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"They're goin' to bury what's left of ya in a soup can!"
The Demoman, Team Fortress 2

This is not quite Never Found the Body — it's found, all right. More specifically, bits and pieces are found. Usually refers to a very violent death, as either only a few measly fragments of a body are found, or it's been so destroyed you need a mop to clean it up and a bucket (not a body bag) to carry it in.

The inevitable result of Turbine Blender, frequent result of Ludicrous Gibs, and often a consequence of the Chunky Salsa Rule. Note that this doesn't preclude what's left of the person being buried, although sometimes alternate arrangements may be made.

This is sometimes used to trick the audience or characters into believing that someone is dead who is still alive, as they never found the rest of the body. The character may later show up with a prosthesis in the place of the missing body part, or a new outfit or weapon, if all that was found was their mangled accessories.

This is often used for those who die in explosions or burning buildings. Albeit it is typically used implausibly since, with the exception of nuclear explosions, neither usually possesses the power to completely atomize a human body.

As this is a Death Trope, unmarked spoilers abound. Beware!


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • Attack on Titan: In the first chapter, a woman runs up to the returning Redshirt Army and begs them to tell her where her son is. The commanding officer gives her a small bundle which turns out to contain a severed hand — that's all that was left of him after the Titans got him. Apparently this is very, very common for the Survey Corps (if they can even find body parts).
  • Bleach: More than a few people leave no body behind after the protagonists are finished with them.
    • Most of Grimmjow's Fracciones leave no corpse behind after Hitsugaya's unit kills them in various ways.
    • Zommari's body becomes dust in the wind after Byakuya defeats him.
    • Ulquiorra crumbles to dust after his body becomes critically injured at the hands of a Hollowfied Ichigo, leaving the latter unsatisfied at the fight's conclusion once he comes to his senses.
    • After Soifon hits Ggio Vega in the same spot twice with Suzumebachi, his body disintegrates completely after a few seconds.
    • Baraggan's body ages to nothing under the effect of his own ability once Hachi turns it against him.
    • Tousen explodes into a puddle of blood after Hisagi defeats him. It's strongly implied, however, that this was Aizen's doing as part of his promise to kill Tousen without mercy if he ever forgave his enemies.
    • Yamamoto incinerates Driscoll Berci as payback for killing Sasakibe. We are treated to the sight of his skin and flesh burning off of his bones, before even those are burned to ash.
    • Yhwach makes sure to utterly eradicate Yamamoto's corpse after mutilating him, ensuring he cannot be resurrected by Orihime or anyone else. The only thing left of him after this are the shattered fragments of Ryujin Jakka.
    • Once Renji whips out his true Bankai against Mask De Masculine, his Zaga Teppo technique burns the Sternritter from the inside out, leaving him to slowly crumble to ash.
    • Mayuri kills Pernida by preventing the latter from eating Nemu's brain, which prevents it from controlling her overwhelming capability for cell regeneration and turns it into a mass of cancerous tissue that eventually explodes.
  • Dragon Ball:
  • Fist of the North Star: A declaration that Kenshiro often makes to evildoers is that not so much as a hair of them will remain in the world. Due to the way the series' titular Hokuto Shinken works, it's not an idle threat either; sometimes people don't merely explode so much as disintegrate when he hits them, such as the Colonel of Godland.
  • F-Zero: GP Legend: Captain Falcon's Heroic Sacrifice results in both him and Black Shadow being vaporized by an explosion. All that remains of the former is his helmet, while literally nothing is left of the latter.
  • Jojos Bizarre Adventure:
  • In Episode 12 of the 2003 anime adaptation of Kino's Journey, Kino travels to a county that achieved peace with its neighbor by competing to slaughter the indigenous tribes in the reason. The curator of the museum, who came up with the plan, reveals her Freudian Excuse to Kino- her husband and children's death- and that this trope applied to her husband.
    "One year, they brought my husband's legs home to me... because they couldn't find the rest of him."
  • Lupin III: Part II: Invoked by Zenigata in episode 75 when he laments the (seeming) demise of Lupin in a fiery explosion. He puts up a brief fight with a dog over a scrap of bone, before concluding that it doesn't belong to his late Friendly Enemy.
  • My Hero Academia
    • Endeavor claims that his eldest son Toya burned to death in 2000-degree Celsius flames, and the only part of him left after the fire was a piece of his lower jawbone. In reality, Toya survived with horrific burn scars and became the villain Dabi, who sought vengeance against Endeavor.
    • Tomura Shigaraki's Decay Quirk can cause those it affects to rot away until there's nothing left. The hands he wears on his villain costume are all that is left of his family, who died when his Quirk first awakened.
  • In the Naruto anime at least one of Orochimaru's test subjects dissolved into nothing. Based on his expression at the time, Orochimaru had seen it enough for it to be a common occurrence.
  • Dominators in Psycho-Pass, when in Eliminator (lethal) mode, thoroughly destroys whatever they hit. A person hit in the body by one will pretty much be reduced to a puddle of blood with maybe one limb left intact. Decomposer mode, which is designed for use against machines, won't even leave blood.
  • Scott Pilgrim Takes Off: Coins (apparently all that's left of him) are put in Scott's casket. It's actually foreshadowing the fact that Scott is actually still alive, as Scott in previous iterations has always left a body behind after being killed.
  • YuYu Hakusho: Hiei's Dragon of the Darkness Flame technique disintegrates Zeru. All that's left of him is a shadow on the wall.

