Basic Trope: Characters take off their shoes before killing themselves.
- Straight: Sakura is Driven to Suicide, and plans to do it by throwing herself off a building. Before she does so, she removes her shoes.
- Exaggerated:
- Sakura strips completely naked before jumping off the building.
- Rather than jumping off a building or cliff, Sakura drinks poison or shoots herself. She still removes her shoes.
- Downplayed: Sakura removes her regular shoes, but replaces them with her house slippers.
- Justified:
- Sakura's culture believes that just as one should remove their shoes before entering a house, one should remove their shoes before entering the afterlife.
- Sakura plans to posthumously gift the shoes to a dear friend or family member.
- Sakura wants her corpse to remind her friends and family of one of her most notable personality traits, so she deliberately dies barefoot.
- Inverted:
- Before jumping off the building, Sakura, who was barefoot, puts her shoes on.
- Sakura strips naked before jumping...except for her shoes.
- Sakura scales the building barefoot to reach the pair of shoes she left on top of it.
- Sakura scales the building naked but for a pair of shoes.
- Subverted:
- Although Sakura was barefoot when she jumped off the building, she did not remove her shoes; she was barefoot the whole time.
- Sakura jumps off the rooftop barefoot, only for her to soon henshin into a giant extraterrestrial humanoid warrior and battle a rampaging Kaiju. As it turns out, she just wanted her coming transformation to be more comfortable for her than it would otherwise be if she still had her shoes on during it.
- Double Subverted: Her family memorializes her by leaving a pair of her finest or most favorite shoes at the spot where she jumped from.
- Parodied: Sakura jumps off the building and dies, and then her spirit notices her body is still wearing shoes, so she comes Back from the Dead long enough to commit a Barefoot Suicide.
- Zig-Zagged: Some characters remove their shoes before committing suicide, others don't.
- Averted:
- Sakura does not kill herself.
- Sakura's culture has no hard-and-fast rules about shoes at the entryway, or etiquette around dying.
- Sakura leaves her shoes on when she jumps off.
- Enforced: Cultural beliefs about shoes, entryways, and the afterlife.
- Lampshaded: "Well, this is it...I guess I should take my shoes off first, huh?"
- Invoked: Sakura is Driven to Suicide in a culture where removing one's shoes before entering a house is a major etiquette rule.
- Exploited:
- Places where people come to commit suicide, in a culture that encourages shoe removal but accepts suicide, leave special racks where people can leave their shoes before they do the deed...or not.
- Sakura's friend Ayano pours glue into Sakura's shoes so she has more time to talk her down.
- Sakura was murdered, but her killer takes the shoes from her corpse and leaves them on the ledge she was pushed from to make it look like a suicide.
- Defied:
- Sakura decides not to kill herself.
- Sakura does not believe in an afterlife, only Cessation of Existence or The Nothing After Death. Since she's not "entering" any place (as far as she's concerned), there's no reason to take off her shoes before "entry."
- Sakura is too distraught to even consider taking a minute to remove her shoes; she just throws herself off the building.
- Just as Sakura jumps off of the building's rooftop, her younger brother, Hiroshi, suddenly interrupts her suicide attempt by grabbing onto the back of her shirt and pulling her back over the rooftop's edge in a desperate attempt to avoid needlessly losing the life of one of the only people in his life that's ever genuinely given at the very least one single flying coprolite about literally anything having to do with his general well-being.
- Implied:
- Sakura is seen as a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, with no shoes and a noose around her neck.
- Empty shoes are seen at the edge of a building as car alarms and police sirens are heard in the distance.
- Discussed: Sakura attends a discussion about people who have taken their lives after removing their shoes first.
- Conversed: Sakura and her sister talk about why you should remove your shoes before committing suicide.
Back to Barefoot Suicide
