Mercy Kills are often framed as regrettable yet often necessary options for characters who are facing A Fate Worse Than Death. However, consent is an important part of the justification for why a given Mercy Kill doesn't make the character doing the Mercy Kill a murderer. However, sometimes, there are villains who will justify what appears to be wanton murders as Mercy Kills, and others where the author makes a point of demonstrating that a character, while well-intentioned, at best had Questionable Consent for what they did/are about to do.
For the sake of keeping things civil, this trope is restricted to cases in which the person killed actively objects to the act in some form or has the fact that a Mercy Kill is coming actively hidden from them. This is a controversial topic in Real Life and fiction, and a Mercy Kill may be portrayed sympathetically by the author even without consent in some cases if the person's Fate Worse Than Death involves making them an Empty Shell and the person doing the Mercy Kill gets there too late to prevent the action. For that reason and the manifold others for which this topic is controversial in Real Life, in cases where consent is disputable and the author portrays the action to be morally ambiguous or negative, the example falls under Questionable Consent instead. Also, to qualify for this trope, a character must actually die. Failed attempts do not count.
This is frequently the modus operandi of the "Angel of Mercy"-type Battleaxe Nurses, who use their positions to become Serial Killers under the pretense of relieving their victims' suffering without consent.
Since this is a Death Trope, expect unmarked spoilers below.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: "I Won't Rely on Anyone Anymore" reveals that in one timeline, Homura Akemi tried to warn the other girls about Kyubey's true nature and that Magical Girls turn into Witches, but no one believed her until Sayaka turned into a Witch. After Homura is forced to Mercy Kill Sayaka, the girls only have a brief moment to mourn the latter before Mami decides to kill the other girls and herself so they won't share Sayaka's fate. She succeeds in killing Kyoko and forces Madoka to kill her before she can do the same to Homura, leaving the poor girl broken and in tears.
Audioplay
- Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk: At one point the elf falls into a Pit Trap and yells at the rest of the party to rescue her. The dwarf has different ideas.
Ranger: What's she saying?
Dwarf: She says we should leave her down there and be on our way.
Elf: Get me out of here, it's all sticky!
Dwarf: She says we should drop big rocks on her head to finish her off.
Comic Books
- Hellblazer: Lord Burnham is a depraved aristocrat who arranges for Mako the blood mage to build him an Artificial Afterlife full of sex slaves of every age before committing suicide, thus escaping Hell. Constantine shows up just after Burnham started the lethal injection to inform him that the slaves' souls have been freed, and now Burnham gets to spend the rest of eternity with a very pissed-off Mako, desperately trying to stop the injection.
- Judge Dredd: This is Serial Killer Oola Blint's, aka "The Angel of Mercy", entire modus operandi, often with the assistance of her weak-willed husband, Homer Blint. She frequently incapacitates unwitting victims with gas before administering a lethal injection. Her actions are seemingly motivated by a genuine belief that she is performing acts of mercy by freeing people from the madness of Mega-City One. At one point, Oola and Homer escape capture and flee to Brit-Cit, where they'd open up a perfectly legal euthanasia clinic, but Oola found that killing people gave her no satisfaction if they actually wanted to die, so she began murdering people again. This causes Homer to finally see through her deluded self-justification for her actions (Oola actually killed because she liked killing) and finally inform the judges about her.
- Subverted in Largo Winch: Nerio Winch summons a man to his penthouse that he knows is plotting to kill him so Nerio won't reveal the man's crimes (one of the W Group's executives). The murderer is surprised at first, then learns Nerio has cancer and so it would count as a Mercy Kill. However, he also knows Nerio had arranged a Thanatos Gambit in case of murder, and instead throws Nerio off the roof.
- The Shadow: During World War II, the Japanese send a secret mission to retrieve a Mineral MacGuffin from China led by General Akamatsu and Major Kondo. Once it's in his hands, Major Kondo has a breakdown on realizing he's been tricked and the rocks are worthless, causing the general to commit seppuku... and just before beheading him, Kondo reveals that nope, those were the right rocks all along, but the general was kind enough to kill himself and leave him in charge of the operation (Kondo plans to sell the rocks to the highest bidder, but they're stolen from him again). Karma bites Kondo later, when those same rocks reappear in the skies of Hiroshima, on August 6, 1945...
