Minor Injury Overreaction: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

 

 

Can (un)intentionally coincide with the [[Rant-Inducing Slight]] and/or [[Afraid of Needles]].

 

Contrast with [[Major Injury Underreaction]], and with [[After-Action Patchup]], where the reaction tends to be [[Afraid of Needles|humanizing]]. Compare with [[Blood Upgrade]].

 

* In ''[[Project A-ko]]'' there was the "My Cheek... It's cut!" moment.

* In ''[[Full Metal Panic!]] ? Fumoffu'''s second [[Fan Service]] episode, Kurz Weber takes a small laser burn to his backside, and convinces Shinji Kazama to go on without him as if he were dying.

** Subverted with Nnoitra. Nnoitra constantly boasts that he cannot be harmed and demonstrates by letting opponents hit him to no avail. When Kenpachi finally manages to cut him, he's shocked, then orders Kenpachi not to get cocky and keeps fighting normally.

** Played straight with [[The Fighting Narcissist|Charlotte]]. When a large lock of his hair is sliced off he goes [[Berserk Button|berserk]].

* In the ''[[Cowboy Bebop]]'' episode "Pierrot Le Fou", Tongpu is an [[Psychopathic Manchild|insane super soldier]] who's [[Immune to Bullets]]. When someone manages to injure him for what's probably the first time since he snapped, he's so shocked from experiencing pain that he breaks down crying. Because he has the mind of a child, he reacts like a child would.

* ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]''!'s Yugi had an extreme case of this. It didn't even have to be a corporeal wound; several times, when his opponents would take a chunk out of his Life Points, he'd act like he was having a heart attack.

** And other times the common hologram is so realistic that it ''can'' cause heart attacks(see Yugi's grandfather, who was hospitalized after losing a duel).

{{quote|[[Yu-Gi-Oh!: The Abridged Series|"For some reason playing a card game has caused me to become severely injured."]]}}

* Schoen of ''[[Weiss Kreuz]]'' is an incredibly vain former model. She takes Ken trying to kill her in stride, right up until he scratches her cheek. She spends the rest of the series trying to kill him for it - though, since she was trying to do that anyway, Ken doesn't really notice the difference.

* While Vita of ''[[Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha]]'' is naturally aggressive, she gets ''especially'' pissed off when one of Nanoha's attacks damages and knocks off her [[Nice Hat]]. Cue Nanoha's "uh oh". It has sentimental value.

* In the ''[[Gunsmith Cats]]'' anime, Radinov the [[Chaotic Evil]] [[Renegade Russian]] tries to torture Rally to death because our heroine shot her earring off. Then again, Radinov [[Psycho for Hire|isn't the sanest person around]].

** If someone had shot off a chunk of my ear, I'd be pretty pissed, too.

* Played humourously in ''[[Yamato Nadeshiko Shichi Henge]]'', where Kyohei is the one whose face gets scratched but ''Sunako'' is the one who takes offense.

* [[Eagle Land|Merika]] from ''Afghanhis-tan'', a one volume manga based on the modern history of Afghanistan, went batshit on Afghanistan after a cat bit her hand. If you didn't notice, this was their depiction of 9/11.

* In the [[Silver Age]] [[Superman|Superboy]] storyline, Lex's resentment towards Superboy had been building for some time, but he didn't become Superboy's archnemesis until the accident that gave him his trademark baldness (which he blamed on Superboy). A later [[Retcon]] would give Lex better motivations.

* [[Doctor Doom]] was ''going'' to be a case of this at one stage of development, the 'horrible disfigurement' that led him to wear a mask at all times truly being a tiny scar. Doom saw it as worse than it was due to his ego; the slightest marring of his perfect features mean this face was [[Ruined FOREVER]]. However, there was nothing they could do about the many people who recoiled in horror from the times his face was shown, typically saying they'd heard it was bad but ''this'' was much ''worse,'' so nothing came of it.

 

== Fan Works ==

* [[Death Note|Light]] in ''[[The Prince of Death]]'' Justified: [[Nightmare Fuel|because he is undead his wounds never heal and he has to be sewn back together.]]

 

* ''[[How to Train Your Dragon]]'': Tuffnut reacts this way to a very small dragon biting his nose.

{{quote|"Oh, I'm hurt! I am very much hurt!"}}

* Louis the alligator in ''[[The Princess and the Frog]]'' goes into death throes when he gets a single bur in his finger.

* A hair-related version in ''[[Spaceballs]]'': After refusing to handle a gun, saying she hates them, Princess Vespa's hair is shot... the resulting reaction? "My hair! He shot my hair! Son of a bitch." Followed by her mowing down her opponents. Her 'droid-of-honor' calls the victory "pretty good for Rambo".

