About

People Die if They are Killed is a memorable quote uttered by the character Shirou Emiya in the 2006 anime series Fate/Stay Night by studio Deen. The quote is a result of translation issues from Japanese to English, creating a humorous redundancy that became a popular catchphrase online. The quote has since become popular among fans of the series as well as 4chan's /a/ board.

Origin

Though the quote originally appeared on the manga version of the series, it became notable on animated adaptation. On June 10th, 2006, the episode "Holy Grail" aired. In the episode, the series' main protagonist Shirou Emiya discusses his body's ability to regenerate from fatal injuries due to a relic known as "Avalon" that was implanted inside of him by Kiritsugu Emiya. It is during this scene that the line appears in the English-translation subtitles (shown below).

Spread

The earliest examples of the quote is believed to have originated from 4chan's /a/ board. Users would mock at the seemingly redundant statement and how it represents characters at being passionate yet very thick-headed. The quote would also be accompanied by other statements or images that are synonymous/contradicts with it or with the image macro O RLY?, You Don't Say? and Demotivational Posters (examples below).

The earliest surviving record of the quote was a screenshot of the scene in the image search engine site Danbooru ^[1] on June 17th, 2006. Months later, on February 10th, 2007, the Danbooru wiki submitted an entry regarding the quote^[2] which was pasted from the Lurkmore Wiki^[3]. On 4chan's Archive.moe, there are over 1m700 archived threads regarding the quote with the earliest being from February 4th, 2008.^[5]

On July 24th, 2008, YouTube user Albana uploaded a video titled "People die if they are killed !" which shows the scene of the quote. It has since gathered more than 652,000 views as of 2015^[4].

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References