If I Can't Have You…

"But if I wasn't ever going to be happy again, then I would make sure that they wouldn't be alive to enjoy their happiness."

— Hikaru Hiyama, Revenge Road

"…no one will/can."

The ultimate characterizing Stock Phrase of the Yandere archetype.

It is also often spoken by jealous and envious or narcissistic characters (often villains) demanding to be loved. The set up is usually as follows: Baddie has grown infatuated with the hero or his Love Interest and kidnaps her with the intent to "marry" her. Or just have his way with her. While it is possible for the villain to love their captive in a non-sicko way, it's usually love of the Love Makes You Evil or Love Hungry variety. Case in point: once the hero breaks her out and they kiss passionately, expect the villain to shout this line and decide that if she won't love him, she's not going to love anyone period, usually before trying to murder her or get rid of her in some other despicable fashion.

If the villain is a Femme Fatale who was wooing the hero, she may well shoot him once his love interest shows up. Many a non-villainous "jilted" Clingy Jealous Girl will react this way, and there may be some truth to it, as this seems to be the mentality behind many people who kill their cheating spouses or ex-lovers (both in fiction and in Real Life). A woman may also be more likely to get away with it.

If the villain ever had an inkling of a chance, this becomes a form of Kick the Dog or Moral Event Horizon that shows that they're "The Wrong Guy".

See No MacGuffin, No Winner when the trope phrase is directed at something of intrinsic value, rather than an object of affection. May overlap with Better Partner Assertion, the leadup to this trope if the assertion is unsuccesful, or Stepping Stone Spouse if the spurned partner has sacrificed a lot to support their partner prior to the breakup. See also Love Makes You Evil, and Living Emotional Crutch. The polar opposite of I Want My Beloved to Be Happy. Often the person trying to kill the object of their affection is Not Good with Rejection. And if that person is a villain, you can bet they will have suffered a Villainous Breakdown.

An alternative to killing their beloved is for the villain to kill the hero for being a romantic rival. If the villain is canny, he'll play it off as an accident. If he isn't quite sane, he'll tell his captive and actually expect this to make her throw herself in his arms. When this trope is magnified and taken to its logical extreme, it becomes either Taking You with Me or Put Them All Out of My Misery.

As this trope frequently occurs during the climax of a story, beware the spoilers!

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• Films — Live-Action
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• Western Animation

Other Examples:

Advertising

• In The Myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, after Orpheus rejects Aristaeus's advances in favor of his wife Eurydice, she kills Eurydice out of spite towards him.

Eastern European Animation

• The protagonist of Ersatz has the power to make anything, anything at all, out of blow-up balloons. He makes a sexy bikini woman, but she dumps him for a surfer. After the man tracks the woman down, he interrupts their sex and kills the woman by pulling her plug out.

Fairy Tales

• In East of the Sun and West of the Moon, the prince is cursed to turn into a bear because he would not marry his stepsister as his Wicked Stepmother wanted.
• In Rapunzel, Mother Gothel throws Rapunzel out into the wilderness, and blinds the prince so they will be unable to find each other.
• Invoked in The Little Mermaid by the sea witch and the sisters of the titular mermaid. They give the mermaid a dagger to use to kill the prince on his wedding night, and then let the blood drip to her legs so she will become a mermaid once more. Ultimately defied by the little mermaid herself, who chooses to spare the prince at the cost of her own life.
• In Snow White Fire Red, her ogress mother curses her so that the prince she ran off with will forget her as soon as his mother kisses him.
• A variant in "The Yellow Dwarf". The dwarf is not entirely unhappy at Princess Toutebelle's Death by Despair, because he would rather she be dead than in the arms of another.

