Phlebotinium powered by deeply unethical means in Anime & Manga.
- The Reverse Explosion system in 009-1, which is powered up by the Psychic Link between the mutants in the world, many of them just being children. Mylene, the titular 009-1 agent, decides to go rogue to stop it.
- In Android Kikaider: The Animation, an enormous Doomsday Device requires Dr. Gill's son to power it.
- In Attack on Titan the Coordinate can only be controlled by the royal family. Eren learns this is because the Coordinate is Ymir, the Founding Titan. A slave to the Eldian king in life, she continued obeying his orders to serve his descendants after dying and becoming part of the Paths binding all Eldians. Eren sees her memories and realizes that Ymir wanted nothing more than to be free and valued but lacked the will to disobey the royal family.
- Battle of the Planets:
- In the episode 'The Space Beetles', the title mechas were powered by kidnapped children. Making the premise even MORE evil than the Science Ninja Team Gatchaman episode it was derived from (which simply used children's destructive instincts to direct the mechas).
- But they still retained the children inside them, making them effective hostages.
- The G-Force: Guardians of Space version had the beetles powered by the destructive impulses -and Gallactor was going to turn the four boys into Brains in Jars to make things 'simpler'.
- In order to become an Apostle or a God Hand in Berserk, the "candidate" has to sacrifice the person (or people) they most love, who are then Branded and usually eaten alive by demons in the most horrible fashion possible. This betrayal serves to sever the newborn Apostle's ties to humanity and allow true evil to enter his or her soul. For worse, this can only happen during the lowest point of the future Apostle's whole life, when they're at their most vulnerable and liable to make the required Deal with the Devil and throw his/her loved ones away to make them into this.
- An episode of Betterman reveals that an "unmanned" mech is actually piloted by another character's "dead" baby brother — now effectively a Brain in a Jar. Releasing him really does kill him.
- Bleach:
- Aizen nonchalantly reveals that he fed his Hogyoku with souls of Hollows and Shinigami alike. He implies this is one of the few ways to awaken it/make it evolve. One of his victims was actually a pre-teen Rangiku Matsumoto, who had a good part of her soul stolen to power it up - this prompted Rangiku's best friend Gin Ichimaru to become Aizen's Dragon with an Agenda. Also Hollows like to eat human children or hollow children as much as anything else.
- It turns out that the entire setting is this. Long ago, the founders of what would become Soul Society took a primordial Quincy, tore him apart, and shoved him into a crystal prison to act as an undying regulator of souls. This "Soul King" acts as the lynchpin for all existence. When the Soul King is killed, the Shinigami's original plan to replace him was to subject Ichigo to this fate since his unique heritage and powers made him a suitable candidate to replace the Soul King. Fortunately for Ichigo, they were able to use the defeated Yhwach's remains as a replacement instead.
- In the original Blue Drop manga, the Arume use their own children as bomb disposal units. They also use synthetic ones, but the "sacrifice" of the Arume children is more "beautiful" in the Arume's way of thinking — even though the synthetic children are full-blown sentient beings in their own right.
- In Bokurano, the energy that fuels the Humongous Mecha is the Life Energy of the pilot. Meaning, whoever pilots it to save the world will die immediately after the fight is over. Moreover, it's theorized (and strongly implied) that the younger a person is, the more Life Energy he or she has. Which is offered as an explanation for why it's preferable for teenagers and little kids to fight and die in huge terrifying mecha battles, even when they join up with the army, and have access to combat-trained volunteers - it certainly explains why Koyemshi is so adamant into having Kana Ushiro, the youngest of the group at age 10, to pilot it. The world of Bokurano is such a nice place, isn't it?
- In The Dark Queen and I Strike Back, the massive railgun Artralia is powered using the severed (but still living) heads of inhumans. The recoil of using Artralia kills the heads after a few shots, so they need constant replacement.
- Digimon Data Squad has the good Dr. Kurata, who removes the hearts of Digimon in order to transform them into his Mecha-Mooks, the Gizumon. It goes further when he starts collecting Digimon life energy to resurrect the Demon Lord Belphemon.
