Injured Self-Drag

Injuries are such a drag.

Being injured to the point of being unable to move is extremely painful and traumatizing. A character in this state is usually bleeding out, has at least one broken bone, and may be on death's door — but that doesn't mean they're always unconscious. If the character is awake, then they're unlikely to want to just lay down and accept an agonizing death. They'll want to move and fight, even if such a thing seems impossible. But what do they do if they're so injured that they're basically immobilized?

They'll drag themselves.

This trope serves to do a lot of things very quickly. For one, it makes the character come off as a Determinator who won't give up even as they're dying. If they're dragging themselves to a weapon, it means that they're still trying to fight even if they're dying while dragging themselves to a safe place means they're just trying to survive. Either way, this act takes a lot of willpower and courage, pulling through in such a dire scenario to achieve one last goal and claim some sort of victory.

It also serves to put the character in even greater agony, all while making them very pitiable to the audience. Their wounds, broken bones, and internal bleeding won't get better as they force themselves to move forward. They'll just be in even more pain, using up the last of their blood and energy. The camera may show them from above, making it clear just how far they have to go and showing the Trail of Blood behind them.

In short, putting a character into this scenario is a good way to make the audience root for them. They're fighting through unimaginable pain in the name of saving themselves (or sometimes others), and even if they physically can't make it, their courage in the moment will still say a lot about them.

This trope can be downplayed in cases where the character isn't at death's door but is still severely injured and barely mobile. Even if they don't end up having to drag themselves around, there will be emphasis on their efforts to keep moving, and on the pain it puts them in, all the same. For instance, they may still be able to stand upright, but will need to find a makeshift crutch or cane to actually move, or they may be walking away with broken legs and bleeding feet. All that matters is that the injury is debilitating to the point of making it so that the character would be expected to just collapse and surrender, and manifests in such a way that moving at all is even more painful.

Video game scenarios may make this trope into a form of Controllable Helplessness, or even a whole Injured Player Character Stage, overlapping with this a lot. In any case, such tropes involve desperate struggling in a situation that's impossible or near impossible to actually win, making them related concepts. Lastly, video games that allow targeting specific body parts will invoke this trope if you cripple the legs of a foe, especially undead or robotic ones.

