Follow TV Tropes

Following

Death of a Child

Go To

https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/child_dying_4.png

"Child victims have quite an impact on people."

While many stories feature children that survive miraculously through any incident, others seem to go out of their way to subvert the Sorting Algorithm of Mortality when it comes to children. In this particular story, children can die just as easily as adults, or perhaps even easier given their relative lack of experience and inability to defend themselves. There are few ways to make a Character Death more impactful than if it's a child or baby.

This trope is most often done for Rule of Drama. After all, Children Are Innocent, and thus their deaths are often something people can hardly accept — "they're too young to die", "they still have a lot of things they could do/achieve", etc. Hence why the trope is more common in serious dramas and stories farther on the cynical side of the Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism. For instance, this trope is distressingly common in most Crapsack World settings to illustrate just how horrible the world in question is. It's also frequent in war stories, especially if the children are themselves combatants. Other times it's used for shock factor, especially in horror; the monster is shown to be especially dangerous since it underlines that no one is safe. More rarely, it's used for Black Comedy,note  since this is serious Crosses the Line Twice material — it's rarely if ever part of a Hilariously Abusive Childhood.

May be the Littlest Cancer Patient, who tend to be not just critically but terminally ill to enhance the level of grief, although the only thing allowed to kill them is their disease. Also the reason why Undead Child is a deeply unsettling trope.

Do note that this is for when the plot actually deals with child death. This is not about a supervillain blowing up a city and Fridge Logic dictating that children must certainly have died in the process unless it specifically addresses the issue.

Related is Outliving One's Offspring, where the offspring is often (but not always) a child, and Tragic Stillbirth for when a fetus's death causes the family trauma. Can overlap with Offing the Offspring if the child's parents are the cause of death. See also Would Hurt a Child, which is used to show how completely beyond the pale a villain is by targeting children (though it doesn't have to end in death).

See also Censored Child Death, when the death still occurs, but is downplayed compared to other deaths in the story.

This is a Death Trope, so beware of unmarked spoilers!


Example subpages:

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Art 
  • Guernica: To reinforce that not even innocents are spared by war, a mother cries over her dead baby.
  • Auguste Rodin:
    • More than a few dead infants and children are shown damned in The Gates of Hell. This is in keeping with the source material, where the protagonist struggles with the morality of damning unbaptized children.
    • Ugolino and his Children are all dead from starvation or about to be.

    Ballads 
  • Child Ballad
    • #20 The Cruel Mother depicts the title character murdering her newborn babies or baby, depending on the variant.
    • In #21 The Maid and the Palmer, the palmer taunts the woman with his knowledge of where she buried the babies she has borne and murdered.
    • In the horribly anti-Semitic #55 "Little Sir Hugh", the protagonist is killed by a "Jew's daughter" and thrown into a well — this was a fairly recurrent medieval legend (it also appears in The Canterbury Tales).
    • The title character of the #93 "Long Lankin" kills a lord's infant son (really very messily) either because the lord didn't pay him for building his castle, or just because he is a serial killer.
    • In many variants of #106 The Famous Flower of Serving Men, the heroine's evil mother has her baby killed.
    • In #173 Mary Hamilton, Mary drowns her newborn baby. She's caught and executed.
      She's tyed it in her apron
      And she's thrown it in the sea;
      Says, Sink ye, swim ye, bonny wee babe!
      You'll ne'er get mair o' me.
    • "Captain Carr" (#178) features the titular captain burning down his enemy's house, killing his wife and children (after a lengthy siege, because the wife is a badass).
  • In Tom Lehrer's "The Irish Ballad", from Songs by Tom Lehrer, the heroine kills her entire family, including cutting her baby brother in half and serving him to guests for dinner because she was bored.
  • The Erl-King by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is about a father riding furiously through the night to get his sick son home. The feverish young boy becomes increasingly distraught, claiming that the Elf King is trying to take him. Whether the Elf King is really there and trying to kidnap the boy or if it's just a fever hallucination is left ambiguous, but by the time the father reaches their home the boy has died.

