Never Say Die / Anime & Manga

• 4Kids Entertainment became synonymous with this trope in the anime fandom.
  • Yu-Gi-Oh!:
    • Like DBZ, almost every mention of death is switched out for "sent to the Shadow Realm" in the 4Kids translation. Which makes it sound even worse if you know the concept of Heaven and Hell and think of "send to the shadow realm" as a euphemism for "condemn to Hell" body and soul. Sometimes they didn't use the Shadow Realm wording, though, when the story arcs being worked on didn't leave place to put it in. Namely, Pegasus's researchers "vanishing" after researching the God Cards, Noah getting "his body inutilized" (and later "saving himself in a backup file" when his Virtual World is destroyed), Amelda's little brother getting "captured" by the Kaiba Corp, Raphael's family being "saved" by lifeboats after a shipwreck, etc. This is because the network censors can't interfere with 4Kids's productions when they're not made for television. 4Kids's reputation for over-the-top censorship actually comes from the network censors.
    • They did get away with one: Noah's five generals were said to be 'scattered throughout the virtual world' when Noah caused them to flicker out of existence in a fit of You Have Failed Me. Likely, in the Japanese version, they were deleted. However, as mentioned before, the whole virtual world was later destroyed! Noah was said to be saved to a backup file, but no such thing was said about them, so they're definitely Killed Off for Real.
    • Averted in the first season, where all deaths, implied deaths, and attempted murders were actually retained. Also averted in the duel between Yugi and brainwashed Joey in Season 2..."death" isn't stated, but it's very clear that the loser of the duel will not end up in the Shadow Realm if they are dragged underwater by an anchor, nor will Tea end up there if a giant crate is dropped on her.
    • Also averted in Yu-Gi-Oh! The Movie: Pyramid of Light by Anubis. Quite ironic since the movie was made by 4Kids.
      Anubis: It is no longer time to duel. Now it is time to die!
    • Somehow the Pyramid of Light also had a straight example in avoiding the word kill when Tristan asks "How do you destroy what's already dead!?" even though it defeats the whole purpose of the saying. You can destroy dead things (or things that were never alive) just fine, it's killing them that leads to a paradox.
    • The Shadow Realm may have been 4Kids' way of recontextualizing an aspect of the Japanese version. Originally, those who lost Shadow Games, originally known as Darkness Games, had their souls or person sent to the World of Darkness (separate from the one in GX.) While the Shadow Realm was certainly used to cover up more violent deaths, like the infamous "dark energy discs", the term is used as a proper substitute in the context of Shadow Games themselves. In fact, death is still implied if a soul is not rescued from the Shadow Realm.
    • Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: In season 3, All mentions of death are replaced to being "sent to the stars", though death was still heavily implied. It became rather awkward when the Supreme King/Jaden's Superpowered Evil Side went on a genocidal rampage. Given nobody actually ends up dead even in Japanese it makes the edit seem rather derogatory.
  • One Piece: Death was avoided, to say the least. Kuina's death from falling down stairs was changed to having her be crippled by the friends of man she defeated (which is arguably worse), Belle-Mere was "imprisoned in a dungeon for the rest of her life", etc. When death wasn't changed to something else, it was very much toned down. Listening to Johnny and Yosaku talking about how they saw Nami "finishing Usopp off" was a nice source of Narm. There's also the guy who, in the manga, was shot in the head by one of Shanks' crew. In the anime, this scene still ran... with Shanks telling the 'dead' man's crewmates "When he wakes up, tell him it was a popgun". Earlier episodes were okay with threats of killing and euphemisms for death, though.
    • Dr. Hiriluk’s suicide was notably kept in the dub, but drastically toned down. Originally he drank an explosive in an attempt to take Wapol with him. In the dub? He just drinks what appears to be poison and the explosion is cut out.
