A Love to Dismember

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.
That right hand of yours... I've got it displayed in my bedroom. I go to sleep with it every night. Doesn't that make you hard?
—Barus, Clover
The only motive that there ever was was to completely control the person - the person I found physically attractive - and keep them with me for as long as possible. Even if it meant just keeping a part of them.
—Jeffery Dahmer

A character has a... physical relationship with a severed body part of some sort, taken off some person. This is about the most pleasant way of putting things—for obvious reasons, this trope induces some very heavy Squick, and is usually a sign that the character is quite severely disturbed.

See also I Love the Dead, Mummies At the Dinner Table and the more literal examples of being Stuffed Into the Fridge.

No real life examples, please; All The Tropes does not care to squick its readers.

Examples of A Love to Dismember include:

Anime and Manga

  • Seiji from Durarara!! is quite a bit obsessed with Celty's head. Then again, Celty is a dullahan...
  • At one point in Black Cat, Creed, Train's Stalker with a Crush, tells Train that he would at least want to have Train by his side even as a dead body rather than let Saya have him.
  • Deadman Wonderland: During an interrogation scene between the two Genkaku licks some blood from Nagi's arm while saying that Nagi's hand has become very cute (after Nagi's hand was cut off by Hibana).
  • In the Peacemaker Kurogane manga, Suzu recovers the head of Yoshida (who was decapitated during the Ikedaya Incident), has it varnished and carries it around, in a rather affectionate way.
    • Later in chapter 24 of the sequel manga Itou orders Hijikata to have "Kondou-kyokuchou beheaded in apology for betraying me." And then tells him that he'd "like that idiot's head to be given to me to do with as I please."
  • Threatened, but not really acted upon in Blood+, when James promises to bring Solomon (post Heel Face Turn) the severed head of his love "to kiss."
  • One Depraved Homosexual villain from Inuyasha threatened to cut off Miroku's face, make it into a wall hanging, and kiss it every day. Eep.
    • Something like this happened thousands of years ago: The Roman Empire was executing Torah sages, and the Emperor's daughter found one of the rabbis to be exceedingly handsome, and so asked her father to spare him. He refused, so she asked instead if his face could be kept; the Emperor agreed and they skinned his face off and preserved it in a jar of brine.
  • Yoshikage Kira from Part 4 of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has a bizarre hand fetish, and will carry around his latest victim's severed hand with him.
  • In the School Days anime, at the end, Kotonoha cuts off Makoto's head from his corpse, and carries it around. The final scene shows her cradling it in her arms on a yacht, saying, "we're finally alone together, Makoto."
  • In the Full Metal Panic! novel, Gauron tells Sōsuke that he fantasized about killing Sōsuke and dragging his corpse out of his AS, and fucking it.
  • In Code Geass, Mao decides he wants to take C.C. to a "quiet, white, immaculate, special house" he built in Australia. Unfortunately, to get to Australia, he needs to take her on a plane, and she's apparently too big to bring aboard. So he's going to have to make her compact. Cue him revving a chainsaw. Mind you, C.C. does have a Healing Factor, so being "made compact" won't actually kill her. Of course, in some ways that's even worse...
  • Rex Godwin of Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's worships his brother's severed arm, and 62 episodes in Rex forcefully removes his prosthetic left arm in order to make his brother's arm his own.
  • Wietoo, in the Eden's Bowy manga, milks this one for extra mileage. After an artificial human 'puppet' he builds rips his younger sister into pieces and splatters them over the room, Wietoo is seen first cuddling, and then passionately kissing, his sister's severed head. Later, he uses her retrievable body parts to make a new 'puppet' which he continues to sexually molest at intervals.
  • Barus of CLAMP's Clover severed Kazuhiko's hand; telling him when next they meet that he's been sleeping with it every night. "Doesn't that make you hard?"
  • The body part in question isn't quite severed, but in one chapter of Nightmare Inspector, a man bricks his wife up in a wall, killing her. Her rotting hand and forearm, however, still jut out from the wall, and the man stays with them and talks to them at times.
  • Manga artist Suehiro Maruo loves this trope, especially concerning eyeballs.
  • A slightly less insane example from Gunnm: Yugo spots at a spare body parts shop the hand of his deceased brother killed some weeks before by a hunter-warrior, that world's bounty hunters. He convinces the vendor to trade his brother's hand for his own, arguing it's younger and will fetch a better price, thus having his brother's hand attached to himself as a keepsake.
  • Miranda of Pandora Hearts is Yandere for Oswald's head.


