Blood Sport: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

In [[The Future]], [[Anyone Can Die|life is cheap]]. No better way to show that than with some good old-fashioned violent spectator sports, where fatalities are a very real possibility every single game, [[Crapsack World|if not the major selling point]]. Essentially, a [[Blood Sport]] is a [[Deadly Game]] version of a modern spectator sport.

See also [[Vehicular Combat]] for a type commonly found in videogames. [[I Know Madden Kombat]] is the inversion of this trope, kinda sorta; sports skills used as combat arts ''off'' the field.

See also [[Snuff Film]]. [[Beastly Bloodsports]] is a subtrope involving animals.

* Motorball from ''[[Battle Angel Alita]]'' and spinoff ''Ashen Victor'' may not be intentionally lethal to participants, but some of the players certainly make it so. Also, a prime example of controlling the underclass by giving them a ''[[Blood Sport]]'' to keep them occupied.

** The Scrapyard also has gladiatorial combat between giant cyborgs for entertaining the masses.

* ''[[Space Adventure Cobra]]'' has a sort of "no-holds-barred" version of Base-ball called "Rug-ball" where the idea is to reach each base in one piece... Naturally, there are a few deaths involved, and [[Badass|naturally]] , Cobra proves himself to be a spectacular player.

** Compare [[Clive Barker]]'s "In the Hills, the Cities."

** And then there was the city where people constantly fought each other in arena for status, and any travellers who entered were automatically forced to participate. The winner would become a first class citizen, and could also make a new law for the city. Kino probably ended up making the place even more bloody than it already was, but also ensured peace in the long term.

* Similarly, the Zoid Battles featured in ''[[Zoids]] New Century Zero'' and ''Fuzors'' are Humongous Mecha cockfights. Somewhat subverted in that there are multiple rules and restrictions in place to prevent death, though serious injury is a very viable possibility...

* The anime ''[[Starship Girl Youko Yamamoto]]'' centers around a game that replaced war in which teams of small, agile spacecraft dogfight each other. Fortunately, highly advanced teleportation technology means that the pilots rarely die.

* ''[[Deadman Wonderland]]'' is a prison where the prisoners are forced to do insanely dangerous "events" like an obstacle race where you can be cut to ribbons, fall to your death or just fall into a pit of spikes. To make matters worse, the audiences watch and believe it is all "special effects". And then there's the Carnival of Corpses; where prisoners with [[Bloody Murder|Branches of Sin powers]] fight each other and sometimes are cheered to kill their defeated opponents. Oh, and the loser (if they live) gets a randomly selected body part (ranging from hair to [[Eye Scream|eyes]] to entire organs or limbs]]) removed while they're awake. If you don't participate and are on "Death Row", then you are killed by poison after 72 hours and can only buy antidote to keep living for another 72 hours with Cast Points; earned by surviving and winning the [[Blood Sport]] games.

** Chessboxing... [[wikipedia:Chess boxing|you mean this?]] [[Defictionalization]] strikes again.

* Spinball, from the notorious ''Action'' comic. Played only by [[Condemned Contestant|Condemned Contestants]]. Rollerball on ice with giant pinball pins as targets. Really.

** Also used in a ritualized "war" between Megacity One and the Sovs, in which Judges from each side fight to the death in a televised contest.

== Fan Fic ==

* Its remake, ''[[Death Race]]'', deals with a closed-circuit race on an island prison, where the competitors are death row inmates racing for their freedom. ''Death Race 2'', a prequel, shows how it began as a cage fight and how they brought cars into the formula to increase ratings.

* ''[[The Condemned]]'' is basically ''[[The Most Dangerous Game]]'' [[X Meets Y|meets]] ''[[Battle Royale]]'' with cameras, or ''[[Death Race]]'' (the recent one) sans racing.

* In ''[[Future Sport]]'', the titular game is the world's most popular sport after the NBA was destroyed by scandal ([[Take That]], soccer fans!), and was originally used as a replacement for gang wars. It is, needless to say, extremely violent and very [[Serious Business]], with the fate of Hawaii being decided by a game of it.

* The titular Thunderdome in ''[[Mad Max]] Beyond Thunderdome''.

* ''[[Danny the Dog]]'' (a.k.a. ''Unleashed'') features an underground pit-fighting circuit involving barbed wire on the walls, axes, spears, and sledgehammers.