    • Series creator Eiichiro Oda enforces this trope on Luffy in an odd (and very literal) way. According to him, the first and only time he had Luffy outright use the word "kill"^note In the middle of the Captain Kuro arc, where he threatens to kill the Black Cat Pirates for laughing at Usopp, his own grandmother sent him a Strongly Worded Letter about taking life and death seriously. After that, he consistently had Luffy use standard Shōnen tough-talk like "kick [your] ass!" for every enemy from the lowliest Mooks to the most monstrous of Arc Villains. Note this is completely in-line with the series' ethos - no matter how bone-crunching his finishing blows are, every major enemy Luffy has fought has explicitly lived to tell the tale.
  • Shaman King managed to replace all the "die"s for "destroy"s, which is quite an accomplishment on an anime about ghosts. And given the context, "destroy" can sometimes sound even more gruesome.
  • Their dub of Sonic X exaggerates this trope, going out of its way to make sure nobody died; 4Kids didn't just replace instances of 'die' and 'kill', they also added dialogue to make sure viewers couldn't even interpret people as dead.
    • In the Sonic Adventure arc episode with Perfect Chaos, several military aircraft are downed while in combat with the monster. The camera shifts to a few people that are lamenting the condition of the city, and then, offscreen, you hear a voice that says "Don't worry! The pilots are okay!" (This phrase, or any possible equivalent, is non-existent in the original Japanese dub.) What's even worse is that said people shouldn't even be in the city. They were all evacuated according to an earlier TV report.
    • The treatment regarding Maria. In Sonic Adventure 2, she was shot dead/fatally wounded by a G.U.N. soldier. This is canon, and plays a good part in Shadow's storyline. In the dub, Maria is referred to as "lost" and 'taken away', though from the dialogue and sloppy editing, one could argue that they meant 'take her body away'. Close examination of the dialogue such as characters using past tense to refer to Maria, reveals she still died in the dub but without using any direct words such as "died" or "killed."
    • Molly from season 3 gets the Spared By Adaptation treatment. In the original, she is given a touching Heroic Sacrifice, while in the dub, she just flies off in the middle of the battle, talking about how she won't stop fighting, and then never shows up again, for some reason. The editing is so jumpy, sloppy, and awkward it's hilarious. Seeing how it was carried out, it's still quite obvious that she died and that something was done to the footage.
  • Despite being dubbed by 4Kids in its earlier years, Pokémon: The Series frequently averted this, especially in the movies and during Kanto. It also played it straight as many references to dying and death from the Japanese version were censored or replaced with euphemisms. In an early episode of the dubbed version, Brock's father straight up said Brock's mother passed away, but this turned into a Dub-Induced Plot Hole when Brock's very much alive mother showed up later. This particularly helped to ruin the "fighting is wrong" moral they tried to push onto The First Movie, due to their refusal to acknowledge death as a consequence when doing so was the only way to really differentiate between the no-holds-barred fights to the death the movie takes a stance against and the in-good-fun battling everything else in the entire series revolves around.
  • Kirby: Right Back at Ya! sometimes does this and sometimes doesn't; one of the episodes ends with King Dedede thinking he'd caused Kirby's death and giving him a funeral, only to find out he's still alive. This scene remained unscathed. However, Knuckle Joe's first appearance was hit by this, with him saying his father was "destroyed" and he's going to find the one who did this and "do the same thing he did to my father". The episode was otherwise left mostly unedited.
• Dragon Ball: In a strange reversal of this trope, after Tambourine assassinates Giran, he takes a swipe at a nearby child's father. The dub for some reason had Tambourine claim that this attack killed him, and that he killed him just for fun... even though we can clearly see said father actually survived and isn't even injured, just spooked. The original Japanese makes no mention of any killing and Tambourine just flies away after mocking him.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • In Funimation's original 1996 dub, dialogue was arbitrarily changed to turn "kill" into "send to another dimension". This could get quite unwieldy: "My next attack is so powerful, it will destroy this planet and send everyone on it to another dimension!" or "Yeah, Frieza's attack sent me to another dimension, and I need you to wish me back with the Dragon Balls!" The censors initially didn't even allow the use of the next most common euphemism, "destroy". The afterlife was also referred to only as "another dimension" for a sizable chunk of the series. Since the series' uncancelling, the censorship was lessened. Often a good source of comedy in any case because the replacement words are so ridiculous. This got especially hilarious in the Garlic Jr. Movie, where they actually did defeat the bad guy by sending him to another dimension. In contrast, the name of both the movie (which aired on the same channel and often in a similar time slot as the tv series) and the dimension that said bad guy was sent to is The Dead Zone. Also, the word "die" is used in the commercial spots that aired during the tv series to advertise the movie, as well.