Comic Books

  • In the comic book DV8, one character's "girlfriend", Lucille, is a head stolen from a store mannequin.
    • Bobby Hill in King of the Hill had a similar experience with one of Luann's practice heads for her beauty school.


Film

  • Before the action starts in Haute Tension, the apparent antagonist is seen in his truck getting fellated by a disembodied head.
  • The Villain Protagonists in slasher flick August Underground's Mordem make one of their victims cut off his own penis so they can stick it into his girlfriend.
  • The film version of Re-Animator had Barbara Crampton straddling an undead head. (But it was the head's idea.)
  • The So Bad It's Good horror film Bloodsucking Freaks has a depraved dwarf use a severed head to fellate himself.
  • In Cemetery Man, a character has a relationship with the severed, zombified head of a girl. He keeps her in a broken television.
    • Slightly different, as the head is not just an inanimate object that he....does things to, she's an actual living being who holds conversations with him and returns his affection.
  • In Lamberto Bava's Macabre, a woman's lover is beheaded in a car crash. She continues to have the affair with his head...
  • Oogie Boogie does this by accident in The Nightmare Before Christmas. He finds Sally's bare, flirtatious leg quite attractive until he finds out it's not actually attached to anything.
  • The End - or Is It? ending of Psycho III.
  • In the movie May, the titular character dismembers different people so she can sew all the parts together and create the perfect friend. Those parts are all things she particularly admired and desired, such as her crush's hands and her co-worker's neck.
  • King Stefan in Maleficent keeps Maleficent's amputated wings in a glass case for nearly twenty years -- and apparently spends quite a bit of time talking to them.


Literature

  • In American Psycho, Patrick Bateman spends a while walking around the room with the head of one of the prostitutes he just killed still impaled on his erection.
  • The title character of Oscar Wilde's play Salome (and Richard Strauss's operatic adaptation) orders John the Baptist's head to be cut off so she can kiss it.

"Ah! thou wouldst not suffer me to kiss thy mouth, Iokanaan. Well! I will kiss it now."

    • Christian tradition from the 4th century was that Salome asked for his death because he spurned her. (And probably factually inaccurate: according to the Jewish historian Josephus, Antipas executed John for political reasons.)
  • The tale of Isabella and the Pot of Basil from Boccaccio's Decameron (and later on, a Keats poem) tells of the titular character preserving the head of her lover inside the aforementioned pot. 19th and 20th century depictions such as those painted by Prerraphaelites like William Holman Hunt, Waterhouse or John White Alexander fall squarely in this trope.
  • Subverted in the Black Dagger Brotherhood, Zsadist keeps a skull in his room. The skull being the skull of his former owner, who he killed and cut the head off of to make sure she was dead. He keeps the skull around so he can remind himself that she's dead, often by stroking it.
  • In Lords and Ladies, a portrait of Lancrian Queen Ynci the Short-Tempered shows, "One hand ... caressed the hand of a captured enemy warrior. The rest of the captured enemy warrior was hanging from various pine trees in the background."
  • In A Song of Ice and Fire, Magister Illyrio mentions that he still has the hands of his second wife, who died of plague many years earlier. It's not implied that this is anything more than a weird keepsake though.


Live-Action TV

  • The Doctor Who episode "Love & Monsters" has a variant in this, in that the main character's girlfriend is attacked by a monster which leaves her as a just a concrete head (but still alive) - yet it's stated (see the page quote) that they still have a "love life". Interpret it however you will.
  • In the Torchwood episode "Day One", Jack holds the Doctor's hand... after the jar he usually keeps it in is broken.
  • The Hitcher of The Mighty Boosh has been known to simulate the act during the stage shows, yielding the following memorable quote... "Yeah, I'm a stump fucker! Which is a concept we couldn't quite get past BBC3!"
  • In Dexter, the Ice Truck Killer is referred to as having chosen not to kill a hooker when he realised she was an amputee. She says that he "started worshipping it (her fake hand)" and did "some freaky stuff with it (as well as her stump)". Given his obsession with dismemberment, it is implied that he may have used the parts of his victims for this as well.
    • Hell, Dexter himself seemed turned on by the Ice Truck Killer's earlier victims. He also considers cutting up his victims part of the ritual.


