Family-Unfriendly Violence: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

[[File:OneHandedGirl.jpg|frame|A [[Blatant Lies|nice little]] [[Fairy Tale]]: a brother is about to lop his sister's hand off.]]

{{quote|''"[[The Joker]] in our show could not kill, because it was a children's television show. Instead of him murdering people we would have him give 'em that [[Slasher Smile|hideous Joker grin]], which in its own way is almost worse".''|The writers of ''[[Batman the Animated Series (Animation)|Batman the Animated Series]]'', on [[The Joker]]}}

Maybe the programme shows the consequences of violence a little too vividly, maybe the designated target has become too sympathetic. Whatever the reason, the result is prime [[Nightmare Fuel]].

{{examples|Examples}}

== [[Anime]] and [[Manga]] ==

* Many [[Shounen]] series (e.g. ''[[Naruto]]'', ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh]]'', ''[[One Piece]]'' - see below) contain scenes of surprisingly graphic violence considering that most are aimed primarily at kids/early teens.

* ''[[Naruto]]'' has Sasuke pulling Zaku's arms until they ''dislocate''. There wasn't any blood but the poor guy was screeching like there's no tomorrow. You can understand why this scares the crap out of Sakura, even though that's the guy that just stomped her into the ground a minute ago.

* The Yu-Gi-Oh Manga had the Shadow Game between Marik and Mai. Remember how in the anime, the duelists would lose memories every time they lost a monster or life points? Well, in the manga, the duelists take whatever damage is done to their monsters (it's worse when you realize that in the manga, the monsters don't disintegrate or explode when they die, like in the anime). When Mai's monster attacks Marik's, it chops its head off. So MARIK'S HEAD FALLS OFF, AND HE PICKS IT UP - STILL TALKING. It gets worse. Later Marik summons a horrific electric torture device that looks like something out of the ''Saw'' movies and uses it to electrocute Mai.

** Oh, and remember the [[Bowdlerise|*Cough* "Dark Energy Disks"]] in the Yugi/Arkana duel? Well not only are they back to the original saw blades, one SLICES INTO ARKANA'S LEG AS YUGI FREES HIM AND HE SCREAMS IN PAIN. Yikes.

*** In fact, the very first "game" played in Yu-Gi-Oh involves knives...

* More than one ''[[Pokémon (Anime)|Pokémon]]'' episode has a battle where a Pokémon is seriously injured or is the victim of a [[No Holds Barred Beatdown]]. Probably the earliest in the series might have been Ash's Vermilion City Gym battle, where on his first try Pikachu got the ever-living snot beaten out of it by Surge's Raichu.

* ''[[One Piece]]'' contains frequent instances of characters being shot, stabbed, slashed, savagely beaten, what have you. This is particularly jarring given the series' [[Crap Saccharine World|cartoony look]] and the story's (supposedly) [[Sliding Scale of Idealism Versus Cynicism|heavily idealistic perspective]].

* ''[[The Great Mouse Detective]]''

** Basil of Baker Street getting the snot kicked out of him by Ratigan on the face of Big Ben was pretty terrifying for a Disney movie.

** His cat got one too when she was ripped to shreds by the Royal Guard dogs.

* The flashback to the laboratory in ''[[The Secret of NIMH]]'', complete with a shot of one of the heroes being impaled through the midsection with a giant syringe. Ironically, in the book the N.I.M.H. researchers were portrayed as normal, and actually pretty nice, people.

* Much of ''[[The Three Stooges]]''' violent slapstick is humorous by nature, but the short ''They Stooge to Conga'' deserves mention here. Curly gets electrified, set on fire, and literally has his nose put to the grindstone. But Moe has a climbing spike dig into his head, his ear, ''and his eye''. This is why that particular short has rarely been shown on television.

* The original PG-rated ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (Film)|Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' features Splinter being chained to a wall and beaten, the Turtles being mercilessly thrashed by the Shredder, and April's home being burned down, the fire that started being caused by a Foot Clan member swinging an [[An Axe to Grind|axe]] at one of the Turtles, missing, and striking an electrical cable, which causes his body to ''start jerking and smoking''.

* ''[[Captain America the First Avenger]]'' is ridiculously violent by superhero movie standards: an elderly lady is shot by a fleeing thug (who later machine guns several people on the sidewalk with puffs of red mist), the thug's driver is shot in the back of the head with a blood splatter, and toward the end of the film a [[Mook]] falls into a propeller with absolutely NO [[Gory Discretion Shot]].