* In more ways than one, this Trope is a driving force behind the events of ''[[Death Becomes Her]]''. Helen Sharp's childhood "friend" Madeline Ashton is always ruining Helen's serious relationships by stealing her boyfriends, {{spoiler|including Helen's fiance near the film's beginning}}, even though Madeline herself has no feelings for them. This prompts Helen to {{spoiler|hatch an elaborate plot to KILL Madeline, a goal she is still pursuing obsessively fourteen years later}}. As extreme as THAT may seem, it somehow manages to pale in comparison to Madeline's amazingly petty motive for repeatedly hurting Helen (arguably ruining her life multiple times) in the first place: {{spoiler|Helen thought Madeline was cheap, and by all indications merely in the sense of not being classy... BACK WHEN THEY WERE SCHOOLGIRLS!!!}}

* In ''[[Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves]]'', Robin's first encounter with the Sheriff of Nottingham ends with the former cutting the latter's cheek for no other reason then to piss him off (oh, and to exert the first portion of vengeance for murdering his father, perhaps). Sheriff is (in)appropriately enraged, and utters the famous threat to [[Cut His Heart Out with a Spoon]].

* ''[[Dodgeball]]'': "Nobody makes me bleed my own blood!"

* In ''Nothing to Lose'' Tim Robbins' character spends several minutes moaning and crying in agony after being shot in the arm, but once he finally gets his shirt off to inspect the wound, it turns out that the bullet barely grazed him.

* ''[[Scott Pilgrim vs. the World]]'' Gideon has one, not to a cut along the cheek that would normally elicit this reaction, but to an earlier attack which left no visible mark. But of course, he did have reason...

{{quote|'''Gideon''': You made me swallow my gum. That's going to be in my digestive tract for seven years!}}

 

== Literature ==

* [[Older Than Feudalism]]: In ''[[The Iliad]]'', Aphrodite gets cut by Diomedes. As a goddess, she cannot die, but she's completely unaccustomed to pain, causing her to run screaming to her brother Ares and plead with him to teach Diomedes a lesson. With the aid of Athena, Diomedes cuts Ares as well, and he has the same reaction, literally running home to cry to this mama.

* In [[Gordon Korman]]'s ''The Zucchini Warriors'', one of the [[Macdonald Hall]] football players (who has ironically given himself the nickname The Beast) gets a bruised elbow. He then insists that it's actually a compound fracture and walks around with his arm in a sling for nine weeks.

* One of the Queens in ''[[Alice in Wonderland]]'' freaks out excessively over a small cut...''before'' she receives the "injury." Afterward, she pays little heed to it.

 

== Live-Action TV ==

* On ''[[Friends]]'', Rachel accidentally head-butts Ross while giving birth, and he moans "you have ''no'' idea how much this hurts." All of the women in the room give him epic [[Death Glare|death glares]], and he shuts up.

* In ''[[The Office]]'', Michael Scott burns his foot on a George Foreman grill and is dismayed when nobody takes his injury seriously. He even tries to monopolize the doctor's attention at the hospital when Dwight is taken there with a pretty serious concussion.

* Variant: In ''[[Top Gear]]'', under hypnosis, presenter Richard Hammond was led to believe the tiny toy car he was riding was his new car, and that co-presenter Jeremy Clarkson had dinged it (by bumping it with another tiny car). He pitched a credible minor fit.

* In ''[[Chuck]]'', the title character is dodging bullets on a regular basis, and actually sees many people get shot, but when pretending to be a doctor and kidnapped by the bad guys, he is accidentally cut in the hand with a scalpel and immediately freaks out and starts babbling about how he gets woozy at the sight of blood. Needless to say, the baddie is not amused. At least, not until they both inhale an almost lethal amount of Nitris Oxide, and start laughing about how they're both about to die. This is sort of reversed when Chuck ends up hurting his leg when a windowsill closes on it. He tells everyone that it is only sprained, but later learns that it is actually a hairline fracture. He openly objects to having it treated at first, and later expresses unhappiness at having to wear a cast.

* The short-lived sketch show ''Fridays'' had a sketch in which guest star [[William Shatner]] played a man at a disco who overreacted to minor pain. When his dance partner (played by cast member Brandis Kemp) accidentally steps on his foot, Shatner's character reacts so violently that he tosses Kemp onto the ground and accidentally exposes her butt [[Thong of Shielding|clad only in thong underwear]] (when the episode that had that sketch reran, the shot of Kemp on the ground with her thong exposed was cut).