Also a Super-Trope to Who Needs Their Whole Body? The person dragging themselves may be an Almost Dead Guy. Contrast Ankle Drag, when someone who tries to escape from a monster or murderer is grabbed by it through the ankle and then forcefully dragged back.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Death Note: The anime ends with Light staggering to an abandoned building riddled with bullets before collapsing on a set of stairs as Ryuk writes his name down in his notebook.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • After losing to Zarbon and being on death's doorstep after getting thrown into a lake, Vegeta tries to weakly crawl and drag himself out of the lake and then escape somewhere safe to recover, succeeding at moving somewhat far from the shore before finally collapsing from exhaustion. The only reason he lives afterwards is that Frieza orders Zarbon to retrieve his body and heal him so they can interrogate him about the Namekian Dragon Balls.
  • In The History of Trunks TV special, Future Gohan is forced to hide from Androids 17 and 18, with neither one being able to find him or Future Trunks. The duo then decide to just destroy the entire area, with both Gohan and Trunks being caught in the crossfire, Gohan losing an arm in the process. With only one senzu bean left, Gohan drags himself over to an unconscious Trunks in order to feed it to him.
• Fullmetal Alchemist: After Edward loses his leg, he crawls towards a conveniently-placed suit of armor and knocks it over so he can bind Al's soul to it.
• Hellsing: Upon realizing on just what Alucard is, Luke Valentine horrifyingly tries to run for it, then gets his leg cut off and tries to crawl away to safety until he sees the exit is at the top of a very long staircase.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Stardust Crusaders: In Polnareff's battle against Vanilla Ice, part of his foot gets sliced off by Ice's Cream. Upon seeing Ice is circling the room to find him, Polnareff desperately tries to crawl out of the attack's path only to quickly realize he doesn't have the strength to escape.
  • Diamond is Unbreakable: When affected by Rohan's Heavens' Door, Koichi immediately crawls to the front door to warn Josuke and Okuyasu about the situation, then gets immediate Laser-Guided Amnesia the second he opens the door.
  • Golden Wind: After his battle with Risotto left him with a heavy amount of blood loss, Diavolo crawls to a near hiding spot to regain his strength consuming blood from nearby animals before ambushing one of the heroes.
  • Stone Ocean: When F.F. is critically injured during a battle with Pucci, Weather Report uses his Stand to create a downpour to distract Pucci while F.F. drags herself away as she emits morse code with several rocks.
  • Steel Ball Run: Johnny's paraplegia has him doing this in several situations. During the fight against Pork Pie, he had to drag himself to an alcove just to avoid getting caught by the scattered hooks.
  • JoJolion: In the final fight, as Josuke is attempting land the decisive shot onto Toru, he gets attacked by the Obladi Oblada and in spite of it encompassing his body, Josuke drags himself until he manages to reach Toru's Wonder of U and delivers the final attack.
  • The JoJoLands: During the group's fight against The Cat, Dragona and Paco drag themselves to the tree Jodio is stuck on to rescue him while avoiding the Razor Floss surrounding them.
• Naruto: Downplayed example. By the end of Naruto's fight with Gaara, both of them are so exhausted and drained that neither has the strength left to stand, or even crawl. But Naruto is so determined not to give up that he starts dragging himself towards Gaara with his chin. It isn’t until others step in and assure him that the fight is over and Sakura is safe that he finally lets himself succumb to unconsciousness.
• Saint Seiya:
  • The biggest benefit of cosmic energy (often called the "seventh sense") is that, even after a saint is gravely injured and/or the other six senses have been disabled, it grants them the physical and psychological capacity to move forward or even fight. This is the reason why Hyoga is spared by Scorpio Milo in their fight in the 8th Zodiac house: The latter is aiming to win by killing him at first, but he's impressed by Hyoga's determination to keep going even after he's very crippled (he had received all 15 of Scorpio's stinging punches, including Antares which is normally the deadliest), so he lets him continue his way upward (still crippled and badly injured) to the house of Pope Ares.
  • In the non-canon film Saint Seiya: Legend of Crimson Youth, set after the original "12 Houses" Arc, Athena's divine brother, Phoebus Abel, comes to inform her that the gods decided to destroy mankind, and he is to take her to his own personal temple, while his subordinates, the three Solar Corona Saints and the resurrected Gold Saints (Gemini Saga, Cancer Deathmask, Capricorn Shura, Aquarius Camus, and Pisces Aphrodite), deal with Athena's Bronze Saints. The larger part of the film is the Bronze Saints fighting against Abel's lackeys, then Corona Atlas doing a surprise attack on them. At the climax of the movie, each of them drags themselves from whatever place of their previous battles and limp toward Abel's temple.

Comic Books

• Spider-Gwen: After the Vulture drops officer Ben Grimm into a dumpster, breaking most of his limbs, he managed to crawl out of the alleyway to the main street to find help. When next seen, he's in a full body cast.

Fan Works

• I am not Done (MHA): Straight with Mina. Even as mangled by her fight with Bakugo, she keeps coming back to laugh into Bakugo's face.
• The Mountain and the Wolf: One of the Wolf's men is found having managed to drag himself against a wall despite his wounds, trying to unsheathe a dagger. Grey Worm kills him so he dies without a weapon in hand, which is a big deal for Norscans.

Film — Animated

• Batman: Under the Red Hood: At the start of the film, the Joker kidnaps Jason Todd, beats him to an inch of his life with a crowbar, and abandons him in a remote warehouse. After the villain takes off, the boy tries to stand up and walk but falls down and begins desperately crawling towards the exit. The next scene focuses on the bloody trail Jason left behind as he finally reaches the door. Unfortunately, he is unable to unlock it and, realizing that the Joker had left a time bomb in the building, calmly accepts he is doomed.

