Last Stand

That's one hell of a last stand!

Englishmen! I am waiting here!
In my heart, I know not an ounce of fear!
We are waiting here my trusted axe and me!
Just come at me, I will not flee!
Death! I know that it awaits!
Soon I will enter Valhalla's gates!

— Amon Amarth, "The Berserker at Stamford Bridge"

The Siege has not killed you all, but the battle is over. Victory is impossible. Escape is impossible or futile. Surrender will not be accepted, or is dishonorable, or will lead to a Fate Worse than Death. The chance to cross the Line in the Sand has come and gone. The Cavalry might not be coming.

There is only one thing to do: make them pay. In blood. Make them pay for every inch they take. For every drop of blood you shed — shed a gallon of theirs. No matter that they outnumber you so badly that you can kill a hundred of them and still be overwhelmed. Take as many of the bastards with you as you can.

You can even hope that the casualties you inflict may aid others on your side when you are gone. Maybe. Even if no one will ever know.

If the forces are in a place with good defences, Truth in Television. Vastly disproportionate forces may be needed to get at such forces in Real Life. It usually ends badly for the smaller force but can become a Pyrrhic Victory for the larger.

Sometimes, The Cavalry or the Big Damn Heroes do show up. Sometimes, the enemy will run out of supplies, victuals, or ammunition, or decide a Pyrrhic Victory is not worth the effort, and leave the battlefield. Sometimes, the dogged opposition causes the enemy forces to decide to take an end-run around you. Sometimes, the news of newly-made peace will reach both the defenders and attackers and resolve the situation without a fight. In very rare cases, the defenders even manage to impress the attackers so much that they offer them extremely favorable terms of surrender that are not only perfectly acceptable but can be considered a victory. More usually though, this trope is a set-up for a Downer Ending, perhaps sweetened by one or two survivors Left for Dead, or sent away to Bring News Back of the loyalty, friendship, and unyielding honor of the doomed forces, leading to It Has Been an Honor — and the Dying Moment of Awesome.

In rare cases, it ends with everyone dying and a full-blown The Bad Guy Wins. Sometimes the villains are forced into a Last Villain Stand, in which case Villainous Valor is often invoked.

Tip-offs when the character is wounded, or stays behind to allow others to escape, include:

• "I've gone as far as I can go. Keep going! I will hold them off as long as I can."
• Leader: "Where's so-and-so?!" The Protagonist: (silently shakes head) or "He Didn't Make It"
• "I'll take a few of them with me before it's done!"

May overlap with You Shall Not Pass!, but in that case, the characters want to maximize the time they hold out. They will sacrifice the chance to slaughter more enemies if it would cost their lives when they could buy more time.

When the characters make them pay in one grand swoop, it's the subtrope Taking You with Me. This can drag out a long time, as the characters send as many people as possible ahead of them. Individual characters (especially wounded ones) may introduce several Taking You with Me incidents.

At least one Moment of Awesome is likely, even if the characters know each one to be a Pyrrhic Victory. From the enemy standpoint, it is a Self-Destructive Charge.

Compare Roaring Rampage of Revenge, which often expresses similar sentiments about those killed. On a larger scale, Hopeless War. Bolivian Army Ending often implies such a stand. In Its Hour of Need often leads to one. War Comes Home tends to feature a variation of this with the scale of the conflict determining if it is the defense of a single stronghold or a nation itself. May also be related to Doomed Moral Victor. Stand Your Ground orders this. Characters who do this can also be considered Defiant to the End. Compare Do Not Go Gentle when it is individuals doing it. Compare And Contrast The Last Dance that is considered a one-on-one version of this trope. Contrast To Win Without Fighting.

It has nothing to do with a person being the possessor of the final Stand.

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Fan Works
• Film
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Video Games
• Western Animation
• Real Life

Other examples:

Card Games

• Magic: The Gathering:
  • Last Stand, in the Apocalypse set, depicts the last battle of a group of Dominarian defenders against the Phyrexian invaders. It has a lot of interesting effects, as it represents, effectively, the entire planet's Last Stand against The Legions of Hell.
  • The Dark Ascension set has the Fateful Hour mechanic, which grants certain spells and creatures special bonuses if the user's life total is at 5 or lower. Many of the cards with the mechanic have flavor to this effect.
• Shadowfist: There is a card depicting the death of signature character Kar Fai, called "Kar Fai's Last Stand". The flavor text says it best:
  "You can't win."
• Yu-Gi-Oh!: This is a card in the Schizo Tech Six Samurai archetype, called Backs to the Wall. It drops your Life Points to 100 (By comparison, most duels start you with 8000 Life Points), but you can summon as many Six Samurai monsters from your graveyard as possible.