- A quite literal (and disturbing, especially for a kids' show) application of this trope occurred in another Digimon series, Digimon Tamers. The Big Bad D-Reaper is a mass of otherworldly energy which intends to slowly consume the entire world. Held captive at its core, though, is Juri Katou, a very young girl who is in deep despair over the death of her best friend and Digimon partner, which was the final and hardest blow to her after several years of quiet and hidden suffering started by her mom's demise. The D-Reaper is literally powered by Juri's misery.
- Fairy Tail:
- The magic in the parallel world of Edolas comes from the lives of the people from the normal world of Earthland.
- In the Key to the Starry Heavens filler arc the Infinity Clock requires a Celestial Mage as a sacrifice to fully work. The person the villains use is Lucy. She is absorbed but this comes to bite Midnight/Brain II in the ass when she uses the power of the clock against him after his control of her weakens from the defeat of his subordinates.
- It is revealed that the daughter of Gray's teacher, Ur, had too much magic energy in her body, which was making her ill, because of her naturally high level of magic energy she was taken away and experimented on (her mother believed her to be dead, while she believed her mother abandon her.) It's not completely clear whether Ultear was just experimented on or if her magical energy was somehow being used to power the facility).
- In Fate/Prototype, the preliminary version of Fate/stay night, when Manaka Sajyou rose to the challenge of fulfilling the Grail's real purpose of raising The Beast, she used her powers to force a bunch of local girls to throw themselves alive into the Grail itself and power it up. She also killed her father Hiroki to use him as a sacrifice to the Grail, and would have done the same to her younger sister Ayaka if her Servant Saber didn't rebel himself against her orders and stabbed her to death. And the kicker? She did that because the only other option would be to sacrifice Saber himself, which she refused to do.
- In Fractale, the world is maintained under a massive integrated system with a central program based off a human girl who, unbeknownst to the people who constructed the system, had been sexually abused by her father until she regressed to a childlike state. In order to refresh the system and prevent total breakdown, they need to not only clone said girl, but also install that same childlike personality into her by subjecting her to similar abuse, to make her as similar to the original as possible.
- Fullmetal Alchemist
- Much of the plot revolves around figuring out what makes the Human Resources work best since live human beings are ingredients to creating certain powerful artifacts. It is eventually stated that the Amestrian Alchemy draws its power from human soul-energy provided by Father but the Xingese Purification Arts and Xerxes Alchemy are clean. As the series progresses it is revealed that Amestrian Alchemy really does derive from the Earth's energies as originally taught, but Father keeps a buffer that prevents alchemy's full usage and forces them to draw from the human soul-energy in his Philosopher's Stone. This conveniently gives him an "off switch" to every Amestrian's alchemy whenever he needs it. The Xingese were feeling this, by the way.
- More to the point, the human souls power (and create) the Philosopher's Stone.
- Most interestingly, despite Hohenheim being a Humanoid Abomination composed of Many Spirits Inside of One who fuels his alchemy, he's come to an understanding with each and every souls within him and often express regret that he has to use his friends in this way. The souls in return, agree to be used this way, and at one point actually cheered on him and even urged him to use more of them to gain the necessary power to hold off the Big Bad's assaults.
- In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), where it's revealed that alchemy instead draws its power from the souls of humans from a parallel universe— ours, in fact. Since our world is in the midst of World War I at the time (and not mentioned, but soon to be followed by the even more lethal 1918 Spanish flu pandemic) there are an abundance of souls for the alchemists to draw on.
- Film continuity Galaxy Express 999 had the upper class using android bodies, powered by tiny energy cells that were made by harvesting humans. (The aristocrats with android bodies in the TV series continuity do slaughter humans, but only because they're really, really, bored.)note
- In the Ghost in the Shell franchise, it is possible to produce hyper-real androids with all the neurological affectations of a living human via electronic "Ghost Dubbing". This process drains and kills the original after only a few copies are made, and in the Ghost in the Shell universe, it is a serious crime punishable by life in prison or getting your brain wiped; plotlines concerning the process appeared in Ghost in the Shell 2: Innocence, a few Stand Alone Complex episodes, and the original manga.
