St. Valentine’s Day and 5 Senseless Anime Murders

 

You’ve heard it before – no one’s really sure about the origins of St. Valentine’s day, and historians have only found traces of various stories wherein someone named St. Valentine always gets horribly murdered by the end. And your candy hearts are stained red with his blood. This is not a post about the ‘greatest’ anime deaths – that would take forever. Rather, this is a post about five completely senseless, meaningless anime deaths to throw at the feet of your senseless, meaningless, bloody holiday. Lovebirds eat your hearts out… literally. Do it. These are, in fact, ranked by senselessness.

5. The Woman from Darker Than Black Episodes 1 and 2

(you can watch the death here, stuff starts going down at 18:00 and the fight starts at 19:00)

Being as it is a proper pulp series, Darker Than Black has no shortage of sudden, shocking deaths that force the viewer to understand the sheer futility of life itself. It sets the tone for this in the first episode with this poor woman whose name is not even worth remembering. She was having troubles in her personal life and found herself mixed up in the wrong crowd, which is how she ended up meeting Hei. Hei acted like the perfect guy, and maybe she thought he could rescue her to some extent. Of course, it was all bullshit – Hei was acting, when in truth he doesn’t give a whole lot of a fuck about anything, and by the end of the woman’s story, it turns out that no one really gave a shit about her, but only about what they could get out of her. In the end, she senselessly steps in the way of a teleportation attack meant to replace Hei’s heart with a section of wall, and instead, well, replaces her heart with a section of wall, killing her instantly. No one missed her, and her body was tossed. Next!

4. The Girl from Boogiepop Phantom Episode 3

(starts at 4:50)

Now here’s a girl who got it rough. The girl from Boogiepop episode 3 basically thought she was ‘all that.’ She thought she had a new worldview and was different from all the others, but the truth is that she was just imitating her dead friend, not even realizing that her friend had been an otherworldly being. In the end, this girl finds herself in the cold, dark shadows of the city like everyone else, and when she’s faced with Boogiepop Phantom, she looses her shit just like everyone else. Boogiepop Phantom basically tells her that she’s not worth his time and to get out of his face, so the girl goes running, screaming, panting, and begging for help. She finds a police officer and them BAM! her entire body gets exploded. Why? No particular reason, other than that she came to the wrong person at the wrong time, since the officer was actually an otherworldly being as well. Sorry, bitch! You see her corpse grotesquely loaded into the back of the police car as it drives off. Next, please!

3. The Old Dude from Neo Ranga Episode 2

(starts at 5:00)

Okay, here’s a particularly weird one. The Shimabara sisters just showed up on the island nation where their brother was apparently king, met the nephew they didn’t know they had, and found out that they were the new kings and would inherit the god Neo Ranga. They think it’s all bullshit after the tribesmen try to trick them into thinking their brother’s soul is speaking to them, but their nephew assures them that Neo Ranga is still very real and takes them to the place where he sleeps. Neo Ranga awakens, and the very first thing it does is crush one of the old dudes with them in half. Yikes! This moment is particularly WTF because the rest of the episode had seemed fairly comedic for the most part, the viewer having not gotten into the show’s crazy pace. Evidently the old guy had some kind of evil purpose all along, but needless to say, the first thing you want to see your new giant pet do is not ‘murder some random dude! Moving along…

2. Naked Chick from Space Adventure Cobra Episode 14

(no video of this one, sorry)

Okay, this is just a hilarious one. Once again, as a proper old-school pulp story, Cobra has plenty of random, nameless character deaths. However, in this particular episode, Cobra is trying to save a girl who is under the ‘ownership’ of a gigantic evil genie who lives inside of a palace on a comet or something like that. Anyway, the genie’s throne room is full of naked women who are all over him, but he does not particularly care about their survival. A good portion of these bitches die, but the most awesome and senseless one is when the genie illustrates to Cobra that he plans to feed him something that will make his body grow until it explodes by feeding said object to one of his random haremites. Sure enough, she begins to expand like a balloon and actually starts to float in the air as she grows and grows, screaming, and eventually just pops. Yeah. Next, please.

1. Random-Ass Businessman from X/1999

(7:26, my god.)

And here we go, folks, the single most senseless, hilarious, and pointless depiction of death in anime history. You may remember X/1999 as that movie where every single major character dies horrifically, which would be great to fill up a ‘best deaths’ list right quick, but there are also countless civilian deaths due to the world ending and all. X, however, is one of the very few anime that actually goes through the trouble of depicting the deaths of random civilians in hilarious ways. The most unforgettable (if you are completely sadistic) of which is this guy who is running down the stairs to try and escape before he gets crushed by a humongous fucking pillar and becomes a gigantic bloodstain. X was always my favorite movie as a newer anime fan, and the deaths were a good reason, but among me and my friends, this was our hidden classic. I remember actually rewinding our VHS to watch this part over and over again, laughing our asses off. Congratulations, random businessman, your misfortune has given us mindless entertainment for about 2 seconds of our endless, dull lives.

That’s all, folks. Just always know that while some people do get to die in totally badass ways, chances are you will probably die when the cool people are fighting on Tokyo Tower and you are busy being flattened by anonymous debris. Sucks to be you.

Happy Valentine’s Day!