Warning: As a potential Death Trope for successful examples, many unmarked spoilers are ahead.
Burn the Witch! in Anime and Manga.
- Attack on Titan: Various factions present at Eren's tribunal are rather paranoid about him (understandably) and want him dissected but then start accusing Mikasa of being a Human Titan too (much less understandably). Mikasa quickly puts a stop to this by demonstrating just how good she is at slicing things, which scares her would-be accusers off.
- Berserk:
- This almost happens to Casca during the Conviction arc after her corrupted child summons several ghosts to protect her from Bishop Mozgus's Cold-Blooded Torture at the Tower of Conviction, which drained him in the process. She's rescued by Isidro, who later becomes one of Guts's new set of True Companions.
- As a child, Lady Farnese often took great joy in assisting her town's burning of heretics.
- Vincent narrowly escapes getting hung for witchcraft in Bizenghast. Later, we get Maphohetka, who definitely had some kind of supernatural ability, as evidenced by her surviving being stabbed in the chest, and is an antagonist to Dinah. In her defense, Maphohetka may be innocent of whatever she was accused of (since the exact nature of Bizenghast's misfortune is never revealed) and the townspeople do actually verge on the "evil and bigoted" side (keeping up their witch lynching traditions well into the late 19th-early 20th century).
- In A Certain Magical Index, back in the Middle Ages, the immortal woman Fraulein Kreutune was tried as a witch and sentenced to various forms of torture and execution, including being burned. Since she was immortal, none of them worked.
- Code Geass:
- Code Geass has this when a mystical trap causes Lelouch to see images of C.C.'s past, including multiple gruesome "deaths" — one of which was, of course, burning at the stake. Justified in that C.C. is both immortal and ageless, plus she became immortal when she was a servant/slave girl in medieval times, meaning she did indeed live through the time when people were doing this sort of thing. It doesn't help matters that official sources both inside and outside the anime call her a witch.
- It also happens to Joan of Arc and Jeanne the Witch (who later becomes C.C.) in Code Geass: Nightmare of Nunnally. Nunnally herself almost suffers the same fate.
- Grimm's Fairy Tale Classics:
- The episode that features The Six Swans (mentioned below) has Princess Elise falsely accused of killing and eating her son by her Wicked Stepmother (who, in this version, is also the local Hot Witch). She's tied up to a cross and about to be burned when she's rescued by her brothers, who then put on the magical shirts she made to undo their curse and return to their human forms; the youngest Prince/Swan returns the unharmed baby to her. Then the Witch tries to summon a powerful wind... and reignites the witch-burning pyre, burning herself to death instead.
- Averted in the Brother and Sister episode, where the Wicked Stepmother runs away and averts being burned. She's mentioned to have eventually died off-screen.
- In High School D×D, Asia Argento was praised by the Church for having Healing Hands. Unfortunately, when it was discovered that her power works on everybody, including devils (she healed the devil Diodora Astaroth while thinking he was human, and he in fact planned this to alienate her from the Church), the Church accused her of gaining the power by a Deal with the Devil and ordered her execution. Luckily, she meets the heroes.
- This is the ultimate fate of the local Badass Preacher Colette and her followers in Innocents Shounen Juujigun, since she ran an underground church that offers godliness to those that would be unable to afford it under the strict rules of the Catholic Church.
- Sally Schumars almost went through this in the Knight Hunters CD dramas, but Farfarello rescued her.
- Minoru Murao's manga Knights opens with an attempted witch burning, as a corrupt priest is accusing the 13 year-old Nina of witchcraft. He fails, and Nina is rescued by the Black Knight and his might-as-well-be-naked companion. Later, the protagonist (and knight-in-training) Mist reveals it was merely a plot to seize her noble family's assets, since the Church is entitled to a witch's property without justification or investigation.
- In Mahou Tsukai Chappy, when Chappy and her brother Jun come to Earth, they decide to not tell anyone about their powers to avert being burned at the stake.
- Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
- Evangeline says that despite being a vampire, she often had to escape such burnings during the middle ages, occasionally getting caught. She laughs about it as something highly amusing these days (the listeners were understandably horrified).
- There is also Asuna threatening to expose Negi early in the manga.
- Phantom Thief Jeanne, as a series whose protagonist is the reincarnation of Joan of Arc, includes
a scene that features Joan's fiery martyrdom. - In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Joan was one of the Puella Magi and the Grand Finale of the TV series shows her with her Soul Gem in her hands as she's about to be burned at the stake.
- In Rage of Bahamut: Genesis, as Joan of Arc is about to be publically burned, the crowds try to save her and fight the local knights for her. Joan is so broken by her ordeals on top of watching the populace being hurt for her sake, she gives in to despair and inhales the demon's concoction, which turns her into a Tyke-Bomb of a demon and flies away with one objective: slay the Archangels holding Bahamut's seal.
- In Soul Eater, there are only two kinds of witches — the stereotypical doomsday witches which are hunted down due to their destructive nature, and the cute friendly witches, which are also hunted down due to their destructive counterparts.
- Going by the flashbacks, the eponymous Witch Hunter Robin (with firestarter powers) was a normal, devout girl who got burned at the stake for being a witch. Or maybe that mysterious old lady was just messing with Robin's mind. In modern times (in Japan) they just get captured and shipped off... and, as the heroes learn to their disgust, drugged, put into People Jars and used to make the anti-witchcraft drug. Either way, it all apparently stems from a long-standing prejudice against them, even though most people have forgotten where it came from to begin with.
- In A Witch's Love at the End of the World, witches were persecuted out of fear by humans after coexisting for many years. The manga's opening Exposition Dump shows witches being killed this way in witch hunts. In a subversion, the only named character to die in a witch hunt so far, Iris, was actually killed after an unspecified method of torture.
