And I Must Scream

Immortality is a lot less fun when you're a tortured, voiceless blob.

A spirit trapped within a tree, no mouth to scream or eyes to see.
A cage of bark, a prison of wood. A thing of rage where nature stood.

— The Grand Oak on the Sylvans, Dragon Age: Origins

A character suffers from a Fate Worse than Death of the highest order. Suicide not an option; even death never comes to free them from it. They are immobilized or otherwise contained, unable to communicate with anyone, and unlikely to be removed from this situation — not even by death — anytime in the foreseeable future.

This is often a variation of Taken for Granite in which the victim remains conscious, and the worst-case scenario for tropes such as Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere, Forced Transformation, Phantom-Zone Picture, and Who Wants to Live Forever?.

Usually, when this arises, it is eternal unless they're freed by outside forces, but a "mere" years-long or centuries-long fate is possible. For instance, a robot with a 100-year battery life getting buried underground. In fact, this is a very common sci-fi trope involving artificial intelligences who are potentially immortal due to being made of software. Unfortunately, if a victim is rescued, they may well have been driven insane from the experience. (Some of the listed examples show exactly that.)

It's also very common for the afterlife to involve this trope. Hell is often represented as a place where those who were evil in life, or who followed the wrong religion, suffer for eternity with no hope of ever getting out. In other cases, often involving The Nothing After Death, everyone is doomed to this fate when they die.

Horrifically, this trope is a common symptom of several diseases in Real Life. Locked In Syndrome for example is a condition where someone lays in something similar to a coma, unable to utilize their limbs or speak, but they are fully conscious. Stephen Hawking would have suffered an And I Must Scream fate from his Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis, if it weren't for the computer that allowed him to speak.

Sometimes appears as a Backstory, if a Sealed Person in a Can was aware while sealed away. Can overlap with Go Mad from the Isolation if the character's separated from other people rather than among them but unable to interact. Also a handy way to punish the villain with a horrible fate, while still leaving a door open for them to return someday.

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Examples subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
  • The DCU
  • Marvel Universe
• Fan Works
• Films — Animation
• Films — Live-Action
• Literature
  • Gamebooks
• Live-Action TV
• Tabletop Games
• Video Games
• Webcomics
• Web Original
  • SCP Foundation
• Western Animation

Other examples:

Animation

• Gypsy Tales: Near the end of "The Gypsy Woman and the Devil", Vunida is transformed into a fully conscious, immobile tree. When her children pass by her in tree form, all she can do is to silently cry.

Audio Plays

• In Adventures in Odyssey when Mr. Whitaker made a program to simulate the afterlife in The Mortal Coil, Eugine, who was not a believer at the time disobeyed Tom Riley and used the program after him. Unfortunately for him, as it is a Christian franchise, the program simulated the afterlife of the individual based on the Bible. So while Mr. Whitaker was in a coma dreaming about heaven, Eugene was unfortunately not a believer at the time, and Mr. Whitaker made his program far more Biblically accurate then fire and brimstone. He recounts his adventure to his co-worker Connie as follows:
  "It-it was the most horrifying thing I've ever experienced. I've never felt such loneliness or isolation. It was as if I was completely separated from everyone and everything: completely and thoroughly alone. Not as though I was off by myself somewhere, but-but as though I were non-existent in a black void of solitude. I was alone Connie. Utterly alone in a burning blackness and I've had nothing but nightmares since then."
  • To Mr. Whitaker’s credit, he would not have intended for anyone to experience Hell, and the episode ends with him realizing that making the program was a terrible idea.
• In Big Finish Doctor Who, the final regeneration of The Eleven is treated this way. As they lay writhing in pain with Artron energy, scrambling to find the MacGuffin of the story which would preserve them as they are, they end up regenerating regardless forcing the Eleven to be a voice in the head of the next regeneration the Twelve, doomed to be stuck with the voices he's been stuck with their entire lives. They break down upon realising this.
• The Big Finish Doctor Who Unbound story, "He Jests at Scars..." features an alternate version of "The Trial of a Time Lord", where the Valeyard triumphs over the Sixth Doctor and gains the Doctor's remaining regenerations and his TARDIS. He goes on to create havoc across the universe, with massive consequences, even accidentally killing the First and Fourth Doctors and severely damaging the web of time. In the end, the damage is so severe that the Valeyard considers himself so dangerous to everything, that any action he takes would cause more harm. Since he is symbiotically linked the TARDIS, it responds by sitting in the middle of the time vortex with the Valeyard and Mel trapped onboard in an illusionary world. However, the power runs out and the illusion fades to reveal the two trapped in the console room by forcefields, unable to move, and soon, according to the Valeyard, unable to talk. However, since the Valeyard and the TARDIS are symbiotically linked, neither can die until the other dies, and both are keeping the other alive, and by extension Mel alive, for all eternity.