    Films — Animated 
  • Mulan: When walking through the ruins of a village that was raided by Shan Yu's Horde of Huns, a single doll is found, as a G-rated signal that there were children killed here.
  • The animated movie version of Roald Dahl's The BFG, wherein we see into a boy's dream and are allowed to at least on some level "bond" with this kid only for him to be very heavily implied to have been eaten. Oh, and when Sophie and The BFG discuss the other Giants' plans to eat some school children, it is acknowledged to have happened.
  • The Prince of Egypt. Because of its particular source material, the child-killing would have been practically impossible to avoid; but still, they do quite a good and discreet job of showing it.
  • Tarzan opens with Kerchak and Kala's infant son wandering away from his sleeping parents and running into the leopard Sabor. Sabor pounces on him and it cuts to his devastated parents' reaction when they hear their son's shrieks as Sabor devours him alive.
  • Film version of Planet Hulk:
    • Caiera, when younger, had to kill her parents to protect her sister. However, she sees that (despite none of the spikes hitting her) she has somehow become infected before Caiera's home breaks down and kills her.
    • After a nuclear bomb explosion, Caiera survives, but the girl she tried to save has turned to ash and dissolves in her arms.
  • In Little Nezha Conquers The Dragon King (1979) a little girl is snatched away by the Dragon King's minions and we later find out that his son Ao Bing has eaten her, later to stop the dragons from laying waste to China, Nezha commits suicide by slashing his throat with his fathers sword, he is later brought back to life by his master.
  • In Mortal Kombat Legends: Scorpion's Revenge , Scorpion's son Satoshi is killed by Quan Chi disguised as Sub Zero right in front of him.
  • Justice League: Gods and Monsters: Two of the shorts used to introduced this movies version of the Justice League invoke this trope.
    • In the first Batman, here the vampiric Kirk Langstrom, is tracking the serial killer Harley Quinn. He finds Harley at her hideout where she has stuffed the bodies of her victims and set them up as a grim mockery of a loving family, including a boy that can be no older than 10 laying on the ground in front of the TV with a stitched up smile on his face.
    • The second sees Superman taking on Brainiac, here not an evil alien conqueror but a bio-weapon in the form of a young child sporting out of control telekinetic powers wreaking havoc in Metropolis. To his credit, Superman does attempt to diffuse the situation in a non-lethal way, but ultimately is forced to break Brainiac's neck to stop the destruction. The last scene of the short has a saddened Superman cradling the body before going off to express his disagreement with those who so irresponsibly created Brainiac in the first place.
  • In Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio Gepetto’s son Carlo is retrieving his father’s things from a church only for it to be bombed by some fighter planes, the church wasn’t a target they just wanted to lighten their load, Carlo’s death has a devastating effect on Gepetto and even carves Pinocchio in an attempt to overcome his loneliness, and who knows how many child soldiers perished when the base was bombed which may have included Candlewick.

    Manhua 
  • Puppet: Leaves death 22 years before the story proper is what kickstarts the whole plot, prompting his father to bring him back to life in the form of a wooden puppet. Losing his son did a number on him, as he is seen in present-day willing to kill people in order to perform some kind of black magic to bring Leaves back to life.

