Thou Shalt Not Kill / Western Animation

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• Aang in Avatar: The Last Airbender is more than willing to use violence if necessary, but draws the line at killing. While he doesn't complain when his friends use potentially lethal force against soldiers, he does take issue when they suggest deliberately killing someone (Katara avenging her mother). This weighs heavily on him in the finale, where he is faced with the possibility that killing Fire Lord Ozai may be the only way to end the Hundred Year War, and pretty much everyone is telling him that he's going to have to do so despite his reservations. He then tries communing with the spirits of previous Avatars, hoping one of them will provide a non-lethal solution, but they too say he'll have to kill Ozai. Even the previous Air Nomad Avatar, who shared Aang's religious objection to killing, says that as Avatar, his duty to protect the world is more important than his personal beliefs, implicitly accusing him of selfishness for being so reluctant to kill. The dilemma is ultimately rendered moot once Aang comes across someone who has the perfect solution to his problem, allowing him to defeat Ozai without killing him.
  • This is averted by Aang's successor Korra in the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra, who is not only more violent than Aang, but has shown that she is willing to kill, even when it isn't strictly necessary. When Tarrlok pressed her Berserk Button one too many times and started a fight, she implicitly intended to kill him for it even after he was rendered defenseless (he used bloodbending to stop her). In the following season, she blatantly threatens to murder a judge when he sentences her father to death for supposedly trying to kidnap her uncle, then chases him down and threatens him further when the sentence is reduced to life imprisonment. When she thought her father was killed by Zaheer in Book 3, she likewise threatened to kill him (that didn't pan out, though not for lack of trying). She also actually kills Unalaq after his fusion with Vaatu, though she regrets having to do so. Korra's allies haven't shown any aversion to lethal force, either; in the Book 3 finale, P'Li is killed by Suyin and Mako kills Ming-Hua.
  • This is part of the Air Nomad philosophy, and Air Nomads in general are opposed to killing. Avatar Yangchen personally rejected this, because she believed that the Avatar's own spiritual needs were to be set aside for the good of the world. Meanwhile, while normally embodying Air Nomad pacifism, Gyatso abandoned this position when the Air Temple was under deadly attack...and proved to be one of the deadliest combatants ever seen, killing over a hundred Fire Nation soldiers by himself.
• The titular Ben 10 follows this principle, and often refuses to kill his enemies. Even when his enemies are the Highbreed, he decides to save them by fixing their DNA once he finds out that they're dying. Any instance where he goes out to kill someone is a telltale sign that things are that bad for him, such as when he attempts to kill Kevin during Ultimate Alien.
• In Captain Simian and the Space Monkeys, the titular heroes' Sufficiently Advanced Alien benefactors supply them with non-lethal weaponry, presumably because of this trope.
• In Dan Vs., the title character is a violent Jerkass with a Hair-Trigger Temper who will go to a Roaring Rampage of Revenge for the most minor of inconveniences. But he draws the line of killing his offender and takes offense when someone suggests it.
  • More Played for Laughs, but Dan was pretty surprised when his best friend Chris admits that he would kill for bacon.
  • Worth noting, however, that in the pilot, Dan was all too willing to kill a library patron because it furthered his goals at the time. Chris talked him down, but a passing vehicle took the whole thing out of their hands anyway.
  • In essence, Dan's willingness to kill depends on two factors: exactly how irrational he is at the moment (and he's almost always on some level of insanity) and Rule of Funny.
  • Dan also only seems to be averse only to killing his offenders directly. He's perfectly fine with encouraging others to do so.
  • There are also a number of times where Dan's revenge should, by all logic, kill his offender, but they survive because of Rule of Funny.
• All fairy godparents in The Fairly OddParents! have to follow Da Rules when they grant wishes. The most sacred, most important rule of all? A kid cannot wish someone dead. Which wasn't a rule until one little girl wished for the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, thus starting WWI. They've even closed the most obvious loopholes by making rules against maiming or severely injuring people — you can only wish for "non-lethal" bad things to happen to your enemies.
