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"Alright, it's time to redeem myself. Through one final act of redemption, I'll save Gohan an- wait a second, why didn't I just grab him? I can probably still do that now, actually. Yeah, that's it, I'll grab him, and throw him out of the wa-AAAARRRRRGH!" — Piccolo, Dragon Ball Abridged
We all know the trope. Everyone's caught in a life-or-death situation. One of the characters hedges their bets, steps forward so the others survive, and ends up on the "death" side of the equation. Pathos is obtained, tears are shed, etc., etc.
Except... well, did he/she really need to do that? Couldn't he have gotten out of the way of the death trap once it was smashed and about to explode? Couldn't she have just held out for a few seconds longer until help arrived? Couldn't he have just talked them all out of that? What can we say, it's pathos — logic must be left by the wayside. The Plot Reaper has spoken.
A Stupid Sacrifice is what happens when a Heroic Sacrifice has a head-on collision with Fridge Logic. It is not a Senseless Sacrifice, where someone offers themselves up as a sacrifice only for outside factors to make it useless; this is when a sacrifice occurs when anyone in command of all their logical faculties could've seen that it didn't have to end this way. Walls will usually be dented. Surprisingly little overlap with Martyr Without A Cause, but sometimes the result of Chronic Hero Syndrome: The Knight Templar or Well Intentioned Extremist may make them — and lament them as Dirty Business — because they can't be bothered to notice that they were unnecessary.
Often a case of Writer On Board. They want this character to die, for whatever reason. There are no other alternatives, period. This situation makes it similar to Dropped A Bridge On Him; the "sacrifice" part making it "honorable", but they weren't going to make enough effort to make it the only logical way.
Compare Shaggy Dog Story.
This is a Death Trope. Spoilers ahoy.
Examples
Anime and Manga
- Early in Code Geass, Lelouch/Zero goes out of his way to rescue his old friend Suzaku when the latter is framed for regicide and set to appear before a Kangaroo Court; Suzaku's insistence on returning to stand trial certainly seems like a Stupid Sacrifice...until he's acquitted because Zero's appearance cast the murder into doubt. Later that season, Suzaku's mentor plans on allowing Britannia to execute him rather than attempting to escape, even after Lelouch shows up to rescue him. The novelization's version of that scene has Lelouch wonder if Stupid Sacrifice is an ingrained racial trait of the Japanese based off of these two instances.
- Turns out it's just ingrained in Suzaku and seems to run in the family as his father tried this as well.
- Lelouch is also apparently suicidal. Come on, you have to set yourself up to die instead of actually being a decent emperor? The people had some pretty high hopes for him when he came into office and he could have pulled the Black Knights and the Chinese Federation back under his command too if he simply bothered to explain.
- Moses from Blood Plus died in a particularly Wall Banger manner. Heck, it barely even counts as a sacrifice. One wonders why he effectively commited suicide and left Lulu to fend for herself as the last of the Schiff.
- In Appleseed, Kudoh manages to overturn a bad situation by kicking a villain's weapon and threatening the others with his own. The good guys grab their guns as well, point it at the baddies and quickly run out of the room. But Kudoh, for some reason, doesn't follow them. He stays there pointing his gun at the baddies, who outnumber him ten to one, and is shot to death as soon as the others are gone.
- Last Exile. Luciola's death. He could have slaughtered every single Guild member in the place and found an alternate way out after shoving Claus, Alvis, and Dio onto the nearest vanship. What does he do instead? He kills a bunch of guards, sure, but then, when he is alone with the Big Bad Delphine, he (instead of killing her, mind you) accepts a ring which disintegrates him.
- It is generally understood that Delphine accepted his sacrifice in exchange for not hunting down Dio again, which she would have been perfectly capable of through the remainder of the series.
- It's also worth noting that, although he was defying Delphine in helping Dio, Claus and Alvis escape, he was still fundamentally loyal to the Guild and couldn't possibly kill Delphine. His fatal duel with Cicada was, in a way, a formal challenge.
- GANTZ. One of a number of acid spewing aliens fires at Katou. Instead of, say, pushing him out of the way, Kishimoto runs around him, blocks him with her body, and takes the blast.
- Heroic Sacrifices never work in Dragon Ball. The really wall banging sacrifice in the series, however, has got to be Piccolo's in Dragon Ball GT, in which he decides to die so that the Black Star Dragon Balls wouldn't be used ever again. Despite the fact that the series had already established that Dragon Balls can be destroyed, or hell, just outright kill the dragon.
- Not to mention that thanks to the sheer distance between the balls, the fact that it's all but impossible to find one without very specialized equipment, and the fact that absoultely everybody crazy/powerful enough to want the things was dead he could have just done nothing and still had the same effect.
- Earlier in Dragon Ball Z, Piccolo had more than enough time to push Gohan out of the way instead of Taking The Bullet from Nappa. (He even has enough time to realize this, as can be seen in the quote at the top of the page.)
- No, he didn't; at least the manga doesn't give that impression.
