Family Unfriendly Death / Other Media

Ballads

• In the Scottish ballad "The Twa Sisters" (#10 of the Child Ballads), two constantly bickering princesses who have fallen in love with the same man go for a walk on the banks of a swollen river. One comes back and says the other one fell in and drowned. No one can find the body - but a few months later a wandering bard shows up with a harp made from the dead princess's bones and strung with her hair. The harp plays itself and sings that her sister pushed her into the river. In Patricia C. Wrede's retelling of the story, there is a third princess, who knows her sister was a liar and suspects the harp might, too — especially since there are lies in what it said.
  • Loreena Mckennitt performs an excellent version of this ballad called The Bonny Swans (which is easily findable on Youtube).
  • In yet another version (one with a particularly upbeat and sunny tempo), the elder sister's punishment for drowning her sibling is being boiled in lead. So much fun to sing with one's actual sisters!
• Ballads in general are full of this sort of thing. Perhaps the most horrifying of the lot is "Long Lankin" (Child #93), in which an itinerant serial killer murders a lord's baby and then his wife:
  "We will pinch him, we will prick him,
  we will stab him with a pin,
  And the nurse shall hold the basin
  for the blood all to run in."
  So they pinched him and they pricked him,
  then they stabbed him with a pin,
  And the false nurse held the basin
  for the blood all to run in.

Followed by Long Lankin being hanged and the nurse being burned on a pyre at the end of the song.

• In the Child Ballad The Lord of Lorn and the False Steward, the false steward is executed, gruesomely, for his treachery.
• The ballad "Child Owlet" ends with the title character being torn apart by horses after being falsely accused of attempted rape:
  ''There was no stone on Elkin Moor
  No broom nor bonny whin
  But's dripping with Child Owlet's blood
  And pieces of his skin.
  There was no grass on Elkin Moor
  No broom nor bonny rush
  But's dripping with Child Owlet's blood
  And pieces of his flesh.
• The French song "La blanche biche" ("The White Doe") tells the story of a young woman turning into said animal every night because of a spell. She ends up killed by her own hunting brother, dismembered and cooked; then her severed head on the table speaks to the guests...

Comic Strips

• The Dick Tracy comics had some horriffic deaths in them, and not only the villains either. One of the worst splatterfests was the story about Itchy. He shoots, stabs, and runs down cops, crooks, and uninvolved citizens with cheery abandon, and when Tracy finally catches up with him, Itchy decides to kill Tracy by somewhat graphically starving him to death. When Tracy finally shot him down like a dog, the readers were rejoicing.

Eastern Animation

• Long John Silver in The Treasure Planet, a 1982 animated sci-fi take on Treasure Island 20 years before Disney's. After murdering the commander and setting his ship to explode with the cast still on it, Phillip shoots Silver in the gut with a laser pistol, resulting in Silver bursting aflame, slowly bleeding out, and crawling away in confused agony before he expires.

Music

• The first verse of Aesop Rock's "Blood Sandwich" recalls a childhood incident at one of his younger brother's Little League games where a gopher appeared in the field, who the coach mauled to death with a baseball bat. The whole spectacle was so off-putting that the game was immediately called off.

Puppet Shows

• Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons has this in spades; the main characters aren't afraid to use guns. There are even a few deaths that are family-unfriendly simply because of the implications.
  • For example, a plane full of people is forced to crash in the ocean in the second episode. It gets worse when a duplicate of the plane was used in a successful assassination of a world leader.
  • In the first episode, the original, full human Captain Scarlet is killed and then the Mysteron version is shot and falls off of a huge viewing platform, screaming as he goes.
  • Multiple members of SPECTRUM from red shirts to nearly-main characters are shot, crushed, drowned or pushed off cliffs. There's a fair number of scenes where the last you see of some red shirts is a flapping hand poking out from under a pile of snow or rocks that eventually goes still.
  • The crowning moment of this trope for Captain Scarlet has to be when the title character throws an electric cable into a Mysteron agent. He screams and catches fire as he's electrocuted.
• Thunderbirds has a number of harrowing deaths by implication: the first Fireflash to go missing was full of passengers. Seeing as the second one was intact on the floor of the ocean after crashing, one assumes all the passengers and crew of the first died of suffocation in the sunken aircraft while the aircraft's instruments were reading wildly off course.

