Basic Trope: A character tries to commit suicide and fails.
- Straight: Bob shoots himself in the head. Instead of dying, he suffers severe head injuries.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob jumps off a skyscraper but somehow survives without even hurting himself.
- Bob tours all over town, trying to get shot and stabbed by thieves, get run over by cars and trains, swallow various types of poison, get a gun and bullets, and jumping from various buildings. A Plague of Good Fortune keeps him alive through all of this and even makes him an Accidental Hero, to his increasing despair.
- Downplayed: Bob jumps off a building and becomes completely paralyzed, but just barely escapes with his life.
- Justified:
- Bob happens to be immortal.
- Bob has a poor aim.
- Bob was Born Lucky and hates it.
- Bob messes up his aim in a panic as he realises at the last second that he doesn't really want to die.
- Inverted: Bob attempts to fake his death, but accidentally kills himself for real.
- Subverted:
- Bob shoots himself in the head and he survives, but later internal bleeding kills him.
- Bob shoots himself in the head, and he is declared brain-dead at the hospital.
- Double Subverted:
- …and then he goes to the hospital where they successfully revive him.
- Another neurologist looks at Bob's vitals, and says that he's still very much alive, but that he's not likely to ever wake up from his coma, and even if he does, his brain is so badly injured that he'll never be able to walk, talk, eat solid food, or take care of himself ever again.
- Parodied: Bob shoots himself in the head … and the bullet bounces off.
- Zig-Zagged:
- Following his suicide attempt, Bob crosses the line between being alive and dead too many times to count.
- Bob goes through a Whole-Plot Reference to Groundhog Day, attempting suicide in several ways which do varying degrees of damage to him. At least one of them kills him but he comes Back from the Dead.
- Averted: Bob successfully commits suicide.
- Enforced: The author had a failed suicide attempt in the past and wants to teach the audience about how committing suicide will end badly.
- Lampshaded: "Why am I in the hospital? I should be dead."
- Invoked: Bob's son Will is afraid his father will commit suicide, and when nobody believes him he sabotages Bob's gun so it jams.
- Exploited: Bob tried to kill himself to avoid paying a debt to Alice. When she learns he failed, she pursues the issue more aggressively and even introduces a new "hundred-percent suicide-attempt interest rate".
- Implied: Bob has a mental disorder and is missing for a few episodes before coming back with noticeable gauze bandages on his wrists.
- Defied:
- Bob looks for instructions on how to kill himself properly.
- As much pain or anguish as he may feel, Bob refuses to try to kill himself.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Bob is not quite a human vegetable and has coma dreams. He still wants to die. He asks Alice to finish the deed when she enters his dreams, but Alice refuses. Bob is effectively trapped in his own mind.
- Reconstructed: Bob is freed thanks to a massive humanitarian intervention and realizes how much better he feels being alive.
Back to Bungled Suicide
