Fatal Family Photo - Television Tropes & Idioms

"Sir, I've checked around and no one aboard this ship has a name."
"So what?"
"So it means we're goons. Faceless cannon fodder!"
"Bah! You have no proof of that."
"Sir, in case you hadn't noticed... EVERYONE ON THE SHIP IS WEARING A RED SHIRT!"
"Bah! Sheer coincidence!"
"YOU'RE LIVING IN DENIAL! HE'S GONNA WIPE US ALL OUT!"
"BAH! YOU'RE CRACKING UNDER THE PRESSURE LAD. JUST RELAX. HERE, LET ME SHOW YOU SOMETHING. It's a picture of my wife and kids! Ain't they something? They're the reason that I'm here. I'm fighting for them. I ain't going to let them down."
"...Well, nice knowing you, Captain."

—Captain SNES #345

"...a man resembling a shaved bear whose life is a cavalcade of success and happiness and sunshine and flowers before he takes one too many lingering looks at his sexy wife and smacks straight into a truck..."

—Yahtzee on the hero of Painkiller

Retirony's equally devious brother. Whenever a character shows the others a picture of their family and/or loved ones, they're shot to the top of the Sorting Algorithm Of Mortality.

It mostly works as a cheap "look at my lovely family" moment so we feel bad for them when the character dies. This isn't immediately lethal though; it usually takes a while to kill the character because it bumps the Red Shirt into the Mauve Shirt's sweet spot for "less likely to die meaninglessly, much likelier to have die meaningfully because it'll hurt more."

The variation where the picture directly leads to the character's death could be seen as a subtle acknowledgment of the trope.

Examples:

Miscellaneous (please help sort them)

The Core: Sergei shows those damn photos so often that anyone with half a brain can see that he won't make it out alive.
Alien Versus Predator (the first movie): Then again, the victim's photos were the only distinguishing thing about his character (most of the other characters weren't so lucky)
In the Full Metal Alchemist manga, 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. Of course, 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... and is the first important character to die.
- Also 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."
Referenced in the Discworld novel Jingo, where a young soldier who has been killed is remarked to have shown his sergeant a picture of his girlfriend the night previous.
A Discussed Trope in the Battlefield: Bad Company blog by Sweetwater (We're dead, 6/16/2008), calling Haggard and Bobby Sanford stupid for discussing home, and for Sanford showing a photo of his wife and daughter, calling that particular action 'like signing your own death warrant!'. As You Know, his proof for it is war movies. Also played straight as the Sanford guy does die (apparently, by a tank while trying to defecate).
In the first Terminator movie, Kyle has a picture of Sarah Connor he treasures.
The moment Kinue Crossroad was seen looking at the picture of her family in Gundam 00, it was obvious her time was up. Didn't take long.
- Season 2 has the same thing happen to Barack Zinin.
The Simpsons had a flashback to Skinner and his buddy in Vietnam. IIRC his buddy got killed showing Skinner his pictures of his girlfriend, because the photo album was brightly-colored and broke his camouflage.
The film Black Hawk Down has Mike Durant showing others a photo of his family. Long after the Black Hawk he was piloting crashes, he's surrounded by Somalians and his photo is lost in the crowd. He survives the entire conflict as a hostage, and is eventually released afterward.
Actually leads to a death in the film Sum of All Fears, where an Israeli pilot's picture of his wife and kids falls off his plane's control panel, his brief distraction of quickly picking the photo back up and placing it into it's original place leads to him now seeing too late the surface to air missile that's flying towards him and he explodes.
Parodied and lampshaded in Hot Shots! One of the pilots shows everyone pictures of his perfect family, and his beautiful, perky wife even shows up at the base to tell him how things are going with the house they just bought. He also puts off putting the single last signature needed onto the insurance on his life until after this flight, and takes some crucial evidence to the JFK assassination and a winning lottery ticket along with him; his call sign? Dead Meat.
Doubly-subverted by Grig in The Last Starfighter, when he shows the hero a picture-cube of his family. Grig ultimately survives, and since he has twelve thousand offspring, the cube starts flashing rapid-fire/near-subliminal images of every last one of them.
Independence Day. As Russell Casse is flying underneath the invader's ship, he looks at a picture of his three children in the cockpit just before he performs a Heroic Sacrifice by flying his jet into the ship's primary weapon and destroying it.
Harry Potter. Lupin! How could you have taken out that photograph of your newborn son! And you! Fleur! Giving him reason, too! You fools!
During the Joe Don Baker stinker Final Justice (as presented on MST 3 K), Joe Don Baker's Texas lawman is looking at family photos with his partner, moments before the partner is gunned down:
Joe Don Baker: Travis is a cute kid. Yer a lucky man, Bob.
Crow: Uh oh.
Used as foreboding in Deep Impact. When Jenny's estranged father returns and gives her several family photos, it begins a series of events where Jenny gives up the chance to escape the mega-tsunami created by the smaller half of the comet and spends her last moments with her father.
Inverted in Gears Of War 2, where Dominic shows everyone a picture of Maria, his wife who had gone missing in the war. It turns out that She was captured by the Locusts, put into a Work Camp and gets a Fate Worse Than Death. So Dom has to kill her.
In Excel Saga, the titular main character is working part time at a construction sight 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 sight catches fire and he dies horribly when he runs back into the inferno to retrieve his family photo.
Inverted in a story this troper is writing, where a character shows one of his fellow soldiers a photo of his fiancée... and she dies. The guy himself survives the whole war.
Subverted in Transformers, at least partially. Jorge Figuerosa talks about going back to his mother's house and eating alligator stew, while Captain Lennox actually talks to his wife via webcam and sees his baby. Neither of them die in the movie (although Fig died in a cut scene).
We see a brief shot of Dryden's picture of his wife and kids on a table when Bond kills him in the opening of Casino Royale.

Western Animation

Averted in Robotech: New Generation and Shadow Chronicles, where Scott and Marcus carry the locket showing Marlene around - and survive, often just as one of few.

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