Family Unfriendly Death / Anime & Manga

aka: Anime

Values Dissonance heavily ties in with the frequency of the trope in anime, due to Japan's very different idea of what's okay for children.

• Attack on Titan has this covered with the fact that their human prey is Eaten Alive. Titans themselves seem to have a wide variety of preferences for exactly how they eat humans; some are stuffed whole into mouths and crunched up, some are bitten in half, some are slurped down, some are dropped straight into the gaping mouth, one was even halfway down feet first being slowly gnawed down.
  • Eren and Mikasa's mother stands out; the Titan actually bent her in half to stop her struggling before placing her in its mouth and snapping down everything but her feet.
  • The Female Titan loves this trope, finding innovating ways to crush and kill humans, sometimes using them as a yo-yo's and soccer balls. The anime toned the violence down heavily, but it's still there as Freeze-Frame Bonus.
• Bleach:
  • Kaien Shiba's death is pretty horrible. Firstly, he has his body taken over by a Hollow, going on a rampage until he is killed by being impaled on Rukia's sword. Then the Hollow's body who he's fused with gets transported back to Hueco Mundo, and forms a new spirit body in the form of Kaien. Adding to this, said Hollow is soon eaten by Aaroniero Arruruerie, who later appears to Rukia as Kaien, and engages her in combat. Finally, Aaroniero's imitation of Kaien is stabbed by Rukia again - this time through the face. Considering the fact that Kaien's body was being used as a puppet for quite a while after his death, it just adds to the nastiness.
  • What happens to a Bount when its Doll is destroyed is not pretty.
• A Certain Magical Index/A Certain Scientific Railgun:
  • There are several of these throughout the series, but the biggest ones are the Sisters. Misaka 00001 is killed by a simple reflected bullet, but proceeds to narrate her exact feelings as she painfully bleeds out, in an extremely disturbing monologue. Misaka 9982 sees a room full of Sisters who have been practically shredded, with their blood splattering the walls; during her own fight, she gets her leg ripped off, crawls painfully across the gravel, picks up a trinket Mikoto gave her... and then has a train dropped on her. Misaka 10031 has all the blood flow in her body reversed, making her basically explode.
  • Acqua of the Back kills Terra of the Left by literally hitting him so hard and fast with a pillar that all that's left of his body are his head, upper torso, and right arm. Acqua then waits for him to bleed to death, who can neither speak nor breathe. At least he deserved it.
• Delicious in Dungeon starts with one: Falin gets eaten alive by the Red Dragon.
  • Several newbie adventurers get caught, paralyzed and digested alive by man-eating plants.
  • One of Chilchuck's early deaths happened when he was stabbed through the throat by a mimic.
• Denjin N: Tadahiro's murders are shown in gory detail, with people being cut apart or pierced by falling objects.
• In Digimon Adventure 02, the still Not Quite Dead Big Bad, now possessing Oikawa, a lonely and obsessed man, ends up dragging the protagonists to a surreal dream dimension. There his spirit exits Oikawa's body through his mouth in an extremely violent and painful-looking manner. (Slow down the tape and the blob of energy that springs from Oikawa's mouth has a grinning face). Once he regains his body, he turns on the two servants he had created using Oikawa and proceeds to torture them and kill them in an unspeakably gruesome way, which traumatises the Digidestined for quite a while as they fear their partners will be subjected to the same fate.
  • Also, in Digimon Tamers, Beelzemon kills Leomon by STABBING HIM THROUGH THE STOMACH, with his bare claws. There's no blood, but they do show that Beelzemon's hand has gone all the way through Leomon's body and is now poking out of his back.
    • One Heel–Face Turn later, and Beelzemon comes this close to having one of these. Specifically, via the D-Reaper shooting what were essentially flying knives into his spine, from the back of his neck down to his tail. The scream he lets out as it happens is pretty much the icing on the cake, and the cherry on top is that his own partners (two toddlers), witness it live on TV. Sweet dreams, kiddies...
  • Digimon Adventure has this is spades in the Dark Masters arc. The first two Dark Masters get frozen by an ice blast at point blank range and drilled from the nose to tail. Whamon gets impaled through the head. Earlier Myotismon gets kicked in the crotch by a huge ball. Metal Etemon gets his chest cracked by a huge hammer, and then he gets impaled.
• Dragon Ball: Both the first series and Dragon Ball Z, with the latter being full of them. Many are censored so that parts of them (but usually not the death itself) are not seen in the edited version.
