Bottomless Bladder: Difference between revisions

== Film ==

* Subverted in one scene in ''[[A League of Their Own]]'', wherein not only does Tom Hanks' character take a leak, his all-female baseball team (whom he doesn't notice or doesn't care are there) actually time how long he pees.

* In ''[[The Usual Suspects]]'', the consistency of a character's urine becomes a major plot point.

* Played with in ''[[Pleasantville]]''. When the main characters are sucked into an idyllic 1950s, black and white TV world, they quickly find the bathrooms have no stalls or urinals.

** Cochran: "I gotta go take a leak." LaForge: "Leak? I'm not detecting any leak." Cochran: [[Breaking the Fourth Wall|"Don't you people from the 24th century ever pee?"]]

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in Austin Powers: Internation Man of Mystery after Austin is thawed from [[Human Popsicle|cryogenic freezing]]. He literally has a Bottomless Bladder during the evacuation scene, much to the dismay of the [[Computer Voice|female computer voice]].

{{quote|'''Jack:''' "24 isn't very realistic. I mean it's already two o'clock and no one's gone to the bathroom yet."}}

* ''[[Star Trek]]'' gives rise to a famous debate as to why there aren't bathrooms in space, the first highly publicized form of this question poking fun at how such inevitabilities are overlooked on TV.

*** It's mentioned several times, but apparently the 24th-century polite term is "waste extraction".

** In an early ''Enterprise'' episode, Trip has to answer an Earth child's letter asking how starship bathrooms work. The fact that we don't actually get to ''hear'' his explanation is possibly a [[Lampshading]] of this trope.

** There is a tale of one unfortunate DM. A PC went to the bathroom and whined to the DM that he deserved [[Character Development|character roleplaying XP]] for the deed (since no one usually paid attention to that stuff). The DM grudgingly awarded him a few points of XP. The other PCs caught on to this, and by the end of the session the dungeon was so [[Toilet Humor|full of poop]] [[Crowning Moment of Funny|that the entire goblin army that inhabited the caverns had drowned.]]

* In Exalted, the Infernal Exalted have access to charms that permanently remove human weaknesses. The charm Transcendent Desert Creature means you never need to use the bathroom again.

 

== [[Video Games]] ==

* Subverted in the ''[[Crusader: No Remorse|Crusader]]'' games by Origin Systems, a 2D-isometric shooter based on the ''[[Ultima VIII]]'' engine. While the titular Silencer was not depicted as actually using the toilet, and received no bonus for accessing it, you could in fact flush them. (This was much more exciting when the game came out in 1995.)

* ''[[Custom Robo]]'' for the Gamecube in the US. Near the end of the game, one of your characters sees a bathroom and "really has to go." It's a rather eerie setting, so he's scared and asks you to come with him. You can go with him, which will lead to a series of battles, or you can repeatedly refuse, which skips it altogether... though after you beat the game and get to the "[[Inevitable Tournament|pointless obligatory tournament]]" part, one of them takes place in said bathroom.

** Once the stormtroopers are dead, you can examine the urinals and discover that they have... staining...

* ''[[Darkseed]]'' forced you to sleep at the end of every day, at the risk of falling unconscious and losing all your inventory.

* Similarly, in ''[[Shadow Hearts]]'', there are a couple plot events and side quests that revolve around a bathroom in a tavern in Prague. None of the main characters ever need to use the facilities, but NPCs do.

* In ''[[Gothic]]'', the player character only uses food and sleep to recover health points, but the [[NPC]]s live fairly normal lives - they sleep at night, and at least one of the less sympathetic male characters will, if watched for long enough, wander off to take a piss against a tree.

* In ''[[Grand Theft Auto]]: San Andreas'', the main character has to eat occasionally. Sleeping is implied to occur when game time is skipped (when saving, periods in jail or hospital), but otherwise the player character becomes hungry after a somewhat realistic amount of time, first losing fat reserves, then muscle mass, then the health bar. If not countered by eating, you end up in the hospital.

* A perfect example of this trope (not a subversion of it) is ''[[Super Mario]] 64''. The player can visit every single room in Princess Toadstool's castle, and not one is a bathroom. Nor do bathrooms show up in any other incarnation of her castle seen in the past twenty plus years. Of course, this is the same princess who is routinely kept in small dungeons and cages for entire games without the problem of sanitation ever coming up, so perhaps this is justified.

