As a Death Trope, this naturally involves spoilers.
Times where no body is left behind after death in Anime and Manga.
Examples:
- Naturally shows up in .hack. When a monster is killed, it slumps to the ground, then vanishes. When a PC is killed, their body goes limp, and turns grey, and vanishes if there's no-one left to revive them. When someone gets data-drained, however, their sprite starts fragmenting, and drifts away piece by piece.
- In Attack on Titan, any body parts cut off a Titan dissolves into steam and smoke. Their whole body dissolves if they are killed.
- In Balancing My Support Magic and Summoning Magic in a Different World, the monsters all disappear in a puff of smoke, leaving only some crystals, and whatever weapons or armor they were wearing, behind. It has yet to be explained how this works, as when wounded, they bleed blue blood, and when they rape women, they clearly cover their targets with semen that sticks around even after they are long gone...
- In Bleach, low-level hollows dissolve when they are killed, while the bodies of most Arrancar and shinigami can last a few hours before breaking down (there are some exceptions, related to the manner in which they were killed).
- In Campione! Heretic Gods and Divine Beasts use matter associated with their nature to create bodies, and when killed their bodies revert to that substance. Thus a kraken turns to water and an earth goddess like Athena turns to sand.
- When a robot dies in Casshern Sins it turns to dust due to the rapid rusting caused by the Ruin.
- In Death Note when Shinigami die, they dissolve into sand.
- Thoroughly averted in Delicious in Dungeon, since the party needs to harvest the corpses in order to get ingredients. This includes draining the blood, deboning them, etc.
- Digimon:
- Digimon dissolve into data upon death. Occasionally, good Digimon revert to digieggs for plot-related purposes.
- In Digimon V-Tamer 01, only those who end their own program leave eggs behind.
- In Digimon Tamers, nobody leaves eggs, though their physical data remains and can be reformatted to create another Digimon, such as Mephistomon or the Devas.
- Also in Tames, agents of the D-Reaper dissolve once destroyed.
- Pointedly averted in Digimon X-Evolution, where the only times a Digimon disappeared like that is if they were NOT dead, and if they were dead, their body WAS left behind.
- Dragon Ball:
- In Dragon Ball, Goku does this to a badly beaten Tambourine in their rematch: when he attempted to run away, Goku, with his Kamahameha, blasted him without a trace.
- Dragon Ball Z:
- Goku's body fades away when he dies. Kami has taken it to the other world so that Goku can have his body in the afterlife for training. Otherwise, people usually stay put where they died.
- Chiaotzu self-destructs in an attempt to take out Nappa, and no body gets left behind. Unfortunately his death is in vain as Nappa is unscathed.
- When Piccolo dies protecting Gohan, due to their shared life-link, Kami fades away from Mr. Popo telling Mr. Popo that he leaves the rest to him.
- Piccolo and Guru (the second time) disappear as well.
- This does NOT happen to the bodies of Burter, Guldo, and Recoome. Even though Guldo and Recoome look like they should have been obliterated by Vegeta's energy blast their corpses are still intact even though they are shown to retain their bodies when we see them in Other World. Jeice, on the other hand, gets completely vaporized, so this trope does apply to him.
- This happens to Krillin when he gets blown up by Frieza.
- All versions of Cell who appear in the main series has been hit with this trope. Justified due to his regenerative properties combined with his saiyan genes. Present Cell is completely destroyed by Future Trunks and Krillin while still in his larval state. The Cell that is the Big Bad of the Cell saga is completely atomised by Super Saiyan 2 Gohan's kamekameha. Future Cell is completely destroyed by Future Trunks' Heat Dome Attack.
- Later, when Vegeta sacrifices himself in an attempt to kill Buu, his attack drains so much energy from his body that it turns to stone, which quickly crumbles into dust and is blown away by the wind.
- Dragon Ball Super:
- A flashback shows Future Trunks using a Burning Attack to completely vaporize Future Dabura and Future Babidi before they could release Majin Buu.
- When Beerus kills the present timeline's Zamasu with hakai, he completely destroys him, disintegrating his body and leaving no trace of him.
- The homunculi from Fullmetal Alchemist disintegrate into nothingness upon dying, as well as the Philosopher's Stone at their core that gives them life. Dismembered body parts also disintegrate as they're regenerated. In the 2003 anime, however, a few (namely Greed and Pride) melted into red goop.
- If a Future Diary holder's diary gets destroyed, their body disappears in a vortex. Holders can still die any other way; the vortex only appears with this specific method. Yuno was rather put out with this revelation as she'd been expecting Ludicrous Gibs.
- In Get Backers, Amon's body dissolves into feathers after he gave his heart to Shido to bring him back to life. Shido's body stuck around, possible because his death was more mundane.
- Another Tear Jerker as Teleporter Accident crosses into this towards the end of Giant Robo with the death of Ginrei, as what's left of her body disappears.
- The Zoanoids in Guyver (anime & manga) are engineered to dissolve after dying, in order to leave no evidence of their existence.
- Whenever anyone dies in Hoshin Engi, their body disappears and their soul flies away as a beam of light.
