Tongue Trauma



""There's no need to say anything more. The first thing I'm going to incinerate is your tongue.""

- Colonel Roy Mustang, Fullmetal Alchemist

Refers to damage done to the tongue of any kind:


 * Someone's tongue getting burnt
 * Someone biting their own tongue
 * Someone biting someone else's tongue
 * Someone tearing out someone else's tongue
 * Someone's tongue getting sliced off
 * Someone's tongue getting stabbed
 * Someone having a really nasty looking piercing on their tongue
 * Someone eats their own tongue
 * Someone eats someone else's tongue. Bonus points if they are force fed one.
 * Someone's tongue gets sliced with a knife

Naturally with this trope, you may expect Nausea Fuel and/or Nightmare Fuel. Also a Sister Trope of Eye Scream, and Fingore.

Anime and Manga

 * Bleach. While fighting the hollow Shrieker, Ichigo punches through his teeth and rips off the end of his tongue.
 * In chapter 56 of the manga Wolf Guy Wolfen Crest Haguro Dou decides to up his freakiness by.
 * in Death Note tries to bite her tongue off because Rem won't kill her, but Watari gags her just before she can do it.
 * In episode 11 of Umineko no Naku Koro ni Rosa is.
 * Naruto:
 * The Bridge saga has a woman threaten this to save her son. The Generic Thugs say they only need one hostage, so they'll kill the boy, but his mother replies that if they do that she'll bite her tongue off and drown in the blood.
 * Naraka Path's form of torture interrogation (pulling out one's tongue and ripping it out when proven lying).
 * Kisame, after being captured.
 * Berserk: When Guts and the Hawks come to rescue Griffith at Wyndham Tower a year after his capture and torture by the King of Midland we see that he is physically crippled with the tendons in his wrists and ankles severed and his tongue cut out. Guts then proceeds to tear out the torturer's tongue on seeing him wearing Griffith's tongue around his neck - "I'm not letting you go to Hell two-tongued!"
 * Wise Yuri, a villain from 666 Satan gets a piercing for every person he has killed, and has at least twenty on his tongue.
 * One Monster of the Week in Busou Renkin bites his tongue off after he is captured by the heroes. He forgot that homunculi don't die of blood loss.
 * In D.Gray-man the Noah Fiddler has a rather horrible tongue. It seems to be a deadly parasite that he has infected with. So far, it has been left up to the reader's imagination how they got there.
 * Comedic example happens in Mahou Sensei Negima where Yue bites her tongue while she was incanting a magic spell when Makie asked her.
 * Zero no Tsukaima: In episode 2 of the final season Louise tells her captors that if they plan to torture her she'll commit suicide by biting her tongue.
 * A former pirate captain who was about to be sold as a slave in One Piece opted for biting off his own tongue instead. However, he was shown later alive and well, though with a shorter tongue.

Comic Books

 * Murmur, one of the newer members of The Flash's Rogues Gallery, is a Serial Killer whose M.O. consists of cutting out his victims' tongues and sewing their lips shut, because he believes this to be the best way to silence the voices that only he can hear..

Fan Works

 * In the Death Note fanfic titled "Stolen" by SekushiAi a psychopath presses a scalpel to Light's tongue, cutting it open. And then he pours some liquid which contains vinegar into Light's mouth right afterwards. Brutal.
 * In "Walk the Shadows", a Harry Potter fanfic by jharad17 after Harry pisses off Nott, a Death Eater, Nott responds by casting a spell which damages his eyes and removes his tongue.
 * In the Naruto fanfic "Purple" (by kodak-85) Naruto bites down hard on Sasuke's tongue to get the latter to stop kissing him.
 * In the Red vs. Blue fanfic "Murderer's Row", has a chunk of his tongue bitten off by  after he tries to force a kiss.
 * In the My Little Pony Friendship Is Magic / Doctor Who crossover fic Mines of Dragon Mountain a saboteur from a race known as the Grundels is captured. Upon delivering a warning to the magnate whose mine he was attacking