    • Humorously, the uncut English dubs still use the term "Otherworld" to refer to the afterlife...but in that case they're actually being true to the original text. Much like the Underworld in Classical Mythology, Dragon Ball cosmology puts Heaven, Hell, and other celestial places (like the home planet of the Gods of Creation) in a single realm just called "the other world" (anoyo) in Japanese. As mentioned below, the uncut dubs are perfectly fine with saying "kill", "die", "See You in Hell", and the like.
  • The original dub of Dragon Ball Z changed "HELL" (which was on the T-shirts of the people who worked there) to "HFIL" — "Home For Infinite Losers." This resulted in an odd incongruence later on, when the DVDs' subtitles and closed captioning often referred to Hell, while the dialogue did not. The censoring of the Hell staff's t-shirts resulted in the phrase "what the HFIL" among the Dragon Ball Z fandom.
    • The beginning of the series had even more horrible mangling beyond "another dimension". Take, for example, when Nappa and Vegeta land on Earth for the first time in the middle of a bustling city. Nappa, just for the hell of it, destroys the entire city, and the last thing we see before it goes up in flames is a huge, bewildered crowd of people. The very next line is "They may have evacuated, but that'll teach them!". Yes, the entire town evacuated in two seconds. Talk about outrunning the fireball.
    • They also destroyed a building, Vegeta lamenting the fact that it was empty because it was Sunday. Yes, these aliens who just arrived from another planet and have never been to Earth before know exactly how we keep track of time and that we take Sundays off in some cultures.
    • Then came the scene where Nappa takes out a couple of news vehicles. One, a futuristic hover vehicle, is handwaved as a drone with nobody aboard, but the second, a chopper, was explicitly shown to have people in it before it blew up. So they dubbed in Tienshinhan's voice saying "Look, I can see their parachutes! They're okay." despite the fact that there is clearly no indication of either a parachute, let alone any survivors in the first place.
    • Parodied in the abridged series ("Oh my God! They blew up the cargo robot! And the cargo was people!"), and in the alternative reality series (Frieza, after destroying Planet Vegeta, says "There go all the Saiyans. Oh wait, it's OK, I can see their parachutes!"). It's also Parodied in the Trapped in TV Land episode of The Fairly OddParents!. Timmy tells Vicky in the DBZ parody that she can have the magic remote "over my cold, non-moving, limited-animation body!"
    • Also parodied in Buttlord GT. Snowflake shouts, "Time to send you to ANOTHER DIMENSION!" then crushes his opponent's skull with one hand. And afterwards: "Ah, he's UNCONSCIOUS".
    • When Chiaotzu blows himself up trying to take out Nappa, Tien recalls that Chiaotzu has already been wished back to life with the dragon balls once. He shakes his fist and screams, "Now it's gonna be a lot harder to wish him back!" As far as Tien knows, it's impossible to wish Chiaotzu back — the Namekian dragon balls are introduced later.
  • The Namek Arc, with its high body count, forced some rather awkward censorship. For example, any time the camera showed the corpses of Namekians or Frieza's soldiers, they would dub in labored breathing or pained groaning to give the impression that they were still alive, just exhausted or badly hurt.
    • In the same vein, when Raditz arrives on Earth, he encounters a frightened farmer who shoots at him. He catches the bullet and uses his thumb to shoot it back at the farmer, hard enough that it goes through him and hits his vehicle behind him. He lies motionless, but his voice is heard saying, "That smarts," like he just stubbed his toe but he'll get over it. Some other dubs cut the bit where Raditz throws the bullet back and just show the farmer falling over, presumably to imply that he fainted.
    • They pretend that Dende's brother Kargo escaped during the attack on his village by editing the footage of Dodoria's mouth blast (cutting out the part where it hits Kargo and making it look like he just happened to miss Moori despite firing at point-blank range) and having other characters say he got away. After that, multiple characters repeatedly talk as if Kargo is still out there somewhere, despite him never appearing again until Frieza's victims are wished back to life.
