You Don't Want to Die a Virgin, Do You?



""If there's a war, I'll sleep with you before you get killed... (scoff) that's what maidens do in books, and I'm a maiden!"

-- The Camomile Lawn"

- Channel 4's adaptation, 1992

It's The End of the World as We Know It, or rather, it's going to be. The heroes are gearing up for the last battle, or just waiting for the End to come. In the meantime, there's some time to spare, some Unresolved Sexual Tension, and a Will They or Won't They? plotline that is driving everyone crazy. There's also a good chance none of them will make it through this alive. So, what now?

It's time to go down with the ship.

See Now or Never Kiss for a PG version. Can lead to an infuriatingly ambiguous Did They or Didn't They? moment. And no, this trope does not only apply to characters who are virgins (though that does add an additional sense of urgency).

See Someone to Remember Him By for when one half of a couple dies and leaves a little something behind. Relationship Upgrade may be awkward if they weren't thinking, and both survive.

Contrast "Glad to Be Alive" Sex. Subtrope of Pre-Climax Climax.

Anime and Manga

 * On the off chance that Yoh gets killed in the Shaman tournament, Anna asks him to have sex with her the night before his next fight.
 * Right in the beginning of 666 Satan in this page, something along these lines is said by Ruby. When she thinks she's going to die (falling off a high cliff), she laments that she doesn't want to die, because she still hasn't done this and that (censored, apparently to imply... well, This and That) with a cute guy.
 * In the first volume of Crying Freeman, Emu Hino wants to experience her first time with Yoh Hinomura before he dispatches her. Luckily, Yoh finds this cake too good to throw out.
 * Mirai Nikki: Yuki and Yuno, who are both virgins
 * In this scene from Yu Yu Hakusho, Dark Tournament referee Juri says it in reference to herself.
 * Eleven Eyes: The two main leads do this on screen (nothing explicit is shown though) in an apocalyptic vision in the penultimate episode.
 * Thoroughly deconstructed in the Bokurano manga, where Isao Kaku, upon learning of his impending death via Humongous Mecha piloting, tries to lose his virginity by attempting to rape his crush and fellow pilot, Chizuru "Chizu" Honda.
 * Yokoshima in Ghost Sweeper Mikami constantly try to hug/kiss a nearby female whenever the situation turns bad, saying things to the effect of this.
 * In Fullmetal Alchemist (both anime series and the manga), Al states, that he would have a girlfriend before dying, because he was afraid of that happening, when they would meet their old Alchemy teacher and she would find out, how they tried human alchemy (Trying to bring back the dead, which costs body parts or a philosopher's stone in The Verse and is strictly forbidden) and joined the military.
 * In Three By Three Eyes,

Card Games
""Oh, no! I don't want to die a virgin!"
 * Played with in the color text of the "Nymphomaniac Cheerleader" card from Grave Robbers From Outer Space:

"You're a virgin?"

"Look, do you want to get some or not?""

Comics

 * In Teen Titans Annual #1, during "Infinite Crisis", Wonder Girl volunteers to look after Superboy as he recovers while the other Titans are called away to organize the relief effort in a decimated Blüdhaven, since her powers are slowly vanishing. Superboy awakens, and he and Wonder Girl spend time alone, reminiscing and longing for "simpler times". Thinking this may be their last night together, the two consummate their relationship in the Kent barn.
 * The Punisher: there's an in-universe book called "Valley Forge, Valley Forge" written by the brother of a soldier who served with Frank in Vietnam. At one point, the author states that he was reasonably certain that his brother lost his virginity before he left for Vietnam. He would eventually die in battle.
 * If, as according to some fans' theories, Rogue and Magneto had sex in Uncanny X-Men #274, this would qualify. If, as per Word of God, Rogue's first time actually was when Gambit talked her into sex while chained to the wall, with other prisoners in the same cavern and - entirely forseeable - in front of a surveillance system in UXM #348, then this does.
 * Happens in The Walking Dead with Glenn and Maggie, although they pursue a serious relationship soon after.
 * Played with in Elf Quest: The Rebels. When Chandra is convinced the city they are in is doomed and there is no way they can survive, she propositions Scorch. He doesn't really get it, because runs off before she's finished talking, because her phrasing gives him an idea how to save the city.

