Better To Die Than Be Killed - Television Tropes & Idioms

Dr. Hiruluk in One Piece chose to do this. Very dramatic scene, and Chopper's reaction wasn't pretty.
- Of course the reason it was so dramatic was because Chopper had inadvertently poisoned Hiruluk while trying to make a medicine to cure his sickness. He chose to kill himself so Chopper wouldn't have to live with the guilt of killing his father.
Subverted at the end of the Nazi arc in Black Lagoon. Dutch gives the leader of the Brown-shirt group one of Revy's guns to shoot himself with. He almost does it, until he points the gun at Dutch, and pulls the trigger, only to find the gun to be empty. Revy and Dutch then turn him into swiss cheese.
- What makes this scene truly hilarious (in a Refuge In Audacity kind of way) is how they have a bet on what he's going to do beforehand, their comments implying they've done this sort of thing before. (Both of them went for "black"; Dutch himself saying noting that "white" isn't much of a bet in this case).
Outlaw Star: Before dying by falling into a star, Hilda bites on a capsule that explodes.
Happens in Vol.3 of the Hellsing manga, where Alucard does what he does best, and the last mook standing turns his gun on himself rather then face him. Alucard looks disgusted.
- Indeed, Alucard holds human life in such high regard that he feels that for someone to kill themself rather than die in combat makes them more of a dog than a human. The fact that Seras (while still human) kept fighting against a vampire in spite of the insurmountable odds is what made Alucard consider her worthy of immortality in the first place.
Rika Furude in Higurashi No Naku Koro Ni chooses to stab herself repeatedly in the neck rather than be captured and tortured to death. She gets better.
- Actually in the HEAD. Staring her would-be torturer Shion in the face the whole way through.
Shin, from Fist Of The North Star, hurls himself off of a building rather than succumb to Kenshiro's attack during their final battle. In the Playstation 2 Fighting Game, he actually has this as a self-inflicted Fatal KO that can be used if he's losing.
Akagi Shigeru in Ten (the series to which Akagi is a prequel) chooses to go through medically-assisted suicide rather than have his mind deteriorate due to Alzheimer's. The fact that he was never afraid to face death makes it easier to digest...the fact that his mind was the greatest weapon he ever had and the fact that he was only in his early fifties doesn't.
In Detective Conan, Teen Genius Shiho Miyano attempts this when locked up for betraying the bad guys, rather than facing execution. She took a poisonous drug she created, but instead of dying she suffered its other effect, which shrank her to the size of a six-year old little girl. Because of that, she was able to escape and eventually assume the identity of Ai Haibara.
- The father of the Child Prodigy Hiroki Sawada from the sixth Non Serial Movie alleged his son committed suicide because of this, but the troper who is writing this example thinks otherwise...
This is what Haman Kahn from Neo Zeon does in Gundam ZZ after losing her last battle against the hero Judau Ashta.
In Getter Robo Armageddon The truth about Michiru's death was that she deliberately messed up the test to kill herself after discovering she was infected by in Invader.
This is the ultimate fate of the homunculus Envy in Fullmetal Alchemist. It kills itself to avoid being killed by lowly humans, and also because he can't cope with being pitied by them.
In X/1999, Seishiro kills himself by piercing Subaru's heart with his hand. He was aware that he was under a spell that would reverse the killing blow and that he would die instead if he attempted to kill Subaru (who wasn't aware of the spell but actually wanted to be killed by Seishiro to be put out of his misery) but he did it anyway because he wanted to be able to choose his death. Kamui explains later that he would rather die be killed by the one he loved than by an enemy, and that Seishiro had the luxury of being able to choose how to die, whereas the rest of the world would not have that choice.
In Legend Of Galactic Heroes, Ansbach bites a poison capsule rather than be taken alive after attempting to assassinate Reinhard, and succeeding in killing Kircheis, during his fake surrender.
Played with in Angel Densetsu. Kuroda and his flunkies got so freaked out about what Kitano might do to them for letting Takehisa get hurt that they rushed headlong to fight the guys who hurt Takehisa, and they won.

Happen several times in the Aliens comics released by Dark Horse Comics as most humans would rather die than be torn apart by the Xenomorphs or be impregnated by a face hugger.
It happens twice in The Dark Knight Returns. First, an army general caps himself when Batman discovers about his illegal arms dealing, and then the Joker twists his own neck and kills himself (thereby making everyone think that Batman finished him off) when Batman paralyzes him but can't bring himself to go all the way.