Film — Live-Action

• City War: The final shootout has Dick trying to launch a one-man raid on Big Bad Ted and his group of gunrunners, killing most of them only to be hit by multiple gunshots during a standoff, before his bestie Ken (whom Dick handcuffed earlier in a Kind Restraints moment) arrives to reinforce him. As Ken goes after Ted, Dick, despite his injuries, managed to follow Ken by dragging himself using a shotgun as an improvised crutch, in time to assist Ken by blasting Ted full of lead.
• Frozen (2010): After spending days freezing alive on a ski lift, suffering from a bad hand injury, and eventually falling and breaking her legs, Parker is able to fight long enough to drag herself down the mountain. She does eventually collapse, but only once she's at the road, and a truck picks her up.
• Iron Man: After Obadiah Stane steals Tony Stark's Mark 2 chest-piece and leaves Tony with his heart failing, the rapidly-weakening Tony can only save his life by getting to the Mark 1 chest-piece that's stored in his lab. He has to cover the last thirty feet or so this way, because he no longer has the strength to stand or even crawl.
• MonsterVerse: After angering Godzilla for getting the best of him in their third fight, King Kong takes painful damage by getting forcefully thrown into the side of a building and dislodged one of his shoulders. The result of this physical trauma was so severe that it even hindered his mobility, that as soon as Godzilla approached Kong in a vulnerable state, he was basically forced to quickly drag himself away from his oncoming wrath, who's inching his way closer to the overwhelmed primate with nothing but unbridled fury on all fours. All of that dragging to safety got him nowhere when Godzilla continued to assault him until he immobilized Kong with only a stomp to keep him still.
• RockNRolla: Implied after Lenny Cole has just had his kneecaps beaten to a pulp with a golf club by Viktor the Russian gangster, right after insulting his boss to his face. We don't see the full extent of Lenny's injuries, but judging by the fact that Viktor wipes his golf club clean afterwards, his kneecaps were most likely reduced to bloody pulps, leaving him screaming and cursing in pain. Yuri calmly tells Lenny that he'll have to drag himself all the way from the 18th hole back to the club shop in order to call for help. From that moment on, Lenny spends the rest of the film (and his life) in a wheelchair.
• Star Wars: Episode III — Revenge of the Sith: The climactic fight between Anakin Skywalker and Obi-wan Kenobi ends with Obi-wan severing Anakin's legs and left arm and Anakin being horribly burned after sliding down a rocky slope and almost ending up in a river of lava. After Obi-wan abandons him, he feebly pulls himself up the slope with his mechanical arm, which gets him far enough away from the lava flow for him to stay alive until Palpatine finds him.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: T-800 is repeatedly hit by a girder landed forward on him by a ruthless T-1000. The former drags across the floor in an attempt to grab an M-79 Grenade Launcher, but T-1000 stabs him downward with a steel tube to keep him immobile and go back to look for John Connor. After a brief self-repair command, T-800 reactivates, removes the tube from his body, grabs the grenade launcher, and drags to a conveyor belt while aiming with the gun to shoot T-1000 and (with the projectile's impact) push him to the molten steel container below, finally killing him.
• There Will Be Blood begins with Daniel Plainview discovering silver in his mine, and after using dynamite to reveal the vein, he starts climbing down the shaft when a ladder step breaks. He falls down and is paralyzed from his legs, but manages to pull himself out and then drag himself to a nearby blacksmith.
• Unedited Footage of a Bear: After Donna gets run over by her evil doppelganger, she's in horrible pain, bleeding in the street. For the duration of the short, we see her painfully dragging herself to her house, where the doppelganger is now tormenting her kids. She makes it to the front steps before the cops show up and arrest her, seemingly for something that happened to her kids in the meantime.