Fairy Tales

• Hans Christian Andersen's "The Girl Who Trod on the Loaf": The title character is punished for her vanity by becoming a statue in Hell. She's able to hear everything being said about her by the living.

Music

• This is the fate of the astronauts in "Pioneers Over C" by VanDerGraafGenerator:
  Doomed to vanish in the flickering light
  disappearing to a darker night
  doomed to vanish in a living death
  living antimatter, anti-breath
• "Hyperspace Cryogenic Insomnia Blues" by Tom Smith, in which the singer is awake during his cryogenic sleep.
  We're two weeks out of Terran orbit
  Ten years left to go...
• This seems to be the fate of Gloryhammer's immortal Big Bad Zargothrax when he's trapped in liquid ice (?) at the end of the first album. In the fourth album, he's released by his clone in an alternative timeline and describes his imprisonment as "decades of torment". In the original timeline, he was frozen for a thousand years before being released by the Chaos Wizards in the second album. It probably doesn't have much of an effect on his psychology — aside from a brief comical glimpse of his origins in "Keeper of the Celestial Flame of Abernethy", he's always shown as a Card-Carrying Villain of pure megalomaniac evil.
• Metallica:
  • "Trapped Under Ice" is about someone who's frozen alive yet still conscious.
    I don't know how to live through this hell
    Woken up, I'm still locked in this shell
    Frozen soul, frozen down to the core
    Break the ice, I can't take anymore
    Freezing, can't move at all
    Screaming, can't hear my call
    I am dying to live
    Cry out—I'm trapped under ice
  • "One", inspired by Johnny Got His Gun, focuses on a soldier who has his eyes, ears, mouth, arms, and legs destroyed (by a WW1 German artillery shell in Johnny and a Vietnamese landmine in "One"), but is still conscious. Though he eventually manages to communicate with the doctors and military men keeping him alive, they refuse to disconnect his life support, and he presumably must exist in that condition (unable to communicate with anyone, see or hear anything, go anywhere, etc.) for the rest of his natural life. Now there's an unsettling thought. The song itself tells the story rather well, especially with these lines:
    Darkness imprisoning me
    All that I see, absolute horror
    I cannot live, I cannot die
    Trapped in myself, body my holding cell
    Landmine has taken my sight
    Taken my speech, taken my hearing
    Taken my arms, taken my legs
    Taken my soul, left me with life in Hell!
• The song "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath is about a man from a post-apocalyptic world where everything was devastated by a man made of metal. He travels back in time to warn the people of the past, but something goes wrong during the time travel process and "he was turned to steel." He is aware of his surroundings, but unable to move or speak, and he is completely ignored by everyone who sees him. He is driven insane and when he finally regains mobility, he goes on a rampage and devastates everything.
• Iron Savior's song "Watcher in the Sky" is from the point of view of the living brain of Iron Savior as the spaceship travels endlessly, out of his control and increasingly unresponsive.
• Pompeii by Bastiel, imagines a hypothetical conversation between two roman citizens who were essentially fossilized by the volcano, waiting for centuries as statues. Obviously they are unable to move, unable to see, unable to speak, only able to think.
  "Manty days fell away with nothing to show...In your pose as the dust settles around us...How am I ever gonna be an optimist about this?"
• Queensrÿche's "Screaming In Digital" perfectly inverts the Trope Namer, taking the POV of a sentient AI which, though granted consciousness by its domineering maker ('father'), is callously denied the option to exercise free will or communicate with anyone else.
• The video to Radiohead's "There There" has Thom Yorke turned into a tree. A tree with his screaming face still visible.
• "Brain Dead" by Judas Priest is about a man suffering from locked-in syndrome who desperately wants to die.
• "Bird Song" by Florence + the Machine.
• "Blow Up the Outside World" by Soundgarden. The speaker is essentially singing about how much his life sucks, yet no matter how hard he tries, he either cannot bring himself to suicide, or simply fails at it again and again.
• The second-to-last verse of Current 93's epic I Have A Special Plan For This World:
  There are some who have no voices
  Or none that will ever speak
  Because of the things they know about this world
  And the things they feel about this world
  Because the thoughts that fill a brain
  That is a damaged brain
  Because the pain that fills a body
  That is a damaged body
  Exists in other worlds
  Countless other worlds
  Each of which stands alone in an infinite empty blackness
  For which no words are being conceived
  And where no voices are able to speak
  When a brain is filled only with damaged thoughts
  When a damaged body is filled only with pain
  And stands alone in a world surrounded by infinite empty blackness
  And exists in a world for which there is no special plan.
• The whole decay process in the song "The Hearse Song".
• "Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens can be seen as someone trying to make the best of this.
• "The Song That Never Ends" is an example of this once the Fridge Horror sets in. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was. And they'll continue singing it forever just because this is the song that never ends. Yes it goes on and on my friends. Some people started singing it...
• The song "Alien Breed", from Death Metal band Internal Bleeding, has this line:
  I am unable to speak
  I am unable to scream
  I watch in horror
  As the experiment goes on before me
• mothy's Re_Birthday is the theme song of this trope. Just listen to it!. For any not wanting to click the link, basically he's trapped in darkness where he can't hear or see anything and based on manual information it is most possibly the womb of a small doll.
• The song "Hamburger Lady" by English band Throbbing Gristle to some extent. The song is based on a short writing by Dr. Al Ackerman who seconds as a from past medical experiences author. The story is focused on a woman burnt severely from the waist up, cutting off all senses and leaving her in a continuous state of agony.
• In the Rush song "Hemispheres", an emissary to the gods Apollo and Dionysus pilots a spaceship into the black hole of Cygnus X-1, so as to pass through the Astral Door:
  I have memory and awareness, but I have no shape or form.
  As a disembodied spirit, I am dead, and yet unborn.
  I have passed into Olympus, as was told in tales of old,
  To the city of immortals, marble white and purest gold.
  
