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Death Of A Child / Anime & Manga

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Children dying in anime and manga.

  • 7 Seeds:
    • Of course, given that the premise of the story is that the chosen teams are the supposedly only people living on earth right now, after meteorites have struck earth, it is expected that a lot of children died during the disaster, too, albeit off-screen.
    • The chapters revolving around the raising of the Team Summer A candidates reveals that the students who "dropped out" ended up killed, but they once again die off-screen.
    • The reader is shown children dying, even mid-sentence, during the epidemic claiming more and more lives of the people in the Ryugu Shelter.
  • Angel Beats! is about a group of teenagers who died young. They're in a purgatory high school reliving the youth they lost until they're content enough to reincarnate.
    • For a more specific example, Yurippe's backstory involves a group of burglars breaking into her house and taking her younger siblings hostage, forcing her to find valuables quickly lest they kill the children. The police didn't show up in time and the robbers killed all of her younger siblings.
  • Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day is about a group of friends who drift apart after one of their group, Meiko "Menma" Honma, dies in an accident when they're young children.
  • Ao no Fuuin:
    • As the Oni begin to grow in number and breed, they do create offspring and little Oni children. These children are not exempt from being hunted and killed by the humans and are often shown tortured, injured or dead.
    • The human children are not safe, either. When an Oni awakens, they are hungry and will eat whatever human is nearby. A young couple gets turned into Oni, Soko hears them awaken and the couple's baby crying... and then the crying suddenly stops.
  • Happens right at the start of Astro Boy. Dr. Tenma losing his son is what causes him to create Astro as a Replacement Goldfish.
  • Children are most definitely victims of Titan attacks in Attack on Titan:
    • A youth approximately 10 - 12 years old being bitten in half by a Titan with blood splattering everywhere and his legs kicking as he's Eaten Alive.
    • Episode 25 clearly shows rocks falling and crushing both children as a consequence of the Stohess incident.
    • Rod Reiss recounts the incident in which his children and wife are killed by Grisha, who went to them in order to steal the Founding Titan. While some of Rod's children are teenagers, a few of them are under the age of 13.
    • In a non-titan example, as punishment for leaving their Fantastic Ghetto without permission, Grisha's sister Faye was fed to dogs (while alive) at the age of eight because the officer responsible thought it was a good character-building exercise for his sons. Grisha and his parents do not take her death well, even though it's covered up by said officer who claims he found her already dead. (Grisha later gets told the truth, which fuels his anger enough that he joins La Résistance.)
    • Child Soldiers Udo and Zofia (who would be 13 at most) get killed during Eren's attack on Liberio. Zofia gets crushed by a boulder and Udo gets trampled to death in the stampede that ensues.
    • During the Rumbling, Ramzi, the refugee child who appeared in Chapter 123, is crushed to death by one of the Wall Titan's feet, and we see his face contorted onscreen as he gets trodden. Just a few pages before, his brother's head is partially scraped off by a falling boulder, with his brain visible. Not only that, but we get multiple panels of crying parents clutching their children, including a mother with her baby, right before they are trampled underfoot.
  • Barefoot Gen features the deaths of many children and babies following the atomic bomb being dropped on Hiroshima, some examples include a little girl being incinerated in the middle of the blast, Gen's female classmate who was standing near him at the time of detonation, his five year old brother Shinji being burned to death in their house along with his father and teenage sister after it collapsed on them, and his baby sister Tomoko dying from malnutrition.
  • Battle Angel Alita: In addition to the Crapsack World of The Scrapyard where villains have no qualms about killing children, there's also the infant-meat-fancying Venusians and the "Methuzalized" space colonists who regard "the next generation as a threat, not a promise" and regularly send death squads after children. There's also the Child Soldiers of Jeru/Ketheres, who Alita and her new friends from Mars try to save a day too late, and the orphans on the Space Karate guy's planet.
  • Kentaro Miura shows repeatedly in the Berserk manga that no one is safe or immune from the horrors of the story's universe, children least of all:
    • The dead body of a little boy can be seen among the victims of the bandit leader from the first major story arc.
    • Later in the second arc Guts is given a ride by a kind priest and a young girl who he takes care of. The three are attacked by demonically possessed skeletons and the young girl Collette is brutally killed. She then returns possessed and kills the priest before going after Guts along with the rest of the undead. Guts then has to kill her again, along with the rest of the skeletons.