- The Transformers (Marvel): The Deathbringers are mechanoids tasked with travelling through space and offering the release of death to those who seek it. However, a damaged and dying Deathbringer comes into contact with the damaged Matrix of Leadership, which corrupts its programming into concluding all life is suffering. The corrupted Deathbringer makes its way to Earth, raining destruction on a human city and killing a healthy Autobot reconnaissance team. The battle with it is complicated by the fact Optimus Prime desperately wants to keep the Deathbringer in one piece so they can try to find out where it came into contact with the Matrix.
Fan Works
- In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfic titled Angel of Mercy, Fluttershy is visited at her cottage by her friend Applejack who wishes to offer her condolences in regards to the death of Angel Bunny. Applejack is currently ill however with Potomac fever, when Fluttershy reads more about the illness from one of her books, she comes to the conclusion that her friend will die from it and prepares to end her friends suffering despite Applejack's protests that she'll get better with plenty of rest and avoiding strenuous activity for the time being. Fluttershy eventually kills Applejack with a knife and the story ends with her visiting Sweet Apple Acres where it's heavily implied that she plans to do the same thing to Granny Smith who also isn't feeling very well.
- Mike's New Ghostly Family: It is revealed that the true reason why Evan Afton, a.k.a. the Bite of '83 victim died was not due to passing away from his injuries, but because his father, William Afton, had his life support unplugged. He presents his case as a Mercy Kill, despite the doctors stating that he could've survived were his injury treated sufficiently, claiming that he doesn't want to leave him broken for the rest of his life. In truth, however, William simply doesn't want to waste his time raising a disabled child, and wants to keep Evan silent about Elizabeth's death at Circus Baby's hands. This act cements the ire he got from Shadow Freddy, a.k.a. Evan Afton's ghost, who is furious that his father would kill him for such petty reasons.
Film - Live Action
- Edge of Tomorrow: Most of the film takes place with main character William Cage in a "Groundhog Day" Loop as a result of his blood getting mixed with that of an alien. While this allows him to go through months or even years of Training from Hell in just a day, it comes with the drawback that a blood transfusion would remove the alien blood and break the loop, which means he absolutely has to die if he's at all injured, leading to a montage of his mentor (and former possessor of this power) Rita Vrataski shooting him whenever he gets injured, often as he tries to drag himself away or proclaims that he's only slightly hurt.
- The End revolves around a man with a terminal disease (played by Burt Reynolds) asking a mental patient (played by Dom De Luise) to kill him so he can end life on his own terms. Hilarity Ensues when he decides to at least try to correct his life beforehand, which leads to him deciding not to commit suicide, which leads to the mental patient thinking it's a "No Matter How Much I Beg" type of situation and keeps on trying to kill him.
- Just Like Heaven: Zig-Zagged. When Elizabeth is revealed to be in a coma rather than actually dead, her spirit and David work to reunite her with her body before her sister takes her off of life support. Subverted since Elizabeth had signed forms prior to her accident not to take extraordinary measures to save her life, so her sister believes she's following Elizabeth's wishes by considering pulling the plug. Double subverted since Elizabeth currently doesn't want to be taken off life support because there is still a chance to save her life, but can't tell her sister that since she's a spirit that only David can hear.
- Me, Myself & Irene: Early during the road trip to transfer Irene Waters to federal custody, she and Officer Charlie Baileygates encounter a cow that was hit by a car and Charlie, thinking the cow is a goner, shoots her with his sidearm to give her a Mercy Kill. The cow turns out to be Made of Iron, though, and keeps struggling to get up even after Charlie empties his sidearm's entire magazine on the poor thing and tries to choke her to death, all the while yelling to stop making it difficult and just die already. During the end credits, we even get to see the cow grazing in a field all bandaged up. A deleted scene takes it even further, where shortly after the incident Charlie and Irene encounter a farmer who warns them to keep an eye out for his prize cow who escaped from his pasture, adding that she has a bad habit of napping in the road.
- In The Revenant, after main character Hugh Glass is badly injured during the bear attack, Fitzgerald tells Glass to blink if he wants a Mercy Kill. Fitzgerald then stares Glass in the eyes for over a minute as Glass does his best to not blink. Eventually Glass does, and Fitzgerald uses that as the excuse he needed.
Literature
- In the Agatha Christie novel By the Pricking of my Thumbs, Tommy and Tuppence remember the case of an "angel of mercy" as they try to figure out the mystery of the disappearance of a friend of theirs:
"A French woman. A woman who'd suffered terribly from the loss of her husband and her child. She was brokenhearted and she was an angel of mercy." "That's right," said Tuppence, "I remember. They called her the angel of whatever the village was. Given or something like that. She went to all the neighbours and nursed them when they were ill. Particularly she used to go to children when they were ill. She nursed them devotedly. But sooner or later, after apparently a slight recovery, they grew much worse and died. She spent hours crying and went to the funeral crying and everybody said they wouldn't know what they'd have done without the angel who'd nursed their darlings and done everything she could."
