History Main / FamilyExtermination

[[foler:Tabletop Games]]

[[folder:Theater]]
* In ''Theatre/{{Macbeth}}'', Macbeth orders the whole Macduff family to be exterminated after being told to "beware Macduff". Unfortunately, Macduff himself isn't at home when the slaughter is carried out.

* The quest given by Mephala, the Daedric Prince of Plotting and Schemes (it's not for nothing she's also called "Webspinner"), has the player invoke this trope. Two families that share a single village have been feuding for generations, but they manage to maintain an uneasy peace among themselves. The player must kill the patriarchs of both clans, then steal an item belonging to them and leave them at the opposite crime scene, framing the members of the opposing family for the murders. When the bodies are discovered, any chance at pacifism goes out the window, and the members of the clans brutally murder each other in the streets until only one survivor remains.

* ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsIVOblivion'' features at least two examples:

** This is BigBad Mankor Camoran's plot for the game: he murders Emperor Uriel Septim and his three sons, which means that there is no one to wear the [[MacGuffin Amulet of Kings]], a magical artifact that was granted to the original emperor of Tamriel by PhysicalGod Talos. The Amulet is a CosmicKeystone that needs to be worn by someone of royal blood to keep the Dragonfires, magical flames that protect Tamriel from [[EldritchAbomination evil creatures known as Daedra]], burning. It turns out that Camoran [[DealWithTheDevil struck a bargain]] with Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction: if he removed the Dragonfires from the equation and allowed Dagon to invade the physical realm, he'd take Camoran, his children, and their followers to "paradise." The player character's main quest involves finding the emperor's illegitimate son and elevating him to the throne, preventing Mehrunes Dagon from destroying all of creation.

* [[MechanicalMonster Clockwerk,]] the BigBad of the ''VideoGame/SlyCooper'' series, has this as his overall goal. A massive owl that's [[Really700YearsOld thousands of years old]], he so despises the Cooper family that he's gradually replaced his entire body with cybernetic parts just so he can keep tormenting them across the centuries. He's spent his immortal life trying to wipe out every single one of the raccoon thieves, and it's eventually revealed that the combination of his determination to massacre them and the sheer hatred in his heart have made him functionally immortal--he wants to kill the Coopers so badly that he ''can't die until he does.''

** One [[ProfessionalKiller Dark Brotherhood]] quest sees the player character given a contract to wipe out an entire family line. The first target is the clan matriarch, who believes the player to be a courier that will deliver birthday presents to her children--so she's [[NiceJobBreakingItHero prepared a detailed list of their locations and schedules]]. The player even has the opportunity to [[VideoGameCrueltyPotential mock the kids about how much their mother bled]] before killing them, too.

* In ''Manga/OnePiece'', This is the World Government's M.O when it comes to Gold Roger since he was such an infamous pirate the influenced the Great Pirate Era. As such they try to find any traces of his bloodline or loved ones and snuff them out just to send a message to pirates around the world. [[spoiler: This ended up including Roger's then newborn, Ace, as they were so paranoid they instantly targeted him for death. Ace's mother had to actually hold in her pregnancy with him to fly under the radar of the Marines before giving birth to him. Years later, they ultimately succeed when Ace takes a fatal hit to protect Luffy from Akainu's lava powers and dies.]]

* In ''[[Film/CountYorga Return of Count Yorga]]'', Yorga becomes smitten with a girl named Cynthia and wants her to willingly accept him and become a vampire. To do so, he sends his brides to her household and has them feed on the entire family save her (Though Cynthia's sister, Helen, is turned and becomes a bride) then having Cythia brought to his manor where he claim she was in a car accident that claimed his family. Over the course of the movie however she slowly starts to regain her memory.

* The backstory of ''ComicBook/ThePunisher'' involves his whole family being killed by gangsters.
* ComicBook/{{Batman}}’s parents were murdered by a criminal.

* [[MechanicalMonster Clockwerk,]] the BigBad of the ''Series/SlyCooper'' series, has this as his overall goal. A massive owl that's [[Really700YearsOld thousands of years old]], he so despises the Cooper family that he's gradually replaced his entire body with cybernetic parts just so he can keep tormenting them across the centuries. He's spent his immortal life trying to wipe out every single one of the raccoon thieves, and it's eventually revealed that the combination of his determination to massacre them and the sheer hatred in his heart have made him functionally immortal--he wants to kill the Coopers so badly that he ''can't die until he does.''

