Mutilation Conga

2 Following

• Marshal Bass: First Samson gets a horseshoe to the head. Then a tomahawk to the head. Then several punches to the head. Then a horse kicks him in the head. Finally, he is shot... in the head.
• Preacher: Herr Starr was disfigured in his youth by fellow children chanting "a star for a Starr" as they blinded him in one eye with a piece of glass (the gangleader was later found with his stomach full of weed killer), which made him lose his hair. He then goes on to variously get a huge scar on his head that makes it look like a penis, have his leg eaten by cannibals, get his penis eaten by a dog, and finally get the top of his head blown off.
• We3: Over time, the animals become more and more beaten up, losing mechanical parts and gaining injuries to their flesh. Most harrowing is the headshot 3 takes, which sticks with him until the end. Ends on a slightly happy note; by the end, 1 and 2 have had their metal parts torn off, leaving mangy and injured but still normal looking animals.

• In Misplaced👁 Image
  (a crossover fic between Naruto and Mass Effect), during the events of Mass Effect 2, the Normandy crew is hunted by an original antagonist known only as the Huntress, the top agent of a black ops organization called "The Tribe" who have been tasked to apprehend Naruto for human experimentation in order to unlock the secrets of chakra. Every time she has gone up against the crew, she ends up getting mutilated or losing a body part. By the time of her final appearance, she is a heavily-cybernetic asari cyborg, with most of her face a metal exoskeleton centered around a red eye with some cybernetic limbs.
• Snap goes through this in Play the Game. His determination to save Rudy and Penny is strong enough for him to keep pushing himself forward. His willingness to keep going despite the pain he is clearly in ends up freaking resident Big Bad Bardot out.
• 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.

• "Mouse Trouble": Tom shows the cumulative effects of each bit of comic mayhem befalling him — completely atypical of the usual Tom and Jerry business.

• Brendan gets repeatedly beaten up in Brick; by the end of the movie, he's limping and coughing up blood.
• The whole premise of Death Becomes Her: Who Wants to Live Forever? if you stop healing from your injuries?
• John McClane is pretty beat up by the end of Die Hard — the three sequels, not quite so much.
• By the end of Fargo, Showalter is not only fuming from the Plethora of Mistakes but also limping from Shep's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and bleeding heavily from a gunshot to the jaw.
• Ferris Bueller's Day Off has Mr. Rooney go through this as part of his Humiliation Conga. In his crusade against Ferris, Rooney ends up with a busted nose courtesy of Jeanie and an extensive collection of bitemarks from the Ferris' rottweiler.
• I'm Gonna Git You Sucka: Leonard and Willie suffer a series of injuries throughout, mostly by being repeatedly captured and thrown down flights of stairs.
• John Wick 1: John's body takes a lot of abuse during his Roaring Rampage of Revenge. He gets even more banged up in John Wick: Chapter 2, and by the end of John Wick: Chapter 3 – Parabellum, Wick's body is decorated with bruises, stab wounds and bullet holes.
• In Kill Bill, this happens to Elle "California Mountain Snake" Driver's eyes: the first is snatched out by Pai Mei as punishment for disrespect when she was studying kung fu under him (as shown in a flashback), and the second by the Bride during a duel, who then proceeds to crush it underfoot.
• The Millennium Trilogy: Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played with Fire, after a gunshot to the head, being Buried Alive in a shallow grave, and surviving an epic fight with her father, is so bloodied up that her badass Dumb Muscle half-brother takes one look at her and runs for his life, thinking she's a zombie.
• National Lampoon's European Vacation: The British bicyclist played by Eric Idle who repeatedly runs into the Griswald family. Hilarity ensues, and the bicyclist becomes progressively more injured.
• Both of the Implacable Man main characters in No Country for Old Men. They repeatedly manage to wing each other, escape, take cover and perform horribly squirm-inducing self-surgery on their wounds before limping back into their game of cat-and-mouse.
• The T-800 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day: first he cuts off the outer flesh of one arm to prove he is what he claims to be to Dyson, then he gets shot up by the cops and beaten up by the T-1000. By the end, he's been impaled through his torso, his legs barely function, one of his arms is completely torn off and a large chunk of flesh is missing from his face and his chest:
  T-800: I need a vacation.
• Happens in Vampire in Brooklyn to Julius, who becomes The Renfield and steadily suffers from injury and rot until the end, where he finds his master's ring and gains all his power, restoring his body (and then some) in the process.

Examples by creator:

• Appears frequently in the works of Jack Chalker, though given Chalker's other interests, the actual mechanism is frequently (but not always) a Forced Transformation. Chalker actually addressed this through an Author Avatar near the end of The Messiah Choice; heroic tales require genuine sacrifice on a heroic scale.

Examples by work title:

• Double or Die: Wolfgang Smith is initially described to be a very normal-looking man, especially next to his tall, skeletal brother Ludwig. He then starts losing bodyparts in several incidents: he loses his right ear when a spark plug flies off from a burning car, Bond knocks out several of his teeth with a piece of marble, he loses four fingers from his left hand when they are caught between two colliding barges, and lastly, his legs are sliced off when a towrope cuts off and whips across the deck of the ship he's on.
• In the Dragaera series, Vlad Taltos also seems to be accumulating injuries, to the point that Steven Brust lampshaded it with a Tim Powers pastiche as part of an extended joke at the end of Iorich.
• It happens as a jump cut rather than extended narration, but The First Law features an inversion of this: an Eater being interrogated by the Inquisition and painlessly collecting a series of third-degree burns, deep cuts, broken limbs, and other horrific injuries as her Healing Factor starts to run down. The session yields questions instead of answers and, in the face of her defiance and apparent immunity to pain, one of the non-plussed Practicals even claims to be "half-way to breaking, myself" by the end.
• The T'lan Imass from the Malazan Book of the Fallen, being already a race of walking skeletons, can take quite a lot of damage before they are considered damaged enough to be put to rest somewhere with a nice vista. In House of Chains, Onrack gets half his skull bitten off, chewed by a Deragoth, and loses an arm, but keeps going cheerfully.
• The short story "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" by Ray Bradbury contains a strangely non-violent and non-antagonistic example. The protagonist eventually starts to lose his cachet, and his audience. He becomes a hit again with the avant garde crowd when he loses a finger and replaces it with a novel prosthetic. This becomes his ongoing means of retaining a following, and explains the story's title.