Comic Books

• Birds of Prey: In issue 14, volume 1, a group of federal marshals, along with the super-powered prisoners they had been transporting, Black Canary, and Catwoman, were transported to Apokolips, where they were attacked by Darkseid's military forces. Stranded with no hope of rescue or escape, they resolve to make sure that the parademons know that they were in a fight. Ultimately averted in that most of them survive and make it back to earth. Lampshaded with one of the most badass speeches ever:
  They might overrun us. They might beat us. They might kill us. But they'll never forget us.
• El Eternauta: The decimated resistance decides to go down fighting when cornered and hearing the as-of-yet unrevealed "ultimate mook" approaching. Still, it gets double subverted since they manage to discover a weakness in the enemy's "ultimate mook", but are soon surrounded and defeated by lesser mooks. There are a few survivors though.
• Fables: The last fortress guarding a magical portal. Only so many could leave so the commander had the women, children, and non-human sentients go first. The rest of the spaces were done by lottery. Well-known characters such as Robin Hood and Friar Tuck make their last stand, taking as many of the bastards with them as possible. This barely even works; fortunately, the Nine Crow brothers (down to seven) were flying aerial support. Four more die allowing the refugees to escape to Earth.
• Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1977): The final two issues involve many of Marvel's heroes and Godzilla duking it out in New York. Although neither side lost any life, the feeling is still there.
• Green Lantern: In the Bat Family Crossover Lights Out, Relic's invasion of Oa is so fierce, the Lanterns have to evacuate Oa before it explodes. The chapter the invasion takes place is even called "Oa's Last Stand".
• The Mighty Thor:
  • Bill, Born of Bills, went out like a damn BEAST.
  • He was preceded in this trope by Skurge the Executioner, who made one of the most epic You Shall Not Pass! last stands in comic history. Made even more meaningful in that he's never truly been resurrected in the many years since.
  • Thor and Captain America led two last stands during Siege. Thor donned his father's armor and wielded the Odinsword to fight the Big Bad. Cap takes Mjolnir and leads a ragtag militia against The Dragon. Amusingly enough, the Big Bad actually is a dragon at this point.
• Secret Six: The ending has the team making a last stand against an army of superheroes. They're all captured with the last shot of the series showing a battered and bruised Bane being dragged off to Arkham Asylum.
• Sonic the Hedgehog (IDW): The Metal Virus Saga sees more and more characters being converted into Zombots and more territory being lost, until finally the only safe zone left is Angel Island. Issue #29, the climax of the saga, then sees the remaining heroes desperately fighting to protect the island while the Zombots attack it, hoping to buy enough time for Sonic and Silver to use the Chaos Emeralds and Warp Topaz to destroy the virus and cure everyone. They ultimately succeed, curing everyone, but Sonic disappears when the Topaz overloads and explodes.
• Star Wars: One story portrays the Imperial stormtroopers as simply men, rather than faceless villains, and, in a deliberate homage to Zulu, they struggle to hold a small outpost against an overwhelming force of tribal natives.
• Superman: Superman a number of times. The first was Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow? then there was The Death of Superman.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The season two finale has the Lost Light crew making an epic last stand against a Villain Team-Up consisting of the Decepticon Justice Division, an army of renegade soldiers, and Overlord. They manage to survive, but only thanks to a huge number of Chekhov's Guns and most of the villains deciding that killing them isn't worth the losses. And even then they don't come out unscathed; Ravage and Skids die during the battle and Ten loses an arm.

Films — Animation

• The Flight of Dragons: Sir Orin Neville-Smythe is under no illusion that his final fight with Breog is not going to be this. All of his friends either dead or in a magically induced sleep, his lady love slain, the objective of their quest nowhere in sight, and facing down the powerful dragon enhanced by evil magic, this will most likely be the end of his life of Adventure. But damned if he isn't going to make sure Breog does not get to enjoy the victory. Fortunately Ommadon's defeat in the end makes this less permanent than most cases.
• Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within has this when Ryan Whittaker is pinned down in the wreckage of a vehicle. He insists to be left behind and assists the rest of the group's getaway from afar with a large rifle until the phantoms claim him.
• How to Train Your Dragon: Faced with a hopeless battle against the Green Death, Stoick orders his people to the far side of the island while he faces the giant dragon alone:
  Stoick: Gobber, go with the men.
  Gobber: I think I'll stay, just in case you're thinking of doing something crazy.
  Stoick: I can buy them a few minutes if I give that thing something to hunt!
  Gobber: Then I can double that time.
• Invoked by Stoic Woobie Blackavar the rabbit in Watership Down when it seems their Great Escape has been cut off. Foreshadowing the bloodiest death in the movie, when Blackavar goes on a Dying Moment of Awesome by staying behind and attacking General Woundwort (that wasn't in the book).
  Blackavar: It nearly came off... We'll take one or two of them with us before the end!

