"In those old Warner Bros. cartoons that they've scrubbed away now, but you see something like that, and it'd be some random character to the side—will pull out a gun and just say like, 'Now I've seen everything...' *BAM!*"
"It's that shit where, you know, you got them winos drinking a bottle and he sees that shit and throws that bottle away and then pulls out a gun. 'Now I've seen everything!' *BAM!*"
— Martin Thomas and Korey Koleman in response to The Burger King being a part of Floyd Mayweather's entourage, JAMIE FOXX AND THE NATIONAL ANTHEM
What can you do when you've seen it all? Not much except kill yourself, apparently.
On its way to becoming a Forgotten Trope, a Seen It All Suicide occurs when a cartoon character, having seen some outrageous sight, proclaims, "Now I've seen everything!" and promptly produces a pistol before shooting himself on the spot. The reason this might happen is because the character feels they have finally cracked and wish to end their lives before it gets worse. When these old cartoons are reaired nowadays, however, this joke is usually Bowdlerised out. Watch for it — if a character proclaims that he's seen it all, expect him not to show up again.
In Real Life, people sometimes say things like, "I'm ready, Jesus", if something momentous has just happened — meant to indicate that they're ready to die, but without the rather jarring effect of pulling a weapon out of thin air and actually doing the job.
A subtrope of Suicide as Comedy.
For the more serious and dramatic situation when a character decides to die because they've seen and done everything and feel that life and the world have nothing left to offer them but crushing boredom, see Nothing Left to Do but Die.
See also: Check, Please!, Mistaken for Bad Vision, No More for Me.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
- A random demon audience member in YuYu Hakusho proclaims "Somebody kill me, now I've seen everything!" after witnessing an apparent one-shot kill.
Literature
- Invoked at the end of Shards of Honor. Emperor Ezar Vorbarra, expecting to be dead within the week, engages in a bit of Gallows Humor with Lord Aral Vorkosigan, who has just suggested the Minister of the Interior as a possible Regent for soon-to-be-Emperor Gregor: "So you do have something good to say for my Ministers after all. I may die now; I've heard everything". He doesn't die immediately, but after he's recruited Aral as Regent, he falls back in exhaustion, implying he's not long for the world (In the sequel, Barrayar, Ezar hangs on just long enough to see Aral confirmed as Regent, after which he finally succumbs to his long illness).
- Subverted in The Winter Queen: this looks like the cause of the suicide on the first pages, but there is a lot more to it.
- Played for drama in Haunted (2005). The Nightmare Box supposedly shows the "truth" of reality, driving people who look into it insane and eventually to suicide.
- In Wizard and Glass, a saloon singer, while witnessing an epic Mexican Standoff, declares, "You can take me to the path at the end of the clearing, cuz now I've seen it all". She doesn't kill herself, but she does remain standing on a stool in the middle of a bar that's probably about to see a gunfight, claiming that getting shot at this point would be totally Worth It.
- In The Restaurant at the End of the Universe the magazine Playbeing states that "When you are tired of Ursa Minor Beta you are tired of life". As a result the suicide rate there quadruples overnight.
- This is not unusual in The Culture, where some people become so long-lived they really have seen everything. One such person is encountered in Look to Windward — ironically there is one thing he hasn't seen, an upcoming grand concert performance, but he still thinks it's pointless to postpone his planned suicide as there's always one more thing.
Live-Action TV
- A dramatic version of this was the original explanation for Gideon's disappearance on Criminal Minds after Mandy Patinkin quit. However, Patinkin refused to do that scene and it was changed to an indefinite road trip that ended with him getting murdered several seasons later.
- This one is not exactly a suicide, but pretty close. On an episode of Friends, Phoebe believes that she has been possessed by the spirit of an old woman who didn't want to pass on until she had seen everything. Later she attends a lesbian wedding, at which point she says in an old lady voice, "Well, now I've seen everything!" goes limp for a moment, and then is back to being her old self.
- Happened in a couple of different ways in The Golden Girls. Once during one of Rose's infamously irritating St. Olaf stories, Sophia simply looks up and says "Check, please". In a second-hand example, when Dorothy is helping Sophia deliver Meals on Wheels, after dealing with a particularly frustrating person on the route, Dorothy walks outside, looks to the heavens and says, "She's ready, God".
- The Good Place: Part of the Celestial Bureaucracy that runs the afterlife is The Accounting Office where all of humanity's acts are judged and assigned a value to determine whether they get you into the Good or Bad Places. One accountant called Matt is in charge of evaluating "Weird Sex Things" and being exposed to so much depravity has clearly taken its toll on him.
Matt: I'm still waiting on a response to the request I filed for immediate suicide.
Neil: Request denied. - In an episode of Married... with Children, when Jefferson is in the hospital next to an elderly man, after a few minutes of listening to Kelly, the old man simply says, "That it, I'm gone" pulls out his IV, and promptly flatlines right there.