Maus: Vladek's sister-in-law learns that the Jews in her town are being rounded up and shipped out to the camps, so she kills herself with poison... and takes the children in her care, including Vladek's first son, with her, insisting that her children will not die in the camps.
Top Ten has robot cop Joe Pi talk the disgraced superhero Atoman into killing himself rather than losing his powers and going to prison as a pedophile, where the villains he'd jailed would undoubtedly show him a very bad time. "It turns out I am not suited to be a negotiator."
Happens to a mook who attempts to assassinate Ozymandias in Watchmen. Turns out the guy wasn't actually willing to die for the cause, but Ozymandias ordered the hit upon himself and then forced the capsule into the mook's mouth during the struggle.
- Before we find out the rest Ozy's response seems pretty reasonable.
Wolverine offers this option to Mystique out in the desert at the end of the post-Messiah Comple X comic Get Mystique—either take the gun with one bullet he leaves next to her and put herself out of her misery, or slowly bleed out to death from getting stabbed in the side by his claws before she can reach medical help.

In Tiberium Wars, it is a common belief among Nod soldiers and officers that their prisoners of war will be tortured and raped by GDI troops - which leads to a Black Hand officer executing his own immobilized wounded to keep them from falling into enemy hands. GDI, meanwhile, views this as appalling and as a fanatical enemy denying them intelligence sources.
In the Brotherhood of Shadow Knights of the Old Republic Mod, a Czerka mining chief does this when his crew suddenly go animalistic and berzerk due to an insane Jedi trying to lure your new party member out of hiding.

In Starship Troopers, Michael Ironside shoots an unfortunate soldier before he gets mauled by a giant bug. He then requests for the same to be done to him if he were to get in a similar situation. Which happens.
In Birth Of A Nation, white girl Flora Cameron throws herself off a cliff to escape being raped by a former slave. Yes, it's racist as all get-out. Yes, it's a film sponsored by the Klan. But it's considered a classic because it was one of the first films to incorporate major dramatic themes with cinematographic style, which we tend to take for granted today. Pity about the Values Dissonance.
Su Lin, Bruce Lee's sister from Enter The Dragon, did this with a piece of glass when Oharra and his men cornered her at the warehouse, choosing to go out with honor rather than be raped and killed by them. It is this that would drive Lee to seek vengeance on Oharra in Han's tournament.
Crops up thrice in the Firefly movie, where it is played straight, played with, and averted.
- Early in the film, Mal does this for someone. He spares a man from the hands of the Reavers by shooting him dead as soon as he's grabbed. It's called a "piece of mercy" by Zoe.
- And a little after that, as the Reavers are giving chase, Jayne gets shot through the leg with a harpoon. He shouts to Mal 'You shoot me if they take me!' whereupon Mal cocks his pistol and aims, prompting Jayne to add 'Well, don't shoot me first!' Mal then starts shooting at his actual target, the harpoon line.
- Near the end, the crew views a video log of a female scientist telling about what happened on Miranda as the newly-created Reavers break down the door offscreen. As it becomes clear that there are too many of them, she stops firing and turns the gun on herself, but can't quite get the shot off before they bear her down. Much horrificness ensues off-screen before Mal mercifully has the recording switched off.
- Don't forget the Operative who forces his victims to fall upon his sword in a sort of forced suicide (or murder if you look at it another way).
In Invasion Of The Body Snatchers, an Army officer commits suicide by gunshot rather than allow the aliens to convert him.
Subverted in Resident Evil: Apocalypse, where the Corrupt Corporate Executive villain is cornered by zombies — he tries to shoot his way out, and when that fails, he puts his gun to his head...to find that it's empty. Cue ghastliness.
- Also subverted in the first Resident Evil movie, where one of the soldiers is trapped by the zombies and considers killing himself to avoid becoming a zombie. However, he instead decides to keep fighting, escapes, and eventually saves the rest of the group.
The "Disgraced Officer" version was done in Enemy At The Gates. Khruschev is brought into Stalingrad to replace the General who had commanded Soviet forces in their initial disastrous counter-attack against the Germans. Khruschev hands him a pistol and says, "Perhaps you would prefer to spare me the paperwork." He leaves the office, we hear a gunshot, and then Khruschev introduces himself as the new commander.
