Shrine to the Fallen

"There's a clock tower in Hereford where the names of the dead are inscribed. We try to honor their deeds, even as their faces fade from our memories. Those memories are all that's left when the bastards have taken everything else."

— Captain Price, Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3

Whether it's your dead little brother, your child that passed on after an illness, your lost love or just that one person you couldn't save, some characters are so attached to a deceased loved one that they have a hard time letting go. A shrine to the dearly departed is often a good way to inform the viewers of this connection, especially if the shrine is to someone who kicked the bucket before the show even started. In fiction, showing a child or bereaved spouse praying at such a shrine is a visual shorthand for the Disappeared Dad or Missing Mom.

These are typically created with a photograph and a number of votive candles or incense, but traditions vary from culture to culture. In Asian cultures, shrines to the dead are a traditional part of the mourning ritual and are placed either in a prominent position in the home or, if the household is wealthy, a place can be purchased/rented at the local temple. There are even shrines for the anonymous dead or women who died unmarried (so they don't come back as a Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl). Shrines to dead family members, called ofrendas, are also put up in Mexico on Día de los Muertos.

If the circumstances of the deceased's death mean there is Not Enough to Bury, the creation of a shrine in their memory may be treated as a funeral, complete with as many of the accompanying rituals as possible and often including a Memorial Photo. In such cases, this trope overlaps with Burying a Substitute.

Compare Empty Bedroom Grieving, the main Western variant of the "shrine" where the family of a deceased person (especially parents for children) to keep the deceased's bedroom exactly how it was when they were alive, and not using it for anything else because it would be the final admittance that the deceased is never coming back. Sometimes they will leave a chair for the deceased; this is especially noteworthy if said chair was the deceased's favorite.

Compare and contrast Stalker Shrine in which this idea takes on a much more sinister note, and Shrine to Self when you just love yourself that much. Compare The Dead Have Names, another way to commemorate the fallen, and Grave-Marking Scene, in which the deceased's final resting place is visited and treated as a shrine.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Masaki family has one in Tenchi Muyo! for Tenchi's mother, who died during a snowstorm.
• Bleach:
  • Isshin keeps a wall-sized poster of his deceased wife and often makes a show of crying to her over his children.
  • Byakuya has a traditional one for his dead wife, Hisana, which is kept behind closed doors in a wall recess.
  • Orihime keeps a shelf with photographs of her deceased brother on it. She will often kneel on a cushion in front of it to talk to him about her day.
  • Ryuuken keeps a discreet one for his deceased wife on his desk at work; on the anniversary of her death, he places a photograph on his desk and wears an all-white suit to work.
• Played for Laughs in Ranma ½, where a seemingly crazy widow treats a shrine to her dead husband almost like an imaginary friend.
• In one mystery on Case Closed, Conan deduces that the name placard of such a shrine is the hiding place of a valuable stamp.
  • In another, Heiji and Kazuha almost fall to their deaths investigating a memorial rock that has incense placed on it.
  • In yet another, a similar rock commemorating the drowning of a young boy is the plot point to the mystery.
• Sano finds out about what happened to his mother this way in Rurouni Kenshin. He prays to it under the guise of wanting to eat dinner faster.
• In The Kindaichi Case Files, the body of one of the victims is found under such a memorial, and Kindaichi takes that to be a sign that the murderer wasn't the monster he claimed to be.
• In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid, the "Yagami Family" keeps a small shrine to the first Reinforce in their house, shown with a picture and a food offering.
• Maria no Danzai: Maria keeps a shrine behind her bed in her new home filled with candles and pictures of Kiritaka (along with two ragdolls that look suspiciously like him and what is presumably a couple of his old socks). She prays to it every night before going to sleep.
• Pegasus from Yu-Gi-Oh! has a tower room and portrait dedicated to his dead fiancée.
• In Ouran High School Host Club, the Fujioka family has a photo of Haruhi's mother in their living room.
• The first chapter of March Comes in Like a Lion features a standard family shrine in the Kawamoto home, with Hina offering some of the curry she and her sisters made to their deceased mother and grandmother.
• In Naruto, the Leaf Village has a memorial which consists of a stone shaped like the blade of a kunai and engraved with the name of every leaf ninja to die in the line of duty.
• In Digimon Adventure 02, Iori's family has a traditional shrine in their home for Iori's deceased father, Hiroki. Ken's family also has a photo of Ken's deceased older brother, Osamu, placed in a prominent spot in their living room.
• Kiss Him, Not Me: Played for laughs. Kae has one dedicated to Shion, a character from her favorite anime.
• Kimi from Barefoot Gen builds a shrine to her husband, son, and daughter who were killed in the atomic bombing and places their skulls recovered from the remains of their house in the middle of it and often prays to them, by the time of the sequel she and Gen have since buried their remains.
• Zombie Land Saga: Takeo keeps a shrine in their house with a picture of Lily's deceased mother.
• Akuma Kun: In "Gluttony", Ichirō examines Hina's bedroom and sees that it's full of photos and diplomas that don't go beyond her high school years, and that they're arranged the way a grieving parent would. He deduces that Hina is actually dead and that her mother made a contract with a demon to have said demon act as a replacement. To make things even more twisted, it's then revealed that Hina's mother actually murdered her daughter after she got fed up with her controlling behavior and tried to leave.

