Technical Pacifist / Literature

• Chocoholic Mysteries: Wildflower Hill in Moose Motive, a hippie-type who believes firmly in nonviolence on moral grounds, which she's passed on to her granddaughter Sissy (short for Forsythia). She makes an exception at the end of the book, lashing out against the book's killer with a fireplace poker in order to defend herself and her family.
• The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant. The Oach of Peace actually covers technical pacifism, and prevents unnecessary violence. It pointedly does not rule out killing — just restraining unnecessary violence.
  Do not hurt when holding is enough
  Do not wound when hurting is enough
  Do not maim when wounding is enough
  And kill not when maiming is enough
  The greatest warrior is he who does not need to kill
• Edmond Dantes of The Count of Monte Cristo promises Abbe Faria that he won't kill anyone, a promise he keeps even after securing his freedom and the Abbe passes away. Instead, his Roaring Rampage of Revenge against those who ruined his life consists largely of putting his enemies in situations where they are virtually guaranteed to be Hoist by Their Own Petard, and letting fate take its course.
• The Assassins' Guild in the Discworld novels, while not pacifistic in even a technical sense, have suppressed the invention of guns, and aren't happy about improvements in crossbow technology, on the grounds that making it too easy to kill people devalues their profession. Sam Vimes, Commander of the City Watch, loathes "spring-gonnes" (concealable pistol crossbows) to the point where anyone caught with one within city limits will end up swinging gently in the breeze.
  • Incidentally, a Patrician-employed assassin comments that the Assassins agree, and that no matter what Vimes does to people he catches with spring-gonnes, they will still be glad the Assassins didn't find them first.
• The Animorphs' allies, The Chee, are programmed to be 100% pacifistic, but Erek King is pretty technical about it. He managed to override the violence prohibition, but was so sickened by the massive amount of carnage he caused (more deaths in one hour than the Animorphs themselves caused in months) that he immediately changed it back and had the item that made it possible thrown away. However, this doesn't stop him from attempting to manipulate the Animorphs into killing the aliens that destroyed his creators. Then there's the final battle, but it's unclear whether or not he was offended because Jake killed and threatened to kill indiscriminately, or because Jake blackmailed him. But it's probably both.
  • An excellent demonstration in the book that introduces the Chee: Rachel (in grizzly morph) bursts into the Kings' house because Marco's been in there for too long, runs into Erek's "father"... and is reduced to roaring in frustration because he just grabbed her arms, preventing her from moving any further.
  • Also, the Animorphs themselves. They're fine with killing Hork-Bajir, Taxxons, and the occasional Gedd, and God himself only knows how many Yeerks. But never ever a human. Which incidentally leads to Visser One (the original) figuring out that they're human. Because she couldn't remember the last time a human had been listed as a casualty. Cue the Animorphs present going "Oh, Crap!." It took the Yeerks a ridiculously long time to figure that one out. But considering who was leading them... there were several instances in previous books where minor Yeerks figure that out through various clues (including the above), discuss the possibility— and decide to let someone else tell Visser Three about it. Visser One is pretty much the first Yeerk to catch on who wasn't afraid of getting gutted on the spot for pointing it out.
• Doc Savage had a code against killing that he really did stick to for the most part even using special mercy bullets. Unfortunately for his enemies this only seemed to extend to directly killing people. Causing plane crashes apparently didn't violate his code nor did arranging for suitably ironic deaths like sabotaging the protective cages a group of slavers used to protect themselves from their giant venomous vampire bats. The most extreme though is probably that he subjected criminals to personality-altering brain surgery in order to avoid having to execute or imprison them, which he saw as inhumane and wasteful.
• The Culture epitomize this trope: they are a bunch of space hippies with the ability to make suns go nova. A character even points out that, since they actively and vocally prefer peace, they've had to learn to be extremely effective at war, when another civilization thinks they'll be a pushover. It's helped by the fact that Special Circumstances exists to intervene as nastily and precisely as needed to avoid larger conflict.
• The Twilight Saga: The Cullens spend their eternal lives trying to coexist peacefully with people, giving up their human-chomping ways. They apparently have absolutely no problem letting other vampires eat humans in the area or even supplying them with transportation to do so. They also have no problem tearing another vampire to pieces and burning it if it tries to kill Bella.
• Parodied in Rustlers' Rhapsody where the hero only shoots his enemies in the hand. At least one bad guy finds this more disturbing than if he shot to kill.
• Durnik starts out this way in The Belgariad — letting an attacker be sucked down by killer quicksand rather than axe the guy's head in, for instance. He generally uses a club in combat rather than a sword or axe. "I really don't like chopping into people. If you hit a man with a club, there's a fair chance he won't die, and there isn't all that blood."
