Sibling Murder

"I've come here to kill you
Won't leave until you've died
Murder born of vengeance
I closed my brother's eyes tonight"

— Avenged Sevenfold, "Chapter Four"

Killing a sibling may not have quite the negative implications of Patricide and Matricide, but it's still traditionally seen as worse than killing someone you're not related to.

This can result from a Cain and Abel situation (good sibling vs. evil sibling), but that's not required. Accidental deaths, mercy kills, etc. can also fit under this trope. In those situations, this can overlap with Kill the Ones You Love.

A subtrope of Murder in the Family. May be the outcome of a Princeling Rivalry or Annoying Younger Sibling. Could also be the result of a Sibling Rivalry gone horribly wrong.

Adoptive siblings and half-siblings also qualify for this trope. "Brothers" or "Sisters" in a religious or martial order don't, as those terms are being used as a standard honorific (on the same line as "Mister" or "Madame") instead of describing relationship.

Can overlap with Kill and Replace in the case of identical twins.

Killing a brother is technically known as "fratricide", and killing a sister is "sororicide", but many people use fratricide to refer to both.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime and Manga

• Akame ga Kill!:
  • This is one of the goals of the titular Akame, who has sworn to kill her sister, Kurome. This is subverted, however, when Kurome makes a Heel–Face Turn thanks to her Love Interest, Wave.
  • It's played straight in the anime, however, when Kurome chooses to meet her end in her final duel against her sister. After telling Wave to let her finish the fight, she only manages to exchange a few more blows with Akame before being impaled upon Akame's cursed katana, Murasame.
• In Bleach, Hinamori Momo attempts to kill her adopted little brother Hitsugaya Toshiro, after her Captain faked his death and left behind a letter which framed Toshiro.
• In the penultimate episode of Blood+, Saya kills her sister, Diva, who had been tormenting her for the entire series. It was supposed to be Mutual Kill but Diva's blood lost its power when she conceived her two twin daughters, meaning she becomes vulnerable to Saya's blood.
• In Code Geass, Lelouch does this twice, reacting badly to it each time:
  • The first major blow Lelouch deals to the Britannian Empire actually involves fratricide: he murders his own half-brother Prince Clovis, the current governor of Area 11 in episode 2.
  • After accidentally using his Geass abilities to send his half-sister Euphemia into a murderous rampage, the only way to stop her was to kill her.
• Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • Near the end of the first series, Envy kills his half-brother Edward. The reason Ed was impaled was that he was so shocked by the reveal that the villainous Envy was his brother that he froze up and left an opening. He is later revived.
  • In the manga and second series, Pride horrifies even his enemies when he eats his younger brother Gluttony, his own ally, to regain the advantage in the fight they are losing. Note that he does this in front of Edward (the personification of Big Brother Instinct) and Greed (another one of his and Gluttony's brothers).
  • During the days of the Fuhrer training program, the young man who would become King Bradley fatally wounded one of his adopted brothers in a training exercise. While he was taken aback by it at first, his teachers told him not to care and that his brother was just a means to help him achieve his goal. The young Fuhrer took that to heart, and in the present day, he's just as much an unfeeling beast as the ones who raised him.
• In Heart Catch Pretty Cure, the last confrontation between Cure Moonlight and Dark Pretty Cure had them learn from Professor Sabaku that the two are actually siblings due to Dark Pretty Cure being made from Yuri's DNA and Sabaku being Yuri's long-lost father. That same battle ends with Cure Moonlight bluntly killing Dark Pretty Cure, who Disappears into Light from her inability to properly heal from her wounds.
• In Juni Taisen: Zodiac War, Boar's backstory shows that she killed her little sister in order to participate in the Zodiac War. The anime adaptation turns up the cruelty, where she bullies her into insanity by making killing others the only thing on her mind, then passes her a knife when her sister's been isolated from the rest of the family.
• In Kemono Jihen, Kabane does this in Shiki's place after Shiki's uncle sics the grotesque, monstrous children of Shiki's mother with other Kemono on them, fulfilling Shiki's plead for help by killing them all.
• Mobile Suit Gundam: Towards the end, Kycilia Zabi kills her older brother, Gihren, and takes control of Zeon. It's a little more understandable than it may seem on its face however, as she had just learned that Gihren killed their father when he tried to negotiate with the Earth Federation and he showed no remorse to her when recounting the deed.
• Albert James Moriarty murdered his younger biological brother in Moriarty the Patriot and replaced him happily with the adopted Louis and "William".
• It is Sasuke's goal for most of Naruto to kill his older brother Itachi for murdering the rest of their clan. He doesn't technically succeed. Itachi dies while fighting Sasuke but not directly due to him.
• The anime of Shaman King has Yoh killing his brother Hao in the final version. However, Hao was hellbent on capturing the King of Spirits so he and his followers could eradicate the human race to create a kingdom for shaman only, so this is somewhat justified.
• In One Piece, it's revealed that the villain Blackbeard got his Devil Fruit by committing one himself. The pirate crew he was in at the time has a strong Family of Choice dynamic amongst its crew members, to the point of calling their captain as "Pops" and them being seen as his children and seriously harming a member is seen as a serious offense. Blackbeard claims that he had no other choice due to the crew's policy regarding Devil Fruit acquisition and as such is treated with hatred amongst his former crew mates.
  • Donquixote Doflamingo murdered his younger brother, Rosinante/Corazon, when the latter seemingly betrayed him by letting Trafalgar Law eat and escape with the Op-Op Fruit, which Doflamingo intended to use in a bid for immortality.
• In the Grand Finale movie of Space Runaway Ideon, Be Invoked, Harulu murders her pregnant younger sister, Karala, by shooting her in the head three times out of jealousy because she was having a baby with the man she loved while Harulu lost her lover during the war. Unfortunately, this sets the tide where Ideon begins its invocation to wipe out the universe.
• Strider: Hiryu was forced to do this to his sister Mariya after she went insane and started murdering other Striders. He tried to talk her out of fighting, but being unable to, was finally forced to fight back and pierce her through with his Cypher. This would weigh heavily on his mind afterwards, eventually leading to him leaving the Striders.
• X/1999: After Kamui chooses to become a Dragon of Heaven, his best friend Fuma Monou automatically becomes the Dragon of Earth and his opposite who kills his younger sister, Kotori, to start the beginning of the apocalypse.

