First-Person Dying Perspective

She's about to break both the camera and your face.

The lethal version of Second-Person Attack. A trope present in visual media, it's a way to instill a sense of dread in a character's final living moments by showing the entire event leading up to it from their viewpoint; the Last Look, so to speak.

Most of the time, this event will fill the viewer's screen and obscure the character's vision, giving a sense of finality to their demise. Thus, in addition to the act of death itself (or, in the case of subversions, fainting), for the trope's purposes, it's important for the viewers to see those last moments from the victim's POV, which for non-visual media such as Literature may require an illustration of the event or a clear description of the soon-to-be-dead character's final moments through their POV. Frequently this shot precedes a Fade to Black that indicates the character has finally died.

May sometimes be a form of Gory Discretion Shot. Usually also the focal point of Camera Abuse.

Subtrope of P.O.V. Cam. Eat the Camera is a Sister Trope, where the character is eaten, and we see the whole process, however it doesn't usually end in death. Compare Sean Connery Is About to Shoot You, where the last the victim and the viewers see is the killer about to commit the act, but the act itself is not shown. Also see Impairment Shot.

Not to be confused with Necro Cam, a Flashback-Montage Realization about how a character died.

As a Death Trope, all spoilers will be left unmarked. Proceed with caution. You Have Been Warned!

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Examples

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• The Bitter Bond revolves around a lion cub Raised in Captivity and released into the wild when he's grown. The lion notices his former handler and races towards a joyous reunion, and gets shot. The POV shifts to him witnessing the handler conducting business with the hunter before succumbing.

Anime & Manga

• Frieren: Beyond Journey's End: The anime version of Aura's Psychic-Assisted Suicide via decapitation shows her last moments from her severed head's POV.
• The movie finale of Neon Genesis Evangelion, The End of Evangelion, shows Asuka and her EVA-02 being brutally devoured by the Mass-Produced EVAs. As she fails to get EVA-02 to go on berserk mode while holding her left eye, she extends her right arm out to Grasp the Sun as she mutters "I'll kill you..." repeatedly until her right arm is split in half. Then, the next scene shows EVA-02 being impaled multiple times with Maya witnessing the whole thing as she reports to Shinji about Asuka's death.

Asian Animation

• BoBoiBoy: When BoBoiBoy finally defeats BoBoiBot with a combined serving of water and lightning, the robot fizzles on a puddle as his dying words are stating that the hero really is awesome, and the perspective briefly shifts to that of his closing eyes before he blacks out for good.
• Subverted in Mechamato. In the 3rd episode, the spaceship's charger that Amato tries to fix MechaBot's battery problem with doesn't seem to work as he's about to deactivate, and the robot groans "Amato... save me..." The perspective changes to his view, and in the center of it is a low battery signal followed by a power off sign as Amato tries to shake him awake, and the screen goes black. The next scene also carries into MechaBot's view as he wakes up, having been returned to the garage with the charger that Rubika, the spaceship's sentient security system, had assisted with making functional again.

Fan Works

• The Peace Not Promised opens with Severus Snape looking into Harry's eyes as he dies, seeing how much they look like Lily's and reminding him of how he failed her, which is his last thought. (Until he awakens in the afterlife and encounters a chance to try things again.)

