces and then herself, and that she wanted to paint the Hellsing Manor in Seras's blood, only for the inverse to happen. To top the cherry on the karmic cake, just as how Zorin destroys people's minds with her illusion magic, Seras literally destroys her mind by grinding her head to a wall at full speed. Her Pre-Mortem One-Liner to Zorin as she kills her says it best:
      "How does it feel having someone fuck with your head!? HOW DOES IT FEEL, YOU BITCH!?"
    • Enrico Maxwell, the leader of the Iscariot Organization, who had shown himself to be as horrifically evil as Millennium by ordering the slaughter of everyone in London due to hating all Protestants, is betrayed by his right-hand man Alexander Anderson in true Iscariot fashion when Anderson destroys the reinforced glass barrier protecting Maxwell from Alucard's unleashed familiars, resulting in him getting horrifically impaled to death.
  • Highschool of the Dead has a great example. As the school is being overrun by the shambling, biting dead, you see two female students, presumably BFFs, who spend every on-screen moment holding hands, with the intention to survive together. Later on, as they're trying to escape the horde up some stairs, one of them gets grabbed and bitten. With the terrified girl crying and whimpering for help and still holding her hand, the other cries "Let go of me! Damnit, bitch, I said LET GO!" and kicks her "cherished friend" down the stairs into the waiting horde. Shortly after, she is herself killed by zombies who came around behind her.
  • Shion Sonozaki in Higurashi: When They Cry (more exactly, the Meakashi-hen arc), after killing most of the cast disguised as Mion, her twin sister, falls to her death when the air gun holster that Mion always wears snags on the wall while Shion's scaling a building.
    • It was more so a suicide in the visual novels and manga. Played straight with Rina (every world) and Teppei (at least three).
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure practically makes this trope a staple of how each Part's Big Bad is defeated:
    • Battle Tendency's Kars, having lived for millennia as a pseudo-vampiric Pillar Man and in that time, focusing his efforts on becoming a truly immortal, unending being at "the top" of all life on Earth, while also slaughtering many Ripple users that tried to stop him, is granted that desire in every sense of the word when he uses the Red Stone of Aja combined with his own creation, the Stone Mask to become the Ultimate Life Form. He doesn't last long enough to relish his newfound superiority as Joseph Joestar, a Ripple user tricks him into causing a volcanic eruption. The force of the blast launches him beyond Earth's atmosphere. Eventually, the Adaptive Ability of the Ultimate Lifeform transforms him into a large stone husk to survive in the cold vacuum of space. Combined with his Complete Immortality, Kars can do nothing but drift aimlessly forever and eventually shuts down mentally from the sheer boredom. Karmic Living, instead.
    • Stardust Crusaders actually has two cases that fit the trope:
      • The deranged J. Geil is killed by Jean-Pierre Polnareff, elder brother of one of his victims that the killer bragged about raping and murdering to his face. Polnareff's response is to eviscerate him with his sword-wielding Stand, Silver Chariot, rendering him helpless like he did his victims. Additionally, his corpse, left strung up upside down from a metal gate, resembles the Hanged Man card of the Tarot that he and his Stand are based on.
      • The Big Bad of both Parts 1 and 3, DIO, having escaped the result of his first defeat by Jonathan Joestar whose body he stole for himself in the time in-between Parts, is ultimately rendered helpless and eventually killed thanks to Jonathan's descendant Jotaro Kujo's mastering the ability to stop time with his Stand, Star Platinum, the same ability that DIO with his Stand, The World used to murder, torture, and intimidate many others in his bid to rule over humanity.
    • Diamond is Unbreakable's Yoshikage Kira's MO in his life as a serial killer was to remove the hands of his female victims and treat them as his "girlfriend". Things became worse when he was granted the power of his Stand, Killer Queen to cause his victims to explode and/or turn into ash, allowing him to go unnoticed for years until the events of the Part owing to his desire to live an incognito, peaceful life despite occasionally falling back into his murderous ways. Towards the story's end, his good luck finally runs out as he is struck and killed by an ambulance that had come to try and help who they thought was a normal man. When he tries to circumvent the attempt by the ghost of one of his previous victims to destroy his spirit for good, he gets his arm bit off by the ghost dog he'd also killed, causing him to fall prey to an otherwordly mass of hands that proceed to drag him to what is essentially Hell, a place where he "can never rest in peace".