- Inuyasha: Happens fairly often to youkai slain by Inu-Yasha. Case in point: Hiten (the elder Thunder Brother) evaporated after Inu-Yasha delivered a fatal blow with Tessaiga. The many cases where youkai are slain by sacred arrows or the Wind Scar, et al, don't count. When Kikyou and Kagura go through Redemption Equals Death storylines, they also leave no bodies behind when they die.
- The black miko Tsubaki unites in the anime with a powerful demon. When he is destroyed, Tsubaki also dies and dissolves.
- Carrossea's body in Madlax presumably disappears off-screen as it is never shown after the episode when he dies. That is probably because he was Dead All Along.
- My-HiME:
- Whenever someone dies as a result of the HiME battles, the victim's heart stops, then their body's color fades, finally ending with slow dissolution into green sparks. Haruka, because she's a Badass Normal, simply refuses to "just die", preferring to get in a parting shot at Shizuru after calling her out on her "disgusting behavior".
- In the Else World sequel My-Otome, the same thing happens to any Otome/Master or Slave/Master relationship. My-Otome's problem is that it was porting over yet another familiar element from My-HiME while ignoring that the logic that series used for the sparkly deaths was specifically for raising the columns and powering the HiME star.
- Kira users in Nabari no Ou fade into dust when they die. Their clothes don't dissolve, leaving an interesting scene.
- Late into the Magic World arc in Negima! Magister Negi Magi, a special attack is introduced that causes anyone it hits to vanish in seconds. This only affects (most) residents of the magic world because said residents are actually part of an elaborate illusion, with the attack simply hacking them back out of existence.
- In Noragami, ayakashi spirits, upon defeat, disintegrate into nothing.
- Ebisu's body disappears with an explosion of blood, leaving only behind their bloodied clothes.
- Panty & Stocking with Garterbelt: When Panty and Stocking kill a ghost, it explodes. Becomes a plot point when they are tried for the murder of a friendly Ghost, as the fact that there was a body meant that they didn't do it, which their literal monkey lawyer juiced-up on electricity to the brain even points out the photo of the victim presented as the decisive evidence against them actually saved their entire case.
- In Pokémon: The Series movies, Latios, Sir Aaron, and Lucario disintegrate once they sacrifice themselves.
- Anything that dies in Psyren dissolves into sand in a few minutes, due to the changes in the environment after the meteor hit Earth.
- In the final episode of Puella Magi Madoka Magica you can briefly see the body of a Magical Girl doing this. It's hard to see though because the shot is panning out and she's dressed in green while laying on grass. This now happens to every Magical Girl upon death because of Madoka's wish. Evidence to support this is that Sayaka didn't leave a body behind either.
- Subverted in The Rising of the Shield Hero when Ren slays a dragon terrorizing a nearby village, only to just walk away, leaving the body behind on the mountainside. The body eventually rots, causing the exact same village to suffer a plague, and the dragon eventually resurrects as a zombie dragon and has to be put down again by Naofumi and burned to destroy the body. When he encounters Ren, he calls him out on leaving the body behind, accusing him of treating the world around him like a game where slain enemies just fade away eventually.
- Plenty of examples in Sailor Moon:
- Neflite/Nephrite is probably one of the more well-known examples, although it happens constantly to both villains and heroes. The latter obviously come Back from the Dead in season finales.
- Averted in the first season finale: When the Sphere of Destruction from Sailor Moon's final attack starts consuming the area around the Dark Kingdom, the bodies of the four Senshi are shown still laying in the same places they fell.
- In the anime series, this happen a lot of times with the Monster of the Week, which are usually disintegrated or turned into dust once they are defeated.
- In Saint Seiya, the final barrier between the Hades and Elysium is the Wall Of Lamentation, seemingly indestructible. Only by channeling the Cosmo of the Twelve Gold Saints of the Zodiac Houses, and creating sunlight in the depths of Hades, can it be breached. All Gold Saints, living or dead, friends or foes, burn their Cosmo, there is a blinding burst of light... And Shun and Seiya can only weep, for all that is left of the heroic Saints of Athena is their Gold Cloths shining in their wake.
- In Samurai Deeper Kyo, this becomes a case of Chekov's corpse. When members of the Mibu clan die or are killed, their bodies vanish into nothingness. Near the end it is revealed that this happens because the members of the Mibu clan are in fact puppets created by the long dead True Mibu, and vanish into nothing because they were originally created from nothing.
- A real Tear Jerker towards the end of s-CRY-ed when Ryoho awakens from near-death to find a pile of clothes and a recognizable hairclip. Scheris had saved his life using Eternal Devote, but doing so had completely consumed her. The emotional shock of this causes Ryuho's emotionless shell to break and for a while he breaks down in weeping, urged on by Kazuma telling him there's no shame in mourning.
- This happens to Nia Teppelin from Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann in the final episode.
- In Umineko: When They Cry, the Stakes of Purgatory do this when they die.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- Happens in Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds when Dark Signers die — upon their death, they crumble to dust.
- In the third season of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, people actually start dying. When this happens on camera instead of falling off a cliff, the people/duel monsters tend to glow bright white then fade into dust that blows away.
- Worth noting that in both series they got better.