* "Rehabilitation" in ''[[Idiocracy]]'' is a judicial sentence as well as a televised event. The convict faces armed "corrections" personnel in a gladiator-style match featuring monster trucks, explosions and plenty of phallic imagery.

* ''The Blood of Heroes'' is about a post-apocalyptic world where the heroes make a living playing a game that involves hitting each other with chains and huge clubs while one person is trying to score a touchdown with a dog's skull.

* The 1989 movie ''[[Arena]]'' is about people fighting for mass entertainment. IN SPACE!!

* In the 1982 version of ''[[Conan the Barbarian]]'', Conan is forced to fight as a gladiator for his owner's amusement and enrichment. Needless to say, he gets really good at it.

* Boxing in ''[[Real Steel]]''. Since robots have replaced humans on the ring, there's nothing to stop the competitors from ''obliterating'' their opponents.

== Literature ==

* ''[[Battle Royale]]'', although the novel is set in an [[Alternate Universe]].

{{quote|''"The good news is, you made the Orcball team! The bad news is...as the ball."''|'''Sgt.Major Guzrak''', ''Grunts!''}}

** Since there's no rules, the halfling team decides this means they can play Orcball mounted on horses with polo mallets. The orcs decide that means they can use mounts too. Harley-Davidsons, specifically.

* Another [[Stephen King]] as Richard Bachman: ''[[The Long Walk]]''. 100 teenage males are required to walk at no less than [[American Customary Measurements|four miles per hour]], with no breaks. Drop below 4 miles an hour and you draw a warning. Walk for an hour without going below the limit and you lose a warning from your record. You can have up to 3 warnings and continue. Draw a fourth warning, and the army grunts who've been tailing the Walkers the entire time shoot you in the head. Last person left alive wins. The Walk follows the same route every year (the end point varies, naturally), and crowds gather to watch when it passes through their area. News updates when Walkers are eliminated or reach certain significant points on the route are broadcast nationwide, too -- characters mention as a matter of course that the Walk is the national pastime.

* [[Robert Sheckley]]'s ''Victim Prime'' and ''The Tenth Victim'' are both set in a world where war has been replaced by "The Hunt". Taking place on a Caribbean island, The Hunt is quite simple: pay your entry fee, then face ten hunts against the same opponent, five as the Hunter and five as the Victim. The Victim is not only allowed, but expected to try to kill the Hunter. Bonus points are awarded for style and ingenuity, points are deducted for unnecessary collateral damage and killing non-victims. The very few who survive all ten hunts are treated as huge celebrities.

* In the ''[[Sword of Truth]]'' series, Emperor Jagang brings to the world the game of Ja'La, which is like football without pads and no penalties for unnecessary roughness...or unnecessary murder.

* The people of [[X Wing Series|Adumar]] seem to ''love'' this trope. They are pilot-crazy and refuse simulators and practice weapons as 'dishonorable', to the point where they were forced to make rules about who could fly against whom to keep the population from plummeting. Even so, those who aren't pilots get into blastsword duels. Even if the loser isn't killed in defeat, the winner can turn to someone to signal palm-up or palm-down whether the loser will live or die, and to turn to someone for the signal is a sign that the winner is sweet on someone. {{spoiler|Turns out that it's really only one prominent nation that is so obsessed, the middle and lower classes are not nearly as fond of it, and people can be convinced of their error.}}

* The "ritual war game" variety is featured in ''[[Ecotopia]]'', where it's used as an outlet for people's aggression and warlike instincts.

* In [[Dune]] by Frank Herbert there are at least two blood sports. Notably, these are sponsored by both in the antagonist and protagonist Houses. One is seen in detail: the Harkonnens have classical gladiatorial matches (with the additions of personal shields (read: force fields)) which the na-baron Feyd-Rautha participates in. Frequently. The second is bull fighting. The Atreides apparently took part in this, though only off camera. They may have stopped in recent years leading up to the book because a bull killed the Old Duke, Duke Leto's father. In the ring. He was fighting it at the time. Actually, at the time he was being gored by it, but you get the point.

* These show up in the [[Riftwar]] cycle, where slaves and prisoners of war are made to fight for entertainment in Kelewan.

* ''The Year of the Flood'', parallel novel to ''[[Oryx and Crake]]'', has Painball, a highly violent version of paintball played by convicts and televised.

* ''Killerbowl'', by Gary K. Wolf, is centered around "street football", a version of American football which is played in a 24-square-block area of the host city. The players are armed with knives, bolo clubs, and spears, and every team has one "hidden safety", who has a rifle with one bullet. Oh, and a single match takes ''a whole day'' to complete.