  • Possibly the earliest example is the death of Bora in the Red Ribbon Arc. After being introduced an episode earlier, Tao Pai-Pai shows up to assassinate Goku as a matter of business. Bora stands in his way to defend the kind-hearted Goku, so Tao takes his spear and flings him up into the air with it. Goku calls the Nimbus to rescue him, but Tao throws his spear straight through his chest before it can get there. Not only does Bora hit the ground with an almighty and limp thud in front of his young child, we get a shot of Nimbus whizzing underneath Bora, too late to save him.
  • Early into Z we get Piccolo using the Makankōsappō/Special Beam Cannon on both Raditz and Goku, killing both the first villain and the hero of the show in the third episode. While the manga showed simply a big hole, the anime introduced lots of blood coming from their wounds and Raditz's mouth.
  • Yamcha's death by the Saibamen during the fight with Nappa and Vegeta deserves a mention. Krillin runs to his body and listens for a heartbeat. After screaming, "He's dead!" he then burst into tears. The death was also captured by the news crews, so everyone at Master Roshi's house witnessed it. There's even an extended period where the visual keeps alternating between Bulma's stunned face, Yamcha's best friend Puar screaming his name and weeping on the television screen, and the scene on the television of Krillin crying beside his body.
    • Averted in the original Ocean cast dub (the one that spawned the Over 9,000 meme). In that one, Yamcha is simply vaporized by the Saibaman's self-destruct.
  • Krillin exploding in the Frieza Saga being a particularly traumatic experience for Gohan, who was watching with tears welling in his eyes. Then again, many other characters had been killed by that point on Namek, not to mention the Saiyan Saga, so it's quite likely Gohan was in therapy at this point.
  • Frieza's death at the hands of Trunks. Cut down the middle, sliced into pieces, then blasted into atoms. Overkill much?
  • Even before then, Frieza's near-death on Namek was very graphic, what with him being cut down his waist, wrist and tail with his own disc attack. In the manga, it was even worse in terms of gore.
  • In the manga, Android 20 squeezes a motorist's neck until it deflates like a balloon and rips his head off. In the anime, he simply strangles the man to death.
  • It is also gruesome to watch the first time Cell absorbs someone - he jabs a rich man with his tail and sucks him in one bit at a time, causing him indescribable pain as all his flesh is sucked out of his body, shriveling up so he's just skin draped on bones, before he is completely sucked into Cell's tail.
  • In Dragon Ball Z Kai's English dub, Android 18 being absorbed by Semi-Perfect Cell is terrifying because of 18's horrific screams. It's even worse because Cell had just used the Taiyōken/Solar Flare, meaning 18 is blinded and thus can't even see what's happening to her.
  • There's a scene in the original manga during the Cell arc where Gohan in Super Saiyan 2 transformation goes on a rampage brutally killing all the Cell Jrs. around. While the anime only shows the Cell Jrs. exploding into gas and smoke, the manga goes as far as showing Gohan ripping apart their arms and breaking them in half, as well as chopping one in the head and showing all the head brains and gore flying out.
  • There is a moment partially edited out of the edited version (but still making clear the character is dead) where Super Buu turns to liquid and goes down a deranged gunman's throat, making him expand and explode.
  • How about Chi-Chi's death? She slaps Majin Buu after he presumably killed her oldest son... so he turns her into an egg and crushes her beneath his foot. In front of her other son (who is seven).
    • Also worth mentioning is the death of all the side-characters in a similar scene later on, where Super Buu picks them all off like a slasher movie on fast-forward. Marron's death is of particular note: while her death isn't particularly gruesome, she's three years old, obviously having no conception of what's happening to her.
• Ginga: Nagareboshi Gin is about a pack of talking dogs on a quest to take down the Big Bad. It also absolutely loves this trope to bits. The aforementioned Big Bad? He gets his head sliced off.
  • A special mention should probably go to Gold Eye of the manga-only wolf arc: his chest explodes as result of Hyouma's Metsu Hen'i Battouga. You can see bits of guts around the bloody cavity. And he doesn't even die straight away, managing to slip in a few final words before finally drifting off permanently.
• One title: Grave of the Fireflies. Nothing like melting like a stick of butter.
• Fist of the North Star has scores of this in literally every episode and chapter, but a particularly hard-to-watch example is when Kenshiro is fighting a serial killer and strikes his meimon acupressure point, causing his back muscles to involuntarily contract far beyond their normal point. After Kenshiro leaves the helpless, screaming and sobbing man for dead, an on-screen timer counts down; when it reaches zero, the murderer's spine breaks backwards and he dies in an unnatural, contorted position.