Literature

• In his autobiography Going Solo, Roald Dahl describes how he crashed his fighter plane and ended up with his face completely smashed in so he could not see, and had to free himself from the wreckage, as the plane went up in flames around him. He describes how his world was in two halves: both were pitch black, but one was burning hot, and one was not, and all his efforts were to get himself out of the burning plane.
• The Indian Lake Trilogy: Don't Fear the Reaper has a section written from the POV of Abby Grandlin, one of the killer's victims. After having half her face smashed in and an eye knocked out of its socket, Abby, a former athlete, manages to drag herself across the gym floor to a rack of basketballs, which she uses to wheel herself the rest of the way to her phone to call the authorities. She keeps herself going by imagining the stands full of people cheering her on.
• Lone Survivor: A Real Life Trope Codifier. He'd just been through a brutal, hours-long firefight during which he watched his three teammates get killed, and he was shot several times, and suffered a broken back, head trauma, and multiple leg fractures. How did Marcus Luttrell live to tell his tale? By crawling seven miles over mountainous terrain to safety.
• Les Misérables: After Éponine takes a bullet for Marius, she drags herself out of the fray of battle and lies alone until Marius come near her, then drags herself over to him.
• Thinks: Discussed by David Lodge, when a woman describes an ordeal of being set upon by a group of youths who injure her and gang-rape her, and throw her into a canal. She manages to swim to safety, and drag herself out of the canal to find help, saying that she survived this ordeal by "separating her mind from her body as much as she could".
• Void Moon: After Karch has shot out both his kneecaps, Leo drags himself over to the shattered remains of his sliding glass door, and proceeds to kill himself by driving his throat down onto the chunks of glass. This robs Karch of the chance to torture the location of the money out of Leo.

Live-Action TV

• Babylon 5:
  • The season one finale has Mr. Garibaldi getting shot In the Back. Shortly after we see him dragging himself to the transport tube where a couple leaving a new year's party find him unconscious.
  • "Shadow Dancing": Stephen Franklin's Journey to Find Oneself ends when he tries to intervene in a mugging and gets stabbed in the stomach. After lying in pain for a while, he starts seeing a Helpful Hallucination of himself that starts outlining all his flaws, especially running away from all his problems. Stephen eventually gets so irritated he starts dragging himself to where someone can find him, his alternate self egging him on.
    Hallucination: Then get up off the damn floor! I don't care how much it hurts. Don't you go passing out on me, because that's just another kind of running away. Now you take some responsibility! Show me that you want it! Get up off the damn floor!
• Breaking Bad: In "No Mas", the Cousins massacre a truck load of smuggled Mexicans, alongside their coyote driver, who survives being shot and tries to drag himself away from the scene. The Cousins being who they are, it doesn't work. They shoot him dead and burn his remains with his passengers and his truck.
• CSI: In "Hog Heaven," an undercover cop infiltrating a biker gang gets outed, and the gang gives him a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown in the bar where they hang out. One slams him in the knee so hard with a large, heavy chain that his kneecap is shattered and he goes down. Several others kick him repeatedly with their biker boots. His right shoulder is dislocated and he gets stabbed in one of his kidneys. Knowing he's a goner, they stand back and watch as he tries to drag himself to the door with his left hand, leaving bloody prints and a Trail of Blood behind. He dies before he gets out.
• Doctor Who: In the Season 35 episode "Heaven Sent", Twelve finds himself in a strange, moving castle with a monster who keeps almost killing him unless he confesses to various things. At the end, he refuses to keep confessing and instead desperately smashes his fists against a glass wall until the monster catches up and kills him, but, being a Time Lord, he has at least a day to survive. He uses this time to drag himself all the way out of the castle with his bleeding hands, leaving clues that he then follows when he revives, repeating the same behaviors for billions of years until the glass breaks. This means that Twelve dragged his dying body through the castle billions of times over, and had he been unable to do it, he never would've been able to eventually free himself for real.
• Firefly: "Out of Gas" is a Nested Story which starts with Mal gravely wounded and dragging himself through Serenity to the engine room to replace a critical part, with cuts back to the events leading up to how he got injured in the first place.
• Game of Thrones: Subverted by Lancel Lannister in the Season 6 finale. After being fatally stabbed in a dark corridor and starting to bleed out, he opts not to crawl somewhere he can potentially be found and saved, but instead toward an eerie green glow off in the distance. As he gets closer, he recognizes it as a Wildfire bomb and hustles toward it with the intent to put out the candles that serve as the bomb's fuse with his spit. Unfortunately, he is moments too late to snuff it out and the candles burn down just before he is able to spit out the wicks. Thus, he perishes by immolation, rather than his stab wound.
• Monk: In the Season 2 episode "Mr. Monk Goes to Mexico", Monk is summoned to... well, Mexico, thanks to a mysterious case wherein a teenage skydiver apparently drowned in midair. Things go poorly, including someone stealing his luggage. Partway through the episode, he's mistakenly declared dead when the thief gets hit by a car. Sharona realizes it couldn't have been her boss seconds before Monk's arrival; trying to console her, the lieutenant tells her that Monk bravely crawled through a dirty place looking for help. Sharona, knowing that her germophobic boss would rather die, is euphoric at the realization that the dead man wasn't him.
• Moon Knight (2022): One of the memories that Steven and Marc go through in "Asylum" is of the night that Marc became Moon Knight. A Trail of Blood is shown leading to Khonshu's temple, and a badly-injured Marc is seen dragging himself to safety. He briefly attempts to commit suicide rather than to slowly bleed to death, but is saved when Khonshu intervenes and makes him his new avatar.