Comic Books

• There was a public one for Vita in Transmetropolitan. It starts out as just a photo of her and a few candles, but as the series progresses it becomes increasingly more elaborate. By the end of the series, there's a life-sized statue of her surrounded by pictures and news clippings.
• Batman
  • Following Jason Todd's death, his Robin costume was put on display in the Batcave. When he was brought back to life, Bruce opted to keep it to remind him of his failure.
  • He did the same when post-Flashpoint Tim Drake appears to have been killed, though the readers are aware Tim's been kidnapped and imprisoned in another dimension.
• In Y: The Last Man, the Washington Monument becomes a shrine to men, all of whom but one died in the Gendercide that kicks off the plot. It's lampshaded that this is because of the monument's phallic interpretations.
• Superman:
  • The Leper from Krypton: When a dying Superman heads towards a star to be cremated, the Justice League raised one statue of Kal-El in their headquarters.
  • When Supergirl dies in Crisis on Infinite Earths, Superman sets a shrine/memorial for his cousin in the Fortress of Solitude, complete with a large statue in the center of the chamber.
  • The Supergirl from Krypton (2004): When Harbinger dies attempting to protect Kara from Darkseid, the Amazons build a spectacular memorial by the seaside: her tomb is sitting on top of a platform, guarded by a giant, luminous statue and flanked by two burning columns.
  • In The Death of Superman, his gravesite bears a giant statue of the Man of Steel that remained even after his resurrection. There was also a small marker in front of the Daily Planet to show where he fell, but it was vaporized by the Cyborg Superman.
  • In The Death of Lightning Lad, the titular hero dies in battle, and the Legion of Super-Heroes places a statue of his in their base to honor their fallen teammate.
  • When Superboy (Conner Kent) died during Infinite Crisis, a similar statue is erected beside Superman's.
• Wonder Woman
  • Wonder Woman (1987): There is a memorial outside of Doom's Doorway for the Amazons (and Steve Trevor's mother) who have fallen fighting the evil trying to escape into the wider world through the door. Amazons frequently leave flowers and other items at the carved marble marking the place.
  • Wonder Woman (2006): There is an eternal flame set before Hippolyta's grave, which has a twenty-four hour guard.
• One of the Firefly comics has a photo of Wash and two of his toy dinosaurs as a memorial on Serenity's bridge.

Fan Works

• In the first story of The Smurfette Village series, Hefty Smurf's house is boarded up and considered off-limits to everyone in the Smurf Village when he ends up missing.
• In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf novel, Papa Smurf has a statue erected of his son Empath as an adult when he was presumed dead by the hand of the Psyche Master when he was still an infant. Later on, though, when Papa Smurf found out his son was still alive, the statue was converted to one promising hope that Empath would someday leave Psychelia, which in turn gets perverted into a shrine for Empath's fellow Smurfs to worship him as their hero who would someday deliver them from the greatest evil of all — namely, Gargamel.
• The fanfic The Wall by Doctor Song on fanfiction.net is about a wall at Grimmauld Place that displays memorabilia of all those who died in the war against Voldemort, and, as time goes on, of veterans of that fight who've passed on.
• Salvage: Prince Zuko's naval crew erect a memorial shrine to him in the galley after he's lost overboard, with a small portrait, a bowl of rice, and his favourite knife. Zuko is bemused to see it when he returns to the ship — both because he wants the knife back and because he didn't expect the crew to care so much.
• Gone Batty (Sefiru): In New Year's day of 1990, Tachibana gifts Majima a small Buddhist shrine with pictures of Nishitani, Lee, and Awano, who all sacrificed their lives to save Majima's.
• lost in the infinite lights: The Mutou household has a shrine dedicated to Yuugi's mom and Grandpa Sugoruku's wife. It's a household rule that when Yuugi survives a dangerous experience, he must express his gratitude to them.

