Wring Every Last Drop out of Him

(aka: Wring Every Last Drop Out Of Her)

2 Following

• Fate/stay night [Unlimited Blade Works]: Heroic spirits in the Archer class can stay around for a while after the bond with their Masters ends. Archer EMIYA has main character status as the co-protagonist's Servant so, in his case, he takes more than a couple of episodes to run out of mana. We see him fight Lancer, Shirou, and even Gilgamesh himself in fear of when he'd empty the tank. It's, only after he feels he's lost his goal that he finally fades away.
• Fist of the North Star: Toki's said to be terminally ill when introduced. Later, he shortens his own lifespan in the hopes of getting strong enough to fight Raoh. Even when mortally wounded by Ryuga, he's still capable of walking while carrying a grown man.

• Death of Dido: Inspired by Virgil's Aeneid, Guercino captures the prolonged, tragic, and epic death of Queen Dido by impalement on an immolation pyre. Her subjects are mourning her, her sister Anna is inconsolable, her lover Aeneas' leaving ship can be seen in the distance, and Goddess Juno is compassionately releasing the queen's soul from her suffering.

• Spider-Man: Aunt May has been on the verge of death for six decades.

• Crankshaft: The slow, agonizing death of Crankshaft's former neighbor from complications of Alzheimer's.
• For Better or for Worse: Grandpa Jim gets progressively sicker and sicker with strokes and heart attacks to the point there have been several "fakeouts" of his death. He has yet another heart attack at the end of the strip, on the day of Liz's wedding. Yet he never actually dies until the age of 89 —somehow surviving two more years (he was born in 1921) after the end of the strip!
• Funky Winkerbean: Lisa spends months slowly dying of a relapsing cancer. Every so often, there's a Hope Spot where it looks like she'd recover, but eventually, she dies and the creator initiates a Time Skip to the future.
• Gasoline Alley: Walt who, in order to keep up with the strip's real-time aging, has hung around to be over 120 years old, and ever more decrepit each year. An occasionally-stated fact is that he's the last surviving World War I vet in America.

• Friday Night Funkin': Mario's Madness: By the time I HATE YOU Luigi climbs out of the lava to confront Boyfriend in "I Hate You", he's living on borrowed time, as he's constantly coughing up blood, and his skin, left eye and nose melted off. It takes until the end of that song for him to finally collapse to his knees, giving Boyfriend the chance to slap him off the bridge and back into lava, killing him off for good.

WinxVerse

• 【Amaranthine Shadows】: A huge part of the plot revolves around Bloom's death, the circumstances behind it, and the identity of her killer. In the prologue, she died off-screen and now roams Magix as a ghost, lamenting all her unfinished business and her friends mourn her. Then, the first chapter kickstarts the events that will lead to her untimely demise. Every four chapters or so, there's an interlude that details Bloom's journey through limbo until she remembers how she died. She's on the brink of death (both in a literal sense and in an "about to finally depart to the land of the dead" sense) for the whole fic.

• Shrek the Third: Old age and having been turned into a frog do King Harold in. A sizeable chunk of the first act is spent tending to him on his deathbed and getting to hear his many last words. It turns into a full gag when he seems to have kicked the bucket and his family starts mourning him, only for the king to spasm and interject one more thing between coughs.

• Pan's Labyrinth: Ofelia's mother's pregnancy starts to go wrong and it seems her soon-to-be little brother will be stillborn. In the last two-thirds of the film, most of the drama is provided by Ofelia and Vidal worrying about Carmen's quickly deteriorating health. The latter can only rely on countless medical check-ups, while Ofelia manages to get a magical solution by placing a mandrake under her mother's bed. It's all for naught, though, as Carmen ultimately dies, starting the final act.
• Reservoir Dogs: Mr. Orange gets shot early on and spends the rest of his screen time (barring flashbacks) dying in agony until he's finally shot again near the end. This is deliberate since he's The Mole, and desperately hoping for the sting operation he's a part of to go successfully.

By Work:

• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince: Dumbledore's been dying since the summer of 1996 because he put on the curse Gaunt ring, one of Voldemort's horcruxes. Snape manages to isolate the withering to just affect Dumbledore's arm, but the Headmaster's days are counted. While Harry doesn't know the aforementioned minutiae, he's quick to notice the state of his mentor's arm, and the readers are left with an impending sense of doom. Moreover, near the end, Dumbledore has to drink a dangerous potion that severely debilitates him. Harry and he then have to fight off an army of inferi to escape; Harry is very frantically trying to get Dumbledore some medical treatment as the latter's health quickly worsens. It's only in the climax that Dumbledore dies, thanks to Snape's pre-planned betrayal.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Hoster Tully lasts more than two books before succumbing —and he spends all of his appearances delirious from painkillers. In a possible acknowledgment of this, by the time he dies, his daughter has become inured enough to death that she barely reacts either.