    • After becoming separated from the rest of the Hawks during an earlier battle, Casca reveals to Guts that long before he joined them a young boy who acted as a page to the mercenary band was killed in battle. She says it is the first time that she truly saw Griffith be disturbed and depressed by something and later is shown to have deeply affected Griffith mentally.
    • During the Band of the Hawks arc, Guts carries out an assassination order by Griffith on the King's brother and then is forced to kill the brother's young son because the boy saw too much, an act that shakes him up terribly — not the very least because the boy reminded Guts of...well, himself when he was the kid's age.
    • After rescuing Griffith after a year of torture the Band of the Hawk gets aid from a young family which includes several children who long supported the group. Shortly afterward, the Black Dog Knights, a group of soldiers composed of the worst rapists, murderers and criminals that Midland has to offer appear, having been sent by the King to kill Griffith. The group, led by Wyald, a truly nasty piece of work of an Apostle, question the mother before she and her family including the young children are raped and killed. And if that wasn't bad enough, they then proceed to dismember their bodies (yes, including the kids) and carry them naked on poles into battle with the Hawks, who are all disgusted at the sight.
    • The Misty Valley arc main villain Rosine started out as a cute, smart tomboy with a horrible home life who loved a certain fairy tale. She later sacrifices her parents to the Godhand and becomes a elf/fairy creature similar to that found in her favorite fairy tale and begins to attack the nearby village killing people and animals and kidnapping children to turn into twisted little elf/fairy creatures that play kickball with eyeballs, play war to the death, and rape each other for fun (remember they are still technically children and are acting in a twisted way like the kids they are.) By the time Guts reaches her, she is insane, and has to be killed in order to prevent her from hurting any more people (and given that Guts is still in hardcore post-Eclipse vengeance mode at this point, all he really cares about is killing another Apostle). During the arc you see that she Used to Be a Sweet Kid who only wanted to have some happiness that she never got at home turning into a case of Alas, Poor Villain especially considering that once she dies, she, like anyone who makes a sacrifice to the Godhand and becomes a demon, is sent straight to hell.
    • Also, those eyeball kick balling, to-the-death war playing elf/fairy creatures that Rosine made from kidnapped children? When they are killed they turn back into kids, leading to Guts being seen as a child killer.
    • In the Millennium Falcon arc, women and children in a village are constantly kidnapped by trolls. The woman are raped till they become pregnant with more trolls, but the rotting bodies of children skewered on poles are seen in the den.
    • And collectively, the most disturbing case in the series so far is what happened to Guts and Casca's own child. When Guts returned to the Hawks and before the crew set out to rescue Griffith, he and Casca had an emotional reunion that ended up with them making love, with said union resulting in Guts impregnating Casca. Though pregnancy was unknown to them at the time, it's assumed that the baby was developing normally in the womb... until the Eclipse happened. When it goes down, everything goes down, with Griffith, now the demon lord Femto, raping the pregnant Casca in front of Guts, tainting her womb with his demonic seed and thus poisoning her unborn child. After the Eclipse, the now traumatized and insane Casca undergoes a miscarriage from the event, resulting in a misshapen fetus being born that has been corrupted by evil. Guts, seeing the child as nothing more than a byproduct of an event he failed to prevent, tries to kill it immediately, but because of Casca's intervention, the child disappears at daybreak.
  • In Bitter Virgin Daisuke's sister's baby is stillborn.
  • A lot of children die, and are depicted dying, in Black Butler. Especially in the Circus Arc. And it's pretty gruesome.
  • Black Lagoon has the deaths of Hansel and Gretel, and the orphans they used as decoys.
  • Bleach:
    • There's this whole deal with a little boy having his soul separated from his body and placed in a parakeet's body by a Hollow...
    • We see ghosts of children several times, their deaths are not shown on screen though.
  • In Blood+ Saya impales a baby within the first minute of the series. Later down the line, Saya's adoptive younger brother Riku ends up getting turned into a Chevalier after having his blood absorbed by Saya's biological twin sister Diva. A few episodes later, Diva rapes and kills Riku.
  • Blue Gender. Things don't go well for poor Yung, and during the massacre of Yung's group by the Blue, we see one of the Big Creepy-Crawlies slash at a mother holding an infant (Mom dies; kid goes flying). Needless to say, if the blow didn't kill the baby, hitting the ground will.