    Comic Books 
  • Commando: Partway through the story "Sky Tiger", the main character is given command of a fighter squadron. His predecessor died when his fighter dived into the ground from fifteen thousand feet. In the words of the squadron's adjutant, there wasn't enough left to fill a jam jar.
  • A plot point in Kevin Smith's Green Arrow run. The "Quiver" story arc revealed that after being killed back in the '90s, Oliver had secretly been resurrected by a guilt-ridden Hal Jordan. However, because Ollie died in an explosion that had reduced his body to mere atoms, Parallax was forced to use lingering particles that had landed on Superman's costume to reconstitute his old friend's physical form.
    Hal Jordan: Be thankful it wasn't Batman you exploded all over. Try combing that overly meticulous guy's costume for any human detritus.
  • The Other Side of Doomsday: Subverted. When a mysterious beam hits Linda Danvers, Iris West, and Jean Loring, it looks like they have been reduced to three little mounds of soot. However, it is revealed that they were teleported into another dimension, and the soot were residuals of the teleportation beam.
  • In Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics) issue #169, Tommy Turtle, who was possessed by the last remaining nanites of the A.D.A.M. AI, resisted control just long enough to get himself vaporized by Dr. Eggman's latest weapon. His ashes were scattered by the wind before Sonic could get to him.
  • Superman:
    • The Girl with the X-Ray Mind, Supergirl's villain Lesla-Lar gets vaporized when she gets shot with a disintegrator raygun.
    • In The Immortal Superman, an energy beast's body disintegrates when it is exposed to harmful energies.
    • In Reign of Doomsday, Doomslayer rips apart Eradicator, whose energy body is dissolved into nothingness.
    • Subverted in Who is Superwoman?. When her Magitek super-suit gets shredded, the ensuing explosion utterly obliterates Lucy Lane's body. All that is left of Superwoman is tiny scraps of flesh and hair scattered over the ground. However, her cells had been altered with DNA alien and imbued with magic when she was turned into Superwoman, which lets her unconsciously regenerate her entire body from those little flesh bits.
      Codename: Assassin: We've gone over the area six times, sir. We've found tiny bits of flesh and hair that match her DNA, but... Nothing substantial.
      General Lane: Of course not. If Supergirl disrupted the field, the suit would've overcompensated. It would've practically vaporized her.
    • The Strange Revenge of Lena Luthor: When Supergirl punches Mind-Bomber's head, he loses control of his powers and is caught in his own explosion's blast. Supergirl X-Rays the place and reckons he has been disintegrated.
      Supergirl: His telekinetic "blast" went out of control when I struck him...and he was caught in his own explosion! It looks like he's been...disintegrated!
    • Subverted in The Supergirl from Krypton (2004). Kara throws herself between Darkseid's blast and Superman, and is apparently reduced to smoking ashes. Though, it turns out that Kara was teleported away and swapped with a pile of ashes to trick Darkseid into believing she had been killed.
    • In The Phantom Zone, General Zod and his criminal gang toss an unconscious Supergirl into the Fortress of Solitude's Disintegration Pit, expecting her to be burned to ashes by radioactive blazes.
      General Zod: "We shall deposit her in the Disintegration Pit! Its radioactive Kryptonian fuel will complete the work begun by us! Supergirl shall be nothing more than a memory...and a handful of atomic ash."
    • The Plague of the Antibiotic Man: Subverted. Superman throws a volcano at Nam-Ek, expecting to weaken him. Though, Nam-Ek disappears without a trace. Superman analyzes the lava, finds traces of Kryptonite, and feeling horrified, he believes Nam-Ek lost his powers and was burned to ashes by a tide of molten rock. Later, though, he discovers that Nam-Ek was merely teleported away.
      Superman: "Kryptonite is deadly to all Kryptonians! So— while the lead in the magma kept the K from affecting me...the concentration of it...in the lava...was enough to destroy Nam-Ek...disintegrating him utterly!"
    • Let My People Grow!: Invoked when Brainiac declares there will be literally nothing left of Superman when he is done with him.
      Brainiac: "I have no idea what you hoped to accomplish with that ridiculous maneuver, Superman— and, regrettably, you're not going to be here long enough for me to find out! That first shot shrunk you to the size of a mosquito— But the blast you're about to receive will reduce you to absolute nothingness!"
    • The Leper from Krypton: Invoked. Superman is dying from an incurable, virulent disease and has only a few hours left. Since he does not want to risk spreading the disease, he builds a rocket and sets course for the hottest star in the universe, where he expects to be turned into a pile of ashes.
      Superman: (thinking) Flambron, mightiest solar furnace in the universe, whose incandescent, neutronic flames match the searing heat of a thousand normal suns! In another second, I'll be a pinch of cosmic dust!
    • Supergirl's Three Super Girl-Friends: According to Brainiac 5, when his infamous ancestor was struck by his own shrinking ray as fighting Superman, he completely disappeared.
      Brainaic 5: "Then he turned super-swiftly flung the saucer into the path of its own ray...! Then it popped out of existence... reduced in size to nothingness!"
  • Watchmen: Jon Osterman gets vaporised in an "intrinsic field" (Picture a nuclear explosion without the "BOOM"). He later reassembles himself on an atomic level and becomes Dr. Manhattan.
    Dr. Manhattan: "A token funeral service is being held. There's nothing to bury."