    • Maiming wasn't safe from sugarcoating either. When Nappa cuts off Tien's arm, they apparently decided it wasn't feasible to edit that much footage, so they just had Tien shout "you just wait until it grows back!" There are some characters who can regrow lost limbs, but Tien isn't one of them.
  • The comic-relief character Mr. Satan alone has spanned a long history of censorship:
    • The renaming to "Hercule" in the edited dub. Many fans consider it to be in the same class of replacements as "HFIL". On the other hand, to a Japanese audience, the name "Mr. Satan" would mostly just connote that he's trying to present himself as a gigantic badass, without any of the religious connotations. In that light, the original name simply wouldn't make sense to an American audience (nor his adoring fans shouting that they love Satan).
    • The French dub renamed him Hercule for different reasons: Since every instance of 'Ma' (demon) and 'Mao' (demon king) was conventionally translated as 'Satan', it would've left him the fourth character officially called Satan, one of whom (Piccolo) was already a main character, and the cast was already making an effort avoiding the name of Chichi's father (dubbed Satanirus) since Piccolo's introduction.
  • After FUNimation moved the series from syndication to Cartoon Network's Toonami, all this fear of using these words ceased (presumably due to the more lenient standards of Cable Television). On the edited Toonami dub, references to death would remain intact, although the word "kill" was only used in the uncut dub and usually edited to "defeat" or "beat." Meanwhile in the UK, the Canadian actors from FUNimation's censored 1996 dub got hired to do an alternate English dub for Episode 108 onward. This dub aired on the UK's version of Toonami (and later Canada's YTV). In this case, the words "kill", "dead", and "die" are never mentioned, being replaced with "hurt" (which gets ridiculous in many situations, but "destroy" is used in some cases), "gone", and "leave". An exception to this was a figure of speech used by Krillin near the end of the World Tournament Saga. In Episode 236, when Gotenks races off to fight Buu, Piccolo says "If he gets killed now, all our efforts are in vain." From here, the words "kill", "die", "dead", and "death" are used as frequently as in the FUNimation dub, and are never replaced again.
  • The CW4Kids version played this straight for the remake, Dragon Ball Z Kai, going so far as to edit dead characters' halos into "orbs". The Nicktoons version also seems to play it semi-straight — you can say "die", but you can't say "kill/murder/etc". It seems to be random in which it occurs, even kill has been used a few times. Averted in the uncut version, naturally, which aired in [adult swim] later.
• The Toonami edit of Outlaw Star Zig Zagged this, some episodes they left "die" or "killed" alone, but in others they wouldn't even let a character say things like "Best to go on living" because it implies death.
• Played with in the Touhou Project manga Strange and Bright Nature Deity; according to canon, fairies instantly resurrect when killed. So it has the three protagonist-fairies looking at a tree which has been split in half by lightning, worried about the fairies that lived there. "They must have been ...!" Cut to a dazed-looking fairy floating along in the breeze. "Yeah, that must be them over there. They'll probably be out of commission for a while."
• Quite possibly the originator of the "send to another dimension" euphemism was Saber Rider and the Star Sheriffs (an Americanization of Sei Juushi Bismarck) in which the villains were re-written as an extradimensional race whose members were teleported back to their own universe whenever shot. Then they came up with the even odder rule that if you shoot them in their own universe, they become human.
• Sailor Moon: The original English dubs seem to go out of their way to ensure that nobody dies, at least in the first season.
  • The Sailor Scouts in the DiC Sailor Moon dub are "captured" by their enemies and disappear from the series until Serena "frees" them. The entire point of that edit was destroyed in the first part's "Sailor Moon Says" segment, which showed Serena clearly talking to the ghosts of her "captured" teammates.
  • Interestingly, Neflite's actual death scene in the dub is a rare aversion ‒ Molly says "please don't die" as she's weeping over him.
