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Death is a necessary fact of life, but that doesn’t make it any easier to cope with. People look to stories for solace because great stories are capable of addressing weighty topics like grief with care. No one gets through this life without losing a loved one. Fiction that confronts this truth can be an incredible comfort.
While many anime characters die violent deaths, others die in ways that are all too mundane. In a medium in which many characters die due to their own choices, it can feel doubly heartbreaking when an accidental death occurs. Often, death makes no logical sense, and anime has dealt with that reality time and time again.
9 Naoko Satomi Falls To Tuberculosis (The Wind Rises)
Tuberculosis devastated many lives at the turn of the 20th century, but these days the disease is so rare that children aren’t even vaccinated against it in the U.S. TB can be treated with antibiotics, but that wasn’t always the case. Once known colloquially as consumption, tuberculosis reached a fever pitch in the 1800s, at which time the disease was responsible for a quarter of all deaths.
Hayao Miyazaki’s The Wind Rises takes place almost one hundred years later, in 1930s pre-war Japan. The protagonist, engineer Jiro Horikoshi, falls in love with a woman named Naoko, who suffers from the disease. In that era, the most common treatment for TB patients involved sending them to open-air hospitals in the hopes the clean oxygen would help them. Tragically, Naoko suffers a lung hemorrhage and dies.
8 The Lovers Plummet From The Balcony (Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu)
Can suicide be described as an accident? Perhaps in some cases, as in Shouwa Genroku Rakugo Shinjuu, when the young rakugo master, Sukeroku, falls from a balcony alongside his paramour, Miyokichi. While lovers’ suicide is the easiest explanation for their deaths, it really isn’t that simple.
During an argument, the balcony gives way under Miyokichi and Sukeroku leaps forward to catch her. The protagonist, Yakumo, tries to save them but doesn’t have the strength to hoist them back up to safety. The embracing lovers fall to their deaths, leaving Yakumo and the audience stunned and devastated, riddled with a thousand questions.
7 The Cast of Angel Beats Suffer Across The Board
Angel Beats is a show fueled by tragedy. Set in a curious purgatory that looks like a high school setting, the characters are all teens who must fulfill a personal goal or wish to move on from limbo. Every one of these kids died a sad, untimely death, though the causes vary.
Protagonist Otanashi died in a trainwreck. Yui, who lived as a quadriplegic, died due to health complications. Another character suffered a cerebral stroke, and another died in a car accident. All of them deserved more, but this is what they got, and sometimes that’s reality.
6 Scar Kills The Rockbells In A Fit Of Rage (Fullmetal Alchemist)
Perhaps Scar’s killing of Winry’s parents, Yuriy and Sara Rockbell, wasn’t strictly an accident, but it didn’t feel exactly like murder, either. During the Ishvalan Civil War, the Rockbells were surgeons who served as emergency doctors on the frontlines. Though both Rockbells were Amestrian, they treated Ishvalans and Amestrians both with equal kindness.
Unfortunately, Scar wakes in a daze while they’re treating him and, in a blind raging panic, realizes the doctors are Amestrian, of the same race as those that slaughtered his brother. Almost on instinct, Scar kills both Rockbells before fleeing the clinic, not registering that they meant him no harm.
5 Ayumi Is Killed As Her Ability Manifests (Charlotte)
In many series, superpowers come across as extremely appealing despite their pitfalls. Yes, it’s sad that Shigeo of Mob Psycho struggles to make friends, but his abilities are amazing. The kids at U.A. may have dramatic backstories, but who wouldn’t want to control ice or walk through walls? Not every anime is as optimistic about the cost of superpowers.
In Charlotte, several characters develop ESP abilities after witnessing the movement of a strange comet. Among them is the protagonist’s sister, Ayumi, who initially seems unaffected by the exposure. But one day Ayumi’s psychic powers manifest unexpectedly, causing her school to collapse around her, crushing her to death.
4 Setsuko And Seito Deserved A Better World (Grave Of The Fireflies)
In the vast catalog of tragic accidental deaths, few works in any medium have come close to achieving the same degree of profound loss as Grave of the Fireflies. A condemnation of war that focuses on the plight of two orphans trying to survive in Japan during WWII, Grave of the Fireflies is ruthless when it comes to delivering harsh truths.
War has victims far beyond the battlefield, and many of those victims are entirely innocent. The two children in the film want nothing more than to live, and the world can’t give them that much. It’s hard to think of any movie as necessary as this one.
3 Ushio Barely Lives At All (Clannad: After Story)
How does one cope with the death of the child? Those who haven’t lost a child can’t possibly comprehend the grief, and those who have lost a child can’t express it fully. And yet children sometimes die, and their families have to continue living.
Clannad: After Story takes an unflinching look at such a scenario, to devastating effect. Ushio Okazaki’s birth is tied to tragedy, as her mother dies shortly after she is born. Unexpectedly a single father, Tomoya falls into a deep depression, asking Nagisa’s father to look after Ushio in his stead. Later, he takes her in, determined to raise her well, but young Ushio perishes suddenly from the same illness that claimed her mother.
2 Mushi End Lives Simply By Existing (Mushishi)
Mushishi’s approach to confronting death is as unusual and atmospheric as the show itself. In the Mushishi universe, Ginko, a wandering medicine man, helps people cope with mushi, parasitic lifeforms that are neither plant nor animal. Over the course of the anime, many people die due to their exposure to mushi, and the show imbues each death with a palpable sense of melancholy.
Among the most tragic deaths involves a child who fell through the ice and drowned in a lake. Thereafter, her elder brother, who failed to save her, is infected by a mushi that causes snow to fall on him in perpetuity, even though he can’t feel the cold. The mushi make the concept of death manifest in a tangible, beautiful way, transforming human emotion into peculiar, visible creatures.
1 Menma Drowns At The Age Of Five (Anohana: The Flower We Saw That Day)
Clannad: After Story addresses the loss of a child from a parent’s perspective, but Anohana takes a different approach. When elementary schooler Menma drowns in a river at the age of five, her childhood friends are hardly old enough to cope with the reality of the situation. Jinta, the boy she confessed her affection for, falls into a deep depression in the years after her loss, eventually dropping out of school and becoming a shut-in.
All of Menma’s friends drift apart, struggling to deal with the tragedy alone for a decade and mostly failing. It’s only after Menma’s ghost appears before Jinta and asks him to fulfill her final wish that all of the friends reunite and begin to heal at last.
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