    Fairy Tales 
  • "The Soldier And Death": The tsar's abandoned palace is haunted by a pack of devils who tear to pieces and eat whoever tries to stay the night, barely leaving anything except tiny bone shards.
    "But I tell you: a man walks in there alive in the evening, and in the morning the servants have to search the floor for the little bits of his bones."

    Fan Works 
  • Abraxas (Hrodvitnon): Monster X inflicts this level of death on more than one of Alan Jonah's goons.
  • Limitless Potential: Following the attack of a rogue mechaniloid, all that was found from Chiyo's friend Fumiko was a few pieces of her charred clothes and nothing more.
  • In My Little Pony vs..., this is what happens to Pikachu after Rainbow Dash is through with it, though this certainly wasn't her intention.
  • Rise of the Minisukas: There only was a blood stain smeared across the streets after the horde of Minisukas was done with Sachiel.
  • In the Girls und Panzer fanfic In Strange Waters, Lucius, part of the Canadian school Vimy Ridge's tankery team, recounts an incident in which an artillery shell struck a Hummel's ammunition compartment, leading to the deaths of everyone inside and a ban on open-topped vehicles in sensha-do, among other things.
    Lucius: We were told that... a piece of charred remain of someone's skin about 1.5cm across was the biggest human remain they found.
  • Hostage Situation: All that's left of Saint and his Powered Armor, after he's killed by a very angry Purity, is a few scraps of metal and just enough DNA to positively identify.
    By the subsequent PRT chatter, there literally hadn't been enough left to scrape into a shoebox.
  • Slipping Between Worlds: This is a common fate for those caught by car bombs in Stroke Country. In general, the family is sent a tightly sealed coffin with whatever bits could be located, sand to make up the missing weight, and a gently worded message to a family member (usually one with military or law enforcement background) to discourage people from trying to sneak a peek, since there is nothing in the coffin that's identifiable as the remains of a loved one anyway. Denise Holtack bursts into hysterical laughter when she realizes that the family getting together to mourn around a coffin full of Stroke Country concrete rubble that may or may not contain a few atoms of her deceased brother's carbonized blood is exactly the kind of sick joke he would find hilarious.
  • Vow of the King: After Ichigo's battle with Mayuri, all that's left of the latter is a single burnt hand.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • Tends to be seen a lot in war movies. In scenes showing the aftermath of some type of heavy bombardment, at least one casualty is likely to be found like this — the trope will frequently be invoked word-for-word by the person who found him. May serve as a means of avoiding a teen-unfriendly rating while still conveying War Is Hell. Sadly Truth in Television.
  • In Batman: The Movie, the film based on the Batman series starring Adam West, several goons are dehydrated into dust, to later be rehydrated by the Penguin inside the Batcave. They attack the Dynamic Duo, but the Penguin handled the procedure incorrectly, making them very unstable. When hit, they instantly vanish into antimatter.
    Robin: You mean... they won't be coming back!?
  • In Cabin Fever, Marcy is annihilated by a rabid dog, to the point where the only remains found later are bloodstains and a foot.
  • Played for laughs in Casino Royale (1967) - Sir James Bond survives a mortar bombardment of his home but M doesn't. He visits M's widow carrying a small box containing all that's left of him.
    Sir James: ...Should it be given a Christian burial? Just how personal is a toupee?
    Lady Fiona: It can only be regarded as an heirloom.
  • This is the Running Gag when it comes to Steve Buscemi roles in The Coen Brothers movies. He has died in nearly every movie he has been in (Barton Fink, Fargo, and The Big Lebowski) with fewer and fewer pieces of himself remaining each time.
  • In The Crimson Rivers, this is said of the young victim of a traffic accident. All that was left to identify her was her index finger. Subverted in that the finger actually came from another girl. She did get a grave, though.
  • In Darkman the title protagonist miraculously survives his laboratory being blown up with him inside, but is believed to have died and his love interest has a funeral ceremony for him where the only thing they could bury of him was an ear that was found in the explosion site.
  • The Fifth Element: All that was left of the Supreme Being after her starship crashed was her right hand. That was enough to re-assemble her.
  • In My Country: One farmer testifies about how his three year-old-son was blown up by a landmine set by black guerrillas, and all that the family could bury was a small piece of his skull.
  • Jurassic Park:
    • In Jurassic Park (1993), Ellie and Muldoon arrive at the scene of a T. rex attack. It's also all Sattler finds of Mr. Arnold after his disappearance is his arm.:
      Muldoon: I think this was Gennaro.
      Ellie: [about fifteen feet away] I think this was too.
    • Happens to Dieter Stark in The Lost World: Jurassic Park — after he's attacked by compies, Roland's team finds "only the parts they didn't like."
  • Played for very dark laughs in Lake Placid, when Hector and Sheriff Hank find the remains of one of the crocodile's victims:
    Hector: [holding up a decayed toe] Is this the man that was killed?
    Hank: He seemed... taller.
  • In Licence to Kill, Hawkins describes the aftermath of the first part of Bond's Roaring Rampage of Revenge, which ended with Bond knocking Dirty Cop Ed Killifer into a Shark Pool:
    Hawkins: Local cops got a tip about a warehouse last night. Turned up 500 keys of Colombian pure, couple of stiffs, and a little bitty piece of what used to be Killifer.
  • Mission to Mars: The crew of the first human mission to the Red Planet gets attacked by a killer sand tornado that rose from the Face on Mars and the only survivor manages to find and bury the body of the astronaut who got her face smashed-in by a flying rock, while he digs graves in the memory of the other two that got brutally sucked and torn to pieces by the vortex.
  • MonsterVerse: Naturally, this happens a lot with gigantic monsters. But special attention goes to Ghidorah in Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019), who goes out of his way to blast humans to unrecognizable ashes with his heads' Gravity Beams instead of causing accidental collateral. Godzilla ultimately does this to Ghidorah as a requirement due to the latter's Healing Factor, vaporizing his entire body piece by piece, although The Stinger reveals there's still a (seemingly-)dead leftover head that was decapitated earlier in the film.
  • Happens at least once in Predator:
    Dutch: Did you find Hawkins?
    Poncho: I... can't tell.
  • Goodspeed lies about this in The Rock to help Mason get his freedom, claiming he was "disintegrated" in an explosion.
  • This was used in Starfighter, about a widow who was suing a government contractor after her husband, an Air Force test pilot, was killed flying a Lockheed F-104 Starfighter. A lawyer tries to accuse her husband of taking drugs. She says there was no trace of drugs in his system. He points out that it was impossible to determine given the 'limited material' available for testing. She demands to know what he means, and is later shown saying in fury to a friend, "I buried his hands!"
  • The Terminator: Corporal Ferro is blown to bits by the HK Tank's plasma cannon fire.

