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"To die without leaving a corpse... that is the way of us Garo."
Something dies, as it is prone to do. After it takes its last breath, the body dissolves for no apparent reason. Often dissolves into smoke that wisps away as the body dramatically falls to the ground. Why this occurs is generally never explained and no character bats an eye at it happening. Often used in media to avoid showing the kiddies a corpse.
For video games, this is a subset of Everything Fades, though with Everything Fades, bodies may stick around for up to a few minutes after monsters die.
Not to be confused with No One Gets Left Behind, in which not one single person (or unit) is left behind when a force retreats, which is maybe the thing you're looking for. Also not to be confused with Never Found the Body, in which the subject's death was not seen/confirmed, and is most likely Not Quite Dead.
Animated Armor may be caused by this. On the other hand, you may never know. See also Disappears into Light and I'm Melting. For the moral equivalent to this, see Self-Disposing Villain. May be the end result of No Immortal Inertia.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- In Bleach, low-level hollows dissolve when they are killed, although high powered Arrancar or Shinigami usually don't (there are some exceptions, related to the manner in which they were killed).
- Whenever anyone dies in Houshin Engi, their body disappears and their soul flies away as a beam of light.
- Plenty of examples in Sailor Moon.
- Nephrite is probably one of the more well-known examples, although it happens constantly to both villains and heroes. The latter obviously come Back from the Dead in season finales.
- Averted in the first season finale: When the Sphere of Destruction from Sailor Moon's final attack starts consuming the area around the Dark Kingdom, the bodies of the four Senshi are shown still laying in the same places they fell.
- Digimon: The Digimon dissolve as soon as they die. Though occasionally they'll revert to digieggs for plot-related purposes.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!
- In Death Note when shinigami die, they dissolve into sand.
- The homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist disintegrate into nothingness upon dying, as well as the Philosopher's Stone at their core that gives them life. Dismembered body parts also disintegrate as they're regenerated.
- Mai-HiME
- Whenever someone dies as a result of the HiME battles, the victim's heart stops, then their body's color fades, finally ending with slow dissolution into green sparks. Haruka, because she's a Badass Normal, simply refuses to "just die", preferring to get in a parting shot at Shizuru after calling her out on her "disgusting behavior".
- In the Else World sequel Mai-Otome, the same thing happens to any Otome/Master or Slave/Master relationship. Mai-Otome's problem is that it was porting over yet another familiar element from Mai-Hi ME while ignoring that the logic that series used for the sparkly deaths was specifically for raising the columns and powering the HiME star.
- The Zoanoids in Guyver (anime & manga) are engineered to dissolve after dying, in order to leave no evidence of their existence.
- Carrossea's body in Madlax presumably disappears off-screen as it is never shown after the episode when he dies. That is probably because he was Dead All Along.
- InuYasha: Happens fairly often to youkai slain by Inu-Yasha. Case in point: Hiten (the elder Thunder Brother) evaporated after Inu-Yasha delivered a fatal blow with Tessaiga. The many cases where youkai are slain by sacred arrows or the Wind Scar, ''et al'', don't count.
- In Get Backers, Amon's body dissolves into feathers after he gave his heart to Shido to bring him back to life. Shido's body stuck around, possible because his death was more mundane.
- Dragon Ball Z
- Goku fades away when he dies. Kami has taken it to the other world so that Goku can have his body in the afterlife for training. Otherwise, people usually stay put when they died.
- Later, when Vegeta sacrifices himself in an attempt to kill Buu, his attack drains so much energy from his body that it turns to stone, which quickly crumbles into dust and is blown away by the wind.
- Naturally shows up in .hack. When a monster is killed, it slumps to the ground, then vanishes. When a PC is killed, their body goes limp, and turns grey, and vanishes if there's no-one left to revive them. When someone gets data-drained, however, their sprite starts fragmenting, and drifts away piece by piece.
- In Saint Seiya, the final barrier between the Hades and Elysium is the Wall Of Lamentation, seemingly indestructible. Only by channeling the Cosmo of the Twelve Gold Saints of the Zodiac Houses, and creating sunlight in the depths of Hades, can it be breached. All Gold Saints, living or dead, friends or foes, burn their Cosmo, there is a blinding burst of light... And Shun and Seiya can only weep, for all that is left of the heroic Saints of Athena is their Gold Cloths shining in their wake.