** This is BigBad Mankor Camoran's plot for the game: he murders Emperor Uriel Septim and his three sons, which means that there is no one to wear the [[MacGuffin Amulet of Kings]], a magical artifact that was granted to the original emperor of Tamriel by PhysicalGod Talos. The Amulet is a CosmicKeystone that needs to be worn to keep the Dragonfires, magical flames that protect Tamriel from [[EldritchAbomination evil creatures known as Daedra]]. It turns out that Camoran [[DealWithTheDevil struck a bargain]] with Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction: if he removed the Dragonfires from the equation and allowed Dagon to invade the physical realm, he'd take Camoran, his children, and their followers to "paradise." The player character's main quest involves finding the emperor's illegitimate son and elevating him to the throne, preventing Mehrunes Dagon from destroying all of creation.

If [[LastOfHisKind there are any survivors]], they are likely to [[YouKilledMyFather carry a grudge]], or even vengeance, against the killer(s) (if they know who the killers are).

* ''Webcomic/TheOrderOfTheStick'': Vaarsuvius uses their borrowed epic magic to cast "Familicide" to wipe out an entire bloodline of black dragons, [[spoiler: which turns out to include the dragon-blooded Draketooth clan of humans, who would otherwise have been allies of the Order.]]

->Every living creature that directly shares your bloodline is dead.

! Examples:

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[[folder: Real Life]]

! Examples

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* In July 1918, the immediate Imperial Family of Russia (Tsar Nicholas, Tsarina Alexandra, and their five children Olga, Tatiana, Maria, Anastasia, and Alexei) and four of their servants were murdered by the Bolsheviks in order to not have a power struggle if the revolution failed. The pro-Tsarist white army was approaching their location and the Bolsheviks didn't want them to be found. They had originally decided to just kill Nicholas and Alexei to wipe out the heirs but decided to kill Alexandra and the girls as to not drag their tenuous hold on the country into a war with their relatives in other countries who would send their armies to come and get them.

* In 2016, in Pike County, Ohio, four members of the Wagner family [[https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/13/us/ohio-piketon-killings-arrests/index.html murdered eight members of the Rhoden family]], possibly over child custody.

* Batman's parents were murdered by criminals.

* In ''Film/TheGodfatherPartII'', Don Ciccio orders the whole family on Antonio Andolini killed. They are all killed except for Antonio's son, Vito, who escapes to America and becomes Vito Corleone. Vito returns decades later and [[NiceJobBreakingItHerod kills Don Ciccio]].

* The ''Series/StarTrekTheNextGeneration'' episode "The Vengeance Factor" features this twice over. A century earlier, the planet Acamar was caught up in an endless series of {{Blood Feud}}s between rival clans, one of which, the Tralesta, was nearly completely destroyed by another clan, the Lornak. The handful of survivors agreed to turn one of their own into a biologically immortal assassin so that she could hunt down ''every single Lornak'' no matter how long it took. By the time the episode takes place, the few other remaining Tralesta are all long dead, only the assassin, a mild-mannered "young" woman named Yuta, remains. While she's long since grown weary of the killing and death, the process that made her stop aging also seems to have locked in the state of grief and pain over losing her clan and she's ''very'' close to completing her mission. As she puts it to the penultimate Lornak, "I am the last of my line, but my clan will outlive yours!". Her chemistry with Riker is ''almost'' enough to convince her to give up on the vendetta, but not quite and he is forced to vaporize her before she can finish off the last survivor (an important political leader engaged in peace talks).

* ''Webcomic/OrderOfTheStick'': Vaarsuvius uses their borrowed epic magic to cast "Familicide" to wipe out an entire bloodline of black dragons, [[spoiler: which turns out to include the dragon-blooded Draketooth clan of humans, who would otherwise have been allies of the Order.]]

** This is BigBad Mankor Camoran's plot for the game: he murders Emperor Uriel Septim and his three sons, which means that there is no one to wear the [[MacGuffin Amulet of Kings]], a magical artifact that was granted to the original emperor of Tamriel by PhysicalGod Talos. The Amulet is a CosmicKeystone that needs to be worn to keep the Dragonfires, magical flames that protect Tamriel from [[EldritchAbominations evil creatures known as Daedra]]. It turns out that Camoran [[DealWithTheDevil struck a bargain]] with Mehrunes Dagon, the Daedric Prince of Destruction: if he removed the Dragonfires from the equation and allowed Dagon to invade the physical realm, he'd take Camoran, his children, and their followers to "paradise." The player character's main quest involves finding the emperor's illegitimate son and elevating him to the throne, preventing Mehrunes Dagon from destroying all of creation.