Notably subverted in the 2002 version of The Count Of Monte Cristo, Prosecutor Villefort has been arrested and is put in an armored carriage. A guard gestures at a pistol on the seat and says, "A courtesy for a gentleman". Villefort puts the gun to his head, pulls the trigger, and The Count appears at the window and says, "You didn't really think I'd make it that easy for you?" Magnificent Bastard.
In The Shadow, one of Shiwan Khan's henchman deliberately allows himself to fall to his death, rather than allow himself to be captured by the Shadow.
The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen starts with an enemy Mook taking a Cyanide Pill.
In The Mist, after the main character and his party run out of gas while attempting to escape. He kills everyone with him (including his son), but runs out of bullets. He exits the car to let the monsters kill him... and the military arrive, killing all the monsters and saving him from his desired death. Cue anguished screaming and roll credits.
Averted in the original Dawn Of The Dead. All of the remaining characters except one are getting ready to escape from the roof of the mall. The character who was left behind gets ready to kill himself as opposed to being turned into a zombie. At the last second, he instead shoots a zombie in front of him and storms his way to the roof where he escapes with the others.
- They had originally planned to have the characters commit suicide, however they decided to go for a more uplifting ending at the last minute.
  - CJ does end up blowing himself up rather than letting himself turn into a zombie (he's been bitten) or eaten.
In Aliens, Lt. Gorman and Private Vasquez are trapped by the aliens and detonate a grenade to kill themselves rather than allow themselves to be captured and impregnated by a facehugger.
- Likewise Ripley and Hicks agree to kill each other rather than be captured by the aliens.
  - Shame that the grenade's shockwave also knocked Newt down a shaft, lead to Ripley having to go after her, which lead to the Queen being roused and stowing away on the ship, which lead to the deaths of Hicks and Newt along with the EEV hiting Fury 151, which lead to the deaths of the prisoners and Ripley's own sacrifice. Ok, so Resurrection showed more eggs from somewhere and Ripley was needed to be cloned to fight them off, but even so - they couldn't wait a few hours to be vapourised anyhow?
  - I'm sorry, I don't know what you're talking about.
This was expected of James Bond after his capture in the opening credits of Die Another Day; M admonishes him for not dying for his country quite yet when he's recovered.
In 30 Days of Night Billy kills his wife and children rather than have the vampires kill them, he attempts to shoot himself but the gun jams, so he sits in the darkness for 28 days...yeah.
In The Bourne Identity Castel commits suicide by jumping out of the window.
Played with in Deep Rising, where a mook is grabbed by a sea monster that will slowly and painfully digest him alive. The hero hands him a weapon as an act of mercy, only for the mook to start shooting him. The hero escapes, the mook tries to take his own life, and discovers he doesn't have any bullets left.
In Space Mutiny, Lt. Steve Codell prefers to jump off a railing than be shot by Kalgan. They compromise: Kalgan pushes him over the railing.
Happens in The Ring Zero. One of Sadako's last victims decides to shoot herself and fellow terrified victim before the Stringy Haired Ghost Girl kills her in a much more vaguely horrifying way.
Played with in Shaun Of The Dead. Shaun, Ed and Liz are trapped beneath a burning pub filled with zombies, and Liz suggests they shoot themselves. They find that their are only two bullets, but Ed says he doesn't mind being eaten. Shaun and Liz then spend a few minutes discussing how to go about it, with Liz saying Shaun should shoot her since she would only mess it up, and Shaun saying he's not sure if he has it in him to shoot his girlfriend his mum and his flatmate all in the same night. Ed then says in the background "Actually... I would like to get shot." Liz and Shaun then realise that they can get out through the keg hatch, and leave Ed with the gun. He kills a few zombies and winds up as one himself. Shaun then keeps him in the shed to play videogames with.
In The Killer, Chow Yun Fat's character is an assassin that always saves one bullet in his gun at all costs, reserved for taking his own life if death was inevitable. This is a code all assassins in this film stick to.
In the Final Destination sequel one of the people who were supposed to die tries this - for the exact reason that he won't let the "Evil Force"/ "Death" decide when he should die and not have any say in it. Of course, he fails.
General Ripper does this in the black comedy Dr. Strangelove, which is all the more hilariously ironic given that the threat is all in his own demented mind.
Kobayashi from The Usual Suspects said that whatever Keaton could to him would be ludicrous compared to what Keyser Soze will do to him if his orders are not carried out.
Alejandro's brother Joaquim from The Mask Of Zorro shot himself rather than get caught.
Taken literally in The Abyss, where the heroine demands that the hero let her drown, rather than share his breathing apparatus. This leaves him conscious and able to carry her drowned body to safety, where she got better.

