Heroic Sacrifice/Other

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• Segata Sanshiro, mascot of the Sega Saturn, heroically gave his life defending his beloved Sega from a terrorist attack. He lives on in our hearts. At least he took something with him.

Art

• The Fallen Caryatid: Ancient Greek architecture included women carved into columns, holding up the roof. They were later carved into buildings done in the Classical style and evolved into men, demons, anyone one wanted to have holding up a building forever. The sculptor Rodin created the Fallen Caryatid as a woman collapsing under the impossible burden, but struggling to carry it still. Many interpretations exist, of course.

Fan Works

• The character Maleus, in this World of Warcraft fanfic.
• The Sangheili/Elite Zuka in the Halo story Enemy of My Enemy, who flies his nearly-destroyed Banshee, piloted by his nearly-dead self, directly into the exposed core of a hostile Scarab, saving the city.
• Flt Lt. Fitzgerald sacrifices himself so the French pilot can get back to the Odyssey in Chapter Four of Reunions Are a Bitch.
• In this Iron Man: Armored Adventures fanfic, both of Gene Khan's parents. Aung managed to nearly kill Zhang while bleeding to death, and Sarantuyaa let herself be killed in order to ensure her son would survive.
• Ianto does this in Shades of Ianto ^{[dead link]} in order to save the Earth.
• In Heta Oni (a fan-made Axis Powers Hetalia video game based off of Ao Oni), after Italy dies, England sacrifices himself to rewind time to save Italy.
• Wheatley in the Portal 2 fic Test Of Humanity invokes this while trying to save Chell and ends up getting caught in an explosion due to an escape plan gone wrong.
• In Past Sins, Nightmare Nyx fights off all the monsters of the Everfree Forest in an attempt to invoke Death Equals Redemption.
  • Actually, she's not attempting to invoke Death Equals Redemption so much as she's simply willing to die if that will help save the town.
• Anne Littners dream is to "Go out in a blaze of glory" in The Spiral Path much to the disturbance of everyone who knows her.
• Agnetha done this in Night of the Seance to ensure a fellow person on the doomed tour bus gets to be with her family again.
• Victoria Beckham does this for a random stranger in How Can It This Be.

Music

• The old-style country song "Big John", based on a real story, about a large mine worker who was generally known as a brute due to his sheer size and strength. However, when the mine began collapsing, he used brute strength to hold up the collapsing beams long enough for his fellow workers to escape the mine, staying behind to hold it up long enough for them all to get out safely. The mine then collapsed completely with him still trapped inside, filling with poison gas, "And they all knew it was the end of the line for Big John."
• Another old country song, also based on a true story, about a truck driver on a narrow road only wide enough for one vehicle, the edge of which opened over a huge fall (a mountainside or cliff or chasm, I can't remember which) and coming from the opposite direction as him was a schoolbus full of children. Rather than hit the bus and most likely killing the children inside, he deliberately drove his rig over the edge of the cliff and plunged to his death, saving the lives of the children at the cost of his own.
• "Soldier", a song by Harvey Andrews, an english poet and songwriter. It starts telling the story of a guy who joined the British Army, because work was hard to find and, besides, there were no wars right away, and (lucky man) found himself in the middle of the British-Irish urban guerilla. The song actually reaches its climax when the guy, who was running a boring patrol tour in a train station, jumps over a bomb just thrown by IRA guerilla fighters, thus dooming himself and saving the lives of the people around him, for whom he nurtured no enmity and who had treated him with cold hatred just seconds before. Inspired by real life example of Sergeant Michael Willetts, thank you other wiki. Damn, he surely must have had some massive balls of steel. This troper definitively thinks that guy should be warranted the rank of Badass, he just can't decides which one.
• Way, way too many Israeli songs to count.
• Mentioned in the song "Your Guardian Angel" by Red Jumpsuit Apparatus.

"I'll be there for you through it all / Even if saving you sends me to Heaven"

Tabletop Games

• In Shadowrun just after his inaugural speech President Dunkelzahn rips out his own heart in an effort to stop the effects of Blood Magic and is assumed assassinated.
• Dungeons & Dragons
  • The supplement Book of Exalted Deeds advises DMs to go easy on resurrection penalties for good characters who go out on one of these; there's even the Risen Martyr prestige class.
  • In Oriental Adventures, Honor Points can be awarded to a character posthumously (which benefits future characters created by the player) and dying heroically in this manner gains such characters a lot of them.
• Warhammer 40,000 - the Imperial Guard, period. Their entire existence is a heroic sacrifice. Against a galaxy crawling with monstrous Tyrannid bugs that outnumber them by an exponentially large ratio, the Lovecraftian horrors of Chaos, the Orkish hordes, life-sucking skeleton-men, mutants, psychics, barbarians and technologically advanced aliens... they're basically conscripts with a ridiculously obsolete lasgun in their hands and some flak armor. They're cannon fodder for the Space Marines who can't be everywhere at once. Unlike the Space Marines, they're not elite super-soldiers with demigod-like training and equipment, just regular people living in a dangerous and uncaring universe full of superpowered evil. And, despite this, they hold the line.
  • The Apocalypse Reload book gave them a new strategic asset: Fire On My Coordinates. Choose a soldier in your army with a communications backpack and have a cruiser in orbit fire a torpedo/plasma blast right on top of them (though they have to pass a morale test to do it). You can just see the squad crouching in the trenches, most of them desperately holding the enemy off while the main army retreats, the communications trooper shouting "fire on my coordinates!" into the microphone, blasting the advancing Ork/Tyranid/Chaos/etc. horde and the squad into very small pieces.
  • Also important to mention is the Imperial Guard Saint Ollanius Pius, the guardsman who threw himself between the Emperor and Horus, even though he saw the man whom he saw as a literal god fall before the 'Beast' that was Horus.
  • Also fitting would be Sanguinius, primarch of the Blood Angels, who, wounded, exhausted and having seen his own death in the future (yes, Sanguinius was able to divine the future to a certain degree), resisted Horus' promises of power, wealth, fame and (most importantly) life in favour of certain death to inflict a chink in Horus' armour.
• In TORG, one of the subplot cards the players can use is Martyr which, once set up, will allow the player to automatically succeed at something by heroically sacrificing their own life.
• Possibly done in Past Sins. At the time of this writing, Nyx is dying from wounds sustained defending Ponyville from monsters, but a few ponies are trying to treat her.
• In Pathfinder, there's an alternate set of abilities for monks in the Advanced Player's handbook that allows a monk to do this at high levels to revive his entire party to full health. However, it's a TRUE heroic sacrifice in a world where Death Is Cheap. If a monk does this, not only are they killed for good, their name can never be spoken or written again. So their sacrifice is doomed to be forgotten.

