Beat Still My Heart: Difference between revisions

* ''[[The Last of the Mohicans|Last of the Mohicans]]'': "When the grey-hair dies, Magua will eat his heart." And he does, cutting the still-beating heart from his body.

{{quote|'''Magua:''' Grey-hair! [[Pre-Mortem One-Liner|Before you die]], [[Just Between You and Me|know that I will]] put to the knife your children so that your seed is wiped from the earth forever.}}

* In ''Bordello of Blood'', a heart ''begins'' beating while outside of the owner's body. (In fact, it reconstructs itself first.)

* In ''Dark Floors'', the mummy Amun rips out the businessman's heart and shows it to him.

== Literature ==

* A gag in [[Christopher Moore]]'s ''[[Lamb: The Gospel According To Biff|Lamb the Gospel According To Biff]]'' is that during Biff and [[Pals with Jesus|Joshua]]'s time at a monastery, one of the monks teaching them self defense claims to know a trick involving tearing out someone's heart. Most people are skeptical. Every day he asks the class if anyone is willing to help him demonstrate. Nobody ever is, on the off chance he isn't lying.

* In [[Edgar Allan Poe]]'s ''The Tell-Tale Heart'', the killer-protagonist imagines he [[Terrible Ticking|still hears]] the beating of his victim's heart.

* Seen in ''[[A Song of Ice and Fire]]'' when Dany visits the warlocks.

 

== Mythology ==

** See above [[Shout-Out]] by '"[[Bridge of Birds]]''.

* [[Older Than Dirt]]: In the ancient Egyptian text called ''The Tale of Two Brothers'', the younger brother Bata removes his own heart and places it on top of a tree. He tells his older brother Anpu/Anubis that he will receive a sign if anything happens to the heart, and that if something ''does'' happen, he is to revive the heart by putting it in a bowl of water. Of course, the heart is eventually knocked down when the [[Femme Fatale]] cuts down the tree, and it dries up into something resembling a date. Anpu finds it and puts it in water, whereupon it grows to its original size and starts beating again, hence reviving Bata. This could be classified as Literature as well, but the story contains a number of mythological elements.

* Subverted in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'''s expansion ''Wrath of the Lich King'', there's a questline where you find the eponymous Lich King's heart and there's a race to destroy it before he can get it back. Turns out {{spoiler|the Lich King destroys it himself anyway, since he sees it as his last shred of "human weakness"}}, but it is not beating: It's frozen.

** As [[O Jthe LION|I]] recall,{{spoiler|it was [[Knight in Shining Armor|Tirion]] who destroyed the heart, after seeing that Arthas couldn't be redeemed, and it did weaken him (at least for a bit). The Lich King does have lines about it being the remnant of his human weakness, though.}}

** There's, of course, the central [[McGuffin]] of ''[[The Elder Scrolls]] III: Morrowind'' - the heart ("divine center") of the god, Lorkhan.

** The demon in question is called a Ripper, and is so named because if it kills you, it will rip out ''your'' heart.

* ''[[Baldur's Gate]] II'' has one part of a quest where you need to get one of these from a demon to be able to leave a particular dungeon. The expansion, ''Throne Of Bhaal'', requires you to destroy one (in fact, two) in order to make an enemy vulnerable, allowing you to kill him.

 

== Video Games ==

** ''Deception'' has the Hara-kiri moves, where dazed characters kill themselves to deny the fatality to their opponent. When it's performed with Kobra, he rips ''his own'' heart out.

** Almost every fighting game with fatalities has used a similar move at least once. ''Mace: The Dark Age'' gives it to the heroic priest. ''[[Primal Rage]]'' and ''War Gods'' have variants where the character eats the heart afterward.