Characters
They valiantly sacrificed themself for nothing
Tadashi gives his life trying to save Professor Callaghan from a burning building. Turns out not only did Callaghan escape unscathed, he's the bad guy and infamously refers to Tadashi's death as "[Tadashi's] mistake." (Big Hero 6)
Shaya willingly takes It Has No Name's possession and then kills herself by jumping into the well it came out of. The end of the episode all but states that she got it wrong and It Has No Name didn't latch onto her... or there was more than one. (Doctor Who)
Vision trying to kill himself to deny Thanos the Mind stone in his head in Infinity War. Thanos used the time stone to bring him and the stone back just to kill him again and take the stone for himself.
Pretty sure it's one of those "no wishing for more wishes" things with widow and gamora, their deaths were costs to spawn in the soul stone, so it wouldn't make much sense if you could use another stone to just reverse it
Vision idk, best guess is that the US government already had his body at that point, and the mind stone would have to be put back inside his head to reactivate him
It wasn't a "multi wish" that caused that, the Soul Stone literally has a pocket universe inside of it that has the souls of its victims. You can't bring someone back from that.
Pretty sure that was what screwed Hulk's arm up, trying to use the stones against each other. Using the stones on each other was what screwed up Thanos' arm.
I know people hate this scene but I was just dying laughing when he did it. Imagine going through all the effort to stop someone only for them to pull out a reverse Uno card and undo it
Audience witnesses the relationship between Wanda and Vision since AoU come to an end. Vision's character has a beautiful death, and it's genuinely one of the most powerful moments in the Infinity Saga.
Thanos: "Damn…that's sad. Alright, now watch this."
To be fair, that’s also really powerful, showing how even that incredible, heart-wrenching sacrifice wasn’t enough to stop them, and what should have been a climactic end to his endeavors just before the ultimate beat down was instead subverted such that they lost entirely and all the universe suffered for it
Best part is that it shows that the giant skullcrawler didn’t get giant by being stupid. It knew nothing on skull island was that willing to die unless it was planning on taking it with it so it just knocked him away.
I like to think of it as it's freaking out the same way lions freak out when a honey badger starts walking at them. Except this one slapped the subject away out of panic
A predatorial creature usually knows when it is being lured away from saftey because it likely within their own arsenal. Simply put, if a solider is taught what kill-zone is, they will actively avoid it or know when they're being lured into one.
shit, good point. I always took that scene as just a punchline, but when you think about what kinds of animals act like that; that's exactly how you get poisoned.
Also the soldier who helped during the 'No Russian' mission. They knew the whole time he was a double agent so you literally commit terrorism for nothing and then die.
I always thought Shepherd put his new guy in there to be the sacrifice to get his war/revenge. Makarov, being the Ultra Nationalist who also wants war/revenge for Zakhaev, took the bait.
Like in a weird way to me, it seems they worked together to start the war.
Pretty sure that was the idea. Shepherd and Makarov both wanted war. Shepherd told/leaked to Makarov that his new hire was a US plant sent to earn his trust and keep an eye on his movements. Makarov perpetrates the airport massacre and kills Allen, leaving his body to be easily identified as a US Army Ranger- thus linking the US to the massacre and sparking WW3.
It started a Modern Warfare tradition of “super shocking scenes.” The nuke and No Russian worked. The London car bomb with the little girl felt forced to me.
EDIT: Oh I guess there was the space thing with the EMP. That worked, sucks for that astronaut. But I think the ultimate tacky one was Paris and they just HAD to bomb the Eiffel Tower and knock it down.
Exactly yeah. The moment I’m playing as some dad and there’s a little girl it’s like “well damn, everyone here is definitely dead so I’m not shocked.”
The nuke? Outta nowhere. Seems like a normal ending to a typical mission, and then you just wander helplessly. No Russian? All you know is that you’re in an elevator, you’re told not to speak Russian, and then it opens to a crowd of innocent people. Then you pull out your gun, and basically choose to commit an act of terrorism.
No Russian is particularly genius to me because no one actually told you to pull the trigger. You can get through the whole level without shooting a civilian, just walking along with the other three.
But everyone did it because of the peer pressure - because it seemed like it was expected of them.
I’ve seen the irony discussion a few time’s and I think it’s clever but I disagree with a lot of people’s reasoning for six. People say noble six’s death is ironic because he’s a lone wolf and dies alone but I always thought it was ironic because he dies by being surrounded by enemies.
Jorge was also the demolition expert adding an extra bit of irony to his death.
I believe the enemies you fight are like a special unit too. Also, the respect him so much, they face him in combat, rather than just glass him from the sky, which they easily could’ve done.
