Basic Trope: A doomed character accepts their death with serenity.
- Straight: Alice, while dying from a gun-wound she got during her Last Stand, tells her friends that It Has Been an Honor to fight alongside them, and then peacefully passes away.
- Exaggerated: Alice, after being tortured for several hours and having all her limbs ripped off, makes a long speech about honour and sacrifice before bleeding out.
- Downplayed:
- Alice mostly coughs blood, but shows no sign of fear and dies thinking about her loved ones.
- Alice sheds a Single Tear as she dies, but otherwise doesn't make a scene.
- Justified:
- Alice is really accustomed to pain and fear, so she is able to keep them at bay as she dies.
- Alice has been sentenced to death. She knows panicking or begging won't make any difference, so she decides not to give her executioners OR the spectators the satisfaction.
- By the time Alice realizes she's dying, all her energy has been taken from her, and so she chooses not to struggle, but to simply accept what's coming.
- Inverted: Alice faces The Grim Reaper. It cowers in fear of her and begs for mercy.
- Subverted:
- Alice is extremely brave during the battle, but as she lies there dying she begins to freak out and shout that she doesn't want to die.
- Alice accepts death knowing she is going to make a hell of a lot of noise when she goes.
- Alice seems downright zen as she prepares to die… because this is all part of her plan — and she might even survive the process.
- Alice accepts death and waits for it... and then she fails to die. Something else makes her avoid death.
- Alice initially accepts her death. When she finds out how she'll die, she starts panicking and is unable to maintain her dignity for long.
- It looks at first blush like Alice did this, but The Coroner checks her dead body later and reveals that she died too quickly for shock (and any thought, both rational and reflexive) to register on her features.
- Double Subverted: ...but right before passing away she accepts her fate and closes her eyes, awaiting death.
- Parodied: Alice shows no signs of fear and impatiently checkes her clock as she bleeds out.
- Zig Zagged: Alice goes into an extreme mood swing as a result of blood loss, spouting encouraging words to her friends in one moment and mourning her fate few seconds later.
- Averted:
- Alice is simply unable to remain calm in a situation like that. She desperately grasps for breath, occasionally screaming in pain and cries tears of helplessness and fear.
- Alice is never placed in a situation where she is facing imminent death.
- Enforced: "We don't want the final moments of the major character to be filled with screams and cries. That would paint her as a coward, because obviously all the brave people die quietly and proudly"
- Lampshaded: "How can you be so calm right now?"
- Invoked: Alice's religion tells her to do this to increase her chances of getting into heaven.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied:
- Alice gets captured by Emperor Evulz who, in order to mitigate the influence of Alice as a martyr, serves her a public execution in a slow, excruciating manner, making preserving any kind of dignity virtually impossible.
- There may be dignity in death but what Alice absolutely refuses to do is go gently.
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: "I wonder why death is always depicted with such dignity. Isn't it a bit unrealistic?"
- Implied:
- Alice is Killed Offscreen, but it is mentioned that she went peacefully.
- Alice's body is the only one not curled up in fear.
- Deconstructed:
- The amount of people who faced death with dignity makes others value their lives significantly less, as dying doesn't seem particularly scary. The Resistance gradually stops using pragmatic tactics, as its members seek glory in suicide attacks.
- Evulz has an O.O.C. Is Serious Business moment where he's shocked that he is so used to seeing his victims squirm in fear or fight back in his executions that when he faces Alice and she accepts her demise, he is genuinely surprised and either has a My God, What Have I Done? / Villainous BSoD moment, is too distracted to notice his slaves banding together after hearing Alice's Rousing Speech before her death, or a mixture of both scenarios
- Reconstructed: Death is still portrayed as painful and not something you want to go through. It's just that you can mitigate the fear if you have something worth dying for.
- Played For Laughs: Alice spends her last living moments mocking the shooter for only managing to hit her after dozens of missed shots
- Played For Drama: "Funny... I always feared death, but now it doesn't bother me that much"
- Played For Horror:
- Alice tries, oh, she definitely tries, but the monster tears her apart in a split second and a fashion that makes her look like a live-action Looney Tune (or, worse yet, is clever and sadistic and powerful enough to force her to let go of her dignity).
- Turns out that the monster targeted Alice because she faced death with dignity. If she had done like the Dirty Coward and screamed her lungs out while letting go of the contents of her bladder, the monster would have let her go in disgust.
Back to Face Death with Dignity.
