8 Shonen Anime & Manga Where the Protagonist Dies

Highlights

• Death isn’t always the end in fiction, as characters like Goku and Yusuke have shown by returning to life multiple times.
• In
  Summer Time Rendering
  , death resets the protagonist’s progress, similar to
  Groundhog Day
  , leading to a mysterious investigation.
• Sometimes, protagonists like Eren Yeager from
  Attack on Titan
  can become villains, ultimately meeting a tragic end for their actions.

Death looms large in fiction. It can get a story going, causing an incident the protagonist must avenge or set right. Or it can be its end, finishing the antagonist off as they get their just deserts. However, there are some stories where the hero bites the dust, which isn’t as uncommon as it seems.

Comic book superheroes have died and come back multiple times. A few movie heroes have sacrificed themselves to save others, and some protagonists were just doomed from the start. Anime and manga are no different, as these shōnen manga and anime protagonists died in various ways.

Spoiler Warning!

8 Summer Time Rendering

Shinpei Ajiro

• Anime Deaths: Episode 1: Goodbye, Summer Days, Episode 2: Shadows, Episode 5: Maelstrom, Episode 12: Bloody Night, Episode 13: Friends, Episode 14: to be/not to be, Episode 18: Face to Face, Episode 20: All is (Not) Lost, Episode 22: Return

Death isn’t necessarily the end of a story. It can just be an annoyance with the right plot. For example, in Summer Time Rendering, Shinpei returns home to mourn the death of his childhood friend Ushio. He was told she died from drowning, only to hear her body had strangulation marks around the neck. There’s something strange going on, and with the help of Ushio’s ghost, Shinpei must get to the bottom of it.

It goes beyond being a murder mystery, as Shinpei himself gets killed by Ushio’s sister, Mio, who was holding another Mio hostage. Instead of dying, he reawakens back at the start of the story. Like Groundhog Day, death just resets his progress to a certain point in time. As the mystery thickens, he ends up looping (thus dying) one way or another in order to free himself and others from the mysterious killers hiding in his hometown.

7 Dragon Ball Z

Goku

• Manga Deaths: Chapter 10: Sayonara Goku, Chapter 141: The Terrifying Message (alt-timeline), Chapter 218: The End of the Cell Game.
• Anime Deaths: Episode 5: Goku Dies! There’s Only One Last Chance!, Episode 129: Upgrade to Super Saiyan (alt-timeline), Episode 188: A Hero’s Farewell.

Speaking of death being an inconvenience. Dying in Dragon Ball isn’t a completely carefree venture, as Goku went through hell and high water to bring Krillin back. Then Dragon Ball Z shocked viewers by killing Goku off in the first few episodes. His friends would eventually bring him back by using Dragon Balls, but not before he’d train with King Kai in the underworld to get stronger.

Future stories would tease his death a few more times, either surviving by the skin of his teeth or coming back via the Dragon Balls or by another supernatural method. The only deaths that stuck were alternate universe ones like Goku dying from a heart virus in Trunks’ timeline or getting bodyswapped and killed by Zamasu in Dragon Ball Super. But canonically, Goku always comes back.

6 YuYu Hakusho

Yusuke Urameshi

• Manga Death: Chapter 1: Goodbye, Material World.
• Anime Death: Episode 1: Surprised to Be Dead.

If death isn’t the end of a person’s story, can it be their beginning? YuYu Hakusho’s Yusuke, a high school delinquent more interested in fighting than studying, has a heart of gold under his brusque exterior. He is killed when he saves a young girl from an oncoming car, only to be struck by it himself. If this was meant to be his fate, that would’ve been the end of it. But it wasn’t.

In fact, his death upset the affairs of Koenma, the stand-in ruler of the underworld. So, he’s given a chance to return to the land of the living if he succeeds at a few testing trials. At first, he was fine with passing on, thinking his family and friends didn’t care about him. But once he attends his own funeral, he learns he was loved more than he thought. He succeeds at the trials, returns to the world of the living, and starts a new life as an Underworld Detective.