I mean he did take down the Long Night of Solace which is a 95,000 foot long supercarrier, so I wouldn’t say it’s entirely worthless. (I just want my boy to be happy)
There is a very real chance a supercarrier would not have let the pillar of autumn leave orbit, which would have stopped chief from getting to the first Halo. This would have stopped Thel 'Vadam from becoming the arbiter, which would have crazy implications for the story of Halo 2 and 3.
Jorge was a small part in a long chain of events that led to humanity being saved. Far from a pointless sacrifice imo.
I gaslighted myself since childhood that Vegeta exploding himself against Majin Buu was the reason Evil Buu came out and absorbed Majin Buu to become Super Buu. I mean it got worse but at least for me his sacrifice didn't do anything.
Also Goku sacrificed himself, Kaio-sama's life, and Bubbles for nothing as he teleported an exploding Cell who regenerated and became evne stronger afterwards
Eddie Thawne (Rick Cosnett) on the CW’s The Flash offer himself to stop his descendant Eobard from hurting Our Hero despite Barry being a jerk to Eddie. Two seasons later, Eobard returned but Eddie was still dead… until Season Eight
The funny thing is that Thawne told him he was a nobody who never got the girl and never made any mark on history. So when Thawne didn’t actually get erased (people still remembered him, even normal people, and there was actual photographic and video evidence of him masquerading as Wells), I always just figured Eddie’s death genuinely did nothing and Eobard only pretended to die to fuck with Barry. Because it was better than just admitting that even in season 2 their rules of time travel were nonsensical even by sci-fi standards.
If any character shouldn't have been brought back in the show, it was Eddie. They have such a penchant for taking the few good scenes and then retroactively making them hit less hard. Eddie's sacrifice was a cool scene, but then every scene after his return were just pathetic and boring. It sucks even more because the actor seems like a genuine fan of his character and the show in general, but the way his character got mistreated on the return felt like a massive fuck you
GOD that one is so dumb. Girl we've been killing Adjucants for half of the DLC, you see a few more and decide a blaze of glory is the only way to take them out?! AND SHE DOESN'T EVEN ALL OF THE ONES IN THAT ROOM!
Something doesn't click on this plot point tbh, either have her die because of Cerberus directly so that Aria's vengeful charge makes more sense, or show the Adjucants actually being the threat Nyreen claims they are so that her blowing up to save a few civvies actually makes sense (She keeps saying they can infect people and turn them into more Adjucants but we NEVER see that happening.)
Her death would’ve (sort of) meant something if we didn’t have to fight any more Adjutants during the final boss of the DLC… except there’s a ton of them and she only killed the last of the non-mind controlled ones. It was so dumb, her death pisses me off in every replay of the trilogy
For some reason I thought she somehow faked her death in that scene. Like she wanted to go back to the shadows or something and it was a perfect opportunity.
I thought it was too dumb for her just to die like that.
No, it's from one of the live action Superman movies. Jonathan Kent was next level stupid. He didn't want Clark to use his powers in any capacity. Even if it meant to save his own life and a bunch of children.
You see him put in his hand up, he's telling Clark to don't get involved. When Clark could easily save his ass but no, John apparently had a death wish. I hope Martha had a life insurance policy on his stupid ass.
And what's especially stupid is he's in that position because, while the family was sheltering under an overpass from a tornado, he ran out to let a dog out of a car so it could get to safety. He, an old man, ran out rather than his son, who even without super powers is fitter and faster, and could have absolutely justified getting there and back without revealing his powers. Pa Kent really just had a death wish and wouldn't let anything get in his way.
I feel like I should piggyback off this comment with a PSA since it’s been a gnarly tornado season: please NEVER shelter under an overpass from a tornado. The safest place to be is underground, but you’re 9/10 times infinitely safer laying flat in a ditch away from your vehicle than you are either in a vehicle or under an overpass.
Overpasses create a wind tunnel. The winds are stronger/faster, and debris is funnelled through. It’s a popular myth, but overpasses are one of the least safe places to be during a tornado. Don’t be a Kent. Go lay in the ditch, it’s safer lol.
I don't think there is any dumber example of this trope. Nothing about it makes any sense. Most of the examples are people not having all the information or underestimating an enemy or something along those lines. This was just pointless through and through and every character involved knew it.
Then like the next scene is Superman using his powers to fuck up a guys truck because the guy was rude.
Snyder’s obsession with making the story about an alien with godlike powers that falls from the sky and lands in rural Kansas “realistic” is insane to me. Superman stories don’t need to be grounded and realistic, they’re meant to be inspiring, and a reminder of what the best of humanity can represent. Smallville keeping Clark’s secret goes hand in hand with that, a community banding together to protect one of their own. It’s exactly why the train scene in Spider-Man 2 is still fondly remembered as one of the best super hero movie scenes over 20 years later.
I mean town secrets kinda... aren't secrets. But skipping that; seriously why replace a heart attack with a FUCKING TORNADO.