- Arguably, Goku at the end of the Cell saga. They have one minute until Cell explodes, and our hero takes almost the full amount of time to think of the obvious solution, then spends his last few seconds jawing away instead of trying to get the hell out of the danger zone. Then refused to come back, despite the fact that death is cheap.
- Justified, since the series creator was deliberately trying to end the series anyway.
- He really should have known by then that killing everybody off didn't work.
- Actually it was also justified in that Goku believed that since many villains were specifically targeting him, the Earth would be safer if he was no longer alive. When this was proven wrong by Buu just wanting to destroy for the sake it he allowed himself to be revived.
- Also, he couldn't have come back even if he wanted to, due to one of the rules of the Dragonballs being that you can't come back if you've died already.
- However, by this time in the series there were multiple sets of dragonballs, and a definite precedent for people being resurrected more than once.
- True, but that was using the Namek Dragonballs; the Nameks view the Dragonballs as more of a divine final resort, and they were mainly allowed to use them in gratitude for helping defeat Frieza. Now that that's over with, it would probably be considered impolite to return and say: "hey, can we use your ultimate religious power to solve our own problems? Thanks!"
- Lampshaded in Yu Yu Hakusho. Yusuke tries to prevent Kurama from sacrificing his life to save his mother's life, saying it doesn't make logical sense because Kurama's mother would be condemned to a life of grief. So in turn, Yusuke offers up his life instead. Eventually they both live and the wish is granted anyway, but only then does the Fridge Logic kick in for Yusuke: if he'd done that, his own mother would've been condemned to a life of grief.
- He prevents this by suggesting that the mirror take part of his life, so Kurama won't have to die and his mother will be saved. Then again, the act is reckless enough to impress the Forlorn Hope into not taking either of their lives.
- Also lampshaded in the first episode, when Yusuke sacrifices himself to save a child from getting hit by a car. Koenma points out that, had he not done so, the car would have swerved anyway and missed the child entirely, so his sacrifice was, to quote, "Totally pointless." This is also the reason he was given the opportunity to come back to life.
- But it isn't this case - Yusuke not only had no way to know the kid would be safe while alive, he didn't try to sacrifice himself, just to save the kid. He also didn't think much of himself, so the kid had a highest priority over himself. It was a Senseless Sacrifice, but not a stupid one.
- Averted in Gall Force: Destruction, where a Catty android is about to sacrifice her existence to get the team past a door only to have another character point out that there's more than one such door and they only have one Catty.
- In the first Fullmetal Alchemist anime, Scar jumps in front of Lust to protect her from a hail of bullets. She's a homunculus who can't be killed that easily, and Scar knows this, but he takes the bullets anyway. To be fair, Lust does tell him how stupid he was and he excuses himself by saying that he acted instinctively. And there's an emotional element as well: the body Lust was made from was the woman Scar's brother loved — and Scar as well, as he later confesses.
- In One Piece, four Alabasta warriors in the Kicking Claw Squad drink a potion known as the "Fatal Fuel", which apparently increases their physical strength but kills them in minutes. Unfortunately, Crocodile can turn into sand and avoid their attacks, an ability he seems to have displayed in front of many people on at least one occasion that they should have known about.
- Fist Of The North Star is almost one very long string of these. Probably the most egregious example is Rei, who after spouting some nonsense about his debt to Kenshiro, decides to attack Raoh despite knowing that he cannot possibly win, since he had seen the Death Omen Star and Raoh had not, and despite the fact that Raoh wasn't doing anything other than hanging out and waiting for Kenshiro to show up. Raoh for his part even tries to warn him off until he realizes that Rei's Death Omen Star meant that Raoh was probably meant to kill him. Ironically Raoh actually ends up saving Rei's life in a way, by interrupting his kamikaze final attack with an strike that will slowly kill him over the course of three days. It does end up killing Rei eventually but he gets a lot more time to actually accomplish some things than if he had been allowed to go through with his plan to ineffectually blow himself up.
- The Silver Fang series loves this trope. No one is happy unles they're about to die. There are at least three seperate occasions of a character killing themselves (or trying to) in order to kill an enemy, without even trying to survive. If you have a spike pit, you can just toss the other guy in, fellas. No need to jump in with him.
- Blue Drop does this at the ending. It conveniently takes away any means of plot expossision and therefore ironically cowers up a severe lack of sustification for the situation in general. Creates a downer ending, except for Hagino who is, along with her entire race a firm believer of Warrior Heaven.
Comic Books
- Batman villain the KGBeast, while trying to escape a pursuing Dark Knight, continually foiled his attempts to bind him with rope by cutting it with his axe. Then when his left arm is caught in the rope... he cuts off his hand, even though it's been established that he could've just cut the rope.
- In "Countdown to Infinite Crisis," Ted Kord, the Blue Beetle is given a chance to join the Checkmate organization rather than die. His response is "Go to Hell." All well and good, right? Wrong. If he had accepted the deal, he could have actually worked to take the organization down from the inside, or at least buy him enough time to tell somebody what he found, rather than die and leave all that information buried.
