Back to Made of Explodium
- Armored Trooper VOTOMS: The titular ATs (Armored Troopers) of the franchise use a liquid called Polymer Ringers Solution that lets the machines move in a human-like way with hydraulics, similar to an advanced breaking fluid. Unfortunately the stuff is absurdly flammable, causing it to explode when subjected to sudden changes in temperature. One wonders why they decided "explodes easily" was an acceptable vehicle design flaw. Furthermore, as each of the StoryArcs of the show reach a climax, more and more explosions will be observed by the viewer, usually with absolutely EVERYTHING blowing up in the current location of the story in the final episode for that arc.
- Code Geass: The various Knightmare Frames can be counted upon to violently explode even after the most minor of hits; a single, glancing strike from a sword or Slash Harken is often enough to do it. The few times when it doesn't happen actually come as quite a surprise. This is probably because of the Sakuradite they all use, which makes you wonder why they would use it in such lightly guarded machines. One of the worst offenders is in Turn 18, when a Mook Mobile literally explodes when Suzaku uses his Knightmare to spin kick it. And it blocked!
- Daimos: Some Robeasts exploded, even if Kazuya only had punched through them or sliced in two pieces with a karate chop or sweeping kick. It was justified in the episode 9, though, when he fought a mecha had a nuke inside.
- Dead Leaves features exploding lipstick as part of Pandy's most successful moves.
- Dragon Ball:
- In Dragon Ball, Demon King Piccolo explodes after Goku punched through him.
- In Dragon Ball Z, the Cell Juniors explode when Gohan hits them. This happens again with Bujin and Bido in the Non-Serial Movie Dragon Ball Z: Bojack Unbound. This is most likely for censorship reasons, since the Cell Juniors don't explode in the manga and you see their crushed heads torn into pieces in detail.
- Gotenks' Dynamite Kick is actually just a normal kick. But Buu explodes a few seconds later.
- I'm the Evil Lord of an Intergalactic Empire!: There exists an interstellar STD that is asymptomatic in women, that causes men's penises to slowly swell until they explode. This gives further justification to Liam's trauma induced Paralyzing Fear of Sexuality, and a minor villain with the Punny Name Peter Petack gets it as a Karmic STD.
- When the Kaiju climb up onto the dock in the first episode of Gaiking: Legend of Daiku Maryu, there's an explosion with every step they take. The entire dock appears to be made of Explodium.
- Gundam:
- If your mobile suit gets hit in the torso, it ''will'' explode in a spectacular manner. If a ship (spacefaring or seafaring) takes a certain critical amount of damage, it will explode in a spectacular manner. In addition, Gundamverse tanks appear to be Made of Explodium as well, since they regularly blow up when struck by the large caliber machine guns often wielded by mobile suits. This is rather puzzling when you think about it, since it's damnably hard to get a tank to explode in real life.
- Gundam as a whole tends to zigzag this when it comes to warships: While a ship destroyed onscreen will usually explode, scenes in past battlefields typically have plenty of clearly destroyed wrecks that are otherwise mostly in one piece.
- The original show indicated this was the result of a mobile suit's reactor going critical, and even managed to play it for some drama in the first episode - when Amuro straight-up chopped the first Zaku in half with his beam saber, the resulting explosion made a decent-sized hole in the colony and ended up sucking quite a few people and objects out into space, forcing him to carefully stab the second one through the cockpit to disable it without letting it blow up and probably destroy the colony outright before the civilians were fully evacuated.
- Z Gundam has a scene in one of the first episodes, where a GM II lands on the ground, without being damaged at all. It still blows up for some reason.
- The Leos of Gundam Wing are the worst by far; they seem to be painted with C4. There's even an infamous scene where a pair of Leos explode due to a buster rifle shot that misses them.
- It is implied in-universe that the Buster Rifle's beams are radioactive, and that it's actually the radiation that causes Leos to blow up.