    Mythology & Religion 
  • The Bible:
    • The Bible features, among other acts of evil, the killings of firstborn children ordered by Pharaoh and King Herod in order to try to prevent both Moses and Jesus from growing up to cause trouble.
    • During Moses' attempts to liberate the Hebrews from slavery in Egypt, God issues a number of plagues meant to force Pharaoh into accepting His terms. When the first nine fail to dissuade him, God decides to kill every firstborn son in Egypt (including the cattle's calves) as a last resort, instructing the Hebrews to mark their houses with lamb blood to spare their own children from the curse (which is where the holiday of Passover comes from); this finally gets Pharaoh to acquiesce to liberation.
    • When the words Molech/Baal-Hammon, Astarte/Astarthe/Astaroth/Ashtoreth, the Valley of Ben-Hinnom/Gehenna, the Ammonites/Amorites, the Canaanites, etc. are mentioned, these are specifically referencing the sacrifices of children, born and unborn, to the gods of some of the cultures of the time. Sometimes the Jewish people (such as Kings Solomon, Achaz, and Manasses) messed up and took on this practice as well, despite God calling such a practice an abomination, and demanding the death of those who did such things. Those people ended up in a lot of trouble. It's the whole reason that Gehenna came to be the Jewish word for Tartarus/Hell (which is different from Sheol/Hades/Purgatory).
    • In 2 Maccabees, when the Jewish people rebelled against the corrupt high priest Jason, who had been appointed by King Antiochus IV, and ran him out of town, the king left Egypt for Jerusalem. Once in Jerusalem, he massacred many, young and old, women and children, virgins and infants. In 1 and 2 Maccabees (2 Maccabees is not a "sequel', it's another viewpoint of what happened in the the first book), King Antiochus IV then decreed that everyone take up the customs of everyone else, except the Jewish customs. He outlawed all Jewish customs, including circumcision. The children who were circumcised were killed, as were their mothers and whoever performed the circumcision.
  • Classical Mythology:
    • Followers of Orphism in Ancient Greece believed that Zeus and Persephone had a son named Zagreus, who was killed and eaten by a group of Titans at Hera's instigation. However, in some tellings, Zagreus's heart was saved by Athena, and he was later reborn as Dionysus.
    • Overlapping with Offing the Offspring: When Jason left his wife Medea for another woman, she murdered their children as part of her revenge scheme.

    Radio 
  • Dragnet refused to shy away from such cases, featuring several investigations of murdered children- even toddlers and infants.
    Joe Friday (narrating): John Albert Kessler: white male American. Age: twenty two months. All the pertinent facts and data would be listed on the crime report. And if and when the case was closed the report would be filed away. Wouldn’t be different from a thousand other dead body reports: same size; same color; same number up in the left hand corner. In the course of ten or twenty years on the job a police officer sees a lot of them. Most of them he forgets. A few of them he never forgets.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Warhammer 40,000, the corpses of children under the age of four (and above ten months) are sometimes used to make Cherubs, which are biomechanical robots. They are used as incense bearers in temples, mobile data storage and fashion statements. Add the fact that they sometimes go 'feral'...
  • In the Ravenloft setting Gazetteers from Arthaus, the narrator S adopts an orphaned infant, only to offer it to the banshee Tristessa in exchange for free passage through her domain, Keening. The insane banshee is obsessed with her long-dead infant son, and attempts to "care for" babies in the deluded belief they're hers; as Tristessa can't feed them or keep them warm enough, they inevitably perish from neglect.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Second edition actually gave stats and experience point recommendations for depicting infants in several species, up to and including humanoids like orcs.
    • Young Dragons (as young as the newly hatched "wyrmling" stage) have continued to be statted out as killable targets in the third and 4th editions, as well as Pathfinder.
  • In Pathfinder, on a number of occasions in the lore. The very first adventure contains an encounter where a goblin tries to eat a small child (though this one is played straight, the kid still has notable bitemarks and would have died if not for his father's last-second rescue) and contained details on the corrupt fertility goddess Lamashtu, whose lore involves gaining power over births by ripping out and eating her uterus, then devouring babies to magically regenerate it, and who frequently has children sacrificed to her. The third adventure involves the party exploring the hut of a group of ogrekin called the Grauls, where one room contains the bones of all of the incestuous clan matriarch's female offspring, murdered at birth to avoid being "competition" for her. Things just keep going from there.
  • In Anathema, your job is to reduce the human population as much as possible. Either directly or indirectly, your actions will result in children dying.