  • In Bokurano, this happens a lot:
    • The robot is piloted by a group of seventh graders who die after they fight, regardless of whether they win or lose, because the robot drains their life force. This includes Kana Ushiro, a fourth grader, in the manga.
    • Children often die as collateral damage in the battles, as Chizu once fires a laser at a man who raped her, killing a baby who's nearby. In the final battle, as Ushiro is forced to kill everyone on the other Earth so that he can kill the pilot and save his universe, fires his lasers all around, and you can see a kid's backpack consumed in an explosion.
    • In the anime, Kokopelli's young daughter fights and dies for her Earth.
  • Case Closed occasionally touches on the deaths of children, though always in the backstory providing a motive for the current killer. The closest it has come to killing a child on-screen was the start of the sixth Non-Serial Movie Detective Conan Film 06: The Phantom of Baker Street, which starts with a ten-year old Child Prodigy jumping of a skyscraper.
  • There's several instances in the general massacres scenes of Code Geass where you can see smaller bodies, clearly of young children and teenagers, albeit undetailed and from a distance.
  • Daimos: This trope occurs as soon as the SECOND episode. A kid spends a short while egging Kazuya and Erika on to kiss. Later, when the enemy attacks, an explosion destroys the greenhouse had gone into. Kazuya and Erika bolt to the place and find him lying between the rubble. The kid opens his eyes and asks Kazuya if he "got lucky" before dying as Kazuya is holding him in arms.
  • Deadman Wonderland:
    • The fourteen year old protagonist is constantly in danger but never really gets hurt. His classmates on the other hand are all brutally murdered within the first ten pages of the series.
    • Hibana Daida, a seven year old, once tortured and killed a boy in kindergarten because he flipped her skirt. Hibana herself is killed by Toto.
  • The Death Note from, well, Death Note has as one of its lesser-known rules that it cannot kill anyone less than 780 days old, or about two years and change. This means that anyone over three years old can die, though that's never actually shown.
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba is not shy to kill children. Tanjiro's brothers and sister are victim of Muzan at the start of the series, many Demon Slayers are teenagers who ends up as victims of the demons, Sabito and Makomo were Dead All Along, and, by the end of the manga, Muichiro Tokito, the youngest of the Hashira at 14, dies against Kokushibo.
  • D.Gray-Man: The Earl of Millennium doesn't care how old you are; as long as you lost someone close to you, he will be there to turn you into an Akuma.
  • Even Digimon is not above killing off children. In Digimon Adventure, Koushiro/Izzy’s adopted parents reveal that their biological child died at around the same time that Koushiro’s birth parents died, without even making it past infancy, Hikari/Kari almost has this happen to her due to illness several times. Digimon Adventure 02 has Ken Ichijouji’s older brother Osamu/Sam (a fifth grader) being fatally hit by a car.
  • Dragon Ball, is no stranger to child death.
    • In the original Dragon Ball, Krillin's first death has being killed by Tambourine when he was young.
    • In the sequel, his daughter is turned into candy and eaten by Super Buu.
    • Not to mention the countless victims in Super Buu's Human Extinction Attack and later Goten and Trunks when Kid Buu blew up the earth.
    • Dende's brother and later Dende himself is killed by Frieza and his goons.
    • In the Future Trunks Saga of Dragon Ball Super, Haru and Maki are killed by Zamasu after he assimilated with the universe.
  • Elfen Lied:
  • In Ergo Proxy, viewers are treated to a baby carriage falling down a flight of stairs in slow motion during the mall chase early on in the series; very much a shout-out to Eisenstein's Bronenosets Potemkin 'Odessa stairs' scene. Later, the carriage is shown lying on its side in a puddle of (presumably the baby's) blood. However, that is certainly not the only baby to die in Ergo Proxy. (Not a spoiler. Really.)
  • Eureka Seven:
    • On one occasion, a little boy's death at the hands of the Scab Corals received an ironically graphic Gory Discretion Shot.
    • Then there the shot of a mother actually smothering her crying infant just before some Corals find them and kill them both. Once again that was a Gory Discretion Shot. Plus the scene when Dominic tries to go looking for a replacement for Anemone.
  • The sequel series, Eureka Seven Ao, has as a key part of its backstory the death of Ao's older sister Amber, which motivated her parents Eureka and Renton into trying to destroy the Scub since she was stillborn because of it.