Toys

• At the end of Bionicle's 2007 story arc, Toa Matoro sacrifices himself by wearing the Mask of Life, which converts him into energy used to revive Mata Nui.
• Originally meant to be played straight as a redemptive act in the end of Bionicle Mask of Light when Makuta allows himself to be crushed under a massive stone door. Later canon turned this into a subversion in that he's not really dead, and was really working towards his master evil plan.

Web Animation

• Shandala and Kamimura at the end of Broken Saints.

Web Original

• Survival of the Fittest character David Jackson attacks Jacob Starr to buy time for Adam Dodd to free Amanda Jones and Madelaine Shirohara from a locked warehouse. David dies in the ensuing gun battle, though not before wounding Jacob.
  • Also subverted in the case of Simon Wood, when he attacked Darnell Butler to buy time for his girlfriend, Madison Conner, to escape. The catch? Darnell isn't playing. Simon is killed in the ensuing fight, albeit accidentally.
  • Handlers can do this if the character of another handler gets rolled. They have one hero card, which means their character dies instead.
  • Ethan Kent from V4 did this in a fit of rage, taking out one of the cameras on purpose, giving the students an opportunity to subvert Danya's plans, but ensuring his own demise. Later, Feo Smith helps the sacrifice come full circle by (somewhat unintentionally) destroying all traces of Ethan's plan after a group of arrivals actually found the location of the island. She does this by setting most of the equipment on fire and shredding most of the paperwork, trying to accomplish it before her collar detonates for staying in a danger zone. Unfortunately, while she does succeed, she doesn't make it out in time.
• The Leet World: After being severely damaged by Ahmad, Asher activates his self destruct mechanism. Ahmad goes into Flash Step mode and tackles him, taking the explosion himself and saving the rest of the cast.
• In the first act of Sapphire Episode III, Ivanka offers to be executed in Alec's stead. A Senseless Sacrifice is narrowly avoided.
• In Dusk Peterson's short story The Fool, the Villain Protagonist writes in his Diary about the capture, rape and romance (Stockholm Syndrome) of his boy slave only to sacrifice himself to a Cruel and Unusual Death so the boy he's fallen in love with can escape and be returned to his surviving family.
• In The Kevin Saga, by Norbert to save Kevin. It didn't work
• Fine Structure has five separate examples. In order:
  • Jim Akker kills himself while Zykov/Oul is telepathically probing his mind in an attempt to take him down too. He also sends a last-minute warning to Ching.
  • Jason Chilton sacrifices himself to save millions of people and several named characters from the Unstoppable Rage of the Twelfth Power.
  • John Zhang kills himself in an ostentatiously physics-breaking way, forcing the Imprisoning God to isolate our entire solar system from the rest of The Multiverse.
  • Anne Poole jumps onto a black hole to undo the results of John Zhang's actions, allowing the Final Battle to go forward.
  • And finally, Ching sacrifices himself in the Final Battle, taking Oul with him.
• Kalani in the season 2 finale of We're Alive
• ...there isn't a word for what Guru does to this trope in Dragon Ball Abridged. He senses that the dragon has been summoned and is granting wishes, and says to himself, "Would be a reeeeaaaal dick move if I died right now." Which he does. Which banishes the dragon. Basically, he kills himself strictly For the Evulz. A Jerkass Sacrifice, if you will.
• Phylis Alince of The Gungan Council destroys the Heart of Darkness to keep it out of the Sith's hands. Some spectacular fireworks ensue as everything near her, including herself, disintigrates!
• Ma-Ti dies protecting modern civilization at the climax of Suburban Knights.
• In Lonelygirl15, Bree Avery does the Ceremony to stop the Order chasing her friends, and Gina Hart takes a bullet to save Jonas.
• In The Gamers Alliance, quite a few characters end up doing this. Hiroshi Hayabusa casts Shiropyr which kills both him and the Big Bad Taro Ofuchi. Kagetsu I does the same to Arawn. Geraud/Grady chooses to become the new world tree when the old one dies. Mori'sul sacrifices himself to save the heroes from a collapsing temple.
• In many Pokémon, the PokeDex entry on Gardevoir says it will give its life to protect a caring trainer; while this has yet to be shown in any game or anime, this video gives an idea of hoe it might happen...