Basic Trope Description: A character is deadly ill, but dies of something entirely different than the illness.
- Straight: Alice has terminal cancer, but dies in a climbing accident.
- Exaggerated:
- A whole group of people with cancer goes on a climbing tour and everyone of them dies in an accident during the tour.
- Alice is run over by a car the immediate moment after leaving the doctor's office following her diagnosis.
- Downplayed: Alice has cancer and gets badly hurt in a climbing accident, giving her some more time to spend in the hospital.
- Justified: Alice wanted to go climbing before her death because she never had time to do it before and it was her Last Request. Happy about the chance, she went in largely unprepared.
- Inverted: Alice dies in an accident during a climbing trip, but the accident was clearly caused by weakness due to her cancer.
- Subverted: During a climbing trip, cancer patient Alice falls down a cliff. She is declared dead by the paramedics, but was in fact only in a coma and wakes up again.
- Double Subverted: Only to die of her injuries some days later in hospital.
- Enforced: The author wants to teach the readers An Aesop about "Memento mori".
- Averted: Alice is too sick to participate in activities like climbing anymore and dies of her cancer.
- Parodied: As soon as Alice is diagnosed with cancer, she slips on a banana peel in her doctor's office and dies an Undignified Death.
- Invoked: Alice planned the accident beforehand and commits suicide by using a bad rope, since she believed in Better to Die than Be Killed and rather wanted to die in an accident than of cancer.
- Defied: Alice is saved from death from her injuries after the climbing accident.
- Exploited: Bob wants to murder Alice out of lust for revenge, and since she is deadly ill, he thinks that the accident will be a more accepted way of dying for her and everyone else - that means, it would be less suspicious.
- Deconstructed: Alice suffers a much more Undignified Death than the cancer had been even able to give her. And Alice's disease was in fact curable, so her death wasn't imminent anyway.
- Reconstructed: This leads to many more mourners at her funeral, and to her death being even more tragic.
- Played for Laughs: Alice suffers a Black Comedy death.
- Played for Drama: Everyone tries to keep her alive, but in the end, everything fails. Alice is dead, and then she didn't even have cancer, and someone seems to have swapped both diagnoses and climbing ropes deliberately...