Film - Animated

• In An American Tail, the Mousekewitz family build a shrine to Fievel, whom they believe is dead, in their new home.
• In Coco, the shrine is more than just a remembrance; spirits in the afterlife can return to visit the living on Dia de Los Muertos if someone has put their picture on an ofrenda.
• At the end of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, one is made in honor of Aaron Davis by Miles and Jefferson after he was murdered by Kingpin. Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse shows they made a much larger second one visible from their apartment rooftop. One of the major reveals to Miles that he landed in the wrong dimension at the end is the same mural, but with Jefferson in place of the very much alive Aaron.
• In Mulan, the Fa family shrine is the home of the ancestral spirits.

Film - Live-Action

• Since India is one of the countries where this is Due to the Dead, a large garlanded picture of a dead family member is extremely common in Bollywood Movies, usually as a shorthand for a character's offscreen death, or as a quick way of telling the audience that someone is a widow, a widower or an orphan.
• Mr. Miyagi has a shrine to his wife in the original The Karate Kid (1984) movie.
• In Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Eddie keeps the desk of his dead partner/brother in the same state as it was the day he died and yells at anyone who sits at it. It has been covered in dust and cobwebs over the years.
• In Little Shop of Horrors, Orin has a closet shrine to his mom, complete with candles.
  Somewhere in heaven above me,
  I know that my mama's proud of me!
• Similar to the above example, Jason Voorhees keeps a shrine to his mother's severed head in Friday the 13th Part 2.
• In Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren keeps the cremated helmet of Darth Vader, his hero and grandfather, on display in his quarters, speaking to it with reverence.
• In Left Behind II: Tribulation Force, there are public shrines with pictures of children who have disappeared due to the Rapture.
• Deadly Detention: The killer has a shrine to his dead daughter set up in a guard room in the prison. His actions are stated to be a Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the students who bullied her into killing herself, but it's more likely he was the one responsible for her suicide.
• Night Witches of the Sky: This film is about an Amazon Brigade of female fighter pilots on the Eastern Front of World War II. Commander Ivanova has a map tracing the westward progress of the Night Witches, apparently since their formation. Whenever a pilot is killed, Ivanova cuts out a picture of her from regimental records and glues it to the map at the point where the pilot was lost.
• Patient Zero (2018): One of the hallways in the bunker is lined with memorial plaques of people who've lost their lives.
• In Top Gun: Maverick, Maverick still has photos of his dead Guy in Back and Best Friend Goose in his hangar, who died from an Ejection Seat failure nearly 35 years prior during an exercise in Top Gun.
• Subverted in Wake Me When It's Over. The locals of Shima have a shrine dedicated to a downed Zero pilot sitting next to the U.S.A.F. outpost on their island. However, Stark implies that the locals actually do not know the deceased pilot personally. So why did they make a shrine around a crashed Zero? Because, being a Japanese island post-WWII, the locals hate the Americans stationed there and know that the Air Force will not remove a religious building or icon, making it impossible to expand the outpost.
• Zebrahead (1992): After Dee Simms is murdered, the other kids cover his locker with pictures, flowers, and notes.

