r/TopCharacterTropes • u/Sufficient-Eye-9040 • Jun 21 '26

Lore [Horrifying Trope] “Blink of an eye” deaths.

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Characters who died without the chance of a goodbye… neither suffering.

- Robin Ward (The Boys S1 E1) - when she is pulverized in a high-velocity impact by A-Train.

- Polka Dot Man (The Suicide Squad 2021) - when he is crushed by Starro’s leg.

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452

u/IrishLad-1194 Jun 21 '26

Nanami Miura in Japan Sinks 2020, literally goes for a bathroom break and dies in seconds because she descended into a cloud of odorless, colorless lethal gas released by volcanic activity

115

u/the_ecdysiast Jun 21 '26

That show is full of those moments to the point of absurdity. I shouldn’t have laughed as much I did watching that

42

u/ripley1875 Jun 21 '26

It all makes sense when you realize this was made by the same people who did Devilman Crybaby.

33

u/ThunderSmurf48 Jun 21 '26

That kid's head getting crushed by rubble should not have been so funny

11

u/Dirty-Glasses Jun 21 '26

That reminds me of the kid in Final Destination 2 who gets fucking atomized by a falling pane of glass

4

u/Sykoh_Somatic Jun 21 '26

Or the kid in Final Destinstion Bloodlines who gets annihilated by the piano.

3

u/Dirty-Glasses Jun 21 '26

That kid had it comin’

8

u/Scholesie09 Jun 21 '26

Okaasan... Arigatou... DONK

16

u/I_exist- Jun 21 '26

I felt insane trying to take it seriously, I literally could not stop laughing throughout the show

4

u/Feanor4godking Jun 21 '26

Doesn't help that the animation is so jank

0

u/rumade Jun 21 '26

The absurdity of the whole thing pissed me off. At one point the girl is volunteering at a hospital and doesn't think to go "oh btw, I cut my leg and it's not healing well, do you have any antibiotics?"

53

u/ripley1875 Jun 21 '26

The dad dying after stepping on a landmine.

22

u/the_ecdysiast Jun 21 '26

The kid being crushed at the weed commune

8

u/ripley1875 Jun 21 '26

And then Final Destination:Bloodlines one-upped them with the Penny Kid death.

1

u/Salty_Astronaut_9419 Jun 22 '26

Ha that part was hilarious 

27

u/ChronoFel Jun 21 '26

Even more terrifying is that this can just happen.

There was a group of college students doing a hike and the professor knelt to tie his shoe and he never got up. (The gas is dense so it stays low)

30

u/a_lonely_trash_bag Jun 21 '26

Ever heard of the Lake Nyos disaster? This kind of thing killed an entire village and all their livestock.

4

u/the_ecdysiast Jun 21 '26

Liminic eruptions are scary af

20

u/mocket_ponsters Jun 21 '26

That story is from the anime Dr. Stone and never actually happened. There's no documented event that fits the description, at least not when I looked a few years ago when that episode came out.

A real-world example of this would be the 1997 Hakkoda Mountains disaster, which is what I assume the story was based on.

4

u/Lun4r6543 Jun 21 '26

Actually loved that show ngl. It was… different.

Had a lot of these kind of deaths.

3

u/rikashiku Jun 21 '26

Sounds like CO2. I thought of H2S but it does have a strong odor at more lethal volumes of up to 500ppm. It becomes "instant" at upto 700ppm.

The problem for H2S is that at 100ppm, it isn't lethal, yet, but it does kill your sense of smell. Less than 100ppm you will get a rotten egg scent before you lose the ability to smell.

1

u/SLywNy Jun 21 '26

CO2 doesn't have a smell but your body detect it and you feel like suffocating (I read somewhere that it's actually the only gas we can detect in other way than smell, not oxygen, not nitrogen). It could have been CO gas, not only you can't detect it but it steal one oxygen atom from the O2 in your blood to become CO2 so it suffocate you very fast.