Basic Trope: A character takes extra precautions to ensure someone is dead.
- Straight: After killing Alice, Bob stabs her through the head before leaving.
- Exaggerated: Bob had previously clubbed Alice repeatedly, stabbed her 28 times, slammed her head on a wall, impaled her with a spear, whipped her until she cried, and broke her back. But just to be sure, Bob shoots her in the head, crushes her skull, breaks all her limbs, then throws her overly-mangled corpse off a cliff.
- Downplayed: Bob clubs Alice to see if she'd react but nothing more.
- Justified:
- Alice has a Healing Factor that regenerates wounds unless a vital organ is destroyed, so she could come back from an absurd amount of Gorn.
- Alice is actually alive, so Bob is just finishing the job.
- Alice is impeccable at playing dead.
- Inverted:
- When Charlie, Daniel, and Edward find Alice dead, they do everything in their power to make sure she's alive.
- No One Could Survive That!
- Subverted:Bob: Alice has fallen. Let's leave.
Alice: [Thank goodness, he's leaving.] - Double Subverted:Bob: Actually... shoot that corpse.
Alice: [Oh, Crap!] - Parodied: To make sure Alice is dead, Bob orders his soldiers to each hand him a weapon that he will use to mutilate her corpse. Including but not limited to a mace, shotgun, longsword, spear, katana, death ray, scimitar, flamethrower, laser gun, explosives, and so forth.
- Zig Zagged: After killing the entire heroic party, Bob severs Alice's head off and stabs Charlie through the head. Daniel and Edward recover and mourn over their dead friends.
- Averted: Bob decides to leave after killing Alice, whether or not she's actually dead.
- Enforced: Bob's actor tends to play/voice Genre Savvy characters, and they decided to put this scene just for him
- Lampshaded: "Sir, is it really necessary to defile that corpse?"
- Invoked: "We need to show that Bob is a rational villain who won't pull any punches"
- Exploited: Alice is Playing Possum, and waits until Bob thrusts his spear to catch it, break it, then beat him up.
- Defied: Bob's superior officer orders that he not defile Alice's corpse.
- Discussed: "First, we must make sure Alice is dead. Hand me my spear."
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Bob's ingenuity and caution is mistaken for savagery by his soldiers, who begin to desert under the idea Bob has gone mad.
- Reconstructed: Bob takes the time to explain to his soldiers why he mutilates corpses, even citing one instance where he chose not to and ended up losing his right eye. He also decides to be more thorough with making sure his opponent is dead (Less gore).
Back to Make Sure He's Dead