Averted in the Lois McMaster Bujold book Memory, where the villain is denied the opportunity for suicide after he's caught.
In the Robert E. Howard poem "The Gold and the Grey," the Cimbri women kill themselves with daggers in order to avoid being enslaved by the Romans ("The Cimbri yield no virgin-slaves to glut the lords of Rome!"). One of them kills her rapist and then kills herself.
Fernand shoots himself in the head in The Count Of Monte Cristo, having had his treacherous past exposed. This also happens to the evil warden in the movie The Shawshank Redemption which is somewhat inspired by the novel.
- In the recent film version, Gérard de Villefort finds a musket in the gendarme carraige about to take him away, but finds it empty when he attempts to use this trope, with the hero appearing in the window asking "if you thought you would get off that easy."
- Interestingly, given its alternation in Sympathetic POV from the novel, in Gankutsuou, Fernand has a more admirable death, choosing to save his son's life and redeem himself through a Heroic Sacrifice.
Subverted in the Evelyn Waugh novel Decline And Fall where one character, Grimes, who is an example of the Humphrey tells of "landing in the soup" (an Unusual Euphemism for being caught engaged in homosexual conduct) during World War One and being placed in a room and given a loaded revolver and some whisky to settle his nerves, so that a court martial could be avoided and the official story would be that he died in combat. After debating this course of action , he decides he would rather live and is found roaring drunk when his fellow soldiers re-enter the room.
A variation in the Book of Judges: "King" Abimalech, after having a millstone dropped on his skull by a woman, manages to survive long enough to ask an attendant to finish him off, to avoid the humiliation of having been killed by a woman. So, Older Than Feudalism.
- In 1 Samuel 31, a wounded King Saul tried to get his armorbearer to kill him so he wouldn't fall into the hands of the Philistines, who he feared would "thrust [him] through, and abuse" him. When the armorbearer refused, Saul killed himself. (In 2 Samuel, a man claimed to have killed him on his request, though this could very well have been to ingratiate himself to David. If this was the case, it backfired.)
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd by Agatha Christie: Poirot offers the revealed murderer a day before he contacts the authorities, in order to kill himself and prevent family disgrace.
In The Eye Of The World, Perrin, Egwene, and Elyas are being pursued by an immense flock of demonically-possessed ravens, and suspect they can't reach safety in time. When they do escape, Elyas finds Perrin about to throw his axe into a pond, as he was considering killing himself and Egwene with it rather than allow them to be eaten alive. He asks Perrin which death he really thinks she'd have preferred, and Perrin decides to keep the axe.
- Also, in The Gathering Storm some inhabitants of Hinderstap town try to commit a suicide in order not to become mindless monsters set to kill each other at every sunset. This doesn't work, anyway.
In World War Z, there are many of these stories because the book takes place during a Zombie Apocalypse. Most notably, a Russian chaplain decides that he and the other religious figures should be the ones "sending them to God" and the resultant religious fervor turns the postwar Russia into a theocracy.
The last Stanza of Rudyard Kipling's A Young British Soldier.
When you're wounded and left on Afghanistan's plains,
And the women come out to cut up what remains,
Jest roll to your rifle and blow out your brains
An' go to your Gawd like a soldier.
On the Beach. Just...On the Beach (the film also has this).
Viqi Shesh in the Star Wars Expanded Universe walks off the top of a Coruscant skyscraper rather than surrender herself to those who she betrayed.
In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel The Guns of Tanith, cornered in the control room with no way to work it, Jagdea takes out poison pills to avoid capture. Bonin doesn't let her, and someone who does know how to work arrives in time.
In Animorphs, an unnamed controller scientist decided that he would rather die of Kandrona Starvation than be killed by Visser Three.
Happens in Romance Of The Three Kingdoms. When Guan Yu is captured and executed, his two surviving subordinates, Zhou Cang and Wang Fu, both commit suicide before Maicheng finally falls.
Pretty much what Judge Samson did in the Philistine Temple.
In The Westmark Trilogy, Zara combines this with Suicide By Cop. Injured and helpless, facing arrest and interrogation, she deliberately taunts the soldiers arresting her and Theo until one of them kills her.
In Arthur C Clarke's short story, The Transit Of Earth, after his mission is completed the main character faces a slow death marooned on Mars, but ultimately elects to travel to a part of the planet where life has been detected, and allow himself to be consumed by those organisms so his body will remain part of a natural ecosystem.