  • Not even Queen Beryl was allowed to die. The dub added dialog from Sailor Moon saying that Beryl was "banished back to the Negaverse" right after their final confrontation with her in which she is eradicated from skin to skeleton. Yeah, if she was sent back to the Negaverse, where she has been throughout the whole show, couldn't she just teleport back out? Yet we never see her again, except in flashbacks...
  • In the third episode of Sailor Moon R, however, Artemis does say that Queen Beryl has been "completely destroyed".
  • Sailor Moon R seems more relaxed about death, in general. Diamond quite literally says he would avenge the deaths of the two whom were killed. It also shows him being impaled by the Doom Phantom, despite Tuxedo Mask's similar impalements from Season 1 getting censored. Blood is also visible and Doom Phantom's declaration of ending all life on Earth is left intact. Wicked Lady is even warned that she won't survive the dark crystal passing through her, though they use the word destroyed when describing it. This may be partly because the second half of the Sailor Moon R dub was produced a few years later (and rather hastily), and was commissioned by the Canadian network YTV for a mostly Canadian audience (which is apparently less likely to be bothered by such things).
  • This phrase is also used in Episode 4 when Sailor Moon destroys the Negamonster, Derela. She says "I banish you to the Negaverse!" Interestingly enough, when she throws her tiara, instead of saying "Moon Tiara Magic" as she usually does, she says "Moon Tiara Vaporize!" The Negaverse seems to be used as a euphemism death at least three times, though it is not the same as the next dimension or the Shadow Realm.
  • This is subverted in the second half of the DiC dub as there are several times the characters say die or death, no kill though.
  • Zig Zagged in the German dub, especially in season 2. Apparently it depended on the translator, whether the D-word was used or replaced by "vanish".
• Mobile Suit Gundam Wing was released on Cartoon Network in two formats, one broadcast in the afterschool hours and one at midnight in CN's post-Watershed block. The former was censored, among other ways, by changing Duo's nickname from "God of Death" to "Great Destroyer." The latter, naturally, was not.
  • Tons of fun when Relena repeatedly begs Heero to kill her throughout the first few episodes.
  • This gets fantastically bad in the censored version of the movie Gundam Wing: Endless Waltz. There's a flashback where Duo is planning to kill everyone in a research facility and then himself with a handgun. They simply cut out the word "kill" and replace each instance with the word "destroy," leading to the ridiculous exchange: "Are you going to destroy me?" "I'm going to destroy everyone here, and then I'm going to destroy myself!" "Then go ahead and destroy me, Duo..."
    • When Quatre compliments Zechs and Noin on managing to blow through an army of Mooks to get to their objective, he says "You've come so far without destroying one soldier!" This might seem like a straight example, but it's actually a plot point^note The soldiers were tricked into fighting for a cause they didn't really believe in, so the good guys were deliberately trying not to kill them, and immediately after Quatre's line we get shots of enemy soldiers abandoning their disabled mecha. Though, it still fits here because he couldn't say "kill" on the air.
  • In one episode Trowa gives the captive Duo and Wu Fei something "to kill time"; the dub changed this to "pass the time". While it means the exact same thing, it's a particularly ludicrous example since the phrase "killing time" is generally not considered objectionable.
  • In one episode, a pair of OZ pilots launch a sneak attack on an Alliance port base. When the base surrenders, one of the pilots launches missiles at the surrender party yelling "This isn't battle, it's an execution!". In the Cartoon Network dub, it's change to "I'm going to destroy you!". The fact wounded soldiers on foot are still being hit by weapons bigger than they are somehow stayed in.
• Naruto:
  • At first, fans were afraid that the English dub was going to suffer from this; in the first few episodes, most instances of a character using the words "death", "kill" etc. were replaced with "destroy" (though Naruto does threaten to kill Mizuki in the first episode). Thankfully, right around the beginning of the Wave Country arc (when the real killing starts), this practice was dropped.