- Gundam, in its usual mode of showing the horrors of war upon innocent youths, is fond of this trope:
- One of the earliest examples is Mobile Suit Victory Gundam's Angel Halo
, a huge Zanscare fortress that contains a MASSIVE Mind Rape machine (basically, a whole fortress with psycommus all over), powered by 20,000 "psyickers", all Newtypes who have been placed into capsules and put into constant trance to amplify the powers of a single Newtype (Queen Maria, and later her daughter Shakti); with it, the Zanscare Empire can collectively mindrape the whole population of Earth if they wish so. (Too bad that Shakti doubled as a Messianic Archetype and the Spanner in the Works. Too bad for Zanscare, that is.) - After War Gundam X:
- In the Ocean Story Arc, a group of pirates who use special radar systems made from the brains of dolphins. By the end of the arc the systems are destroyed.
- Before this there was the MAN-003 Patulia, a Mobile Armor that required a Newtype (in this case, an ailing artificial Newtype named Caris Nautilus) to operate its wired beam cannons. Said Newtype was rescued before the machine could consume him.
- Another Newtype (Lucille Lilliant) was sought after to force her lend her massive Newtype powers to those who found her and her capsule. The Lorelei arc was focused on the Freeden crew finding said Newtype first and saving her. They succeed, and Lucille is able to peacefully pass away after being 15 years in a forced coma.
- The Devil Gundam from Mobile Fighter G Gundam was created to operate at its strongest if a being that has the power to create life is its core. In other words, a woman. Unfortunately for Allenby Beardsley and Rain Mikamura, the local Action Girls, both were seize by the villains and became "candidates" to be place in the core; when a Brainwashed and Crazy Allenby was saved by Rain from this, she was left as the only one within range of the Big Bad so he'd use her to engage in the final phase of his plan. Fortunately for Rain, her Love Interest Domon, Domon's True Companions (all of them also fond of Rain herself), many other Gundam Fighters and the newly-recovered Allenby were not about to let that happen.
- The Boosted Men/Extended from Mobile Suit Gundam SEED can be examples of this trope - child soldiers specifically developed with drugs, mental conditioning, and a horrific training program, creating Naturals that could properly compete with Coordinators. They're even classified as equipment under "biological CPU" rather than pilots. Stella Loussier especially, once she takes control of the Destroy Gundam- a humongous Gundam (by Gundam standards) designed to level entire cities in a matter of minutes.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam AGE a captured Yurin L'Ciel is strapped into the cockpit of a pink mobile suit and used as an amplifier for Desil's powers. It ends as well as expected.
- In Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans, the Gundam Frames require the Alaya-Vijnana interface to be piloted, which is a risky surgery operation that must be performed on a child in order to be effective (so the child's developing nervous system incorporates the technology). On top of that, overuse of the Alaya-Vijnana can cause severe neurological damage, especially when the limiters on the system are released. When Mikazuki briefly released them at the end of the first season, he permanently lost sight in his right eye as well as the use of his right arm, except when he's hooked up to the Gundam. One shudders to think what piloting a Gundam was like before those limiters were put in place.
- Another Gundam example would be the EXAM System from the Blue Destiny video game and related media. Accidentally created when something went wrong with attempt to make an anti-Newtype system, resulting in the consciousness and "soul" of the Newtype participating in the procedure being sealed within the machine...which apparently allowed it to be copied and split between the four EXAM computers built. The spirit of the trapped girl tries to communicate with the pilots, begging them to destroy EXAM so she can be at peace; Yuu Kajima agrees, while Nimbus Schterzen is convinced he's The Chosen One and wants to destroy every EXAM except the one in his machine.
