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How many roads must a man walk down before you can call him a Man? The world may never know but one thing is for sure: at the end of one of those roads, he had better show some unfortunate creature the end of the line.

This old tradition of killing as initiation into Manhood is about as old as the institution of the Hunter-Gatherer social order and about as relevant to a society as that institution as a means of testing the mettle of a new member of the hunting troupe. Still, that doesn't stop many a buttoned-down work-a-day father from suburbia from believing that his son will go astray and won't be of any use to anyone if he doesn't go through this rite of passage which his ancestors may or may not have had to undergo themselves (at least in TV land).

Naturally, every once in a while, either because the society/organization is gender-blind or someone wants to get in on the deadly fun, a woman will go through the same process to mixed reaction or no reaction at all if it were one of those aforementioned gender-blind societies/organizations.

A different variation of this trope is for elite military forces to kill a man (usually an enemy, but can be a low ranking ally) as part of initiation. This perhaps makes a bit more sense, given that as a member of an elite force, your job is to kill people; might as well make sure you're capable of doing so before graduating.

Contrast Real Women Never Wear Dresses, Badass Pacifist. Sometimes used in training in The Spartan Way.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• The anime Kikaider uses this concept as a last twist out of left field. To "Become A Real Boy," Jiro ends up becoming capable of killing and committing other evil acts, even if they are for good reasons, due to a fusion of his concience circuit and an evil control circuit.
• While not a direct fulfillment, in Tsukihime the plot does not kick off or get truly interesting until the protagonist begins having homicidal impulses. Indeed, without at least one major 'death' racked up in any route, nothing would happen to propel the story or character development.
• Subverted in Monster. When Dr. Tenma shoots a man for the first time, it seems that he is now fully prepared to Shoot The Dog when the time comes ("I've stopped shaking..."). However, not only did the man that he shot survive, but Tenma manages to get through the entire ordeal without having to kill a single person.
  • Yes, but the issue was never one of being a 'real man'; it was always purely ethical.
• Holy crap is this ever averted in Trigun! Killing people is serious freaking business, and the hallmark of characters who are either morally ambiguous or just plain psycho. Even nonfatally wounding the villain is portrayed as a crippling-guilt-inducing act.
• Rurouni Kenshin, working on Batman Logic, mostly averts this trope. However, the reason Kenshin avoids killing is because he was the cause of so many deaths in the past.
• Black Cat can be seen as kind of a spiritual successor to Rurouni Kenshin in this sense; right up to the end, Train averts this trope by refusing to kill the Big Bad, even after said Big Bad gave him detailed instructions on how to do it and tried to explain that he couldn't be stopped any other way. Like Kenshin, Train is a reformed assassin.

Comic Books

• Aversion: Batman has a strict 'no-killing' policy and his sticking to his principles no matter how much danger it puts him in is seen as proof of his manly character.
  • In All Star Batman And Robin, Batman (In Name Only) trains Robin by locking him in the Batcave and forcing the latter to kill rats and bugs for food.
• Cassandra Cain, later Batgirl III, cracked and ran away from her father after she killed a man as the final stage of her assassin training (she was around eight at the time).
• In Udon's Street Fighter comic, Juli's first mission is a test: Kill her own mother.
• In the Marvel Alternate Universe Age Of Apocalypse, Colossus is shown training young mutants for the fight against Apocalypse, expecting them to kill each other to ensure that only the very best remain.
• In the Star Wars Expanded Universe, there are a few comics focusing on the training of the Emperor's Red Guards. Part of this involves partners who have worked together all along killing each other in front of the Emperor to show their loyalty.

Film

• In the remake of Casino Royale it is revealed that secret agents are only promoted to 00 status after assassinating two targets (killing without intention to doesn't count).
  • This is also a plot point in the original novel, in which Le Chiffre is James Bond's third target.
  • And invokes quite a lot of Fridge Logic: James Bond is supposedly an ex-SBS commando, yet his body count only has one digit when he's being considered for MI 6?
    • Since killing in battle requires different skills from assassination, it would make sense if they only counted kills working for MI6.
    • It's more clear in the original novel. It's killing in cold blood. As in, a guy who has an unloaded gun that you yourself made sure of.
• In La Femme Nikita and its American adaptation Point Of No Return, the maiin character has completed her training as an assassin. Her boss takes her out to dinner to celebrate and then reveals that it's actually a test: she has to kill a target and escape without preparation. The first episode of The Series has the same scenario.
• In Surviving the Game, Gary Busey's character relates a story of a dog his father bought him as a child... and had him kill with his bare hands later to prove himself a man.
• Variation: In Monster's Ball, Hank and his son Sonny are officers who work on Death Row and the story opens as the latter is about to participate in his first "last walk" of a condemned man. (The title refers to the party that used to be thrown the night before an execution.) However, Sonny loses his nerve and vomits during the walk. Hank is humiliated and furious and confronts him the next morning; the fight ends with Sonny committing suicide. The remainder of the film has Hank struggling with this loss (and notably, his own father chalks Sonny's fate up to weakness).
• This is Luigi Largo's philosophy of life in Repo! The Genetic Opera. He considers himself his father's worthy heir because, of the three siblings, he's the only one who kills people on a regular basis.
• Naked Weapon features a wide variety of pubescent girls being kidnapped from around the world and sent to a tropical island. After immediately killing anybody who says 'Yes, I wanna go home!', they spend the next 9-10 years in a nonstop boot camp teaching the girls everything there is to know about firearms, human anatomy, unarmed combat, and social interaction, honing them into the world's finest assassins. As a penultimate final exam, they are assembled in their barracks and told that they have two minutes to kill half their number or they will all die. In the actual final exam, they are forced to compete in a gladiator-style tournament until only one remains. However, their "performance" is so great that the Madam allows three to survive instead.