Edward Elric

• Anime Death: Episode 50: Death

Just because an anime adapts a manga doesn’t mean it’ll adapt it 100% accurately. For example, before Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood, there was the 2003 Fullmetal Alchemist series. Since the anime was due to conclude soon, and the manga was still running at the time, creator Hiromu Arakawa allowed Bones to divert from her plot and make its own changes.

For example, King Bradley became the Pride homunculus instead of Wrath. Sloth is a stoic woman instead of a giant man. Then, Edward Elric is killed by Envy, only to be revived when Alphonse exchanges his life for Edward’s. In turn, Edward sacrifices himself again for Alphonse, only to end up in pre-World War 2 Germany because its main writer, Shō Aikawa, is a strange guy. Thank heavens for Brotherhood.

4 Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Phantom Blood

Jonathan Joestar

• Manga Death: Chapter 44: Fire and Ice, Jonathan and Dio Part 6.
• Anime Death: Episode 9: The Final Ripple!

One of the reasons Hirohiko Araki cited for changing Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure’s cast and settings completely per part was because he gets bored quickly. It showed in his early work, where he’d end strips after a few months and start a new one. For Jojo’s inaugural part, Phantom Blood, he ended it with a capital E by killing off its hero, Jonathan Joestar.

He could’ve let him go off into the sunset with his wife, Erina. Instead, he had Dio and his minions come back and leave Jonathan at death’s door with multiple fatal wounds. However, he goes out like a hero, destroying the ship to take out all of Dio’s forces and taking his evil stepbrother down with him while Erina flees to the safety of Part 2: Battle Tendency.

3 Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean

Jolyne Cujoh

• Manga Death: Chapter 155: Made in Heaven, Part 7.
• Anime Death: Episode 37: Made in Heaven, Part 2.

To make up for Jonathan’s fate, nearly every subsequent part ends on a high note. Battle Tendency’s Joseph averts his fate and lives to a ripe old age. Diamond is Unbreakable’s Josuke saves his hometown from a serial killer, and Vento Aureo’s Giorno has his dream of becoming a Gang Star come true. But Stone Ocean’s Jolyne Cujoh failed to stop Father Pucci from completing Dio’s ritual and gaining god-like powers.

With his new time-accelerating stand, Made in Heaven, he kills off Jolyne’s friends, including her father, Jotaro, and then murders her. But not before she saves her friend Emporio so he can make it into Pucci’s new universe. He’d end up stopping Pucci and arrive in an altered universe where his friends came back and had happier lives. Except they’re not the same people he knew. Jolyne died, so her alt-universe self Irene could live.

2 Attack on Titan

Eren Yeager

• Manga Death: Chapter 138: A Long Dream.
• Anime Death: Episode 93: A Long Dream.

Protagonists aren’t always heroes. Some could even become villains by the end, like Attack on Titan’s Eren Yeager. In a world where humans shut themselves away in walled cities to protect themselves from the titular man-eating giants, Eren seems like the typical shōnen hero at first. He wanted to avenge the death of his mother by taking the fight to the Titans.

However, he turns more and more towards the dark side as the story progresses, until he becomes the world’s most powerful Titan. By the end of the manga, he and his Titans had wiped out 80% of the world’s population before Eren’s childhood friend Mikasa put him out of his misery. His madness’ method did ultimately put an end to the Titans, but at a high cost.

1 Death Note

Light Yagami

• Manga Death: Chapter 107: Curtain.
• Anime Death: Episode 37: New World.

Even when an anime is adapted accurately, it can still change things. Death Note’s anime wasn’t as drastically different as FMA 2003 was from its source material, though their endings still came from different places. When Light’s plans finally fall apart, and Ryuk grants him mercy by signing his name in his notebook, the anime has him lying serenely in bright lights, like an angel heading home to God.

Yet Ohba and Obata didn’t see him that way. Instead of holding out for as long as possible and passing gently into the sunlight, Manga Light dies crying and begging Ryuk to save him, only for the shinigami to rebuke him. He spent most of the story thinking he was the god of a new world just because he had Ryuk’s book. Instead, spurned by his allies, he died as he truly was- a loser whose ambitions went beyond his reach.