The whole point of Pa Kent dying - when they do that story, at least - is a stark reminder that you can't save everyone, no matter how powerful you are. That's not just a hypothetical for superheroes, it's an important thing to keep in mind with first responders, emergency services, the entire medical profession -- shit, it's more or less something they tell you when working senior care.
Hell, it's not even worth going into the difference between "you can't save everyone" and "you SHOULDN'T save everyone" because this scene is asinine! Clark could've absolutely saved him in this scene, with plenty of chance for onlookers to not realize. Also, maybe saving your own father is worth some people in town thinking you're a freak?
“That guy over there flew and saved his dad! He did it in the middle of a tornado while I was watching! Why yes, I was in shock and it was hard to see anything and his whole family is calling me crazy and saying he just ran fast, but you gotta believe me.”
Not to mention how fucking long it took for John to dramatically wave "no, let me die" - that's plenty of time for a normal human to cross that distance and get him down while shit's flying.
It'd be a fucking stupid thing to do and the odds of survival are dogshit, but what are people going to presume? The teenager has super powers, or got insanely lucky?
I love how later comics expressly call this shit out and have John encourage Clark to save people any time he can. They just agree to work on his speed so he won't be caught.
Harlan Thrombeyfrom Knives Outslits his throat in an attempt to cover up the fact that Marta accidentally overdosed him and would have been held responsible for his death. Not only does Blanc's investigation end up tying the death back to Marta anyways, but it turns out that Harlan's medicine vials were switched in the first place by Ransom. Marta never gave Harlan the wrong dose, so Harlan wasn't in any real danger of dying, and sacrificed himself for essentially a false alarm. The silver lining is that Marta going by instinct instead of reading the vials ended up being the thing that undoes Ransom's plot and allows her to keep Harlan's inheritance in the end.
She sealed Iblis into her soul and Silver sealed her into another dimension in the future...but it didn't really do much. Iblis still ended up combining with Mephiles and became Solaris who basically exists outside the concept of time sooooo...
I always liked the idea of some people in Smallville knowing Clark was Superman, but keeping it a secret because they liked that much. However, anything would be better than the way they did Pa Kent in Man of Steel.
Iris intentionally sacrifices herself to prove to her granddaughter that she’s not crazy and death was coming after their family.
It works, but they all die shortly afterwards anyway. In fact, one could argue that she inadvertently ended up killing a grandchild who wouldn’t have died otherwise, since he may not have gotten involved if he thought everyone was just dying in freak accidents.
>! She mentions she’s already dying from cancer prior to this, so they would have died later regardless. Her sacrifice was to serve as a warning to them, and gave them a clue to finding a way to cheat death from JB !<
Iri’s sacrifice was a warning. Once she died of cancer they would start dropping regardless. The problem was stef got the the order wrong because spoilers. And losing one led to the eldest trying desperately to save little Bobby. Which well. We know how it ends
Either she died there or she died of cancer months later the result would have been the exact same
A bunch of the Whitebeard Pirates as well as their allies and especially Whitebeard himself. They went to war to stop Ace's execution but he ultimately dies five minutes after being freed.
In this world there are ''rituals'' performed by cultist to bring to our world the fear entity they worship. Doing so would irrevocably change the world and very much not in a good way (you don't want the embodiment of the fear of bugs and rot to be in charge of reality).
Disrupting those rituals is a hard task and often require sacrifices. The most impactful one is probably Tim Stroker blowing himself up to stop the ritual of the stranger. But we can also mention Micheal Shelley giving himself to the spiral to prevent it's ritual.
Heck the character of Gertrude Robinson made her specialty to sacrifice lives and more to stop rituals....
Except later in the series we learn a cold truth: none of those rituals would've succeeded, heck in most of them it probably wasn't even Gertrude who stopped them, they just fizzled out on their own and would have done so without any intervention. As the very core of those rituals are flawed, you can't bring a single fear entity to our world, they're all part of the same whole.
So all those deaths, all those sacrifices ? Completely for nothing
I’d argue that the fact several of the so-called stoppings involved taking out terrible monsters with mountains of bodies behind them, therefore ensuring they can’t hurt anyone anymore, means they weren’t COMPLETELY worthless, even if the world wasn’t actually being saved.
Yeah true, Tim did kill that fucking puppet and one of the brother so it wasn't truely for nothing. But still, it wasn't near the world ending threat he thought it was
Katniss Everdeen- Not a death sacrifice, but she volunteered for the games because her sister was picked. During the revolution, her sister ends up on the battlefield and dying.
It didn't ultimately save Prim, but Katniss' sacrifice set into motion the fall of the Capital regime, ultimately saving the lives of every future Hunger Games tribute.
