Basic Trope: A character dies while wearing a white shirt, similar garment or outfit, often in an unusually bloody way.
- Straight: Bob wears a white shirt into combat and is stabbed to death, with stains dramatically covering the shirt.
- Exaggerated: Bob enters battle wearing a white shirt, and then is promptly blown into bloody shreds by a grenade. All the other deaths in the battle are surprisingly lacking in blood.
- Downplayed: Bob enters combat, and while he isn't killed, he sustains injury that leave some faint blood stains on his shirt.
- Justified:
- The bright white of Bob's shirt made him an easy target to pick out, and so he suffered a more direct, bloody hit than the others in the battle.
- A magic-user in the series has cursed our heroes' white shirts, making them more vulnerable to attack while wearing them.
- Justified/Downplayed: White shirts, having no paint layer on them, are slightly easier to penetrate than colored shirts.
- Inverted:
- Bob, dressed in his white shirt, is the only one who leaves the battle without any blood on him.
- Bob wears a black shirt into combat and suffers an unusually bloody death.
- Bob wears a white shirt into combat and is harder to pick out because of the snow, ending up as the only person who lives.
- Subverted: Bob goes into battle dressed in white. His shirt gets covered in blooms of blood — other people's blood.
- Double Subverted: ...Until he gets a Boom, Headshot!.
- Parodied: Bob is a Marty Stu. In order to kill him, he's given a white shirt to wear into battle.
- Zig-Zagged: Bob wears a white shirt to one battle and gets injured badly. At the next one, however, he escapes unscathed.
- Averted:
- Nobody wears a white shirt to the fight.
- Someone wears a white shirt, but doesn't die or lose much blood.
- Enforced: The fight scene didn't look violent enough for the series' target demographic, so they made the characters' shirt white to help the blood stand out more.
- Lampshaded: "...Ouch, the white shirt makes the blood look even worse."
- Invoked: Knowing that he will probably die in battle, Bob wears a white shirt to make his death dramatic-seeming and spectacular as he leads the suicidal charge against the enemy.
- Exploited: Alice manages to get Bob's bloody shirt off of him and uses it to frame someone else for a murder she committed.
- Defied: Not wanting to stick out and thus be easily targeted by the enemy, Bob refuses to wear white to the battle.
- Discussed: "Hmm, what'll we wear to the fight?" "Well, the ones wearing white always seem to end up in danger..."
- Conversed: "Oh, you know that guy is going to die. No one wears a white shirt into battle and have it remain white at the end."
- Deconstructed: Bob's injuries also sever nerves and he's unable to feel the pain. An onlooker sees the blood and he's rushed to the emergency room. Had he worn red, he might not have made a full recovery.
- Reconstructed: A heavily-injured person in red clothing is found shortly afterward, and Bob agrees to let them receive treatment first. He dies in the interim, his injuries having been underestimated as a result of the mistaken belief that they looked far worse than they were.
...You might want to wear green instead- you might get killed on the way back to White Shirt of Death!