Music

• Radio Tapok's "Tsushima" describes the phenomenal journey halfway around the world that the Russian Baltic Fleet took to even reach the eponymous Russo-Japanese War battlefield in the Far East, even though they were doomed from the get-go. It came to be known in naval history as "the Voyage of the Damned".
• Sabaton's eighth album The Last Stand is a Concept Album about this and Hold the Line with songs about the Spartans at Thermopylae, the Lost Battalion, the Swiss Guard in 1527, Rorke's Drift, and the Samurai at Shiroyama.

Tabletop Games

• Victory in the Pacific: The Japanese fleet is usually reduced to making one of these at the end of the game, due to their lack of reinforcements.
• Warhammer: One of the standard scenarios.
  • In 1st Edition, Bugman met his end when, on returning to his brewery, he found it under attack by a goblin army. His band was pitifully weak and exhausted after a long campaign against the goblins of the Bad Lands, but they took up the brewery's defense and were slain to the last.
  • 3rd edition has maps and paper counters for a scenario called "Fornerond's Last Stand", in which a High Elf force has been ambushed by greenskins.
  • Warhammer: The End Times is this for basically all the good factions and characters on a global scale as Chaos and the Skaven join forces to destroy the world. It's so blatant that whole factions like Bretonnia are wiped out offscreen. Which leads to Warhammer: Age of Sigmar.
• Warhammer 40,000: The setting gives everyone ample opportunities to die heroically, both on and off the tabletop. A 4th Edition scenario, typically the last mission in a campaign, revolved around one side's Last Stand; the defenders won if they had any surviving models at the end of the game, meaning they held out long enough to let their comrades escape, or that they killed enough of the enemy to have their names forever etched into their opponent's minds.
  • One famous example from the fluff is the Battle of Macragge, in which the Ultramarines' homeworld found itself facing the Tyranids of Hive Fleet Behemoth. The Ultramarines' 1st Company, comprised of the best warriors in the chapter, made their stand in a polar fortress. When reinforcements finally arrived, they had to clear the Tyranid corpses with flamethrowers, and eventually found the bodies of their battle-brothers in the heart of the fortress, back-to-back and surrounded by walls of alien dead.
  • One Space Marines codex mentions that many chapters' histories feature such heroic last stands, many of which were probably unnecessary.
  • The Sisters of Battle are driven by a degree of religious zealotry unusual even by the standards of the Imperium, and in many cases refuse to give ground, resources or just the satisfaction of victory to the Imperium's enemies. As a result, there's a long history of their forces fighting to the bitter end against stronger foes and being slaughtered to the last.
  • The Eldar of Craftworld Iyanden were prepared to make one against Hive Fleet Kraken, but were saved by the timely arrival of the exiled Prince Yriel. It was a Pyrrhic Victory, however — four-fifths of the Craftworld's population was dead, Prince Yriel doomed himself by taking up the cursed Spear of Twilight, and Iyanden was forced to use the spirit stones of the dead to field armies of Wraithguard to supplement their forces. To quote Yriel, "We may have won the battle, but our ancestors have lost their souls."
  • The Imperial Guard are particularly good at this. General Sturmm of Dawn of War fame summed up a Guardsman's duty as "We die standing."
  • The Necrons actively avoid this, preferring to teleport away without a trace rather than lose a battle. In earlier editions this was even the army's Achilles' Heel — once it had been reduced to a certain percentage of its starting models, the rest would phase out, giving the opponent the victory.
  • The Tau don't believe in Last Stands — unlike most of the other races, Tau military dogma is highly mobile and considers the amount of territory controlled in a conflict to be meaningless compared to the armies that fight on it. Soldiers lost holding a position are therefore throwing their lives away for no reason, and a Tau commander who would commit himself to a Last Stand is incompetent rather than courageous.
  • In the ominously-named "Fall of Cadia", the entire Cadian 8th Regiment, along with their commander, Lord-Castellan Ursakar Creed. The planet broke before the Guard did.
  • Basically the entire setting represents a massive, galaxy-spanning last stand by the forces of good (relatively speaking) against the forces of evil, that has been going on for the last ten thousand years.

