The below list contains major spoilers for KILLBOY including major character deaths.

  • Graphic mechanized and infantry combat; dismemberment, immolation, crushing
  • Mass civilian casualties, described institutionally (casualty figures as market data)
  • Death of children, including a first-person account by the soldier responsible
  • Maiming; a character's arm and eyes destroyed on-page; prosthetics and surgical replacement
  • Strangulation
  • Execution by sidearm at close range
  • Radiation injury; catastrophic nerve destruction; burned bodies
  • Interrogation and detention
  • Killing a mentor and friend
  • The killing of a Native person at the hands of a half-white military soldier
  • Killing a lover, by hand, at length, while conscious of doing it
  • The death of multiple LGBT or LGBT-coded characters, often violently
  • Invocation of the 9/11 attacks in mechanically central ways
  • A parent killed by the protagonist's own side, in an act the protagonist supports
  • Cruelty to a parent — deliberate, sustained, in service of self-preservation
  • Bereaved family confronting the person responsible
  • Gender assigned by military induction; a founding text defining "woman" as the non-soldier
  • A protagonist forcibly and administratively misclassified/misgendered for her entire adult life; documents overwritten
  • Self-directed allegorical transphobia and misogyny; the protagonist's own contempt for women, including herself
  • Misogynist slurs and abuse
  • Neural surveillance conducted through a person's body without her knowledge or consent
  • Human experimentation; volunteers selected for the intensity of their attachments and burned alive
  • Military indoctrination from early childhood
  • Colonial occupation depicted via close analogue to the real US occupation of Hawaiʻi, including the seizure of ʻIolani Palace and the deliberate use of kindness toward children as a military recruiting instrument
  • Racism, institutional and internalized; a colonized character who believes her people deserve their subjection
  • Theocratic indoctrination; real scripture deployed as a military and fascist apparatus; an afterlife used as a recruiting promise
  • Genocide, referenced and depicted
  • Explicit sexual content (two scenes)
  • One occurs between soldiers, one of whom is unknowingly instrumented as a surveillance device — the encounter is observed by the state through a participant who does not know it — it is also between a soldier and their superior officer
  • One occurs with a nonhuman intelligence bonded to the protagonist's nervous system
  • Tobacco use
  • Suicide, in the specific sense of a fatal act undertaken deliberately, competently, and treated by the narrative as correct
  • Dissociation; derealization; time distortion under fire