Fan Works

 * During this chapter of the Code Geass fanfic In the End, C.C
 * In Avatar: The Abridged Series Episode 3, when Aang is chased by the Unagi, he runs saying "Can't die, still a virgin" repeatedly.

Films -- Live Action

 * Trope Namer: Alicia Casse's boyfriend from Independence Day tries to talk her into losing her virginity, seeing as the world is probably going to be destroyed by aliens, and quotes the trope name verbatim. Foiled by Alicia's Big Damn Brother interrupting and taking her home. Given a slightly touching revisit in a deleted scene, where Alicia says the same thing to a boy in the underground bunker, and he replies that if they don't make it, they'll both die virgins, but at least they'll die together.
 * Niida tries this in Battle Royale with Chigusa. He then tries to rape her...it ends badly.
 * Played for laughs in Zombie Strippers. A chaste young man and his equally virginal girlfriend are trapped in a room while zombies pound on the door outside. As it seems their deaths are imminent, he suggests they have sex. After she shoots him down, he begins to run off a list of increasingly filthy sex acts that they could perform instead. When she asks where he's even heard of this stuff, he replies "The Internet".
 * Grease 2: Intentionally invoked and set to music, with the song "Let's Do It For Our Country". One of the guys brings his girlfriend down to the bomb shelter, where a confederate sounds the bomb siren to make her think it's The End of the World as We Know It. Cue musical number. Unfortunately, she misses the point and thinks he's singing about joining the army, and when the siren stops, she rushes out of the shelter only to find his buddies listening at the door.
 * Airplane! II: The Sequel: Played with; the supposed virgin has a long line waiting for her as she repeats this to every guy on the plane. For extra Rule of Funny, the line also includes a donkey, and in the next scene, they're smoking together.
 * In Evolution, a girl is seen with an "I don't want to die a virgin" sign.
 * In one of the many dramatic scenes in The Sinking Of Japan, the protagonist's girlfriend aks him to make love to her before they both die. The protagonist politely declines, saying that they will have their chance when they meet again in London.
 * In Dogma, Bethany promises Jay that she'd have sex with him if "the world was going to end and there were only five minutes left to live."
 * A variation in the After the End movie Testament, played as a pure Tear Jerker: A girl dying of radiation poisoning asks her mother to describe what it's like to make love, since she knows she won't live long enough to find out for herself.

Jokes

 * A subversion in joke form: The captain of a cruise ship announces the ship is sinking, and there aren't enough lifeboats for everybody. One young woman stands up and starts yelling that she doesn't want to die without knowing what it's like to be a woman. Then a Tall, Dark and Handsome man stands up as well, slowly approaches her. With everybody watching, the young girl trembling with anticipation, he rips off his shirt and throws it in her face, yelling "Iron my shirt, woman!"