Theater

• There Shall Be No Night is set during the 1939-40 Winter War between the Soviet Union and Finland. Miranda's husband and only child have both been killed during the fighting and Soviet troops are rapidly approaching, but as the play ends Miranda and Uncle Waldemar are planning to go down fighting. At the first sight of Soviets, they're going to burn down the house, take their guns to the stone wall in the garden, and hold out for as long as they can.
• The aptly-named "The Final Battle" in Les Misérables. The revolutionaries realize that the people have not risen up and that there are no reinforcements coming, and that this must be their final stand. See below:
  Enjolras:Let us die facing our foes / Make them bleed while we can
  Combferre: Make 'em pay through the nose
  Courfeyrac: Make 'em pay for every man!
  Enjolras: Let others rise / To take our place / Until the earth is free!
  They are quickly gunned down as the National Guard storms the barricade.
• In Super Danganronpa 2: The Stage, instead of making a Suicide Pact via Duel to the Death, Gundham Tanaka and Nekomaru Nidai decide to go down swinging against a horde of Monokumas.

Webcomics

• Nodwick: Bracing for a last stand. Surprise! It's the henchmen!
• In Drow Tales, the Sharen clan is ultimately faced with one of these against the Sarghress as the District War enters its conclusion.
• Erf World:
  • First half of the comic is this. Stanley's side is desperate enough to summon a "perfect" warlord. Unfortunately, this person is Parson.
  • When things start to completely fall apart, Parson has a few words to say on the subject of last stands.
    Parson: So this'll be the last of the last stands...
    [enemies start pouring in instead of waiting for reinforcements]
    Parson: All right, boop this. Wanda! Fall back to the Portal Room and tighten the perimeter until it holds! Call it the last — of the last of the last stands.
• In Nip and Tuck, the Show Within a Show Rebel Cry has the hero declare he will fight one to defend the only thing they have yet to take from him.
• Subnormality has a rather touching comic about a last stand.
• In Homestuck, this is what happened to post-scratch Dave and Rose. Worse, they knew it was going to happen... but fought the bad guy anyway because as Jake said when told what had happened, that's what heroes do.
• In Schlock Mercenary, the mercenaries practice hand-to-hand for bar brawls, not this after they run out of ammo.
  • That's not to say they don't get into the situation, just that they prefer the enemy to do so.
• In The Red Star, Maya recounts how her husband had held off vastly superior forces and lost only three men -- reinforcements had arrived in time, then.
• Crimson Knights: Huldric, Geron and a bunch of other knights hold of the Cralesian forces buying time while most of their forces escape through the catacombs of the castle.

Web Animation

• At the end of Season 13 of Red vs. Blue, the Reds and Blues are trapped aboard the Staff of Charon, pinned down in Hargrove's trophy room by enemy gunfire with the room about to be breached, leaving them with no choice but to fight their way out. They survive, with the exception of Church.

Web Original

• Happens to Nahman, member of the GIProz during the "Mount and Blade" video. He is one of the few remaining members of the Austrian military who try holding out against Freikorps that are storming their hill.
• Survival of the Fittest had one near the end of version three, during the escape attempt. While the majority of the students went to the coast (where the escape boats were waiting), one group stayed behind to buy time for the others, fighting the platoon of Danya's soldiers sent to stop them. Only two of them - Adam Dodd and Neil Sinclair - made it out alive, but the others not only succeeded in delaying the soldiers, they wiped out the platoon by blowing up the armory.
• No Spanish Civil War in 1936 gives us an impressive Last Stand in Zaragoza done by the Spanish Army, led by Francisco Franco. The German siege of Zaragoza starts on March 28, 1941. They send their best Wehrmacht and SS troops into the city, and they are fighting soldiers, militias and civilians that don't want to leave the city (a "ragtag force of Spanish and British regular troops, militiamen, and simple civilians", literally). The German estimation is that it'll take 10 days to take the city. It takes them that much (April 7th) to surround the city completely, pitting 50,000 Allied soldiers and militias against 200,000 German soldiers. It takes them 45 days (May 12th) just to take the northern half of the city. Zaragoza doesn't surrender until June 3rd. The result? A good chunk of the German army invading Spain has been held up in Zaragoza for more than two months, the Germans have lost a boatload of tanks and they got 100,000 casualties. The Allies have just 50,000 casualties, mostly Spanish, plus some planes that were trying to drop supplies to keep the siege going.
• The Salvation War has this trope as what seems to be its dominant feature.
• The Chaos Timeline has a Sir Winston of Marlborough fighting the Socialists who's quite similar to him.
• The Last Angel involves quite many, the pacification of Varissha and the battle of Earth stand out in particular.
• Malê Rising has a last stand during the Great War at Saragarhi, where Ibrahim Abacar was stationed.
• In Mahu in "Crownless Eagle" sees several last stands taking place, both from the new Commonwealth Republic and its many foes. The former often become victories thanks to the superior leadership, training, and technology of the republicans. The latter, however...

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