Comic Books

• In Afterlife with Archie, Cheryl apparently kills her twin brother Jason and proceeds to rename herself.
• Batman foe Sterling Silversmith murdered his brother when the brother threatened to go to the police unless Sterling increased his cut of the profit from their smuggling scheme.
• Green Lantern has Mongul II beheading his sister Mongal.
• In My Little Pony: Nightmare Knights, the alternate Nightmare Moon is killed by her sibling Daybreaker when she attempts to betray the Pony of Shadows.
• Robin (1993):
  • Of the four siblings Tim ends up with after being adopted by Bruce three of them try to kill him. Jason and Damian both target him after Talia spent years convincing them to despise him and consider him an inferior interloper and Cass while Brainwashed and Crazy. None of them succeed, though Jason did the most physical damage.
  • Ulysses Armstrong, the "General", kills his younger siblings when he blows up a car his parents had just arrived in. He was not trying to kill them as he didn't know they were there, but was trying to murder everyone present. His reaction is to blame Robin for their deaths for not saving them and seek deadly vengance.
• Superman:
  • In Crucible, Roho attempts to murder his brother Tsavo after being disowned by their parents.
  • Subverted in Strangers at the Heart's Core. Lesla-Lar has deluded herself into believing Supergirl, whom she intends and attempts to murder, is her twin sister.
• Wonder Woman (1942): One of Sunny South's cousins murdered his brother prior to murdering her father, all of it in a bid to get the whole of the inheritance rather than sharing with family.
• X-Men: In his second appearance in X-Men: Schism #3, West African Manuel Enduque notes he assumed control of the family's slave-trading business by strangling his sleeping father and shipping his seven older brothers to a planet of carnivorous aliens with a taste for sapient prey.

Fairy Tales

• "Prince Ivan, the Witch Baby, and the Little Sister of the Sun": Prince Ivan's younger sister, a cannibalistic witch, attempts to capture and eat up Ivan several times.
• In "Tấm Cám", Tam's half-sister Cam kills her reincarnated bird self. Later on, Tam reincarnates into a human and orders soldiers to pour boiling water on her sister. Tam later serves her sister's meat to her stepmother.

Fan Works

• Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): In this Godzilla MonsterVerse fanfiction, MaNi/Elder Brother (who has the mind of Ghidorah's right head) has absolutely no compunctions against trying to sadistically torment and kill San (Ghidorah's former left head and the Youngest Brother of the trio) since the latter is no longer part of Ghidorah, and Ghidorah's resurrected middle head is happy to sadistically watch it all. San and Vivienne manage to kill MaNi (more or less) and Ichi in retaliation.
• Subverted in Ash and Petals. Azula successfully killed Zuko when she shot him with lightning. Or so, it's told. Zuko actually survived his injuries.

• Better Bones AU:
  • Hawkfrost is now killed by his sister Mothwing rather than his brother Bramblestar, so the "blood will spill blood" prophecy still applies.
  • After betraying his siblings Spottedpelt and Ripplestar by warning the other Clans of Ripplestar's planned gathering attack, Gorseclaw kills Spottedpelt in the ensuing battle.
  • Clear Sky doesn't kill his brother Jagged Peak outright, but he kicks him out of his group while he has a broken leg because he thinks his brother is a "burden", leaving him to starve. Gray Wing and Storm accompany him to try to save his life but he dies anyway.
  • Marshwing kills his sister Applefur, a Dark Forest trainee, during the Great Battle.
• Blood! Rusty AU: Rusty and Scourge force Socks and Ruby, their half-siblings and full-blooded siblings respectively, to jump into sewer waters. It's a moment that signifies that Rusty is becoming more cold-blooded and desensitized to violence.
• In Frost Killing Hour, Elsa accidentally freezes her younger brother Jack to death when her ice powers get out of control.
• Empire of the Pacific: In this Lilo & Stitch fanfiction, it's revealed that Emperor 626 in the hellish alternate timeline had all of the other experiments (Stitch's "cousins" in the main timeline, and in a sense his siblings by virtue of the fact they were all made by the same creator) destroyed to ensure he was unchallenged, to Lilo's horror.
• It's mentioned in A Game of Castles that Bowser's father killed his brother, Morton's father.
• In Hellsister Trilogy, Supergirl kills her twin Satan Girl in self-defense (Satan Girl had attempted to murder her half a dozen times, and talking her down or locking her up had proved to be useless).
• Aksel attempts to poison his brother in the Frozen fic In Pain And Blood. He fails when it's noticed that his father died in a suspiciously similar fashion a few years prior.
• Cinder does this to her sister in My Name Is Cinder as a Mercy Kill. She stabs her sister Clementine in the neck before burning the house down because she'd rather not allow her to share the same fate as her mother.
• The Big Bad of the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fic Princess Trixie Sparkle is Celestia's and Luna's older sister who wants revenge on Celestia. Her goal is to kill Celestia.
• Light kills Sayu in the Death Note fanfic She Knows to prevent her from revealing that he is Kira. He feels bad about it but doesn't regret it.
• Subverted in the RWBY oneshot Tiger, Burning (The Iokheaira Remix). Yang tries to kill a newborn Ruby because she thinks killing her would bring back their mother who died in childbirth. Yang doesn't kill her sister and grows to love her instead.
• In To Belong, Prince Charming ran away from home because he murdered his fiancee Belle and his older brother John. It is thought that he killed them in a drunken stupor, but it's implied that something forced him to kill them.
• This Multi-Animator Project video set to Evelyn Evelyn is a Warriors Alternate Universe work. Squirrelflight gets jealous because her mate Brambleclaw is attracted to her sister Leafpool, so she kills Leafpool. Squirrelflight's adopted daughter (and Leafpool's biological one) Hollyleaf finds out what Squirrelflight did and kills her.