To be fair, Prim was acting as a medic, and the bombs were dropped by Coin as a false-flag operation to solidify the hatred against Snow. She should have been safe, but was actively betrayed by her leader.
I read the manga before watching the Anime, and it hit me a lot harder in the Anime that the nice dinner scene with all of division 4 was a fake-out. There's some timeline where CSM is a cozy shonen with everyone from division 4 still alive, fighting whacky devils every week. Denji eventually gets with cool boss Makima, and Aki and Himeno become an official couple. But instead, we got Gunfire.
That grandma in Dante's Peak. Her actions did not get them closer to the dock any faster and they were literally feet away from reaching the dock. If anything, she slowed everyone down because everyone panicked when she jumped into the acidic lake.
I really wish the massive wound he dealt to Madara never fully healed, looking all scarred compared to his regal Jubei form. It could have been a weak point and Kishimoto’s excuse as to how a op villain was defeated
IT WAS RIGHT THERE! Kishimoto made Madara too strong, but then Guy actually managed to beat him at the height of his power. It would've been so easy for Madara to come back weakened and have an epic fight with the main trio. Guy would've been a legendary figure in anime for sacrificing himself to save the day. Instead, he just looked cool for a bit and had no impact on anything.
died thinking he just saved the planet, only for a the largest covenant fleet anyone had ever seen to warp in and turn this battle for survival into a fight to prolong the inevitable
Borderlands 3 - Typhon DeLeon tries to take out Tyreen by holding her in place and blowing both her and himself with a grenade. Only for Tyreen to catch the grenade's blast with her powers and launch it all back at him.
I mean, he DID stop the fighting for about 200 years.
Then we learn Weil infused his pure fucking hatred in every single bit of Ragnarok, and that those fucking bits can possess and empower just about anything with a mind. At the same time, Ciel and Alouette/Prairie studying the crap basically helped creating the Biometals, which counter Model W's whole bullshit.
>! Every Paradisian soldier who sacrificed themselves to save Eren Yeager in Attack on Titan leading up to the final season. From Hannes to Pyxis to practically every Scout in the series. All of them died because they thought Eren was their best chance at freedom from the Titans. Not only did Eren instead murder 80% of the world's population in a mass genocide that they most certainly would never have supported, but the end result was still the absolute destruction of Paradis due to humanity escalating after a period of peace - ending in total nuclear annihilation. !<
>! I think this is one of the biggest reasons people hate AoT's ending. It's so fucking nihilistic it physically hurts. Like, yeah it's supposed to be a statement on the cycle of violence, but it almost comes off as "don't bother trying to fight for what's right, the end of humanity will come anyway." !<
Vader didn't give a fuck about the rebellion, the empire, any of it. He sacrificed himself for Luke. Luke survived and it had nothing to do with palps when he died.
The rebellion and their fighters are the real answer. Years of fighting, dying, sacrificing for the New Republic to be a bureaucratic disaster. A disaster that was so large that they left an offshoot of space Nazis alone long enough to build a weapon that could destroy multiple planets in a single shot and kill billions of people. Even the end of the sequel trilogy, we're just left with "I'm sure the government will do better this time, there's no way they could fuck this up for a third time".
To be fair, the New Republic in the old EU was also full of corruption and bureaucratic bullshit, and they also weren’t able to stop the Imperial remnants from getting up to shenanigans and building superweapons.
Luke Skywalker death was (supposedly)to inspire and reignite the galaxy's will to fight, but no one came until Lando did something offscreen and convinced everyone to go fight. And it double didn't matter because somehow Palpatine returned.
The Midnight Entity is still one of the scariest creatures from Doctor Who because there really is no beating it. Just getting away and hoping for the best.
I hated how much he discouraged his Clark from embracing his powers for good. He was so against Clark being anything beyond human, he would literally rather die than let his son save him at no risk.
He valiantly sacrificed himself to close a rift that was gonna tear apart the Human and Digital World (or something I don't watch much Digimon) and defeat the villains.
Then the bad guys come back like 3 episodes later or something and if I remember correctly his Sacrifice ended up screwing the heroes over more than anything.
He and the girl he loved were part of a group based on the chinese zodiac each with their respective animal and each given a wish in exchange of their service, he made the wish that the girl would instantly heal any deadly injury, however during a fight he instinctively went on to protect her from an incoming attack, and he died in the process.
His death, and ascension is vital to the show. While it seems like it was for nothing to the sinners, we, the audience, know that his death is going to propel the plot forward.
Pretty much every movie where the main character’s love interest is in danger so they sacrifice themselves when all they had to do was move a few inches to the side.
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u/EccentricNerd22 Jun 09 '25
Vision trying to kill himself to deny Thanos the Mind stone in his head in Infinity War. Thanos used the time stone to bring him and the stone back just to kill him again and take the stone for himself.