• Subverted by the Aiel in The Wheel of Time. A Proud Warrior Race that bizarrely doesn't use swords, you later find out that their ancestors were Actual Pacifists and the pledge not to use a sword was part of a general pledge against violence, using the sword as a metaphor for all weapons, that got twisted over the years into a prohibition on a particular weapon but not on being a warrior in general.
• In Mistborn: The Original Trilogy, kandra follow The Contract, which among other things, strictly prohibits killing humans. After OreSeur (actually, a different kandra impersonating OreSeur to serve as The Mole Hidden in Plain Sight on the good guys) attacks an assassin sent to kill his master, Vin is shocked that he broke his code. He responds that while most kandra "think that helping someone kill is the same as killing", it isn't technically in The Contract, and that he did nothing wrong.
• In "Little Lost Robot", there is a robot whose programming includes a glitch that results in its not being fully Three Laws-Compliant: its version of the First Law of Robotics (usually "A robot may not injure a human being or, through inaction, allow a human being to come to harm.") is incomplete, stating only, "A robot may not injure a human being" and leaving out the bit about inaction. This seemingly minor omission has some truly frightening implications in the literal mind of a robot. For example, the robot could drop an anvil on a human's head: the robot is not squashing the human's brains out, the anvil is, and the robot is merely allowing it to do so by not catching it again.
• The Race from SA Swann's Terran Confederacy universe. They consider it to be the height of immorality to actually raise a hand (or pseudopod) against another sapient. Hiring mercenaries, sparking wars, destabilizing countries, building AI guided weapons, these are all fine, but they would never actually use violence against you themselves.
• Shrike becomes one of these towards the end of the Mortal Engines Quadrilogy, after Character Development causes him to feel tremendous guilt over all the lives he's ended in the past. He won't kill you, but he will disarm you of your weapons and subdue you non-lethally if required, and if his adopted daughter Hester decides you need to die, he won't do anything to stop her. He also feels no shame over the prospect of killing Stalker Fang, feeling that killing her to prevent the genocide she wants to enact is an acceptable course of action, and since she's basically a corpse animated by cybernetics, it doesn't really feel like killing anyway.
• Harry Potter almost exclusively uses entirely non-lethal spells in combat, like Expelliarmus and Stupefy, even when others are fighting to kill. Not once has he come close to using Avada Kedavra. The one time he successfully used a potentially-lethal spell (Sectumsempra), he immediately regretted it.
  • He didn't have violent motives even when using Sectumsempra. He had absolutely no idea what the spell did - he found it in a potions book along with the words "for enemies." And the only time he used it, his opponent was about to use an incredibly illegal spell on him.
  • Of course, he does attempt to use Stupefy on Death Eaters while flying hundreds of feet above the ground, while knowing full well a successful hit could result in a fatal fall, as moments later he deliberately avoids using it on a mind-controlled Stan Shunpike for that very reason.
• Peeta Mellark from The Hunger Games. Before conflict arises, he will try to go the path that involves the least amount of bloodshed.
• In the Dreamblood Duology, Gatherers kill to preserve the peace prescribed by Hananja's Law, and they do it in such a way that their 'victims' fall asleep peacefully.
• In Daniel Keys Moran's Tales of the Continuing Time, Trent frequently tells everyone around him "Killing people is wrong". He is a big user of FadeAway, using it in squirt guns, automated defense systems and in a fire suppression system where it took out a room full of people. But he has been responsible for numerous deaths, including one PeaceForcer Elite who tried to swim after him but drowned (Elites are very heavy and don't swim well), and an unknown number of people when his opponent didn't believe that Trent had boobytrapped the weapons system on PeaceForcer Heaven. Trent truly regrets every one of those deaths.
• The Stainless Steel Rat: Jim DiGriz frequently engages in non-lethal violence, but refuses to kill for religious reasons — as an atheist, he believes that this life is all anybody gets, so killing people takes everything away from them.
• After the Revolution: Roland the Super-Soldier refuses to kill, and due to his enhancements is well capable of calculating the optimal way of producing non-lethal but still quite debilitating takedowns against anything short of fellow posthumans or Power Armour. Killing is, however, the only restraint he has, and his use of the trope is deconstructed when Sasha has to treat some of his victims and notes that they're all basically consigned to A Fate Worse Than Death in the healthcare-strapped Heavenly Kingdom, while the hospitals in the wealthier AmFed would likely be able to restore them to full functionality. Roland gradually becomes more violent over the course of the book and eventually starts killing wholesale again, often in ways every bit as cruel as the ones that left his opponents technically alive.
• Dragonvarld: Draconas can't kill humans as it violates dragon law with the greatest penalties. He can still help other people fight and kill humans though, but must limit himself to non-lethal harm on them directly.
• Warrior Cats: Riverstar. He always tries to find a non-violent solution if possible, and in Riverstar's Home he hesitates instead of killing the Big Bad Slash. Slash takes this opportunity to threaten the life of an elder, and the elder's daughter ends up saving him and accidentally killing Slash by knocking him into the river.

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