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More Expendable Than You: Difference between revisions
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* Perhaps the most famous example of the trope is found in ''[[A Tale of Two Cities]]'', when Sydney Carton takes the place of his look-alike Charles Darnay to be executed on the guillotine. He did this because [[I Want My Beloved to Be Happy|he loved Darnay's wife]] and because he'd never before done anything he considered truly worthwhile. The origin of the "It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done..." quote.
* ''[[The Epic of Gilgamesh]]'': Before Gilgamesh and Enkidu set off on their first adventure, the people of Uruk makes Enkidu promise to bring their king back alive.
* In ''[[Harry Potter
** A variant in ''Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone'', spelled out in the film, when Ron sacrifices himself in the chess game because he knows that Harry is the one who needs to confront Snape and Voldemort. "Not me, not Hermione, ''you''!"
* In [[Ciaphas Cain]]'s first adventure, when his attempt to escape ran into a Tyranid horde, he explained that he had guessed it and scouted; when his commander said he could have sent someone else, Cain says that he's the most expendable officer in the company.
* This happens to Thalia Ng in ''The Prefect'' by [[Alastair Reynolds]]. She's trapped with a bunch of civilians in an orbital habitat that's been taken over by rogue robots; she comes up with an escape scheme that begins by blowing up a bunch of structural supports, and then discovers that the timer on her explosives isn't long enough to make it away safely. The civilian she's been confiding in knocks her out, drags her away from the supports, and sets the explosives himself.
* In ''[[Luke Skywalker and the Shadows of Mindor]]'', Luke willingly and gladly risks his life for a stranger, who as it turns out knew Anakin Skywalker, being mind-controlled by the villain. A couple chapters on, that character, no longer controlled, is about to kill thirty other mind-controlled characters to save Luke when he realizes that Luke won't shrug it off like Anakin would have. He would be disappointed and sad. Luke would sacrifice himself to save thirty innocents. He'd sacrifice himself to save one innocent. [[The Cape (trope)|He'd just almost sacrificed himself to save one not-so-innocent]]. Luke ''isn't'' expendable, but he doesn't seem to realize that at all. So this character has to take out the mind-controlled characters the hard, risky way.
* Played with in [[Dragonlance|The Siege of Mount Nevermind]] where in a cruel joke, some gnome soldiers tell the gully dwarves under their command that "expendable" means "brave". Later, when one of the gully dwarves with the protagonists gets sucked up an aqueduct, his brother prepares to rescue him, claiming he's the most expendable. The gnomes try to tell him that no one is expendable, but he simply shouts "Ragg as expendable as a lion!" and jumps in the aqueduct.
* In ''[[The Death Gate Cycle|Serpent Mage]]'', when some women find out that they need to go alone in a submarine to an unknown destination to save their people, the boyfriend of one of them knocks her out and takes her place, managing not to get discovered until the ship has left. His reasoning was that he thought she would die and couldn't bear the thought of living without her. {{spoiler|Everyone who goes in the sub ends up surviving the trip (though not necessarily the whole story), the girl left behind kills herself, believing her beloved to be dead and their people doomed.}}
* [[Magnificent Bastard]] Cao Cao is saved by Cao Hong's [[Heroic Sacrifice]] in the [[Romance of the Three Kingdoms]]. Cao Hong's final words to Cao Cao roughly translate to, "The world can do without me, but not without you!"
* In ''London'', Peter and Thomas drug their brother-in-law in his prison cell so that Peter can take his place, before he can be burned for refusing to acknowledge Henry VIII as the new head of the Church. Notable in that, for Peter to be free to visit the prison, he had to first swear that ''he'' accepted the king's decree, which means he's fairly certain that he'll be ''going to Hell'' when he agrees to lay down his life. No "far better resting place" expected, in this case, yet he does it anyway so their sister's family won't be left without a husband and father. {{spoiler|Subverted in that Peter, who's been ill for a while, has a heart attack and dies of natural causes before Thomas can smother him as they'd planned.}}
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{{quote|''"Good lord, Professor," Ned Land answered me, "don't mention it! What did we do that's so praiseworthy? Not a thing. It was a question of simple arithmetic. Your life is worth more than ours. So we had to save it."''}}
* In [[Half Prince]], when preparing to compete in a melee battle, the members choose the person most likely to survive and decide to protect Doll at all costs so they can win. When they later decide to split into groups of two to escape more easily, they're divided so one of them can sacrifice the other if they have to.
* When she applied for a job with the CIA, [[Mrs. Pollifax (franchise)|Mrs. Pollifax]] (who at the time was a bit of a [[Death Seeker]]) offered this as one reason for hiring her: being an elderly woman in her sixties, she could easily be sacrificed to protect or save a younger, better trained agent. Boy, was she wrong.
== [[Live Action TV]] ==
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