Fan Works

• Near the end of Blood and Ink, Cinder tries multiple times to get Ruby to join her after she finds out about Cinder's true nature as a Mob Boss, but Ruby refuses each time because Cinder had earlier ordered an attack on her sister, Yang. When Ruby states that she prefers her friends over her, Cinder is driven over the edge and kills her.
• In the cross-over comic Grim Tales from Down Below, Minnie screams this at Junior before trying to decapitate him. While she's not actually a villain, she is under the influence of Him, making her evil at the time it was said.
  • For added Squick, Minnie is Junior's half-sister, so he's as creeped out as the readers are.
• Defying the Odds shows this in a flashback, as Tweety tells Sylvester the harsh promise Tyler made to her when she turned dwon his marriage proposal.
• In Revenge Road, Hikaru decides to kill Kyosuke and Madoka, angry at Kyosuke for rejecting her and Madoka (to a slightly lesser degree) for stealing him away, and jealous of the happiness they share.
• In the final chapter of Project Gethinator, Admiral Daro'Xen, who is Yandere in a big way for Commander Shepard, utterly loses it after he decisively turns her down and calls her on her crazy scheme and her obsession with him. After realizing that Shepard is in love with Tali, Xen goes into full-on Woman Scorned mode, and proceeds to turn the same faulty mineral scanner that Tali's idiot crewman Prazza from the preceding fic Inglorious Bosh'tets accidentally used to make a star go supernova on the main star of the Eta Carinae system, causing it to go hyper-nova, making sure to have the Normandy's drive core disabled so Shepard, Tali and the crew cannot escape. Only Shepard's quick thinking and Legion's advanced technical skills get everyone out of there alive.
• Calvin & Hobbes: The Series gives this a bizarre and interesting twist:
  Thunderstorm: IF I CAN'T HAVE THIS WORLD, THEN IT CAN'T HAVE YOU!
  Andy: Has anyone ever said that before?
  Jack: I don't think so. That was a pretty good line.
• Played with in Inner Demons. When Queen!Twilight realizes that her brother is rejecting her advances in favor of, you know, his wife, she decides she will kill him along with the rest of the heroes — but first she's going to make him watch her kill Cadence. Fortunately, the rest of the Mane Six show up in time to stop her.
• Dirty Sympathy has Daryan attempt to kill Klavier by having him strangled to death when he finds out that the latter is cheating on him another man. Daryan outright states this trope as his reason for not ending his relationship with Klavier when the latter questions why they don't break up if Daryan hates him so much.
• In Mega Man: Defender of the Human Race, Splash Woman blows up her underwater hideout after losing, saying that if she can't have Mega Man no one will.
• In Hunting the Unicorn, Blaine's stalker Alex threatens to run a concussed Blaine over if his friends call 911.
• Mischief Revived:
  Charlie: Why Fred? Why try to kill your own brother?
  Ron: He can’t have Hermione. I won’t let him. If I can’t have her, neither can he.
• The Bridge: Archmage Saros was Princess Amore Diamante's Court Mage who secretly desired her. When she married a peasant named Bene Lyric and had a daughter, Saros reinvented himself as King Sombra and killed Amore and her husband before taking over the Crystal Empire. He would have killed her infant daughter as well if King Caesar hadn't rescued her.
• YANDERE SUMIA has Sumia kill all her rivals for Chrom's affections- Maribelle, Sully, Olivia, the female Avatar and even the Maiden- only to find that Chrom won't marry a "waifu killer" like her. She then impales him with her lance and kills him, as punishment for not accepting her.
• In Girls und Panzer: Hope Dies, Yukari murders Miho for refusing her advances, since Miho already had a girlfriend; Erika.
• A platonic example happens in as lambs in the midst of wolves. Azula genuinely loves her brother, Zuko, but feels that Azulon should have gone through with his original plan of killing him instead of making him Iroh's heir since she would rather see him dead than never see him again (since he now lives in another wing of the palace and the rest of Zuko's family is forbidden from visiting).
• In the Hawaii Five-0 story, Play Date Gone Bad, Ian, who is Grace's friend's, Marley, nanny, feels this after being rejected by Danny after kissing him, as he believed they had a connection while Danny doesn't feel the same way, which leads Ian to stabbing him and fleeing the scene.
• Son of the Sannin: During Hinata's final battle with Toneri Otsutsuki, the latter grows increasingly angry of being not only constantly rebuffed in his advances, but also compared unfavorably to Naruto. In the end he accepts that Hinata will never be his and decides to just fight her to the death.
• In Death Note: The Abridged Series (kpts4tv), Light says this to L before shooting him.
• In Shards of a Memory, Shredder considers Tang Shen choosing Hamato Yoshi instead of him as a "humiliation" worth killing both of them over, having raised her daughter into thinking that Tang Shen was a traitor out of spite before he found out that she was still alive.
• In The Weaver Option Asdrubael Vect swears to himself that he will either rule Commorragh or destroy it himself. He's not exaggerating either, having already seeded Lower Commorragh with hidden anti-empyreal bombs. When Vect's army succumbs to Slaanesh, he begins detonating the bombs, both to destroy the Dark City and kill his daemonic pursuers.
• Elementary My Dear Natsuki, in the penultimate chapter of "The Empty House", Tomoe Margurite has Shizuru Viola in her clutches, now painfully aware that Shizuru will never return her affections. She begins ranting at Shizuru, and Natsuki recognizes this trope by name as the main point of Tomoe's rant. She manages to draw her weapon with her good arm and deliver a fatal shot against Tomoe, saving Shizuru.
  Natsuki: Keep your bloody hands off my Shizuru.
• Toriel from Underfell is a maternal example towards all of the fallen children. Like in canon, she's eager to adopt any kids she finds lost in the Ruins and tries her best to take care of them. Also like in canon, she doesn't take their wanting to leave well, but that's where the similarities end. While Toriel genuinely wants what's best for the player character and tries to stop them leaving because she believes they would never survive in the underground, fell!Toriel (Torifell?) accuses them of "betraying" and "tricking" her. Then she tries to burn them alive. This being an open Fan Verse, opinion often splits on what happens when Frisk wins the battle and spares her. Sometimes she refuses to stop attacking and chases them away. Sometimes she repents and begs forgiveness. Either way, it's a horrifying encounter.
• In Everqueen, Isha's first mission outside the Emperor's capital is a city whose ruler destroyed it rather than surrendering.
• The My Hero Academia fic Pulse and Void has an obsessed villainous torture variant. Present Mic is kidnapped by a villain with a power siphon quirk. His Torture Technician buddy is tasked with breaking Mic so he’ll scream and fuel the power siphoner. However, the torturer, Fusion, gets obsessed with trying to keep Mic as essentially a pet and sex toy. When an enraged Aizawa shows up to rescue Mic and exact revenge, Fusion tries to escape with Mic and when that fails, he stabs Mic in the side and throws him into a pit opened up by the power siphoner and his Internal Monologue states it fairly verbatim.

