Faking the Dead: Difference between revisions

* Happens in the [[X Wing Series]] time and time again. Mostly, it's the Rogues managing to escape death and taking advantage of everyone's assumptions until they can come back triumphant, but {{spoiler|Asyr Sei'lar instead goes back to her homeworld to fight her species' [[Planet of Hats|Hat]] of political treachery}}, and then there's {{spoiler|Isard}}. The survival of the Rogues is believed by one minor Imperial character to be a fake - he believes that they really have died each time, and were replaced by clones.

** Another book in the [[Star Wars Expanded Universe]] has a birdman who really wants to quit the criminal business and return to his homeworld, but he's fairly high up in the criminal syndicate Black Sun, and [[Resignations Not Accepted]] something like that. His underlord even hints that if he tries, his world will suffer. In the same book, Darth Vader gives a character the terrible choice of betraying his friend, one of the last surviving Jedi, or having the plateau where his people live bombed from orbit. Both of them are eventually thought to have been caught in a nuclear blast, and both of them take advantage of being thought dead.

** {{spoiler|''Not completely...'' It actually killed one of Voldemort's last horcruxes, which was in Harry, permitting his final defeat.}}

** Janus Thickey disappeared leaving only a hasty [[Oh Crap]] A Lethifold's Killing Me note. His family went into mourning until he was found living with the landlady of a local inn. It may be related that the hospital's ward for long term spell damage is named for him.

* In ''The Leper of St. Giles'' by [[Ellis Peters]], [[Brother Cadfael]] discovers that a mourned crusader is still alive, but had his Saracen captors falsely report his death from battle-wounds. In reality, the unfortunate warrior had contracted leprosy and didn't want anyone to see or pity his disfigurements.

* A tactic employed in self-defense by {{spoiler|the Count}} in ''[[A Night in the Lonesome October]]'' by [[Roger Zelazny]], to avert a potential assassination.