Music

  • The Tom Lehrer song "I Hold Your Hand In Mine" is sung by a man about his love's hand, which he cut off of her the night she died. At the end:

"I'm sorry now I killed you, for our love was something fine/But till they come to get me I shall hold your hand in mine!"

    • Lehrer made it a point to joke that, of all the songs he'd ever sung, that was the one he got the most requests not to.
  • "Bowling Balls" by Insane Clown Posse is about a man who has a disturbing obsession with human heads, and keeps them as his friends. Sometimes girlfriends.
  • "TV Set", by The Cramps:

"Oh baby, I see you in my TV set, oh baby, I see you in my TV set,
I cut your head off and put it in my TV set, I use your eyeballs for dials on my TV set...."


Music Video

  • "Sha Shou", by JJ Lin.


Mythology

  • The Egyptian goddess Isis used magic to revive her murdered husband Osiris just enough to impregnate her. But some versions of the myth state that she was unable to find his penis after Set dismembered him.


Video Games

  • Dr. George Greggs, the operator of the ? Organ Replacement Lab? in the videogame Dead Space's Fourth "Misplaced Affection" Webisode, kept Jane Gauthier's fingers with him while he was locked up in his lab. At the end, he is seen stroking them, and when he is killed by the necromorphs that break in, his severed arm and her fingers mutate and become connected. CECL-RC notes the irony in Greggs' wish to forever be with Gauthier; because of the Necromorphs, the two will always be together "in sickness, though not in health."
  • In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, the traitor to the Dark Brotherhood keeps the mummified head of his mother (who was killed by the Brotherhood previously) in his cellar.
  • In Tears to Tiara JRPG, Arthur offers to make a dried head out of a Demon Lord his sister has taken a liking to. He objects to their marriage, you see. Fortunately, he never gets to actually fulfilling this threat.
  • Happens in Dragon Age II. You investigate the disappearance of several women who disappear either completely, or you only find part of their remains. It's revealed that the abductor/killer sends the victim while lilies before abducting them. Not too much later, your Mother disappears and you find white lilies that were delivered. You track down your mother, you find that the killer was abducting women in an attempt to stitch together his dead wife, and the last piece was your mother's head.
  • Kusaka in Kara no Shoujo takes a bunch of body parts and puts them all together and has sex with them.
  • Fate Stay Night Visual Novel Bad End #01 of 40: Ilyasviel kills Shirou and rips his head off, while casting a spell that makes him unable to die unless his head gets smashed, and takes him home to do God knows what.
  • Hatoful Boyfriend has this happen if you romance Doctor Shuu, in which case he severs your head to preserve it.
  • Lollipop Chainsaw is a game about making zombie-killing look Tastes Like Diabetes cute. Which is why Juliet amputates to save her boyfriend from an infected bite on the arm by severing his head. Remember, Juliet looks like a (censored). Also this is a Suda51 game.


Web Comics

  • Turns up in the "Shuinji and the Suicide Girl" stories on Sexy Losers once or twice (probably more).
  • The page image is from Contemplating Reiko
  • Oglaf did a take on this which involved an adult Salome secretly making out with a severed head presented to her with the intention of mocking her adolescent follies.
  • In Homestuck, Gamzee finds the dead body of Tavros, who had been one of his best friends in life, and with whom he was in love. He rips off his head and is then shown Flash Stepping back and forth, kissing it and covering his mouth with Tavros's brown blood.


Western Animation

  • Non-sinister, still vaguely creepy example: During the second Season Finale of The Venture Brothers, the cast is going through the wreckage of Phantom Limb's ship and keep finding his invisible extremities. Gay superhero The Alchemist picks one up and begins to speak before squeezing it a couple of times, saying "Oh, oh, I'm keeping this," and stashing it in his robes. Three guesses as to what it was.
    • And Brock keeps Molotov's eye in a jar of water next to his bed.

Molotov: "Awww, you kept it."

    • Also, Baron Ãœnderbheit has the heads of his seven wives mounted on the wall, as well as keeping the hand of one (still wearing the wedding ring).
  • Averted in Courage the Cowardly Dog. The thief, Maria keeps her husband's severed hand around with her. Averted in that the hand is alive. It isn't her husband's hand, the hand is Mano, her husband.


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