- Given Kord's characterisation, it could be that joining Checkmate would have gone entirely against his principles, and he would rather die than let his ethics be compromised. Whether this is Honor Before Reason or The Determinator depends on the reader.
- Considering Maxwell Lord was a telepath, he could have easily verified whether Ted really intended to work for him. The fact that this hasn't occurred to the above troper makes this one wonder whether he's simply looking for an excuse to whine about killing off his favourite.
- Lord had mind control, not telepathy, which still would have made any ulterior motives come up very quickly during the screening process. Not that Maxwell Lord was stupid enough to trust a conversion in that kind of situation anyway.
Film
- In the prologue of Twister, the man sacrificed himself trying to hold the cellar door shut to protect his family from the tornado, getting sucked into the storm when the doors gave way. But even after the twister forced the cellar open, his family remained unharmed. So was it really necessary?
- In Star Trek Nemesis, was Data's Heroic Sacrifice even necessary? Did he have to fire the phaser himself, instead of setting the phaser to overload and beaming out?
- Brent Spiner felt that he could no longer convincingly play an ageless character and demanded that Data "die" in ''Nemesis''. Curiously, they still introduced an identical twin, who is left alive. And gets all of Data's memories.
- Awesomely skewered here
 :
DATA: The transporters conveniently failed after sending Picard, so I'm going to leap across space to get to Shinzon's ship.
GEORDI: What about the transporters in the shuttles?
DATA: Shut up.
GEORDI: What about the Captain's Yacht?
DATA: Shut up.
GEORDI: Why didn't we just send a bomb instead of Picard?
DATA: Shut up.
GEORDI: What about the transporters in the cargo bays? They're independent units, remember?
DATA: What part of "shut the fuck up" do you not understand? This is my big heroic exit, asshole. Don't fuck it up.
- The bomb part at least makes sense, since, you know, they can detect that sort of thing coming through.
- In Spider-Man 3 Harry jumps in front of the glider Venom is about to use to kill Peter, but given that he died facing Peter, he must have either spun in midair as he jumped, or ran past him between Venom and Peter to get impaled. Couldn't he have tried to grab the glider? Or just given Venom a shove? This is particularly bad when Peter breaks out of Venom's restraints a few seconds later, so if he'd tried fighting Venom instead of sacrificing himself he'd have had Peter helping him too.
- In X-Men II, it is not particularly clear why Jean Grey couldn't have used her telekinesis to save everyone from inside the plane.
- Wasn't it clear that Jean was committing suicide? She decided to off herself because she could feel Phoenix's power building inside of herself and was afraid of what came next.
- That's a lovely explanation. In no way is it clear from the film.
- In X-Men III, why did Magneto sacrifice his troops against soldiers he knew were armed with the serum, rather than have Phoenix just nuke the island from afar?
- A deleted X3 scene showed Magneto ordering Phoenix to do something clever to stop the troops. She just looks at him and says "You sound like [Xavier] again" and otherwise ignores him. As for the masses of mutants he sends out first, I think it was pretty clear he considered them expendable. He says "pawns go first" and presumably was using them as a decoy/means to lower the troops' ammo.
- In fact, why did he need anyone to begin with? If he was powerful enough to pick up the Golden Gate Bridge off its struts, and bring it to Alcatraz, couldn't he have just crushed the entire island and everyone on it with the bridge?
- In X-Men III we also have a case of a Stupid Sacrificer. Jean asks Wolverine to end it, and he stabs her in the chest, thus killing her and effectively, well, ending it. Then you think about it and see the obvious: the battlefield is littered with weapons and cartridges filled with mutant-disabling serum.
- Ah, but Jean Grey could disintegrate anything he brought near her. The only things immune were his adamantium skeleton and his own flesh which could regenerate faster than she could vaporize it. The serum and vials wouldn't stand a chance.
- Skeleton, flesh, and Magic Pants.
- And magic Hair Gel...
- The same thing as the KGBeast example above happens in the Film Of The Book of Hannibal. Hannibal Lecter, supergenius, who once got out of restraints using part of a ballpoint pen, cuts off his own hand to escape from normal handcuffs. As Roger Ebert put it, "I'm disappointed he didn't take it with as a snack."
- Some people theorize he DID cut the handcuffs and was wearing the cast to conceal it on the plane. How he got it through the metal detector is a question for another day.
- In the film version of Harry Potter and the Philospher's/Sorcerer's Stone, Ron sacrifices himself as a chess piece so that they can win the magical game of chess and reach the stone. In the book, he himself is the knight, so he has to stand still and let the queen 'take' him. In the film he's sitting atop a massive stone horse, and many people have asked themselves why he just sat on that horse and watched as the queen approached, rather than jumping off... Granted, he doesn't die, but he could have done.
- Plus, in either scenario, Ron sees that the knight has to be sacrificed... but wait a minute..., if he's the one directing the game, why didn't he make himself (if not one of the other kids) the king? Which is, after all, the only piece guaranteed to survive winning the game.