  I see the gods in battle rage on high:
  Thunderbolts across the sky!
  I cannot move, I cannot hide.
  I feel a silent scream begin inside.
• "Nightingale" by The Reign of Kindo is about a man left paralyzed and unable to speak after a car accident. To make things worse for him, his girlfriend left him for another man after the fact.
  "I was driving fast, with roses on my seat
  And headed home, I was late, with dinner getting cold
  When I was struck in the side of the car,
  And then I saw your face, I couldn't move, I couldn't say a word to you
  
  And everything in my world was yours,
  When I held you tenderly
  Oh now, my world is caving in, cause you're sleeping next to him,
  If I could die, you bet your life I would..."
• The Mechanisms
  • "Lost In The Cosmos" tells the story of Drumbot Brian, or at least the part he remembers- the part where he dies, wherein he is strapped to a rocket and shot into space, until Dr Carmilla finds him and rebuilds every part of his body but his still-beating heart.
    Sinews fixed forever more
    All alone and a-lowly
    His bones encased in a screaming form
    Lost in the cosmos lonely
    At last his heart, its beating slowed
    All alone and a-lowly
    But it did not cease, his tale was not o’er
    Lost in the cosmos lonely
  • "Sleeping Beauty", from the Rock Opera Once Upon a Time in Space contains this, in the lines from Briar Rose's perspective:
    Wires through my veins and my tendons,
    Keeping safe my hateful old lord
    Protecting his infernal defence grid,
    Unwillingly my lifeblood is poured
    I once heard them say a kiss could wake me up
    But I hope my prince will bring a sword
  • The fate of all who die in the City from the Rock Opera Ulysses Dies at Dawn is to have their brains entered into the Acheron, a vast neural network where their barely there consciousnesses are forced into a semi-living purgatory, unable to voice their pain.
    At this point, some words of explanation are needed. Understand, a whole planet covered with steel and wire needs a lot of computing power to run. And there’s no processor more powerful or abundant than the brain. So you have the Acheron, a vast network of dead minds, however badly damaged, plugged in and kicked back into a half-conscious hell to run the City. All ruled over by a mad bastard by the name of Hades.
  • Freya's fate in "Ragnarok II: The Calling", from the Rock Opera The Bifrost Incident. The influences of the Old Ones fuse her to the Ratatosk Express to watch the rest of the carnage.
    The silver and the platinum of etchings on the wall
    Reach to her, her melting skin their cold embrace appalls
    As she fuses to the core of this abomination train
    Forever watching, but robbed of any way to voice her pain