Film

 * In Oldboy, Dae-su.
 * The "sloth" victim from Se7en bit off and ate his own tongue.
 * King Kong rips out an attacking T Rex's tongue with his teeth in the new King Kong movie.
 * In Ichi the Killer, protagonist Kakihara slices off the tip of his own tongue.
 * In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves the Sherrif threatens to cut out Will Scarlet's tongue. This is one of his more plausable threats.
 * Resident Evil. When the mutated experiment shoots out its tongue at Alice in the train car, she stabs the tongue with a pipe, pinning it to the grating. Later the experiment falls through the hole in the floor and the door is closed, cutting off part of its tongue.
 * In The Mummy 1999, Imhotep has his tongue cut out among other things before he is Buried Alive. Imhotep also cuts someone else's tongue and keeps it for himself after he resurrects.
 * In Rat Race, Randall Pear has a heated up car cigarette lighter fall into his mouth.
 * In Pirates of the Caribbean, Cotton has had his tongue cut out and trained his parrot to talk for him. "No one's quite sure how."
 * Million Dollar Baby: tries to commit suicide by biting through her tongue.
 * Herschell Gordon Lewis's Blood Feast, features one kill in which the killer pulls a young woman's tongue out, leaving an excessively bloody mess.
 * The Eighties schlock-fest Truth or Dare: A Critical Madness has an early scene in which the protagonist is dared to cut his own tongue out, which he promptly does. Later, he is able to talk normally after work with a speech therapist. Seriously.
 * In The People Under the Stairs, it is explained that the owners of the house preferred to cut off / out the "bad parts" of their children and lock them in the basement. In at least one case, the "bad part" was the kid's tongue.
 * In Robin Hood: Men in Tights, Rob's tongue is seized in a pair of pliers and stretched a good foot, only to snap back into his mouth when released.
 * One of Don Giovanni's men had his tongue cut out. Why? He was making a funny face.
 * In Eastern Promises Nikolai puts out a cigarette on his own tongue. It doesn't faze him at all, but it was traumatic enough to show up on the Parents Guide on IMDB.
 * The newest version of True Grit has  It only results in him talking funny for the remainder of the film.
 * During the climax of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland, the Jabberwock's tongue gets cut off by Alice just right before their battle.
 * In The Goonies, Mama Fratelli threatens to invoke this trope on Mouth.
 * In The Midnight Meat Train, Bradley Cooper's character gets his tongue ripped off by another character's teeth.
 * In Dead Silence, Mary Shaw's prime method of killing is ripping out her victims' tongues.
 * In Jeepers Creepers, the Creeper uses his teeth to remove the tongue from a cop's severed head.
 * The first thing The Warlock does in the titular movie is bite some poor shmuck's tongue off and make an omlet of it. Then It Got Worse.
 * In Audition, there is evidence that this may be the least horrible thing she does to her boyfriends. Her ex got his tongue cut out and Aoyama got an injection of something paralytic under his tongue.

Literature

 * Robert Heinlein's Methuselah's Children. When a member of the Howard Families is taken captive, he bites his own tongue almost in half so he can't be forced to tell the truth about the Families' secrets.
 * In Terry Goodkind's Sword of Truth series of novels, the hero Richard kicks a sadistic little princess on the chin hard enough to smash most of her teeth and sever her tongue completely. Normally you don't condone child abuse, but she had it coming. She gets better.
 * In The Hunger Games (which takes place is a futurisitc dystopia) criminals have their tongues cut out and become Avoxes.
 * In The Anubis Gates by Tim Powers, Dog Faced Joe chews up the tongue of his current body before abandoning it and possessing a new one.
 * The Ritual of Chüd in Stephen King's IT.
 * Also occurs during the demise of  near the end of The Dark Tower series.
 * The protagonist of Fight Club challenges an entire club to fights at the end of the book, and bites off half his tongue when hit with an uppercut.
 * The original fairy tale of The Little Mermaid has the sea witch cut off the mermaid's tongue as payment for the human legs.
 * The High Priest (Priestess?) from the Inheritance Cycle had part of his/her tongue cut out as part of a self-mutilation ritual. However, that's barely noticeable considering that he/she is also missing all four limbs.
 * Ellen James in The World According to Garp had her tongue cut out by rapists to prevent her from identifying them. They didn't take into account that she could still write.
 * The Bird Woman tears out Spider's tongue in Anansi Boys after she gets tired of him trying to talk his way out.
 * Ser Ilyn Payne, the executioner in A Song of Ice and Fire, had his tongue ripped out with hot pincers as punishment for making a joke about the king.