- Which is, after all, still on the board. Of course they had to play the pieces the game designated as the free pieces. And their magic is not good enough to magically spawn a chess knight and remove a chess king.
- The 2007-version of I Am Legend has a particularly bad example of this, when the main character spontaneously decides to blow himself and all the vampires up while a perfectly fine escape route was available. Some times you can rewrite the script at last minute without any ill effects. Other times, not so much.
- The vampires would've caught up fairly quickly, and considering the regular people were in a narrow tunnel with no weapons, leaving them with no way to avoid or defend themselves from attackers, the sacrifice was probably necessary.
- You seem to be mistaken. It wasn't a tunnel, it was more like a small room in the wall. He told them to stay in there until dawn. His sacrifice was necessary for the others to survive. However, the ending of the movie was completely stupid when compared to the book.
- Which means that it wasn't a stupid sacrifice, as he took out all the 'dark seekers' so she wouldn't be found and could get the cure away...
- In Hellboy 2: The Golden Army, the elven princess stabs herself in the heart to kill her linked villain-brother as he rises to kill Hellboy behind his back. However, if she saw it happening, why didn't she simply shout and saved Abe from Heartache? Or, if shouting is too risky, just stab her own hand and get him to drop the dagger???
- In the same movie, why didn't they just break the piece of the Crown that controlled the Golden Army earlier since that was all it took to stop it, and they apparently knew that?
- Or just, y'know, have his twin raise the whole "the army won't act if an alternate legitimate heir/commander makes a challenge" thing? The same link that killed the poor kitten would prevent him from dueling her and render the army useless.
- Of course, Abe could have just not given him the piece in the first place, considering that the Prince's threat of killing his sister was about as empty as they come. Well, unless the Prince was suicidal enough to do it... But then he couldn't use the crown either... My head hurts.
- Well it was pretty clear that Abe was in love with the princess and pretty naive ("They lied to me!" "Abe old buddy, when this is over we need to have a talk...") Also, the prince made it pretty clear that as long as he lived he wasn't going to stop trying to kill Hellboy/kill the humans, so his sister probably realized he had to die and she should ensure it quickly rather than bother trying to convince someone else.
- Upon seeing this movie last week, my 11 year old brother pointed out all these exact flaws and then some. I could only convince him to drop it by telling him that every single character in that room was clinically retarded.
- This isn't very difficult. Nuada couldn't kill his sister. He was very capable of incapacitating her. Any challenge would not last long as the fight is not necessarily to the death. Nuala killed herself when it became clear Nuada would never, EVER stop as long as he was alive. If the Golden army failed, he'd turn to a new way to destroy humanity.
- At the climax of 30 Days Of Night, the female characters are trapped under a car that's surrounded by fire. So Eben deliberately infects himself with Vampire blood in order to become strong enough to kill their leader. And then five minutes after he does so the sun comes up, frying the remaining vampires along with Eben. Oh and the fire threatening to kill the girls? They managed to escape without his help.
- They only escaped because Eben distracted the vampires surrounding the car, though. Otherwise, they were either going to die by fire, or die by mauling, had they made a run for it.
- Plus, Eben let himself be killed by the sun, because unlike some vampires, the ones in the film truly are bloodthirsty inhuman monsters. Remember the little vampire girl? She was a former member of the townsfolk and took great pleasure in feeding off the remains of one of her victims. And then there was John. He'd only received a few scratches during the initial attack. By the time Eben found him, he was already overwhelmed with delirious hunger and tried to attack him. There really was no going back for these vampires, he wouldn't have been able to hold off attacking his loved ones for long if he'd hidden from the sun. In the end, his sacrifice actually worked out, as he not only managed to save them, but he killed the Big Bad which was the ONLY thing that made the other vampires scared enough to back off.
- In the Transformers live-action movie, Optimus Prime says that should it be impossible to keep the Decepticons from getting the Allspark, they should shove it into his chest in order to destroy it. This would also kill him by overloading his spark. It would be ridiculously easy to hide the Allspark somewhere (they did it before), and even more so when it shrinks to the size of a microwave, but Optimus just has to be heroic. Of course Megatron winds up being the victim of this rather than Optimus, destroying two threats at once, vaguely redeeming this idiotic statement.
- The thing is, the Cube was out in the open by then. Hiding it again would require construction of a completely new facility, and there wasn't time for that. It was indestructible by normal means, and so Optimus was willing to use himself to destroy it, if and when it came to that. And using his own spark to destroy it was a lot less of a risk then using Megatron's, as if Megatron even got his hands on the damn thing for one moment it would have been the end. Plus, Optimus was hesitant to destroy Megatron because Megatron was his BROTHER.
- It doesn't change the fact that he'd leave a his already out-numbered and out-gunned troops and a planet full of squishy people at the mercy of the single most powerful Decepticon (who would be more than a little pissed that his goal was destroyed so easily).
- This is Optimus Prime we're talking about here. Sacrificing himself is pretty much become a running joke (Hell, it was a running joke even back in Beast Wars when Megatron lampshaded it with "My, you Optimuses do love to sacrifice yourselves, don't you?").