Literature

• Ciaphas Cain: In Cain's Last Stand, Cain returns to the valley where one of his major battles from Death or Glory took place. The site now holds a steel obelisk with the names of everyone who fell in that battle engraved on it.
• In the Circle of Magic series, Daja maintains a shrine to her family after she is the only survivor of a pirate attack on her family's fleet.
• In Timothy Zahn's "Conqueror's" trilogy, the alien Zhirrzh have many of these. Each contains a large number of ceramic cages, each of which contains what appears to be a small sausage. While these are clearly shrines to the fallen, the humans quickly find out they aren't exactly passive...
• In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, it's revealed that there is a large statue in Godric's Hollow that basically functions as a shrine to Harry's parents. Various witches and wizards have carved messages on the statue. It's a variant on the trope because the messages are all really for Harry, who is still alive.
• My Story: At the end of The Trenches: Billy Stevens, The Western Front, Billy states that a memorial was set up in Carlisle to honour the memories of the local men who died in World War I. He notes, however, that his friend Robert Matthews' name isn't on it. This is because, during one attack, Robert knew that if he charged the Germans as ordered in one battle, he and his platoon would've been gunned down like the ones before him, so he refused the order. He was arrested for desertion and sentenced to death by firing squad. The fact that he isn't being honoured, but is seen as a coward, becomes a source of vexation for Billy.
• Underdogs: A stone slab in the Underdogs' base shows the names of the twenty team members who have been killed.
• Under Heaven: Kuala Nor is an unofficial shrine, due to Shen Tai spending two years burying soldiers as part of his mourning period, after his father's death. His actions are considered enough to earn him a gift of 250 Sardian horses, 'dragon' horses, where four is considered enough to prompt deadly envy.
  When choosing a bow choose a strong one,
  If you shot an arrow shoot a long one,
  To capture the enemy capture their leader,
  But carry within you the knowledge
  That war is brought to bring peace.

Live-Action TV

• In Dead Like Me, Reggie makes one out of toilet seats for George.
• Red Dwarf: Back To Earth implies that an extra bit of the ship has been built (or at least cleaned up specially, which is a pretty big deal for Lister) just to house a commemorative gravestone to Kochanski. Who turns out not to actually be dead anyway.
• Battlestar Galactica: The crew of Galactica set up one to the victims of the Cylons' attack on humanity. The toll is so great it takes up an entire hallway. Subsequent episodes see more photographs being added as characters get killed along the way. In the series finale the hallway is dismantled when the crew are forced to abandon the ship and Hot Dog takes it on himself to gather up the unclaimed photographs so those people won't be forgotten.
• In the Supernatural episode "What Is And What Should Never Be" (S02, Ep20), a candlelit vigil is held in Indianapolis one year after the crash of flight 424.
• The Stinger of the Doctor Who episode "Face the Raven" reveals that one has been made from the TARDIS itself to mark the demise of Clara Oswald; Rigsy "tags" its police box exterior with painted flowers and a portrait of her. The Doctor doesn't have a say on this because he has just been delivered into the hands of an enemy and won't be using it anytime soon.
• Million Yen Women: The shrines to Shin's mother, the young policeman that Shin's father killed and Nanaka's feature prominently in the story.
• Daredevil (2015): Following Ben Urich's death, Mitchell Ellison never bothered to clear out Ben's office and left it empty and intact, as he has deep regrets over not having backed Ben's investigation into Wilson Fisk. Ellison later gives the office to Karen Page following the closure of Nelson & Murdock. Karen blames herself for Ben's death, so she keeps all of his framed articles and other mementos around.
• The Defenders (2017):
  • A small shrine of candles and photographs is seen erected on a burned-out car that belonged to Cole's brother when Misty and Luke walk by it. Later, when an earthquake triggered by the Hand rocks Manhattan, Luke shields Cole's mother from being crushed by a falling streetlight as she's lighting a candle at the memorial.
  • Following Matt's apparent death in the destruction of Midland Circle, we see Karen holding a very lonely candlelit vigil at Matt's church. Foggy drops by and Karen asks him to join her to hold a prayer for Matt.
• The Punisher (2017): The death of Karen's boyfriend is still affecting her even months later when Frank drops by. A sharp-eyed observer will notice Karen has a small shrine to Matt on the table under her TV when Frank is in her apartment, specifically, a photograph of her, Matt, and Foggy celebrating St. Patrick's Day at Josie's.
• Game of Thrones: The Starks have a family crypt in Winterfell where they put statues of their deceased relatives. In the pilot episode, King Robert Baratheon visits the crypt where he places a flower on the statue of Lyanna Stark, his late fiancee. Later in Season 7, the statue of Eddard Stark is added after he was beheaded in Season 1 and his remains were sent home. His daughters and his bastard son/nephew visit the crypt from time to time.
• In The Handmaid's Tale episode "Unwomen", June sets up a shrine within the basement of the Boston Globe office building as a memorial of those who were slaughtered for standing up against the Gilead regime.
• Alma Gêmea: After Luna's death, her atelier becomes a shrine dedicated to her memory, where Rafael keeps all of her Tragic Keepsakes and spends a significant part of his time grieving her.
• Guy's Grocery Games: After the October 2019 death of long-time contestant and judge Carl Ruiz, a portrait of Carl was hung in Flavortown Market over his GGG championship belt. When the show moved to a larger set in 2021, Guy made a point of moving the portrait himself.
• The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power: In Lindon, the Elves have a shrine of statues carved in wood to honor the fallen ones. Among the thousands of them, some of the statues belong to well-known heroic figures like Finrod, Beren, Luthien and the wolfhound Huan.
• Played for laughs in Chalk. Eric Slatt keeps a shrine to his domineering mother in a cupboard in his office, containing a photograph of her, and a small vase, supposedly containing her ashes. This is foreshadowed by the young Eric waving this vase at her, implying he wishes she was dead. She is not actually dead, and Eric's wife Janet is practically a twin of his mother, with the same personality. They meet each other in this episode.