- Anything that dies in Psyren dissolves into sand in a few minutes, due to the changes in the environment after the meteor hit Earth.
- In Umineko No Naku Koro Ni, the Stakes of Purgatory do this when they die.
- Kira users in Nabari No Ou fade into dust when they die. Their clothes don't dissolve, leaving an interesting scene.
- Late into the Magic World arc in Mahou Sensei Negima!, a special attack is introduced that causes anyone it hits to vanish in seconds. This only affects (most) residents of the magic world because said residents are actually part of an elaborate illusion, with the attack simply hacking them back out of existence.
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: When Panty and Stocking kill a ghost, it explodes. Becomes a plot point when they are tried for the murder of a friendly Ghost, as the fact that there was a body meant that they didn't do it.
- In Samurai Deeper Kyo, this becomes a case of Chekov's corpse. When members of the Mibu clan die or are killed, their bodies vanish into nothingness. Near the end it is revealed that this happens because the members of the Mibu clan are in fact puppets created by the long dead True Mibu, and vanish into nothing because they were originally created from nothing.
- This happens to Nia Teppelin from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in the final episode.
- In the Naruto anime at least one of Orochimaru's test subjects dissolved into nothing. Based on his expression at the time, Orochimaru had seen it enough for it to be a common occurrence.
- When a robot dies in Casshern Sins it turns to dust.
Films — Animation
- In Anastasia, Rasputin's body turns to dust and blows away as soon as his Soul Jar is destroyed.
- The Rankin/Bass version of The Hobbit features giant spiders that gave a scratchy yelp and spun away into oblivion when slain. To a high-school classroom, this is hilarious. When Thorin dies his body remains and a veil is spread over it in a dignified manner, disappointing anyone expecting a spider-like demise.
- In Sleeping Beauty, Maleficent becomes a dragon, gets impaled by a sword, and falls down a cliff. When the sword's shown again, it has only a cloak under it.
Films — Live-Action
- In This Island Earth, the Mutant dissolves after being killed. This is given a Hand Wave as its body being obliterated by the change in pressure as the ship approaches Earth.
- Star Wars
- Obi-Wan Kenobi in A New Hope.
- And Yoda in Return of the Jedi.
- And almost every Jedi who dies in the the Expanded Universe. Sith and other users of The Dark Side, on the other hand, explode instead of fading away when they die.
- An exception for the Sith is Darth Nihilus, whose body very visibly crumbles quietly away under his robes once the Exile turns his back.
- In Blade, vampires collapse into ash when killed.
- In Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, defeated Evil Exes turn into a shower of coins, as they do in the comic. This is particularly amusing considering it not only takes place in Canada, but when Scott slays bystanders their coins take the shape of their bodies on the floor.
- In fact, the comic comments on this when Gideon Graves and those in the audience get hit in the head with the showering coins.
- In Elektra defeated villians disappear in a puff of green smoke, something unique in Marvel Universe films. They're ninja — it's presumably deliberate so that the Hand's secrets are kept secure.
- Captain America: The First Avenger has anyone caught within the shots of various Tesseract-powered weaponry disintegrating completely in a blue mist.
- Harry Potter:
- This is how Voldemort dies in the film version of Deathly Hallows. After all his horcruxes are destroyed and he finally gets blasted, his body dissolves into something similar to pieces of skin, like dandruff, which blow into the wind.
- The movies apparently like this trope, if the deaths of Professor Quirrell and Bellatrix Lestrange are any indication. Well, at least for villains. Good guys seem to leave behind bodies when they die (well, except for Sirius)).
- The standard fate for most Indiana Jones villains.
- This is what happens to Darwin in X-Men: First Class immediately after taking a blast. One of his teammates even commented "We can't even bury him".
- The probable first appearance of this in film (and the definite first appearance of the Stop Trick that enabled it) was in A Trip to the Moon. It reappears in a lot of other films by Georges Méliès.
- In a new movie called The Darkest Hour, the main "aliens" can shred a human body into dust in a slightly disturbing manner.