In The Lord Of The Rings, Denethor burns himself to death rather than be killed by Sauron's forces, though the fact that (thanks to Sauron's manipulations) he thought he'd sacrificed his sons (and many soldiers) for nothing also had something to do with it.
Street Magic has the villain poison herself in her room rather than be arrested and humiliated for killing the local police's undercover agents, as well as countless commoners, since there's no chance in hell that her aristocratic family is going to protect her.

Lois And Clark had Lex Luthor jump from a building rather than face jail. It seemed to be a point with him, because later he tried to electrocute himself but Superman stopped him. This might be the only time where a villain was effectively Killed Off For Real by being captured.
Doctor Who episode "The Satan Pit" featured a variant that could probably be considered assisted suicide, when a character requests that the air be sucked from the chamber he is in before the enemy gets him.
Eden in Heroes chose to shoot herself in the head rather than let Sylar take her brain (and her mind-control powers).
Subverted in the pilot episode for The Sarah Connor Chronicles; Sarah is jumped by the Terminator Cromartie, who is attempting to use her to get to John. She tries to commit suicide rather than be used as a tool to assassinate her son, but Cromartie grabs her gun at the last second and knocks her out.
In Sharpe, the title character discovers that another character is a (coerced) spy and on his request, allows him to die in a glorious suicide charge rather than being executed for treachery.
In a particularly dark episode of Foyle's War, DCI Foyle reminds the episode's Big Bad of everything he's lost, including son, fortune, and power. Foyle walks out of the house, and when a gunshot is heard and he doesn't pause, the viewer realizes that that was his intention.
President Clark in Babylon 5 puts a PPG to his head at the end of the Earth Alliance Civil War. But not before he programs the planetary defense grid to open fire on Earth, in the hopes of taking everyone with him.
Lampshaded in Dexter: "A badass like Doakes... he'd rather burn than get burned."
- And subverted in Season 1. The Ice Truck Killer is found dead in an apparent suicide, and the police comment that he must have considered it his final victory, because now he can never be caught. In fact, the suicide is a fake; he was killed by Dexter.
John Cavil's blink-and-you'll-miss-it death in the Battlestar Galactica finale.
- The Season Two Finale has also one of those. Pinned down by Centurions and realising the Cylons want the Colonials alive, Starbuck asks Anders to kill her rather than being sent to a Farm. It never comes to that though.
Chloe in Harpers Island chooses to throw herself in a river and die over being gutted by John Wakefield.
A Super Sentai Monster Of The Week pulled this... but it turns out he was using a hologram to fake his own death, and had actually escaped.
CSI had a serial killer who suffocated himself soon after he was arrested, He even worked in a suicide note into the drawing he was working on.
HBO's Rome has several of these, but You Should Know This Already.
In the Monty Pythons Flying Circus "YPRES 1914" skit, five WW1 soldiers are trapped behind enemy lines, but there are only enough rations for 4 people to survive the trip back. One of them must take...The Other Way Out (rather than, say, surrendering to the Germans).
Shane, in the series finale of The Shield, turns his gun on himself when the cops break down his door. Before that, though, he already poisoned his wife and son with fatal doses of painkillers; the former because she would have ended up in prison for life as well, the latter to "spare" him from going into the foster care system.
The elderly patient of the House episode "Informed Consent" doesn't want to die the tortuous way described by House. He asks the doctors to help kill him painlessly, or at least discharge him so he can die on his own terms. Chase and House seem willing to honor his request (although House, as usual, needs to solve the puzzle), but in a surprising move it's Cameron who assists him after giving a terminal diagnosis.
In the sixth season of Homicide: Life on the Street, when Detective Kellerman's dirty shooting of drug lord Luther Mahoney is exposed, and he is given the option of resigning in disgrace but going free or staying on the force but potentially going to jail (and taking some of his friends with him), he asks his ex-partner Lewis for one last favor: to give him his service weapon and leave the room for a few minutes. Lewis refuses.

In Warhammer 40000, suicide is an acceptable end for disgraced officers of the Imperial Guard, as well as an acceptable option for individuals who are touched by the Warp. Considering what the Warp does to people touched by it, this is fully understandable.
- In an amusing subversion, the Imperial Infantryman's Uplifting Primer expressly orders Guardsmen to not commit suicide, at least without authorisation and certainly not wasting valuable ammunition to do so without authorisation. The penalty for attempting to commit suicide is death.