  • The German version however really looks like 4kids went crazy with it. It goes as far as editing corpses and blood out of a scene centered on said bodies. They're not even allowed to show swords. Zabuza's big entrance, ending with his sword sticking out of a tree and him standing on it, was edited so that only the handle is un-painted away, and Zabuza is standing perfectly straight on thin air. Sasuke's whole backstory doesn't make any sense, because nobody can know that his clan was killed. Instead, it was said they were "held captive". Also, the condition for unlocking the Mangekyo Sharingan was changed from "kill a friend" to "betray a friend". So Itachi never killed that one guy who went missing, he just made sure he would fall into the river ... and no further elaboration was provided. This makes Sasuke's lamenting about how he won't fulfill the condition after his fight with Naruto in the Valley of the End especially silly, considering that if betrayal is all it takes then he did fulfill that condition.
  • The first Clash of Ninja Revolution game was pretty silly with this. Any death references are replaced with "defeat" or "destroy". It makes Sasuke sound like Itachi is his rival instead of wanting to kill him. And it's strange because the previous games were okay with mentioning death.
  • The Naruto: Shippuden broadcast version briefly shown on Disney XD has shown that this is in full effect for the most part; for example, they changed Itachi's line in the first episode into "You must DEFEAT your best friend. You must DESTROY him."
  • On the same note as the German dub, the less said about the infamous Jetix UK cut, the better. It was basically the already-edited dub that showed on Cartoon Network US, but edited in such a way that manages to outdo some of the stupidest 4Kids edits, almost on the same level as One Piece! Aside from all the cuts to violence and all, Never Say Die was in full effect, which resulted in some lines being mangled and cut (An example being in the first episode: "If you ever lay a hand on my sensei..."*Cut to next scene*). Amazingly though one or two lines slipped through (Like Sasuke's "I promised myself that I'd stay alive...until I killed him..." line in episode 16).
• In the Lion Version of Voltron, the main characters had a nearly clairvoyant ability to tell whether or not the citizens of a destroyed city or planet had evacuated, just by looking at the burned and blasted out remains of said city or planet. Just about every other Never Say Die rule was in effect for this series (although the censors did let at least one "peasants being eaten whole by monsters" scene slip past them.)
  • Whenever possible, scenes that might have involved the killing of human beings are dubbed so that the destroyed creatures were actually robots.
  • Early in GoLion, the original Blue Lion (Takashi Shirogane, who was renamed Sven in Voltron) is killed. Instead of saying Sven was killed, they say that he went to heal on Planet Ebb, and then went back to the evil planet to help with a rebellion. It was quite confusing with everyone standing over his grave, crying, and talking about how he was really hurt and then had to go away, but he wasn't dead, really.
  • When the character (in the original, Shirogane's kid brother Ryou) reappeared in the story, his absence was explained by a bout of insanity. When this second character fell from a great height while grappling with the main villain, his death was dubbed away, to the point of the main cast (with shocked expressions and streaming tears) saying "He fell into the water..." A brief voice-over informs us that he was alive, but just really badly hurt.
  • This eventually paid off in the Post-Script Season, where Sven came back as a supporting character and even got to pilot Blue Lion again, thus averting this trope via Spared by the Adaptation.
  • The Vehicle Force Voltron also had this. (Example: one of the villains is actually killed in an early episode, but in his death scene, an image of him saying "I'll be back" is spliced in) Look up Voltron on Wikipedia and you'll see how different the American and Japanese versions really are.
  • A specific example from Vehicle Force is when the Voltron team befriend a young bad guy, who's then attacked by the rest of the bad guys, and trapped in a burning fighter. The animation shows that Jeff is being restrained from a futile rescue attempt, but we cut to an unconvincing scene explaining that the bad guy had set off happily to another base...
• While it didn't always shy away from the topic of death, Battle of the Planets included a Robot Buddy, 7-Zark-7, whose primary function was to reassure viewers that each episode's high body count was Mecha-Mooks, unmanned aircraft, merely stunned, just pining for the fjords, and so forth. In one episode, for example, the team's mission is to rescue two captured astronauts; Zark informs us that they got away safely. But their escape is never shown on-screen, for the simple reason that in the Science Ninja Team Gatchaman original, they were killed and their corpses used as bait in a trap.