    Theatre 
  • Shakespeare includes this trope fairly often, which isn't that surprising as he lived during a time when child mortality was fairly common:
    • Macbeth: Macduff's wife and children are murdered — including a son, who is murdered on-stage.
    • The title character in Richard III arranges the (offstage) murders of his nephews, which are then described to us by the killer. This is depicted as Richard's Moral Event Horizon.
    • Mamillius in The Winter's Tale dies of an unspecified illness, implied to be caused by the gods punishing his father for insisting that his wife was guilty of adultery even when an oracle says otherwise. Leontes (the father in question) also believes for most of the play that he's had his infant daughter killed (although the audience knows otherwise).
    • Arthur in King John dies from a fall while trying to escape from prison.
    • The Boy in Henry V is killed when a group of the French attack the luggage train he's guarding.
    • Romeo and Juliet centers around the deaths of young people, of course: Juliet is only thirteen when she commits suicide, and Romeo's age is never stated but presumably he's not much older.
  • The one act play, “Our Place,” ends with Sidney, a six year old, drowning to death. The last thing before the epilogue is her brother, who she had spent the scene fighting with, is her older brother cradling her. Seeing as though their parents were never shown, this is often the show’s biggest Tear Jerker.
  • Caryl Churchill's Owners: Quite shockingly, the play ends with a death of a baby. Mrs Arlington's baby dies in a fire when their luxurious house burns down.
  • In The Consul, Magda's baby dies quietly during the second act.
  • Westeros: An American Musical: Gregor Clegane killing Elia Martell's children is mentioned in "The Dorne Identity" and "Talk Less, Stab More".
  • I and You: The characters discuss the trauma of witnessing the death of a boy at Anthony's basketball game at several points, and try to process their own feelings about life if someone so young and seemingly healthy could die so suddenly.

    Toys 

    Visual Novels 
  • The first Liar Liar takes place in middle school and the second one takes place when the characters are first years in high school. Every ending involves at least one character dying. Yukari is an outright Serial Killer who has been killing since elementary school.
  • Spirit Hunter: NG:
    • The deaths in the Screaming Author case are particularly horrifying due to the victims being girls that are no older than thirteen. The protagonists struggle to listen through the cassette tapes that document their final moments, where they're all screaming and begging for mercy.
    • The first victim of the Momoi fire was a young boy that the arsonist deliberately covered in gasoline and set alight, a depraved act that makes Akira sick to the stomach when he witnesses it via his psychometry.
  • Sunrider Mask of Arcadius has a graphic example. When Solar Alliance soldiers launch a heavy-handed operation to rescue Kayto Shields and Kryska Stares from the Space Pirate Cosette Cosmos and bullets are flying left and right, a little girl that the two of them met earlier picks up a knife to defend herself with and is promptly gunned down. The shock of seeing a child killed right before his eyes leaves Kayto with nightmares for the rest of the game.
  • Anyone Can Die in When They Cry. Neither series wimps out about very graphically showing people dying, whether they're ten, fifteen, thirty, or sixty.
    • Rika from Higurashi: When They Cry in particular is stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop where she's been forced to live the same month, dying each time, for possibly hundreds of years.
    • In Umineko: When They Cry, nine-year-old Maria is not exempt from dying during the Rokkenjima Massacre; but in the fourth arc in particular, when her body is found, Battler notes that the murderer apparently went out of their way to make her look Peaceful in Death, and it actually looks worse since she's lying in the lap of her mother, whose face was half-blown off, surrounded by adults whose faces were also half-blown off. At the end of the series, it's made clear that Maria is fated to die along with everyone else who was on Rokkenjima.
  • Your Turn to Die has this possibly happen in the climax of the second chapter. Specifically, the player is presented with a Sadistic Choice on whether to kill the 14 year old Kanna, the young adult Sou, or save the otherwise doomed college student Nao while condemning everyone else to their deaths, including Kanna and the 12 year old Gin.