- In Blade II, main female character Nyssa, finding herself in the presence of his mutated hypervampire brother, willingly lets him suck her blood and thus infect her, for no clearly explained reason. Ten seconds later Blade comes and kicks the baddie's ass. The sun comes up, and Nyssa decides she'd rather die than turn into another mutated vampire, which she could have easily avoided in the first place by just running from the baddie for ten seconds.
- She wanted to offer penance to her brother for the way their father had cruelly mistreated him. I thought that was obvious simply from watching the movie.
- In Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End, Will Turner's death (and subsequent resurrection at the price of leaving his wife to captain the Flying Dutchman) could have been prevented if Captain Jack Sparrow had stabbed the heart of Davy Jones while Jones was distracted, rather than drawing his attention with a witty One Liner.
- You appear to have missed the point that Jones knew Jack would hesitate before condemning himself to take Jones' place as captain of the Flying Dutchman (frankly, anyone would as it means having your own heart cut out to take the place of Jones'). And this doesn't really count as a "sacrifice" anyway.
- In Star Wars episode two, Yoda lets the villain Dooku get away, an event that leads directly to lots of disasters in the subsequent four movies. When Dooku causes a pillar to fall upon Anakin and Obi-Wan, it requires Yoda great effort and concentration to just barely Force-push the heavy pillar out of the way, thus sacrificing his victory. On the other hand, Yoda could easily have moved the much lighter Anakin and Obi-Wan out of the way.
Literature
- In Dan Abnett's Gaunts Ghosts novel Honour Guard, Baffels led his company into battle and they had to retreat. Baffels, unsure of himself in command, did not, and died. Gaunt later said that Baffels had done all that could have been done.
- Invoked in Traitor General. When the hounds find their scent, Landerson sees that his fall had torn off his bandage, and tells Gaunt that it's his blood, and he will try to draw them off. Gaunt refuses to let him because they would still be chased "no matter how heroic and stupid you decide to be."
- Likewise invoked in Guns Of Tanith. After being shot down while inserting the Larisel teams, Jagdea has to be rescued by the same teams from a Blood Pact patrol looking for downed pilots. She volunteers to stay behind and let the next patrol capture her (after a suitable fight). Mkvenner and Domor shoot this plan down on the grounds that a) the bad guys are very good at torture and b) the only way to make it vaguely plausible that Jagdea'd killed the patrol would be to leave the kind of weapons that would cause those wounds, and a 'downed pilot' toting a sniper rifle and the signature combat knife of a different regiment just raises more questions. Not to mention that they'd need those weapons themselves.
- In the final climax of Zilpha Keatley Snyder's Green Sky trilogy, protagonist Raamo is is about to throw a deadly ray-gun (encased in a heavy lead-lined urn) into a deep watery chasm. Does he simply throw it in? No, because he's telepathic and is getting confused by the psychic emanations he's picking up from onlookers who think the weapon should be kept just in case (it's literally the only weapon on the planet). So he slips and falls in, the urn still in his hands, literally dying for the sins of his people. Obviously meant as an Heroic Sacrifice, it came off as an Esoteric Happy Ending at best — the kind that Snyder has all but trademarked in the endings of her novels. After being called on this by roughly 90% of her readers, she made a computer game sequel to the series where you can save him, as an Authors Saving Throw.
- Twilight is horrible about this. Whenever a hostile vampire appears, Bella immediately decides to try to get herself killed in order to "save" her Nigh Invulnerable boyfriend.
- She only needed to save Edward once and she was the only one that could do it. However she did this when trying to save her mother because James told her he kidnapped her and she decided to go alone, when it was more logical to tell her powerful vampire family James's plans, and it was unnecesary either since James was using an old video with her mother on it.
- Karen Traviss' Star Wars novel Order 66 has one of her characters (Etain) sacrificing herself to save a stormtrooper from Jedi after Order 66 is issued.
- Many readers have come up with ways to save the life of the stowaway girl who dies at the end of the short story The Cold Equations.
- In the Star Wars Expanded Universe novel Vector Prime, Chewbacca sacrifices himself to save Anakin under circumstances suspiciously less dire than the characters had encountered before. If he had time to throw the kid, he had time to climb up himself. It's almost as though he realized the author decided it was time for him to die, so he just gave up.
- Err, there was a massive windstorm going on as the result of the moon coming down and the atmosphere about to ignite. Chewie was literally blasted off his feet and thrown some distance away before he could get on- by the time the Falcon had a read on his location again, it was too late to do anything about it.
Live Action TV
Western Animation
- Played For Laughs in the Slurm factory episode of Futurama, the Slurm mascot does a You Shall Not Pass with his boombox, bringing the tunnel down to cover the Planet Express crew's escape. But what made the tunnel go down was the vibrations from his boombox. Instead of standing next to it, continuously "rocking out" until the rocks crush him when he simply could have left the box and ran.
- He did make it somewhat clear that he'd grown tired of living.
- I always had the impression he collapsed the tunnel by partying really hard. He literally brought the house down.
