Losing Your Head/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A character survives having their head cut off.

  • Straight: Alice ends up decapitated by accident, but her head is inexplicably still alive afterward.
  • Exaggerated: Alice gets caught in an explosion that completely destroys her body but throws her head clear of the blast. When it lands (after a fifty-foot drop!), it turns out that Alice's head is not only still intact, but alive as well.
  • Justified: Alice is a robot, or some kind of creature that can survive being beheaded.
    • See Reconstructed below.
  • Inverted: Alice accidentally gets her head chopped off, and her still-alive body carries on like nothing happened.
  • Subverted: Alice's head seems just fine after it's cut off, but it turns out she can only survive without her body for a short while.
  • Double Subverted: Alice's head can only survive without her body for a short while, but Applied Phlebotinum exists that will let her survive like that indefinitely.
  • Parodied: Alice's head is cut off after an improbable series of events, and then launches into a lengthy musical number showing off just how alive she really is.
  • Deconstructed: Alice survives being decapitated, but is horrified to find that she's lost her body.
  • Reconstructed: Alice is just a head. The body is just something that allows her to move. Which would explain why both head and body are still alive.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice is frequently decapitated in a show with Negative Continuity; her head sometimes survives afterwards, but not always.
  • Averted: Decapitation is lethal, pure and simple. Alice gets her head chopped off and dies.
  • Enforced: Alice is a character in a show meant to sell a line of toys with detachable, swappable heads.
  • Lampshaded: "Wow! And I thought 'Losing Your Head' was just a figure of speech!"
  • Invoked: Alice is scheduled to be executed by guillotine, but with some magical help, she comes up with an unorthodox escape plan: the execution is carried out and Alice is beheaded, but her head is left alive and is easily smuggled to safety.
  • Defied: The ability to survive being decapitated is common enough that most people use guns instead of swords.
  • Discussed: "So you can survive having your head cut off? You can stick it back on afterward, right?"
  • Conversed: "I don't care if it's magic keeping her severed head alive or not! Her head's got no lungs, so how the heck is she talking?"
  • Plotted A Good Waste: Alice's seemingly throwaway ability to survive decapitation on a regular basis leads to a source of existential angst for her as she's forced to confront the question of whether she's really human or not.
  • Played For Laughs: Alice's head gets chopped off Once an Episode, and Hilarity Ensues as her severed head ends up in one sticky situation after another, possibly with her headless body in hot pursuit.
  • Played For Drama: A magical spell allows Alice to shrug off being beheaded, but when her head is stolen before it can be reattached to her body, then it becomes a quest to reunite her head and body before the spell wears off and Alice dies for real.

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