    Webcomics 
  • Weapon Brown: Cal V1-n has absolutely no qualms about killing children right in front of their parents. His casual apathy for infants can be witnessed here.
  • In Off-White, Gebo returns home to find that his entire pack has been slaughtered by humans, even the puppies. Later lampshaded when Albert and Seven come across the pack's remains.
    Albert: They've even killed the puppies. How could they kill something so cute?
    Seven: Are you kidding me? Cute? So what? Is cuteness of something a good enough reason not to kill it?
  • Ansem Retort: An orphanage was burned in the very first comic and Axel and Zexion's 'Spock diet' consists of force feeding blended babies to Sora.
  • Salt The Holly: Cade has a flashback to when an assassin squad massacred his family. Not even a baby girl is spared.
  • Drowtales: Given its setting. Several children, including infants, die on screen, and the drow equivalent of a seven-year-old child not only dies (mostly) on screen, but is killed by another child the same age as part of a Sadistic Choice. Later on Vene, Ariel's younger brother is killed as part of an attempt to wipe out Quain'tana's bloodline and his two siblings, one a toddler and the other an infant, nearly suffer the same.
  • Homestuck: Equius, Vriska, Eridan, Tavros, Nepeta, and Feferi are all Killed Off for Real (though they can potentially reappear due to how ghosts and the afterlife work in the Homestuck-verse). A lot of kids definitely died when Sburb ravages a planet with meteors, not to mention how pretty much all trolls died when the Vast Glub occurred. It's also shown in Vriska's backstory that her lusus killed a bunch of troll children (specifically it forced Vriska to lure other kids in for it to eat; if she refused it would try to kill her).
  • In Guilded Age, when the reality-destroying monster attacks the World's Rebellion, Penk sends a boy who idolizes him to go get his drum while he and Magda fight the monster. When the boy and his sister find it, the monster catches up to them. It's not shown on screen, but when we return to them, we learn that the monster got him. His sister takes it very hard.
  • Jerry from Raining Knives is too old to count, but he does reference this trope. After his brother Dylan tells him that he's a ghost, Jerry tells him that "Teenagers don't die".
    Dylan: You died.
    Jerry: Teenagers don't die.
    Dylan: No, they're killed.
  • Kaiten Mutenmaru: Anne was not even in her teens when the poverty-stricken rebels killed her in a blind rage for stepping between them and Sick, who had nothing to do with the tyranny of his aristocratic parents over the town of Throne.
  • I'm the Grim Reaper:
    • Thankfully not shown on-screen, but the first case that Chase and Scarlet investigate is of a missing boy, who is confirmed to have been killed. His mother strangled him, cut him into pieces, and flushed him down the toilet to hide the evidence.
    • It's revealed that a part of Chase's Dark and Troubled Past was his mother killing his two younger siblings after their father's death.
  • Muted: Camille's twin sister Chloe died in the greenhouse fire when they were eight.
  • Unsounded: The first death is Cara, an innocent young orphan far from home who ends up enslaved, vivisected alive and then left to die when the villains' hideout is found while they're removing some of her organs to make room to smuggle First Silver in her. She's far from the last kid to die in the story.