Literature

 * In Squire, before Kel is set up to joust against Lord Wyldon, Cleon jokingly makes this offer to her. She calls his bluff, but realizes that the only reason he does not want to sleep with her is that he wants to marry her in proper Noble fashion--with her as a virgin. He's trying to talk his mother around to allowing them a marriage, and wants to prove that he doesn't just think of Kel as a happy fling.
 * Happens in Good Omens when Newt and Anathema were caught in the big pre-Apocalypse storm. Made funnier because
 * Implied and avoided in Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows. At the beginning of the book, before Harry goes off to attempt to defeat Voldemort, Ginny says she wants to give Harry something special for his birthday and starts to "kiss him like she had never kissed him before" which many fans took to mean it would have led to something that was deff not kissing. Of course, to avoid the story from getting too inappropriate, J.K. sent in Ron the cockblocker and overprotective brother of Ginny.
 * In World War Z, a former security guard tells about the time he guarded a group of rich and famous celebrities who had barricaded themselves in a sort of fortress on Long Island to avoid zombie attacks. In a hubristic move, they also broadcast videos of themselves locked away, watching the carnage unfold. The fortress is soon stormed -- not by zombies, but by furious regular people. As the guard manages to escape, he witnesses two people he thought were supposed to be political enemies (implied to be  and ) "going at it" like there was no tomorrow. Well, for them, there wasn't..
 * The Zombie Survival Guide anticipates mass orgies throughout the world should a zombie plague grow large enough to threaten human extinction.
 * In A Darkness at Sethanon, squires Jimmy and Locklear hook up with two girls about their age before the sack of Armengar. Both of the girls and the street-smart Jimmy are extremely casual about it, while the naive Locklear overreacts and decides he's going to marry the girl he slept with, . This is in contrast to their roles in later books, where Locklear is a suave ladies' man and Jimmy is Happily Married.
 * The Peking Target by Adam Hall. Quiller parachutes into Korea with a female soldier who breaks her leg on landing. Knowing their mission will be blown if she's evacuated, she insists Quiller give her the Coupd de Grâce; but as a last request she asks him to have sex with her first.
 * X Wing Series:
 * Invoked, though they're not virgins. Mirax and Corran, after growing closer together, have a last exchange before he goes on a dangerous mission, and he says he might not come back. Mirax archly tells him that if he's looking to use a Tomorrow We May Die line to get her to bed him, it's a little late for that, and he should have used it last night.
 * Similarly invoked in Death Star. A pilot named Villian Dance uses the "I might die tomorrow" line as an ironic pickup line, knowing the woman he's talking to can see right through it.
 * In Michelle Magorian's A Little Love Song/Not a Swan, set in 1943, Derry convinces Rose to have sex with him before he goes to war, invoking this trope. It isn't until after he has left town that Rose finds out that
 * In Gust Front, Lampshaded, then carried out a few chapters later, with.
 * Adrian Mole, in his first diary, commented that he hoped the bomb wouldn't be dropped before he finished his O Levels as he didn't want to die an unqualified virgin (and getting laid seemed unlikely).
 * In the first book of the Tales of the Otori series, Iida Sadamu uses this
 * Bella in The Twilight Saga doesn't plan on dying exactly, but she wants to experience sex with Edward before she ceases being a human.
 * Bella in The Twilight Saga doesn't plan on dying exactly, but she wants to experience sex with Edward before she ceases being a human.

Live Action TV
"Girl 1: I've never been with a man. I could die tomorrow, and I've never been with a man.
 * In the original V miniseries from 1983, Robin Maxwell says Daniel "I don't want to die a virgin" after seeing the floating alien spaceship.
 * Willow on Buffy before the big fight with the Mayor on Graduation Day, with Oz.
 * Also, parodied in Xander's dream in "Dirty Girls":

Xander: Well, uh?

Girl 2: I've never been with a man before either.

Xander: Colleen.

Girl 2: I've never been with her in front of a man before.

Girl 1: I've never been with her in front of a man, either.

Xander: Um...

Girl 1: Xander...

Girl 2: We're so scared.

Rona: Xander! Xander! Goddamnit!

Xander: (wakes up) What's going on? I was sleeping.

Rona: Dominique has the stomach flu, and the toilet bowl is backed up."

"Anna: (goes up on tiptoe and kisses him)
 * Supernatural's Dean Winchester cuts himself a slice of angel food cake on the eve of a battle that he expects to lose.

Dean: What was that for?

Anna: Our last night on Earth. All that.

Dean: You're stealing my best line."

"Jo: Are you giving me the last night on Earth speech?
 * On the eve of a mid-season finale's climactic battle:

Dean: No. No. But if I was, would that... would that work?"