    • Golden Wind has two cases of this trope of its own:
      • Diavolo has spent over a decade as a Don controlling his branch of The Mafia, Passione, from the shadows, never allowing anyone to see his face or know his identity. He is helped in that regard by the power(s) of his Stand, King Crimson, which can erase a section of time and has a secondary ability of limited precognition, always allowing him to stay one step ahead of anyone who manages to get close to him. When he is killed by Giorno Giovanna's evolved Stand, Gold Experience Requiem, with its powers to reverse the actions of an enemy to "zero", he is forced to experience an unending loop of death for eternity, never able to know when, how, or by who his demise is going to occur. An added bonus to this is that one of Passione's most lucrative operations under Diavolo was drug smuggling. The very first death in his endless cycle had him being stabbed by a drug addict and bleeding out.
      • Polpo, the Capo/Lieutenant in charge of Passione's operations in the city of Naples, is notorious for his gluttony and extravagant lifestyle even while sitting in a prison cell thanks to his status, as well as a firm belief that murder is considered a rightful act if done to someone who disrespects you. As part of Giorno's plan to infiltrate the organization, he has to gain Polpo's blessing to become a member. In the process, Giorno uses his Stand's ability to manipulate life energy to change one of Polpo's guns into a banana, tricking the mobster into shooting himself in the head when he peels it and unknowingly pulls the trigger. He did so as revenge for Polpo's Stand killing an innocent man and thus disrespecting the value of his life. It also has the bonus benefit of not only allowing Giorno to kill Polpo without making it look like foul play (very few people knew of Gold Experience's abilities at that point), but it also benefited Giorno's companions by giving Bruno Bucciarati an opportunity to step up as a new Capo, eventually leading to the gang meeting Trish Una.
    • Stone Ocean's Enrico Pucci hoped to achieve the vision of "heaven" that his close friend Dio has always hoped for until Jotaro killed him in Part 3. Pucci used his position as the priest of the Green Dolphin Street Prison facility to get Jotaro's daughter incarcerated and trick Jotaro into letting him steal his memories and Stand with his own Stand, Whitesnake. During the final battle, despite Pucci's power-up, Jotaro is able to trick him into giving up the Stand power of Weather Report that Emporio Alnino then uses to kill Pucci once and for all, ending his plan to reach "heaven" moments before it could be completed.
  • A fairly standard way of tying up stories with murderers, con artists, etc. in The Kurosagi Corpse Delivery Service if they're not caught by the police. Insurance salesman killed by an unlikely probability, cryopreservation scammer trapped in a glacier — whatever your sin, Narrative Causality has a death suitable as your punishment.
  • Maria no Danzai: Nozomu Okaya and his gang are a bunch of horrifyingly sociopathic kids that like to torture their classmates for fun, with one of their named victims being Kiritaka Nagare. After months of torture, Kiritaka is forced to jump onto a road because they threaten to post a heavily-edited sex video of his mother on the internet unless he jumps. Kiritaka dies from being run over by a truck, and the bullies balk not at his death, but at the fact that they will get into trouble if his death is connected to them. To avoid this, they plant fake evidence and overall make his death look like a suicide caused by Abusive Parents. Two years later, Okaya and his gang continue to destroy the lives of their classmates, but unbeknownst to them, Kiritaka's mother, Mari, discovered the truth about her son's death and swore to avenge him by destroying Okaya and his gang, erasing her former identity, changing her name to Maria Akeboshi and infiltrating their school as a nurse to do so. Maria plans not to just get revenge on Okaya and his friends: she plans to make them suffer.
  • Played straight at the final showdown between Johan and Tenma in Monster, during which Tenma is presented with a choice of shooting the former or watching him kill a small boy, when Johan is instead shot down by the child's drunken, raving father who just happened to stumble upon the scene. Promptly subverted when the paramedics discover that Johan is still alive, and Tenma decides to try to save his life once again.
  • In Muhyo and Roji, two Executors, a Dirty Old Man who forced Rio to wear revealing outfits for his pleasure and a woman who bullied her for it, caused Rio's Start of Darkness when they refused to save her mother from a haunt simply because they didn't like her. Not only do they end up being killed, but the anime shows their deaths in a flashback, with Rio standing there and doing nothing to help them.