• Pokémon Adventures: The American English-translated version uses this:
  • During the Yellow arc, for example, the Nerd (who moments earlier was trying to kill Yellow) says that the "defeat" of Misty, Erika, Brock, and Blaine will make everything much more fair. The four react as if he had said "deaths" because... he does. The Viz Kid's version seems to flip between using this trope and averting it. The next mention, where Agatha tries to kill the nerd because He Knows Too Much, they note that the nerd will die if it continues.
  • Volume 5 has Lance vaporizing a city, followed by him only wanting to "hurt" Yellow. And then proceeds to nearly drown her, and leaves her as she is sinking into the sea.
  • In Volume 1, the Arbok that is cut in half is referred to as a Zombie Pokemon immediately after; 5 Volumes later you find out that it lived anyways.
• Pokémon: Diamond and Pearl Adventure! plays this straight, to an extent. A character attempts suicide but they still refer to it as "going" (as in "We don't want you to go") rather than "die". It's not as apparent as other examples, as people often do use that euphemism, but it still counts.
• Zigzagged around by Digimon:
  • Digimon Adventure starts with it being an ironclad rule: the first die-related word uttered is Myotismon saying of the Eighth Child, "and when we do find him, then he must die!" The fandom was in total shock at it. Each successive season gets a little more comfortable with it - by the last arc of Tamers and the first arc of Frontier, hearing death words (in an actual end-of-life context, not "Mom's gonna kill me if I don't get home in time for dinner!") ceases to be remarkable, only for it to return full force in Digimon Data Squad.
  • Note, however, that the Adventure dub does play it straight later on, when Myotismon starts killing off his own henchmen, with him stating that he's "banishing (them) to his dungeon in the Digital World."
  • In Tamers, despite Takato swearing vengeance against Beelzemon for killing Leomon, where you would probably normally hear "I'LL KILL YOU!", even the toned-down dialogue, in the context of the moment, carries some degree of violent suggestion against what he'll do to Beelzemon:
    Takato: I'll make you hurt! I'LL MAKE YOU PAY!!!
  • Data Squad plays the trope straight — the word "die" is used twice, maybe three times throughout the whole series, and only to say that Digimon-don't-die. Every other death, Digimon or human, is euphemisized. "Reconfigured" is the usual term for the temporary death that results in a digi-egg, but a weapon that corrupts the victim's data so they can never revive can render you "permanently deleted."
  • The established dub name for him/her in Frontier was Crusadermon. It's said that Powers That Be in Japan told the American producers what name they wanted to use (whether katakana that amounted to Rhodo Knightmon was meant to mean Lord Knightmon or actually Rhodo Knightmon due to his/her coloration was quite debated in fandom) and landed in Narmville.
• Done to ridiculous lengths to all anime aired on German TV station RTL2, who were somewhat pioneers in terms of animes but have since pedaled back A LOT.
  • This worsened over the time, beginning with simply cutting out all blood and death scenes and culminated in censored dialogue in Digimon Tamers. Right now, the censorship policy seems to be as follows: Death has to be changed to "being captured", "not feeling well" or "being asleep", with "Fight" being changed to - "Game!". One can imagine how ridiculous the typical Naruto episode sounds like with these changes.
  • The same goes for Digimon Tamers, in which there's no resurrection and dead means dead. If having someone's hand driven through your body, whereupon you give a Final Speech and dissolve into bits of data that is absorbed by the enemy, and your death has a big hand in the rest of the series... there's no way to turn that into "asleep," and if it becomes "capture..." well, it's workable, but the killer does a Heel–Face Turn eventually, and he'd be quite the Jerkass for not letting the "captured" character go. Digimon Data Squad is a notable exception for this, though.
  • There's also an Arabic Digimon dub that censors "evolution," rumored to be because of the "evolution-vs-intelligent-design-vs-why-not-both" thing - it can be a religiously-charged thing if you must make it one. The Digimon are said to switch out for their "big brothers," and there's even a (never-seen) base where the "big brothers" hang out. You'd think it would be easier to just change the word; "Agumon upgrade to Greymon!" can't offend anyone, can it?
• An interesting version of this occurs in the Mobile Fighter G Gundam dub (even Uncut). The dub does its very best to not use the word ‘die’, and instead uses a Hurricane of Euphemisms.