    Literature 
  • Agatha H. and the Voice of the Castle: While in the Heterodyne family crypt, Carson comments that all the Heterodynes are there, although in some cases they're a few bits of ash or scraps of armor.
  • Artemis Fowl: A quite literal example in the fourth book, where it's mentioned that Commander Root's funeral had to take place with an empty coffin because the explosion that killed him left nothing behind.
  • In The Devil Game, a Creepypasta, it's described that one may end up in the same room as the Devil if the summoning goes wrong. The summoner's fate is left to the imagination of the reader, but it's said that how much of the body is found and in what state depends on the Devil's mood.
  • Devolution: When the Sasquatches kill people, they then tear the bodies apart in order to consume every last bit of meat possible, usually leaving nothing but bits of crushed bone behind.
  • In Discworld:
    • It is said that if someone is affected by the blowfish poison, you don't need to hold a funeral — just repaint the walls.
    • Also from Discworld, some of the learning opportunities in the Unseen University have led to unfortunates being returned to the grieving parents as gloop in a bucket, with a note saying "we did warn him".
    • In Thud!, troll mob boss Crysophrase assures Vimes that some trolls who were foolish enough to threaten his family against his orders were "dealt with", and asks if they've ever thought of adding a rockery to Ramkin Manor while gesturing to a box the narration describes as "not big enough to contain an entire troll".
    • A few characters in Raising Steam underestimate the power of experimental steam engines and end up as super-heated red mist, sometimes pattering down over a large new clearing in the forest.
  • Subverted in the Dirk Pitt novel Vixen 03. Loren Smith's father disappeared in an explosion years ago; the only fragments found were a boot and a thumb. However, when Pitt discovers the wreck of a military transport aircraft codenamed Vixen 03 sunk in a local lake, in the cargo bay he finds a skeleton strapped to the floor and missing a boot and a thumb.
  • In The Grimnoir Chronicles, the Gravity Master protagonist is seen altering gravity in order to smash people a few times, and it's implied many more times.
    "The learned gentlemen from the university have asked me if I relied on Einstein's General Theory of Relativity or if I used the simpler rules of Newton's Law of Universal Gravitation on the evening in question when I accidentally took Sheriff Johnson's life. Shit. I don't know. I just got angry and squished the fucker. But I've gotten better at running things and I promise not to do it no more."
    Jake Sullivan, Parole Hearing, Rockville State Penitentiary 1928
  • In Hammer's Slammers given how the titular PMCs pilot Hover Tanks with Plasma Cannons and often fight in wars where nukes aren't off the table, it's once mentioned that many relatives of dead Slammers get a sealed casket full of 70 kilos of sand.
  • Harry Potter:
    • In the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, it's said that the largest piece of Peter Pettigrew that was ever found after he was killed by Sirius Black was his finger. He was actually a traitor and cut off the finger to simultaneously fake his death and frame Black for his crimes.
    • Invoked in the second book as well, where Snape comments that whoever faces Neville Longbottom in a practice duel will likely be sent to the infirmary in a matchbox. (In the movie, it's Ron's malfunctioning wand that earns the quip.)
    • Played with in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: Barty Crouch Jr. murders Barty Crouch Sr. and transfigures his corpse into a small bone...before burying the bone in the Forbidden Forest.
    • In the seventh book, "Mad-Eye" Moody's body was never recovered. It wasn't until Harry recovered his eponymous magical eye that he got any sort of burial at all.
  • Pulser darts, from the Honor Harrington novels, don't so much tear through their victims as they do shred them. And then there's kinetic weapons, which vaporize anything in range into very small pieces. 'Small' as in 'subatomic'. Graphically illustrated after the fall of the Masadan theocracy; domestic violence rates skyrocketed, as abused wives frequently murdered their husbands. Some of them got... creative.
