Mortal Wound Reveal/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Someone is shown, unexpectedly, to have sustained a deadly wound.

  • Straight: After a vicious fight, Lara Lovintrest's face is shown in close-up by the camera as the rest of the Five-Man Band celebrate. The camera pans down, and the audience sees that she has sustained a serious wound to the stomach. She collapses.
  • Exaggerated: After a vicious fight, Lara Lovintrest appears fine, until a camera pan reveals that her entire midsection has been blown away. Then her top half splits down the middle, for good measure. Deader Than Dead.
  • Justified: The camera pan that reveals the mortal wound is following the gaze of the hero, who initially meets Lara Lovintrest's blank gaze with an excited grin, realises something is wrong, and slowly forces himself to look down. Thus, the reveal occurs in-universe as well as outside it.
  • Inverted: Lara Lovintrest charges ahead of the party, into impossible odds. The camera cuts away, then back to the now-apparently-dying character, with no shot of the wound she is implied to have sustained at all. She lives, however, and goes onto live a happy fulfilled life.
  • Subverted: Lara Lovintrest goes pale after an intense action scene -- a stray bullet, oh unkind fates! has pierced her completely through. On closer inspection, she's just faint from fear, and the deadly wound a mere scratch.
  • Double Subverted: After taking a while to recover from the flesh wound, Lara Lovintrest is hit AGAIN in the very next battle/event. She dies. Bonus points if she bravely stutters something along the lines of, "I guess I won't be coming back *cough, cough* this time."
  • Parodied: A token minority is repeatedly cut to by the camera after any vaguely threatening event, while the entire rest of the cast look expectantly at him. He eventually gets annoyed by this, and tells the audience to quit playing to cheap stereotypes. And promptly is killed by Mortal Wound Reveal in the next shot.
  • Deconstructed: The Mortal Wound Reveal is used in a Film Within A Film by a twisted psychopath, who uses the shot as a way to prolong his weird cathartic pleasure in the deaths of his little 'characters'.
  • Reconstructed: The main character, after saving Lara Lovintrest from the evil clutches of Filmstudent Mcstandin, realises she is dying. Not wishing to look, she asks him to do it anyway as a way of recognising that she is dying, and that that's important.
  • Zig Zagged: In a Horror film, the main bad guy receives multiple Mortal Wound Reveals, each apparently more fatal than the last. He resists them all, seemingly using the slow, anguished Mortal Wound Reveals of others. Eventually, he is impossibly gravely wounded by a simple blade of grass, thrown by a virgin, in accordance with the rituals that bound him.
  • Averted: Everyone stays in a nice safe house and has a discussion about the necessity or otherwise of Negative Dialectics. For some reason.
  • Enforced: Joss Whedon needs to feed from the sweet life-giving tears of his audience. So he plays this trope in the milkiest, hammiest, cheesiest way possible, on a main character. I feel hungry.
  • Lampshaded: While running from the Big Bad, the hero sees Lara Lovintrest apparently standing stock-still in fright some way back. The Lancer pulls his arm to continue, telling him that she's clearly dead.
  • Invoked: ???
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: The team make sure that they can keep an eye on each other and on their physical health at all times.
  • Discussed: ???
  • Conversed: ???

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