Mythology & Religion

• Classical Mythology:
  • Prometheus's punishment from Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humanity is to be chained to a rock and have his ever-regrowing liver serve as a buffet for an eagle for eternity. However, he still exults in being able to resist telling Zeus the secret of his eventual overthrowal, a fate that Zeus has been anxious to evade ever since the start of his reign. Unlike other examples of this trope in Greek mythology, Heracles eventually frees him.
  • Atlas is condemned to bear the heavens (not the world) on his shoulders for eternity. He was later turned to stone by Athena or Perseus, using Medusa's head, which in some versions is treated as a Mercy Kill as he could no longer stand the weight.
  • Most of the Greek Titans are bound in Tartarus. As are the giants.
  • Typhon is forever trapped under Mount Etna after Zeus threw the mountain on top of him, with his immortal rage causing the mountain to shake and spew fire and smoke.
  • Tantalus committed one of the most monstrous acts in Greek mythology by killing his son, cooking him, and serving the resulting dish to the gods, who were so horrified and disgusted that they condemned him to an eternity of thirst and starvation. Tantalus was trapped in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree, however, whenever he bent down to drink, the water level went down, and whenever he reached up for a fruit, the branches would move out of his reach. From this fate comes the word "tantalize".
  • Sisyphus had attempted to cheat death, so the gods made his punishment reflect the futility of trying to break the system: he is trapped until he can push a boulder up a slope... but every time he reaches the top, the boulder rolls back down.
  • The forty-nine Danaïdes murdered their husbands. In Tartarus, their punishment is to carry water from one place to the next. The jugs they have to carry it in are full of leaks that by the time they reached their destination, they would be empty so they would have to go back over and over and over and over again. (Their sister who fell in love with her husband had a kinder fate.)
  • Tithonus is granted immortality, but not eternal youth. As a result, his body withers and his mind decays; he remains, for all time, forgotten in some hidden room, babbling endlessly. (In another story, he eventually turns into a cricket.)
  • When the gods want to swear the most solemn of oaths, they swear on the River Styx in the Underworld. Some authors simply have the oath unbreakable, but others say it can be broken. The consequences are harsh indeed: for a year the oathbreaker lies unable to eat, drink, move, or breathe (and Greek gods cannot die). The next nine years, in which they merely cannot associate with other deities at all, looks mild in comparison.
• Norse Mythology:
  • Loki, the Trickster God, was punished by being chained to a rock with a serpent eternally dripping caustic venom in his face. His wife, Sigyn, stands over him catching the venom in a bowl, occasionally has to turn aside to empty the bowl before it overflows. When she turns aside to do so, or if she allows it to become overfull and spill, his spasms of pain cause earthquakes. Some versions of the binding of Loki state that Loki wasn't just bound to a rock with poison dripping onto him, he was bound with his own son's intestines.
  • The fate of Loki's monster offspring, the wolf Fenrir. It is bound by unbreakable fetters and gagged by a sword stuck in the roof of its mouth. A river of blood and saliva flows continuously from its jaws. It will remain bound like this until Ragnarok.
• The Bible:
  • Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for taking a last look at the home she lived in for so many years. Whether she was conscious after the transformation is to be debated, but if she was she couldn't move or speak while her salt body was slowly eroded by rainfall and winds (and maybe some local deer).
  • Gehenna (AKA Valley of Hinnom), a valley near Jerusalem's Old City, has been used in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as an analogous or symbolic reference for Hell itself. In Judaism, this place is sometimes used to refer to She'ol, where wicked souls are sent for punishment and/or purification for roughly a year's time before being sent to the afterlife. The really wicked souls are destroyed instead.
  • The Four Gospels:
    • In Mark's gospel, Jesus refers to the Book of Isaiah's description of Hell in one of his sermons, specifically that those in Hell suffer everlasting fire, and that "their worm does not die" (they would be conscious of their perpetually rotting state). This is also where symbolic references to Gehenna are made.
    • Matthew's gospel recounts that Jesus spoke of Hell as "darkness" and "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (sorrow and regret). Later theologians, such as C. S. Lewis, speculate based on Jesus' statements in Matthew's gospel that the main punishment of Hell is mostly (or exclusively) from the isolation from God.
• The Qur'an: Verse 87:13 describes the torment of the damned in the "greatest fire" (Hell): "He does not die in there, nor does he live."
• Native American Mythology:
  • Lakota mythology features one story dealing with the origin of the sweat: A boy whose uncles were all captured by a witch and dehydrated. As the vapors entered their bodies, they were restored.
  • In Chumash folklore (Native American tribe from Southern California), souls of murderers and other evil people are turned to stone from the neck down and are forced to watch other souls travel to the afterlife.