Films — Animation

• In Barbie and the Magic of Pegasus, the Evil Wizard Wenlock turns Brietta into a pegasus and turns Brietta and Annika's parents to stone when the sisters reject his proposals.
• The Frog Princess: As soon as Koshchei realizes there is a significant chance of Ivan killing him, he turns Vasilisa into a golden statue.
• Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a rather horrifying example... As he puts it: "She will be mine or she will burn!" He chooses the latter after Esmeralda spits in his eye and gives him a Kubrick Stare to show she'd rather be her people's martyr than his lover.
• In Megamind, this is what triggers Titan/Hal Stewart's Face–Heel Turn since he only agreed to become a superhero on the basis that this would attract Roxanne to him. When this didn't turn out to be the case, he begins a city-wide rampage, and ends up tying her to a radio tower on the top of a tall building.
• In Rainbow Brite and the Star Stealer, once the Big Bad fails to capture the Diamond Planet for herself, she has a Villainous Breakdown^note Which is more of a temper-tantrum in her case, but still, and attempts to ram her ship into it while actually saying the trope name, sort of.
  Dark Princess: If I can't have that diamond, no one's going to have it! I always get my way in the end!
• In Justice League: The Flashpoint Paradox, Wonder Woman of the Bad Future decides to commit gendercide after Aquaman rejected her (over killing his wife), and it's made very clear that she's invoking this trope throughout their war as she kills him with tears in her eyes before cradling his corpse.
• In The Super Mario Bros. Movie, after Bowser reaches his Rage Breaking Point by seeing Peach happily reuniting with Mario and getting affectionate with him right after ruining their wedding, he tries to nuke the Mushroom Kingdom just so they can't be together.
• Part of Lotso's backstory in Toy Story 3. He and his friends were misplaced by their owner during a car trip, and by the time they found their way home, her parents had bought the kid a new Lotso. Instead of letting his friends go back, he spent the rest of his life trying to make other toys as miserable and jaded as him.
  Lotso: She replaced us!
  Woody: She replaced you! And if you couldn't have her, then no one could!