• The American dubbed version of Baldios - The Movie (renamed The Battle for Earth Station S1) goes to great pains to point out that a villain is only 'stunning' a group of guards. And then leaves in the bit where Earth's population is all but wiped out by a massive environmental disaster.
• Speed Racer has frequent crashes, though it is rare for the show to explicitly say that a character died from being in a crash. There are several times however when this trope pops up. The two-part "The Fire Race' for example, doesn't use the word "die," but the phrase "will never race again" is used frequently.
• Star Blazers averted this trope, except in episodes where it played it straight. In general, the dub was inconsistent about this. One episode addresses that several crew members had died, however, in the final Iscandar episode, the poisonous gas used by the Gamilas/Gamilons is portrayed as "radioactive sleeping gas", implying that anyone infected would come out of it at some point, yet Kodai/Wildstar's (and the rest of the crew's) reaction to Yuki/Nova clearly indicates that she had died, although just before that, she had used the Cosmo Cleaner D/Cosmo DNA just in time for her to come out of it. Then later in the same episode, Captain Okita/Avatar is directly portrayed as dying from his already existing radiation poisoning before he has a chance to see the Earth restored.
• Zatch Bell!:
  • Zatch Bell had one strange example of this trope - in a certain episode telling us the events of Sherry's childhood, we learn that she had Abusive Parents and tried to commit suicide by throwing herself off a bridge on a stormy night. Viz's dub did something weird here - it edited the dialogue to Sherry "walking next to the river and almost falling", but edited very little of the footage. Most people who watched the dub version will still tell you that she tried to commit suicide.
  • The series in general averts the trope sometimes, other times play it straight. One filler character who had his parents dead in the original had them "sent to a hospital" in the dub.
• Interesting case in Studio Ghibli's My Neighbor Totoro. Some time after Mei goes missing, a sandal that looks a lot like hers is found floating on the surface of the lake, and everyone immediately suspects the worst. Satsuki runs to the lake without another word, the old woman next door is seen praying, several dozen people are searching the lake for a body... and yet no one says anything about what they think happened to Mei. No "death," "die," not even "drown." Absolutely nothing is said about it. The movie actually does otherwise use the words death and die with the girls' dangerously ill mom.
• In the first three chapters of Bakuman。, Moritaka (mistakenly) thinks that his uncle Nobuhiro, a mangaka who made one hit series, committed suicide after falling into debt trying to make another. The chapters that appeared in Shonen Jump have him using euphemisms, such as thinking that his death was "something worse" than overwork, or that he "end(ed) it all". As such, Moritaka's mother's shocked expression when he claims that was how his uncle died loses some of its impact.
• Inverted in Nyaruko: Crawling with Love! where Nyarko and Cuuko talk about how they killed the latter's Clingy Jealous Girl cousin Cuune, only for Mahiro to immediately point out that she's not dead, she literally is trapped in another dimension^note The three aliens set up individual bedrooms in a Pocket Dimension; when Cuune fell asleep in Cuuko's room, Nyarko closed it up and then removed the door.
• Played straight in the English dub of Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo, though in a comedic fashion.
  And now, I will take...a nap!
• In Guardian Fairy Michel, this is averted, but with a really odd twist. One episode features a gluttonous gourmand who collapses in the middle of a giant meal. The episode doesn't shy away from saying that he's dying, and in fact revolves around his dying request—but rather than give a realistic cause for his collapse, like heart disease or diabetes, he's said to be dying of an "overworked stomach."
• Early on in the English dub of Yo-kai Watch, which airs on Disney XD and has stricter broadcasting standards than TV Tokyo, substitutes many of the death words with "demise" or "no longer alive". It still lets a few clear references to death slip though. Youkai are usually dead humans and animals, so it's hard to get around them being dead. Later on in the series, references to death start to slip in more often as well.
• The Adventures Of The Little Prince: The American edition had one episode ("The Dancing Bear") jump through several hoops to avoid even considering the apparent death of a old man's pet bear, even though the man is clearly praying before the bear's grave in one scene. As this cartoon is from abroad the American edition has to hurriedly throw together awkward dialogue and editing in order to "resurrect" the little bear by the end.

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