Films — Live-Action

• The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is almost told exclusively from the first-person perspective of its subject, stroke victim Jean-Dominique Bauby, who is suffering from Locked-in syndrome and can only move his left eyelid. Despite this, he manages to write a memoir; Bauby dies of pneumonia just two days after its publication.
• Dune: The death of Duke Leto is told from his perspective. Having been drugged and brought before his enemy, Baron Harkonnen, he bites down on a poison-gas capsule in his mouth disguised as a tooth, with the intention of killing them both. Only semi-aware of his surroundings, he sees people falling and hears panicked shouts and crashes as the gas fills the room, but it fades as the poison takes action, leaving him briefly with a jumble of old memories and his last thought — "The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes" — and then silence.
• When "Joe" shoots Ramon at the end of A Fistful of Dollars, we get a brief sequence filmed as a first-person POV from Ramon's perspective. The camera shakily jerks and heaves one way and then another, mirroring the mortally wounded Ramon's movements as he tries and fails to steady himself. This is the only time this happens in the film and as soon as Ramon dies the film reverts to a steady third-person perspective.
• The Flintstones: Cliff Vandercave, new vice-president of Mr. Slate's quarry company, tries to steal Slate's fortune and pin it on Fred. After several serious company shenanigans, Cliff threatens Fred and Barney's children, Pebbles and Bamm-Bamm, by putting them on an enormous rock-crushing machine. When Fred wrecks the machine after rescuing the children, Cliff tries to abscond with the money, but a liquid substance from the damaged machine flows out and down over the high ridge that the machine is sitting upon. Cliff, and the audience, can only watch in horror as the substance (later revealed to be concrete) splatters all over him and encases him forever, from his point-of-view.
• The Hunger Games: During Rue's death, the camera points at the sky and grows blurry, showing how the scene feels for the dying girl.
• Independence Day: David's friend Marty meets his end when another car launched into the air crushes his own after one of the alien ships fires its superweapon for the first time in New York City. His last glimpse is of said car hurtling towards him.
  Marty: Ohhhh crap...
• Into the Wild: When Christopher McCandless is dying from eating a poisonous plant, he looks up at the sky. We see shots of the sky interspersed with shots of his memories. In the next third-person shot, he is dead.
• During the climax of The Professional, when Léon is shot from behind, the camera brightens at the instant of the gunshot and then sinks down to the ground as seen with his own eyes.
• Man of Steel: Lara meets her end as the audience watches her watch Krypton destroy itself.
  Kelor: Lady Lara? Shouldn't you find refuge?
  Lara Lor-Van: [resigned] There is no refuge, Kelor. Jor-El was right. This is the end...
  [Gargantuan spires of flame and magma erupt from the ground in the distance]
  Lara: Make a better world than ours, Kal.
  [The flames completely engulf her and the point-of-view of the audience]
  [Cut to space, where Krypton destabilizes and shatters]
• The Myth: General Meng's Last Stand ends with his execution via Off with His Head! by the enemy commandant; as Meng's cranium flies off the audience sees everything from Meng's POV before hitting the floor and closing his eyes while looking at his own headless corpse.
• RoboCop (1987): Alex Murphy's death is largely shot from his perspective as his life flashes before his eyes, from Alex interacting with his wife and son, the criminals who attacked him, and the paramedics trying to save his life as he's bleeding out on the operating table. Everything goes black and fades away, but then an operating system and a Robo Cam starts back up...
• Subverted, then played straight in Terminator 2: Judgment Day: After defeating the T-1000, when the T-800 is lowered into the molten steel to destroy what is left of the Terminator technology, the last viewpoint of the T-800 is of a digitized status report indicating total system failure, which then collapses into eternal darkness.

Literature

• In ''Goosebumps: Tick Tock, You're Dead!": You play as a beleaguered child with a bratty brother; later, you find a scientist who has just developed time-travel devices, and your brother steals one of them for himself. You use the other to travel in search of him. However, in one branch of the adventure, you travel to the future, where school has become a do-or-die affair; Get a question wrong, and you are promptly executed by an android, in a closet-like machine called the "Deframmilizer". Should you happen to meet the same fate, your last view is of the robot closing the door on you, shrouding you in darkness.
• In A Storm of Swords, the Red Wedding happens in Catelyn Stark's final POV chapter where she watches everyone dying in the hands of the Boltons and Freys. As she saw Robb die, she completely loses it as she starts laughing mad as she slits the throat of Walder Frey's grandson. Her last thoughts were about her children and when one of the Freys goes behind her to slash her throat and combs her hair to the back, Catelyn silently begs in her mind not to cut her hair because Ned loves her hair. Then, the last line of her last POV chapter is "Then the steel was at her throat, and its bite was red and cold."
• Warrior Cats:
  • Overlapping with A Death in the Limelight, Flametail's perspective gets added to the Switching P.O.V. roster of the Omen of the Stars arc in the third book - meaning we get to see his last moments as he drowns under a frozen lake from his perspective.
  • Bristlefrost, one of the three POV characters of the seventh arc, The Broken Code, dies near the end of the last book in a Heroic Sacrifice to kill the Big Bad. We see her death from her perspective, imagining the happy future she would have had with her lover Rootspring had she lived.

Live-Action TV

• Hell on Wheels: When Ruth Cole is hanged for murder, the last shot of the episode is seen through her eyes as she looks through the cloth of the death mask. The camera suddenly drops as the trapdoor is released, then everything goes dark.
• Star Trek: Voyager, "Ex Post Facto": Invoked as a plot point. Paris seemingly commits a murder on an alien planet-of-the-week, and by the laws of the planet, is forced, by neural implant, to witness the memory of the crime from the viewpoint of the victim every fourteen hours.
• The Tales from the Crypt season 6 finale You, Murderer, centers on the view of protagonist Lou Spinelli. He is murdered by his wife and best friend, and the entire episode is viewed through his eyes. As such, we see through his POV when his wife bashes in his head with a nude statue, and kills him. However, as is the episode's theme, while Lou is still dead, he can still hear, see, and feel everything that goes on around him, including the rigor mortis of his body.

Tabletop Games

• Werewolf: The Apocalypse: This is one of the powers of the Corax (wereravens); by eating one of the victim's eyes they can see the last moments of the victim's life.