Live Action TV

 * An episode of Grey's Anatomy had a patient of the week have tongue cancer that would cost her her tongue. Fortunately the gang come up with an experimental procedure that avoids that.
 * In Rome Titus Pullo rips out a mans tongue with his teeth then keeps him in a cage for years. Pullo is one of the good guys, by the way.
 * The House MD episode "No Reason" has a patient with a swollen tongue that swells so much it fills up his entire mouth.
 * In 1000 Ways to Die, a criminal tries to run from a cop, but ends up falling into a sewer hole and hits his lower jaw on the way down, causing him to literally bite his own tongue off.
 * Khal Drogo in Game of Thrones slices an advesary's throat and rips out his tongue through the hole. Sort of a Dothraki version of a Columbian Necktie.
 * Luther. A gang hoping to get their hands on a stache of diamonds let the husband know they're serious by cutting out his wife's tongue.

Video Games

 * Swollen tongues get chopped off in Theme Hospital.
 * In Deadly Premonition, the Raincoat Killer bites out his victims' tongues.
 * The servant grunt from Amnesia has a pretty gruesome mouth area in general.
 * In Fallout: New Vegas, Mean Sonofabitch, the friendly Super Mutant had his tongue cut out by NCR soldiers, which explains his generally unintelligible dialogue.
 * Happened to three of the abducted children in the backstory of Corpse Party.

Web Original

 * One of Cillian Crowe's kills in Survival of the Fittest v1 has him rip out a guy's tongue, and then slicing open his skull.
 * In the incredibly disturbing short film The Cat with Hands the titular cat (note: probably not even a cat at all) bites off a guy's tongue to complete its repertoire of body parts which it has been collecting for years to become a human. Holy shit.

Western Animation

 * In My Life as a Teenage Robot, Sheldon is looking for Jenny when he trips over a crack in the sidewalk and bites his own tongue as he falls flat.
 * This is Sniffles' gimmick on Happy Tree Friends.
 * In Teen Titans, Beast Boy (as an aardvark) got his tongue stepped on.
 * According to Lisa Simpson in theSimpsons episode where she exposes founder Jebediah Springfield as an evil pirate named Hans Sprungfeld, Sprungfeld actually wore a silver tongue because his real one got bitten off by a Turk.
 * This happens quite a few times in Ren and Stimpy like in "Mad Dog Hoek" during a rant Stimpy's tongue stretches and snaps off, in "Magical Singing Cheese" Stimpy rips his tongue off a frozen flagpole, Ren has had his share too like in one instance his tongue got burned off and in other he got stung in the tongue by a bee.
 * In the Powerpuff Girls episode "The Boys Are Back In Town" after getting sick of being beating by the recently resurrected Rowdyruff Boys Buttercup punches Butch causing him to bite his tongue.
 * In the The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy episode "Which Came First?" Billy gets his tongue burned off by acidic egg yolk from the mutant chicken's eggs.
 * In an episode of Futurama Bender offers to share his food with Fry and Fry politely declines saying that robot food is different from human food, but Bender dumps some in his mouth causing his tongue to catch on fire. (Once Fry stops screaming in pain he seems to quite enjoy the food.)
 * Courage the Cowardly Dog occasionally gets his tongue stomped on, electrocuted, or burned to a crisp.
 * One of the least-fortunate residents of Foster's Home for Imaginary Friends has tongues for his feet. Not only does it hurt him to walk on them, but he can actually taste whether anyone's cleaned the floor recently.

Real Life

 * Erik "The Lizardman" Sprague is a sideshow performer who has modified himself to resemble a lizard, including a bifurcated tongue. Actually a more-common-than-you'd-think form of body modification; it's done by gradually splitting the tongue with a razor sharp blade after a procedure similar to a normal tongue piercing. Given time, the split tongue muscles adapt and you can wiggle the two halves independently from each other.
 * The parasitic crustacean Cymothoa exigua (WARNING: Do not click the link if you plan to sleep soundly tonight) actually latches on to a fish's tongue and causes it to shrivel up and atrophy. The crustacean then clings to the stub and serves as the fish's new tongue in a manner not dissimilar to a corporate takeover.
 * Veterinarians use tongue-clamps to affix pulse monitors to unconscious dogs and cats that are undergoing surgical procedures. Not harmful, but rather uncomfortable even to look at, never mind wear.
 * There are probably few people who haven't experienced the pain of biting their own tongue by accident.
 * Upon killing a baleen whale, orcas will often eat nothing but the dead whale's tongue. Granted, that's a big tongue, and usually the only part of the whale that's easily accessible without chewing through skin as thick and tough as a car tire.