Lacerating Love Language

"Slice! Punch! Torment!"

"Sometimes love hurts, Pud'n. And I love you a lot."

— Evil Bunny, The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy

Some characters just really can't seem to express their attraction in a normal way. This character chooses to showcase their affection through acts of physical violence. Often brutally and bloodily. Frequently these characters are presented as Cute and Psycho. Not exclusively romantic, though it usually is.

Typically an extreme form of Belligerent Sexual Tension and Loving Bully. If played seriously, this may quickly devolve into Domestic Abuse, while if Played for Laughs, it tends to end in over-the-top slapstick comedy. If played sexily, this character is often a Fetishized Abuser. Regardless — especially if the character in question is female — expect a lot of Double Standard: Abuse, Female on Male.

This character may be a Yandere if they target their violence at others as well, out of jealousy or possessiveness. Frequently also a Tsundere, on the far end of the "Spicy" side of the spectrum. If caught between two of these characters, you've found yourself in a Psychotic Love Triangle.

See also Sex Is Violence, In Love with Your Carnage, Destructive Romance, Hemo Erotic, Love Makes You Crazy, Slap-Slap-Kiss, and Love Makes You Evil. Compare Destructo-Nookie and Interplay of Sex and Violence. For cases where the harm was unintentional, see And Call Him "George". See also Consuming Passion where love, sex, and wanting to eat someone alive are treated interchangeably.

Due to the subject matter, No Real Life Examples, Please!

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• The 100 Girlfriends Who Really, Really, Really, Really, Really Love You: Karane routinely expresses affection by attacking Rentarou in some way, ranging from jamming food into his face to outright slugging him. She mentions at one point that she once put him in a full-body cast in a fit of embarrassment.
• Baccano!: Ladd's way of expressing love? "I'll kill you last".
• This is the main premise of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, where the titular main character is sent to kill the male lead. She doesn't want to kill him, as she falls in love with him. Unfortunately for him, she can only express this love by beating him senseless and reviving him to do it all over again.
• Love Hina: Naru Narusegawa is pretty much known for her violence and struggles to come to terms with her feelings towards Keitaro as a result.
• In Mission: Yozakura Family, Ayaka Kirisaki is a spy whose Insane Troll Logic leaves to fall In Love with the Mark every single time. She believes that she can only show her love by killing her targets and her "love" makes her the one most worthy of killing them. She only starts to change her ways after Taiyo evades her attempts at killing him and Mutsumi becomes her Closet Key. Even then, she's still all too happy to "train" Taiyo with lethal methods.
• In My Hero Academia, Himiko Toga is a Depraved Bisexual who falls in love easily. She expresses her affection by wanting to become the targets of her affection, which involves her stabbing and drinking their blood to make use of her Shapeshifter Quirk.
• Nichijou: Misato frequently attacks her love interest with actual weaponry, as well as anyone who suggests she might have feelings for him.
• In Venus Puts Fur On Me, it's heavily implied that Shirosaki Hana's sadistic behavior towards Nakajima is her trying to process a crush towards him.

Fan Works

• The Palaververse: Wedding March: Charity the pyrefalcon, from a Death World, expresses gratitude as "I'll kill you last.":
  And the form that gratitude took for Charity in that moment was this: for letting her out, she'd eviscerate the cage-opener last.

Films — Animation

• Fun and Fancy Free: A major plot point in Bongo is that the titular character, a bear raised in the circus, is unaware that wild bears express love by slapping each other. Thus, when Lulubelle tries to declare her love for him with a smack, poor Bongo thinks she's turned on him and leaves brokenhearted, only realizing when he sees a party of bears slapping each other silly to a song.
  When a bird loves a bird, he can flitter
  When a puppy falls in love, he can yap
  Every pigeon likes to coo when he says "I love you"
  But a bear likes to say it with a slap

Films — Live-Action

• Liliom: Liliom is a poor barker who marries Julie but gets into violent arguments with her. When he dies trying to steal enough money to support their coming child, he is sent to purgatory, but given a chance to see his daughter sixteen years later. When Louise rejects his gift, not knowing he's her father, he slaps her, seeming to doom him to Hell. However, before he is sentenced, Louise is then seen telling her mother that Liliom's slap felt like a kiss. She asks if it is possible to receive a slap that does not hurt at all. Julie, knowing exactly who she's talking about, says yes, and it is declared that it was Liliom's love for his daughter that miraculously stopped the slap from hurting, redeeming him and sending him to heaven. ^note  This and Carousel are based on the same Hungarian play, which has much more of a Downer Ending.

Literature

• In the Discworld, courtship between Trolls takes this form. Trolls are a very physical race made out of animate stone; a Troll girl wants to know if her desired male is capable of hitting her so hard with a thrown rock ^note It must be an attractively patterned rock, ideally studded with nice veining or semi-precious stones that she is stunned, if not knocked out. In return, she punches him as hard as she can. Then romance continues in an appropriate physical manner.
• Played for Drama in Reign of the Seven Spellblades. Nanao Hibiya was raised in a sword style whose core tenet is "Enjoy not the sword of vengeance, but the sword of mutual love"—meaning to seek happiness in a Duel to the Death with one you admire and respect. She's internalized this ideal so much that when she falls in Love at First Punch with Oliver Horn after they spar in Sword Arts class, she admits she can't tell the difference between the man and his sword, and can't kick the desire to fight him without holding back again. This comes to a head at the end of volume 9, where, provoked to irrational jealousy by the end of their championship match in the combat leagues, she throws him against a tree for a Forceful Kiss. Oliver's Internal Monologue describes her looking at him as if "Yearning to carve her way into her beloved, or, barring that, at least pull him down and have her way with him."

