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Fear the Reaper

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Fear the Reaper (trope)
My name is Death, and the end is here...
The First Lord of Chaos is Death, who holds the entire universe in his cruel grasp. It was he who imposed on the world of Titan the doom of Time and the decree that things may cease to exist, in direct opposition to the gods of Good, who can only create and mould, but never destroy.

Death is terrifying.

It’s often painful and unfair, it always brings grief and loss, and deliberately causing it is one of the most evil acts possible. Therefore, it stands to reason that if death is a person, or if there is a person who governs and orchestrates it, then that person must themselves be someone terrifying, unjust, and cruel.

This trope is when the Grim Reaper, God of the Dead or another embodiment of Death is portrayed as an ultimately malicious force. They might be actively trying to wipe out all life, take sadistic delight in their duties, rule the afterlife with an iron fist, or simply be completely apathetic to the suffering of the living. Either way, Death in these settings is no gentle shepherd but the ultimate mass murderer.

Super-Trope to Everyone Hates Hades, where an existing deity of death is made evil based on the above reasoning (examples involving evil versions of pre-existing death gods should be placed under that trope, not here), and Enemies with Death, where whether or not Death is hostile to people in general, they're certainly hostile to you specifically. Closely related to, and often overlaps with, God of Evil and Dark Is Evil, as well as more indirectly with Living Forever Is Awesome and Undead Abomination. The Inverted Trope is Don't Fear the Reaper, where Death is portrayed as a positive or benevolent figure. See also The Underworld and The Nothing After Death for stories where Death is a horrible experience, rather than a horrible person.


Examples:

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    Anime and Manga 
  • Death Note: The Shinigami are the Gods of Death. They must constantly kill humans before their time in order to fuel their own eternal life, and also grant mortals the power to commit supernatural murders purely to see what they do with it. Any Shinigami who does start caring about humans is killed if they try to protect a human from death, due to "failing as a Shinigami".

    Comic Books 
  • Green Lantern: Nekron is the embodiment of the Black end of the Emotional Spectrum – that is, Death as the absence of everything. He’s one of the setting's most powerful Omnicidal Maniacs, and is served by the Black Lanterns, animated corpses that torture the living while keeping the departed’s soul trapped inside, helpless to control their body but fully conscious.
  • Swamp Thing: Subverted with the Black, the elemental court of death. While initially portrayed as working to corrode all life into undead monsters before killing off everything, it eventually turns out that’s just the current Avatar’s own malice. The Black itself is one of the more reasonable elemental courts — after all, how can death exist if there’s nothing alive to die?
  • Thanos Rising: While she's normally portrayed as neutral at worst, this book has Death as actively evil and the Greater-Scope Villain to Thanos. She found the Titan as a child and proceeded to manipulate him into becoming ever more depraved, so as to create a force that would spread her domain further than ever.

    Fan Works 
  • Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality: We eventually discover that in this continuity, Dementors are manifestations of Death, and this connection is what makes them the most evil and terrifying things in existence. Harry destroys one with the promise that one day, “we won’t have to say goodbye anymore”.

    Films — Animation 
  • KPop Demon Hunters: Implied; the Saja Boys are never explicitly identified with Jeoseungsaja, the Korean equivalent of the Grim Reaper, but they dress like him and are in the business of collecting souls. They're also depicted as demons who embody the worst excesses of the Korean Pop Industry.
  • Puss in Boots: The Last Wish: Downplayed. While the Wolf is a major villain, spending the film hunting down and psychologically terrorising Puss over not showing him enough respect, he does have a sense of honour. When Puss stops fearing him and promises to live his life to the fullest, the Wolf reluctantly gives up the hunt and leaves, promising not to return until his natural death.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Clash of the Titans (2010): The God of the Dead Hades is a villainous figure whose main plot is to gain power over Zeus by terrorizing humanity — unlike other gods, he feeds on mortal fear rather than prayer.
  • Final Destination: Death itself is the monster of this horror franchise, an unseen force who actively tracks down those who evaded it and kills them in horrific ways for going against its design. The few glimpses of its personality we see in extended media show us a cruel being who frequently gloats over the pain it causes.
  • Meet Joe Black: When he first appears "Joe Black" is an incredibly sinister force, actively threatens Bill into helping him, and shows little regard for the lives of mortals. Luckily, he gets better over the course of the movie.