- In the non-canon crossover between Mobile Suit Gundam ZZ and Space Runaway Ideon, Neo Zeon planned to use seven-year-old Princess Mineva Lao Zabi and her Newtype powers to reawaken Ideon. All it did was piss off the mecha and force Amuro Ray and Judau Ashta to save her and put it down.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: The Witch from Mercury features probably the most literal possible example of this. The tech that powers Gundams in this universe is one that puts immense strain on a person's body and mind, to the point that it is very likely to kill or permanently injure a person if they spend any length of time in combat. The most common route for using them among the more illicit groups is to take someone expendable and physically enhance them before tossing them in the cockpit, at which they can maybe survive for a few sorties while operating their suits at a significant level. However, the main character's mother, Prospera, found that there was indeed a way to completely remove the strain from a pilot: take the brain patterns of another human, and turn them into the suit's operating system, offloading all the issues onto them. Prospera found this out in the case of her four-year old daughter, who now lives on inside the Gundam Aerial. Each GUND-BIT attached to it is controlled by a clone of her, meaning Aerial is powered by a dozen childrens' minds.
- One of the earliest examples is Mobile Suit Victory Gundam's Angel Halo
- Gunparade March the mechas require young children with a genetic trait to run them. But because such children are hard to come by, they genetically engineer them. The side effect is that their growth is arrested at around eight years old.
- The Hero is Overpowered but Overly Cautious:
- The holy sword, Igzasion, is supposed to be the only weapon capable of killing Geabrande's Demon Lord, but it can only be made through the sacrifice of Elulu, due to her being a dragonkin who absorbed energy from the human world.
- Gaeabrande's Demon Lord developed Chain Destruction, a device that can kill the real souls of summoned heroes and gods. He harvested the negative emotions of countless priests that he tortured in order to make it.
- In Innocent Venus, artificially created children provide the neural systems in the mechas so that they are psychically compatible with the pilots. The memories of the trauma inflicted on them remain in the mechas, making it dangerous for pilots to stay psychically linked to their mechas for too long...
- In Inuyasha, the titular character at first believes that to empower Tetsusaiga to shatter barriers he needs to slay Shiori, a half-demon child who creates a powerful barrier for her demon-bat kin. Averted when InuYasha refuses to follow through. Shiori then gives him the focusing jewel she used to create the barriers which is able to empower the blade.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: Killer Queen Bites the Dust is unable to activate without inhabiting itself inside of Hayato Kawajiri's body, with him acting as the catalyst for setting it off whenever others try to ask him about Yoshikage Kira's identity.
- A short film called Kakurenbo had kids being hunted by demons through an empty city, and when they were caught, they were plugged into a generator just like every other group of children to play the game before them, presumably so the lights would lure more children to come and play. It's also strongly implied that the last child will have to "seek" the next group of children.
- In Kurau Phantom Memory, human beings are deliberately afflicted with Rynax energy in an attempt to turn them into superweapons. Since Rynax energy consists of sentient beings, this procedure almost always causes a lot of misery for all involved test subjects.
- In Little Witch Academia (2017), Shiny Chariot learns a spell from her best friend Croix that uses dreams and emotions to allow for greater spectacles at her stage shows. What Croix doesn't tell her is that this spell uses a person's dreams and converts it into magical energy, depriving the target of their magical ability. The main characters Akko and Diana were at one of Chariot's shows when they were young children. Yet when they meet again years later, Diana eventually regained her magical ability after discovering she had lost it, while Akko is left unable to even fly on a broom, the simplest of witch skills.
- Made in Abyss has cartridges, designed as a means of preventing the Curse of the Abyss by Bondrewd. It is revealed that they were created from orphaned children, subjected to a process in which they were stripped of all "unnecessary" body parts and crammed into boxes the size of lunchboxes, while still alive. They then would experience all the effects of the curse in place of whoever carried them (in this case, Bondrewd).
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS has the Saint's Cradle, a massively overpowered Cool Starship that can only power up when commanded by a direct descendant of the Saint Kings of Ancient Belka. The problem? The last Saint King died over a hundred years ago without any heirs, so their bloodline is effectively extinct. So what is a Mad Scientist to do? Why, clone the last Kaiser, infuse said clone (despite her being a six-year-old girl) with a Lost Logia, torture her until she is under his complete control, then make her activate the Cradle, despite how utterly painful the process is for her. The problem with that? Little Vivio just had to go and get herself adopted by not one, but two Action Moms — both of whom qualify at this point in the series as People of Mass Destruction, and are less than happy with this Mad Scientist's shit.