  • All For One in My Hero Academia spent his entire life fulfilling his dream of becoming a feared demon lord nobody could ever stand up to. To that end he steals Quirks from heroes and civilians to become ever more powerful and feared, but in the end he is forced to use a quirk, Rewind, so powerful he fears it because of the power of friendship allows the heroes to inflict critical injuries to himself. After that his body keeps regressing as the heroes keep fighting him until he literally becomes a screaming baby, feared by nobody and regresses past that to become nothing at all.
  • In Nadia: The Secret of Blue Water, Big Bad Gargoyle suffers one of these in a big way when he enters a space intended solely for Atlanteans and is promptly turned into salt, revealing that he, who has been fighting for years to subjugate the human race under Atlantean rule, is himself a human adopted by the Atlanteans.
  • Pacific Rim: The Black: After spending all of Season 2 trying to brainwash the Boy into the Kaiju Messiah, the High Priestess of the Sisters is killed by him in the finale when he rejects her.
  • Many stories in Pet Shop of Horrors. Others tend to be the brighter side of Laser-Guided Karma, like the little girl and the Doberman.
  • Although it's not quite the same thing, Osamu Tezuka's Phoenix masterpiece is rife with examples of karmic retribution. Consider the one in Strange Beings / Life: A woman, raised by her evil father as a warrior, learns that her father is dying but might yet be saved by a mysterious nun who lives on a remote island. She travels to the island to kill the nun. After killing the nun, she finds she can't leave the island, and circumstances cause her to pretend to be the nun for some travelers. She finally works out that time is flowing backward, and not only is she the nun, but she can look forward to a day when she gets killed by her own hand. Which will of course continue the cycle indefinitely, unless she can work off her sins through healing those who come to visit the nun. In other words, this is Karmic Death, or dying through one's own actions, a little more directly than most, and with a delay of over ten years between act and payback. Also notable in that by the time of death, the woman had learned her lesson and was no longer a villain type in the slightest.
  • Of all series, Pokémon: The Series did this with Bounty Hunter J (assuming she actually died). After capturing one of the Lake Trio (Azelf), Mesprit and Uxie arrive and during a battle with her, use Future Sight on her ship. After capturing them and handing them to Team Galactic (and collecting her payment), her ignoring/forgetting about Future Sight leads to the pixies' attack striking her ship and sending it sinking into Lake Valor, followed by the glass breaking and flooding the chamber, and the ship marvellously exploding, killing J and all her henchmen. Shows what you get for trying to capture three superpowered pixies almost as old as time itself...
  • In Romeo × Juliet, Lord Montague kills one of his allies and friends in front of his son, for no real reason at all. Said son goes insane and later stabs Montague to death.
  • Shishio Makoto of Rurouni Kenshin suffers a Karmic Death, succumbing to a fatal condition that does not allow him to fight for more than 15 minutes at a time without overheating (and in this case, causing his body fats and oils to catch fire), just as his opponent Kenshin is lying exhausted and helpless on the floor. This is made even more karmic due to his wealth of fire-based attacks, and the series implies that his death is literally karmic; "The man does not choose the age: the age chooses the man."
  • A majority of Sailor Moon's humanoid villains were killed by their superiors for failing once too often, or by other, envious members of the same Quirky Miniboss Squad. Said superiors usually changed into monsters for the season finale and thus could be blown to bits.
    • Subverted in the manga, where the Senshi themselves killed the minor villains (Sailor Moon herself got a few too.)
    • Zoisite's death in the anime is this. First, he siccs some assassin youma on Nephrite so that he would be killed in front of someone he cared about (Naru), as Nephrite was deemed a traitor for trying to save a human. A season later, Zoisite is killed by Queen Beryl for going against her command to capture Tuxedo Mask alive and slowly dies in the arms of his lover Kunzite.
      • Nephrite's death also counts given that he exploited Naru's love for him to further his agenda. By Zoisite kidnapping Naru along with the Heavenly King developing his own feelings for the girl, Nephrite ends up dying as a result.
    • Rubeus from Sailor Moon R was an abusive boss towards the Specter Sisters as he left them to die for their failures while calling them disgraces to the Black Moon Clan. When he finds himself battered and desperate to escape his self-destructing ship, his colleague Esmeraude appears only to give him a well deserved "The Reason You Suck" Speech while leaving him to die on his UFO.
    • Mimete in the anime dies when she is trapped in the machine she was intending to use to kill the Sailor Guardians, the same machine invented by her colleague Eudial whom Mimete had killed earlier to take her position.