Film — Animation

• Just barely subverted in Brother Bear: After the late Sitka turns his youngest brother Kenai into a bear as punishment for killing the mother bear that killed Sitka early on, the middle brother Denahi, not seeing Kenai's transformation, mistakes the now-transformed Kenai for the bear that seemingly "killed" Kenai, and spends most of the movie trying to kill both Kenai and Koda, the son of the bear Kenai killed, until during one final battle, Sitka immediately changes Kenai back into a human before Denahi can successfully kill him, thus causing Denahi to finally realize the error of his ways seeing that his desire for revenge almost led him to kill his own brother while he is still a bear, and immediately causing him to perform a Heel–Face Turn.
• Elsa from Frozen nearly accidentally killed her sister as a child. They were playing with Elsa's ice powers when Elsa slipped and hit Anna on the head. Anna was saved by trolls but afterwards, their parents separated the sisters. Years later this occurs again when Elsa accidentally freezes Anna's heart during a panic attack. Anna turns to ice in the climax but is revived through The Power of Love.
• Scar is a big-time contender for this, having killed his brother Mufasa to take over the Pridelands in The Lion King. He even made his nephew Simba believe he killed his father and let him run away, though Simba didn't end up dying like expected and came back after a Time Skip.

Film — Live-Action

• In Alice, Sweet Alice, the Enfant Terrible Alice is accused of murdering her younger sister Karen. Subverted when it turns out that Alice was a Red Herring.
• It's revealed in Black Panther that King T'Chaka killed his brother N'Jobu years ago for betraying Wakanda and trying to kill Zuri.
• The Cable Guy: A Running Gag on the background of the plot is the trial of Former Child Star Stan Sweet, who murdered his twin brother Sam in cold blood (after they went their different ways, Stan into a life of crime and debauchery and Sam entering a cult). The events of the film end up disrupting the live transmission of the trial's verdict, and thus (at least for the audience) it will forever remain unknown.
• In Chicago, Velma Kelly kills her sister for having an affair with her husband.
• In Curse of the Undead, Drago killed his brother when he returned from Spain to discover the brother having an affair with his wife. This set in motion the chain of events that ends with Drago becoming a vampire.
• Leta from Fantastic Beasts was sent on a ship from France to the US as a little girl with her baby brother Corvus in tow. Corvus spent the whole night crying and Leta, being a kid who just wanted some sleep, swapped him with the calm baby down the hall. The ship sank and the lifeboat the actual Corvus was on sank, killing him. She’s hated herself ever since and spends most of the second movie telling people that Creedence can’t be her brother because her brother is dead, despite no one listening to her. Dumbledore (who, as noted below, similarly caused a sibling’s death) tries to tell her that she needs to forgive herself because people shouldn’t beat themselves up for the rest of their lives for mistakes they made as kids but she still can’t do it.
• In The Good Son, Henry had drowned his baby brother in the bath just because he had Henry's rubber duck. He later attempts to kill his sister by throwing her onto thin ice. She is saved from drowning but ends up in the hospital.
• In Greenfingers, Colin is in prison for killing his brother in an argument over a girl they both liked.
• The Halloween series has gone through many a reboot, but one thing that always remains consistent is Michael Myers stabbing his older sister to death.
• Holocaust 2000: It turns out Angel had strangled his twin brother in the womb with his umbilical cord. On purpose, as he's the Antichrist. He freely admits his intent to kill his new baby sister as well.
• It's a Wonderful Knife (2023): Waters murders his own brother when he tries to leave town.
• Julia X: When Jessica goes fully Axe-Crazy, she stabs her sister Julia to death, because she has decided that it is her 'turn' now and she needs to take Julia's place.
• Both "the Big One" raptor in Jurassic Park and the I. rex in Jurassic World ate the siblings they were secluded with first.
• Nine Dead: One of Leon's past sins is the murder of his own brother. They were both criminals, one was just trying to backstab the other.
• Subverted at the end of Pan's Labyrinth. Ofelia is asked to kill her baby brother to prove herself as a princess of another world. She refuses to do so. Soon, she's killed... and then she's spirited away to her real home anyway.
• SHAZAM! (2019): The antagonist Dr. Sivana throws his Big Brother Bully out of a window. In the same scene, he lets his father be eaten by the Seven Deadly Sins.
• In Sleepy Hollow (1999), two little girls are first seen in identical dresses during the flashback sequence leading to the Hessian's death. They are later revealed to be Lady Van Tassel and her sister, the crone in the Western Woods, which leads to the below revelation:
  Lady Van Tassel: Oh, my sister, by the way, sadly passed away. Quite recently.
  Katrina: You killed your own sister?
  Lady Van Tassel: She brought this on herself... (to a creeping young Masbath) by helping you and your master!
• Stardust mixes this with Decadent Court. As the king lays dying he notes that three of his sons still live, commenting that he'd killed all his own siblings before his father even fell ill. Moments later, one of his sons, Secundus, is pushed out of the tower by Septimus and joins his other brothers, whose ghosts show signs of the various ways they were murdered.
• What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?:
  • The twist is that Blanche crippled herself when she attempted to run over her sister Jane. Throughout the film, both the audience and Jane herself thought that Jane had tried to kill her sister in a jealous, drunken rage. In reality, Blanche was mad at Jane, tried to kill her, but Jane moved out of the way and Blanche broke her spine instead.
  • It's possible this occurred at the end. Blanche is dying due to dehydration and starvation brought on by Jane's Villainous Breakdown. The police find her at the end but it isn't specified if they were too late or not.
• It's revealed near the end of Wonder Woman (2017) that Diana is Zeus' daughter. This means that the Big Bad of the film, Ares, is her half-brother. Diana ends up killing him in the end.
• First invoked, then subverted, in Zombieland. Wichita asks Tallahassee and Columbus to perform a Mercy Kill on her infected sister, Little Rock, then stops them and insists that she be the one to do the deed. She then promptly turns the gun on the two men so that she and her NOT-infected sister can steal their weapons and vehicle.