Literature

• The Red Badge Of Courage.
• Many gangster stories have the characters "make their bones" by killing two men. The Godfather is probably the most famous example.
  "I'm Moe Green! I made my bones when you were going out with cheerleaders!"
• In A Song Of Ice And Fire, a new member of the Unsullied, an organization of eunuch slave soldiers, receives a puppy whom he must strangle bare-handed at the end of his training.
  • That's not all: "To win his spiked cap, an Unsullied most go to the slave marts with a silver mark, find a wailing newborn, and kill it before its mother's eyes. In this way do the Astapori slavers make certain that there is no weakness left in them. Few ever fail the test. The silver mark is for the owner of the slaves, and not for the mother of the slain newborn."
  • A similar story is told about the SS. They had to raise a dog as part of their training, and the first order they were given after graduating was "shoot the dog." - this probably could be considered bollocks though, as Hitler really liked dogs.
• Subverted in the Discworld novel "Pyramids": During the mock assassination that features as the final exam of the Assassin's Guild, the protagonist convinces himself that his target is not a dummy but a person, possibly even one of his fellow candidates. He resolves to fail the test on purpose, but accidentally succeeds in killing the dummy.
  • But played straight in that the student is meant to think it's a real person-it is, after all, the final exam for the Assassin's Guild. While it's true that over the course of his lifetime an Assassin may only be sent out on eight or so commissions, if an Assassin chokes on one of these extremely few commissions, we're looking at loss of revenue, loss of business, and, worst of all, loss of reputation, which will result in further consequences A and B.
• In the Doctor Who novel No Future a (female) soldier tells The Brigadier how, before her secondment to UNIT, part of her training was to raise a rabbit, and then kill it. At the time, she thought she didn't mind, now she was a warrior. The Brig's training makes her realise she did, and he tells her "Then they were bastards, Tennant, to order you to do that. What were they?"
• In Dark Light, the second book in the Engines of Light Trilogy by Ken MacLeod, the characters come to the planet Rawliston, where the population is divided into three cultures: "Christians" (Post-Industrial Revolution Victorians), "Heathens" (Autochthonous people with a cottage craft system capable of producing highly complex creations), and "Savages" (Hunter Gatherers who live on the outskirts of the actual civilization). The Heathens have a sort of gender-caste system, where gender is not determined by actual sex, but by conduct and career. The ritual to "become a man" involves the Heathens going out and killing a "Savage".
• In Clan Of The Cave Bear, this goes in the opposite direction for girls: females of the Clan are forbidden to hunt or use weapons, and female protagonist Ayla gets in big trouble when they find out she's been learning on her own.
  • However, played straight with the Clan in general-a boy becomes a man when he makes his first big kill.
• Played semi-straight in children's book Blood in the Snow. The main character inherits a gun from his grandfather and his father makes it clear to him that if he wants to be a man, he'll have to learn how to shoot. Due to a traumatic experience involving a stuffed animal he owned as a kids being used for target practice, he trades the gun for a silver flute with a kid at school and endures the ridicule by his father. He later trades the flute back (it's apparently platinum-plated and therefore worth more than originally thought) for the gun so that he can put a fix out of its misery, the source of the titular blood, and it's implied that making these hard decisions is what's made him a man.
• Used horribly in The Knife of Never Letting Go, where on their fourteenth birthday, boys from Prentisstown have to kill another man, usually someone they've known all their life, in order to be accepted into adulthood. They don't know about this before hand, but the main character, Todd, finds out and chooses not to go along with it. For reasons you'd have to read the book to understand, the man who was to be his victim comes after him and attempts to provoke him into murdering him by killing or kidnapping several people he cares about.
• The Marines in Jarhead (including the author) are stoked up on the prospect of their first kill, which is directly compared to losing their virginity and becoming a real man.

Live Action TV

• Night Gallery episode "Clean Kills". A wealthy hunter tries to force his son to kill a deer by threatening to disinherit him.
• Generation Kill mentions this twice- first with Trombley who joined the Marines to kill people (and complains whenever he doesn't get a chance to shoot) and later when Person (the lead Humvee driver) gets a chance to shoot at the Hajji-
  Person- Look at me, Brad. I'm a man now, just like you... except I don't look like a faggot and talk all educated.

Video Games

• According to the novels, Ghosts in Star Craft have to kill someone as final test. It's less a test about being a man, and more about efficiency (the most important Ghosts happen to be female anyway).

