Bloodless Carnage/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Violence occurs, but no blood or major wounds are shown.

  • Straight: Bob gets stabbed and falls down, but does not bleed or have visible wounds.
  • Exaggerated: Bob is shot five times from point blank range, then stabbed profusely, fed through a large meat grinder, and poked with a spatula. His dead body appears to be completely intact, with no blood to be seen.
  • Justified: Bob is some sort of inhuman entity who has no blood, and so when he is shot, he does not bleed.
    • Bob is shot with an Agony Beam that does not cause physical damage to the tissue, but disintegrates the tissue to atom levels.
  • Inverted: High-Pressure Blood sprays from even the slightest wound.
  • Subverted: Bob gets stabbed and appears not to be bleeding, but he's wearing several layers of clothing and it just hadn't soaked through yet.
    • Bob appears not to be bleeding, but he's suffering an internal tissue bleeding.
  • Double Subverted: ...Except the dark splotch on his red jacked isn't blood, because the sword also stabbed through the canteen of tomato juice carried from the string around his neck.
  • Parodied: Alice stabs Bob repeatedly, getting increasingly frustrated that he won't bleed or show signs of damage, even though he's long dead. Eventually, she just gives up.
  • Deconstructed: Because his violent deeds don't cause any unsightly blood or large wounds, the villain becomes desensitized to killing and starts mass-murdering people.
  • Reconstructed: A program is put in place to make sure everyone knows the horrors of violent actions despite the fact that nobody ever bleeds or shows major external injury.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice stabs a mook who bleeds out, yet when Bob shoots her several times and leaves her to die she never bleeds. Bob ends up finishing Alice later and she bleeds then.
  • Averted: People are wounded in perfectly normal amounts when they are injured.
  • Enforced:
    • It's a family-friendly show, and they need to keep it that way, so blood can't be shown even if violence does pop up.
    • The game is for a low configuration portable console, and it doesn't have the resources to display blood.
  • Lampshaded: "AUGH! Even if I'm not bleeding, this invisible stab wound hurts like a bitch, so help me out, guys!"
  • Invoked: An Ax Crazy character makes sure to be very clean when he attacks people, to save him the trouble of too much cleaning up the evidence.
  • Defied: An Ax Crazy character won't stop until the crime scene is covered in blood, and can't stand to make just a small, clean wound.
  • Discussed: "Oh my god, you've been stabbed!" "Why am I not bleeding? Why do we never bleed here?"
  • Conversed: Before his first big battle, the hero's mentor reminds him that even though fiction might not show blood when people get shot and stabbed, reality is different.

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