Never Say Die / Literature

• 1Q84: Aomame refers to her murder victims as "being sent to another world".
• Animorphs:
  • Subverted most notably in #22. Rachel initially wants to say she's going to 'destroy' Sixth Ranger Traitor David, but that's a 'weasel word' and she admits to herself (and the reader) that she wants to kill him. Badly. While Cassie comes up with the only safe alternative to killing David, Rachel is stuck struggling with her violent tendencies for the rest of the series.
  • Again subverted when a family of campers gets caught up in a battle between Yeerks and free Hork-Bajir, who have, until this point, stubbornly refused to believe that the battle was real no matter what evidence they'd shown. They'd appeared to believe, but we find that they didn't really get it until this scene happens: (Paraphrased)
    Jake: Try not to get killed.
    Camper: When you say killed, you mean killed as in "captured" or "stunned," right?
    Jake: Unfortunately, I mean killed as in dead.
  • In other instances, this trope is played straight - the kids talk about how the Yeerks would "destroy" them and their families, and so on, also using "annihilate" as a euphemism. However, as the Yeerks are parasites, these vague euphemisms could be used to mean "killed or infested".
• Piers Anthony does this on purpose in his Xanth series. Instead of going to the bathroom or engaging in sexual activity, characters merely see ellipses.
• In The Legend of Rah and the Muggles, the Big Bad seeks to assassinate the title character. That this is rendered as making him "sleep forever" is especially ridiculous in a story which begins with a global nuclear war, though one might well question the suitability of the latter for a children's story.
• Discworld:
  • Assassins don't kill people. They are "inhumed".
  • Deconstructed in Hogfather, where the Tooth Fairy's country is defined by the belief of children, looking like a children's drawing for instance, and death does not exist there because no-one tells children about it. People just disappear when fatally injured. And the molecular-thin blade of Death's sword cannot exist there.
    You don't die here. You just get old... listening to the laughter.
• Warrior Cats:
  • There are a few instances when main characters are dying where death is referred to as "going to hunt with StarClan" or something similar for poetic effect.
  • The word "pregnant" is never used, regardless of how often characters have been pregnant throughout the series. They simply say "bearing kits" or something similar. This can be somewhat justified, because that could actually be how cats talk, similar to the series' use of Gosh Dang It to Heck!.
  • There is also when Lionblaze is trying to threaten Ashfur and he says "I can beat you in a fight if I have to," even though it's somewhat obvious he's threatening to kill him.
  • At one point, they refer to Scourge having "destroyed" Tigerstar, but they probably used that word because saying he "killed" him would have been a huge understatement.
  • Subverted in Into the Wild:
    Firepaw: He wants to get rid of Ravenpaw.
    Graypaw: Get rid of him? You mean kill him?
  • Because of the usual lack of squeamishness, when characters kept referring to Hollyleaf as having been "lost" instead of "killed" when a rockfall collapsed on her and they assumed No One Could Survive That!, fans figured she was alive since they made such a point of avoiding the word.
• Played for Drama in A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, where Francie is made by her mother to cross out every instance of the word "drunk" (a frequent condition of her father) in her diary and replace it with "sick."
• The Green-Sky Trilogy doesn't have issues describing something as dead, but as pacifists, they replace the word "kill" with "dead", and stigmatize the usage as a verb.
• A culture described in Rumo & His Miraculous Adventures raised children with no concept of death so that they would be abnormally fearless.
• The novel The Impossible Bird plays this trope a bit more literally: only people who have killed someone are physically capable of saying the word "die." (It's never explained exactly why this is so, although all the killing does turn out to be important to the plot.)
• From Borges' "Narrative Art and Magic": «Saracen historians, whose works are the source of José Antonio Conde's Historia de la dominación de los árabes en España, do not write that a king of caliph died, but that "he was delivered into his final reward or prize" or that "he passed into the mercy of the All-Powerful," or that "he awaited his fate so many years, so many moons, and so many days."
• Comes up in A Brother's Price. When she hears that her big brother is going to leave the family to be married, little Bunny Whistler wails "I don't want Jerin to go away like Papa did!". Immediately Jerin assures her, "Papa died, honey. I'm not going to die. I'm just going to live at someone else's house." It's a subversion, but one that initially looks like this trope.
• In Watership Down, characters mostly use the phrase "to stop running" as a euphemism for death. That said, the concept of death is not swept under the rug at all, and is an omnipresent threat throughout the story, and the word "kill" is frequently used with no hesitation or sugar-coating.
• In I Am America (And So Can You!), Stephen's parents apparently employed this trope by letting little Stephen know that his dog, Shasta, had moved to a big farm upstate. He takes this at face value, thinking his beloved pet had abandoned him in favor of more space to run around and play with his grandfather, and insisting that his new dog was better than Shasta ever was, even if he was getting slower in his old age.
• Used by special operatives in Vladimir Vasilyev's Wolfish Nature duology. The reason for that is that the dog-humans of this Alternate Universe have mastered genetic engineering and have subjected all people on the planet to the Bio-Correction centuries prior, which removed everyone's "wolf gene" (i.e. the gene that allows a person to kill). Anyone who kills another person, even by accident, is usually driven insane by the act. In fact, any murders that happen are either the result of madmen or special operatives, who spend many years training to do so without going insane. Even then, the psychological toll of killing is such that they're afraid of even using the word "kill", lest the word itself push them over the edge. Instead, the word "fuse" (as in "dynamite fuse") is used, so an operative might be asked how many fuses he's had in his career (very few have anything even close to 10).
• In Clementine, Friend of the Week, when Clementine loses her pet kitten, Moisturizer, she blames herself, but her father tells her that she's not to blame, that he got out because he was curious; kittens are curious. At that, Clementine is reminded of "a certain terrible saying regarding curiosity and cats," which she says that she is not going to repeat in her narration. However, she sees her father seeing her remember it and tells her that "But satisfaction brought him back" is the end of the saying. She replies simply that she hopes so.
• The children's picture book Benny and Penny in How to Say Goodbye is about death and averts this in that right in the beginning scene, Benny is jumping on leaves and Penny tells him on to because he'll hurt them, but Benny says that he can't because they're already dead. Penny wonders how long the leaves will be dead and Benny tells her "a long time." In the very next scene, Penny discovers a dead salamander and says that she thinks he's dead. Children's books meant to teach kids how to deal with loss and death almost always avert this trope.
• Survivor Dogs:
  • This is used a few times, such as when Lucky fears Alpha will "destroy" him, but it's usually averted. Death is described bluntly and only rarely are Deadly Euphemisms used. The series outright begins with an earthquake that kills everyone in the shelter but two dogs.
  • In the third book, Lucky and Mickey try to avoid outright mentioning their mother's death around the orphaned Fierce Dog litter. This only lasts a few pages as Alpha and the others have no such qualms.
• An Averted Trope in The Mouse Watch, as words like "kill" and "die" are used occasionally. This is true to the book's being Darker and Edgier than both its source material (it's a Spin-Off of Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers) and competing Children's Literature series such as Geronimo Stilton.
• Rowley Jefferson's Awesome Friendly Spooky Stories: In story 3, Ghost Friend, Rusty's best friend Gabe dies for no reason, but Rowley doesn't say he dies because "it's way too sad for a kids book". It becomes pointless quickly because Gabe is confirmed dead two pages later.
• The Rough Patch is about a fox named Evan grieving the death of his beloved dog. The word "death", however, is never mentioned, with the moment where Evan discovers his dog's body being referred to as simply "the unthinkable".
• Togetherly Long: The story uses the word "end" in place of words such as "die" or "kill."

---