    They never did find all of Elder Simonds.
  • Horatio Hornblower loses his friend and comrade-in-arms William Bush this way, after seven books and almost fifteen years of war. In Lord Hornblower, Bush leads a commando raid against a French army and is caught in the explosion of an ammunition barge. "A few rags and tatters of men" are found after the explosion, but nothing recognizable as an individual.
  • The Hunger Games:
    • Primrose Everdeen is at the centre of a bomb blast and nothing is left.
    • Also happened with Katniss' father, who was killed in a mine explosion.
    • An unnamed female tribute who dropped her district token, a wooden ball, at the beginning of her Games, triggering the landmines which surround the Cornucopia and are primed to go off if a tribute moves from their plate before the countdown finishes. According to Katniss, "they literally had to scrape bits of her off the ground."
  • The Lovely Bones: Susie Salmon's body is dismembered after she is killed, and her elbow is eventually found out by the authorities (which allows them to confirm that she is indeed dead). However, the rest of her remains are stored in a safe by her killer, George Harvey, and the safe is dumped into a sinkhole, so they will probably never be found.
  • Stephen King's story "The Mangler" features a scene where one of the workers gets caught in the folder apparatus of the haunted laundry machine. The result is not described in the narration, but in the words of a traumatized witness, "they took her away in a basket".
  • In the Nursery Crime novel The Fourth Bear, the body of Henrietta "Goldilocks" Hatchett is found in grisly smithereens in an area of the World War One simulation theme park SommeWorld that very realistically simulates an artillery barrage.
  • In Derek Robinson's black comedies of the Royal Air Force, after really bad crashes or flamers, it was often the case that bodies were not available for burial. A particularly egregious example happens in A Piece Of Cake where a grieving relative, innocent of the nature of his nephew's death (he burnt to death in a flamer from a mile up) wants to open the coffin to see poor Maurice's face one last time.... as only deep-fried fragments of the body were retrieved, the rest of the coffin was ballasted by sandbags, to approximate the weight of a full corpse. This is Truth in Television. Similar expedients were used for tank troopers killed in brew-ups or men killed in catastrophic explosions. This has been long-standing practice for a long time and may still happen today, although military authorities are naturally reticent.
  • All that's left of Bluddbeak from the Redwall novel Triss after taking on a trio of adders is scattered feathers.
  • In the Proud Immortal Demon Way timeline of The Scum Villain's Self-Saving System: Ren Zha Fanpai Zijiu Xitong, Luo Binghe's plans for Yue Qingyuan's mortal remains are for a grisly Past Victim Showcase rather than a respectful burial, but after being shot with ten thousand poisoned arrows, there isn't enough left of Yue Qingyuan's body for that either. Luo Binghe instead displays Yue Qingyuan's sword Xuan Su, in several pieces itself, to a horrified Shen Qingqiu.
  • Referenced in Heinlein's To Sail Beyond the Sunset: Maureen says of her own apparent death that when a person her size is hit by a semi-truck, "they pick up the remains with blotting paper."
  • To Shape a Dragon's Breath: Birning Svenisson, the would-be assassin of Jarl Joervarsson, is reduced to nothing but ash and a scorch mark on the grass from Kasaqua's destroying breath after attacking her, Anequs, and the jarl.
  • Happens to Jesmin Ackbar in Wraith Squadron when her X-Wing is disabled and crash-lands at full speed (it doesn't explode, it shreds instantly on impact from kinetic shock). A torpedo is therefore substituted for her corpse during her burial in space.
  • In the Russian The Silmarillion parody, The Zwirmarillion, this is what happened to Finrod. They buried "several of the largest pieces of him they could find".