Music

• Alluded to in the music video for Kikuo's "I'll Forgive You, Even If You Die". Of the two people featured in the video, the yellow person is implied to be dead, as they and the blue person are never in the same room at the same time and the blue one meets their friend in the clouds. The very first scene shows the yellow person sitting at a table not even touching their bowl of rice, but simply wafting the steam into their face to eat—which is something the Buddha was known to do, and is referenced in one of the mourning practices of butsudan (in which one can leave offerings of food, such as a bowl of rice much like the yellow one's bowl, at the deceased's shrine). It's equally implied that this was the blue person's offering to them.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: At the Underground City beneath Freeway 42, The Outcasts hold a large secluded antechamber with a shrine holding illuminating candles and photographs of the victims who perished to the Mechanika Virus.
• In The World Ends with You, there's one for Beat and Rhyme, after they died in a car accident.
• In World of Warcraft, there are a couple of in-game places that commemorate deceased Blizzard employees or their relatives. One of them is even called similarly to this trope's name.
• An Easter Egg in Max Payne 2: The Fall of Max Payne is a hidden shrine for a deceased programmer, consisting of a room with just a photo, his name, and birth and death dates, as well as some creepy music.
• Earth & Beyond had a sector with space monuments to space exploration. There were monuments to the dead astronauts of Apollo 1 and Challenger. When the shuttle Columbia was destroyed on reentry a new monument was added to the game to honor the astronauts who died in the disaster.
• Grand Poo World 3 has a secret level called "Hall of Champions" that functions as a memorial to Twitch streamer UghRochester, who was a huge fan of the first 2 games but passed away before the third came out.
• In Tales of Monkey Island Chapter 5: Rise of the Pirate God, Club 41 becomes a shrine to Guybrush, whose Martyrdom Culture is due to his Heroic (or rather Stupid) Sacrifice for saving the entire Gulf of Melange from the Pox of LeChuck. The Club even has barrels of Grog, Banang, and root beer, along with votive candles, Guybrush's commemorative photo, and a wreath to be used as kindling next to Guybrush's corpse for cremation... unless his spirit can repossess his body in time, that is.
• In Mass Effect 3, the Normandy SR-2 has a wall that bears the names of all the crewmembers who have died over the course of the series. Depending on your actions, it can become a very crowded memorial. The disaster variant also shows up on the Citadel in the Docks level, where refugees leave pictures and other mementos of dead or missing family and friends. As the game goes on, the wall gradually fills in with more memorials. You can help Ashley and Cortez make their own additions as well.
• Fetch from inFAMOUS: Second Son turned her whole hideout into one for the brother she accidentally killed in a drug-induced psychotic break, complete with using her neon powers to graffiti the walls with his name.
• In the "Harley Quinn's Revenge" DLC of Batman: Arkham City, in two weeks the Steel Mill has turned into a shrine to the Joker, who has died of Titan poisoning. The exterior of the former funhouse has been renamed as "Harley's Funland", with statues of Harley guarding the gates and banners bearing the Joker's pictures and writings such as "R.I.P. Joker" and "Joker Forever". The interior is redecorated a little bit, while the centerpiece of the final room is transformed into a chapel interior, with lots of lit up white votive candles surrounding the altar and the monument of the Joker holding a glass globe, with Batman encased inside it.
• X-COM:
  • In XCOM: Enemy Unknown, there is a memorial wall for every soldier that has died during the game. In the background, you can see pictures taped to the wall, with shot glasses in front. As the casualties rise, the number of photographs and shot glasses increase.
  • In the sequel XCOM 2, there's an entire bar with a picture wall for this purpose, with each fallen soldier getting their own photo.
• Danganronpa:
  • In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, after Mahiru's death, Hiyoko creates one for her, except she made it so poorly that everyone is horrified by it.
  • In the spinoff Danganronpa Another Episode: Ultra Despair Girls, Monaca makes one for Masaru when he goes MIA. She's only pretending to care and even forgets his name during the memorial service. When more of her group goes missing, she doesn't even bother with the memorial.
• Part of Captain Price's String Theory in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 becomes a Shrine to Soap after the latter's death. There are also references to a clock tower at the SAS barracks, where fallen comrades' names are engraved. Soap finally gets his name on the clock tower after Task Force 141 is successfully reinstated.
• The Ensemble Stars! event Starlight Festival has the protagonist visit one of these for all Yumenosaki students who died or were Driven to Suicide trying and failing to become top class idols. Arashi Narukami occasionally comes to pray to the cenotaph.
• Case 5 of Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Spirit of Justice has Amara's tomb, which was built at the former site of the music theater. According to Athena Cykes, the tomb "cost some $800 million [in U.S. dollars] to build, and took 400 workers five years to complete. Special memorial rites were also conducted at various points of its construction." The tomb even has a portrait of the Holy Mother, a sarcophagus that is said to act as a freezer for Amara Sigatar Khura'in's mummified body, and other portraits that paint her in a good light and her husband Dhurke Sahdmadhi in a bad light. Ironically Double Subverted in that, although it turns out that Amara is still alive, no one would ever imagine that the tomb would end up as a final resting place for her husband, who died at the hands of her brother-in-law Inga Karkhuul Khura'in in his effort to save Maya Fey there. When you examine the altar at the former Sahdmadhi Law Offices as Apollo Justice, Datz Are'bal explains that the place has a shrine to the fallen victims of the Defense Culpability Act.
• In Insanity, Emiko's bedroom was kept exactly the same after she died. In a flashback, it's revealed that there was another reason for this besides memorializing her; Shigeki believed he could resurrect her and so wanted her room maintained so she could still use it.