Tabletop Games

• Blades in the Dark (and most Forged in the Dark games): Taking harm of the highest order (level 3 a.k.a. "severe"), such as having one leg shattered, typically incapacitates a player character, so that they, though still conscious, are incapable of doing anything useful on their own except slowly and painfully crawling to safety. Gameplay-wise, level 3 harm bars the corresponding player from using action rolls (the core mechanic of the game) unless another character helps theirs or they spend stress points for each action attempted.

Video Games

• ANNO: Mutationem: In one viewable video recording at The Consortium's facility, it shows one of the staff members dragging themself towards the security forces after coming into contact with The Eroder, and then immediately transforms into a Blob Monster.
• Another World: In the final level, Lester is seized by one of the alien men who are looking for him right after falling off a building's roof, and is badly beaten by him. Buddy reaches just in time and fights against the enemy to give Lester time to escape, but Lester himself is too weak to walk or run. He has to drag with a great amount of effort to reach a spot where he can activate a powerful laser from the ceiling to kill the alien man. This requires serious input from the player, not only because Lester is having a difficult time dragging himself but also because, if he doesn't make it to the spot in time, the alien will come at him and finish the job right after incapacitating Buddy. Even after succeeding, the still-weakened Lester has to keep dragging until warping back to the building's roof and escaping with Buddy.
• Assassin's Creed III: After being gravely injured by a falling stake from a burning ship while chasing Charles Lee in Sequence 12, Connor struggles to make his way in a very crippled state to the bar where Charles (who in turn dragged to get there after having received a gunshot in the belly by Connor himself) is hiding, in order to finally kill him. Connor survives but suffers from occasional pain as a result of the wound.
• Ben and Ed: If Ed’s legs get cut off, he normally starts walking on his hands. But if an additional arm is cut off, Ed starts slowly dragging himself forward with one hand. This leaves him more vulnerable to getting the rest of his body cut off.
• Call of Duty:
  • In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2, the Player Character is stabbed by the Big Bad right before the final fight. Part of the fight involves you dragging yourself to the villain's dropped sidearm, although said villain catches you and kicks the gun away before you can take hold of it.
  • In Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3, during the third segment of Yuri's flashback to his origin story, he is shot in the stomach by Makarov. Yuri drags himself to a nearby elevator in a futile attempt to stop the airport massacre.
• Dota 2:
  • Certain multi-legged characters like Nyx Assassin, Broodmother or Weaver, when on low-health, have walking animations where they drag themselves with their back pair of legs limp. As the game operates on a Critical Existence Failure system, that disability is just a visual effect that doesn't impair their movespeed or combat effectiveness at all.
  • About half of the zombies spawned through Undying's Tombstone have only their upper half left, so this is their only method of locomotion left.
• Possible in Dwarf Fortress thanks to its ridiculously detailed damage system. Creatures may be forced to crawl if their legs stop working due to injury, or if they run out of stamina and collapse from over-exertion.
• Endoparasitic: This is the sole traversal method of the main protagonist, Cynte, since monsters had tore off both of his legs and his left arm.