- At the end of The Rock, Sean Connery's character, an alcatraz inmate, runs off and asks Cage's character to tell the authorities that he was killed. Nicholas Cage's character does so, and when asked about the body, says that this occurred to him as a result of the bioweapon MacGuffin.
Gamebooks
Literature
- The Dresden Files is a fairly realistic urban fantasy, and, as such, most things do indeed leave the expected corpses. However, some things, such as demons and various Eldritch Abominations, manifest a body when they come into the real world, and when defeated, this body turns to ectoplasm which slowly evaporates. In other words, a thoroughly Justified Trope, used selectively for effect.
- Likewise justified when embodied Auditors die in Thief of Time, because they build their human bodies out of molecules from dust and random debris, and can only keep them intact and functional by actively exerting their willpower.
- In the Dark Tower series, we meet Father Callahan from Salem's Lot who finds that, when vampires die, they helpfully follow this trope.
- Star Wars: in The Last Command, Joruus C'baoth's body is consumed by blue energy, presumably based on what appears to befall the Emperor's body in Return of the Jedi (especially considering the entire final battle draws heavily from the climax of that film).
- Justified in His Dark Materials, where daemon bodies flash out of existence as soon as they or their owners die.
- The Silmarillion: "Then [Fëanor] died; but he had neither burial nor tomb, for so fiery was his spirit that as it sped his body fell to ash, and was borne away like smoke [...]"
- In Dracula, Dracula and his Brides are said to crumble into dust on death. Justified in text as a side effect of their unnatural preservation being removed and centuries of decay catching up with them. Subverted with Lucy, whose body remains intact, as her mortal death had occurred only a few days before her Vampiric one.
- Draconians in Dragonlance self-destruct in various ways when they die, with the exact manner depending on their sub-species.
- In Dragon Weather, a slain dragon rots extremely fast. Lord Obsidian notes that this is useful for making sure that a dragon is not faking.
- In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Queen of the Black Coast", the hyenas transform back into men before crumbling.
- The Halo Expanded Universe novels reveal that this is a regular hazard with space travel. Even when a slipspace drive is offline, nearby items and people run the risk of simply disappearing. And when the drive is active ships have a chance of going into slipspace and never returning.
- In Dean Koontz's Phantoms, a small California town is wiped out by an Eldritch Abomination, but most of the residents are never actually found, having been eaten. The few bodies they do find suggest it's better that way.
- Almost every monster in the Percy Jackson and the Olympians books. Sometimes a piece of the monster will remain if it was cut off before the monster died (such as the Minotaur's horn), or if severing it causes the monster to die (such as Medusa's head).
- This also apparently happens to monsters in The Kane Chronicles, which Word Of God confirms takes place in the same universe as Percy Jackson.
Live-Action TV
Puppet Shows
- In The Dark Crystal, both the Skeksis and the Mystics leave no body behind when they die. The Skeksis crumble to dust, but the Mystics simply fade away.
Tabletop Games
- In both Vampire The Masquerade and The Requiem, vampires rot to dust within seconds of their Final Death. This is repeatedly commented on in Hunter The Vigil — vampires are the only type of supernatural creature to clean up after itself. Everything else leaves corpses to deal with. Usually human.
- Titanspawn in Scion usually evaporate, melt away, or otherwise cease to exist once slain. The only part left behind is a piece or an item (called a Trophy) that serves as a reward for the Scions that destroyed it. Some of them, like the nekomata, are more complicated.
- In Warhammer 40000, Necron bodies will seemingly dissipate if a battle seems to be lost. This is because the bodies are being teleported back to their tombs to be repaired.
- Call Of Cthulhu. Several Cthulhu Mythos monsters will dissolve into liquid after they're killed, such as the Dark Young of Shub-Niggurath and the Mi-Go.
Video Games
- Virtually every video game where you destroy and/or kill enemies has them vanish a short time after being killed. This is largely due to programming and performance issues, plus piled up corpses would get in the way of characters that can't jump or RTS units that can't just walk over the artillery riddled tank. Only aversions, subversions, and extraordinary genre examples or types of fade outs (smoke, liquid, etc.) should be noted here.