  • Fairy Tail has an example that isn't immediately obvious. In Zero, the Blue Skull guild attacks the Red Lizard guild, forcing Mavis and Zera, both young children, to flee. Zera collapses from her wounds, and while it seems as though she eventually recovers, she actually died, and ended up becoming Mavis' Imaginary Friend. Mavis only realized the truth about Zera several years later, shortly before Zera vanished forever.
  • Fist of the North Star
    • Several children die in the manga, but are spared in the TV series (notably Bat's younger brother Taki, who is murdered by one of Jackal's men; and Ryo, the kid at Shuu's hideout who died eating bread that Souther and his men poisoned). Strangely, the TV series "made up" for it by having several adult characters who survived the manga die instead (like both Harn Brothers instead of just Haz). In the first Raoh Den movie, the child-poisoning scene is restored.
    • In contrast to the TV series, the original 1986 movie shows a group of nomads being massacred by camouflaged thugs while wandering the desert. The casualties include a young mother and her infant child.
  • Seven ways to Sunday in Franken Fran, where kids die in nasty ways : a little girl gets her head bitten off, a boy from the same chapter is mutated into a monster by a virus and killed by the remaining survivors, another girl from a later chapter is stabbed in the head... Some chapters play it straight, though.
  • Fullmetal Alchemist:
  • In Future Diary, Anyone Can Die, even children:
    • The 4 year old Reisuke is killed by Yuno.
    • Later on Yukki's 14 year old friends are all gunned down as well.
    • Although a lot of their ages are ambiguous, and many are too old to count, the 8th's orphanage is slaughtered.
  • This is Genocyber's claim to fame, to the point that the most brutal and obvious example has ended up on at least one shock site.
  • The first two installments of Getter Robo didn't stray from depicting children as part of the many victims of the Dinosaur Empire and Hyakki's Empire brutal attacks, occasionally showing them dying just as gruesomely as the adults. Later entries would stray further from this, with the original manga version of Getter Robo Arc actually having a bit early on where some kids actually get saved by the Getter pilots.
  • Go Nagai:
    • Devilman: Two of the worst deaths are destined for Sachiko, Akira's little neighbor, and Miki's younger brother.
    • In fact, in regards to Devilman and Devilman Lady, Go Nagai has absolutely NO compunction about killing children and babies in the most horrific way possible and showing it very clearly, preferably in front of their parents.
    • The UFO Robo Grendizer manga (also a Go Nagai production) has a villain who in a flashback kidnaps all the kids from planet Fleed and says he'll give them back in exchange for the planet's weapons. When they give up the weapons, he gives back the kids- by dropping them from 30,000 feet in the air. And in the present, he steals Great Mazinger and ties up a bunch of kids as well as people Duke cares about all over the robot so Grendizer can't fight back.
    • There's also an episode of Mazinger Z where Shirou's crush, Lorelei, was a Robot Girl with the body of a 10-year-old cutie... and in control of a huge mecha beast. She doesn't make it. In another, Sayaka's cousin Yuri (who is actually crippled) is kidnapped and placed inside a capsule in a mecha beast's head; she's luckier than the others, though, and survives.
    • Violence Jack. The first arc alone is filled with graphic deaths of young kids.
  • In Grave of the Fireflies both the protagonist and his younger sister die. They warned you.
  • Gunslinger Girl:
    • The series has a premise which revolves around Child Soldiers so this is expected. By the end every one of the protagonists have died, some on-screen and some rather peacefully during the twenty year timeskip. The first gen Cyborgs were all essentially terminally ill from the first chapter and not expected to live longer than four years, if they weren't killed in combat.
    • Jose and Jean's kid sister Enrica died long before the manga began. Jose uses Henrietta as a Replacement Goldfish for her.
    • Rico befriends a busboy named Emilio but is later told to shoot him in order to leave no witnesses.
  • It's implied in Haibane Renmei that the main characters are Dead All Along. Most haibane are hatched as young children and older ones like Rakka are only teens. There's a group of "young feathers" that are taken care of by Team Mom Reki.
  • In the Hellsing manga, one of the first images readers are shown during Millennium's invasion of London is a limp, bloody and unmistakably dead infant in the jaws of a Vampire-Nazi.
  • Hunter × Hunter: This is how the Chimera arc starts, with a pair of sibling coming across the queen who eats both of them.
  • In In This Corner of the World, Keiko's daughter Harumi is killed by a time-delayed bomb after an air raid. This continues to haunt the other characters for the remainder of the story, and it also shows how much World War II is now intruding on their everyday lives.