** One could start to wonder what she needs a plumber for in the first place.

** Luigi's Mansion has at least two bathrooms.

* Although nobody uses them, the final area of ''[[Mother 3]]'' includes, of all things, a bathroom [[The Maze|maze]], where you have to choose the right stall to proceed. The other stalls may contain items, enemies, and the [[Nightmare Fuel|Ultimate Chimera]].

* In the early days, many [[Interactive Fiction]] games attempted to add "realism" by requiring the player to eat. This often added to the difficulty by requiring the players to find (rare) food items, pretty much constantly, as authors never really got how often a human in a crisis could go without eating. In one [[Egregious]] example, the protagonist of [[Infocom]]'s ''[[Planetfall|Stationfall]]'' had to eat almost hourly lest he fall into a coma and die (within the parody-[[Space Opera]] setting, this was explained by the comically low nutritional value of futuristic food).

** So many players complained about this "feature" in Infocom's ''Enchanter'', that at the beginning of the sequel, ''Sorcerer'', you find a magical potion that lets you go without food for the rest of the game automatically.

* ''[[Rogue (video game)|Rogue]]'' and its descendant ''[[Nethack]]'' both require the player character to eat, but at relatively realistic intervals. While ''[[Rogue (video game)|Rogue]]'' merely provided generic "food", ''[[Nethack]]'' includes a wide variety of comestibles, ranging from fruit and iron rations to the corpses of the monsters you slay (which may give you powers or weird afflictions) and on occasion even tins of preserved food (which the player can also make himself from monster corpses if he has acquired a tinning kit...). ''[[Nethack]]'' also tracks the freshness of various foods; it is possible to get sick and die from eating spoiled or tainted meals. On top of this, eating too much (usually to acquire stat boosts from monster corpses) can cause you to choke and die from a burst stomach. Food can also be used to tame enemies and to train pets to steal from stores.

* In the classic game ''[[Maniac Mansion]]'', you do encounter a restroom at one point, but your characters never feel the urge to use it. In fact, if you tell them to use it, they'll respond, "I'd like a little more privacy for that!" They do think it's fun to flush it, though.

* [[Lampshade Hanging|Lampshaded]] in ''[[Neverwinter Nights]]'': "While the adventurers don't need to eat, the monsters do. They eat adventurers."

** In the ''Hordes of the Underdark'' Expansion, the Protagonist's kobold companion Deekin will narrate your progress through certain areas. Often these are lampshades of this Trope, mentioning how sore his feet are and how he wishes that 'the Boss' would let him stop for a bathroom break.

** ''[[Kingdom of Loathing]]'' also lampshades the bladder variant, in a small, random adventure:

{{quote|After travelling for a while, you discover a need to go to the bathroom (which rarely happens in these games, but hey, you've gotta go sometime, right?)}}

** Try getting a cop outfit so you're not arrested, then throwing a doughnut on the ground, pissing all over it, pick it up, then find a cop and give them a tasty treat. Also, your piss can be turned into a stream of napalm in [[New Game+|enhanced mode]], immediately setting people, cats, your dog etc. on fire.

*** Somewhat subverted within the game; early on in the last day, the player character says something along the lines of "I really gotta take a whiz". Doing so reveals his urine is now green and brown and thick: he's contracted gonorrhea, and he makes a note to get cured. Of course, [[Video Game Cruelty Potential|you can go on urinating on people all the same, causing them to vomit.]]

* In ''[[Metal Gear Solid]]'', there are a few areas with toilets (Most notably the area before the [[Mind Screw]] Psycho Mantis [[Boss Battle]]) in which the guards can be found relieving themselves (A funnier example of this is in ''[[Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty]]''), [[Fridge Logic|which leaves one to wonder]]: was it the nanotechnology in Snake's body that renders it unnecessary for Snake to take a break?

** Either that, or the suit's just very, very self-contained. Y'know. Like an astronaut's.

 

== Web Original ==

 

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[[Category:Acceptable Breaks From Reality]]

[[Category:Bathroom Tropes]]

[[Category:Alliterative Trope Titles]]