- Diablo averts the trope: not only do corpses stay behind, the bodies of acid/poison spitters can continue to damage you if you stand on them.
- Resident Evil
- Resident Evil 4 leaves the bodies of bosses such as Dr. Salvador, and sometimes not even them. Ganado mooks dissolve into ooze shortly after being killed.
- The Resident Evil remake leaves behind killed zombies for good reason: Unless you burn the body, it will get back up much stronger and faster about a half hour later.
- In Crysis, the final function of the nanosuit involves completely incinerating itself and the downed user (your character or one of his similarly-equipped Red Shirt colleagues) from the inside out to assure enemy forces aren't able to capture information from their corpse. Nifty. The Aliens do this too, their machines always self-destruct.
- Doom
- Averted in the first two games, where corpses remain as 2D textures.
- Played straight in the third game, for the performance reasons listed above. Power gamers, annoyed that their rigs weren't being used to their full potential, rapidly modded the game to force bodies to stay put.
- Averted in Primal. Corpses remain permanently, unless Jen is killed before passing the next Checkpoint. Then the corpse vanishes when its monster is respawned. There aren't enough monsters per area create an overload of corpses. Corpses also have energy for Scree to drain and may contain objects necessary to continue.
- Oddly, this happened more often as the Tomb Raider series went on, despite the technical progress; in TR 1 and 2, enemies pretty much never disappear, 3 had them disappear after you had turned away for a little while, in 4 and every subsequent game corpses always disappear right in front of your eyes after a few seconds. However, Underworld has been confirmed to be averting this.
- In Okami and Okamiden, your enemies turn into flowers when you kill them. Instead of spurting blood, they will literally shoot pure flowers from their veins. Issun explains this in the first game as "When a demon is exorcised, the gods power can return, and nature thrives." This doesn't explain how the flowers the Demons leave behind disappear too.
- Since Shadow Of The Colossus only has 16 enemies anyway, and they're too spread out to risk piling up, the corpses of killed Colossi remain throughout the whole game, and you can even have flashback-styled fights with ones you've already killed. The small creatures, however, such as lizards, disappear after you kill them.
- Both played straight and averted in Metal Gear Solid 4. When killed, the elite FROG soldiers immediately dissolve into dust. However, when a normal soldier is killed, his body remains and must be disposed of to keep other soldiers from discovering it.
- Spaceship wrecks in EVE Online last for about two hours before vanishing.
- Baldur's Gate averts this trope. Everything you kill lies there dead for the rest of the game, unless you killed it in some way that doesn't leave a body (e.g. vaporizing zombies with your enchanted mace).
- Golden Axe is possibly the oldest game that doesn't do this: in the arcade version, every enemy you defeat fades to gray and remains on the floor like that. In most ports, however, the enemies do disappear, probably because of memory constraints.
- The first few Fallout games averted this in that corpses tended to stick around for several days unless the player managed to obliterate their opponent with certain energy weapons. After the corpses decay/presumably are eaten a pool of blood remains on the spot. Generally the blood pools disappeared after some days but those that did not sometimes hid useful items.
- In Total Annihilation, destroyed units leave behind beaten shape of themselves, blocking way for other units and fire. Fortunately, they are easy to destroy. Or they can be recycled for resources, but this takes a lot more time.
- Averted in Dawn Of War, partially because the Necrons can re-use their corpses.
- The Legend of Zelda
- Averted in No One Lives Forever, because disposing of the bodies without detection is a major gameplay mechanic.
- No More Heroes. In the English/uncensored version, the enemies, after being cutting in half, while stay for a few seconds before disappearing, giving enough time for blood geysers to erupt, where as in the Japanese/censored version, they just turn into dust right away. This is noticeable for the bosses. In America, the bosses won't disappear after dying. They'll just sit there, gruesomely dead, where as in the Japan, the bodies will turn to dust when needed. Special notice goes to Holly Summers, whose head gets blown off. In America, the head is gone and you bury her. In Japan, well, it's like in the cartoons where the character has black all over their face. And you still bury her.
- Giants Citizen Kabuto handwaves this trope by revealing that the planet you're on is host to an extremely ravenous race of scavengers who live underground, constantly awaiting fresh meat: Killing enemies greets you with the sight of hundreds of them popping up all around the newly formed corpse and rapidly devouring it before vanishing back underground, leaving only a bloodstain and a power-up.