Video Games

• Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 does this twice: first at the end of the "No Russian" mission, when the terrorists (knowing Allen is an undercover agent) shoot him and leave him for dead to make it look like a False Flag Operation; then at the end of "Loose Ends", in which General Shepherd arrives to retrieve the DSM, then kills the surviving Task Force 141 members and sets their bodies on fire, all seen from the perspective of task force member Roach.
• Doom (2016): All of the Doom Slayer's deaths take place from his POV.
• In God of War III, the player experiences each of the blows of the No-Holds-Barred Beatdown that Kratos gives to Poseidon from Poseidon's own point of view. In an incomplete variation, the fight ends with Kratos jamming his thumbs into Poseidon's eyes and blinding him, turning the screen black, before finishing him off with a Neck Snap shown from a third-person camera angle.
• Fire Emblem Engage: After the Final Battle, when Alear and Veyle defeat Sombron, they comfort him in his final moments, and, in an attempt to try to give him closure, they encourage Sombron to try to summon the Emblem of Foundations one last time. After he does so, it pans to Sombron's point of view, where, alongside Alear and Veyle, he sees a light and believes that it is the Emblem. It is then when he passes. Alear and Veyle are unable to see the Emblem, though they believe that only Sombron can see them. However, aside from that, it is made unclear whether or not Sombron really did reunite with the Emblem or if he was just imagining things.
• In both installments of Gunfighter: The Legend of Jesse James, whenever the titular character runs out of lives, he falls over and the camera collapses from his POV before getting blurry.
• Injustice 2: Sub-Zero's Victory Pose has him walking through the camera, picking the cameraman (supposedly his opponent), freezing their neck and ripping it, in a family-friendly recreation of his "Spine Rip" fatality from his home series.
• Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance: During Sundowner's introduction scene where he fights off bodyguards of the president he's about to kidnap, players are treated to the viewpoint of the last of them getting caught between the blades of Sundowner's Shear Menace, which he sadistically slides along the sides of the bodyguard's neck for a longer while before decapitating the poor guy. After the blades close, his vision is filled with a shutdown/fatal error message from his AR overlay.
• Mirror's Edge: Implied with Faith's death via falling from a high height. We see Faith's falling from her POV, however we don't see the final moment, only her view being obscured and a Sickening "Crunch!" sound afterwards.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • Implied in Mortal Kombat: Shaolin Monks: Should you lose against Kitana, Mileena, and Jade, Jade makes you trip to the ground with her Bo staff, while Mileena uses her sais to keep you from waking up. Then the view switches to your character's eyes, as Jade impales you with her Bo. Just moments prior to the Bo hitting your head, the screen turns black, and the word "Fatality" appears.
  • Mortal Kombat 11: Kano's "Face Like A Dropped Pie" Fatality has him headbutting his opponent using his laser eye implant. In the fatal hit, we see Kano from the victim's P.O.V. before the final headbutt makes their head explode with the overcrank effect showing the aftermath.
• In Resident Evil (Remake), the player receives a video tape by examining the body of Kenneth from S.T.A.R.S bravo team. After reaching the Umbrella facility located underneath the Spencer mansion, the player finds video equipment that can be used to view Kenneth's videotape. The footage is from Kenneth's point of view and shows him trying to shoot a zombie, but fails and is ultimately killed by the creature.
• Unreal series:
  • In Unreal and Unreal Tournament, if the "full gore" blood option is set, all of the player's deaths during matches are seen from the player's POV.
    • Players being gibbed or headshotted see how their head bounces through the different surfaces.
    • Some maps feature death pits (i.e. the bottom of the mountain in DM-Peak) or high-pressure zones (i.e. the pressurization chamber in DM-Pressure). Players falling or caught into them see their vision slowly obscured in a certain color (usually white, though DM-Peak features a cyan-colored effect) and a zoomed-out FOV effect. Then we see the player's remains in third person and the scoreboard.
  • The ending of Unreal Championship features a subversion: after you defeat your teammates in the finals, you're taken to a cutscene where you're trapped in a jar, previously seen in the "Insidious" Deathmatch level, being forced to watch the action while you can't get out from it. Then a rocket is about to hit you. Cue the credits.
• Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus: During B.J.'s public execution at the hands of Frau Engel we see the whole process from B.J.'s point of view, including the head chopping, and it being separated from his Dented Iron body. The next scene has Frau Engel holding B.J.'s severed head.
• Xenoblade Chronicles 3: When Shania shoots herself, the camera changes to her perspective as a Gory Discretion Shot. The final thing she sees is Ghondor and Sena running to her as she falls to the ground.

Visual Novels

• Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice has this as one of its game mechanics. The Divination Seance enables lawyers to experience the victim's final moments through their eyes in a pool of water.

Web Animation

• The Gmod Idiot Box, "GIBlets: Bob WAS building an Army...": After Bob destroys Metrocop #1's new Playstation delivery, #1 flies into a rage, assaulting Bob in comedically-violent ways. #1's final act is to ban Bob with Dr. Hax's giant Banhammer, and Bob's final view is of the hammer coming down upon him.
  Server Message: Bob was banned permanently.

Western Animation

• Futurama: "Love's Labours Lost In Space": When Leela and Fry rescue animals from the soon-to-collapse planet Vergon 6, one of the animals threatens a smaller one, later known as "Nibbler". Nibbler quickly makes work of it by swallowing it whole, with the last thing it sees being the inside of Nibbler's mouth.

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