Jokes

• A pair of twin infants hated each other due to wanting the mother's attention for themselves and plots to kill each other. So, when their mother breastfeeds either of them in turn, they each secretly applied a layer of poison on their mom's nipples, hoping they can poison the sibling in the process.
  The very next morning, though? The mother is shocked to discover that the father had died in his sleep...

Literature

• In The ABC Murders, the main murder was this trope; the others were just a coverup.
• In Animorphs, this is attempted three times, only the last of which is successful:
  • Esplin 9466 the Greater (aka Visser Three) attempts to kill his own twin, Esplin 9466 the Lesser, out of jealousy. The latter's fate is left unknown, but at the time the Animorphs meet him, the Visser is wholly unsuccessful, despite cutting his brother off from the Kandrona.
  • Then, we meet Arbat, brother to Alloran (aka Visser Three's host). It's unknown how much he actually meant his assassination mission of killing the Visser — as his real mission was something else — but he was also unsuccessful. Had he been successful, his brother would have died along with Esplin.
  • Finally we have Tom, Jake's brother, an involuntary controller. When the Yeerk in Tom's head becomes too high-ranking and dangerous, Jake sends his cousin Rachel on a suicide mission to murder Tom/the Yeerk in his head. Both Rachel and Tom die.
• The Belgariad: Inheritance in the Murgo court is oldest surviving son gets everything. Urvon used to have lots of brothers and half-brothers, but when we meet him he's an only child.
• The Bridge Kingdom Archives: this is what Lara seems to be doing at the beginning of the book and what her sister Marylyn tries to do near the end (but is killed by Lara instead).
• The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness: The father of Torak is killed by a demon-possessed bear in Wolf Brother. It turns out in Spirit Walker that the bear was created specifically to kill Torak's father by his brother Tenris.
• The Chronicles of Narnia: In The Magician's Nephew, Jadis casts a forbidden spell to kill her unnamed younger sister (along with everything else in her universe) at the end of a civil war and prevent her from becoming Empress.
• Lula from The Cuckoo's Calling was killed by her adoptive brother John after she found her biological brother and wrote John out of her will. John had also killed their other brother, Charlie, as kids when he pushed him into a quarry.
• In Guardians of Ga'Hoole:
  • The evil owl Kludd attempted this with both Soren and Egglatine, by pushing them out if their nest before they could fly.
  • Averted in "The Burning", Soren - now a member of the Great Ga'Hoole Tree army, couldn't bring himself to kill Kludd, the head of the enemy army. However, Kludd's wife Nyra tries to teach their son Nyroc that Soren did kill Kludd.
• In Harry Potter, Dumbledore's sister, Ariana, got killed in a Mêlée à Trois between him, their brother Aberforth, and Grindelwald. They don't know exactly who did the killing, but both brothers really don't make a distinction between having maybe killed her and actually having killed her. As far as they're concerned, they killed her, and both feel incredibly guilty about it a century later.
• In It Patrick Hockstetter a member of Henry Bowers gang, killed his baby brother Avery, when he was five because he found him annoying and thought his parents were replacing him.
• Jaine Austen Mysteries: SueEllen Kingsley from Killer Blonde is murdered by her own sister, Carolee.
• In the The Lion King: Six New Adventures book A Tale Of Two Brothers, it's revealed that Scar (then known as "Taka") tried to kill Mufasa as an adolescent. Taka himself ended up getting injured by the buffalo, which is why he has a scar.
• In Feed, Shaun shoots his sister Georgia. This is actually a consensual Mercy Kill, since she's in the process of becoming a zombie and she's fully aware of this.
• Old Kingdom:
  • Kerrigor, the Big Bad of Sabriel, had his two sisters sacrificed on two of the Great Charter Stones by his minions to break them. He also killed his mother and would have killed his half-brother if not for the arrival of the Abhorsen.