 * And just before an encounter with that the characters believe will prove fatal, Dean, on hearing that Castiel "never had occasion" to lose his virginity, attempts to set him up with a hooker (called Chastity, no less). Hilarity Ensues.
 * In City of Men, this conversation was had by three different couples in the episode "It's Gotta Be Now".
 * Played with in Angel season four, with : "You've never had anything that's real... [...] and if this is the end, I want you to have something that is."
 * And later it turns out.
 * In the Australian mini-series 1915, the two couples consummate their relationships before the boys ship off to World War One. One of the girls becomes pregnant.
 * Scott and Chloe on Stargate Universe, after learning that Destiny is about to fly into a star. They both survive (much to their surprise), and it becomes their relationship upgrade.
 * No Ordinary Family: Referenced for laughs in the first episode; on a plane experiencing engine failures during a storm, the teenage daughter of the titular family wails that she's going to die, "and I haven't even done it yet!" With both her parents in earshot. They look... unsure how to respond to or feel about this.
 * The remake of the TV Movie The Initiation of Sarah does this, but interestingly it's actually tied to the plot. Right before the Good Sorority goes to try and stop the Evil Sorority, Sarah goes to *ahem* "be with" her boyfriend. However, it was earlier established that the Evil Sorority were a group of witches who were sacrificing virgins to prep for a ceremony, so Sarah was trying to take her boyfriend off the menu.
 * The Clueless Halloween special is a parody of Scream, with the cast being apparently killed off one by one in a haunted house. When Dionne and Murray, the last ones left (surprisingly), are being trapped by the killer, Murray tries to instigate this. Dionne cuts him down, pointing out that the virgin always survives in horror movies.
 * The Clueless Halloween special is a parody of Scream, with the cast being apparently killed off one by one in a haunted house. When Dionne and Murray, the last ones left (surprisingly), are being trapped by the killer, Murray tries to instigate this. Dionne cuts him down, pointing out that the virgin always survives in horror movies.

Music

 * The lyrics to this song.
 * If you listen to the lyrics of Romanthony's unplugged version of Daft Punk's "One More Time," (from the Daft Club remix album), you realize that what was originally just a silly dance refrain ("one more time") is actually a plea from the singer to invoke this trope before machines take over.

Poetry
"Shall I be moved to love you, pray,
 * In Andrew Marvell's poem, "To His Coy Mistress," he basically tells the woman in verse that life's too short to be shy, and that if she dies a virgin "then worms shall try/ That long preserv'd virginity."
 * A. D. Hope, in his poem "His Coy Mistress to Mr. Marvell," serves him a blistering (and hilarious) retort:

By hints that I must soon decay?

No woman's won by being told

How quickly she is growing old[...]

But -- well I ask: to draw attention

To worms in -- what I blush to mention,

And prate of dust upon it too!

Sir, was this any way to woo?"

Religion

 * The Bible: In the book of Judges, Jephthah must give his daughter over to the Tabernacle as the result of a promise to God Gone Horribly Wrong, meaning that she will never marry. As a compromise, he allows his daughter two months to go up and down the mountains bewailing her virginity. (NOTE: This was NOT a human sacrifice. The "burnt offering" mentioned is to accompany the turning over of a person to the Tabernacle sanctuary, it does not refer to the actual person being given. Jephthah expected a servant to come out first, not an animal.) The mainstream opinion is (and has been, basically since they started keeping track) that Jephthah's daughter WAS a human sacrifice. The matter is still up for debate, as the text is quite ambiguous, but at the very least later retellings of the story like the Carissimi oratorio are all based on the idea that she was killed.

Tabletop Games

 * In the zombie-themed board game Last Night on Earth, one of the cards that the Zombie controller can play on the heroes is "(This could be our) Last Night On Earth." When played, a male and female character standing on the same square "lose a turn." The only character immune is the town priest.