  • Inuyasha:
    • Suikotsu's evil side emerges for the first time when a soldier kills an injured little girl he was trying to save. Worse, the soldier gloats about that since, in his view, he spared the little girl from more pain. When the soldier tries to kill HIM, a panicked Suikotsu kills the other first with the same scalpel he was using to operate on his unfortunate little patient.
    • Rin's first appearance has her being brutally and graphically slaughtered by Kouga's wolves. Thankfully, she gets better. Oh, and much later on? She gets dragged into Hell. Again, she gets better.
    • Kohaku not only was he brainwashed into killing his dad and fellow Demon Slayers as well as injuring his older sister, but then he takes a fatal attack for her and dies. Then he's revived. But is Brainwashed and Crazy. And it takes him a LOT to get better.
  • In the latter half of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable, Josuke declines Koichi's plea to hunt down the Serial Killer stalking their community, believing that crime not related to Stand-users is a problem for the police. But when the local Bratty Half-Pint Shigechi catches the killer red-handed and learns firsthand that he does have a Stand, Josuke and the town's Stand-using community rally together to bring Shigechi's killer to justice.
  • In the seventeenth volume of The Kindaichi Case Files, "The Undying Butterflies" in which a twelve-year-old girl is the first victim of the story's murders.
  • In Maria no Danzai, Mari Nagare is sent into a deep depression when, not only does her middle-schooler son Kiritaka commit suicide, but she's there to watch him get run over by a truck. Then she learns that it wasn't a suicide after all...
  • It's revealed late into Magnetic Rose that Heintz's daughter Emily died as a little kid. She wanted to be an astronaut like Heintz, so she climbed onto the roof of her house dressed in her astronaut costume and ended up slipping.
  • Michiko & Hatchin has several cases of young children dying, almost dying, and killing people themselves. An episode with a memorable Downer Ending has a woman and her little sister being gunned down by a bunch of kids. One episode even has a woman put her baby in the middle of the road so it would get hurt, or worse, and she could receive money.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team, Shiro and his team are completely sickened when they see Zeon soldiers gun down a mother and her child for leaving their house at night.
  • Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam specifically showed an infant body in the gassed colony 30 Bunch, and a mother and infant child are briefly shown dying when the Titans use the Colony Laser to destroy several colonies as a "demonstration".
  • Mobile Suit Gundam SEED doesn't shy itself from this trope either both with the girl that gave the origami flower to Kira being killed in the explosion that Yzak caused when he shot the refugee shuttle in which she was. There's also the shot of a dead mother and her child in the ruins of Junius 7, which either shocked or caused a complete breakdown to the characters who entered the room where these bodies were.
  • Muhyo and Roji's ghosts are often children, who die of causes such as falling onto a subway train tracks, fires, car accident, or even suicide, or parents who lost their children. The moment of their deaths is often shown in flashbacks.
  • The only confirmed death in Musuko ga Kawaikute Shikataganai Mazoku no Hahaoya is Byakuren, who is mortally wounded during a raid on a C.A.T.T facility with her allies being unable to do anything but give her some morphine to ease her pain as she bleeds out. Her death casts a shadow over the rest of the series (especially regarding how much it messes up her little brother) and sets the final major arc in motion.
  • My Hero Academia:
    • When Tomura Shigaraki's Quirk first activated while he was a young boy, one of the first victims was his slightly older sister.
    • The Todoroki family's eldest child, Toya, had long been missing, with whatever happened to him left vague. Chapter 249, however, implies that Toya is dead, since his father, Enji "Endeavor" Todoroki is visiting a shrine to Toya and wishing he could have had dinner with the family. In a subversion, Toya is actually very much alive... Unfortunately, he's also become the villain Dabi.
  • In My-Otome, Mimi, a young girl who is part of the refugees of Windbloom, dies from her wounds after being attacked by a desert monster.
  • Naruto:
    • The Big Bad very nearly kills baby Naruto. Not surprising, as the Big Bad himself was a child soldier and witnessed his 12 year old best friend/crush's brutal assisted suicide.
    • Not to mention that the Iwa jounin in Kakashi Gaiden have zero qualms with mutilating Kakashi, mentally torturing Rin, and almost murdering all three of them, resulting in Obito being buried in an avalanche and Kakashi and Rin being forced to leave him for dead. It turns out that Obito actually survived.
    • Nawaki, Tsunade's little brother, was killed around age 11-12 in an explosion. It was not pretty.