Podcasts

• In one of the Towers of Sorcery in The Fallen Gods, the enslaved merfolk. They can only say "How may I serve you today?" in a sing-song voice, unless given a command that requires them to say something not related to their status as slaves. If one does allude to this they begin to freak out and become anxious, but literally cannot change their tune.
• In The Bright Sessions, Mark, an Unwitting Test Subject who could copy the powers of other atypicals he was physically near, was forced to mentally travel back to the 1800s with time traveler Camille. Unfortunately she died, and his mind was left stranded, unable to interact with anything or anyone, whilst his body was stuck in a coma in a Black Site in the present. Fortunately his sister found another time traveler and figured a way to rescue him after two years.
• The Magnus Archives:
  • Minor character Eugene Vanderstock ends up immobilized but alive after Gertrude fills his wax body with sawdust and decapitates him. Jon doesn't know where Eugene's head is, but he knows he's desperate to scream.
  • Minor character Sergey Ushanka, in a desperate attempt to keep his mind intact after his degenerative brain disease killed him, somehow uploaded his consciousness into a computer. However, a computer is binary, full of 1s and 0s, while the human mind is more grey, so this resulted in Ushanka being stuck in a hell of his own making where it hurts to think or even exist and "the angles cut me when I try to think".
  • Victims of the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead become stuck in a sort of limbo between life and death, and those bound to it have dulled emotions and feel pain just existing.
• In Trials & Trebuchets, the victims of the pebble demon have their souls trapped in pebbles, where they can still see and hear everything around them but are incapable of communicating or interacting with the world in any way.

Theatre

• Downplayed and even made slightly humorous in Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. At the end of Act One, all of the characters we've seen throughout the first act form a living tableau of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat's masterpiece. It's a beautiful, powerful image...until Act Two begins. It's been one hundred years, and the people in that idyllic park scene have been trapped there all of that time. While they're able to stretch slightly, they can only do so for a few seconds before they have to return to their positions. Time has stopped for them, and while they can't age, they're also wearing many thick layers of clothing on a blisteringly hot summer day, surrounded by people they've come to despise in the past century, and frozen exactly as they were the moment the painting was finished (a little girl with bad vision isn't wearing her glasses, so her vision will always be hopelessly blurred, and her hands are sticky; a boatman with bad hygiene has his odor lingering around him—and those sitting near him—and so on). And so long as art historians keep restoring La Grande Jatte, they're going to be stuck like that forever.
• In the musical adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, the Enchantress's curse becomes one of these. Rather than automatically changing the Prince and his servants into a hideous beast and random household objects (presumably because there was no way to costume that convincingly), the spell instead works extremely slowly; the humans retain their normal sizes and shapes, but as time passes, they become more thing-like as their human features and appendages are gradually replaced with inanimate parts. It's never made clear whether or not completely transforming into an object (a fate that's befallen some of the servants already) kills you or traps your still-conscious mind in a piece of bric-a-brac without any sensory organs, but still very much alive.
• Poor Lavinia, in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, undergoes this fate. After being raped by two of Tamora's sons, they cut her tongue from her mouth and chop off her hands so she can't communicate what's happened to her. Though she eventually devises a way to tell her father who committed the crime, she's still a virtually helpless, badly traumatized girl who can never speak again.
• Wicked has a particularly ambiguous and downright disturbing example. It's said throughout the play that animals are losing their power of speech, and if applicable, their ability to walk on two legs. But we're never told whether or not they actually remember when they could walk and talk, leaving one of two possibilities…either they have forgotten their own sentience, or they are psychologically tortured to the point of not speaking out for fear something will happen. Something Bad indeed.