- In the Star Trek: Voyager episode "Death Wish", a member of the Q Continuum (played by Gerrit Graham) wishes to end his life because he feels that his purpose in life as a Q is finished and that immortality is more of a life sentence than a boon to being a Q. It takes a court case between that Q and the Q played by John De Lancie arbitrated by Captain Janeway to determine that a Q has a right to becoming mortal if he or she so desires to be and so that Q was granted his request to become mortal so that he could die in peace, although Janeway argues that his newly-granted mortality should give him a reason to explore that existence instead of ending it. He kills himself anyway, feeling that he'd only be pretending to be human.
- Played for Laughs in an episode of Titus, where in a gag in the negative space, Titus wonders what would happen if he got everything he ever wanted. The a cutaway gag plays where his girlfriend agrees to marry him and is pregnant with his baby, his father says he's proud of him and he finds out his Hot Rod shop won a major industry award. Titus declars he's never been happier then runs off screen before a gunshot is heard.
- In The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "Time Enough at Last", Henry Bemis is the only survivor of an H-bomb. Since almost everything is destroyed, there is not much to do. This upsets Bemis and he pounds his hands on his knees and says "If only there was something to do!" He sees a gun and puts it up to his head to shoot himself, but he sees a library and doesn't shoot himself. Of course, this being the Twilight Zone, he was better off with the first option. He had all the time in the world, but not his glasses.
MMORPGs
- Common when people have run out of things to do in EVE Online, and often can be justified as in-character.
Music
- Matthew Sweet's song "Someone to Pull the Trigger" (the title an example of Exactly What It Says on the Tin), which includes the line, "Everything I'll ever be, I've been".
- Implied in "Try Not To Breathe" by R.E.M.: the verses, when taken at face value, describe the narrator attempting to suffocate themselves, while the backing vocals repeat the line "I have seen things you will never see".
- Kris Kristofferson song "Kiss the World Good-bye".
Tabletop Games
- Some tabletop RPG players, not realizing that it's possible to simply retire a player character if they've gotten bored with it, have had their PCs commit suicide so they can roll up a new one. More enterprising players who want a PC to die but want to avoid the anti-climax of suicide will coordinate with the Game Master or seek out an opportunity for a Heroic Sacrifice, Last Stand, Bolivian Army Ending, Suicide by Cop (when the character or cops are villainous), Taking You with Me, a heroic My Death Is Just the Beginning, or any of the Death Tropes that can cause a Dying Moment of Awesome.
- An artifact from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons was a magical organ that could produce various effects by playing certain songs. However, if the performer who played the song rolled high enough, anyone who heard the song (including the performer) would be so struck by its beauty that everything else would pale in comparison, causing them to become depressed or even suicidal.
Video Games
- In Arknights, this is how The Damazti Cluster, leader of the eponymous Sarkaz Tribe and one of Theresis' top agents, is finally defeated in Chapter 12. A combination of their ability to clone themselves seemingly-infinitely, their Voluntary Shapeshifting and their nature as a Mind Hive spread across the aforementioned clones means it's near impossible to kill them in a straight fight. However, they're also one of the oldest beings on Terra, having been around since the original Sarkaz civilisation, the Teekaz, fell, and talking to Logos reveals just how monotonous The Damazti's current existence is: they really have Seen It All and only really strive to emulate others to try and counteract their Lack of Empathy. When Logos points out that the only thing they've not experienced yet is true death, The Damazti commends him, Amiya and The Doctor for their efforts before voluntarily expiring.
- In Source games like Garry's Mod and Team Fortress 2, hitting a killbind to either ragdoll or explode is a common reaction from not-serious players to witnessing something extremely odd, exceptionally funny, or both. Hilarity Ensues either way.
Webcomics
- chainsawsuit: The All-Award: the totality of human achievement. The recipient of the award celebrates by leaping into an open grave.
- In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja Dracula is carefully planning one of these. But before he dies, he wants to know what awaits him on the other side.
- Slightly Damned: Rhea jokes about killing herself after seeing a killer bunny transform into a human.
This is too much. Hand me that knife - I'm going to kill myself.
Web Original
- Apparently the result of drinking "the perfect drink" as brewed by SCP-294.
Subject later committed suicide, leaving a note which read "I'm sorry, but at this point everything's just one big letdown". Requesting such a drink again is highly discouraged.
- Cyanide and Happiness played this very straight in one episode, where a man wordlessly puts a gun to his head after witnessing a very bizarre series of events, and checking "see everything" off his bucket list.
- raocow, during his Let's Play of Vip 5 (a Super Mario World hack). Upon seeing the overworld map for the first time, he scrolls around the whole screen to look at everything, then he stops talking so he can hum along with the background music, Treasure of the Rudra's "Crime of the Heart". Then:
raocow: Well, now I've got an argument that life isn't worth living anymore, because I doubt I'll ever experience anything better ever in my life. So, um, this is the last video ever I'll ever make as I'm going to end my life shortly. See y'all in the afterlife.
- We Are Our Adventuring Avatars: Deadpool does this upon seeing a character from Hatoful Boyfriend.
Deadpool: ...Okay, no. Pigeons... no. Just... no. We're done here.