== Live Action TV ==

* The Zulu-style cricket match in ''[[Monty Python's Flying Circus]]'' is probably a form of this, as most of the players wind up speared by assegais.

* In the short-lived ''[[Max Headroom]]'' series, this trope is subverted. An evil TV executive was hyping a new sport involving melee weapons and teenage skateboarders, and did all kinds of nasty things to ensure there'd be spectacular violence ... but when players started dropping on camera, the studio audience ''booed'' and the ratings plummeted. The public apparently was NOT eager for that kind of gratuitous gore (yet).

* In ''[[Deep Space Nine]]'' episode "By Infernos Light" Worf is held captive by the Dominion and forced to fight a series of Jem'hader to the death as a Jem'hader training exercise.

== Tabletop Games ==

** See also the planet of Solaris VII, which is known across the galaxy for commercial mech-fights.

** In the Mystara setting, "court ball" is a blood sport favored by several Aztec-based cultures. In the Hollow World, athletic Blacklore elves engage in dangerous aerial duels on hoverboards, attacking one another with flame-cutters. (Not really a sport, they're just bored out of their minds.)

* The wargame/[[Tabletop Games|Tabletop RPG]] hybrid ''[[Car Wars]]'', from Steve Jackson Games: not only is the favorite sport "autoduelling" ([[Vehicular Combat]] with armed stock cars), but its primary competitor is "combat football".

* Aside from the good old-fashioned Gladiator arenas found in many places, the ''[[Rifts]]'' setting includes a whole list of "Juicer" sports, played mostly by juicers ([[Psycho Serum|drug-induced]] supermen), and by those few who can keep up. This includes Deadball (a form of Handball where the ball in question randomly extrudes spikes), the Murderthon (was once won by a [[Mighty Glacier]] juicer who flattened everyone else as they passed), and Juicer Football. Juicer characters can actually take "deadball" as a weapon skill, and buy ''exploding'' deadballs for weapons.

* Games Workshop's ''[[Blood Bowl]]'' is a [[Warhammer]]-themed version of American football and rugby reimagined as a bloodsport that has replaced warfare in its alternate universe. Orcs, skaven and even undead field teams and are expected to try and maim their opponents to get ahead. Even sneaking a chainsaw onto the field isn't grounds for stopping the game.

* The computer game inspired by the movie ''[[Death Race 2000]]'', ''[[Carmageddon]]'', was even more so - and duly immediately ran afoul of [[Moral Guardians]].

** In some countries they got around censors by making the pedestrians into zombies, but in the third game specifically titled ''Carmageddon TDR 2000'', they headed it off by making zombie peds in the first place. Though cars get destroyed, no one is seen to die, and the way your own character survives auto-destruction implies your rivals may not be killed either, so it's no longer a Blood Sport.

** The aforementioned chicken can jump buildings and control fire. It is considered [[Character Tiers|so-so]] at best, unless it can limber up as it fights. Then it's [[Took a Level In Badass|just as awesome as advertised]].

** The Pokemon canon does not portray Pokemon battling as especially risky; while by any human standards they would seem highly dangerous, the worst that happens is that they "faint", they can always be brought back to full health, and the subject of Pokemon death is in the anime usually never associated directly with battling, or at most only with trying to battle rampaging legendary creatures. A lot of Pokemon [[Fan Fiction]], on the other hand, loves to take a somewhat more cynical approach to the battling aspect.

** ''F-Zero X'' and onwards makes mentions to various safety features added after a [[Noodle Incident|Great Accident]]. It is unclear what these are, and strangely, at the same time, the player now gets rewarded for killing his foes (with extra continues) as opposed to merely having less competition.

*** It's implied that fallen vehicles are recovered in mid-air, and there's probably some form of beaming safeguard to remove the driver from a burning vehicle. All done by a trio of [[Sonic the Hedgehog|Chao]] in a small ufo.

* The Commodore 64 and Amstrad CPC game ''[[Skate Ball]]'' was one-third handball, one-third roller-hockey, and one-third barroom brawl, played on a field full of deadly traps. On ice.

