Infant Immortality/Playing With

Basic Trope: Children are immune from death.

• Straight: A group of children survive a terrible storm unharmed, while many of the nearby adults are killed.
  • Or, an Axe Crazy murderer kills several adults, leaving any children he comes across alive.
• Exaggerated: A terrible disaster strikes and kills everyone over the age of 18, but not anyone beneath it, leading to a Teenage Wasteland.
  • The apocalypse occurs, killing all of humanity. Except the children
• Justified: Children tend to be more resilient to harm and due to their size and youthful energy, are more likely to escape danger than adults.
  • Also, the Axe Crazy murderer wouldn't hurt a child/has standards.
  • In some horror/fantasy settings, demons and other supernatural terrors who know what's good for them will, at the most, give a human child a good scare and be satisfied with that. Children being the most innocent of all human beings, angels tend to be far more protective of them and harming so much as hair on Little Billy or Little Suzie's head is just asking for a heavenly hit squad to show up and make lasagna out of you.
  • "I see you slugs shooting kids, and I'll run ya over with the tank, got me?!"
  • Only Fatal to Adults
• Inverted: Only children die, and all the adults make it out alive.
• Subverted: During a natural disaster, a bus full of school children narrowly avoid several collapsing buildings, only for the bus to explode into a massive fireball.
• Double Subverted: But the children happen to survive anyway, only a little burned.
• Parodied: In a Crapsack World, where Everything Is Trying To Kill Them, a group of children manage to narrowly avoid every danger that comes their way, while all the adults around them drop like flies.
  • A villain sees a lone baby roaming on a playground, and decides to blow him up with a rocket launcher just for the kicks of it. After the dust from the explosion disipates, we see that the baby is perfectly happy and fine, in fact, he even found it funny because he's laughing as if he has seen a silly face.
• Deconstructed: During a natural disaster, countless of adults die horifically, but all of their children survive them. With very few adults left, the children must grow up fast and help to rebuild the city. As a result of the disaster, all of the children lose their childhoods and their innocence. They grow up to become bitter and aggravated at everything.
  • Alternatively: During a massive disaster, a group of children discover that for some reason, they are surviving all of the catastrophes that are killing all the adults. Given this knowledge, the children figure that they're invincible and decide to take more chances, which actually does kill them.
  • Or the militaries of the world start to fight with child soldiers due to their complete invincibility
• Reconstructed: The rest of society is comforted by the fact that mortality applies to all.
• Zig Zagged: In a Crapsack World falling apart, several children make it out of a disaster zone alive, except one of them gets crushed by a building. Another child is shot in the leg, but survives, but eventually dies of blood loss. The first dead child shows up again, explaining that it only looked like the building crushed him, but he was really safe behind it. But then the other children kill him for his meat. But it turns out that this was all a simulation, and nobody is really dead. Until the simulation malfunctions and starts killing everyone, except for the children. But then it starts killing the children too...
• Averted: Would Hurt a Child.
• Exploited: A group of kids knowing that they can't die go on Suicide Missions to achieve their goals
• Enforced: "We need a lot of violence and death, but not to any of the children, or else all the Moral Guardians will complain."
• Lampshaded: "How many casualties?" "Over 9,000." "How many of those are children?" "None." "What?"
• Invoked: The authorities keep all the children in a safe shelter before any potentially violent scenes.
• Defied: The Axe Crazy murderer makes sure to kill all of the children first.
• Discussed: "The kids will be okay. Children never die in these situations."
• Conversed: "Does nobody under twelve die in these movies?"

---

Back to Infant Immortality.