  - The penalty of comitting suicide without authorisation is having your body incinerated and the ashes shot to spaces, and then sending the bill to your next of kin.
  - Though paradoxical, not so far fetched: suicide used to be (and in some cases, still is) a crime in many Real Life cultures, even posthumously. However, since lawyers have no sense of humor whatsoever, attempted suicide never was a capital one. Jail time and heavy fines, that's the ticket. Will put the love of life back in the fellow!
- The IG also have a "For Their Own Good" rule that basically means that if a sanctioned psyker suffers a Perils of the Warp attack within range of a Commissar, they are immediately shot and killed.
- It's also a much-preferred alternative to be taken alive by the Dark Eldar or the Emperor's Children.

Averted in Macbeth - "Why should I play the Roman fool, and die on mine own sword? Whiles I see lives, the gashes do better upon them."
- But played straight in Antony and Cleopatra, where both title characters commit suicide to avoid humiliation and death after their armies are defeated.
- Not to mention four times in Julius Caesar.
  - In the two above plays, Shakespeare was working from established historical fact. Antony, Cleopatra, Brutus, Portia, Cassius, and Titinius really did commit suicide, or at least the histories available to Shakespeare show that they did.

The Snopes version of the "Flagpole ball has a pistol for suicide" Urban Legend.

In Call Of Duty 4, at the end of the mission "The Sins of the Father", Zakhaev's son commits suicide once he realizes the SAS, Russians, and United States Marines are trying to capture him to locate his father.
- Then again, if I had the British SAS, the Spetsnaz, and the United States Marine Corps all after my head, I'd kill myself too.
In Bioshock, Andrew Ryan opts to commit an interesting form of suicide both to deny Atlas the pleasure of killing him and to humiliate you: turns out you've been Brainwashed this entire time, and he uses your code words to make you kill him, while he taunts you for being a "slave."
At the end of Star Craft Brood War, Admiral DuGalle writes a message to his wife, Helena, about the failures of the UED in the Koprulu sector before he kills himself out of shame, because he ordered the execution of his best friend, unknowingly cooperated with the Big Bad to kill her enemy, practically handed said Big Bad her new army, then failed to kill the Big Bad. A lot to be ashamed of.
- The ending text then notes that the Zerg caught up with them and not a single ship managed to leave Koprulu.
The enemy commander commits suicide in the secret ending of Cybernator. Well, in the Japanese version, anyway.
At the end of the House Of The Dead 2 video game (and of Typing Of The Dead), there are three possible endings. Two involve the main villain taking a swan dive off of the side of a highrise. One of those endings involves bungee cords and the villain bouncing back onto the top of the building and burping at you. I'm not making this up...
Wing Commander IV. In the good ending, Admiral Tolwyn is found guilty of treason. In a chilling finale to his tale, audio from a news report announces that all appeals have been denied as his corpse is shown in his cell, dangling lazily. He has crudely hung himself rather than face court martial.
At least one farmer in Ex Mortis 2 killed his family and then himself rather than endure a long and agonising death at the hands of the Exmortis. The brother-in-law wasn't so lucky, and the PC doesn't get the option.
System Shock 2: At least one of the people on the Von Braun opted to hang himself rather than be assimilated by the Many, and your alleged 'guide' is revealed to have killed herself long before. There's also Captain William Diego, who had a med-robot cut the infection from his body in full knowledge that he would quickly succumb to blood-loss, which he did.
This way out is taken by five separate characters in Dead Space; a number of NPCs (frequently right in front of Isaac), and Nicole, via lethal injection before the game even began.
In some areas of Left 4 Dead there are a disturbing number of bodies which are obviously suicidees (single pistol lying around, blood around the head). Given the alternative...
- Likewise, Half Life 2 has its fair share of similar cases in isolated areas. Usually, they're in places infested with Xen creatures or Headcrabs, but there were some that presumably just wanted to escape the tyranny of the Combine.
Samurai Shodown IV has a special move that "kills" the player (for some characters it's a suicide, for others is something less interesting). Since it doesn't necessarily end the fights (it's worth only one KO) it can be used strategically, as in the next round the player starts with a full rage meter.
In Warcraft III, upon death, Demon Hunter heroes will stab themselves with their own blades as they die, provided they are still in Night Elf form.
After you defeat Colonel Radec in Killzone 2, he and his men commit suicide, preferring death to being prisoners of the ISA.