- The Chaos Cycle: The family members of the women that go missing in the woods of Black Hollow are often the ones who kill these women. They believe that they've become possessed by the entity known as The Dreamwalker, and that they are performing an act of mercy by killing them while they're possessed. This turns out to be a delusion that they've concocted to make themselves feel better, as the women are harmless. It is revealed that these people are being influenced into doing the killings by the demon Abaddon.
- Dreamblood Duology: In the theocracy of Gujaareh, specialized priests "Gather" the dying into the Dream Land-afterlife by creating a happy Dying Dream. It's one of their most sacred rites and guarantees them peace in the afterlife. However, once the priests approve a Gathering, the client can't back out, even if that means coming for them in their sleep.
- In The Giver, elderly people and people with disabilities are "Released to Elsewhere." Late in the book, the main character discovers that this means euthanasia.
- Averted in His Dark Materials' third tome, "The Amber Spyglass", where Will refuses to Mercy Kill a wounded frog, stating he doesn't know how it really feels.
- Misery: Downplayed due to Annie's clear insanity. She had started off "mercy-killing" people when she worked as a nurse to take people out of their "poor, unfortunate" circumstances. It's clear that, due to her God complex, "they were all poor unfortunate souls."
Live Action TV
- Criminal Minds: Unsurprisingly for a show that deals with the broad spectrum of types of Serial Killer, there have been a few examples of "angels of death" (also occasionally called "angels of mercy"):
- In "Broken Wing", the killer iss a recovered drug addict who targeted fellow addicts in rehab centers believing that he was helping them prevent the inevitable relapse.
- In "Children of the Dark", one member of the foster-brother tag-team of family annihilators poisons the children to give them peaceful deaths, in direct comparison to his brother who bludgeons the parents to death with anything he can get his hands on. They targeted families that they believed to be abusive (as theirs were, both of them), believing the murdered children were going to a better place.
- In "Closing Time", the killer is a bartender who targets customers who were on a downward spiral because their wives had become unfaithful and they were unable to find good work, just like had happened to him. He claimed that he was helping them take "the way out" that said spiral was not letting them choose.
- In the episode "A Higher Power", the criminal of the week is targeting the grieving families of fourteen children who died in a fire, thinking that he is helping them move on from their grief and be Together in Death with their children. Ironically, the "suicide" that put the BAU on his trail was an actual suicide he was totally uninvolved with, and the agents had to inform the detective brother of the dead man, who spent the whole episode hoping that There Are No Coincidences.
- In "Miasma", the killer is a man who murders sick people (with symptoms similar to the sickness his own mother had) believing that he is doing them a favor by giving them a quicker and less humiliating death. Of course, he also decides that he had to do something about preventing the disease from spreading, namely setting their homes on fire.
- Dexter: The titular Serial-Killer Killer's first victim is an "Angel of Death" nurse who overdoses sick and elderly patients with morphine to "take their pain away", whether or not they actually happened to be terminally ill.
- Elementary: Exploited in "Lesser Evils". A custodian at a hospital had been a doctor in his native country and started Mercy Killing terminally ill patients on his own initiative. The actual Monster of the Week is a surgeon in danger of losing his job over errors, and tries to cover up his latest flub, leaving a clamp in a thoracic surgery patient's chest, by altering her chart to show terminal cardiac cancer so the "angel of death" whom he'd realized was active at the hospital would kill her for him.
- Killing Eve: Villanelle meets Gabriel, who gets maimed in the car accident that killed his parents. He hasn't yet seen his burns, but she sees them and concedes that they are bad. She then immediately gives him a Neck Snap without further discussion.
- In Ratched, we are told a Dark Secret of Mildred Ratched's: that she was kicked out of the Army for euthanizing injured soldiers when she served as a nurse in the Korean War. She commits further murder and mayhem on the road to becoming the Battleaxe Nurse of the Oregon psychiatric hospital she runs with an iron fist in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.
- Star Trek: Voyager: In the episode "Coda," Janeway is trapped in a time loop. In one instance of this loop, she contracts the Vidiian phage. With no other choice, The Doctor euthanizes her with nerve gas. In desperation, Janeway attempts to delete the EMH, only to find that a safeguard had been set in place preventing her from doing so.