  • In Clariel, it turns out that the title character's mother Jaciel is estranged from her family because she was accused of this. Her older brother was already dead, his body having been stolen by one of the Dead, so she killed it by dousing her brother's body in molten gold, but due to her father the Abhorsen's dereliction of his duties, Jaciel's story was not believed and she was kicked out.
• The Oleander Sword: Malini kills Chandra by giving him a choice: die by poison now, or slowly over time. Chandra does the former.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • In A Clash of Kings, Stannis Baratheon sends Melisandre to kill his brother Renly using her shadow baby.
  • Ramsay Snow is believed by his father, Roose Bolton, to have killed his half-brother, Domeric, who died shortly after he visited him. This way, Roose would be forced to legitimize Ramsay as heir, lest House Bolton go extinct.
  • Gregor Clegane killed his baby sister, and nearly killed Sandor as well. He survived with half of his face burned off.
  • It is implied that Balon Greyjoy's death was engineered by his younger brother Euron, who wants to succeed him as the King of the Iron Islands. Confirmed outright in the preview chapters of The Winds of Winter, along with not one, but two other half-brothers.
  • Aegon II Targaryen burned alive and fed his half-sister, Rhaenyra, to his dragon, Sunfyre.
  • Arryk and Erryk Cargyll, twins and members of the Kingsguard, ended up killing each other, having sided with the opposite factions during the Dance of the Dragons.
  • Maekar I accidentally killed his older brother Baelor during a Trial of Seven.
• In the final book of The Spirit Thief, Benehime kills her brother and steals his power so that there'd be no-one left able to oppose her plans to kill the world.
• Star Wars Legends: Jaina Solo has to kill her twin brother Jacen when he becomes Sith Lord Darth Caedus. Granted, he does hesitate momentarily during their battle to save someone else's life by warning them of something, but Jaina still has to kill him. The only upside is that she thinks she felt him die as Jacen, rather than Caedus, through their Force twin bond, and it gives hope that he might have been redeemed at the last minute. She takes it really hard, as Han and Leia find her cradling his body and sobbing when they arrive.
• Subverted in Survivor Dogs. Blade tries to force Storm and her litter-brother Fang into a fight to the death, however, Storm refuses to kill Fang.
• Talion: Revenant: Prince Uriah of Hamis left the country ruling unrest, and his younger brother Roderick took the throne. Later he was invited back by Roderick to make peace, then murdered. Uriah however fathered children while abroad, and Nolan descends from him, with a claim to the throne.
• To Kill a Kingdom: To try and eliminate any empathy in her daughter Lira, the Siren Queen tries to force Lira into killing her cousin (the Siren Queen's own niece). The Siren Queen's sister ends up sacrificing herself and allows Lira to kill her instead of her daughter, which the Queen allows and makes her giddy.
• The Twilight Saga: Volturi leader Aro killed his sister, Didyme, after he found out that she and Marcus were planning to leave the coven.
• Warrior Cats:
  • Scourge is Firestar's Ax-Crazy half-brother. He was responsible for taking Firestar's first life and attempted to kill Cloudtail, who is Firestar's nephew and thus is also his own kin. Firestar saves Cloudtail by biting Scourge's neck, killing him.
  • Brambleclaw kills his villainous half-brother Hawkfrost in self-defense.
• Subverted in Wings of Fire. Peril was told that she killed her twin sibling prior to hatching. In reality, her mother was forced to kill one dragonet to save the other (although the Midquel book “Dragonslayer” reveals that the supposedly dead dragonet is alive and well). Queen Scarlet then proceeded to double-cross her and try to kill Peril, however, she ultimately let Peril live in order to use her as a pawn.