Theme Parks

• A subtle example in the queue for Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!. One of the artifact cases contains a damaged Ultron drone that makes vague threats of destroying humanity. Assuming that every other Ultron drone was destroyed (as is the case at the end of Age of Ultron), then that drone contains all of Ultron's massive code and consciousness, but is barely able to talk, let alone function.

Toys

• BIONICLE:
  • The Eldritch Abomination Tren Krom, who had his body sealed to an island and was rendered completely immobile. Furthermore, he was so hideous that anyone who looked at him ran the risk of going insane. Then, he went and tricked Lewa into switching bodies with him, leaving poor Lewa stranded on an isolated island in a monstrous, tentacled body, unable to move around, not being able to speak except via telepathy, and with no hope of rescue since his friends think he's still with them, if acting a bit strangely. It got reversed in the end, and after a while, Tren Krom was finally granted his freedom. And then murdered off screen instantly.
  • The Mask of Life, with the exception of those chosen to bear it, curses every living being that comes into contact with it by subjecting them to one of these fates, with even its own creators not exempt from being cursed. What's worse: killing every living thing you touch, being attached to a giant spider, or causing inanimate objects to become sentient and scream at you?
• According to Sine's backstory in Little Apple Dolls she was transported to a purgatory full of people stuck in this fate after she died. It's referred to as "the in between" between life and death.
  The Little Girl saw many like her. They were pale and hollow eyed. Lost and lonely. Some, their eyes sealed shut and their mouths wiped away. They could not speak. They could not see. Their time before, was cut short by being real sick and having their lives taken by force. A little boy ran up towards her and shook her; he was speaking but she could not understand. He spoke in rustling leaves and sirens.

