Mutilation Conga

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A character gradually accumulates Amusing Injuries over the course of a story, but rather than shrug them off, he shows the traces of every one of them, and ends up a bleeding, black-eyed Implacable Man limping toward his goal. He quite literally looks like the world has chewed him up and spat him back out.

Expect a lot of Clothing Damage, and an attitude of Tranquil Fury. Can be just as easily Played for Laughs or Played for Drama - the latter can work as a subversion of Just a Flesh Wound, as it shows that what doesn't kill you can still slow you down a hell of a lot.

Rasputinian Death is a subtrope where the injuries are each of the No One Could Survive That variety, and the final fatality actually sticks.

Compare: Crush Parade when characters and objects are repeatedly run over and trampled by different things; Scars Are Forever when a character bears the marks of past injuries for the rest of his life.

Examples of Mutilation Conga include:


Anime and Manga

  • Happens to virtually every male main character in Ranma ½ at some point in the series.

Comic Books

Fanfic

  • Happens to the hero of Sleeping with the Girls over the course of his adventures, and manages to be played for both Drama and Laughs at the same time.

Film

T-800: I need a vacation.

Literature

Live Action TV

Professional Wrestling

  • WWE's revival of ECW had Colin Delaney, a Jobber who would take brutal beatings and come out wearing more and more bandages every week.

Video Games

  • The health meter in Doom was a picture of a guy's face getting progressively bloodier and beaten up the more damage the player took.
  • The gun-toting mugger in Deja Vu suffers from this. Each of his first three confrontations can and should end with a punch to the face, and he gets both eyes swollen and a bloody nose before the fourth time, when such a punch gets you shot.
  • Max Payne is a non-comedic example.
  • Recurring Boss examples include Klungo in Banjo Tooie and King Bulblin in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Web Original

Western Animation

  • Homer Simpson has this happen multiple times, from the classic "Springfield Gorge" aftermath, and the time he tried to prove to Marge he loved her and ended up going through a bed of roses before falling out the aeroplane.
  • This sometimes happened to Finn in Adventure Time.
  • One Tom and Jerry cartoon had Tom showing the cumulative effects of each bit of comic mayhem befalling him - completely atypical of the usual business.