Video Games

 * Occurs in Final Fantasy VII between Cloud and on the night before the party enters the Very Definitely Final Dungeon. The cutscene and the aftermath the next morning leave the Did They or Didn't They? deliberately vague, but her reaction to being told that the rest of the group was watching the whole time from the airship is more intense the higher your Relationship Values, with the obvious implications. According to VII's Perfect Works-type book (JPN only, sadly), it says that yes, they did do it.
 * BioWare and Obsidian almost always put the culminating sequence of their romance arcs on the eve of a major battle that it is unlikely the heroes will survive.
 * In Neverwinter Nights 2, the culminating scenes in the main campaign come as The Dragon's horrifically large undead army is about to lay siege to the player's fortress.
 * In Jade Empire, the culminating scenes (and implied sex) come on the evening before the ten heroes are about to face off against the entire Imperial Army.
 * In Mass Effect 1 and 2, the protagonist and his/her Designated Love Interest have a chance to consummate their relation before the game's final mission. Most of the options definitely aren't or probably aren't virgins, the exceptions being Tali and Liara. Tali because her race's unique answer to the immune system leaves a very high chance that she'd be allergic to any potential partners, even of her own species, while Liara explicitly mentions that she's never been in a romantic relationship.
 * In Dragon Age, if the female Warden is romancing Alistair (who reveals himself to be a virgin after getting to a "good friends" sort of stage) and doesn't proposition him herself, once it's been going on for a while, he'll eventually approach her, saying that seeing as they face danger day-to-day, he wants to take advantage of having the chance and "say I threw caution to the wind just this once".
 * One of the two other Grey Warden candidates from the Player Character's joining can be found (unsuccessfully) trying this at Ostagar, telling a female soldier they could all be dead by tomorrow. (In his defense, it might not have been so unsuccessful if he had not used such graphic terms. To describe the killing.)
 * In Monster Girl Quest, uses this justification for

Web Animation

 * One of the non-canon endings to Red vs. Blue has Tucker try this on Sister, who's more than eager to get to it. Until Grif kills Tucker.

Webcomics
"Lord Grater: You said you'd give me a kiss if I was the last man in the universe, and I am!
 * On The Order of the Stick, Haley elects to spend the night before the Battle of Azure City with Elan.
 * In Sluggy Freelance Lord Grater stops himself and Princess-Princess from escaping a Universe Shattering Kaboom in order to invoke this trope.

Princess-Princess: I said I wouldn't kiss you even if you were the last man in the universe!!!

Lord Grater: Oh. Never mind."

"Man: Baby... you don't want to die a virgin, do you?
 * In a Cyanide and Happiness strip:

Woman: Um... That line only works if I'm about to die.

Man: Hmmm... good point. (pulls a gun on her) Baby... you don't want to die a virgin, do you?"


 * Played for Laughs in El Goonish Shive during the goo panic scene. Read those background screams.

Web Originals
"Swaim: Hey! No one's going to judge you; who cares if you get pregnant; and you're not going to work tomorrow; Get in my goddamn van!"
 * Discussed as possibly the best end-case scenario in the event of apocalypse via meteor in Cracked's After Hours


 * The creators of Dragonball Z Abridged did a YouTube video where they did their parody of "I'll Make a Man Out of You" from Mulan. At one point Krillin says "I don't wanna die a virgin!" Popo responds with "Boy, you really need to watch just what you say!" Watch it here (Click here to jumps right to the part where he says it).

Western Animation
"Whip: Why couldn't we have been saved ten minutes later?
 * In Tripping the Rift, expecting they are about to die, Whip asks Six to take his virginity as he does not wish to die as a virgin. She agrees, but just before anything can happen, they are saved, much to his dismay.

Six: You would have only needed ten seconds."


 * Family Guy when Meg and Neil are about to be killed by a serial killer, Meg exclaims that she has never even had her first kiss, Neil claims that there is still time.
 * In King of the Hill episode Texas City Twister, Nancy, while reporting on the tornado, suggests that the people at the trailer park that if one hasn't experienced the miracle of love making, that now would be a good time.
 * Subverted in Bob's Burgers episode "Food Truckin'", when the family is trapped in and Tina declares that she doesn't want to die a virgin, to which trapped with them Randy response to with "Me too", causing Tina to perk up saying "That gives me an idea!", which Bob quickly responds to with a harsh no.