In Wild Arms 5, after Kartikeya is defeated by Greg, he opts to finish himself off by using his ARM to blow a giant hole in his gut so as to deny Greg the joy of revenge. Greg then declares that he no longer cares about his revenge anymore, leaving Kartikeya with a dumbfounded look on his face as he dies.
Outside of storylines, sometimes suicide is not as bad for your (team's) score as losing to an enemy. For example, in Super Smash Bros Time battles, by default, a self-destruct takes a point off your score, but getting KOed takes a point off your score and awards one to whoever got the finishing blow. Either way, your damage is reset. In battles with only two fighters \ teams, it's particularly clear; if Fighter A KOs Fighter B 3 times, and fighter A self-destructs 5 times (resetting their damage each time), Fighter A will win. The way around this is to set the self-destruct penalty to 2 points instead of 1, although that makes accidental SDs more annoying. Unfortunately in most games like this there's rarely a way to not reset a player's damage when they self-destruct, so either suicides are exploitable, or punished too severely for innocent mistakes.
- That's why you play Stock matches instead so the winner isn't "highest KO count" but "last man standing".

Towards the end of Survival Of The Fittest V1, two characters are involved in a car chase across the island. At the culmination of this chase, one has been killed, and the other - Jeremy Torres has crashed his car into the side of a warehouse, which at the time, is a dangerzone. Rather than allowing himself to be killed up by his collar, the barely living character shoots himself as a final act of defiance. His car then blows up, igniting chemicals in the warehouse and resulting in a massive explosion.
- And near the end of V3, Quincy Archer takes one look at his sword, remembers that most of the remaining students have guns now, and promptly slits his own throat.
In There Will Be Brawl, Bowser chose to blow himself up with a Bob-Omb and take out as many Game and Watches as possible rather than be killed and mutilated like the rest of the victims.

Subverted in the South Park episode Night of the Living Homeless — When a scientist tries to kill himself before the homeless break down the door to his lab, he ends up non-fatally shooting himself in the head several times before finally hitting the mark.
At the end of season 3 of the Spawn animated series, Sam and Twitch give Chief Banks the choice of either killing himself or be disgraced once his link with Jason Wynn is exposed to the public and having his family dragged into such a dirty mess. Chief Banks choses to kill himself.
In a Never Say Die version, Melody, the only one who knows the key to the Diamond Castle and who happens to be trapped in a mirror, shatters the mirror rather than let the castle fall into the villain's hands, in essence trapping herself in the mirror forever. She gets better.

Cleopatra VII.
Erwin Rommel. Given the choice from Fieldmarshall Keitel. He could face the People's Court and potential persecution of his family, or choose to commit suicide quietly, and in the latter place the government would assure his family pension payments and a state funeral claiming he had died a hero.
Most of the higher-level Nazis has a cyanide pill in their possession. If they saw capture as imminent, they would bite into their cheek and open the pill, thus killing themselves. It happened at least once during the Nuremberg trials, to Hermann Göring, whose capsule was in his luggage when he was captured. He had to convince a friendly guard to bring it to him before he was executed.
- At least one Nazi smuggled the pill in between his... ah... other cheeks.
Decebalus of Dacia, to avoid being captured and humiliated by the Romans.
Likewise, Hannibal.
During the reign of the Roman emperor Nero, people on his hit list often got notified that they probably wanted to commit suicide or he'd make them wish they had. Given how sadistically Nero had some people executed, it should be no surprise that many who received such notes took their advice. Among those that did were his former tutor the philosopher Seneca and Petronius, author of the Satyricon.
- What actually is deliciously ironic, because Nero committed suicide when he was declared as an enemy of state after the burning of Rome. Sure, it was completely normal back then, but nonethless it's a great example of poetic justice.
- This predates Nero by centuries. The Roman religion did not see suicide as a sin, and in fact held up suicide as a noble form of death second only to death in battle. Free men and women who had been convicted or who were likely to be convicted of capital crimes were allowed to kill themselves before they could be executed; under Roman law before Nero, this meant their heirs would then be allowed to inherit their property rather than having it confiscated by the state. Nero's main innovation was that if the accused committed suicide, Nero would take his property but let the accused's family live. If he refused to commit suicide, Nero would order the execution of the entire family, including children. Even worse, because the law prohibited execution of a female virgin, any daughters in the family (even infants) would be raped by the executioner before being strangled and thrown down the Tarpeian Rocks into the Tiber. Nero also executed men solely to get their estates, manufacturing charges that no jury would disagree with lest they become his next victims.