    • It's shown that during the Warring States period, the plight of Child Soldiers was even worse than it is currently. A scene shows a bunch of adult Uchiha ninja ganging up on Itama Senju, Hashirama's and Tobirama's child brother. Their even younger brother, Kawarama, got it worse; the Senju only learned that he was dead when they received his arm.
    • Orochimaru injected Hashirama's gene on many Konoha infants, only one of whom, Yamato, survived.
  • By the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion, EVERYONE is dead (sorta) and some 14 year olds have suffered multiple, rather hideous deaths (impaled, eaten alive, impaled some more, then killed).
  • Occurs offscreen in Noir. In the Intoccabile episodes, when a Mafia traitor gets questioned by the titular Intoccabile, with his wife and child in the next room to ensure his cooperation... and both get shot due to his hesitation. Also, Mirielle's older brother died when he was a young child in the assassination that killed her parents.
  • Now and Then, Here and There: The fact that the plot revolves around Child Soldiers in a Crapsack World should give you an indication of what happens.
  • One Piece:
    • Zoro's friend Kuina tripped down the stairs and died, which had a profound effect on him. Neither of them were much older than 10 years old.
    • When Ohara was razed by the Buster Call, Sakazuki (later known as Akainu), had the evacuation ship destroyed in case any scholars were on board. Every passenger was killed, including a young Robin's cousin, as well as the kids who bullied her.
    • In the case that was orchestrated by the World Government where they ordered that every infant including ones not yet born that could be related to Roger to be killed on sight - including the mother and anyone related to her.
    • A flashback in the Dressrosa arc has the extermination of the city of Flavence. Only a then-10-year-old Trafalgar Law survived. Everyone else, including a nun who was supporting the child, the kids she was taking care of, and the child's parents and younger sister, were all wiped out by the World Government. Needless to say, this fucked Law up pretty badly.
  • Plastic Memories: In its first episode Tsukasa and Isla have to retrieve and terminate a child Giftia who has reached her expiration date.
  • Pokémon: The Series:
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica infamously used this in the third episode when Mami gets her head eaten by a witch. It only gets worse from there.
  • Reiko the Zombie Shop: Played straight by child murdering psychopath Saki Yurikawa. Introduced in the first volume, Saki's a teenage serial killer who has murdered over twenty little girls. She initially takes an interest in them being her "little sister", and when they refuse she snaps and utterly butchers them. Even after her death and zombification by titular heroine Reiko children still die in this series.
  • Sailor Moon: In the last episode of the 1990s anime, the Big Bad herself, Galaxia possessed by Chaos, slashes the sword of sealing which transforms into a dying Chibi Chibi Moon. As Sailor Moon sadly cradles her, she disappears and dies in her arms. And what's worse, her physical form is that of a baby!
  • Satou Kashi no Dangan wa Uchinukenai uses this in a horrid way. Middle schooler Mokuzu's abusive father Masachika ends up beating her so badly one day that she dies of the injuries. He tries hiding the body in the mountains, but Nagisa and her older brother Tomohiko end up finding poor Mokuzu's dismembered corpse.
  • School-Live! takes place in a Zombie Apocalypse and thus contains a lot of death. Seniors, young adults, teenagers, little kids, puppies... No one is spared. At one point, the characters visit an elementary school where there are no survivors and they even encounter a zombified boy with a sign around his neck.
  • In Science Ninja Team Gatchaman, the nameless, faceless children either unseen or briefly seen on the streets when a mecha comes stomping through are screwed.
  • Serial Experiments Lain has a few, but everything is reversed in the final episode:
    • The anime begins with middle schooler Chisa being Driven to Suicide.
    • In one episode a man is playing a Deep Immersion Game he found on the Wired. It's a maze-based shooter. Somehow it ends up getting mixed with a tag game kindergartners are playing and he ends up shooting a little girl.
    • The video game of the anime ends with Lain shooting herself.
  • The anime of Shakugan no Shana got away with killing two children (one human and one Torch) in the first two episodes, perhaps because their deaths didn't leave behind any bodies.
  • Sonic X:
    • In episode 77 there is a Heroic Sacrifice by Cosmo.
    • Posthumous Character Maria Robotnik was killed as a young girl, just like in the games. This deeply traumatized the man who shot her. The English dub used euphemisms like "taken away" and "lost", but close examination of dialogue like the man being remarked as the "only survivor" and such reveal she still died nevertheless.