- Averted in Thief: The Dark Project and its sequels, which all involved hiding bodies (corpses or unconscious foes) to avoid alerting guards and other traffic (and inspired the body-disposal game mechanic of No One Lives Forever, above). With rare exceptions, such as haunts and fire elementals, all kills in Thief leave a corpse and a liability.
- Played particularly bizarrely in The Conduit, where the enemies visibly dissolve or incinerate shortly after death — something that obviously should have an in-universe reason, as opposed to just disappearing because of engine limitations — but no-one bothers to comment it.
- Nonhuman enemies in Final Fantasy X collapse into pyreflies (supernatural firefly-like insects) when slain. This is because they're the souls of people not given proper burial rites. Machines explode, but their parts and human enemies are subject to Everything Fades.
- Subverted in Vagrant Story. On the island of Lea Monde, where the main game takes place, everything does fade as part of the black magic infiltrating every part of the ruins. In the prologue to the game, which does not take place on Lea Monde, the bodies of enemies do not disappear.
- Averted in Far Cry 2, corpses tend to stick around until you leave the area far behind; then the area resets, removing corpses, replenishing supplies and guards, etc. The most obvious handwave is that the next patrol comes by, cleans up, and calls in reinforcements to restock the place, though you never see this happening. The game would quickly become super easy if everything you destroyed stayed destroyed.
- Played with in Parasite Eve 2. Monsters melt into puddles of goo whenever you kill them, but in the last part of the game, the stage becomes populated with killer cyborgs, and their bodies do not disappear, even if you leave the room and come back!
- A weapon in Team Fortress 2, a knife called "Your Eternal Reward," allows a Spy to backstab someone, cause their corpse to silently vanish, then immediately assume the victim's appearance, thus blending in near-perfectly with enemies who are left unaware that their real teammate is dead.
- Due to censorship, this is cranked up to eleven in the Australian version of Left 4 Dead 2, with bodies often disappearing before they even hit the ground
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- Both averted and played straight in the Unreal series, which is normally powered by the sheer momentum of its Ludicrous Gibs, but has "gore settings" that can be adjusted all the way down to "bodies are indestructible and digitally disintegrate when killed."
- Tank and vehicle hulls in Company Of Heroes stick around a good long while if they're not hit by more explosions or crushed by heavy tanks, and actually present cover for infantry to use. The Panzer Elite can use repair vehicles to get any Axis tanks back in action so long as the hull remains mostly intact too. Infantry also tend to take a while to fade, and can be 'rescued' by Medics from a Bunker to form a new squad.
- Destroy All Humans! gives us the disintegrator ray and the Ion Detonator.
- Averted in Dragon Age: Origins, once you kill someone/something their corpse/skeleton will lay in the place you killed them for the rest of the game. Except for Abominations, they explode after you kill them, and Rage Demons and Shades, they disappear somewhere. Played straight in Dragon Age II, though.
- Whenever someone dies in The Sims, they transforms into an urn (if inside) or a tombstone (if outside). As long as the urn/tombstone isn't deleted, the sim's ghost will occasionally came around at night. Some pre-made lots come with tombstones and are thus already haunted.
- In Alan Wake, the Taken dissolve when they're killed. Alan gets freaked out by it.
Web Comics
Web Original
Western Animation
- In Justice League, a lot of the beasties from the episode "The Terror Beyond" didn't leave bodies when destroyed, in many cases because they were incredibly squishy. The giant-claw-whale-monster-thing that kills Solomon Grundy dissolves into acid when killed, for some reason.
- Code Lyoko
- The monsters explode when killed, and whatever debris they left behind quickly vanish. There is one enemy that does this a little differently. Creepers don't just explode, but also partially melt before vanishing completely.
- The heroes also disappear when "devirtualized". Of course, this is inside a virtual world.
- When Jaga dies in the first episode of the original Thundercats, his body turns to dust instantly, leaving only his empty clothes.*
A later episode reveals that he is actually trapped in another dimension.
- In Avatar The Last Airbender, Princess Yue's body vanishes shortly after she dies to Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence.
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