- In Magic Knight Rayearth, many characters, including the heroines of the story, have come to regard the Pillar system as one. This is because said Pillar is completely trapped by his or her mission as such, even the littlest desire for anything NOT related to Cephiro's happiness will "taint" them and cause the land to start falling apart, and only death will release them.
- In Magi: Labyrinth of Magic, Magnostadt is a Magocracy where 2/3 of the population lives underground, their magoi running the magical items that make the surface a paradise. Some people are surprisingly okay with this, since they provided for without having to actually work, but sucks if you want to survive a common cold or ever see the sky again.
- ''Mahoromatic: In the manga, brains of "scrapped" cyborgs are used for facility management in the Keepers' headquarters. While still conscious.
- In My Hero Academia, the Shie Hassaikai are producing Power Nullifier bullets that disable the Quirk factor through the use of Eri, a little girl who has a Quirk that allows her to rewind things back to a previous state. They do this by harvesting her blood and tissues as a prime matter for the bullets until she's dead. Then their leader, Overhaul, who has the power to deconstruct and reconstruct anything he touches, brings her back to life to repeat the process. Midoriya and Mirio are absolutely disgusted in themselves that they weren't able to immediately save her when they encountered her beforehand after they found out. Even the former Boss of the Shie Hassaikai was appalled by the lengths Overhaul was going to in order to gain power.
- In My-HiME, the summon monsters controlled by the HiME are tied to the life force of their "most important person" (a family member, boyfriend/girlfriend, etc.). If that monster is destroyed in combat, the person dies with it and fades into the ether, also robbing the HiME of her abilities. This leaves a possibility that the killed character can be brought back to life, but this doesn't come into play until the very end.
- My-Otome:
- One episode of the OVA Mini Series MAPS (and presumably the original manga) featured a Wave-Motion Gun that was powered by the psychic energy released by hundreds of small animals being brutally killed en masse. The Gecko Ending of the anime series revealed that the MacGuffin, the Star Maps, were meant to be used to target a galactic-scale version of the weapon.
- Naruto:
- The lore has it that members of the Uchiha clan can only get the Mangekyo Sharingan by killing their best friend. Later events show that they "only" need the tragic death of a loved one, killed by them or not. But once you've done that, the fun really begins: using the Mangekyo Sharingan causes blindness and the only way to restore your vision permanently is to take the eyes of someone else who also possesses it, preferably a relative.
- Kakashi's own Sharingan, which helped make him one of the most powerful shinobi around, was transplanted from his dying best friend Obito, a death Kakashi blames on himself. Kakashi and Obito/Tobi obtained the Mangekyo at the same time when Kakashi killed the Brainwashed and Crazy Rin, the partner whom both of them cared for.
- Akatsuki member Kakuzu was able to obtain immortality by stealing his opponents' hearts.
- Fellow Akatsuki member Sasori makes puppets out of people. And he's not the only one, either: it's a technique that was taught to him by his grandmother Chiyo.
- Jugo can replace injured organs and body parts by absorbing those of other people. However, he's a nice enough guy that he restricts this to people who are already dead and even then only in emergencies.
- Impure World Resurrection resurrects one dead person as an undying slave of the technique's user, at the cost of a live person used as a medium.
- In Negima! Magister Negi Magi, as a child, Asuna Vesperina Theotanasia Entheofushia was an Artificial Human used to power the magic-cancelling defense system of Ostia while bound in chains. Later she was also used to power the magic-cancelling spell that would have destroyed the whole Magic World. Thanks to everyone's joint effort at containment, only the whole of Ostia was destroyed. The resulting mental trauma from being used as the power source to destroy a whole country was probably one of the reasons Nagi and party decided to wipe her memory and send her to Earth, so she could live a normal life as a schoolgirl named Asuna Kagurazaka.