    Live-Action TV 
  • In Breaking Bad, Hector kills Gus and Tyrus with a bomb strapped to his wheelchair. While Gus is left (mostly) intact, Hector (who was sitting right on top of the bomb) and Tyrus (who was standing right next to Hector) are completely vaporized, with the only evidence of either of them being an unidentifiable severed leg.
  • Implied in CASUAL+Y after the death of Paramedic Jeff Collier in a car explosion. His wife, ranting at colleagues who are celebrating Jeff's life instead of mourning his death, mentions that he was blown to pieces and there was nothing to celebrate. Pan round to Jamie Collier standing behind her, asking if it's true.
  • On NCIS three American soldiers in Afghanistan were blown up by a bomb and only pieces of their bodies were recovered. And if that wasn't enough, as they were being shipped back to the States to be officially identified, the plane that was carrying them crashed, damaging the remains to the point where most ways of identifying them would be useless. The remains turn out to be those of only two of the soldiers since the third was instead captured by terrorists and held captive.
  • NYPD Blue: the Medavoy subplot of one episode involved a Hasidic Jewish girl who had been killed and butchered and partially eaten by animals, leaving not much body left. At the end of the episode after they caught the guy that did it, Medavoy gave the girl's father some crime scene dirt which had some of her blood in it; in the Hassidem(sp) circle you have to bury the whole body, and Medavoy wanted to give the father as much of the remains as there were available.
  • Primeval: In Series 1 Episode 3 a mosausar emerges through an anomaly into a suburban swimming pool where it gobbles up an unsuspecting lifeguard before returning to its own time. Later it re-emerges in a resevoir where it regurgitates a bolus of its recent meal. The bolus is a blob of gore composed of materials that the creature could not digest and is unrecognizable as human remains.
    Claudia: Well, the DNA is conclusive. It's that boy from the swimming pool...or what's left of him.
  • In Smallville, "Gone", Lex tells Clark that there is nothing left of Chloe after the huge explosion in Covenant. Of course, he is lying.
  • In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Devil in the Dark", the Horta uses a spray of acid to attack its targets. Not much is left beyond a few bits of acid-burned bones and a roughly human-shaped stain on the ground.
  • Supernatural: The research scientist in "Tall Tales" after the alligator was done with him. Only two very mutilated limbs were under the blanket in the morgue.
  • In the first episode of Torchwood: Children of Earth, the villains blow up Jack with a bomb inside his stomach. In the next episode, they only find small pieces of his body remaining, from which he still manages to regenerate. Unfortunately, he wakes up loooooong before he's done healing. He screams. A lot. Shudder.