Roleplay

• Several characters in Darwin's Soldiers die some pretty horrible deaths.
• The modus operandi of Venomstripe of Warrior Cats RPG.

Theatre

• Herbert Nirdlinger's murder in ACT Theatre's recent play of Double Indemnity was pretty traumatizing.

Toys

• BIONICLE had several, but mostly in web serials and books, so it was up to your imagination to picture them. Still, they were pretty gruesome: for example alternate versions of characters getting frozen and shattered to pieces, experiencing a Portal Cut, and being literally broken to pieces with a warhammer. Makuta in general tended to suffer quite horrible deaths. Some had their armor melted away with a virus, and their "essence" (containing their mind) incinerated. Also in the serials, Ancient got blown to atoms, and another side character, Botar had his internal organs crushed through his armor. Besides the web serials, some more illustrated works also depicted such events. An example is the last comic of '08, which showed Makuta being zapped to dust by a lightning storm. Finally, the death of the ultimate Big Bad, Makuta Teridax himself also fits this trope. While in the comic, it looked like a simple asteroid caught him in the head, blowing a smoking hole into his skull, the illustrated on-line story medium, the Mata Nui Saga depicted the same event in a more violent way: he got pushed into an oncoming planet, and the upper part of his head shattered to pieces. Interestingly, according to the writer, he originally had a more graphic way of killing off Teridax in mind, which the Story Team finally rejected. This would have involved the hero, Mata Nui tearing his chest open.

Web Animation

• With DEATH BATTLE! being a... fight to the death, there are quite a few of these. Stand-outs:
  • "Fox McCloud vs. Bucky O'Hare" has Fox strangling Bucky and then blasting his head off with his laser pistol.
  • "Princess Peach vs. Princess Zelda" ends with Zelda getting kicked in the face so hard that her head splatters like a melon.
  • "Harry Potter vs. Luke Skywalker" has Harry screaming in agony as his head splits open at the scar.
  • The "Starter Pokemon Battle Royale" has Venusaur being roasted alive and Charizard getting his wings ripped off and being filled with water until he explodes.
  • "Beast vs. Goliath" ends with the former being graphically bifurcated.
  • The "Goku vs. Superman" rematch ends with Goku getting his brain vaporised by Superman's heat vision.
  • "Yang Xiao Long vs. Tifa Lockhart" ends with the former finishing her opponent off with a shotgun-gauntlet Recoil Boosted Neck Snap. Notable as Barbara Dunkelman, Yang's voice actress who was watching the episode's live premiere, visibly flinched in horror at the deathblow.
  • All of the above easily topped by "Dante vs. Bayonetta", which has Dante completely liquefying Bayonetta, and then the closing shot shows the poor witch's soul fruitlessly kicking and screaming as it's dragged into Inferno to face a Fate Worse than Death.
  • But even that is topped by "Natsu vs. Ace", where we get a close up of Ace's face boiling away from Natsu's lightning attack. It's not instant, either — we see his skin blister and boil away, then his eyes drop out of their sockets before melting, all the while when Ace is screaming. The Nightmare Fuel page for Death Battle even provides the sweet looking picture of it.
• Happy Tree Friends is devoted to this. Every episode features deaths that are extremely gruesome and photorealistic... and yet it looks like a children's cartoon.
• There are loads in Rise of the Mushroom Kingdom.
  • Among the highlights are a Koopa burning alive in lava, Mouser's getting eviscerated, Luigi getting torn in half and... well... any time a Yoshi is onscreen.
  • In Power Star, any time Mario pulls that sword out of nowhere, everything dies in painful ways. And those are the mooks, things get freaking violent when the main characters start dying.
• For most of Red vs. Blue, the deaths of characters are caused by gunshots, tanks, energy sword wounds, and aspirin overdose. Then along comes Revelation and we get Agent Texas being impaled through the face in episode 19 by the Meta. It doesn't help at all that her body is convulsing while he kills her.
• In Super Mario Bros. Z, Mecha Sonic loves killing his opponents in the most painful and brutal ways possible. Just ask Sonic's friends, the Koopa Bros, and especially the Axem Rangers X.
• Teen Girl Squad: Cheerleader, So-and-So, What's Her Face, and/or The Ugly One are often dispatched this way too many times. Let's list some examples! Getting impaled by arrows, getting dropped off a very tall building onto a bunch of spikes, Whatserface getting "lathed" in the 10th issue (read: split in half), getting flattened by a drum or a 12-sided die, food poisoning, getting burned alive, getting eaten by a shark, and at one point getting chopped up by a maniac in a speedo with a chainsaw.
• For a film length web animation with no set target audience, Wolf Song: The Movie is pretty full of this. Here, you have characters brutally torn apart with blood splattering everywhere, with very few discretion shots and all the death scenes being played seriously, but the death scene that really takes the cake is that of Arrow, who is hurled to the ground so hard he breaks his spine, then gets his chest torn open, exposing his innards. Who knew a 2D wolf animation with vibrant characters that has been watched by children and adults alike could be this graphic and violent?