- Without their forcefields, the Virgos are this, to the point where even punching off their head/camera causes them to blow up.
- This was Lampshaded in SD Gundam Force when they enter Lacroa (a medieval-themed world using Gundam Wing mecha) the Pawn Leos explode and revert back to card form when damaged. The rest of the group is confused while Zero brings up that they always do this.
- In Gundam 00, everything blows up. One example involved the 00 Gundam quartering an asteroid its swords, triggering expansion in pockets of frozen gases sufficiently to cause the surface to rupture with extreme force and leading to a spectacular explosion.
- Mobile Suit Gundam: The 08th MS Team takes an interesting approach to this trope. While it generally follows the exploding rule, many mecha are simply damaged to inoperation from machine gun fire about as often as they explode. However, during one scene, it's discovered a mobile suit is going to completely explode, starting from its reactor. Since mobile suits are operated by nuclear power, this is a very big deal, and it becomes a scramble to evacuate before the suit explodes. Which makes one wonder why no one else ever makes a big deal about all the Zakus and Doms blowing up all over the place...
- The 08th MS Team is by far the most realistic of all Gundam shows to date; the only time a mobile suit is documented as exploding was when the Federation were sending GM teams into the Zeon base in hopes of setting off booby traps left in the base entrance. This, however, did not work.
- This goes double in Gundam Unicorn, Marida Cruz was shooting to kill. But she made sure that no reactors are hit. And when it hits...it took out the colony with it.
- There is also Usso making a point to not destroy suits via a hit to the reactor. This is for two reasons, the first is that by this point the earth is so war-ravaged that everyone doesn't know how many more blasts it will take before become something of a dust ball. And the second is as much as the suits are smaller now, they are still VERY much nuclear... and a hit to the reactor will bring one to critical mass quickly.
- In Gundam F91, the Crossbone Vanguard invents a weapon specifically to avoid doing this. The shotlancer is a hydraulic lance that can be fired like a giant lawn dart or used as a melee weapon; either way, the intent is that it damages the enemy mobile suit's reactor cooling systems, triggering the safety cutoff.
- War in the Pocket takes 08th MS Team in the sense Mobile suit combat leaves metal husks. With the exception of the Kampfer fight scene, the mechs don't explode cleanly and flaming debris hits the general population with particularly brutal results.
- In Jo Jos Bizarre Adventure Diamond Is Unbreakable, this is what the Stand Killer Queen does — its power turns objects and even people into explosives.
- Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha StrikerS:
- Cinque's Inherent Skill is the ability to turn any metal into explodium. She usually applies it to her knives.
- When Wendi shoots a disabled Type III Gadget Drone with a shot that causes this, it causes a massive explosion.
- The Relics in StrikerS. Being filled to the brim with magical energy, they explode spectacularly when they break. One of them was the cause of the airport fire at the start of the season.
- Mazinger: Many Mechanical Beasts from Mazinger Z exploded easily -and spectacularly- even if there was no reason for it (other than animating spectacular explosions, of course). Aeros B3 reinforced this trope: it was loaded with explosives since its purpose was diving in Mount Fuji and exploding within it to awaken the volcano and bury the Institute under a tidal wave of lava. A subversion was Balanger M1, that were clusters of submarine, guided mines did NOT explode but stuck to their target and shocked it with electricity. Several Warrior Monsters and Saucer Beast from Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer also followed this trope.
- For some strange reason, Negi's duplicates in Negima! Magister Negi Magi's Kyoto Arc don't just poof back to paper like normal when you kiss them. Instead, they explode.
- Neon Genesis Evangelion's Angels sometimes play with this. The third (which is the first encountered) encountered blows up in a cross-shaped explosion, the seventh and tenth form new lakes when they explode, and the sixteenth blows up the entire city when it dies. This is probably out of convenience, as it takes several episodes to clear out the body of one of the Angels that doesn't blow up.