- The titular cyborgs from Neon Genesis Evangelion are made from the cybernetically modified cloned flesh of the very beings they're used to fight and the souls of the mothers of the various pilots. And they're piloted by forsaken children, themselves, including a girl who is one of many clones of one of the aforementioned mothers (Rei), alongside that mother's son and the clone girl's brother (Shinji) and the daughter of another woman driven mad by an Eva-related experiment (Asuka).
- In Noein, the only thing protecting La'cryma from the encroachment of Shangri-la is a quantum computer powered by the humans embedded within it.
- Project ARMS. Pretty much literally. Almost every Egrigori experiment uses a child as the test subject. Most prominent are the Keith clones which were implanted with the first ARMS, many of which turned into monsters as a result, the Chapel children who were given drugs while in the womb to make them super smart and work as scientists for the group, various mutant and psychic children taken to be soldiers, and Alice who was on the research team and whose dying body was bonded to an alien lifeform and became a computer controlling the Egrigori. There's also the other ARMS teens, who were specially genetically engineered to be soldiers to take down the Egrigori.
- Puella Magi Madoka Magica: Kyubey's Magical Girl system is this in a nutshell. Rip out the souls of pubescent magical girls and make them suffer the tragic consequences of their wishes until their souls shatter and they mutate into reality-warping Eldritch Abominations, all to stave off the heat death of the universe. The universe is literally powered by the souls of dead children.
- RahXephon. The huge mecha style beings attacking the city are in fact psychically linked to people within the city. Thus when the being is damaged so is the person they're linked to. There is a rather interesting plot twist in that a young girl who's in love with the protagonist and whom he swore to protect... turns out to be one of those people and he ends up killing her, while believing that he's protecting her. Cue very unterstandable angst when this happens.
- In Reborn! (2004), the first generation of the Gola Mosca were powered by Dying Will Flames. As shown when Tsuna rips the Gola Mosca attacking Hibari and his friends apart and discovers a person inside of it. The situation is made worse for Tsuna since it was his grandfather, the 9th head of the Vongola family inside of it.
- The Record of a Fallen Vampire: The Black Swan parasite inhabits teenage girls to kill the Strauss. If they can't, they are themselves killed by the Black Swan, usually in about five years. Also, the Black Swan itself was made from the souls of Stella and her and Strauss' unborn daughter. Really sad.
- Junior◊, from R.O.D the TV appears first as a mysterious, effeminate child antagonist, working as a secret agent for the British Library towards their heinous goal. He's lived a lonely life and is automatically drawn to those that show him kindness. However, after his Heel–Face Turn it becomes apparent that Junior was kidnapped as a baby from his I-jinn mother (Nancy) and had basically been intended his entire life to become a vessel for The Gentleman. The process involves having all the old man's information DOWNLOADED into his brain. And ... what's supposed to happen to him? Um, you don't want to know.
- Romeo × Juliet eventually reveals that Neo Verona's prosperity (and continued existence) is contingent on the willing sacrifice of the daughters of House Capulet, who become integrated with Escalus and bound to it for eternity. This does not sit well with Juliet's boyfriend Romeo, who fights first Juliet (the Sole Survivor of the Capulet clan) and then Ophelia (the guardian of Escalus itself) to save her from her cruel fate; in the end, however, Romeo dies right after defeating Ophelia, destroying Escalus in the process. Juliet then saves Neo Verona by turning herself into a new Escalus... but with the implication that the cycle of sacrifice that sustained Neo Verona in the past has finally been broken.
- In the Sailor Moon Super S movie, Queen Badiane wanted to use all of the children on Earth like this, kidnapping them and putting them on stasis to feed off their dreams.
- Pasifica Cassul in Scrapped Princess may be considered this seeing as she was basically a nuke for the Church, she was meant to gather energy her whole life, and then die on her 16th birthday, releasing the energy and defeating God in order to set the world straight.
- Serial Experiments Lain features a scientist who tried to tap the psychic energy of hundreds of children, apparently draining them and leaving them in a deep coma.