• Battlestar Galactica (2003): Laura Roslin's illness only becomes majorly visible on two occasions. In her very first scene and when she's being informed that she has cancer and spent the entire run of the show dying in varying degrees.
• Black Adder: The first season has a Shout-Out to The Importance of Being Earnest when it mentions a character who has been on his deathbed for so long that everyone is thoroughly sick of it and wants him to either recover or die, but "it's this shilly-shallying that's so undignified". That said, given that the man in question is an extremely wealthy noble, both potential claimants to his property would much rather he died as soon as possible... provided his will says the right thing, of course.
• Deadliest Catch:
  • If you're a cynical viewer. The producer took great care to say before the season started that it was Phil's decision to keep filming because he wanted his story to be complete, regardless of the ending.
  • Subverted with Jake Anderson, as his father's corpse is found after the filming of the seventh season ends. This means that the show could not exploit the angst. If his Twitter account posting is any indication, Jake seems kind of bitter that the show focused as much as it did on him losing loved ones as it did.
  • Jake's uncle, Nick, has a mind for this when Jake's sister dies. After talking with Sig and deciding that he should be the one to tell him, he turns to the cameraman and says point-blank "I don't want you filming this."
• Dragula: On their podcast, the Boulets reveal they worried that Cynthia was having a breakdown during the first Fright Feat, which involved walking through the woods at night, getting attacked by masked men with tasers, and having a bucket of blood hurled on her. Then, they realized she was doing an overly dramatic death scene, complete with lifting her head back up to check before putting it back down, before getting up and continuing the challenge.
• Saturday Night Live: The running gag "Generalissimo Francisco Franco is still dead!" early on is intended as a parody of the ongoing news coverage of his health before his death, which the writers thought had verged on this.
• St. Elsewhere: Dr. Auschlander is diagnosed with terminal cancer in the pilot episode, and residents bet on when he's going to croak. He survives 6 seasons of crises, chemotherapy, accidents, and the deaths of several major characters, before dying in the final episode. (Or did he...?)

• Gang of Youths: "Achilles Come Down" is about Achilles on the brink of suicide, with his self-hating conscience and the singer respectively inciting him to jump off the roof and trying to dissuade him of the idea. All seven minutes of song are spent this way. On top of that, Achilles has given up life due to his lover Patroclus' death, which would make it a double case of this trope.

• Classical Mythology: In Virgil's version of the Aeneid, Queen Dido decides to commit suicide for having betrayed her late husband's memory by falling in love with Aeneas. She recruits her sister Anna's help in building a pyre under the pretense of getting rid of everything that reminds her of her lover. Dido lies down in the pyre but gets impaled by one of Aeneas' swords before she can even immolate herself. Anna rushes to her side and embraces her while everybody else mourns their dying queen. Then, Goddess Juno is sent to release Dido's spirit from her suffering in a dramatic scene. On top of that, Aeneas glimpses the glow of Dido's funeral pyre from afar as he's shipping off Cartague. Thus making this one Older Than Feudalism.
• Voudoun: Invoked. When slighted, the Marassa triplets will prolong illnesses and other conditions until they receive a proper apology.

• The Importance of Being Earnest: Quoth Lady Bracknell about Algernon's "sick friend" Bunbury —who Algernon made up as an excuse to avoid unwanted social engagements, and has been using as an excuse for years. "I think it is high time that Mr. Bunbury made up his mind whether he is going to live or to die. This shilly-shallying with the question is absurd."
• A Midsummer Night's Dream: Pyramus' death scene is expected to become an Overly Long Gag. He stabs himself and then proceeds to bombard the audience with as many dialogue lines as possible about how he's died, his soul leaving his body. It takes so long that Moonshine gets fed up and leaves him alone on stage. When he finally dies, he yells a final "DIE!".

• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Solid Snake starts off already rapidly aging and coughing, proceeds to get the shit kicked out of him at the end of every mission, gets fried, shot, blown up, beaten, injected repeatedly for self-medication, and doesn't quit smoking. It's admirable how much punishment he can take, but Hideo Kojima is definitely punishing Snake in as many ways as humanly possible.

• Bruno the Bandit: Parodied. 'Uncle' Lucius has been dying in one of the Bunkleyutzes' back rooms for over thirty years! No one can bear to kick him out, even though he's not actually related to them —many a character has said, "I thought that he was your Uncle Lucius!"
• Homestuck: In the "Game Over" timeline, Terezi is telekenetically forced to stab herself with her own Sword Cane, mortally wounding her. Despite this, she has enough time to steal Jade's shoes, fly over to LOPAN, have a conversation with John, write out a list of instructions in her own blood for John to pull a Cosmic Retcon of the timeline, and then draw her own outline in chalk before finally dying.

• Winx Club: In "The Day of Justice", Nabu uses up all of his magic/life force to contain the abyss created by the Black Circle (paralleling Tecna's sacrifice to close the Omega Portal at Andros back in season 3). He is then said to have fallen into a coma, with the Earth fairies promising to take care of him while the Winx go and hunt down the Wizards of the Black Circle. Whether they'll be able to save him is a permanent plot point up until the season finale, as we are teased he'll be healed/revived with the Black Gift. Unfortunately, the Wizards steal it and cruelly waste in on a flower, prompting Aisha to join Nebula and enact revenge. The worst thing is that some dubs never give confirmation whether he's actually died. And, in season 5, Aisha is naturally still mourning, so we get some nightmare regret sequences of him.

• Hospitals occasionally have to deal with these sorts of people in the real world —continually sick with some unknown illness which will almost certainly kill them (or believing themselves to be so). The term used for such unfortunate figures is GOMER, aka "Get Out of My Emergency Room".
• And even outside of hospitals, some people hold on surprisingly long before succumbing, whether to extreme old age, terminal illness, or injuries that are ultimately mortal but not quite severe enough to be quick about it.
• This can be very much Truth in Television with gunshot wounds, which can be a lot weirder and more varied in effect than most people think; you're just as likely to keep running around for hours, fully cognizant and capable of action, after being shot in the chest as you are to die instantly. It all depends on a huge amount of factors like where precisely you were hit, the type of bullet or gun used, your own physical attributes, how deep the bullet goes, and more. As any cop, soldier, or gun-owner can tell you, there is no such thing in real life as shooting to wound; if you have to pull a gun on someone and shoot, you shoot until they are no longer a threat (i.e., dead). Failure to do so will probably result in the person you're shooting at dying anyways (it is all too easy to hit a blood artery or major organ, even when trying not to), but not before they take advantage of your restraint to shoot you.