Live-Action TV

• Arrow: John Diggle shoots his younger brother, Andy, dead, after learning that he is actually Evil All Along.
• In The Borgias, Cesare kills his younger brother Juan, after Juan has brought a humiliating defeat onto the family. Lucrezia also tries to kill Juan earlier (for threatening her baby) but her attempt doesn't succeed.
• The Crowded Room: Rya begins to suspect Danny murdered his brother Adam, among other people. It turns out Adam is one of his alters.
• Doctor Who: In "Demons of the Punjab", Hindu fanatic Manish, although not pulling the trigger himself, does everything else to arrange his brother's death for daring to marry a Muslim woman.
• The Glamorous Imperial Concubine:
  • Fu Ya's uncle murders his brother for the throne.
  • A rare heroic version: Fu Ya kills Du Yun after he poisons Qi You.
• On Haven Duke is forced to kill his brother, Wade, after he becomes Drunk on the Dark Side and has Jumped Off The Slippery Slope, killing Trouble people for the Power High. When he goes after Jennifer, Duke kills him. It's implied to be part Addictive Magic, and part Suicide by Cop, since Wade is still aware enough to know he can't stop himself.
• House: One episode featured a teenage patient-of-the-week who had run away from home and was supporting herself. Her Dark Secret is that she accidentally killed her brother. By the end of the episode, she's reunited with her parents, who had already lost one child too many.
• House of the Dragon: Larys Strong arranges for his father Lyonel and brother Harwin to perish in a fire at his castle of Harrenhal so he can become Lord Larys Strong of Harrenhal.
• Law & Order: SVU: One episode features a case of a girl who's been missing since she was 14. The end of the episode reveals that she had been killed by her then-16-year-old sister after threatening to tell on her for doing drugs.
  • In a more sympathetic case, a boy is convinced to murder his brother by his possessive, controlling mother when the state was planning on taking him from her, because she told him they'd be better off dead than in foster care. When the boy learns that her entire argument was based on a lie, he breaks down completely.
  • In another sympathetic example, a human trafficking victim kills his sister after she tried to run away, because their captors would have punished the remaining children for her escape. When Huang points out that the sister might have intended to bring back help for the others, he's horrified.
• In Lucifer, the titular character is forced to kill his brother Uriel with Azrael's blade (it eradicates a being's soul, without sending it to Hell or Heaven), in order to save Chloe and Mother. For the following episode, he tries to come to terms with killing his own brother and acts out, even putting himself in front of a sniper (while near to Chloe, which would render him mortal) to be punished.
• In the Miami Vice episode "Definitely Miami," a woman stabs her drug lord brother to death before being killed by a sniper. She'd previously testified against him when he killed her husband.
• Moon Lovers:
  • Wang Yo shoves Wang Mu into the water and watches as he drowns.
  • Wang Eun is fatally injured by Wang Yo. He begs Wang So to kill him, but people who don't know what happened assume Wang So murdered him.
• My Country: The New Age: Bang-won kills his half-brother Bang-seok.
• On Resident Alien, the backstory for the main character, Hugh Mann alien Harry Vanderspeigle, is that as is customary with his people, Harry was abandoned to the ice-wind desert in a survival of the fittest situation with all of his numerous siblings. He killed them all for food, the sole survivor.
• The Rise of Phoenixes: The Crown Prince is behind the deaths of his brothers Ning Qiao and Ning Yan.
• Subverted in Riverdale. Everyone believes Jason was murdered by his twin Cheryl, however, Cheryl didn't kill him. Their father did.
• The Rising: Michael murders his brother William due to William's effort to reveal his crimes.
• Stranger Things: Victor Creel was convictied of killing his family, but it turns out his son's death was faked by the government so they could study his powers and it was his son who killed his mother and little sister.
• Supernatural: Angels are all siblings, which means there is a lot of this, since they never hesitate to kill each other if it means that they can get what they want.

Music

• Avenged Sevenfold's "Chapter Four" is based on the story of Cain and Abel. It's a Murder Ballad about a brother killing his own brother.
• The song "You Only Want Me 'Cause You Want My Sister" by Evelyn Evelyn is about a set of identical twin sisters where one is jealous that her boyfriend is also attracted to her twin. The singer ultimately gets mad enough to poison her sister in order to prove that her boyfriend wants her, not her sister too. Unlike most of the songs on the Concept Album, the twins aren't Evelyn Evelyn (being Conjoined Twins, they'd both die if the other died, and it's Out of Character for them to hurt one another).
• NOFX's "The Decline" features a man killing his brother with their father's gun.
  Down by the creek, under brush, under dirt
  There's a carcass of my second kill
  Down by the park, under stone, under pine
  There's a carcass of my brother William

Mythology & Religion

• The Bible:
  • The very first murder was committed by Cain against his own brother Abel.
  • Toyed with but averted in the story of Joseph, son of Jacob: at first his brothers plot to kill him, but then Reuben persuades the others to just throw him into a dry well and abandon him. Then, when merchants pass by, Judah persuades the other brothers to sell Joseph as a slave instead.
  • Among King David's children, Absalom arranges for his half-brother Amon's murder after the latter rapes their sister Tamar.
• Many tellings of the legend of Romulus and Remus have Romulus killing his brother before going on to found the city of Rome.

Podcasts

• Black Jack Justice:
  • "The Reunion" features Jack and Trixie being hired by Edie, a woman hoping to reconcile with her estranged twin sister Jane after Edie had stolen the man Jane loved. Small inconsistencies add up for Jack until he's finally certain that Edie is dead, killed by Jane in the course of an argument when Edie did indeed come back seeking condolences when her husband, Jane's past love, had passed away. Jane tried to engineer a fake reconciliation so that she wouldn't be suspected when Edie was missed.
  • Subverted in "Small Mercies". The episode opens with Jack and Trixie learning an acquaintance of theirs, Mick Parker, had been shot and was dying. Everyone's suspicion immediately falls on Mick's brother, Ted. The brothers had been at one another's throats longer than any but those who knew them all their lives could remember and Ted was there, but had been so drunk even he isn't sure what happened. During a conversation with Mick's wife Angie, the thing that had driven them apart so long ago, Jack lays out that he's long since realized Ted was innocent. Angie had tried to arrange a situation in which one brother would kill the other, the law would deal with the survivor, and Angie would be free without having to worry about inconveniences like divorce proceedings. When the situation didn't go as expected, Angie wound up having to do the deed herself. Despite that, it still might have worked because, as Mick lay dying, he named Ted as his killer instead of Angie. Between that and Ted's unreliability, the surviving brother would have been sunk if not for Jack and Trixie.

Theatre

• In Hamlet, Claudius killed his brother, married his widow, and became king, setting up the main plot which has said brother's son, the title character, seeking revenge for him.
• In King Lear, Goneril poisons her sister Regan because she saw her as competition for Edmund.