* On the far end of the spectrum, however, we have ''[[Mutant League Football]]''. Players included [[Fantasy Kitchen Sink|trolls, skeletons, aliens, and robots]], fields were littered with [[Death Course|landmines, pits, and other booby traps]], each team had a number of "audibles" representing tricks and gadgets that could be used once per half (like giving a player a [[Jet Pack]], [[Stuff Blowing Up|hand grenades]], or [[Fartillery|lethal flatulence]], or [[Shmuck Bait|rigging the ball to explode and then fumbling it]]), players would occasionally be killed from taking too much abuse on the field, and you could occasionally bribe the ref to call bogus penalties on your opponent for things like "whining" or "nose-picking". Of course, your opponent could then kill the ref and only take a five-yard penalty. There was also ''Mutant League Hockey'', which was pretty much the same thing with a different sport.

** And the animated series inspired by them, ''[[Mutant League]]''.

** ''[[Skyrim]]'' actually doesn't have any kind of violent arena combat, though that is primarily because [[Grim Up North|simply stepping out your front door puts you in a horribly lethal environment where everything that doesn't want to kill you for your pocket change just wants to eat you or turn you into a zombie.]]

* A bloodless Blood Sport, strange as it sounds: the primary export of the planet Solaris VII from ''[[Mechwarrior]]'' seems to be Mech-on-Mech arena fights. All the battles are live-fire; ejection seats are mandatory equipment for obvious reasons. In [[MW 4]]: Mercenaries, you can choose to become a Solaris pilot, meeting - and fighting - plenty of [[Mauve Shirt|fellow contenders]] along the way.

* In the Dreamcast game ''[[Headhunter]]'' we learn that criminals imprisoned in the undersea-dome (so you could say it's sort of a [[Mad Max|waterdome]]) get to fight each other to the death which then gets broadcast live on TV, the winner gets a shorter sentence and the loser gets to generously donate their organs. Maybe they just didn't like Wade but some criminals got much better weapons than others.

* No-one remembers ''Deathrow'' for the original xbox? A sports game which is a mix of frisbee, basketball and a gladitorial arena. Two teams of four play, one team wins when they knock the entire other team out, or they've scored more goals when time runs out. Most players go for the fighting option.

* ''Bill Laimbeer's Combat Basketball''. Mmmyep.

* ''[[The Club]]'''s premise is based on this trope. Convicts, adrenaline junkies and psychos fight for survival and people bet their money on whether they survive or not.

* [[Vehicular Combat|Combat Racing]] in ''[[Jak and Daxter|Jak X]]''.

== Webcomics ==

* "Cutthroat combat croquet" from ''[[Strange Candy]]''. A running gag is that the characters treat it no differently than any other rough varsity sport, even though every match seen - including a ''practice match'' - ends with at least one player (often an entire team) dead.

* The Great Outdoor Fight from [[Achewood]]: three days, three thousand men, one victor.

== Western Animation ==

* ''[[Samurai Jack]]'' winds up in two of these during the show's run. A [[The Thunderdome|Thunderdome]] after being captured and forced to compete {{spoiler|which he single-handily manages to shut down after the area's warriors prove no match for him.}} and an underground creature fight ring after being turned into a chicken and captured by a greedy Italian man.

* During its early years, [[Useful Notes/Mixed Martial Arts|Mixed Martial Arts]] was compared to "human cockfighting", and the sensationalistic word "bloodsport" is still commonly used in mainstream media to describe it. Old school boxing purists will stand beside their framed pictures of Muhammad Ali looming with fist cocked over an unconscious Sonny Liston and complain about how "brutal" the emerging sport is. Suffice it to say, modern MMA is no more dangerous or brutal than boxing, and arguably less so.

** A major reason for this is that MMA fights often reduce to grappling, and fighters will tap out. That beats getting beating senseless. That said, submissions are going down every year as fighters learn how to break more and more holds.

* In its early years, [[Useful Notes/American Football|American Football]] (then primarily played at the collegiate level) was an incredibly violent sport. It was a regular occurrence for players to die as a result of injuries sustained on the field. Many of these deaths were the result of mass movement plays, a now-banned type of play in which the whole offensive team started running from 20 yards behind the starting line right before the whistle blew. A lot of skulls got caved in this way. It got to the point that the President of the United States threatened to push for it to be outlawed, leading to the creation of the Intercollegiate Athletic Association (now known as the NCAA) in 1906 to regulate the game. The President in question who made that threat? ''[[Theodore Roosevelt]]''. Yes, football used to be so violent, even the most [[Badass]] President in history thought it went too far.

* This trope may explain some of [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qh5hNY83UA4 the appeal] of [[Australian Rules Football]].