Web Comics

• In Gunnerkrigg Court, Diego and his robots have one for Jeanne. Overlaps with Stalker Shrine, considering how he acted towards her when she was alive and the role he played in her death.
• Tina of Wapsi Square has one that has a bit of an overlap with Shrine to Self. You can work out how that makes sense on your own.
• Erfworld has a macabre version: the dreaded Necromancer Wanda Firebaugh keeps a "stone garden" of small monuments to everyone she's "uncroaked" as undead minions, describing how they were known by their loved ones. It's a rare show of sentimentality from an otherwise callous mass-murdering slave-soldier.
• The Secret Knots: "Glitches" centers around a high-tech version of one. At some point in the future people began to make 'meta-memorials', virtual reality worlds filled with things important to the deceased and the person who made the memorial, as well as a bot that acts as representation of the deceased. They were later discontinued, not out of ethical or philosophical quandaries, but because companies realized people were putting images of copyrighted characters and versions of games inside them, but the memorials continued to be maintained on hacked servers. Xeni, the main character of the comic, spends more time in her memorial to her friend to than she does in the real world; her mom calls it a virtual tomb that she's locked herself inside of.

Web Original

• There is no GATE; we did not fight there: In the interlude *Til' Our Dying Breaths*, Kell leads Kytheus to a memorial of the 'Sons of the Storm', which was the group led by Kryton Westwind, the first ruler of Rhavenfell and Kytheus' fallen grandfather. Statues of each fallen member are presented in the memorial, including one of Kryton himself. A number of old armor, standards, and banners are also kept within the room.
• In RWBY, it's revealed that there's a statue of Pyrrha Nikos in her hometown of Argus as one of the Hunters and Huntresses that died during the Fall of Beacon.