• Fallout 76: A ghoul will drag if the player's character cripples their legs. The game goes so far as to make ghoul leg crippling an occasional daily challenge.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII: In a flashback scene, Cloud and Zack are ambushed by various soldiers and despite Zack's efforts, he is gunned down while Cloud is left injured. Cloud could only crawl to Zack's body while picking up his sword before delivering a Skyward Scream.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: The Warrior of Light is badly wounded by a magitek explosion after being kidnapped by Fandaniel and stuffed into a Garlean body. They still have enough left in them to drag themselves back to Camp Broken Glass and to tackle Zenos, who is wearing their body to the floor.
• Hardcore Mecha: After the destruction of Fervenca City, Tarethur and his mech crash outside near an outpost. With his arm injured, he had to make his way towards the entrance before having another encounter with Vulphaes.
• Henry Stickmin Series: In the "Revenged" ending of Completing The Mission, Henry is unable to escape the doomed Toppat airship before it hits the ground and is mortally injured in the crash. All he can do at that point is pull himself out of the wreckage and slowly limp over to a nearby rock, upon which he collapses and dies.
• Hotline Miami: Enemies will randomly, instead of dying from an otherwise fatal injury, survive and crawl away from the scene. They'll stop moving a few seconds later, but you can finish them off with a Neck Snap or stomp to the head for extra points.
• In Mass Effect 3, at the end of "Priority: Tuchanka", if you choose to murder Mordin Solus to prevent the genophage from being cured, he spends his last moments defiantly crawling towards the computer console he needs to counteract the sabotage despite the Carnifex round in his sternum. Sadly, his body gives out on him before he can fix the cure.
• Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots: Upon reaching the microwave corridor, Old Snake begins to receive the impact of said microwaves onto his body (as they heat the molecules of the water present in his body). Though Raiden offered himself to go in his place, Snake persuaded him to keep the enemy soldiers distracted while he traversed the perilous corridor. Snake walks through the corridor with extreme difficulty, and when he can't do so anymore he crawls, and when he's too weak to do that he creeps forward. He succeeds in reaching the other end.
• Owl Boy: In the last battle, Otus is injured by a blast from the Anti-Hex artifact. As Molstrom tries to claim it for himself, Otus' allies hold him back while he crawls towards the artifact in one last attempt to use it against Molstrom.
• Return Of The Obra Dinn sees this happen twice:
  • After being hit by a spike during the crab rider attack, the ship’s steward, Zungi Sathi, drags himself to the port walk in an attempt to recover. There, he is accidentally shot by bosun’s mate Charles Miner.
  • After being stabbed by gunner’s mate Olus Waiter, midshipman Thomas Lanke drags himself to the midshipmen’s cabin. First Mate William Hoscut attends to him as he dies.
• Vampire: The Masquerade - Bloodlines: Grunfeld Bach turns out to be clinging to life after his Boss Battle, dragging himself over to taunt you and activate a self-destruct just as you're ready to leave his lair. This can require him to drag himself through a large cavern and up a long set of stairs, so he must really want to smack-talk you to your face.
• The purple-haired girl who serves as the Final Boss of The Witch's House drags herself after the player character, Viola, through the titular house to the exit. She has to move this way because her legs have been cut off.
• Xenogears: At the end of Disc 1, Fei and Elly are shot down by Ramsus and crash-land in a forest, with both of them sustaining critical injuries. Fei could only carry the unconscious Elly while forcing himself to press onwards regardless of his own wounds before collapsing, and only survived because they were unknowingly rescued by Grahf when he took them to Taura.