- Why Women Kill: When he was a kid, Bertram Filcott performed a Mercy Kill on his mother at her request. This set him on the path to becoming an "Angel of Death", a Serial Killer of people who are incredibly sick and in pain, reasoning that it's better than letting them suffer. He does this with truly altruistic intentions in mind, viewing it as a sad but ultimately merciful act. The problem is, he never asks if people want this "kindness", and it genuinely doesn't occur to him that he should.
Tabletop Games
- Cyberpunk 2020: At the end of "Never Fade Away" (a short flavor story featured in the rulebook), Johnny Silverhand finds his kidnapped girlfriend Alt apparently brain-dead and, assuming she is gone, disconnects her from Arasaka's machine that's keeping her body alive. What he doesn't know (nor bothers to find out) is that Alt's consciousness was only temporarily transferred to a nearby server, so she was just fine (if unable to voice her protest) until he decided to unplug her, which is what actually killed her. In Cyberpunk 2077, Alt is still very much pissed at him for this, even after having long Ascended to a Higher Plane of Existence as a disembodied quasi-AI.
Theatre
- Arsenic and Old Lace: The majority of the plot hinges on Mortimer Brewster discovering that his elderly aunts are serial killers who poison homeless men who arrive at their house looking for the room they have for rent. They believe that they are doing them a kindness after they noticed the tenant who died from a heart attack (and became their stressor) looked so peaceful once he passed away and they want to help other "poor, lonely men" find the same peace.
Video Games
- Everhood: The first act of the game involves Red — the Player Character — on a quest to retrieve their stolen arm. Once that goal is accomplished, however, Frog reveals to Red their true mission and purpose for coming to the titular Everhood: euthanizing every single member of the remaining population, who are prevented from entering the cycle of reincarnation and have been slowly driven mad by the millions of years spent living with immortality, but are too afraid of death to end their suffering via suicide.
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the Final Boss of Endwalker is the Endsinger, a Hive Mind of Meteia who all succumbed to the overwhelming despair of countless fallen civilizations they discovered in their travels. They believe that true happiness cannot be found in life, having heard cries for oblivion from across the universe. As a result, they aspire to wipe out all life in creation and end the cycle of reincarnation so none will have to suffer the pain of existence again. By the events of the game, it's implied that much of the life in the universe has been snuffed out as a result, with Midgardsormr, who fled the Dragonstar with his seven eggs, referring to Hydaelyn as the sole source of hope in all of creation. The people of Hydaelyn are understandably not keen on having their lives snuffed out and band together to stop the Big Bad from completing their plot.
"This is a kindness."
- The fate of Mary Shepherd-Sunderland in Silent Hill 2 at the hands of her husband, James. Though both of them knew that she was as good as dead thanks to her disease, she is still shown struggling as she's subjected to a Vorpal Pillow, meaning that the act was very much a one-sided decision. Despite this, the game leaves it open to interpretation what James' motives for the act were, and whether or not he deserves redemption.
Visual Novels
- Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony: Kokichi and Gonta see a flashback light revealing Earth has become an apocalyptic wasteland. Kokichi then convinces the other boy to help make a Trial where everyone will fail to find the killer, allowing them to Mercy Kill the students so no one will have to learn the Awful Truth. However, Kokichi reveals during the trial that he never intended to carry out the Mercy Kill plan at all, merely using Gonta as a pawn, and exposes him as the culprit. Unfortunately, the students refuse to die and Gonta is executed for killing Miu while Kokichi laughs at everyone's anguish all the way through, knowing they can't do anything to him because only the person who actually murdered the victim can get executed.
Webcomics
- Cuanta Vida: Medic claims that Sniper requested a Mercy Kill after losing his eyes. However, when Scout is incapacitated, Medic tries to give him a lethal injection by deceit and then by force, insisting that he's become a liability to the team. Spy kills Medic instead.
- Unsounded: Bell asks questions of a horrifically burned soldier and once he gets useful information out of the man he covers his face with his hand to smother him as he waxes on about the beauty of the afterlife he believes himself to be sending him to while the poor soldier struggles fruitlessly against him.
Web Video
- Critical Role: Campaign Three: Discussed. While talking about removing the gods, FRIDA likens them to Aeormatons that are kept "on" by people's worship, and after so many millennia, they deserve rest. Imogen is somewhat disturbed by this and points out that the Ruby Vanguard's goal is to annihilate the gods, regardless of whether or not it would be merciful.