* In ''[[Kaizoku Sentai Gokaiger]]'', [[Big Bad]] Oiles Gill freaks out when Gokai Red manages to graze his arm with a single bullet, and spends the rest of that episode (as well as the next one) whining about how much it hurts and how he'll make the Gokaigers pay. This is, of course, done to show how much of a [[Spoiled Brat]] Gill is.

 

== Newspaper Comics ==

* Linus van Pelt, in an early ''[[Peanuts]]'' strip, panics big-time after bumping his head.

 

== Professional Wrestling ==

* Pretty much any move ever taken by Shawn Michaels, Marty Janetty, or Curt Hennig.

* A lot of the finishers are essentially sold to the crowd by doing this. The Stone Cold Stunner is a notable example (as is the hilarious way The Rock always flopped across the ring after receiving one).

* Almost anytime someone uses a grapple in pro wrestling, it's this. Grapples are usually applied lightly without using too much pressure, while the other wrestler screams and writhes as if it's agonizing. It's done for the [[Kayfabe]].

 

== Video Games ==

* ''[[Suikoden IV]]''. [[Dirty Coward|"Ow, my arm!"]]

* Possibly the best example would be the Witch from ''[[Left 4 Dead]]''. All you need to do to flip her crazy switch is to get too far inside her personal bubble. Stay there for a second too long and you'll be wondering how the pale, weeping waif just tore out your entrails.

* Dwarves in ''[[Dwarf Fortress]]'' will stay bedridden for years over broken toes or bruised fingers. This leads many players to design their hospitals to include magma-powered euthanasia devices.

* The pedestrians in ''[[Infamous (video game series)|In Famous]]'' will occasionally [[Artificial Stupidity|trip on the sidewalk or other low obstacles]] and then ''lay there squirming in pain'' until the player heals them.

 

== Web Comics ==

* In [[Chimneyspeak]], a small cut across the nose of wealthy heiress Chelsea Grinn caused her to go absolutely insane, and turn into an absolutely insane woman who is now covered in scars, is nigh unstoppable, and kills for basically no reason at all. The voice in her head representing what is left of her reason at one points gets angry and reminds her that they could have had a perfectly normal life if they just applied a small amount of makeup.

* [[Three Word Phrase]]: [http://threewordphrase.com/deathzone.htm Chapped lips while mountain climbing?] [[Cut the Safety Rope|Something must be done!]]

 

== Web Original ==

* In ''[[Awesome Series|PokeAwesome - Just a Pokemon Battle]]'', [[Pokémon|Ash's Pikachu]] is hit by a Solar Beam, causing him to hurt his knee. Half of the short is just Pikachu cussing out his opponent and Ash in his anger. This happening after [[Hypocritical Humor|whaling on a Venusaur with his "Thunder Smash."]]

 

== Western Animation ==

* In one episode of ''[[SpongeBob SquarePants]]'', Spongebob cries a fountain of tears simply because he stubbed his toe. This is the same character that [[Healing Factor|repeatedly rips his own arms off]] for a sight gag.

* Geoff did this in an episode of ''[[Total Drama Island]]'', while walking he suddenly fell over and grabbed his leg, screaming in pain. While all the other contestants rush to his side and agree he's way too injured to move on, the camera man zooms in on his leg and scans it over several times, confused that nothing's actually wrong. Finally, we see zoomed-in he has a tiny splinter. Needless to say, he's pampered for the rest of the episode.

{{quote|'''Eddy:''' ''(after the kids ambush them for quarters)'' Double D! Tell me you saved some! Tell me we're okay!!

'''Edd:''' Eddy! It was ''horrible'' Eddy! LOOK WHAT THEY DID TO MY SHIRT!! }}

** It's almost the whole plot of the episode 'Cry Ed', when Jimmy manages to hurt his foot with a ''clothespin'', and everybody in the Cul-de-sac starts fussing over him, leading Eddy to decide to get "injured" and sympathy, too.

* [[Transformers Prime|Knock Out]] actually has this as his [[Berserk Button]]. He's very proud of his paint job and takes any damage to it very seriously.

 

== Real Life ==

* In [[Association Football]], players often try to draw free kicks, etc. by "diving" - falling to the ground and pretending to be much more seriously injured than they actually are. The trope is effectively [[Lampshaded]] when, more often than not, said player gets up and runs off at full tilt when their pleas are ignored.

** This is known as "flopping" in basketball circles. Former Laker and Hornet Vlade Divac was considered the best around at drawing fouls from fleeting or non-existent contact.

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Injury Tropes]]

[[Category:Comedy Tropes]]