Web Animation

• The Amazing Digital Circus: Because Pomni doesn't come back for her after getting attacked by Kaufmo, Ragatha is forced to drag herself from the room corridor to the hall, despite the pain from the glitching.
• Happy Tree Friends:
  • In the episode "Water You Wading For", after getting mangled by piranhas, sea lions, and an alligator, Cuddles, now missing his entire lower body among other things, manages to escape the lake he made the mistake of swimming in and pulls himself away from it. Unfortunately, it does little to save him, as he's promptly body slammed and crushed by a whale.
  • While Sniffles is exiting his shrinking submarine in the episode "I've Got You Under My Skin", he accidentally steps on the shrinking knob, causing it to start shrinking with him halfway out and thus cutting him in half horizontally. Having lost his entire lower body, he tries to drag himself towards a first aid kit on a table. Unfortunately, he fails to notice Lumpy's silly straw falling on his intestine and pinning it to the floor, meaning that his organs get pulled out one by one as he drags himself closer to the table. To add insult to injury, when he finally reaches the table, he accidentally tips it over, causing it to fall on his head and split it in half moments before the first aid kit falls into his hand.
• RWBY:
  • Following her battle with Raven, Cinder regains consciousness underwater. She has just enough energy left to drag herself out of the water towards a crack in the cave she's in. She's spent and exhausted, but manages to walk out of the cave while clutching her ribs. After only making it a few steps, she collapses in front of a passerby, who starts to help her until she sees the Grimm arm. Cinder has just enough energy left to seize the moment and mug the passerby for the clothing and money she needs to survive.
  • Flashbacks reveal that Salem and Oz once fought a terrible battle that appeared to lead to both of their deaths. Oz drags himself from the battlefield, leaving a trail of blood behind him, clearly determined to reach a specific location. The fight is triggered when Oz realises their children are in danger from their own mother; Salem catches him sneaking the kids out and the pair end up fighting right there, resulting in the destruction of their kingdom, home and children. Oz tries to drag his dying body to the place where the children died, but Salem reforms in time to kill him before he can reach it.

Web Comics

• Bob and George: After getting beaten up by the Cossack Bots, Mega Man crawls eighty miles to Dr. Cossack's lair with a hole in his chest and stumps for arms; one of his legs fell off along the way. He's incredibly annoyed when he discovers that it was all for nothing; not only did Proto Man basically lie that Cossack was behind everything, Proto Man and the Cossack Bots saved the day without him. Being a robot, though, he gets better.
• Goblins has a sequence where a lot of freed prisoners are trying to flee a city. One has a bloody stump for a foot and can only hobble along using a stick. He encounters setbacks: first getting knocked down in the rush, then slipping and falling with the stick landing just out of reach. He's very visibly struggling and desperate, each step leaving a bloody footprint, and the framing emphasizes just how far he has to go.
• Unsounded: Ricker tries to crawl away from the survivors of his attack on the shrine after he's knocked off the roof. One of his legs is so badly damaged that it is torn off as he drags himself across the ground.

Web Original

• The narrator of the short Creepypasta "I Need To Believe In Ghosts" sees a horrifically mutilated, bleeding specter dragging its ruined body towards him. He escapes...only to learn that he wasn't fleeing a ghost but a terribly injured woman, who bled out on the floor after he abandoned her.
• Dragon Ball Z Abridged: The adaptation of The History of Trunks special has Future Gohan trying to drag himself over to Future Trunks, though laments that the loss of his arm makes the process much more difficult.