- The TV special Garfield in Paradise ends with Odie and a mechanic Monkey driving a Cool Car into a volcano to prevent it from erupting. The tribal chief lampshades the foolishness of the sacrifice by pointing out that they could have just pushed the car in. This is subverted, though, as Monkey and Odie climb out of the volcano alive.
- In the last episode of Frisky Dingo as the Antbaby is attacking everyone, Taqu'il decides to leap into the maw of the Antbaby with a bomb. He does so, gets eaten, and nothing happens. Xander's response, "What do you think his overall plan was?"
Video Games
- Please don't tell me you were stupid enough to decide to aid the Kuei-Jin in Vampire The Masquerade Bloodlines.
- Dirge of Cerberus proves guilty of this in one occassion. When Implacable Man Azul is attacking the party, Shalua holds the hydraulic door open for Vincent and Shelke to escape through. This wouldn't be so bad... except that Shelke had literally just finished demonstrating her ability to paralyze Azul indefinitely with a barrier materia. Even disregarding this, there was no need whatsoever for Shalua to stay behind to hold the door open, considering that it had an adjacent button to open it. Was it really too much trouble to just push the button again and open the door a second time?
- Fallout 3. Oh, Fallout 3. If you've missed it anywhere else on the Wiki... By the end of the game, you (or a team mate) are asked to step into a chamber to complete the project your father started to bring clean water to the wasteland. Thing is, the chamber is bathed in radiation. You can't send in the rad-resistant Super Mutant, the Ghoul who is healed by radiation, the robot that is completely unaffected by radiation, or a slave with an explosive collar around her neck that is completely subservient to your whim in every other way, and no reason is given in any case bar "no, fuck you." Your rad-resistant armor fails, your anti-rad meds do crap. You (or the likewise unprotected team mate) have to go in and die horribly of radiation poisoning.
- And in an even worse implementation of Gameplay And Story Segregation, the fatal rad poisoning doesn't do jack until you press the button and turn Project Purity on, at which point you instantly dissolve into goo, with enough Rad-X and RadAway you could stay in the chamber indefinitely.
- Even worse, the chamber only became irradiated due to a doubly Stupid Sacrifice by your character's father, who gave his life to keep a mere two Enclave troopers (whom you could have stopped in the blink of an eye) out of the chamber. Furthermore, he had no reason to keep them out in the first place. They were the bad guys, but they were trying to do exactly what he was trying to do, and what your character sacrifices him/herself to do: push that button. The only way his asinine "kill them before they push the button, so we can push the button" scheme makes any sense at all is if he somehow found out about President Eden's FEV scheme, failed to realize the Enclave officers at the purifier had no intention of implementing it, and neglected to mention either fact, instead opting to blather on about what the Enclave would do after Project Purity went into effect.
- If by "trying to do exactly what he was trying to do" you mean "use the promise of clean water to force people to undergo genetic testing, and "detain genetic non-compliants"." sure. And by "genetic non-compliant" we mean everyone who registers as a mutant by the Enclave's standards, meaning not only actual Super Mutants and ghouls, but also all humans who aren't Enclave or Vault Dwellers (and considering the sheer volume of people that would involve, the "dispose of detainees by flame when the witholding facility becomes overcrowded" clause would go into effect very quickly). Listen to the PA system when the Enclave first shows up at Project Purity. James knows enough about these people to be sincerly freaked out and attempt to lock down the Memorial. No argument that his sacrifice was senseless once his One Man Army offspring showed up in the Rotunda, though.
- Not to mention that Colonel Autumn demonstrated earlier that it's possible to spend an extended time in that chamber without ill effects. Thankfully the devs have promised to retcon the ending in the third downloadable content announced, to be released in March. When even the writers realize how horrible a decision they've made...
- Well, said DLC is out... and instead of dying, you actually send Fawkes in, but the game calls you a pussy for it.
- Actually, in the DLC the player character can enter the chamber, and push the button as well. Fast forward to a few weeks later and you wake up from a coma with no more explanation than "You were knocked out!". Still, it is an improvement over the original ending]].
- Or you can send Sara Lyons in, and have her die.
- Gouto's death in Raidou Kuzunoha Vs The Soulless Army, in the end, felt a bit pointless. While it was a poignant moment for the main character, being the only time we see him cry (and even then, no tears are shown), the demon you send with him most likely would have been able to accomplish the mission on its own.
- In Age of Mythology, Chiron offers to slow down the oncoming horde of bad guys, by standing under a precarious pile of stones and kicking them. Never mind that he could have easily, you know, kicked them over from the other side, or even gotten out of the way of the path blocking the rockslide. And for that matter, there wasn't even that many bad guys. They could have fought their way out!
- In Fable 2 The dog dies when he tries to attack Lucien, unfortunately, Lucien was preparing to fire his weapon at the time. Sure, Lucien probably would have taken care of the dog later anyway, but the dog jumped into a bullet for no real reason. It didn't attack until then either, even though Lucien gave you a huge speech about how wrong you are.