    Literature 
  • Discworld:
  • The Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant: The Dragon, a very direct metaphor for the inevitability of death, is a terrifying and unstoppable monster who demands the kingdom send thousands of people to be devoured by it daily. When it’s finally killed, the entire kingdom cheers its death, and celebrate that they now have time at last.
  • Fighting Fantasy: Death is the Greater-Scope Villain of the setting, the ultimate master of all the monsters and villains through the series. The sourcebooks reveal that his introduction of Mortality to the universe was the moment evil began as a concept in Titan.
  • The Midnight Library: The villain of "Carnival Dance" is the Mayan death god Ah Puch, who was sealed into a mask after trying to eat the souls of the Mayan people. He escapes in the modern day only to start preying on carnival-goers.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Being Human (UK): The Men With Sticks and Ropes are the psychopomps who lead the recently departed into the afterlife. They're also cruel and vicious beings — it's implied, given the dead's terror of them, that they do awful things to the departed, confirmed that they do awful things to the undead, and they're eventually revealed to be agents of The Devil working to bring about Hell on Earth.
  • Torchwood: Death is depicted as a malicious creature who requires thirteen souls to cross over to the world of the living and roam forever as a force of destruction. After using Owen as a way of crossing through during "Dead Man Walking", it goes to a hospital to kill twelve people, and would have killed more if Torchwood hadn’t stopped it.

    Mythology and Religion 
  • In Christianity, Death is an unnatural force of decay and corruption introduced by the Original Sin. It affects everything in the material world, causing it to slowly fall apart and, well, die. Everything from Atomic Decay, to your big sister getting sick, to Steve Jobs getting cancer, to your grandma wrecking her computer, to a star going supernova, to you stubbing your toe is the result of Death's slow destruction of the universe. Whether it's self-aware or not isn't made clear, but Jesus addressed it directly on His resurrection, and Revelation discusses it being punished in hellfire along with Satan.

    Podcasts 
  • The Magnus Archives: The End embodies all our fears regarding death – unjust, untimely, and agonizing. In its statements we see it doing such things as taunting people with their imminent horrible deaths and trapping those who ask for immortality in eternally conscious rotting corpses, and in Season 5, we discover it's one of the two Entities capable of planning - specifically, it's planning to kill off all conscious life forever. The Grim Reaper exists as one of its Avatars, and spends their time killing random people while trying to pass their cursed fate onto another.