Video Games

• In Age of Empires II, Attila the Hun must kill his brother, Bleda, to take control of the Huns in the first scenario of his campaign. The goal is for either Attila to directly attack Bleda, or allow the Iron Boar to do the job. If the boar is killed first, Bleda will then turn against Attila and try to kill him.
• In Dragon Age: Origins, this trope is in play to show the dangerous, brutal nature of dwarven political intrigue. In the Dwarf Noble origin, the player's younger brother, Bhelen, tells them that their older brother, Trian, is going to try to kill them to prevent them from taking Trian's place as named heir. The player themselves can kill Trian, or decide to wait and see what he does. However, the whole thing is actually Bhelen's scheme; if the player kills Trian, Bhelen leads the other dwarven lords (including the player character's father, the king) to see the scene and immediately condemn the player character to exile and death. If the PC decides not to kill Trian, Bhelen has him killed anyway and frames the player character for it. He thus eliminates both his rivals to the throne in one stroke. The player character can come back and kill Bhelen in revenge if they support Lord Harrowmont as king during the Orzammar quest.
• Dyztopia: Post-Human RPG: Gemini's real goal is to take complete control of Runi and use their combined psychic powers to kill all of the other Zodiac Archdemons, who are all considered siblings. As such, none of the other archdemons miss her if the player gets the outcome where Runi kills Gemini.
• Fire Emblem:
  • Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon: Princess Minerva wants to be the one to kill her brother Michalis, an enemy of the protagonist's group:
  Minerva: I love him enough to spare him death on some stranger's sword, do you see? Let him be punished by my hands.
  • In Fire Emblem: Genealogy of the Holy War, the final boss is Julius, the hero Seliph's possessed younger half brother and the twin brother of Mysterious Waif Julia. Anyone can kill Julius, and he gives special dialogue if killed by Seliph, but Julia's Last Disc Magic is the most effective weapon.
  • Fire Emblem Fates has a protagonist who's a Child of Two Worlds, with an adoptive family in Nohr and a birth one in Hoshido that turns out to be adoptive too. Choosing one family will pit him/her against the other and will bring a huge chance of this taking place. The only fully unavoidable instance of this is Xander's Accidental Murder of his half-sister Elise in Birthright when she tries to protect the Avatar with an Heroic Sacrifice; while Xander himself and Possessed!Takumi from Conquest can be put down by the Avatar, he/she is not absolutely required to do so, though the gameplay will heavily favor it. As for Ryoma, when he realized the Avatar was hesitant to kill him, and knowing the Avatar him/herself might die if he/she refuses, Ryoma commits Seppuku to spare the Avatar that burden.
  • If playing the Nohr route, there's also twin brothers Kaze and Saizo. Depending on how well/badly you play, either can kill the other, though they do have dialogue admitting that they'd rather not.
• In the Grand Theft Auto IV mission "Blood Brothers", Dirty Cop Francis McReary orders Niko to kill Francis's brother Derrick. In turn, Derrick figures out that Francis wants to kill him, so he then calls on Niko to assassinate Francis instead. The player gets to choose which brother dies.
• In Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep, after Cinderella is freed from their tyranny, her evil stepsisters summon an Unversed called the Cursed Coach to murder her out of hatred. The attempt backfires, and they are killed by one of its bombs instead.
• The Inciting Incident of OMORI is a boy accidently killing his sister by pushing her down the stairs.
• The Overwatch, "Dragons" short tells the story of Hanzo, who was ordered to straighten out his wayward brother Genji but was forced to kill him, which led to Hanzo abandoning his clan in disillusionment. At the end, the ninja assassin he fights against turns out to be the brother he thought he had killed all those years ago.
• In Rain World Five Pebbles kills his older sister Looks to the Moon while attempting a breeding program that will erase the self-destruction taboo and allow him to die which fails, him getting the rot in the progress while his sister was revived by one of the others in their local group.
• Resident Evil 6: Helena is forced to kill her younger sister Deborah, who's been infected by the C-virus.
• Romancing Saga 3: The remaster finally brought an expansion to Tatyana, a character that had implication of a background that never came to anything. Heading into the new Phantom Maze shows that Tatyana was supposed to be on the receiving end of this from her older siblings, as they were angry that their father had picked her as the one to inherit the fortune of the family. They poisoned her favorite sweets at her birthday dinner and she overheard them, running away from home before she came to harm.
• In Runescape's Myreque questline, Vanescula Drakan conspires with the Myreque to kill her brothers and take control over Morytania. She directly kills the younger Ramis and injures Lord Draken enough for him to be killed.
• The Sakabashira Game: Several years before the game's events, Evan killed his sister by shoving her out of a window. Should he be the last contestant standing, his Heel Realization results in him planning to kill himself out of penance.
• The biggest reveal of Silent Hill: Homecoming is that Alex Shepherd accidentally killed his younger brother, Joshua, years ago, which was the reason why he was sent away by his parents, not to the army, but to a mental hospital.
• The trailer for the Star Wars: The Old Republic expansion Knights of the Fallen Empire depicts twin brothers Arcann and Thexan as they grow and train in the ways of the Force, eventually being sent on missions against both the Republic and the Sith Empire. Evenutally, Arcann grows furious at their father, Emperor Valkorion's indifference towards their efforts which had cost Arcann an arm and caused serious burns on his face. He lunged at their father with his lightsaber while his back was turned, prompting Thexan to engage him in a duel to protect their father. The duel ended when Arcann struck Thexan across the stomach, causing his death.