- Pelleas kills himself (technically he has someone else kill him) to break a blood pact in Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, after finding out that it ends when the people who made it die, and he signed it, and was the target. It didn't work, because it also requires the destruction of the physical document, he just didn't sign it. He could have found this out easily enough just by asking somebody.
- Although, on a second playthrough, you can stop his death. The contract is nulled by killed the other signer instead.
- Do you know how Beat died in The World Ends With You? When his little sister was about to be hit by a car, he put himself in the way of the car. Both of them died. Even he admits it was a stupid idea afterward.
- And later Rhyme does a similar thing, only substituting a Shark Noise instead of a car. Although she succedes in saving Beat, Rhyme also dooms him, seeing as people who've formed a 'pact' can't survive for more than a few minutes if their partner gets erased. Although Beat survives, this leads to his Start Of Darkness.
- Amidst all of the sacrifice in Final Fantasy IV, Palom and Porom turn themselves into statues to hold a pair of advancing walls of doom in place. In the party, however, was a mighty sage who probably could have brought the castle down around them if he had thought of doing so. This mostly served as a gimmick to remove the characters from the party, as the number would otherwise have exceeded the Arbitrary Headcount Limit. Fortunately, they got better.
- There's also the fact that Porom usually knows Teleport by the time this occurs, and there was absolutely no given reason for this slightly more logical way to escape not to work.
- The real Wallbanger is the fact that said sage is unable to de-petrify them because they did it voluntarily. Gameplay And Story Segregation is one thing, coming up with stupid handwaves is another.
- Especially since this never comes up again. If you were to, say, use Break on yourself in battle, you can still de-petrify yourself with Esuna or a Gold Needle, no problem.
- And yet the elder of Mysidia could.
- Presumably, he's the most learned person in Mysidia. He probably knows of magical secrets that even Tellah doesn't, or doesn't remember.
- Speaking of Tellah, the pointlessness of his own sacrifice was part of the plot - if he'd waited for everyone to wear Golbez down before using his Spirit Bomb, his sacrifice might have done a bit more than knock the Big Bad back (though it did free Kain from his control and might have also shaken Zemus' control of Golbez long enough for the latter to stop himself from killing his own brother.
- All of the game's fake-out deaths are like this. Cid did not need to jump off the ship with a bomb - he's more than capable of building advanced remote controls, so it's hard to believe he didn't have a remote controlled detonator. Even assuming he didn't, jumping with the bomb would not alter its speed any. The fact that he held a bomb that had enough force to collapse a cavern and yet he just gets better makes it all the more of a Wallbanger. And going back a few minutes earlier, if all Yang did to stop the cannon was blow up the guns...why not just walk out of the room with everyone else and let Rydia set it on fire or use one of her summons?! There was no particular reason the sequence required him to stand in the room and die.
- To be fair, it seemed to me that what Yang did was stuff himself in the cannon itself, thereby messing up it's aim. They couldn't walk out of the room because the goblins screwed up the controls to lock the cannons in place... firing on the Dwarves. And in any case, Yang has the Brace ability, so he's one of the few who could probably survive an explosion like that.
- Corinne's sacrifice seems somewhat pointless in Tales of Symphonia, especially since Lloyd blocks the same attack by Volt moments later. Genis, despite being able to escape the forcefield trap with Lloyd, stays behind for some reason, even though there's no proof that the trap would reset and seal them in again if he tried to escape with him. Averted with Sheena's plan to give herself to Kuchinawa (who worked with the Pope in order to get revenge on her) to save the group from the Papal Knights; Zelos drags her through the Otherworldly Gate after it opens, and tells her that the Pope is after the rest of the group anyway.
- In Tales of the Abyss, Asch runs into Luke performing the ritual to destroy the miasma, with the intent of giving his life instead, as he had intended before Luke decided to sacrifice himself. Both of them survive for the moment, but this seemed somewhat poorly thought out, since he'd been warned he would likely be consumed, too.
- The reasons become a bit more sensical if you a) consider that Asch is dying as a result of complications from the replication process and repeated strain from using his hyperresonance and b) by this point, Luke has given him severe self-esteem issues by having done far more to save the world than he could.
- He thought that he was dying. The implication from the optional Contamination sidequest seemed to be that it was Luke that would be absorbed into the original, leaving nothing but his memories behind. He just didn't understand the technical explanation that he was given.
- To say nothing of Asch's death scene. "Alright, we'll fight and the winner will go and beat Van while the loser stays and powers the fonic door mechanism long enough for he other guy to get out. Leave together? What do you think we are, a pair of some sort of city-disintergrating, two-people-across-a-continent-teleporting, fonic-tech rewriting plot devices, who happen to be holding the two halves of the world's most powerful amplifier of seventh fonons, or something? Don't be ridiculous."
- One chapter in Advance Wars: Days of Ruin would be a hell of a lot easier if you actually had control over Brenner's unit rather then it being forced in place as a fighting retreat would have been possible.
