r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Doot_revenant666 • Mar 27 '25

Weekly Discussion Post Probably the most controversial one , honest thoughts on "No Kill Rule"? What are the most egrigious examples of it in your opinion? What media makes it work in your opinion?

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u/mightynifty_2 Mar 27 '25

Pretty sure most stories where killing is a thing the protagonist does have some version of "oops, I made things worse because the person I killed had a really strong friend/family member/ally and now they're pissed." Or "Whoopsie, just started an all-out war because I showed violence and murder to be an acceptable form of dealing with problems."

Sometimes they even kill the wrong person and have to deal with the moral ramifications of that. It's basically a trope in and of itself. Both choices can have their downsides.

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u/alguien99 Mar 27 '25

I never saw an example of killing the wrong person, i always wanted to see that but never found any media that did it

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u/daFinn Jun 11 '25

You should then read Spider-Man Versus Wolverine #1, one of the best Spidey stories in my opinion.

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u/alguien99 Jun 11 '25

Were spiderman kills a woman because he thought she was wolverine? I saw that already

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u/Valiran9 Jun 13 '25

Fury by Fritz Lang. It’s a German movie from 1936, so the pop culture zeitgeist is pretty much unaware it exists.

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u/dobar_dan_ Jun 29 '25 edited Jul 07 '25

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This post was mass deleted and anonymized with Redact

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u/Boris_Godunov Nov 18 '25

Killing even the "right" person would have a huge moral weight on most people, especially if it was the first person they killed. That tends to give people trauma, especially good people.

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u/Electronic_Issue_978 Aug 30 '26

People tend to forget that because they consume a lot of action hero content. And that genre has a habit of showing the main characters mowing down a bunch of nameless henchmen while still being portrayed as likable or heroic

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u/Electronic_Issue_978 Aug 30 '26

Steven Universe heavily implied that if anything happened to the antagonists, earth would get *fucked*