• The Chimera Ant arc of the Hunter × Hunter manga, with the titular Chimera Ants chopping up people while they're still alive and feeding them to their queen. Also, one of them cutting open a character's skull and manipulating his brain with needles to get information about the manga's Functional Magic out of him.
• In Osamu Tezuka's Kimba the White Lion, the death of Kimba's parents are pretty heartbreaking for many adults. Kimba's father gets shot, and his mother drowns while trapped in a boat just a few months later.
  • Their deaths are tame compared to the eponymous character's death in the original manga and movie. Kimba performs a Heroic Sacrifice for his human friends, who needed food and shelter while lost in a blizzard, by jumping off a mountain to impale himself with a kris sword so they can eat him.
    • There is a Buddhist fable about a rabbit that kills itself by jumping into a fire so that a starving holy man can eat it. A rendition of this story is included in Tezuka's later manga series Buddha (which in general is not a kids' story), over twenty years after the first publication of Kimba.
• While hardly the only example in Kinnikuman, Ramenman kills Brockenman in the anime by turning him into noodles and eating him, which is a lot more disturbing than it should be. In the manga he rips Brockenman in half with his Camel Clutch. Messily.
• The Macross OVAs and films tend to be a lot more visually gruesome than the TV shows:
  • Macross: Do You Remember Love? has its fair share of gory deaths, including several instances of people's faces being blown apart.
  • Macross Plus Movie Edition: Guld Goa Bowman's death scene. He rams an enemy AI fighter with his own plane, not before having to accelerate so hard that his fists over his stomach breaks his ribcage (and mashes his guts), his eyeballs are squished by their own weight, and he vomits blood all over his helmet.
  • Macross Zero has a shot of DD Ivanov's face melting off when power beams destroy his fighter, a red shirt fighter pilot getting hit in the cockpit and literally exploding (covering whatever remains of his canopy with gore), and Nora getting blown out of her cockpit and then hit by a anti-air beam.
• Mobile Suit Gundam featured its fair share of death, being set in the midst of a brutal war, but special mention goes to the death of Kycilia Zabi, who died at the hands of Char Aznable by having her head blown off by a bazooka and her remains blasted to pieces in the ensuing explosion.
• Presumably the reason why Episodes 27 and 35 of Monster Rancher were skipped after their first airing by the Fox channel. In the former, Gray Wolf is stabbed in the throat by Tiger with his horn (though the cause of death seems to be the destruction of his baddie crest from said stab). Especially considering that Gray Wolf is Tiger's brother who was turned evil by Moo. In the latter, Naga commits suicide by falling over the edge of his castle, despite the others trying to save him.
  • Undine commits suicide in Episode 24, jumping into the fire after Golem tries to save her despite her betrayal.
• Mother Keeper, first one being when we first meet Turkes and he murders a little girl and then beheads her brother. Later on, during Syal's backstory, Allen gets the top of his head blasted off. Then in the final part of Hunter, Silas suffers a similar fate.
• My Hero Academia has Magne as the first actual on-screen death of a named character, killed via having her whole upper torso reduced to Ludicrous Gibs. The second one, from the same arc, is Sir Nighteye, who has a huge hole blown in his torso. He is later shown in the hospital, with numerous tubes inside the hole trying (and ultimately failing) to stop the blood loss.
• Naruto has loads. The first arc gives us Kakashi (seemingly) being sliced to bits with spiked chains, and Zabuza dies an amazingly Rasputinian Death. The second arc has the random Rain ninjas that Gaara gets with his sand attack- they explode so hard that Gaara uses an umbrella to avoid the blood.
• One Piece: *sob* Portgas D. Ace. That's what being punched with a fist of lava and having your insides melt down as a result will do to you.
  • The same token, Whitebeard's Robocop-esque death. (Given the ethical arguments being made in that scene, this is probably designed to prove his moral correctness by reference to Benkei's standing death.)
  • Also the victims of Magellan's Hydra poison are coaxed in a glob of extremely painful poison that will eventually melt them. Uuuuuk...
  • Many of the flashbacks deaths are considerably shocking in relation to present day, where deaths are rare. You've got Nami's adoptive mother getting shot in the head at point-blank range and a boat of refugees being blown up by cannonfire, among other atrocities.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • Lucario in Pokémon: Lucario and the Mystery of Mew. Sure there's no blood, but we're treated to the poor guy sobbing and spasming in excruciating pain while he slowly disintegrates, and it's about six steps more horrifying than the series full of cutesy monsters tends to run. Even more so considering he's one of the good guys, and it's usually a Big Bad who gets this type of death.