Western Animation

• Despite the fact that Negative Continuity pretty much undoes every rite-of-passage he's ever gone through, Bobby Hill on King Of The Hill had to kill a deer to become a man. It looked like he wouldn't get a chance since the limit for hunting licenses had been reached for the year and he would be left behind by his friends who all have a kill of their own (even Kahn JR.) but fortune smiles on him when he accidentally runs a deer over during a driving lesson Hank was giving him.
  • On the other hand, the roadkill incident may simply be a technicality for Hank, who had already accepted Bobby when he refused to take what they both saw as a cheap shot.
• A comedic take on this was the topic of an episode of American Dad. Francine lost all interest in Stan when she learns that Stan had up until that point never actually killed anyone and won't accept him back into bed until he has taken a life. As with Bobby Hill, his first kill is a total accident, not that Francine cares.
  • Stan from American Dad intentionally killed but shot the wrong target.
• In The Simpsons when Homer is worried that Bart might be gay, he takes him out to kill a deer because that will make a "real" man of him. Of course it's an unmitigated disaster and Homer, Bart and Barney end up being rescued by the rest of the family's new gay friend without having to kill anything.
• In Moral Orel, Clay took Orel hunting when he thought "it was time." After Orel couldn't shoot a helpless (and adorable) deer, Clay started drinking, ended up killing and eating a hunting dog before accidentally shooting Orel and leaving him to deal with the wound as he went to sleep. Orel was forced to kill a bear to save his horrible father, but when Clay woke up, he lied and told him Clay had killed the bear.
• On Taz-Mania, Francis X. Bushlad wants to win his manhood (and the right to wear trousers) by killing a tasmanian devil. Subverted in that Francis doesn't have to do this; there are other and more peaceful ways to attain manhood in his tribe.
  • his other choices where performing a hostile takeover of a fortune 500 company or accumulating a stock portfolio of the return of no less than 36 percent per annum
• In the South Park episode "Volcano", Stan's Uncle Jimbo takes the boys hunting, and is shocked when Stan doesn't want to kill the rabbit he has a chance to shoot. Jimbo is both surprised and disappointed in Stan, and Eric mercilessly teases him for it. Kenny, on the other hand, has no problems either shooting a whole magazine worth of ammo into a deer, or drinking the gasoline for the fishing boat, which impresses Jimbo enough to label him a "dirty little bastard". At the end, Stan finally scores a kill — namely that of the friendly Bigfoot-like Scuzzlebutt, who was just being celebrated for saving their lives — and doesn't understand why Jimbo and the others are upset instead of proud. Trying to figure this out leads the kids to eschew hunting and go watch cartoons instead.
• On Avatar The Last Airbender, this was why Zuko was scarred, humiliated and exiled by his father for speaking out against the idea of sacrificing the country's loyal soldiers.

Real Life

• Prior to the ban on lion-hunting, a Massai boy was to spear a lion as part of his rite-of-passage shortly before his circumcision. Some still do, not that it is actively encouraged anymore.
• American President Lyndon B Johnson would require anyone seeking his political favor to join him on his Texas ranch where they would go "hunting" (actually, just sit in a blind while someone drove animals to them). If you wanted him to respect you as a man, you had to kill one.
  • In recent elections, pretty much every contender for the US presidency has had to have at least one picture of themselves in a blaze orange vest carrying a rifle or shotgun. Barack Obama, notably, is one of the few that hasn't pretended to be a hunter.
• In urban legend, any number of elite special forces teams (Green Berets, SAS, the Nazi SS, etc.) required as a final test of loyalty that the candidate kill a spouse, family member, or other significant personal relation. In a widely-circulated joke based on this tale, 3 agents are candidates, one has a fiance, one is a newlywed, and one has been married for ten years. The first two candidates chicken out and can't pull the trigger, while the third says "The gun had blanks, so I had to beat her to death."
• Japanese military training during WWII and the "China incident" took this to an extreme. Not only was the training extremely brutal, a Japanese soldier was not considered fully trained until he killed a prisoner of war with a sword or bayonet, often while the POWs were immobilized.
• In Ancient Greece, Spartan boys were sent out naked with only a single blanket to fend for themselves for a period of time, "living like a werewolf." Stealing and murdering Helots were the main (and traditional) ways to get food and protection against the elements, but any boy actually found killing a Helot was put to death. Since the Helots outnumbered the Spartans by more than two to one, the Spartans regularly killed off a large chunk of the Helot population to keep them in line. Killing wasn't reqired, only recommended, for the passage into manhood.
• There is of course prudence. If it is known someone is a killer, there will be reluctance to tell him that he is not a real man.
  • Likewise if you want someone to keep said people out of your hair, telling them that they are real men for doing this is useful.

Web Original

• Billy had to do this in Dr Horribles Sing Along Blog before he could enter into the Evil League of Evil.
  • Mildly played with, in that he would presumabely been accepted for a REALLY good robbery, or just something threatening. Only failure at that caused murder to be necessary. Possibly his own.

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