Basic Trope: A Heroic Sacrifice that ends up being All for Nothing.
- Straight:
- Bob attempts to pull a Heroic Sacrifice to stop the Big Bad, Emperor Evulz, from pressing the Big Red Button that causes his evil plan to unfold. After his death, Evulz simply presses the red button anyway.
- Bob decides to take a bullet in order to save his friend Alice, who's secretly wearing a bullet-proof vest.
- Exaggerated: Bob's Heroic Sacrifice could've prevented Evulz from destroying the entire world, but since he doesn't, well...
- Downplayed:
- Bob doesn't die in the sacrifice, but does get severely injured and it ends up being for nothing.
- Bob's sacrifice manages to stop Evulz, but only because he never thought to pull the machine's blatantly-obvious plug before deciding dying was the answer.
- Justified: Bob didn't think his Heroic Sacrifice through, and Evulz is Genre Savvy enough to know how to prevent him from doing it.
- Bob is Wrong Genre Savvy and/or is working with bad information - as far as he knows, his sacrifice is necessary, but the audience knows it's not.
- Inverted: The sacrifice actually ends up making everything better, possibly because Bob was a Hate Sink to begin with so nobody really misses him.
- Subverted:
- As Bob dies, it's revealed that he hit the self-destruct button on Evulz' machine.
- It was a Disney Death, or Bob gets resurrected and destroys the machine.
- Double Subverted:
- It was a decoy.
- Then Bob tries to save Alice from the explosion, only to accidentally kill them both.
- Parodied: Bob tries Taking the Bullet for Alice at literally every opportunity, protecting her from everything from literal bullets to getting splashed at the pool. Alice isn't amused.
- Zig-Zagged: Whether Bob's sacrifice was senseless or not tends to be Depending on the Writer.
- Averted:
- Nobody does a Heroic Sacrifice.
- If someone does have a Heroic Sacrifice, it ends up being important.
- Enforced: "This is a Darker and Edgier work, we can't have Heroic Sacrifices be important!"
- Lampshaded: "Oh, self-disposing trash. Should have made the button self pressing as well."
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "They killed Bob off in that Heroic Sacrifice, only for it to do nothing? How cruel."
- Played for Drama: Bob is a Death Seeker, but believes that Suicide is Shameful and that Death Equals Redemption. While he claims that he's just trying to protect Alice, he's clearly just looking for a "heroic" reason to die.
Back to Senseless Sacrifice