    • A teenage character called Molly commits a Heroic Sacrifice. The 4kids dub censored this though as well. In the English dub Molly ran off instead, though the dramatic tension combined with her crying doesn't make it seem that way.
  • In the Space Runaway Ideon movie, even the kids perish. Special mention goes to the scene when a little girl is beheaded by a gunshot onscreen. Poor, poor Ashura.
  • In Street Fighter Alpha: The Animation, Ryu's kid brother dies.
  • Tokyo Ghoul does this several times, to brutal effect:
    • When Yamori becomes bored of simply torturing Kaneki, he decides to switch things up by bringing in a mother and child. He tells Kaneki that he has to decide which one will die. When Kaneki refuses to cooperate, Yamori strangles the child to death before killing the mother. This serves as the final straw that pushes him over the edge. Notably, the anime changes the victims into a pair of adult lovers.
    • Investigator Koutarou Amon was raised by an infamous Child Eater, Donato Porpora. Witnessing one of his friends being eaten by his father is what caused Amon to become a Knight Templar as an adult.
    • In the sequel, the Oggai make their debut in the field by ripping a mother and child to pieces.
    • In Chapter 144, this is the tipping point. A mortally-wounded Kaneki resolves to survive no matter what it takes, resolving to kill humans for the first time. He kills 12-year old Hajime before turning on the other Oggai, killing and eating them all in a mindless frenzy. This is exactly what the Big Bad wanted, feeding the children to Kaneki in order to create a monstrous being he dubs "Dragon". During the resulting slaughter in the streets of Tokyo, several children are shown to be among the victims it devours.
  • Tokyo Magnitude 8.0:
    • The series takes place during and after a large earthquake and thus many people, children and adults, are implied or explicitly shown to die.
    • Yuuki, the protagonist's little brother, ends up dying near the end of the series due to cranial bleeding combined with dehydration.
  • The Tsukihime manga featured a chapter when one of the antagonists invades a hotel, using his powers to kill anybody. He passes by a pair of children and it looks like he'll let them live...till his monsters chomp on them too.
  • In a Venus Versus Virus arc, one of a set of twins gets turned into a Virus. She asks Lucia to Mercy Kill her so that she doesn't harm her brother.
  • In Who's Left Behind? Kayoko's Diary, the titular child protagonist loses her entire family, including her 4 year-old younger brother, to the firebombing of Tokyo. Only her teenaged older brother survives by climbing through a window into the local middle school.
  • Toboe was actually the first of the Wolf's Rain wolves to die. He's the youngest wolf, being roughly thirteen to fourteen in human form.
  • Fourteen year old Kaori dies in the final episode of Your Lie in April. She had been suffering from a disease her entire life but it was getting worse by the start of the series. Knowing she had little time left she set out to befriend the boy who inspired her to begin playing the violin almost ten years ago.
  • None of the fifteen-and-under cast of Yuki Yuna is a Hero die, despite all the battles. They cannot die. They only lose their senses until they can't take care of themselves anymore. Played straight in the prequel light novel Washio Sumi Is a Hero and its film adaptation, where an eleven year old Magical Girl died.
  • Yuri Kuma Arashi: Princess Lulu's brother didn't die from being thrown off a cliff, being thrown off a cliff into quicksand occupied by a Dune worm, or being thrown into a volcano. Instead, he died from a bee sting allergy.
  • Yuureitou contains one boy dying in-series and another dying as a major factor in a character's backstory.
  • Amanuma from YuYu Hakusho thought his ability just made games realistic, but Sensui didn't tell him everything that happened in the game would actually happen. He died when Kurama defeated him, since that is what happens to the boss in the game they were playing. Koenma is able to revive him, though.
  • Zambot 3: This series is notorious -among other reasons- for going with Anyone Can Die in show aimed at children. It does not matter if you are a kid; it does not matter if you are a kid and a secondary character; it does not matter if you are a kid and a MAIN character. Given this is a show produced by Yoshiyuki Tomino, it should not be shocking.
  • Zombie Land Saga: While the girls of Franchouchou all died quite young, Lily, the Token Mini-Moe, died at twelve years old from a heart attack. It's an odd case of Played for Drama though, as the death itself isn't shown as a major source of trauma for her. Instead the drama comes from how this affected her relationship with her father, who would spend years mourning, and not being able to see him again due to being a zombie causes her a lot of anguish.

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