| abstract
| - You're the hero, and you've got a chance to take a shot at the villain. If you don't do it now, the chances are good the villain will get away, or the doomsday device will go off, or something equally nasty. One problem: your ally is in the blast zone. "Like You Would Really Do It", the audience (and maybe the villain) is thinking. Sometimes the answer is "yes". While it's possible (and more common) for the hero to Take a Third Option, the hero actually going through (even accidentally) with it obviously has much more dramatic impact. An Anti-Hero will decide that saving the world is just too important to let collateral damage or personal concerns get in the way and tearfully pull the trigger. Sometimes there will be consent, explicit or inferred, on the part of the person in the firing line, that getting the villain is more important than them surviving. Non-Anti Heroes put in this position might have sworn a mutual pact to take the villain down no matter what, up to and including a Suicide Pact in dire circumstances, or the trapped character will give some sort of signal indicating to their comrade they're prepared to die for the cause. Or they may have some Applied Phlebotinum or superpower stashed away that the villain (or even the hero) doesn't know about and may secure their survival. An alternate way this trope can occur is when a character makes a Heroic Sacrifice by directing someone else to open fire on their own position in hopes of taking out the villain as the villain attacks them. If the character making the Heroic Sacrifice does die there will be deep repercussions. At the very least, if it's possible, a posthumous recognition of their life and deed will be called for. At worst, the hero will discover just how much Being Good Sucks, No Good Deed Goes Unpunished, and they may spend the rest of their life as The Atoner. May come close to or overlap with I Cannot Self-Terminate, Kill Us Both, Mercy Kill, and/or Shoot the Hostage if the character(s) sacrificed has been, or will be, put through hell by the villain, but a Mercy Kill alone does not this trope make. Arguably a supertrope of Kill Us Both. This differs from Shoot the Hostage in that the innocent in the line of fire is not a hostage but a fellow hero. For cases where the character sacrificed is being used as a Human Shield, please put those examples under Shoot the Hostage rather than here. Kill Us Both is a more specific case where the hero can restrain, but not defeat the villain on his own, and decides that he'd rather be killed than let the villain continue his reign of terror. This focuses more on the decision that collateral damage is acceptable and holding fire is not. The heroic counterpart to We Have Reserves, this differs in that while the villain orders his archers to shoot at his own men callously, the heroic general gives the order with a deeply felt tear in his eye. Examples of Trial by Friendly Fire include:
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