Live-Action TV

• Star Trek: Klingons are known to get rather violent in their courtship rituals. Post-coital trips to the Infirmary are not uncommon, and a broken clavicle on the wedding night is considered to be a blessing on the marriage.
  Worf: [Mighty Roar] That is how the Klingon lures a mate.
  Wesley: [Beat] Are you telling me to go yell at Salia?
  Worf: No. Men do not roar. Women roar. Then they hurl heavy objects... [smiles, lost in thought] and claw at you...
  Wesley: What does the man do?
  Worf: [Still smiling] He reads love poetry... [Regains his stoicism] He ducks a lot.

Music

• Carole King and Gerry Goffin wrote the song "He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss)" from the point-of-view of a battered wife trying to explain why she stays with her abuser. The title is a quote from King and Goffin's babysitter, who said it while talking about her own abusive boyfriend.
• "Bang Bang" by K'naan.
  "She was walkin' around with a loaded shotgun
  Ready to fire me a hot one
  It went bang, bang, bang, straight through my heart"
• "Tear You Apart" by She Wants Revenge is about a dangerous, almost violent physical attraction.
  "I want to hold you close, soft breath, beating heart
  As I whisper in your ear, I want to fucking tear you apart"

Theatre

• Carousel: Billy Bigelow and Julie Jordan love each other passionately, but their romance costs them both their jobs, and not long into their marriage, Billy has begun to hit his wife. Hoping to provide for their future child, he ends up dying in a botched robbery, but is given the chance to visit his daughter Louise many years later on her graduation day. When Louise rejects his help and his gift, not knowing he's her father, he slaps her. Louise tells her mother that Billy's slap felt like a kiss, not a blow. She asks if that's possible, and Julie understands, realizing it was Billy. ^note  This and Liliom are based on the same Hungarian play, which has much more of a Downer Ending.
  Julie: It is possible dear, for someone to hit you, hit you hard, and it not hurt at all.
• Little Shop of Horrors: A cut song, "The Worse He Treats Me", would have discussed and parodied this trope, as Audrey discusses her relationship with her abusive boyfriend Orin, taking his beatings as a sign of love. The song was meant to show more of Audrey's self-loathing mindset than Orin's actual affection, but the writers realized the song was in poor taste regardless and cut it.

Video Games

• Exaggerated in Destiny and Destiny 2: among the Hive, love and violence are considered the same concept. Their gods, possessed of Resurrective Immortality, delighted in waging war and killing each other over and over again to affirm their bond as siblings. This is used to demonstrate both how twisted their worldview is and, tragically, how genuinely they loved each other.
• Tekken Tag Tournament 2: Sebastian says that Lili's obsession with tormenting Asuka is a "show of affection".

Webcomics

• Bittersweet Candy Bowl: Lucy is very violent towards Mike, whom she's actually in love with. Eventually it became too much for Mike and he snapped at her, resulting in Lucy later attempting suicide.
• Ennui GO!: Calixta, while otherwise being a Shrinking Violet, expresses affection via painful yet otherwise harmless acts of violence (mostly punches and wrestling moves). Her boyfriend Max tends to just treat this as a random quirk of hers, though to be fair, it's far from the weirdest thing in the comic.

Web Original

• Dream SMP: Sapnap's idea of showing affection to Squeeks, Tubbo's pet fox, is to punch him (which he considers "petting") and shoot at him with flame arrows.

Western Animation

• Bob's Burgers: It's a bit of a Running Gag of Louise to slap people she has a crush on. In "Boyz 4 Now", she gets a Celebrity Crush on Boo Boo and becomes determined to smack him. When she meets him again in "Bye-Bye Boo Boo", she gives him another slap, which instantly causes him to remember her. And as a possible Call-Back to this, when she gets to kiss Rudy in "Bob Actually", she slaps him too.
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy: In "Wishbones", Pud'n wishes for a pet bunny that will love him. But as the wish granter is a sentient skull functioning like a monkey's paw - meaning that Be Careful What You Wish For is in full effect - what Pud'n gets is a bunny that expresses its "love" first by hitting him, and then going to terrifying lengths trying to kill him. Just to drive the point home, the bunny says that "love hurts" and that it "loves him a lot"; it even provides the page quote.
• The Loud House: Both Lynn and Ronnie Anne tend to express affection via punching.
• Sam & Max: Max uses violence to express a lot of things, and one of them is love, which is best exemplified by the conversation he has with Sam in "Moai Better Blues" about their office punching bag.
  Sam: I'd hoped after getting a punching bag for the office, Max would stop hitting me all the time.
  Max: But that's how I show affection!
  Sam: Well, could you stop loving me so much before 6 AM?
  Max: No way, Sam! I could never stop loving you!

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