Western Animation

• The Amazing World of Gumball: In "The Sock", Principal Brown misunderstands Gumball and Darwin's silent request for help as them saying Miss Simian is trapped in a well, so he jumps out a window to save her. Badly injured, he drags himself forward by the elbows, saying, "Elbows, don't fail me now." When they approach Miss Simian, she somehow also thinks she's trapped in a well and jumps out a window in the same way, dragging herself by her chin and saying, "Come on chin, don't fail me now."
• American Dad!: Parodied in the Season 7 episode "Son of Stan", where Stan clones Steve and raises the clone (named Stevearino) in a highly disciplined manner to prove his way is the best way to bring Steve up. This backfires, causing Stevearino to become a psychopath who kills animals and intends to murder Steve to replace him. At the end of the episode, Stevearino is seemingly killed by an explosion and left for dead by the Smith family. However, it's shown that he's still alive, though injured. He spots one of the cats he tortured and a gun that's between them. The two try to crawl to it, with the cat getting there first and shooting Stevearino.
• The Flintstones: In the Season 3 episode "Dino Goes to Hollyrock", Sassie has to pretend she has three broken legs for a scene. She drags herself to deliver the money to the bank. Then Dino comes along to deliver the money for Sassie and creates an igloo to make her feel at home.
• Gravity Falls: In "Weirdmageddon Part 1", we get a Mad Max-style car chase with Gideon (who, at least at this point in time, is working for Bill) and his jail gang on hot pursuit of Dipper and Wendy as the former try to stop Mabel from being rescued via Gideon's not-so-successful meddling. Wendy openly admits that she's a less-than-amateur driver, but they manage to get pretty far...until they have to jump a gorge, at which the car flips over multiple times and crashes, knocking Wendy out for a few minutes. Cue Dipper immediately getting out of the car, wasting no time to prepare for the effects of sidling on the intensely hot, fragile, decaying ground and quite literally (as you may imagine) pulling his weight towards Mabel's bubble without showing any signs of slowing down.
• Invincible: In Episode 7, Nolan retaliates against the GDA soldiers that were sent to kill him, with one of them having her body distorted upon getting blasted out by force, only attempting a Futile Hand Reach towards the surveillance group at the nearby house after dragging herself before dropping dead.
• Justice League Unlimited: In the animated adaptation of For the Man Who Has Everything, Wonder Woman tries to fight Mongul, but is outmatched and mercilessly pummeled by him. Though Superman arrives just in time to save her from the killing blow, she is too injured to walk or fly, leading her to crawl her way to safety.
• Primal: In Episode 4, one of the Primitive Men breaks his ankle after tripping, and immediately tries to bring the boar he killed back to his hiding hole before the arrival of the giant red bats.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: In the episode "Fire Dogs", Mr. Horse falls from a very tall building and lands feet-first on Ren and Stimpy, breaking both of his hind legs in the process. He then drags himself away by the front legs, groaning and sobbing from the pain.
• Rick and Morty: Played for Laughs In "The Rickshank Redemption". After the Galactic Federation collapses and pulls out from Earth, a confused Jerry crawls all the way from his workplace back home to avoid being injured and is surprised to find out it worked.
• SpongeBob SquarePants:
  • In "Prehibernation Week", SpongeBob's legs get incredibly sore from sandboarding, and when he tries to go home, he has to lift each leg off the ground with his hands in order to take a single step.
  • In "The Camping Episode", Squidward gets attacked by a sea bear and tries to limp away, only for the sea bear to attack him again because it hates limping. Squidward then tries to crawl away offscreen, but gets attacked again because, apparently, the sea bear hates crawling, too (or just doesn't like Squidward).

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