* ''[[Arashi no Yoru Ni]]'' is a heartwarming tale about the [[Odd Friendship|friendship]] between a wolf and a goat. Five minutes in, a goat bites off a wolf's ear, splatting blood over the screen. (Not the same goat and wolf, thankfully.) And it doesn't end there!

* The ''[[Deptford Mice]]'' - dear god, where do we START?! Well, how about the rats who worship Jupiter, {{spoiler|a giant mutated cat who breathes fire}}, and feed him live sacrifices, while skinning their own prey alive? And the rat who was rude to a higher-ranking officer in his youth, so said officer cut the kid's lips off? And {{spoiler|Madame Akkikuyu's [[Heroic Sacrifice]] - she throws herself onto a bonfire when she realises Jupiter's spirit is possessing her.}} And on another "upsetting the [[Moral Guardians]]" note, it's heavily implied that Madame Akkikuyu started out as a prostitute.

* ''Guardians of Ga'Hoole''. For a children's book series, there's a lot of blood and absurdly gory injuries. For instance, an eagle's tongue is torn out, Ezylryb bit off his own talon, and last of all, the death of the owl Phillip, who was {{spoiler|killed by Nyra by first being slashed across the chest and then HAVING HIS HEART PULLED OUT.}}

** And in non-death violence, one [[Big Bad]] gets half of his face ripped off by a hawk. Another survives gets bitten in the head by an adder and has [[Two Faced|a hideously deformed and flayed face]] to show for it. Yet another has his paw ripped off. One mook gets smashed hard into a wall (and survives). Another mook is tortured on a rack before being strung up and shot full of arrows.

* One of the reasons the BBC gave for the terminating the [[Virgin New Adventures]] (in the [[Doctor Who Expanded Universe]]) was that they had gone overboard on the sex n' violence. The BBC [[Eighth Doctor Adventures]] that followed included such stories as "The City of the Dead", where the Doctor does horrible things to his broken leg, and "Interference", where he spends most of the first book being pointlessly<ref>his guards probably didn't even care what he knew</ref> tortured in a Saudi cell.

** This is actually a parody/homage of samurai films' brutal deaths of combatants.

* For implied violence, the various ''mutilations'' that happen to Baxter Stockman in the 2003 ''[[Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2003 (Animation)|Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles]]'' series qualify to an almost ridiculous degree:

* ''[[Justice League (Animation)|Justice League]]'' has a bad habit of playing incredible violence against minimally superpowered foes as being slapstick or perfectly harmless, even when [[Fridge Logic|it should have maimed or killed the person]]. Countless guns are blown up in people's hands with little more than a flinch, thieves slipping and landing on their heads, entire blocks being blown up complete with people panicking, that sorta thing. A nasty example would be the fate of the vile Steven Mandragora. The episode "Double Date" holds him as the Huntress's target, someone she is willing to kill to avenge the parents he killed before her very eyes, and while tough enough to take a punch or sonic wail, not particularly superpowered. The Huntress plans to kill him with a few crossbow bolts. In the episode's denouement, she has the option of killing him in front of his son or letting him back into police custody. Instead of executing him with the crossbow bolts, she refuses to kill and instead... drops a ton of steel I-beams on his head from at least a hundred feet up. [[Fridge Logic|Wait, what?]]

** ''[[Batman the Animated Series (Animation)|Batman the Animated Series]]'' does this quite a bit, too. People are routinely thrown across rooms, hit in the jaw with fists/crowbars/baseball bats/two-by-fours, and seen falling 20-30 feet onto their faces, necks, shoulders, etc.. Victims usually sit up a moment later rubbing their foreheads, but even once you realize this pattern, the moment of impact never really gets any less cringe-inducing. Even ''Mask of the Phantasm'', which got away with blood and on-screen deaths, has a few glaring moments - most notably, Bruce getting hit in the stomach with a baseball bat, ''which was being held out by a passing motorcyclist'' and thus connected with huge amounts of force, then getting up a few seconds later without so much as a cracked rib. Or, just the [[DCAU]] in general is a very violent "kids show" (though it may not have been intended to be).

** How about the EXTREMELY detailed death of {{spoiler|Soundwave}}?

* ''[[Transformers Prime]]'' is going full-throttle with this. The first episode has {{spoiler|Cliffjumper getting stabbed by Starscream, complete with [[Symbolic Blood]]}}, while episodes three and four include Bulkhead tearing out an Eradicon's "guts" and Optimus and Ratchet slicing their way through a small army of {{spoiler|the robot undead}}.