This is discussion archived from a time before the current discussion method was installed.
Violet: Fixed a small factual error with forest of the dead, CAL is the little girl, not the computer
Morgan Wick: Huh?
Ununnilium: An episode/storyline of an Anyone Can Die series where the good guys manage to solve the problem without anyone dying.
Silent Hunter: Not really. More like an episode of a series where people usually die every episode, where no-one dies. It should be pointed out that "The Empty Child" takes place during a German air-raid, so there were almost certainly off-screen deaths.
Robert: Doctor Who, for example, had less than five Everybody Lives episodes in over twenty-five years.
Ununnilium: That's true; Anyone Can Die applies mostly to major characters, while this happens even in shows where the main cast has Contractual Immortality but everyone else is a Red Shirt.
Morgan Wick: So it's, "an episode of a show that actually manages not to kill anyone for once"? First, that's not a trope, that's the absence of a trope. Second, examples can only come from shows that, well, kill people on an extremely regular basis. Though I can certainly see where you're coming from if we had an episode of South Park where Kenny didn't die. That would be noticable in and of itself.
Ununnilium: It's not just "oh hey nobody died this time lolz". It's when the good guys categorically, unequivocally succeed, in a show where most victories are at least a bit phyrric. You actually feel good for the characters and their world.
Seth: It was inspired in no small part by discussion in Everybody's Dead, Dave. If only we could think of more examples. There arent many shows with as brutal a body count as Doctor Who.
Robert: Buffy had deaths in something like half the episodes (not counting vampires and other monsters), well short of Doctor Who, and that was the kind of show you'd expect to have a high body count.
Ununnilium: One reason Doctor Who had so many is that they were in a different setting each serial, so there were a lot of one-shot characters to kill off.
Robert: So, had Buffy been Walking the Earth, the bodycount would have probably been higher. Are there any Buffy-esque walking the earth shows?
CSI, and the like, have dead bodies most episodes, but that doesn't really count for this trope. The protagonists aren't trying to save lives. Exceptional episodes in a hospital drama with a high body count would count.
Ununnilium: Does Supernatural count as Buffy-esque WTE?
Seth: And they certainly have a high body count. But i can't think of any everybody lives episodes.
Later>> Supernatural does have an Everybody Lives episode. Most times they are called into a situation when someone dies but in Season 1 Episode 9 "Home" they go to the place before anyone dies because Sam has a vision. No-one dies in that episode and unless i'm missing one it is the only episode where nobody dies.
Ununnilium: Woot. Add it.
The Defenestrator: Is the a Discworld book where Everybody Lives? I think Death is in every book, at least, but I'm not sure that's the same thing.
Daibhid C: Astonishingly, despite being set in a fairly realistic war zone, I think Monstrous Regiment might qualify.
Infophile: Sometimes Death shows up to people "in the right state of mind," which often includes Rincewind. I think The Last Continent might also have had a zero death count, on these lines.
Daibhid C: There's one man in the road-gang who gets bitten by an Ecksian (and therefore, by definition, deadly) spider. I thought Amazing Maurice might qualify, since the major on-page deaths turn out to be Only Mostly Dead, but then I remembered Hamnpork. (And then I thought "Of course it doesn't qualify, it won an award, didn't it?")
Mr Death: Removed the MGS 2 entry, because it just doesn't apply at all to the trope.
Doug S. Machina: Removed this "Subverted in Planescape: Torment when the entire party dies and one's character is sent to eternal torture in Hell." It's an example for Kill Em All.
Antheia: Removed some examples that don't seem to qualify. It seems like many people mistake this trope to mean "nobody dies in the end of the story", or even "somebody doesn't die in the end". Oh, and by the way, can a movie or other one-shot story qualify for this trope?
- Mulder is convicted of murder and if I remember correctly sentenced to death at the end of X-Files but Skinner and Scully save him. "Cigarette Smoking Man," however is disintegrated by massive explosions.
- Similarly weird is the mere two (and only one manages to stay dead, really) deaths during the actual series of Neon Genesis Evangelion, which can surprise viewers who know it by reputation first. Admittedly, there are several (billion) more in the backstory, four or five of whom get flashbacks, but really, the series has almost no named character deaths. Until The Movie, that is.
- Avatar The Last Airbender:The first season had a minor character die. The second was a major Downer Ending coming of the death of a secondary character. The Grand Finale features not only the survival of all it's protagonists, but spares the lives of Princess Azula and Fire Lord Ozai, the series' two most unforgivable villains, as well! The only ones that were even hurt were Sokka (injured leg, lost his weapons), Azula (mental breakdown), Ozai (lost his bending) and Zuko (got hurt by lightning and ended scarred. Again.).
- Certain characters survived the ending of Samurai Champloo to the point of disbelief.
- Considering the incredibly dark Deconstruction that Sailor Nothing is, the number of protagonists who survive in the end (ALL OF THEM!) is extremely shocking.
Bob: Cutting a few more like that.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is particularly guilty of this: although the cast constantly find themselves in life-threatening situations and experiment with increasingly powerful means of mass destruction, rarely if ever does anyone really bite the dust over the course of three seasons. And even if they do, they are usually the major villains, anyway. This gets lampshaded in the second season manga, where Admirals Leti and Lindy wonder just what kind of miracle happened for there to be no casualties during the Book of Darkness incident.
- Close Encounters Of The Third Kind is the only major science fiction film of recent decades that this troper can think of which does not contain a single death.
- Operatic example: The Girl Of The Golden West is definitely not a light-hearted comic piece, but death is never more than threatened. This is particularly unusual considering that Puccini's other operas include several famous tear-jerking death scenes.
- The second-to-last episode of Library War ended with two major characters potentially dead—one being shot multiple times in the chest, and another getting caught in a large explosion. However, in the last episode, they both make a full recovery.
- The classic 1932 horror film The Old Dark House might very well be the only horror film since 1931 where Everybody Lives (and it's still a good, creepy film).
Shockz: Should this perhaps be changed to Unusually Low Body Count or something? People are increasingly adding examples where not everybody lives, but there's still a significantly smaller number of casualties than would be expected from the tone/setting/previous episodes/whatever of the work, and there's no separate trope (as far as I know) for that.
Antheia: No, I don't think we should change the trope. Unusually Low Body Count (or Unexpectedly Low Body Count, which would work for one-shot things like movies) could be tropable on its own, but I don't think this trope should be changed. There really is something special about absolutely noone dying in an episode of a show or whatever where usually at least someone does.