Visual Novels

• Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc: We learn in the final chapter that The Mastermind was sisters with one of the participants, and executed her on a whim simply For the Evulz.
• Higurashi: When They Cry: Shion is prone to this in different arcs. Her twin sister Mion is the next in line to be the head of their yakuza clan, though, in reality, Shion is the heir. Years ago they switched places but couldn't switch back when Mion (Shion by birth) was given a tattoo. Shion also blames her family for murdering her missing crush. (In reality, Satoshi is actually alive but is in a coma.) In Meakashi and Watagashi Shion goes on a murder spree which includes putting Mion in a cage and forcing her to hear as she killed their grandmother, her crush's little sister, and several other people. She even attempts to kill (and in the anime attempt to rape) Mion's crush Keiichi. At the end of both arcs, she kills Mion and pretends to be her afterwards. Shion stabs Keiichi (though he survives) but later kills herself when the reality of her actions finally washes over her. Despite Shion's behavior in those infamous arcs, Shion and Mion get along very well in most worlds.
• Liar Liar 2:
  • One of the Bad Ends has Minami stabbing her older sister, to avenge her boyfriend who Yukari killed in the previous game. Minami plans on turning herself in afterwards but wanted revenge. It's one of the few Tear Jerker scenes in the series, as Yukari confesses she killed Minami's boyfriend (and her ex) to protect her from dating a two-timing jerk. Yukari is normally sadistic and Ax-Crazy but loves Minami and is content to die if it makes her happy.
  • The game's ending comes in three forms: In the Normal End, Minami does a Wounded Gazelle Gambit and tries to kill Yukari but Yukari kills her instead. The Bad End variant has Yukari not protecting herself, causing Minami to kill her. The Good End has Yukari's girlfriend kill Minami to protect her, however, Yukari gets upset that Miho killed her sister and kills her.
• In Long Live the Queen, although Elodie is an only child herself, she is close with her cousin Charlotte. However, in a playthrough where Elodie is played cruelly, unlocks her Lumen powers and uses them to accidentally summon a kraken in the process of destroying an enemy fleet at sea, and learns about Charlotte's latent powers as a Lumen herself, it's possible for her to arrange for Charlotte to be sacrificed to the Kraken to appease it, as the only means of subduing it are either a monthly ritual spell for seven years, or the sacrifice of a young Lumen girl as tribute.
• Sisterly Bliss ~Don't Let Mom Find Out~: In Futaba's bad route, after Ichika told Futaba many times that they can't be in love, Futaba kills her by stabbing her.
• Umineko: When They Cry: We have the 4 children of the Ushiromiya householder in such an extreme situation of Sibling Rivalry to reach and overtake the Cain and Abel trope. In particular, Eva (and Eva-Beatrice) and Rudolf are the most inclined to enter this trope.

Web Animation

• Gossip City: Toshi pushed his sister Kaho in front of a speeding truck, leaving her son Ken behind. He and his wife refuse to raise him, but Kaho's friend Natsuki intervened and decided that she will raise him. Years later, it turns out that he murdered Kaho in cold blood just to get insurance money and pay his debts to shady people. On top of that, the truck driver was also in on it.

Webcomics

• Raining Knives begins with Dylan killing his more popular brother Jerry in a fit of jealousy.
• Mias World, If you take how far King went with letting his wife and Enemie torture World at face value, it’s just torture. But, in reality, he is a doctor, and he realizes that the Electric Torture he subjected him to could kill his brother if he goes too far, or severely burn or brain damage him.
• Rebirth: After witnessing Ian push Neo to the zombies, and remembering him doing the same to Iva in the past timeline, Noah decides it would be better for Ian to die, and pushes him to the zombies.
• Unsounded: Lemuel was part of the conspiracy that saw to his brother's assassination. He was heartbroken over it, but convinced it was unavoidable.

Web Video

• My Dad's Tapes: Uncle Don was responsible for the father's death, not for any malicious reasons, but all a part of their plan to keep balance in the world.
• The Weather: Alan drowned his little brother for the crime of tattling on him.

Western Animation

• At the end of the Book One in The Legend of Korra, Tarrlok kills himself and his brother Noatak (aka, Amon) by blowing up the boat they're fleeing on.
• The tie-in animated series The Lion Guard reveals that Scar was bestowed with the Roar of the Elders when he headed-up the Lion Guard during Mufasa's rule. But when his Lion Guard refused to help him in overthrowing Mufasa, Scar used the roar to destroy them. But as the Roar was never meant to be used for evil, the Great Kings of the Past depowered him of it.
• In The Owl House, paintings in the background in the episode "Hollow Mind" detail what Philip Wittebane/Emperor Belos did to his brother. Philip's older brother Caleb went missing after he was persuaded to come to the Demon Realm by a witch. Philip, convinced that witches and witchcraft are evil, figured out a way to cross the boundary himself, and spent years traveling the Boiling Isles looking for Caleb. When Philip found him again, he discovered that Caleb married and had a child with a witch, and became so enraged at this perceived betrayal that he attacked the couple with a knife, ending in Caleb's death.
  • This becomes an Exaggerated Trope later. Belos figured out how to create a Grimwalker, modeled him after Caleb, and raised him to become the Golden Guard, a fiercely loyal soldier who would serve as his right hand man. However, this Golden Guard eventually betrayed him and was subsequently murdered by Belos, who started the whole thing over again with a new Grimwalker. This cycle of betrayal and murder repeated itself likely dozens of times, and desensitized Philip so much that when the current Golden Guard (sixteen year-old Hunter) discovers the truth and brokenly asks Belos why he killed his family, Belos doesn't show any emotion beyond mild annoyance and disappointment as he concludes that Hunter is on the path to betrayal as well. He even wistfully laments that Hunter "looked the most like him" before trying to drag him down into his subconscious.

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