    Western Animation 
  • Arcane: This show does not hold back on killing children. Whether being crushed by debris, beheaded, or falling to their death, being a kid is no guarantee of safety.
  • Happy Tree Friends: Pop and Cub's gimmick is mainly that Pop is not a competent parent and his negligence constantly costs the life of Cub, and sometimes of himself, in very gruesome ways (as is the norm for Happy Tree Friends episodes). Examples include when he tries to wash him in the sink and accidentally scalds his lower half, then slices him up below the waist in the garbage disposal and when he is cutting the hedge and accidentally slices the top part of his head off.
  • In Farthing Wood Friends:
    • After the rodents have babies, the little ones are killed and impaled by a bird of prey in the very next episode.
    • This has happened a few more times; one of Mr. and Mrs. Rabbit's offspring is shot by a hunter, then fed to his dog, and Dreamer, one of Fox and Vixen's cubs, is killed by Scarface.
  • Family Guy:
    Brian: Stewie, I killed one of my own kind! I mean how would you feel if you killed a baby!
    Stewie: Well, actually I've killed seven...
    • Peter has killed many children both intentionally and unintentionally.
    • Stewie has also killed children, or has been implied to. One infamous example was in "Chick Cancer," where, after a falling-out with his "girlfriend" Olivia (a former theater partner) and upset that she has made friends with another boy, in a fit of rage Stewie sets a cardboard house the other toddlers were in on fire ... and neither are seen escaping. Olivia would show up in a later episode, but the boy is never even hinted to be so lucky.
  • Justice League: Gods and Monsters: Superman is forced to kill the Unstable Powered Child Brainiac at the latter's own request.
  • In many of The Simpsons: Treehouse of Horror Halloween episodes, where Negative Continuity and Anyone Can Die are both in full effect, child characters (including Bart, Lisa, Maggie, etc.) are not immune to the comedic carnage that frequently happens.
  • In the American Dad! episode "100 A.D." junior reporter Matty Moyer is among the characters killed in a bus crash.
  • If Anything Happens I Love You: Two parents are driven apart by grief after their daughter is killed in a school shooting.
  • Star Wars: The Clone Wars:
    • "ARC Troopers" shows towers of cloning tanks being destroyed during an attack on Kamino. That is hundreds of babies dying on-screen.
    • In "Padawan Lost", Kalifa, a tweenaged girl was murdered by Garnac, a Trandoshan Egomaniac Hunter.
    • In "A Friend in Need", Pre Vizsla leader of Death Watch, killed a teenage girl because her grandfather dared to speak up against the way his gang treated their village.
    • In "Revenge", Darth Maul slaughters a village, including children, to get the Jedi's attention. For once, Clone Wars plays it safe and keeps the slaughter largely offscreen.
  • In the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Hooky", SpongeBob and Patrick arrive at a field filled with fisherman hooks. When SpongeBob wonders why no else is at the "carnival", Patrick mentions seeing a kid there earlier. As he says this, a pair of juvenile sneakers can be seen on the ground...
  • Winx Club has a borderline example when the Pixies are being held hostage by Darkar, and realize the other captive Pixies are gone, leaving behind only their clothes, heavily implying they've been killed. We never actually met the unfortunate Pixies (4kids named one of them "Charmy"), so they could have been adults, but the Pixies were portrayed as a childlike race at this point of the series, anyway.
    • As Chatta noted, Darkar needed to keep them alive to find out where their village was, so it's possible that the remains of other pixies were just fakes meant to scare them. As mentioned, this implication is ruined in the 4kids dub, which addressed one of the unfortunate pixies by name and had Darkar mock them for missing their friend.
  • In Voltron: Legendary Defender, Romelle's younger brother Bandor was among those "chosen" by Lotor to be taken off to a special village to be cleansed of his life. We then cut to later on, where he managed to escape, tell Romelle she was right, and then die in her arms as a withering husk.

    Other 
  • A PSA for AIDS prevention had a woman talking about how her husband died from AIDS. She didn't realize he'd passed the virus onto her until their baby was born with it. As she reveals this last part, she walks over to an empty crib.
  • Drinking and Driving Wrecks Lives:
    • In "Fireman's Story", one of the dead victims was a baby.
    • In "Children's Story", the victim is a school-aged child.
    • In "Kathy Can't Sleep", a little boy was killed by Kathy's drunk driver father.


 
Feedback

Video Example(s):

Top

How Jasper died

Jasper finds Cameron Campbell's incriminating treasures, and tries to get a picture, only to knock out the torch. He finds a candle that turns out to be dynamite, throws it into more dynamite, and gets blown up.

How well does it match the trope?

5 (5 votes)

Example of:

Main / DynamiteCandle

Media sources:

Report