(he puts a gun to his head, and pulls the trigger) - In SynthOrange's Let's Play of Princess Maker 2, the King commands his general to kill him, and then put every man, woman, and child in the kingdom to the sword. The reason? He had eaten the last of Lizzie Shinkicker's prize-winning mackerel in cream sauce, and with none left, saw no reason to go on living anymore. Fortunately, it only happened in a parallel universe.
- At the end of Heavy is Dead, after the Heavy came back to life and killed the Engineer, the Spy decried the whole scenario as being 'idiotic' and left to hang himself by backflipping off a chair.
Western Animation
- A number of Looney Tunes cartoons employ this gag, usually with a side character offing himself in response to witnessing something outrageous. Bob Clampett in particular loved this gag , but each of the WB directors used it at least once. Of course, since the 1970s, Moral Guardians - afraid that children might procure firearms and, on a lark, blow their own brains out - have edited most of these scenes out for TV airings.
- Clampett may have been the first to use the gag in 1940's "The Sour Puss", where a caged canary, watching a cat tear around the house in paroxysms of glee after hearing he and Porky are going to go fishing, says the "Now I've seen everything!" line in a Jack Benny voice.
- The trope image is from Clampett's "An Itch in Time". When Elmer's cat sees both his owner and the dog getting carried off on a plate by A. Flea, he quips "Now I've seen everything!" and shoots himself in the head with a pistol.
- In Clampett's adaptation of "Horton Hatches the Egg", a Lorre Lookalike fish does this after seeing Horton, sitting on a nest in his tree, going by on the deck of a freighter.
- Frank Tashlin's "The Stupid Cupid" has a scene where Elmer Fudd, in the guise of Cupid, shoots an arrow at a bulldog who's chasing a cat. Instantly smitten, the dog gets on his knees and declares his love for the cat in a French accent. To which the cat — that is, the male cat — shrugs to the camera, "Now I've seen everything!" and shoots himself in the head... followed by all the rest of his nine lives doing the same.
- In Robert McKimson's "The Grey Hounded Hare", the race announcer says, "Now I've seen everything!"...and then a gunshot is heard over the P.A. speaker.
- Chuck Jones' Cheese Chasers uses an extended version of this trope and Nothing Left to Do but Die. Hubie and Bertie discover that they have eaten enough cheese to make themselves sick of the stuff, and decide to commit suicide by cat. Their efforts cause the cat to go mad and try to commit suicide himself by asking a bulldog to "massacre" him, driving the dog mad as well.
- Metalocalypse has something very similar to this. One episode deals with the group learning to be stand-up comedians from a strange old sea captain. After they put on a good performance, he says "Well, can't teach them no more", pulls out a gun, and blows his brains out. Despite being an animated series, this is decidedly not cartoonish.
- Cartman from South Park makes an attempt after watching High School Musical.
Cartman: (brightly) Well, I'm out, guys. If this is what's cool now I think I'm done. I no longer have any connection to this world. I'm going to go home and kill myself. Goodbye, friends.
- Justice League: Crisis on Two Earths: Owlman becomes an Omnicidal Maniac through an extreme version of this trope.
Owlman: It doesn't matter.
- Futurama does a version in "The Late Phillip J. Fry". After witnessing Earth become nothing more than a charred, dead planet and there being no way to get home, Fry suggests to Farnsworth and Bender that they might as well watch the universe end, and with nothing else to do, they agree.
Real Life
- Actor George Sanders committed suicide and left a note behind saying he'd done it because he was bored.
- Hunter S. Thompson claimed to have committed suicide because he had been alive for seventeen more years than he actually wanted to be. His family states it was a well-thought out act resulting from Thompson's many painful and chronic medical conditions.
- George Eastman, the founder of Eastman Kodak, left a note saying "To my friends, My work is done. Why wait?"
- An old Italian saying: "Vedi Napoli e poi mori" (See Naples and die) plays with this trope. It can mean that after seeing beautiful Naples, you can die happily. Joke is, it can also mean "See Naples and then Mori" (Mori is a town in northern Italy). Naples is also an Italian euphemism for Hell. So it can also be interpreted as something along the lines of "See Hell and die" (Va fa napoli, or something very close, is essentially the Italian bowdlerised version of Go to Hell).
- Naples also being a hot spot for certain plagues through history also has something to do with the idea. Going to Naples meant you might catch a fatal disease and die there.
- Additionally, "vaffanculo" idiomatically indicates "go fuck yourself" or literally "go to the ass". The bowdlerization brings to mind someone saying "vaffan", glancing at a child, and finishing with "apoli" and a sheepish look.
- Naples also being a hot spot for certain plagues through history also has something to do with the idea. Going to Naples meant you might catch a fatal disease and die there.
- The possibility was invoked by Dr Johnson when he stated, "When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life" (Parodied with the Douglas Adams quote under Literature).
- Greek philosopher Democritus, father of atomismnote , allegedly decided to starve to death once he had reached the age of 100, stating that he had lived enough and wanted to die with dignity.