Western Animation

• Arcane: The Firelights have a mural of the faces of those who died, most of them fighting Silco's crime organisation. Ironically one of the faces is of a young Powder, even though she's still alive as Silco's chief enforcer Jinx.
• In Avatar: The Last Airbender, when Iroh returns to Ba Sing Se incognito six years after failing to conquer it, he creates a shrine to his son, with a picture, incense, and food, at the place where he fell in battle.
• South Park: In "A Song of Ass and Fire", the police have a "Black Friday Wall of Honor" for all the fallen policemen during the yearly event. By the looks of it, there are already around 30 victims to be mourned.
• Star Trek: Lower Decks reveals that the Ferengi homeworld has one of these for the Dominion War — only it is for finances that were lost.
• During the second season of Young Justice (2010), the team visits a room in Mount Justice called "The Grotto", the Grotto houses shrines to fallen heroes, including the second Blue Beetle: Ted Kord, the Second Robin: Jason Todd, and Tula aka Aquagirl.

Real Life

• Extreme sports clubs have a custom of hanging the photos of the members, who have died in the hobby, on the wall.
• There is a United States national memorial which honors firefighters who perish in a fire-fighting action, as well as many state memorials. These are sometimes treated as substitute gravesites if a fallen firefighter is cremated by last request, by necessity, or by the circumstances of their death in the line of duty.
• Celebrities often get massive shrines outside their homes (or somewhere associated with them) after they pass on. Princess Diana and Michael Jackson are two pretty good examples; the shrine outside Buckingham's gates was so massive that it actually started to block foot traffic.
• This also seems to happen for victims of drive-by shootings and car accidents, especially if the victim was very young.
• The fictional character Ianto Jones from Torchwood received this in the real world after he died in Children of Earth.
• Like the above example, after the final episode of One Foot in the Grave, many people left flowers and tributes at the filming location where the fictional protagonist Victor Meldrew was killed in a hit and run.
• Can often happen at the sites of major disasters or terrorist attacks, where people leave ad hoc collections of notes and mementos to remember the dead.
• When the highly decorated WWII veteran and former movie star Audie Murphy died in a plane crash in 1971, near the top of a mountain in Virginia, the local chapter of the Veterans of Foreign Wars decided to build a memorial as close to the site as they could. They cleared and expanded the nearest mountain trail, and built a small stone monument with a plaque in 1974. Over the years, hikers have built a small wall or cairn around it, just by adding one stone per person to the existing pile. They occasionally leave other items as well. The informal add-ons are more impressive when you realize that most hikers tackle this trail because it is a relatively easy one, and have only vaguely heard of Murphy before they reach the monument.
• Queen Victoria had a form of this after the death of her beloved husband, Prince Albert. For the rest of her life, the servants would lay out his clothes and toiletries every morning exactly as he would have used them in life, as though he was going to wake up at any moment and get ready for the day.
• Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo became the great stumbling block of Japanese-Asian relations because the priests there decided to commemorate the Second World War by enshrining the kami (spirit) of everyone who died fighting for Japan; this includes a few thousand war criminals and thousands of foreign nationals who were forcibly conscripted to fight (or perform slave labor) for Japan. Needlessly to say, no one's happy about this. Even today, various Asian families are still petitioning the priests to remove the spirits of their ancestors from those who got them killed.
• During the tribute to Motörhead frontman Ian "Lemmy" Kilmister at the 2016 Grammy Awards, a spotlight was placed on a setpiece showcasing his signature bass guitar and amp, as well as his boots and hat.
• There's a religious and cultural phenomenon in Chile about the "animitas", which are little shrines dedicated to some deceased person who died in the street by diverse reasons (car accident, robbery victim, passional crime, etc) in where his/her family put an animita in the place he/she died as a kind of Lonely Funeral. Sometimes, the people pray some of them and then some miracles happen, there're few animitas in Chile that are venerated and are so famous as churches because of this.
• The people of Toronto one day decided to come together spontaneously and made a shrine to honor a dead raccoon that the City hadn't picked up. It started when one smartass decided to leave a note. Things quickly spiraled from there to the point people were leaving flowers and candles around him.
• When the Highland Gardens Hotel in Los Angeles was known as the Landmark, one night in 1970 Janis Joplin checked into Room 105...and never checked out. After it was sold, the closet of that room was dedicated fully to her memory, being the closest thing to a grave she has (her ashes were scattered at sea). Even some 50 years later, fans and admirers rent it out or just stop by to leave flower boas, whiskey bottles and LOTS of sharpied-on messages.
• The bell of the Edmund Fitzgerald was incorporated into a shrine to its dead. On the day of the dedication, it was rung 30 times—once for each of the 29 crewmembers, and the 30th for all the others who had lost their lives on the Great Lakes.

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