Visual Novels

• In Akai Ito, Nozomi was trapped inside the Ryugetsu for... a long time. Even though in other characters' route she is always a villain, when you are in her route it's explained that she was a princess of some sort, and discarded her original body to obtain freedom from the deadly political game of her era. She then became a ghost that is attached to the Ryugetsu. How did she accomplish this? By making deal with Nushi, which, at that time, seemed sympathetic. When Nushi was defeated and sealed by the onikiri, she became trapped in the mirror. As she wondered why Nushi never come for her, her psyche crumbled, and out of loneliness (and low self-esteem, she's really a messed-up person) she created another persona that act as her twin little sister. But that little sister, Mikage, was really a part of Nushi's shattered soul, and manipulates her into manipulating the owner of the mirror to do atrocious things, all to free Nushi.
• The fate of the Pale Bride in Analogue: A Hate Story, after her adoptive parents cut out her tongue to keep her from arguing. While she was in stasis, the people of the Mugunghwa stopped using the Korean alphabet and can no longer read it, and she can't write the Chinese characters they use now, so she has no way of communicating with anybody anymore aside from body language. And then the only person who ever treated her with kindness after she came out of stasis dies. No wonder she snapped.
• Dayshift at Freddy's: In two of the second game's endings, either Dave or Old Sport are impaled by springlocks (rusty metal spikes), trapped in the blocked-off safe room, and are likely still conscious, as shown by the ending screens.
• The final fate of Tiberius from Demonbane. In Al's route, he gets absorbed into the Shining Trapezohedron, forever trapped in a dimension of shrieking madness and suffering.
• Fate/stay night:
  • In the Fate route, under the church are the still living remains of the orphans from the fire that nearly destroyed the town ten years ago, turned into mana batteries for Gilgamesh by Kirei. Made worse by the fact that if you don't go there it's Game Over for you. Despite the protagonist actually saying that he feels a massive evil presence from the church's basement and that he should leave. This feeling has saved his and Saber's life around 5 times before, but the game designers suddenly just expect you to go against it. And the reward is Body Horror. Joy.
  • And then there's the Bad End where Caster turns Shirou into a living wand for projection magecraft.
  • And the Bad End where Ilya puts Shirou's soul in a doll. And the one where she carries off his severed but still living head (the very first Bad End you can get, by the way!). Really, this trope shows up with disturbing frequency.
• In Nameless — The One Thing You Must Recall, all dolls and stuffed animals, unbeknownst to humans, have sentience. However, they are still (without the influence of magic) just inanimate objects, and therefore they suffer whatever violence a careless or vindictive person might casually inflict on a toy while having no means to fight back or even indicate their distress. Additionally, they are capable of human emotions of attachment, sorrow, etc., but again, have no means of communicating them and suffer constantly at the whims of others. It's really no wonder that the cast (largely made up of magically animated toys) is such a Dysfunction Junction.
• In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, the Big Bad Dahlia Hawthorne brags that about avoiding punishment for past crimes due to already being dead, seeing as how she's been executed for crimes she committed years before, having come back from the dead by way of spirit channelling to get revenge. However, Phoenix and Mia describe the malevolent spirit's failure of the attempted crime and, because spirits live on after death, give the "ultimate punishment" of remaining a failure for all of eternity. This does the job, and ended up causing the spirit to scream in agony, before fading back into the afterlife.
  Phoenix: ...I remember what you said earlier in the trial. You said there was no way we could punish you...because you were already dead.
  Dahlia: What about it!?
  Phoenix: Then you said... Even when the body dies, the spirit, the ego, it lives on... forever.
  Mia: ...That's very true, Dahlia. And that's exactly the punishment you'll never be able to escape from. For all of eternity, you'll have to remain as Dahlia Hawthorne. A miserable, pathetic, weak creature who can never win at anything... And for you, there is no escape from that. No hope of freedom. Since the day you were executed... the narrow bridge that once stretched out in front of you has burnt to a crisp!
• Slow Damage: The fate of Towa in Fujieda's Bad Ending. He has mentally broken completely and seems to be acting like his mother did in life, a manipulative, seductive, and creepy woman that could make people do whatever she wanted. But Towa himself is still present in this state, though obviously in a very held-down kind of way, with him clinging to Fujieda at one point and just barely managing to whisper out a 'Help me'. He is trapped and can't escape on his own, if at all.
• The only bad ending on Sigma's route in Virtue's Last Reward. When Sigma wakes up in the infirmary and finds that his cybernetic arm has been cut off with everyone else gone. Next, he screams and passes out.
  • Another thing is that, if the sensor between chromatic doors doesn't register the correct bracelets, then everyone in between said chromatic doors will be trapped forever, with the chromatic doors never opening.
• When They Cry:
  • Rika Furude from Higurashi has been stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop for somewhere between a century and a millennium. In most iterations, one of her friends will go insane and kill a bunch of people. In every iteration, Rika is murdered, usually disemboweled while she's still alive, and most or all of her friends die within a few days. Then she's resurrected in the past, and goes through it all over again, and she's the only one who remembers what's happening, but enough important details keep changing so she is unable to stop it, and as with most examples, Rika eventually goes completely insane from it. In the sequel story, Umineko, there is a new character named Frederica Bernkastel that looks heavily like Rika. It is revealed that Frederica is an amalgamation of all the hundreds or thousands of Rika's incarnations that have died horribly, forming a being aptly titled "The most cruel witch", and one of her pastimes is doing the exact same thing to other mortals that just so happened to her unwitting "creator".