- Ninja Slayer: From the animation, this is how every ninja dies when defeated. They shout "SAYONARA!" and go KABOOM!
- One Piece has Baroques Work assassin Mr. 5, whose devil fruit makes his entire body this.
- Pokémon: The Series:
- The show has been doing this trope for attacks to blast Team Rocket off since the beginning, and has been using it recently even when TR's not involved.
- How the hell does a stream of water explode from hitting a barrage of sharp leaves?
- In the games, there are actually two attacks (Selfdestruct and Explosion) and an ability (Aftermath), which cause Pokémon to explode in a way that only knocks them out.
- Bulbapedia's page on "Anime Physics"
discusses the tendency for things to explode in the anime. "Most attacks explode when they connect with an opposing attack, even if the attacks would not normally do so." The entry lampshades the water/leaves explosions and the "moves amplified in power and even made to explode just to enable them to blast off Team Rocket", and notices "Some moves explode when they clearly cannot, such as a Bite attack." - Taken to the extreme with James' Carnivine. Early on in the DP saga, it caused an explosion if it did pretty much anything.
- Most of Clemont's inventions quickly go boom. Apparently the kid who built a robot duplicate of himself has never heard of fuses.
- Queen Millennia: Tsukuba Observatory tries to analyze one of the meteorites by drilling it with a laser. Shortly, everyone has to evacuate before it explodes with nuclear power.
- Ranma ½:
- Bakusai Tenketsu. Okay, even if you can destroy things by hitting some sort of natural weakpoint in their structure with your bare finger (even though your finger couldn't penetrate their surface in the first place, realistically)...why would they blow up with maximum shrapnel?!
- Gosunkugi once receives a mail-order armor which he puts on to help him overpower Ranma. It turns out that there's a mechanism installed into it (described in the instruction manual and all), which will cause the armor to blow up if he doesn't defeat Ranma within a certain time limit. Yes, for absolutely no reason.
- The Big Cheese in Samurai Pizza Cats has a tendency to explode violently whenever his plans fail. In one episode his entire extended family is shown to have this trait, and in another his advisor Jerry Atric explodes when he's unable to.
- Samurai 7: Not only do robots immediately explode when cut in half, the explosion begins at a point between the two halves, where there isn't actually any robot left. Perhaps it's volatile gas igniting from the sparks of the sword's passage?
- Sgt. Frog: Viper, a rival alien invader, explodes "for some reason" when he's defeated by the Keroro Platoon.
- Pretty much anyone who drives a car and doesn't have a name in Speed Racer is going to have this happen to them. Sometimes they're shown to be unharmed (if they're relevant to the plot for longer than fifteen seconds), but most of the time it's live and let die. Somewhat accurate for the time, since race cars were pretty volatile in the '60s, but wildly overdone. You can tell where most of the animation budget went after a quick race or two.
- Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann:
- While every mech that's beaten blows up, you can tell how important it is by how spectacular the explosions are. The ones found at the end of the arcs generally have them making three-pronged dust clouds and blowing up repeatedly. The Final Battle had the Big Bad blowing out about seven times, and in different colors each time.note
- The Mugann, in particular, are literally Made of Explodium, on purpose: When defeated, they turn into lots of pieces that fall down and explode on impact. The intent is to make their enemies afraid to destroy them near populated areas. They detonate quite spectacularly in one episode where Simon and Viral annihilate an entire fleet of them just by showing up. And it appears the more of them are in one cloud, the bigger their death explosion will be.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!: In later seasons of various monsters explode when defeated and the shockwave blow away the duelists somewhat. It becomes more questionable since they're holograms, so they shouldn't cause any physical force at all. Kaiba actually mentions this in his second duel with Yugi, explaining that the shockwaves from his dragon being destroyed would be powerful enough to blow him off the castle. Commented on in the Abridged version: "For some reason, playing a Children's Card Game has caused me to become severely injured." "Somehow, a hologram with no real physical form just hurt me."