  • Lucario is far from the only movie character to get this treatment. Celebi had the life force drained from it until it became a withered, dessicated husk. Latios graphically drowns to death in a Heroic Sacrifice. Darkrai, similar to Lucario, is graphically disintegrated. Zoroark is graphically electrocuted to death by the Big Bad while her young son is Forced to Watch. The last one is notable for easily being the most graphic, brutal death of the entire series.
    • At least Celebi, Darkrai, and Zoroark got better.
  • In the Team Galactic finale, Hunter J and her henchmen end up trapped in their ship as it sinks into the depths of Lake Valor. They probably didn't have time to go via drowning, considering the ship exploded moments after it sank.
  • Those scientists Mewtwo killed at the very beginning of Pokémon: The First Movie.
  • It's never mentioned in the animated adaptation, but in the original radio drama version of Mewtwo's origin story Amber's death is on-screen. She was hit by a car.
  • Ash getting turned to stone later in the first movie. Granted, he got reverted to normal, and it has been stated that he was merely put into a stasis.
  • The reason Harriet in Pokémon: The Power of Us is afraid of fire and won't let herself get close to any Pokémon is because when she was much younger, her companion Snubbull was killed trying to recover the startup key to the power plant when it caught fire. We're treated to the sight of the two of them desperately reaching for each other right before the flashover consumes the Snubbull.
• Hiroko Asahina's death in RahXephon is utterly horrifying, especially when the rest of the show's violence is rather tame. Ayato goes out to fight the Monster of the Week without realizing that it's been linked to his Unlucky Childhood Friend. He rips it apart like he would any other monster, only realizing what he's done when it spells out Asahina's last words. He comes home to find that all the damage he did was mirrored on her, and he just ripped his friend to pieces.
• Ringing Bell has Chirin's mother being strangled to death by the Wolf King, Chirin accidentally knocking over a bird's nest full of eggs after the mother has been killed by a snake, and finally, the Wolf King being stabbed to death by a now-adult Chirin, who has transformed into a demonic ram.
• In both the manga and anime of Sailor Moon,
  • Some of the villains die in rather unpleasant manners, placing emphasis on the fact that these deaths are at the hands the heroes. There are two instances where we see the flesh melt off of the bones of the heroes themselves.
  • The three cats get torn apart by one of Galaxia's minions in the final arc. Like everyone else who died that arc, they got better, but it's still pretty unsettling.
  • In the original anime from The '90s, our protagonists suffer very disturbing deaths in the first part of the final episodes of the first season: Jupiter takes out two monsters in a Suicide Attack (they attack her with electricity, she comments on the irony, and uses a Supreme Thunder that results in a explosion, with her body stuck on the resultant ice structure), Mercury gets crushed and roasted alive, Venus suffers a similar fate to both (she also gets nearly crushed to death, and her attack against the monster ends with a fiery explosion that kills her). The worst one might be Sailor Mars: in her attempt to protect Sailor Moon, she ends crushed (there's a pattern here) with ice and tortured to her apparent death by the last remaining of the monsters that also killed the others before her; and also an example for said monster, since Mars is alive long enough to pull off a last attack that involves roasting the monster alive with fire. Damn.
  • And in the episode after that one, Mamoru/Tuxedo Mask/Prince Endymion, after being successfully healed from being Brainwashed and Crazy, gets impaled by a crystal shard thrown by Queen Beryl in an attempt to kill Sailor Moon, and bleeds to death. Later on, after Queen Beryl fuses with Metallia and goes One-Winged Angel, Sailor Moon manages to defeat her (with the help of the spirits of her friends) by hurling a large sphere of pink energy towards her... which slowly consumes Super Beryl, and we can actually see how her flesh is dissolved and only bone remains before that is destroyed too, and she screams in agony. The fact it's in silhuette doesn't diminish how disturbing it is.
  • The anime also has Nephrite, who gets stabbed by a mook with a thorn. Unlike when Ann, Diamond, and even two nonfatal instances of Tuxedo Mask get stabbed, the stabbing is fully shown onscreen (that is, no shadows or silhuettes or Gory Discretion Shot), the thorn remains embedded in him despite Naru's attempts to remove it, and there is green blood everywhere.
  • Doctor Tomoe's possessor Germatoid in Sailor Moon S gets stabbed in the eye. Although there's no blood this time, and the violence is downplayed by Germatoid's final word being "Owie!"