  • Also, in Umineko, this is the consequence of a witch causing a Logic Error. The offending witch becomes trapped in the paradox until they can think of a way to resolve it — or for all eternity, whichever comes first.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus is heavily inspired by and shares its basic premise with the Trope Namer story, though mostly has this played for (darkly comedic) laughs. The one instance where it is treated seriously is the danger of getting "Abstracted", wherein the victim has become so overcome by despair and grief over their situation that they completely lose their sense of self and become a mindless, glitch spreading beast. This cannot be reverted, not even by the AI controlling the simulation, so they get thrown into the cellar and never released.
• The second episode of Battle for BFDI has Taco being trapped in a giant jawbreaker. Sure, it’s Played for Laughs, but imagine being cramped up in a small cage with no light, contact with anyone or any chance of escape. She even eats part of herself to survive.
• Also somewhat Played for Laughs in Battle for Dream Island Again: after Puffball removes Pin's limbs, Ice Cube removes her face, making her just a regular old inanimate pin. And she's still alive after that, with the closest she can communicate with others being with the ooze she sweats. At least by the time this happens we already know that Pin will eventually have both her limbs and face back during IDFB.
• DEATH BATTLE!: There’s a couple of times where death is preferable to the fate that the loser endures.
  • Ultron rewrites his opponent's AI, Sigma, into being nothing than an extension of his will.
  • Thanos vs. Darkseid has the former gets what is undoubtedly the worst fate in the series: being killed and trapped in the Omega Sanction, to relive countless and increasingly humiliating lives and deaths forever. His wish to truly die and be with Lady Death doesn't help.
• FTL: Kestrel Adventures:
  • If you look very closely after Riccado damages the FTL drive mid-flight, you can see that the crew of the Kestrel are made to relive the worst experiences of their lives. Jose and Riccado see their mom leaving, Pavallo sees the federation/mantia war, Cremity sees his friends die in the station he was found in, etc.
  • Also possibly the fate of General Teidrich and Key as they were mind raped and incorporated into Sai 1's hive mind, forced to undertake actions of evil against their friends. We see this in later episodes, where Teidrich's mind is represented by a mouthless version of himself floating in space, unable to do anything while Sai-1 gloats and steals his body, thereby making this a very literal example.
• Happy Tree Friends:
  • In "Blast From The Past", Sniffles accidentally causes an eternal time-loop of himself, Lumpy, Cuddles, Giggles, and Toothy dying over and over again.
  • In "Tongue Twister Trouble", Sniffles gets frozen alive.
  • In "House Warming", Petunia is reduced to a burnt bloody mush that can barely even move.
  • In "By The Seat Of Your Pants", Handy (who already lost both of his arms), gets his legs chopped off by Fliqpy, rendering him immobile.
  • In "Dream Job", Lumpy inadvertently tortures Sniffles by flipping through various channels of the TV attached to his dream helmet, forcing him to go through numerous deaths until he overpowers the TV and renders him catatonic.
• If Pokedex Entries Were Literal: In If Pokédex Entries Were EVEN MORE Literal, someone who is burned by the flames a Houndoom shoots from its mouth feels the pain forever. Sure enough, a Squirtle is burned in such a way and is shown to be screaming in agony seventy years later!
  Squirtle's Trainer (as an old man): Will you just SHUT UP!?
• My Story Animated:
  • "I have been in a coma for years, i could hear everything" is about a girl named Ariana who ends up in a coma-like state for several years. Even though she's still conscious and can still hear everything around her, she can't move or speak.
  • "I Woke Up during Surgery. The Doctors Ignored Me!" is about a girl named Sarah who experiences anesthesia awareness during heart surgery. Since she was given a paralytic, that meant she couldn't move, not even to scream in pain.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • Tex would have fallen victim to this trope, her mind is imprisoned forever in an A.I capture unit. However this is subverted in that Church traps himself in the capture unit in order to save her or at least be with her.
  • How Maine ended up becoming the Meta: Sigma began to corrupt him, forcing his battle strategies to become more and more primal, until all resemblance of humanity was fully eroded, leaving him a merciless killer, murdering his former allies and taking their equipment and AI fragments, all so Sigma could become the reborn Alpha.
  • It doesn't stop there: by Reconstruction^*Keep in mind that this is when the Meta had been running rampant for a year In-Universe, after Wash activates the EMP failsafe, Maine doesn't go back to normal. If anything, he becomes more psychotic and unhinged. Sigma rewrote so much of his old personality, power-hungry psycho is all that's left. Can you imagine being a servant for so long, that all you can do when your master dies is to just keep on serving?
  • You Wake Up in a Room, and are forced to do calculations for fake combat scenarios. You fail every single time, being told your love had died in the process. That's what happens to the Alpha. By the time Tex goes to rescue him, he doesn't even know who she is, remember his own name, what he's been doing, or why he's even there.
• RWBY: The Hound's intelligence comes with some horrifying implications. The host is just barely alive, and falls into a Madness Mantra after being struck with Ruby's Silver Eyes. How much remained of the original man is unknown, but it's clear that he's suffered in ways that are difficult to comprehend and been reduced to a feral state.
• A deleted sequel draft of Wolf Song: The Movie has Kara use the stone too many times, rendering her physically incapable of death… while still processing the deaths of those closest to her poorly, resulting in her trying to end her life numerous times, with her battered body regenerating each time. There is a reason this sequel idea has been cut, as the creator would later realise it wasn’t the best idea.

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