    Radio 
  • Torchwood: The Lost Files: Syriath from "The House of the Dead" is an Ancient Evil Eldritch Abomination trapped in the Rift since before time, and has been described as a "Death Feeder" and the "Queen of the Dead". Bending time to send visions of the dead, she manipulates people into opening the Rift by invoking and warping the image of their deceased loved ones, with her end goal being to tear the world of the living apart using the dead as a weapon.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Anathema: While of the Well-Intentioned Extremist variety, trying to avoid overpopulation, the game still makes it clear that by being agents of Death, shrouds are mass-murdering monsters. Those with any trace of humanity are likely to try and revolt against their master.
  • Dungeons & Dragons: A very common trope. Almost every god with the Death Domain is some shade of Evil, with 5e explicitly having it as a villain-only domain that also encompasses concepts like undeath, murder, pain, and disease. In 3rd edition, they eventually had to come up with the Repose domain to allow for the possibility of non-evil death gods, as by default simply having death in your portfolio required granting evil spells.
    • Forgotten Realms: In ancient times, the Consummate Professional original god of the dead, Jergal, voluntarily divided up his portfolio between "the Dead Three", a trio of evil epic-level adventurers who challenged him to attain divinity: Bane became the god of tyranny, Bhaal became the god of murder, and Myrkul became the god of death. Myrkul in particular was infamous for his cruelty and capriciousness, with his temples hosting torture chambers and his priests demanding exorbitant fees for funerary rites and often raising corpses as The Undead. He also created the Wall of the Faithless around the City of the Dead, formed of the souls of all who refused to worship any god at all, which are slowly and agonizingly consumed over hundreds of years. Nobody cried when Mystra killed him during the Time of Troubles.
    • Greyhawk: Nerull is the primary god of death, darkness, murder, and the Underworld. He is also known as the Reaper, the Foe of All Good, and the Hater of Life.
  • Exalted: Zigzagged. While Saturn, the god of death, is at worst somewhat distant, the creators of the afterlife are Undead Abominations in never-ending torment at the bottom of the Underworld, and to the extent they can be said to want anything at all, seek to end their pain by destroying the world.
  • Geist: The Sin-Eaters has this as a collective trope for the forces of death. Between them, the Deathlords, the Kerberoi and the Reapers run an underworld focused on exploiting each soul to the utmost before erasing them once there's no more to gain from them, while brutally punishing any souls who rebel - a system explicitly compared to atrocities like the Slave Trade. The protagonist factions are rebels against this system, trying to tear it down and create a fairer afterlife.
  • In Dark Alleys: Reapers, the setting's psychopomps, are the primary antagonists of the Survivors, tracking down and killing anyone who escaped their grasp. It's eventually revealed that death is an artificial construct preventing humans from developing their true power, and freeing ourselves from the reapers is one of the most important steps to escaping the Powers From Beyond.
  • In Nomine: Saminga, Demon Prince of Death, is a vicious thug who draws his power from mass killings and spitefully destroys the souls of those who fall into his domain. Although it should be noted, he’s not quite as high up the totem pole as he’d like to think, and his actual status as God of the Dead is very much up for debate.
  • Pathfinder has two forces of death, one amoral and one monstrous. Pharasma, goddess of death, isn't exactly evil, but is completely indifferent to the souls that come before her and "mercilessly cold" in her duties. The daemons, embodiments of different ways to die, are far worse. It's mentioned that each daemon's greatest desire is to kill all non-daemons in the multiverse, then kill all other daemons, and only then, when it's sure that all other life is gone from the universe, finish the job by killing itself.
  • Warhammer 40,000: Aza'gorod the Nightbringer is a C'tan who was once the Star God of death, darkness, and destruction, and was held to be the most powerful of the C'tan. His imprint was so powerful that he subconsciously influenced the depiction and fear of death among the younger races of the galaxy, including the Aeldari's Kaelis Ra and the human concept of the Grim Reaper.
  • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar: Nagash, who ascended from “just” the most powerful necromancer in the world to the God of Death during the End Times. He now rules the afterlife as a vicious tyrant, subjecting most of the dead to horrible eternal fates while sending his armies to hasten the day every soul is under his control. It’s mentioned that there were more benign death gods, once. Nagash has, over the millennia, killed every single one of them.
  • Warhammer Fantasy: The elves' goddess of the Underworld, Ereth Khial, is a hateful figure who rebelled against the Top God Asuryan and now does her best to spite him by stealing elven souls away to an afterlife of enslavement and misery.