- Several of the people who were killed/seriously injured in Metal Gear Solid 4:
- Raiden, who, upon seeing that Snake is in danger of being crushed by a giant warship heading directly towards the pier he's laying on, decides to hold back the warship. Instead of the alternative, picking up Snake and running as fast as he can away from the pier. Raiden loses both arms for his trouble.
- And been shot at by several Metal gear Rays and a warship with a Nuke Launcher. I'd prefer having my friends arm cut off too. The reaosn Liquid didn't send them as he's an egotistical maniac and used his ship as an ultimate form of Cherry Tapping.
- Naomi, who commits suicide by destroying the nanomachines that were keeping her cancer in check. Aside from the fact that the explanation for this is wholly unsatisfactory (she never forgave herself for creating Vamp, but she wasn't even the one who made him, not to mention she'd finally helped stop him for good), but she left behind a newfound love interest and a girl who looked up to her. There was a spare seat for her in Metal Gear Rex, but she decides to stay behind and say her final words - to no one in particular. Good going.
- Big Boss. He decided to go out one day and place flowers on the Boss' gravestone, and took Major Zero with him. Then, he waited until Snake showed up (and almost killed himself). Only then did he decide to make his grand entrance. He spends twenty minutes tying up all the loose ends and plot holes seen throughout the series, performs the symbolic gesture of euthanizing Zero and then dies himself, knowing that Snake was carrying the mutated FOXDIE in him. Couldn't all of this just been solved by...a letter? A phone call? He shows up for the first time in four games, spouts expository dialogue and then knows it's time to die?
- The whole point is that Big Boss wanted to die. He realized that he was the reason for all the crazy shit that had happened to the world, and like Naomi, he chose to die as penance.
- Good job sticking a soulstone into your head, random warrior from Diablo. Wrestling against the lord of Terror, yeah right. Take the damn soulstone to the Horadric mage, who can send you back down to destroy the thing. Admittedly, he was kinda messed up by this point and it's pointed out that this was a very very bad idea. Still, why would you think your willpower can stand up to the devil, who also happens to be immortal so he'll win ANYWAY?
- Does this count as a Heroic Sacrifice? Everyone else knew it wouldn't work, his mind had simply been corrupted by Diablo too much by this point. The best summation of the reaction everyone else has is: *facepalm* "You idiot."
- Lost Planet. Paraphrasing lightly:
Wayne: "Hey Basil, come with me in my hyper-advanced, better-than-anything-the-enemies-have Humongous Mecha and let's blow this joint."
Basil: "No, you go, I'd rather stay here for no discernible reason whatsoever and fight the vastly overpowering enemy forces until they shoot me to within an inch of my life, leaving me with just barely enough energy to activate the detonator for the explosives I've been planting around."
Wayne: "Righty-o, I won't even think about making you abandon such an obviously pointless and masochistic plan. See ya! Or not, y'know."
- At the end of X 2 The Threat, your wingman flies his fighter into the enemy doomsday weapon to destroy it. All well and good, except that X2 is not the sort of game where you are limited to a single fighter yourself. His kamikaze run doesn't seem quite as noble when you've got three capital ships, laden with multiple Wave Motion Guns and entire squadrons of fighter spacecraft, sitting in firing range.
- In Mega Man X: Command Mission, Aile rips a key device out of his own chest, hands it to X, and then shoves him out the door, seals it behind him, and proceeds to blow himself up to destroy a small group of incoming minor, pathetically weak Mooks that wouldn't really have stood much of a chance against X.
- Later on, Spider sacrifices both himself and the level boss to create a big enough explosion to blast the door open before the base self-destructed. Except that at that point in the game, the team have more than enough firepower between them to create more damage than just two reploids exploding. Or even blow open their own door through the walls.
- Maybe he, being in actuality the [1], just got sick of the charade?
- In Digital Devil Saga, Cielo conveniently forgot his mouthlaser against a few Mooks (not to mention his lightning spells, booster spells and whatever other non-cutscene skills you've learned by then), as he himself points out in the afterlife a few minutes later! To be fair, the game itself implies that it could have been a conscious decision to die.
- Belleza of Skies Of Arcadia ramming the Big Bad's escape vessel. With an aerial battleship. That had guns. Why Didn't She Just Shoot Him?
- Valkyria Chronicles. Because it's an aversion, it could be a lot of things, but when you consider that the whole point of her trying to blow up the Marmotah with her powers was to save her friends and the capital, there's the matter of how close they are to said capital when she tries it. The blast radius is huge on that attack. If she'd managed to do it, Squad 7, and possibly Randgriz, would have been vaporized in the process.
Real Life
Mythology
- Quite a few incarnated gods (Apollo, Mitras, Osiris etc.) get themselves painfully killed for things they could easily have achieved with their powers. Being nailed to a tree is often the cause of death for some reason.
- It's symbolic - the god dies, and is reborn anew. The cycle of growth and harvesting of the grain, the cycle of the seasons, the prmise of life after death for the god's followers - a very common theme in religion. The tree, in some cases at least, is probably due to cultural contamination from Christianity in the days when these myths were still an oral tradition.
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