Jokes

• "I gripped the diamond ring in my left hand and the grenade's pin in my right. Whatever her answer, we'll be spending the rest of our lives together."

Manhwa

• Threads of Time: Sali Tayi explicitly tells Atan Hadas that if she runs away with Moon-Bin and doesn't marry him, he'll kill them both.

Myths & Religion

• Narcissus from Greek Mythology. As the story goes, Narcissus (the origin of the word narcissism) is a beautiful boy who is constantly forced to reject the many women throwing themselves at him, and he sometimes does so quite coldly. One such woman curses him with a wish: "If he should love, deny him what he loves!" This wish was granted by the Goddess Nemesis and indirectly leads to his death.
• The huldra of Scandinavian folklore are a type of fairy who appear as beautiful women with cow or horse tails. Although they are often eager to marry, they are also very strict and demanding, and if you even think of turning one down, she will kill you.
• In one version of the Hyacinthus myth, his death isn't an accident. Zephyr grows jealous that Hyacinthus chose Apollo over him, and purposefully blew the discus off-course to hit him. Needless to say, this version is more popular.
• There is a Japanese folktale about the daughter of a village major, Kiyohime. She fell in love with a handsome young priest named Anchin. The feelings are mutual, but he eventually rejects her and she turns into a serpent. He escapes into the Dōjō-ji temple, but she follows him and burns the place down, before committing suicide. One of the Kihachirō Kawamoto Shorts reprises this story almost beat for beat.
• The Judgment of Solomon from The Bible: When King Solomon decided to solve the argument two women had over whose baby it was by cutting the child in two, one of the women pleaded for the king to spare the child's life and give him to the other woman, while the other woman said, "Let him be neither mine nor yours; let him be cut in two." Solomon determined from this that the woman that pleaded for the child's life was the true mother and so awarded custody to her.

Theatre

• In the final act of Carmen, Don José confronts Carmen, first pleading with her to resume their affair and then threatening her. She rejects him, and so he stabs her to death.
• In the opera Wozzeck, the title character stabs Marie to death following this line. (Büchner's play doesn't use the line.)
• The ending of Menotti's opera Maria Golovin has an extremely jealous Donato attempt this on Maria. Subverted in that he is blind and thus has to ask his mother to aim the gun at her, which she doesn't, instead pointing him in the wrong direction and leading him to believe that he did.
• Éponine in the musical Les Misérables. In the song "One Day More," Marius is debating to himself whether to follow Cosette to England or fight with the students. Éponine, standing beside him, practically makes the decision for him by grabbing him by the arm and the two of them running off. A minute later, they are next seen with Enjolras and the other students, and Marius tells Enjolras "My place is here, I fight with you." This is made a lot more obvious in the revival, back when Celia Keenan-Bolger was Éponine (in the revival, Éponine extends her hand out to Marius, and he quickly grabs her hand and they both run).
• In Martin Guerre, the play's antagonist, Guilliame attemtps to kill Bertrande after losing her to not one but TWO Martin Guerres.
• Tamamo-no-Mae Asahi no Tamoto: Prince Usugumo lusts after Lady Katsura, but she doesn't return his affection. He is also planning to start a coup against his younger brother, the current Emperor. What does he do? He orders one of his men to steal a sacred sword from the lady's family and then demand them to hand over her head if they want the sword back. Little does he know the one carrying out said order is Lady Katsura's biological father.
• Subverted in Verve by Mark Lucas. A Butt-Monkey lawyer finds himself dumped for a vibrator.
  "If I can’t have her, then no shiny piece of Taiwanese plastic will!"
• Nessarose from Wicked reacts to Boq’s rejection of her love by stealing her sister Elphaba’s spellbook and cursing him to “lose his heart” to her, inadvertently making him literally lose his heart. Nessa begs Elphaba to save him before the spell kills him, and Elphaba does so by creating a new form for him that doesn’t need a heart to live. The incident leads to Nessarose becoming the Wicked Witch of the East and to Boq becoming the Tin Man.
• Death from Elisabeth goes to great lengths to get Sisi for himself: showing up to gloat at her failed fairytale marriage twice (the first time was after a marital tiff, the second time to reveal that Franz Joseph cheated on her and gave her syphilis, seducing her son Rudolf ^note starting to talk to him when he was a small child into revolting against his father and eventually killing himself, and then finally sending Lucheni, armed with a file, to murder her. At that point Sisi was already such a Broken Bird Death Seeker that she refused help from her lady-in-waiting and ran into Death's arms.
• Near the end of Heathers, J.D. breaks into Veronica's house with the intention of killing her for breaking up with him. However, he changed his mind and decided that he shouldn't kill the girl he loves, but instead their classmates under the belief that they came between him and Veronica.