Seppuku could be used by samurai to avoid falling into enemy hands. Jigai was a less messy version that women could use to the same ends.
During World War II, Japanese propaganda was used to convince Japanese soldiers and the natives of the islands they occupied that the Americans were savages who would torture them if they ever captured them. This often led to mass suicides among Japanese soldiers and native civilians whenever the Americans landed on an island.
Serial killer/torturer/rapist Leonard Lake got arrested for shoplifting. When it was clear that the police wouldn't let him go without some investigation, which would undoubtedly lead the police to discover his crimes, he left a note to his wife and ingested a cyanide capsule that killed him in order to avoid having to face legal proceedings and certain death sentence.
Mathematician and father of the computer Alan Turing was convicted of homosexuality and offered the choice between a series of chemical injections that would amount to chemical castration and cause him to grow breasts, and a long stay in prison, where he was unlikely to get the best of treatment. He chose the injections, but about a year later, he was found dead of cyanide poisoning, specifically from an apple impregnated with cyanide. Although his mother maintained until her death that it was a lab accident, the death was ruled a suicide.
- Also, mathematician Felix Hausdorff committed suicide with his wife and wife's sister in order to avoid going to a concentration camp.
"By the time you receive these lines, we three will have solved the problem in another way - in the way which you have continually attempted to dissuade us. ..."
At the end of the Jewish Rebellion against the Roman Empire in the first century AD, the entire population that had taken refuge in the fortress of Masada, soldiers and civilians alike, committed mass suicide rather than face slavery or crucifixion at the hands of the Romans.
- Twelve centuries later the Jews of York who had taken shelter in the castle during a pogrom followed their ancestors' example and committed mass suicide.
- Also happened in Numantia, Spain (then, Hispania), in 143 BD. After the long siege from the Romans and its chief Scipius Emilianus, lots of Numantians chose to die rather than surrender.
- The Roman general Varus and many other Roman officers did this in the final moments of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest, both out of shame (3 Roman legions were completely annihilated), and out of fear for what the Germanic tribesmen would do to them (many of the captured Roman soldiers were tortured, then had their head nailed to a tree while they were still alive).
A WWII German soldier told an account of being overrun by the Russians at Stalingrad. The soldier next to him took a small picture of his significant other from his pocket, had a last look, tore it into tiny shreds and subsequently shot himself. The survivor was captured and spent more than a decade in a Gulag before returning home. And he was one of the lucky ones.
- He was very lucky. Roughly 100,000 German soldiers (originally, there were more than 300,000 in the army) were taken prisoner during the Battle of Stalingrad. Only 5000 returned home.
This was the motivation behind the People's Temple mass suicide at Jonestown, though in this case only a small fraction of those dead would have faced criminal charges. It's also unclear how many people were actually willing participants in the suicide and how many were tricked/forced into it.
Gavrilo Princip, the man who killed Archduke Franz Ferdinand and set off World War I, attempted to do this, but the cyanide was too old and his gun was wrenched out of his hands.
Dr. Bruce Ivans, the prime suspect in the 2002 anthrax poisonings in the U.S., committed suicide in 2008, shortly ahead of being indicted for murder in the attacks.
Marvin Heemeyer, otherwise known as Captain Killdozer, built a tank and then proceeded to destroy his town causing over $7 million in damages before getting his tank stuck in a basement. He shot himself in the head after realising he was stuck.
- He had also built the Killdozer so that there was no way of getting into, or out of, it. The whole thing was a case of Taking You With Me and Sticking It To The Man.
I wish I could recall what unit it was, but I recall reading that an entire French military unit (Company size, I believe?), imprisoned during the Haitian Revolution for suspected treason, which committed mass suicide by strangulation rather than face torture or more likely, starvation.
King Mithridates VI of Pontus attempted this when about to be killed by the Romans; unfortunately, the attempt was done using a poison he had built up an immunity to; accounts vary on whether he got a lackey to run him through with a sword or whether the Romans got at him first.
The Norwegian warrior king Óláfr Tryggvason (GENTLEMAN ADVEN... oh, sorry), after losing a last stand at sea against all contemporary Scandinavian powers, ultimately losing only when engaged by other Norwegians. The king then threw himself into the sea without bothering to take off his mail, which most likely pulled him to the bottom of the Baltic sea. However, he did sometimes do this for sport prior to the battle, and therefore some believed he managed to save himself after all.
During the purges of the 1930s, several Soviet politicians committed suicide rather than go to the gulag.

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