    Video Games 
  • Baldur's Gate III: Two of the Dead Three, the evil deities who are the game’s Greater Scope Villains, embody Death in some sense (Myrkul is grief, Bhaal is murder). note  Both of them ultimately plan to horribly murder everyone in the Forgotten Realms, albeit in different and often contradictory ways.
  • Castlevania: Death is repeatedly portrayed as Dracula's closest ally in his efforts to Kill All Humans. Although polite and Affably Evil, Death will do anything to support his master, even offering up his soul to help the Misanthrope Supreme power up for the final battle.
  • Dark Souls I: Gravelord Nito, First of the Dead, became Lordran's equivalent of the Grim Reaper after receiving his Lord Soul, which granted him power over death itself. A literal twenty-five foot tall mountain of corpses, Nito stands out among the other Lord Soul bearers for being a terrifyingly neutral force whose ultimate goal is spreading death and decay to all living things.
  • Darkest Dungeon II: Death is a wandering boss who has a chance to appear in Resistance Encounters if you have the Flagellant in your party, since he has managed to escape Death's embrace by fighting her off using his gangrene magic. She appears as a ghastly, emaciated pale rider in an Ethereal White Dress who is covered with numerous small divots across her body, and she'll rip your whole party apart if it means killing the Flagellant. Her encounter is designed in a way to intentionally invoke panic if she appears at a bad time.
  • Death and Taxes: While the Grim themselves can be as cruel or as kind as the player wishes, Fate – the ultimate manager of the process of death — comes off as highly sinister from the beginning. You eventually discover that he’s secretly manipulating his agents into destroying all life on earth so he can finally end his own eternal existence. That said, you can give him a My God, What Have I Done? moment and convince him to give you his role, so you can do it right.
  • Diablo III: Malthael, previously the leader of the angels, decides that humanity is the greatest threat remaining against his kind after the Prime Evils of Hell have been defeated. As such, he becomes the embodiment of death and sends legions of corrupted angels to try to eradicate all humans.
  • Final Fantasy IX: Necron is the embodiment of death and existential dread. It believes that life is inherently full of suffering and that non-existence is the only way to escape the fear of death completely, trying to murder the party and everything else out of a misplaced and alien sense of compassion regardless if anyone is asking for it or not.
  • Six Ages: Ride Like the Wind: Death is characterized in Rider myths as a jealous, obsessive stalker of Erissa, the healer goddess. He first came into being as Pain, and spread suffering and harm in the world in an effort to make Erissa seem more valuable and thus make her love him. When she refused him and simply went to work to heal, he made himself into Death to repeat his "courtship", continued to bring "gifts" into the world such as despair and war, and tried to woo her further by offering to only kill the people she loved at the very last. Erissa still denied him, but he has never accepted this — ever single wound, bruise, and death since then has been an attempt by Death to make Life love him, and every recovered injury and new medicine has been Life saying "no".
  • Sunless Skies: The Sapphir'd King is the ruler of the afterlife, and perhaps the worst of the Judgements. He's constantly cruel, arrogant and utterly dismissive of the mere mortals who come to his realm, leaving many as Unpersons or slaves sold to the living. And beneath all that the "gate to transcendence" is actually his mouth - he eats the souls of everyone who dies to sustain himself, erasing them forever. If you kill him, the entire afterlife is grateful to you
  • Persona 3: Nyx is an Eldritch Abomination and a Planet Eater whose mere coming will herald "The Fall", an event that will lead to the end of all life on Earth. It is also the progenitor of the game's other avatars of Death that the heroes encounter throughout the story: Thanatos, Pharos, and Ryoji. So S.E.E.S. does everything in its power to investigate the Dark Hour and Tartarus to both stop the Shadows and find a way to prevent Nyx's coming. Subverted with the reveal that Nyx is an Almighty Idiot being called to Earth by Erebus, the embodiment of mankind's wishes for death. It is even described as "maternal" in side materials and wishes to spare people pain, but can't help but try to fulfill its function due to Erebus.
  • Twisted Metal: Mr. Grimm is the Reaper of Souls, and lost any nobility of his profession long ago. He's now addicted to the high of devouring the souls he claims, consuming them rather than letting them move on to the afterlife, and his wish upon winning the contest is to start an apocalyptic global war so he can finally devour every soul on earth. At least he grows to regret that — with everyone dead, he has no more souls to feed his addiction, trapping him in eternal withdrawal.

    Visual Novels 

    Web Animation 
  • Purgatony: Downplayed. Death cares about souls being properly sorted into Heaven and Hell, only because it is his job, meanwhile being careless about anyone's suffering. He even threatens to destroy Tony's soul if Tony is lazy on his job (though later turns out he is uncertain about whether souls could be destroyed at all). Then the episode What?! Dreams May Come?! tells us that Death is willing to commit mass murder, just so he could recruit more workers in Purgatory.

    Webcomics 

    Western Animation 

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