Basic Trope: A character dies due to intense grief or sadness.
- Straight: Alice dies soon after the tragic and untimely death of Bob, her One True Love.
- Exaggerated: Bob dies, Alice's parents die, Alice is fired from her job, her house burns down, and her dog is run over by a car. Alice herself dies soon afterwards.
- Downplayed: After Bob's death, Alice suffers from a lingering case of Soap Opera Disease. She eventually recovers.
- Justified:
- Alice wastes away because she no longer has the will to care for herself properly.
- Alice suffers a heart attack due to the severe emotional stress she's under.
- Alice can't live without Bob and is Driven to Suicide so that they can be Together in Death.
- Inverted: Alice and Bob get married, but during the ceremony Alice is so overwhelmed with joy that she has a fatal heart attack.
- Alice's despair ironically protect her from death as she is beyond caring already.
- Subverted: Alice attempts suicide by overdosing on pills, but due to Mid-Suicide Regret she calls an ambulance.
- Double Subverted: But the pills Alice took caused severe damage to her internal organs, and she dies on the way to the hospital.
- Parodied: Alice's lottery ticket is a loser, and she's so disappointed that she drops dead on the spot.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice falls ill and attempts suicide multiple times after Bob's death. She survives, but the cumulative damage she's caused to herself nearly kills her anyway and lands her in the hospital. There, she meets a cute and charming nurse named Daniel. The two fall in love and Alice regains her will to live. Then it's revealed that Daniel isn't real, and the entire relationship was a Dying Dream that Alice had while she was hospitalized. Maybe. Whether Alice actually survives or not is deliberately left ambiguous.
- Averted: Alice mourns Bob's loss, but she lives a long life afterwards.
- Enforced:
- The author firmly believes that True Art Is Angsty.
- The author suffers a Creator Breakdown after the death of their own spouse.
- Lampshaded: "To think, you can get so depressed enough to literally die from it..."
- Invoked: Charlie will inherit Alice and Bob's business empire after they die, so he murders Bob in the hopes that Alice will waste away soon afterwards.
- Exploited: Charlie will inherit Alice and Bob's business empire after they die, so after Bob's death Charlie deliberately does everything he can to drive Alice deeper into despair until she finally succumbs.
- Defied: Alice mourns Bob's loss, but makes a vow to live on in honour of his memory.
- Discussed: "The last thing we need right now is somebody dropping dead because their Trauma Conga Line had no brakes."
- Conversed: "Yikes, the writers really wanted to make her life hell before she had enough and killed herself."
- Implied: After Bob, Alice's husband, dies, she suddenly goes missing, and nobody is able to find her. Not even her closest friends and loved ones have any idea as to where she's gone or what she's doing.
- Alice was hospitalized but mentioned as improving. News of Bob's death reaches her after his notable absenses and her health crashes and she dies in three days. It is noted both people may feel better shortly before a sudden crash leading up to their death and that despair can worsen underlying conditions. Which one it was is something characters who knew her philosophize about.
- Deconstructed: Alice was a great person and inspired many in her life, but her grief-induced death ends up causing Disaster Dominoes by way of making her closest friends also kill themselves in despair.
- Reconstructed: Alice's death serves as a wakeup call to the community that this severe trauma is NOT healthy for anyone, and steps are taken to keep it from happening again.
- Played for Laughs: Suicide as Comedy
- Played for Drama: It's only after Alice's suicide that all the people who have abused her realize how horrible they've been to her.
- Played for Horror: Alice kills herself from grief... but not before murdering her family in the process.
Back to Death by Despair. Oh, why bother, nothing's worth reading anymore...
