Playing With / Never Say "Die"

Basic Trope: Words related to death are avoided.

• Straight:
  • Bob is gunned down by a barrage of lasers. When his partner Alice is asked what happened to him, she replies "They destroyed him."
  • An anime dub clumsily replaces references to death with lines such as "I'll send you to the next dimension!" or "I shall banish you to the Shadow Realm!"
• Exaggerated:
  • Bob's entrails are violently ripped from his body and stuffed into his mouth, suffocating him. When his partner Alice is asked what happened to him, she replies "They hurt him."
  • Bob is decapitated by a katana-wielding maniac. Alice says that he was hurt during the fight and Bob is seen recovering in a hospital later on.
  • Bob lives in a Crapsack World where civilization is a dystopian dictatorship, the main characters are part of La Résistance and on the losing side of war, while prejudice runs rampant and genocide is obviously one of the topics of the story. Euphemisms like "retired" are still used throughout the dialogue and the work miraculously has a G/PG or E rating, depending on the medium.
• Downplayed:
  • Words like "die" and "death" are used. Just not "kill" and "murder".
  • Alternatively, the equivalent "die" "kill" and "murder" words are used in a scene involving two members from rival factions arguing in French, and again in a Japanese one-liner by a hitman, but the subtitles (in English) are never translated directly, and the words never come up verbally in English.
• Justified:
  • Despite what it looks like, the character really isn't dead.
  • The character doesn't want to say it in front of a child.
  • The characters are too uncomfortable with the topic of another person's death to outright say that they're dead.
  • The stand-in word for death sounds more devastating than kill (i.e. Destroyed).
  • The character is a creature to whom other terms are more accurate, like "Deletion" for an A.I. or "stop moving" for an Animate Inanimate Object. If the character is human, the other terms might be accurate to the supernatural stuff going on around them, like "consumed by darkness" if a shadow took them over and left nothing behind.
  • Death is an unknown concept since all characters are immortal.
  • Death is a taboo topic in their culture, so euphemisms are always used to refer to it.
  • Considering what happened to Bob, "died" would be kind of an Understatement.
  • The "Next Dimension" or the "Shadow Realm" really is the afterlife; it's just parallel to our world and has its own name, hence all they're really doing is trapping them in another world for the rest of their un-death.
  • Being "sent to the Shadow Realm" is their world's local equivalent of saying "gone to Heaven/Hell", so everyone there knows what it means. It's a declaration of death in their world, just not in ours.
  • Bob turns out to be a very beloved character to the audience. The author doesn't want to really kill off Bob but instead says that he's "gone" to make it sound like he's just simply missing. This way, the author can bring back Bob for a future installment to please the fans who like him.
• Inverted:
  • A character is in a non-fatal condition, but is said to have died.
  • "Dead", "kill", and all their synonyms have become in-universe slang for any sort of incapitation, regardless of actual fatality of the attack. Even fainting is referred to as "dying".
    (Upon seeing the aftermath of a slapfight) "You totally slaughtered that guy!"
  • An anime sub substitutes any instance of "sent to the Shadow Realm" in the original Japanese audio with "killed". The dub goes even further and treats them as effectively dead from then on, making clunky attempts to justify all scenes in the Shadow Realm as "the undead plane" even when an actual "undead plane" was shown.
  • Everybody is perfectly capable of saying "death", "die", etc. It's just that nobody, down to the lowliest Mooks and randos, ever faces any fatal situations throughout the series.
  • Death is a well known and discussed topic— but the public is having trouble talking about that pesky in-between state between being dead and not-dead, so everyone uses euphemisms for that instead.
  • In this universe, when someone dies, it's standard for descriptions of their death to be juicy and detailed. Saying someone simply "died" is considered taboo, and using a Deadly Euphemism will get you mocked at best.
  • Instead of using words like "live" and "survive", a character says "not-die".
• Subverted:
  • The stand-in for death is scarier than a regular death.
  • Alice tries to be discreet about Bob's death by using an euphemism, only for Charlie to bluntly ask "He's dead?" out loud, much to the former's chagrin.
  • A character was said to have been "sent to the Shadow Realm" in both the dub and the sub.
• Double Subverted:
  • The obvious substitute turns out to be the real thing.
  • An anime dub said a character was "sent to the Shadow Realm", when the subtitles make it clear that he died. However, it turns out later that said character really was sent to the Shadow Realm, and everyone only thought he had died.
  • Both the dub and sub say "sent to the Shadow Realm"; in the original audio, on the other hand, you can clearly hear "shi" (death) when others refer to the character.
• Parodied:
  • A character is very clearly about to say the word "die", but gives off the Aside Glance and uses an incredibly obvious workaround.
    • The camera then pans around to a bunch of angry looking people who are in charge of the censorship department. Dare they actually say it, they should expect to get absolutely MAULED.
  • The word "death" and its synonyms are treated like swearing.
  • In a hysteric fit, Alice exclaims "Bob is DEEEEEEEEE- STROYED!"
  • Alice says that Bob is fucking destroyed beyond any fucking recognition.
  • No one even uses death in a metaphoric sense, eg, instead of "Dying to meet you" it's now "Sent-to-another-dimension to meet you" or "Dead End" becomes "Defeated End".
  • Every time someone says 'die' or any other death-related word, it gets bleeped out loudly.
  • The cast swears like sailors, discusses topics like sex and sexual violence, and the world they live in practically chews its denizens and spits out a mangled corpse beyond recognition... but saying "die" is still a no-no.
• Zig Zagged:
  • Death is referred to very rarely, but it just happens, there's no irony or anything to it. Still, they avoid it the rest of the time even though they've done it other times.
  • Sometimes they do say "die/death/etc", sometimes they don't. It depends on the writer, really.
• Averted: People say die when they see someone die.
• Enforced: The show's demographic may find death too scary.^note This is more plausible than you think.
• Lampshaded:
  • "He was destroyed. Wasted. Eliminated. Sent to another dimension. And everything else that means that thing we can't say on this network."
  • Look! I can see their parachutes! They're okay!
• Invoked: "There's a word for what happened to him, but it's not one I'm going to use in front of the children."
• Exploited: The passcode for the villain's hideout is "die", but our heroes can't say it out loud or show the word on screen, so can't use it.
• Defied:
  • "Can't you just say he's dead!?"
  • When a character says "die", a Moral Guardian bursts in to scold them only to suffer a brutal and gory death by that characters's hand, who then turns to the camera to ask "Any more objections?"
• Discussed: "No one around here is ever willing to use the D word. The clean one."
• Conversed: "Why can't the guys on that show just admit he died?"
• Deconstructed:
  • Because no one ever says die in this society, no one growing up ever learns to appreciate death, and can't understand why mommy and daddy won't come home.
  • The society ends up developing a myriad of Deadly Euphemism.
• Reconstructed:
  • Death is explained to older children, but the word isn't used in polite company for benefit of the younger ones.
  • Over the course of the series we get plenty of worldbuilding which explains exactly what "The Next Dimension" is; a Pocket Dimension controlled by the Big Bad which allows him to make himself stronger by draining the life force of those inside. While this plot point only occurs in the dub, it's handled well enough that it causes many fans to prefer the dub over the sub.
• Played For Laughs: Alice said the word "Dead End" and gets corrected by Bob that it's "Ended End"
• Played For Drama:
  • The network gets called out by the audience for being too cowardly for not mentioning any references to death.
  • Being sent to "The Next Dimension" or "The Shadow Realm" is outright stated to be a Fate Worse than Death, heightening the tragedy of a character's demise.

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