Webcomics

• The Black Brick Road of O.Z.'s Pepper, the Wicked Witch of the East, dies being crushed by a house. With lots of blood.
• Everyday Heroes is normally all-ages suitable... except for the few pages where Wrecking Paul shows his true colors.
• Homestuck is practically a love letter to this trope. Because Homestuck is about KIDS AND FUN
  • And because the kids need one too: KIDS AND FUN
• minus. might look all cutesey and colourful, with the main character being a (super-powered, Reality Warper) kid who normally just wants to have fun, but some of the things the eponymous character does implies this trope, providing a certain amount of Fridge Horror. Though mitigated by the fact Death Is Cheap in-universe, and people seem to quite happily end up existing as ghosts in the afterlife...
• The Order of the Stick manages to have a few - quite surprising, for a Stick-Figure Comic. For starters, there's Belkar, who has a thing for making accessories out of the kobolds he kills (claiming his first such victim's life off-screen, but taking the top of his skull as a hat). Then there's the prequel novel Start of Darkness, where the paladins slaughter Redcloak's entire hometown, Redcloak uses "Smite" to shatter a paladin's face while he's still alive, and Xykon establishes his modus operandi of zombifying his victims or otherwise preventing their resurrection in an otherwise revival-friendly story.
  • Vaarsuvius. "Shapechange." That is all.
  • "Implosion." That is all.
  • Tsukiko's death is thankfully mostly offpanel, but the context and what we do see is pretty gruesome.
• In The Silver Eye, Bhatair Hollingsworth is beheaded, then chopped into tiny pieces.
  Aetius:Cut him up until he is no longer recognizable as being human. He has to be so dead, not even Blue can save him.
• While Sluggy Freelance isn't for children, Pete Abrams does try to keep it PG-13 ... except when he wants to tear people apart like wet tissue paper. He apparently caught some flak for a strip where a demon rips a person in half, then, realizing he forgot to ask questions before killing her, tries to mash the two halves back together.
  • It's much worse in the "KITTEN" story arcs. Here are some highlights.
• Sonic the Comic – Online!, a Darker and Edgier fan continuation of the already dark British Sonic the Comic, has Tekno killing a villain known as "Set", complete with a Gory Discretion Shot by beating him to death. Nevertheless, fans were not happy about this. They later retconned it so he survived though.
• In Unsounded while the deaths themselves occur offstage, we are presented with the aftermath of Starfish beating Ephsephim's brains out and especially Duane killing and starting to devour Turas. When we first see the scene, he's in the process of chowing down on his eye. The comic had up until that point been relatively lighthearted and kid safe for a piece with a zombie main character, but it quickly went far more gory and violent with subsequent deaths.

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