Tabletop Games

• In Rocket Age if Yathlax the Eye can't have Princess D'larna, he'll kill her... plus some more beside. Needless to say Yathlax, D'larna's former bodyguard, has gone off the deep end.
• Warhammer 40,000 has this in the form of the Exterminatus, the Imperium of Man's normal method for when a planet is completely overrun by aliens or Chaos beyond the point of recovery. Earth-Shattering Kaboom normally ensues.

Visual Novels

• Chop Chop Fruit salad Mystery Jam DokiDoki Dating Sim THingy: In Strawberry's bad ending, Chopper-Strawberry kills Banana and then Apple because they've turned into a yandere and resent that Apple loves Banana and not Strawberry.
• Fate/stay night: Gilgamesh decides at the end of Fate route that if Saber will not submit to him, he'll just rape and kill her. But then again, even if she did agree, his next idea of how their relationship would go would be making her drink the 'black mud' from the cursed Grail, destroying her mind and giving her a physical form.
• School Days:
  • To My Child is one of the bad endings you can get where this happens. On it Makoto is stabbed to death by Sekai after he abandoned her while pregnant to pursue a relationship with Kotonoha, who was also pregnant. While this ending is very similar to the anime one, there are some details that make it very different, mainly the fact that Makoto genuinely cared about Sekai and, depending on which path you take to get there, he genuinely wanted to take care of both Sekai and Kotonoha before Sekai disappears on her own, or he came to regret having told Sekai to leave and desperately wanted to find her and take care of her as well. Also the fact that Sekai's pregnancy was real.
  • Completely subverted in the extended version of Bloody End. After killing Sekai, Kotonoha was ready to kill Makoto as well by choking him with her scarf. However, the sole idea of Makoto dying is enough to bring her back to her senses and made her realize what she had just done.
• In Tsukihime, Akiha says something like this in one of the routes, and does her damnedest to kill Shiki.
• In Ever17, Sora gets really close to this after seeing Takeshi and Tsugumi having sex in the gondola.
• The Extreme Love Ends for Shion and Toma in Starstruck Love have this happen to the heroine.
• The Bad Ends in Yandere I Love You So I Want To Kill You. If Subaru makes the wrong choices either in the main story or in the selected Yandere ending sequence, then he will be killed. But it doesn't stop there; stuff still goes on after he dies.
• In Purrfect Apawcalypse, the third game reveals that Patches' reason for killing Angel was this trope; they used to date in secret but Angel broke up with him after being turned off by his possessive behavior and declarations that he'd kill Angel if he ever left him, whereupon Patches demonstrated that his declarations were not exaggerations in the slightest.

Web Animation

• On The Edge:
  • Yoichi Kashima from the episode The female torture sommelier tears his stomach apart raped and murdered his English language teacher for turning him down. He didn't get arrested because his father was the Attorney General.
  • The intro of Torture Sommelier vs Dagger-weilding Yakuza [sic] features a stalker who strangled a young woman named Miho to death for dating someone other than him.
• RWBY: This is Adam's reaction to Blake deciding not to be part of his genocidal terrorist group as well as breaking off their (according to Word of God) abusive relationship. He swears to destroy everything she loves. He starts by cutting off Yang's arm when she tries to rescue Blake from him.

