Chest Burster/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: An nasty parasite leaves the body in a nasty way.

  • Straight: The alien erupts from Bob's chest.
  • Exaggerated: Bob explodes, leaving a brood of aliens squirming amid the gore.
  • Justified: The alien was going to make a less messy Orifice Evacuation, but then something in Bob's body made it leave in a hurry.
  • Inverted:
    • An alien burrows into Bob's chest to make its home.
    • Bob is eaten whole by an alien and bursts out of the alien's chest.
  • Subverted: After having an alien embryo placed inside him, Bob clutches his chest and screams in agony, but he's just having a heart attack.
  • Double Subverted: Bob's heart attack turns out to be the result of the alien living inside him. *burst*
  • Parodied: Bob's chest has a door inexplicably built in, and the alien parasite leaves in a very civil manner. Then the parasite suffers a Chest Burster.
  • Deconstructed:
    • The aliens purposely burst out of peoples' chests as a form of psychological warfare...
    • Bob is really a Worm That Walks made of a colony of snake-like aliens, he's doing this to attack without revealing himself, or because he's in trouble and ejecting a single Worm is the only way he can escape without raising suspicion.
  • Reconstructed: ...but it turns out the aliens need to burst out of something to survive in the outside world (much like a butterfly breaks out of its chrysalis to stimulate its wing muscles).
  • Zig Zagged: An alien bursts out of Bob's chest, he successfully kills it and patches up the wound, and another alien bursts out of his chest a while later.
  • Averted: The aliens in this story are not parasitic.
  • Enforced: "We need to make our aliens more terrifying. Let's have them burst out of their victims!"
  • Lampshaded: "Why do they always come out of the chest?"
  • Invoked: A Mad Scientist bred chestibursticus horriblis as a terror-inducing bioweapon.
  • Defied:
    • Anyone discovered to be harboring an alien parasite is promptly killed and burned.
    • Alternatively everyone in an area even remotely suspected to harbor one is dosed with a drug that kills the eggs if they get into their system.
  • Discussed: "If one of those beasties stings you, it's really laying eggs. So hold on to your ribs."
  • Conversed: "The aliens are chestbursters? Gross!"

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