    Music 
  • The Cat Came Back states that "20 pieces of the man was all they ever found."note 
  • 'Ten Finger Johnny' has the eponymous character blowing himself to successively smaller and smaller bits.
  • A popular campfire song He Jumped From 40 Thousand Feet (without a parachute) relates the grisly fate of someone who leapt from a plane without their parachute on. According to various verses, "They scraped him off the runway like a lump of strawberry jam" and "They put him in a matchbox and they sent him home to Mum". note 

    Myths & Religion 
  • In The Bible, Jezebel's body is devoured by a pack of feral dogs after she is defenestrated, leaving only her head and her two hands (as predicted by Elijah.)
  • At least seven widely scattered places in Britain are claimed as the final resting place of King Arthur. In France and Denmark, similar myths exist concerning fabulous legendary heroes Roland and Holger Dansk.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Discussed several times in the various BattleTech source books and quite a few BattleTech Expanded Universe stories, and with good reason. A lot of people die in ways that preclude having something to bury, most often involving cockpit hits or reactor/ammo explosions, or sometimes 'Mech-scale weapons being used on people. One particular instance in "Double Blind" has a mercenary unit trying to bury one of their fallen, only to examine the 'Mech and find little more than intermingled bits of charred bone and metal fragments in the ruined cockpit, intermixed and vaporized by a PPC shot to the 'Mech's head. They treat these remains as their comrade's ashes and spread them from the air.
  • In Call of Cthulhu the companions of a dhole's victims can find enough to bury with a successful Luck roll. In the Shadows of Yog Sothoth adventure supplement, during the climax, the Keeper (referee) is advised not to let a certain symbol protect the characters, except possibly by allowing a piece of a body the size of the symbol to survive destruction.
  • In Dungeons & Dragons, the disintegrate spell does this. One of the reasons why this spell is used is because the game's most common resurrection spells require a more-or-less intact corpse, and disintegrate leaves nothing but dust. Of course, higher-level resurrection spells can still work on the dust (or even without the dust).

