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I Will Only Slow You Down
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You have a group of protagonists, one of whom has been injured or disabled. Either that person is literally slowing the group down, or Someone Has to Die. Naturally, the "damaged" party member volunteers to sacrifice themselves and/or be left behind: after all, being permanently injured is a Fate Worse than Death and well..they'll just slow them down.
A Super Trope of No One Gets Left Behind, and a Sub Trope of Heroic Sacrifice. Often used in a More Hero than Thou dispute.
Often leads to You Shall Not Pass, Self Destructive Charge or No One Gets Left Behind, but also covers other situations such as quietly going off to die when no one's looking.
Makes sense when the character is already mortally wounded, and can be a natural end to Your Days Are Numbered. If they're not it has Unfortunate Implications for the value placed on disabled/scarred etc people (by themselves and those around them) and easily turns into Death by Disfigurement.
Can be a Death Trope, so expect spoilers.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Done rather cruelly in Weiss Kreuz. Birman, one of Weiss' handlers, is captured and subjected to Mutilation Interrogation by La Mort. The boys are ordered to kill her before she cracks and tells them everything she knows; when they protest, Manx reminds them that they're killers, not rescuers. When they find her alive, they decide to rescue her anyway, and she asks Aya for the gun he carries as a backup weapon, saying grimly that she's still got one finger to pull a trigger with. Aya gives it to her, apparently thinking she wanted to help them escape, but she explains the trope and shoots herself instead.
- Main character Seiya attempts to pull this in Saint Seiya when he's under the effects of a poison-based techniques and Shun can't fight his own Evil Counterpart properly, since one of his chains is wrapped around Seiya's arm to keep him from falling off a cliff. Seiya mentions this trope right before he uses his free hand to cut off the already-damaged chain and willingly throw himself off, which sends Shun into an Unstoppable Rage against his enemy. Luckily, Seiya lives to tell. Barely, but he does.
- Done at least twice in Fullmetal Alchemist.
Comics
Film
Literature
Live Action TV
- Subverted in the first season two episode of Stargate SG-1 in which Daniel is badly wounded. Thinking that this will likely kill him anyway, he tells Jack to take the others and go on without him while he plans to stay behind and cover their escape. However he ends up meeting no resistance and instead hauls himself to a Goa'uld sarcophagus to get healed.
- Anders in Battlestar Galactica.
- LOST: This is given as the reason Charlotte and Daniel stay behind while the rest of the left-behinds travel to the Orchid. Of the group, Charlotte is suffering the worst effects of time-traveling. This also allows the pair a poignant death scene, which motivates Daniel's actions for the rest of the season.
- In Deep Space Nine, a few examples:
- Injured Kira to Dax after the crash in "The Siege", but Dax takes her along anyway.
- Dax is bleeding to death in "Change of Heart" is left behind by Worf to finish a mission. He ends up abandoning the mission and comes back for her
- Humorous example in "The Ascent", where Quark hauls the injured Odo (during the period when he had become a "solid") up a mountain on a stretcher. When Odo protests, Quark emphasizes his reasoning: Odo's along for emergency rations; if he dies, he's food.
- Worf yells "leave me!" to Ezri when he's shot as they try to escape the Dominion. She just tells him to shut up.
- In the Doctor Who serial The Invasion of Time, one of the savage Gallifreyans to Leela. He then goes for Playing Possum.
- In one episode of Blackadder Goes Forth, Blackadder and Baldrick have been captured by the Germans and sentenced to spend the rest of the war teaching young schoolgirls in Heidelberg home economics. Edmund is far more comfortable with this fate than with being sent back to the front again. When his companions come to rescue him, he attempts to invoke this trope in order to be left behind, claiming to have "splintered his pancreas". It doesn't work.
- In the HBO film Deadly Voyage (based on a true story), Kingsley Ofosu and his brother are trying to escape from the murderous crew of the ship they have stowed away on (who have already killed their seven companions). As they reach the deck, his injured brother, knowing that the two of them will never escape together, pushes Kingsley away from him and staggers off on his own. Sure enough, the crew quickly catches him and throws him overboard, but the separation and the distraction gives Kingsley the precious extra few minutes needed to escape.
Tabletop RPG
- A variation in the Classic Traveller adventure Rescue on Galatea by FASA. During a rescue mission in enemy territory an NPC is wounded. The PCs hear a shot: when they arrive they find the NPC dead, killed by another NPC named Freeman. Freeman explains that he had to shoot the wounded NPC because he would have just slowed them down, or worse been forced to tell about the team's mission if captured.
Video Games
- Played straight and inverted in Left 4 Dead, where a struggling Survivor may encourage the rest to go on to the next safe room without them. Justified because Death Is Cheap and they'll respawn in the safe room at the beginning of the next map. This is considered a valid tactic on the higher difficulties, since a dozen or more attempts may be needed to finish a campaign on Expert.
- Used along with the exact phrase "I will only slow you down" by the injured Grey Warden Keenan in Dragon Age Origins: Awakening.
- Meryl asks Solid Snake to shoot her in the first Metal Gear Solid after being shot by Sniper Wolf, claiming she promised she wouldn't slow him down and broke her promise. Actually killing her gets you a Non Standard Game Over.
- In Betrayal At Krondor, whenever a party member gets "killed" in battle, they will tell the others to leave them. No matter how bad it is, they will invariably be told, word for word, that No One Gets Left Behind, and will remain in the party in a state of Near Death.
- In Fable III, when Walter and the Hero first arrive in Aurora, they encounter a creature known as the Crawler and Walter is left blind and injured. Knowing he's too weak to cross the desert in his current state, Walter tells the Hero to leave him behind, saying "I won't just slow you down, I'll get you killed." You're actually forced to leave him behind, but doing so at the first opportunity makes you an evil asshole.
- Hope, suddenly and briefly, in Final Fantasy XIII.
Western Animation
Web Original
- Completely averted in Freddie W's video "Flower Warfare" where, at the end, Freddie falls and beings to tell his comrade to go on without him, just to see she's already done so, barely stopping to see him fall.
Web Comic
Real Life
- Captain Lawrence Oates
 is most well known for committing suicide by Antarctic so the rest of his exploration party could live. He was suffering from a frostbitten foot and injuries he received during service in the Boer War. Unfortunately, this didn't help save his comrades. His last words were written in Robert Scott's diary as:
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