If [[LastOfHisKind there are any survivors]], they are likely to [[YouKilledMyFather carry a grudge]], or even vengeance, against the killer(s) (if they know who they are).

[[AC:Anime]]

* The Uchiha Clan Massacre in {{Naruto}} was done to prevent their potential uprising against the Konoha village. It was done by their own member, Uchiha Itachi, who's more loyal to the village than to his clan.

[[AC:ComicBook]]
* During Grant Morrison's run in Creator/DCComics Comicbook/AnimalMan the family of the titular character was murdered as a retaliation for his ecoactivism. It was later undone by [[AuthorAvatar Morrison]] [[BreakingTheFourthWall himself]].

* ''Film/ThePunisher2004'': [[Main/AdaptationalBackstoryChange His backstory is even more dramatic compared to the comics]]: his entire family is exterminated during a family reunion, not only his wife and children.

* In the science fiction book ''Literature/KillRatio'', strains of an engineered plague that only targets specific bloodlines are released in the UN's Headquarters on the moon. The first victims of the plague are members of an Arabian family that run a small French restaurant in the lunar complex.The only survivor of the attack is a member of their kitchen staff who married into the family -- an anthropologist who studies the mysterious deaths notes that the survivor is Kabyle.
* In ''[[Literature/{{Redwall}} The Pearls of Lutra]]'', there is the Lutra otter clan that got exterminated (except for a SoleSurvivor) because of the beautiful pink pearls they owned that the BigBad wanted for his crown. [[spoiler:He never got the pearls anyway, and Martin the Warrior (the Second) shouted the name of Lutra when killing him]].

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[[AC:WebComic]]
* ''WebComic/OrderOfTheStick'': Vaarsuvius uses their borrowed epic magic to cast "Familicide" to wipe out an entire bloodline of black dragons, [[spoiler: which turns out to include the dragon-blooded Draketooth clan of humans, who would otherwise have been allies of the Order.]]

* ''WebVideo/EverymanHybrid'': Stephanie's DarkAndTroubledPast involves her coming home from school and finding her entire family not only killed by Slender Man, but dismembered and shoved into bloody garbage bags hanging from the trees. This caused her to burn down her house, with her family's corpses inside, and flee to New Jersey, where she met the [=EverymanHYBRID=] boys, and was done simply because Slender Man is possessive and wanted to hurt her. [[spoiler:Later subverted, as it turns out [[MindScrew her family may not have existed at all, apart from her memories.]]]]

* The Petit family was exterminated, apart from the father (who survived), by Steven Hayes and Joshua Komisarjevski, who came to burlarize the Petits' house and then, after raping the mother and her two daughters, set fire to the building.
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/In_Cold_Blood Herbert Clutter]], a wealthy farmer residing in Holcomb, Kansas, was murdered, along with his wife Bonnie and his two younger daughters Nancy and Kenyon, by the recently paroled Richard Eugene "Dick" Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who wanted to rob the save they thought was were. Hickock and Smith were hanged on 1965,and were the last to be executed in Kansas since. It inspired Capote in writing ''Literature/InColdBlood''
* On 1869, from August 24 to September 19, [[http://www.executedtoday.com/2009/01/19/1870-jean-baptiste-troppmann-mass-murderer/ Jean-Baptiste Troppmann]] murdered his associate Jean Kinck, his wife Hortense and six of their seven children, the last one being with a wetnurse, becoming one of the more reviled criminals in the 1870s France before being beheaded on 1870.
* On April 13, 2003, David Hotyat exterminated Xavier Flactif ans his family, [[DrivenByEnvy out of jealousy]] because Flactif was wealthier than Hotyat.
* Happens sometimes in gang wars involving the more hermetic, blood-relation-based organized crime groups such as the Sicilian Mafia and more recently the drug cartels of Central and South America. Simply having the same last name as an opposing faction is reason enough to be killed, especially in the "vendetta" culture of Sicily where males are often honor-bound to avenge their slain relatives. In such a culture, it makes perfect (if chilling) sense to just [[KillEmAll kill an entire family]] and not have to worry about vengeance being taken years down the road.
* On 2016, in Pike County, Ohio, four members of the Wagner family [[https://edition.cnn.com/2018/11/13/us/ohio-piketon-killings-arrests/index.html murdered eight members of the Rhoden family]], possibly over child custody.