  • Heck, all of the deaths in S season were disturbing, but the three that stood out the most were Telulu's (being blown up by her own Hyper Telulun), Viluy's (being disintegrated alive by her own nanobots, albeit bloodlessly), and Eudial's (dies in a car crash, which is more disturbing due to its mundane nature).
    • Uranus' and Neptune's death in S are also pretty disturbing. In Neptune's case, after somehow surviving being shot by shiteloads of machine gun rounds from Eudial's death trap, Eudial kills her by panic-firing her Heart Crystal-ripping weapon directly at Neptune. In Uranus' case, after seeing Neptune got killed, she practically has a Heroic BSoD and decides to kill herself with the same weapon that Eudial uses to kill Neptune. They got better, but that's still a pretty gruesome way of death for a Magical Girl anime show.
  • Viluy's death has the rare distinction of being scary in both the original Japanese and the Cloverway dub.
  • In the manga Sailor Venus has a propensity for inflicting them:
    • In her solo series she messily beheads the youma Wan-Wan.
    • Also from Codename: Sailor V, Danburite slowly disintegrates after being hit by her beam attack.
    • In the series proper she kills Zoisite by hacking him into pieces with a Precision-Guided Boomerang. This is before she makes her proper debut: killing Zoisite was how she announced her presence.
    • A flashback reveals that, in their past lives, she killed Beryl by cutting her open with a sword harder than diamond and poisonous to boot. This fully explains Beryl's terror for her and her minor Villainous Breakdown when she's in the same room with a Sailor Venus that is so furious she stopped showing emotions and has to state she's furious and is wielding the same sword from the last time-and of course Sailor Venus skewers her again before she can properly freak out.
• Satou Kashi no Dangan wa Uchinukenai features two instances of characters' dismembered bodies being found, including the second main character Umino after she is beaten to death by her dad.
• In an episode of Speed Racer, one of the other drivers gets stuck in a mass of molten pitch. As he climbs onto the top of his car to salvage his stolen loot, a column of lava strikes his face, and he falls and sinks into the pitch. Crashing and dying is commonplace in the show. Racing is Serious Business.
  • There was also the fate of the crew of the laser tank: Molten lava poured into the tank through a breach made by an ejected rock.
• An entire research team is boiled alive four and half minutes into Steamboy.
• The beginning of Summer Days with Coo has the father of the title character gruesomely killed by a samurai sword that also takes off his arm.
• In Toriko's Puffer Whale arc, Toriko, Coco and Komatsu come across a pit of toxic insects. Then an unlucky Bishokoya falls in, gets swarmed while screaming in agony, and is reduced to several bones on the floor. OUCH. Later on, several animals are sucked dry by killer trees, The two Wall Penguins in Ice Hell are killed when Tommyrod sends a giant parasite to burrow through them in a VERY gruesome manner, and finally, Tommyrod himself has his "Child", a gigantic insect abomination explode out of his body, leaving him an empty husk (It's implied that he got better, but still.....)
• Then there's Smokescreen's temporary death from Transformers: Armada. Guy gets a gigantic hole shot through him, and the force of the gun slowly shoves him through a wall. That still doesn't stop him, and he tries to fight even with the giant hole, and the fact that he appears to be melting. After a minute of struggling, he finally collapses.
  • The Karmic Death of Thrust. During his monologue, his foot get caught in the transforming Unicron's gears. By the time he notices it's up to his thigh, and he gets slowly sucked in and crushed while he begs Galvatron for mercy. The final shot is of his head swelling from the pressure and then Unicron's armor finally closing over him with a jolt of electricity. This is a kid's show?
  • Starscream's death toward the finale was, aside from being pretty sad, also pretty horrifying. While he's getting graphically disintegrated by Unicron's attack, you can clearly see his arm fall off before his body is completely destroyed.
• Shoukei is almost given this in The Twelve Kingdoms, when the peasants sentence her to be dismembered. She's saved in the nick of time, though.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! often tops Absurdly High-Stakes Games with bizarre deaths, such as two duelists falling through a building after they lose. Most of the time, however, people just enter death-like comas after losing Shadow Games.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds has Sayer use his Psychic Powers to inflict real damage in his duel with Carly. Carly get blasted by a monster, and the force is enough to blast her through a window of the room they're in. Carly then falls fro a ridiculously high distance (long enough for her to realize her incoming death) before crashing into a shed and dying. We even get a shot of her body, complete with Dull Eyes of Unhappiness.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh! ARC-V has Sergey falling from a high road and having his body ripped in half. He survives this... only to have rioters find and beat him to death with makeshift weapons.

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