  • In Samurai Champloo, an episode discussing Church and one woman's faith in God employs karma to kill the false priest attempting to profit from the persecution of Japanese Christians of the Endo Period by crushing him beneath a statue of Jesus: it fell because of a fracture created by the misfiring of a rifle.
  • In School Days, the main character, Makoto, is The Casanova who has spent 90% of the series playing with the hearts and interests of several girls, becoming more and more of a Jerkass as the story advances. In the end, though, Sekai, who is supposedly expecting his baby, snaps violently after he suggests she should have an abortion; she violently kills him by repeatedly stabbing him to death with a kitchen knife.
    • That was only in the anime however. In the game's ending that was closest to that scene, Sekai stabbed Makoto because he decided to simply abandon her and go back to his old girlfriend, Kotonoha. Of course, as he's crawling across the ground and bleeding to death, Makoto becomes The Atoner and realizes the error of his ways, then dies.
    • Sekai ends up this way in the anime, too. Kotonoha had suffered bullying and a rape at the hands of a fellow classmate because of Sekai's actions, and after learning Sekai has killed Makoto, she goes insane. Kotonoha then proceeds to pay Sekai back for all the psychological abuse she's suffered, and slits her jugular vein open with a dozuki.
  • In Shadow Star, one of the main character's best friends is bullied to truly monstrous extents by the local Alpha Bitch Aki Honda and her Girl Posse. The peak of it is when Aki rapes the poor girl with a test tube. What does the victim do when she gets a shadow dragon? Well... she uses said dragon to kill all but one of them — and even the sole survivor gets her leg ripped off. Oh, and she kills other people too. The one who gets the worst death of all is Aki herself, who gets the shadow dragon raping her with its clawed finger and then ripping her body in half. Then things go considerably From Bad to Worse. The fact that this is even considered Karmic Death at all speaks volumes on just how completely messed up the world of Shadow Star is.
  • Sword Art Online has a few:
    • Vassago Casals is the man responsible for many a bad thing that has befallen on Kirito and the others since Aincrad, including having an obsession over Kirito. Therefore, it was only natural that Kirito is ultimately the one who kills him at the end of Alicization. Extra karmic in that one of his former acolytes, Johnny Black, was the person who got Kirito trapped in the Underworld in the first place.
    • After arrogantly promising to grant Chudelkin's wish to touch her body if he disposed of the rebels, with no intention of keeping her word, guess who ends up killing Quinella? Chudelkin using his last breath to Incarnate the remains of his broken body into a fiery swarm and launches himself at Quinella so he can finally get the reward she longed for, with Quinella both horrified and disgusted at the repulsive clown touching her body.
  • Show by Rock!! The backstory of the main villain of Season 2, Victorious, uses this trope. As a little girl, Victorious was friends with another girl named Astrael. They both decide to work together to complete the hardest trial for their school on their home planet, which involves climbing a mountain. As they climb, Astrael nearly slips and falls, but Victorious catches her and encourages her to keep going. As they get very close to the top, the tables turn and Victorious slips. Rather than save her friend, Astrael abandons her to fall, so she can get to the top alone and claim the prize for herself. Completely devastated by this betrayal, Victorious becomes consumed by darkness and flies up to the top of the mountain just before Astrael reaches it. Astrael is so startled by Victorious that she loses her grip and she falls to her death. If she hadn't been selfish and greedy, she could've lived and shared the prize with Victorious.
  • Strider Hiryu: Vice-Director Matic gets his just desserts in the manga when Yggdrasil, the heart of the ZAIN Mind Control Project he wanted to use in his quest for world domination, impales him in the heart.
  • Folken Lacour de Fanel in The Vision of Escaflowne. After his Heel–Face Turn, Folken tries to attack his ex-boss Dornkirk, but the sword he uses breaks in two and the tip injures Folken fatally by impaling him in the chest. It doesn't help that the Zaibach has a machine that actually uses karma and destiny as its fuel.
    • There's also a subversion here, as Folken went to battle fully knowing that his days were numbered due to all the experiments Dornkirk had performed on him through the years.
  • The bandit in Mark Baker's segment in Winter Days is crushed to death by a falling tree while trying to retrieve the lumberjack's hat, which had stuck to the trunk by an arrow he had shot earlier.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, Episode 37, when Divine sends Carly falling to her death. He immediately regrets it.

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