• Gargoyles has an interesting relationship to this trope. In the modern day, the Clan is generally averse to killing. In the flashbacks to Scotland, though, they don't seem to have any problem with it. At one point, Goliath spells it out that killing someone in the heat of battle was alright. Just attacking someone with the intent to kill, however, was murder.
  • Averted near the end of the series where a family hunting Demona nearly kill Goliath's daughter. He declares that he will "hunt them down. And I will kill them." He doesn't (initially) change his mind either; the next time he sees them, he tries to kill them by hurling them into a wall of electrical equipment. They only survived because they had special armor on that absorbed the damage. Apparently, the writers had to fight tooth and nail to let that line stay in as it was.
    • It's even more complicated. From a cultural standpoint, revenge is an acceptable response within Gargoyle society, to the point of it being honorable (at least for the Scottish Clan). Probably for the sake of family-friendliness, one of the first lessons the Gargoyles seem to absorb is that the modern-day justice system is now the proper outlet for punishing transgressors, since it isn't nearly as corrupt as ancient courts were. But as mentioned above, that isn't always good enough for the heroes.
• He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983): He-Man seemed to live and die by a code of not killing anyone. This causes a crisis of conscience in one episode where he believes he has allowed someone to be killed but it was actually a trick by Skeletor to make him give up his powers.
• Invoked by the Sword of Power in He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (2021). While it can cut down robots, undead, and inanimate objects with ease, it cannot take a life. This limitation is why King Grayskull created the power of Havoc, since the power of Grayskull was proving insufficient in winning the war against the Snake Men.
• In the MGM One Shot Cartoon "Peace on Earth," mankind has eliminated itself through warfare. Animals come out to assess things as an owl discovers a Bible which he turns to "Thou Shalt Not Kill." The owl perceives the book as a set of rules that man couldn't be bothered to pay attention to.
• My Goldfish is Evil: Although easily capable of killing Admiral Bubbles by any number of simple methods, and though the former has tried to kill him a few times, Beanie chooses not to do so for moral reasons, in imitation of his favorite superhero and because Bubbles is the last thing he and his mom have of his father. Admiral Bubbles taunts him for this a few times.
• Although killing is rarely touched upon in the show, Codename: Kids Next Door seems to somewhat demonstrate the KND, and some villains going by this trope. They instead try to subdue each other as a means to win fights; respectively, the KND would subdue and apprehend villains to imprison them in Arctic base, while the non-killing villains merely do whatever they have in mind with KND Operatives once they overpower them.
• A Robot Chicken skit had Batman managing to get past his code by giving the court a testimony that ends with The Joker getting the death penalty.
  Batman: "It's erm, out of my hands."
• In Steven Universe:
  • Steven and his mother Rose both view shattering a Gem (which would permanently kill them) as a horrible thing and refuse to do so. Rose took this to the point of having her personal sword forged specifically to be able to destroy a Gem's unimportant body (thus rendering them helpless, but able to regenerate eventually) but never their Gem. Both end up refusing Bismuth's offer of a One-Hit Kill weapon designed specifically for shattering Gems for this reason. However, Rose did seem to only apply this condition to herself, merely desiring her army treat shattering as a last resort rather than their go to battle strategy given her interactions with Bismuth and we learn Rose had to make an exception to save Earth by killing Pink Diamond, its reigning Evil Overlord. Except she didn't, as Rose Quartz is Pink Diamond.
  • The Crystal Gems as a whole seem to have this mentality towards humans. Which makes sense, given the entire reason they've done everything they have was for their protection. They're still willing to beat one up though if they threaten Steven.
• The Filmation compilation series The Superman/Aquaman Hour of Adventure, averts this. Superman doesn't hesitate to kill the alien villain Mastermind by blowing him up.

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