Basic Trope: Children are immune to death.
- Straight:
- A group of children survive a terrible storm unharmed, while many of the nearby adults are killed.
- An Axe-Crazy murderer kills several adults, leaving any children he comes across alive.
- Exaggerated:
- A terrible disaster strikes and kills everyone over the age of 18, but not anyone beneath it, leading to a Teenage Wasteland.
- The apocalypse occurs, killing all of humanity. Except the children.
- Everyone is immune to death, except the elderly.
- The universe is utterly destroyed alongside existence, the children survived it without any problems and can still live.
- A baby goes through excruciatingly painful torture, and survives without a scratch, not even getting hurt at all.
- Downplayed: Only children under the age of 10 come under the banner of "infant".
- Justified:
- Children tend to be more resilient to harm and due to their size and youthful energy, are more likely to escape danger than adults.
- Also, the Axe-Crazy murderer wouldn't hurt a child/has standards.
- In some horror/fantasy settings, demons and other supernatural terrors who know what's good for them will, at the most, give a human child a good scare and be satisfied with that. Children being the most innocent of all human beings, angels tend to be far more protective of them and harming so much as hair on Little Billy or Little Suzie's head is just asking for a heavenly hit squad to show up and make lasagna out of you.
- "I see you slugs shooting kids, and I'll run ya over with the tank, got me?!"
- Only Fatal to Adults
- The area has features where the storm doesn't reach, but only kids fit inside those features.
- Inverted: Only children die, and all the adults make it out alive.
- Subverted: During a natural disaster, a bus full of school children narrowly avoid several collapsing buildings, only for the bus to explode into a massive fireball.
- Double Subverted: But the children happen to survive anyway, only a little burned.
- Parodied:
- In a Crapsack World, where Everything Is Trying To Kill Them, a group of children manage to narrowly avoid every danger that comes their way, while all the adults around them drop like flies.
- As a Running Gag, Abusive Parents attempt to murder their children any way they can think of. It never works.
- Children tends to ignore anything that has over 100% chance of killing them because they never die.
- A nuclear bomb is dropped on a large city, killing hundreds of people...but the baby's house is left untouched.
- To gain an advantage over the SWAT teams in the upcoming firefight, a group of bank robbers burst out of the buildin covered head-to-toe in live babies.
- Zig Zagged: In a Crapsack World falling apart, several children make it out of a disaster zone alive, except one of them gets crushed by a building. Another child is shot in the leg, but survives, but eventually dies of blood loss. The first dead child shows up again, explaining that it only looked like the building crushed him, but he was really safe behind it. But then the other children kill him for his meat. But it turns out that this was all a simulation, and nobody is really dead. Until the simulation malfunctions and starts killing everyone, except for the children. But then it starts killing the children too...
- Averted:
- Enforced: "We need a lot of violence and death, but not to any of the children, or else all the Moral Guardians will complain."
- Lampshaded: "How many casualties?" "Over 9,000." "How many of those are children?" "None." "What?"
- Invoked:
- The authorities keep all the children in a safe shelter before any potentially violent scenes.
- Dr. Apocalypse specifically makes sure his biological weapons don't affect children.
- Exploited: A group of kids knowing that they can't die go on Suicide Missions to achieve their goals
- Defied: The Axe-Crazy murderer makes sure to kill all of the children first.
- Discussed: "The kids will be okay. Children never die in these situations."
- Conversed: "Does nobody under twelve die in these movies?"
- Implied: There is a list of all the victims of a recent accident. None of said victims were children.
- Deconstructed:
- During a natural disaster, countless of adults die horrifically, but all of their children survive them. With very few adults left, the children must grow up fast and help to rebuild the city. As a result of the disaster, all of the children lose their childhoods and their innocence. They grow up to become bitter and aggravated at everything.
- Alternatively: During a massive disaster, a group of children discover that for some reason, they are surviving all of the catastrophes that are killing all the adults. Given this knowledge, the children figure that they're invincible and decide to take more chances, which actually does kill them.
- Or the armies of the world start to fight with child soldiers due to their complete invincibility
- Reconstructed: The rest of society is comforted by the fact that mortality applies to all.
- Played For Laughs: A villain sees a lone baby roaming on a playground, and decides to blow him up with a rocket launcher just for the kicks of it. After the dust from the explosion dissipates, we see that the baby is perfectly happy and fine, in fact, he even found it funny because he's laughing as if he has seen a silly face.
- Played For Drama: A villain's biological weapon kills dozens of people except for a single baby, and the heroes have to figure out why it was the only one who survived. It may provide an answer to how they can save everyone else in time.
Back to Improbable Infant Survival