Web Comics

• There was a really weird version of this in Dominic Deegan; when it's revealed that villain Karnak was in a Love Triangle with Donovan over Miranda, the reason he's been trying to kill Miranda is to hurt him for taking her away from him.
• In General Protection Fault, Trudy says this exact phrase when pointing a gun at Nick's head after he stated that he could not trust her or return her feelings upon realizing her role in a wide-reaching conspiracy. In an alternate future, the same scene had resulted in her killing him, but in this timeline, he merely stands there, resolute, until she drops the gun and is unable to shoot him.
• Gunnerkrigg Court. Diego sets up a scheme to fortify the Court in such a way that it simultaneously murders the hypotenuse and subjects the woman who resisted his advances to a Fate Worse than Death.
• Homestuck plays this straight when Eridan decides to kill Feferi when she defends Sollux after Eridan KO'd him. An unusual case because Eridan wanted both Feferi and Sollux, but they both rejected him and hooked up with each other, prompting his murderous rampage.
• Raven Red, toward Harmony Thunder, in Jet Dream. She specifically wants the sex-changed Harmony back in her male persona as Jack Thunder - something everyone else knows to be impossible. If she can't have Jack Thunder, well....
• One strip of Rosianna Rabbit has a bereaved Harry Hare dig up the body of Rosianna to revive her as a Frankenstein's Monster, only to kill her and his deformed assistant after he catches them falling in love.
• Spacetrawler may be the only work to combine this trope with The Only One Allowed to Defeat You: Growp's attempts to murder Emily are actually his twisted way of saying he loves her. He eventually takes a bullet and dies to save her from getting killed by the wrong person.

Web Original

• Chatoyant College: Paul shows this trope. In Book 9, Corrie rescinds that magical restraining order. His reaction is to attack Dawn with a stone knife.
• The culprit's motive in It's a Southern Thing sketch "If Law and Order:SVU was Southern". Someone put an old and well-seasoned cast iron skillet through the dishwasher, ruining it, which is treated exactly like a murder in the actual Law and Order would be. (Mind you, to a good cook, it kind of is that serious.) One sister, who is a bad cook, was set to inherit it. The other one, who loves cooking, resented that her unskilled sister was going to get it, and decided that if she couldn't have the skillet, no one would.

Web Videos

• Played for Laughs in Episode 54 of the Chuckle Sandwich podcast. Charlie announces that he's leaving the podcast in order to focus on other projects, so Schlatt and Ted send a bomb to his house so nobody else can have him.
• A non-romantic/sexual example occurs in Season 1 of the Dream SMP — this is Wilbur's supposed reasoning for wanting to blow up Manburg. He knows that even if he kicks out Schlatt and becomes president again, he'd be an illegitimate president, no longer allied with the Greater Dream SMP because there'd no longer be an Enemy Mine, and going back to the way things were would be pretty much impossible, as many major landmarks have been destroyed and relations have changed drastically. As a result, Wilbur decides that if he can't have his country back, Schlatt can't have it either. This turns out to all be a front for him, as he has also stated in private that his reasoning for doing so is that the beliefs and ideals that he built the nation for no longer existed. These polarizing claims have, as a result, caused many to develop conflicting views on him.
• Hardly Working: Pat in "My Bloody Valentine" plays a possessive sociopath who kills Sarah after previously murdering everyone in the office who flirted with her on Valentine's Day. It backfires on him, as she wanted to ask him out before he stabbed her fatally.
• Played for Laughs in Golden Time Forever Online when Koko threatens to kill Mitsuo, learn necromancy to revive him, kill him again, revive him again, marry him, and live off of his life insurance money. In that order.
• The Veronica Exclusive: This is probably the reason Jane threatens to murder Veronica (along with the rest of the school) after Veronica breaks up with her. She alternates between desperately trying to sweet-talk Veronica into coming back to her and screaming about how she's going to kill her, and it is creepy.

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