• Doctor Who: "The End of Time" puts the Tenth Doctor through the wringer. By the end, he's been zapped with lightning and gotten cuts and other injuries from falling through a skylight, all before the radiation that actually makes him regenerate.
• Game of Thrones: Lord Beric Dondarrion bears the scars of all the fatal injuries he was resurrected from, including a missing eye and the mark of a hangman's noose.
• It's a bit of a dark Running Gag that each season of Hannibal ends with Smug Snake Dr. Frederick Chilton being subjected to increasingly debilitating and disfiguring injuries.^note This is in contrast to the book and film series that inspired the show, where Chilton is probably eaten by Hannibal Lecter at the end of The Silence of the Lambs but is otherwise intact through most of the stories in which he appears. Fans like to joke that Chilton is the Hannibal Alternate Company Equivalent to Rickety Cricket from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia (see below).
  • At the end of Season One, his abdominal organs are pulled out by a copycat killer to Hannibal himself; we learn at the start of Season Two that he was saved, though he lost a kidney and some of his gastric function.
  • At the end of Season Two, he's shot in the face by a patient weaponized against him by Hannibal; in Season Three, we catch up with him wearing dentures, makeup, and a prosthetic eye to conceal the damage.
  • At the end of Season Three, Chilton's lips are bitten off by Francis "Red Dragon" Dolarhyde before he's strapped to a wheelchair and set on fire. Notably, this was Freddy Lounds' fate in Red Dragon, while the show's female counterpart Freddie Lounds is unscathed, despite a Season Two fake-out that initially lead the viewer and characters to believe exactly this had happened to her and the preservation of the plot point that it was Lounds' writing about the "the Tooth Fairy" that enraged Dolarhyde in the first place — he just took it out on Chilton instead!
  • Bryan Fuller has stated that if there had been a fourth season of Hannibal, Chilton would have still lived to see it (with the help of extensive skin grafts) and presumably been mutilated yet again in the climax.
• In the How I Met Your Mother episode "Murtaugh", Barney tries to live like a 21-year-old for a weekend, and this is what happens.
• Poor Rickety Cricket in It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia suffers some kind of permanent injury or deformation almost every episode he appears in, frequently because of the carelessness or maliciousness of the main characters. Over the course of the series he's had his neck slashed open, lost an eye, had his kidney stolen, had a toe bitten off by a cat, and had half his face burned off. This is on top of numerous non-anatomical degradations such as falling out of the priesthood, becoming homeless, and getting addicted to hard drugs.

• 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.

• Klungo from Banjo-Tooie is a Recurring Boss example. After being defeated by Banjo and Kazooie, he returns to Grunty and takes more beatings from her. He looks more and more battered each time he faces the bear and bird heroes, until he finally pulls a Heel–Face Turn by the end, lamenting that even his wife won't want to see the way he looks.
• BLOODMONEY! (2025): Harvey receives increasingly gnarly disfigurements as the player tortures him with different items, from small cuts and bruises to getting stabbed in his left eye, set on fire, slashed in his cheek and losing his left hand. The Bad Ending culminates in you finishing him off with a gun.
• The gun-toting mugger in Déjà Vu (1985) 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.
• The health meter in Doom (1993) is a picture of Doomguy's face getting progressively bloodier and more beaten up the more damage the player takes.
• King Bulblin from The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess is a Recurring Boss example.
• In Spec Ops: The Line, Captain Walker becomes increasingly scarred as the game progresses; by the end, he's covered in burns, walks with a heavy limp, and his voice goes from crisp and concise military jargon to parched and bloodthirsty curses. The physical damage also reflects his Sanity Slippage.

• Happy Tree Friends: Quite a handful of episodes will have at least one character (usually among the starring ones) gradually accumulate more and more injuries as they become the most unluckiest being alive. Expect that character to suffer a slow and agonizing death. Major episodes that do this are: "Eye Candy", "The Chokes on You", "Water Way to Go", "Brake the Cycle", "An Inconvenient Tooth", "Ski Ya, Wouldn't Wanna Be Ya", "Can't Stop Coffin", "Whose Line is it Anyway?" and all of the "Sniffles vs. The Ant Family" episodes.

• The main character of The Horribly Slow Murderer with the Extremely Inefficient Weapon is beaten to death with a spoon. For years on end. By the end, his body is just one giant bruise.

• Joshua, a minor character from Clarence (2014), gets injured in every episode he appears in. Unlike the other characters on the show, he keeps his scars for following appearances, including an eyepatch and a hook hand.
• G.I. Joe: Renegades: In Major Bludd's first appearance, he loses an eye. In his second appearance, his arm gets ripped off by a crocodie.
• The My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "It's About Time" begins with Twilight Sparkle getting a visit from her disheveled future self (actually, she's from next Tuesday). Over the course of the episode, her efforts to prevent the "impending disaster" she believes is coming result in her gradually accumulating the injuries her future self had.
• Baxter Stockman undergoes this throughout Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2003), being punished by the Shredder by having parts of his body removed for every failure, until he is a Brain in a Jar by Season 3.