- There seemed to be some sort of explosion caused by an overflow of psychic energy, dissolving the children's bodies, trapping them forever in the Wired. The scientist comments how no matter what he does, bringing them back to real world is impossible.
- Space Battleship Yamato 2199: The Cosmo Reverser System, sought after by the crew of the Yamato to reverse the destruction wrought on their planet, requires the memories of someone from the earth in order to work. The stored consciousness of Mamoru Kodai was originally meant to be used to facilitate this, but his spirit activated the system early so it could revive Yuki Mori for his brother, Susumu. When Captain Okita passes away shortly after the Yamato comes into range of Earth, though, his spirit restarts the system and saves the earth.
- Str.A.In.: Strategic Armored Infantry has the evil Deague searching for "samples", i.e. the mysterious alien Emilys. What they are samples of is the alien race that was dissected — without anaesthetic — to create the first mimics; the two Emilys in the series are the last living one and the last non-scrapped mimic with a still-living alien brain inside.
- Taken as literally as possible in Sword of the Stranger. The antagonists want to sacrifice Kotaro, an orphaned child, to make their emperor immortal. They don't quite manage to carry out the sacrifice, of course, so we never find out whether it would have worked. They do, however, paint their entire gigantic altar red with chicken blood as part of the ceremony.
- In Toriko process of cooking the ultimate ingredient from Acacia's menu happens to involve a lot of human sacrifices, because said ingredient requires a lot of energy, and without proper "fertilizer" to satiate it, will simply suck energy out of every living thing close to it, killing the person who cooks it. Humans just happen to be perfectly fit for a role of fertilizer.
- Yuui and Fay in Tsubasa -RESERVoir CHRoNiCLE-, in an Omelas-esque fashion. Since the people of their country believe that twins inherently bring misfortune to those around them, it's decided that the two kids should be sent to the Sinners' Valley, a hellish limbo of sorts, so this doesn't happen. It doesn't work.
- In Vandread, the enemy's planet harvest organs to support themselves on a planet so polluted that they had to convert the entire surface into a giant machine. The enemy has gone as far as to manipulate the cultures of human colonies to cater to the harvest. The home world, Earth, has declared this necessary for continuation of humanity. All human colonies are just "parts" and are expected to fulfill their "purpose". The bloody war between men and women in the protagonists' home system exists only to prime sexual dimorphism for the reaping.
- In The Vision of Escaflowne Abridged, Emperor Donkirk became ruler of Zaibach by inventing a machine like this, one that turns blood into oil. As he put it "Cutting out the middle man"
- In Witchblade, the I-Weapons are corpses that had a cloneblade stuck on them.
- Witch Hunter Robin
- Orbo, the fuild that nullifies witchcraft, is later discovered as being made out of the drained bodily fluids of the witches everyone thought were being humanely imprisoned. Made especially horrifying, as many of the sometimes-innocent witches, including children, had character development earlier in the series.
- There was also a witch whose power allowed him to sacrifice people to heal others. However, he only killed crooks, and eventually himself.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- The Millennium Items are revealed to be created with the souls of 99 slaughtered victims. In the original Japanese version, they were created by literally mixing the flesh, blood, and bones of the victims into the gold used to cast them.
- Also, the Duel Monsters used in the show are actually the souls of at least several citizens and soldiers from Ancient Egypt during Pharaoh Atem's rule, if not from billions of people in the anime's past. For example, Yugi's signature card, Dark Magician, contains the soul of one of the Pharaoh's most trusted priests (Mahad) while Dark Magician Girl is apparently said priest's apprentice (Mana).
- In Yu-Gi-Oh! ZEXAL, Dr. Faker is attacking the Astral World by using Haruto's Psychic Powers to bombard it with trash.
- And in Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V, the Professor's ARC-V machine requires the souls of thousands of people in order to fuse the dimensions together, as well as to reassemble his daughter. The latter part also requires him to use her four reincarnations as components. He succeeds in bringing his daughter back to life, but at the cost of Yuzu, Serena, Rin, and Ruri.