    Theatre 
  • The Awful Truth of what happened to Michael Trojan in Bandstand, who was killed by a grenade dropped in a trench by his best friend.
    Donny: There were no hands, Julia! No face, no hair to comb. It's not like the movies.

    Video Games 
  • In Brothers in Arms, this is the fate of Doyle, after encountering a German armored unit. Just as he and Hartsock's squad are about to continue moving through the city of St. Sauveur, a Panzer IV blasts him and he virtually disintegrates, leaving nothing but his weapon and uniform patch.
  • Cultist Simulator: Rituals that require a Human Sacrifice tend to involve destroying the body pretty thoroughly. Helpfully, this means the ritual won't generate a Human Corpse card.
  • Happens to the unlucky FBI agent who gets thrown in a ore-grinder in Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth.
  • Something between this and Never Found the Body happens in Chrono Trigger. After the rest of the party has been wiped out, Crono tries to confront Lavos on his own but is completely obliterated by Lavos's attack, with his body visibly disintegrating in the energy blast. However, this is a Time Travel story, and using the titular Chrono Trigger, a life-sized doll of Crono, and a bit of time travel, the party manages to go back in time, freeze time, and swap out Crono for the doll, allowing him to survive. Interestingly, this is the first time in the entire plot that the party actually manages to meaningfully change history - but it won't be the last.
  • In Diablo III, the Wizard's Disintegrate skill allows him/her to fire a beam of magical energy that can completely vaporize enemies it hits.
  • Several deaths in the Danganronpa series end in this.
    • The culprit of case 2 in Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, Peko Pekoyama, is reduced to this after being stabbed repeatedly by samurai robots, leaving nothing but blood splatter behind. It's lampshaded when the one person who was close to the deceased wants to hold a funeral, "even though there's nothing left of" the person.
    • The victim of Case 5 in Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, Kokichi Oma, is found in this kind of state due to having been crushed by a hydraulic press - all our heroes find is a huge blood splatter coming out of the press. The press was also broken by the culprit, so the other remaining parts of the body go mercifully unseen.
  • In Deep Rock Galactic, you can sometimes find a lost helmet that once belonged to another dwarf, which points to a location where they might be found. When you get there, all you find is discarded body armor and several pieces of materials strewn about. Your dwarf will sometimes lament over the loss of a fellow dwarf and might sometimes say they'll take their lost gear home as a way of paying their last respects.
  • In the second installment of the Fear Effect series, one of Hana's brutal deaths results in this. She's in an elevator shaft, and after a look of stunned fear and a cutoff shriek, her body gets obliterated by the elevator, leaving a bloody smear on the wall. Any remaining bits of her would have likely fit into a small baggy.
  • This is the unfortunate fate of Molly Schultz in Grand Theft Auto V after she runs in front of a jet turbine and gets reduced to nothing more than a hand and a chunky red mess.
  • At the end of Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeroes, Paz is blown to bits by a bomb hidden inside of her, with the resulting explosion also knocking Snake's helicopter out of the air. This is further highlighted in the intro to Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, where the doctor overseeing Snake's recovery from this incident mentions that fragments of human bone and teeth had to be surgically removed from his body — fragments belonging to Paz, no doubt.
  • When a player is killed in Mutant Football League, the killer gets to make a snappy remark to the camera. Relevant to this trope:
    They won't carry that guy off in a stretcher, they'll carry him off in a sponge.
  • In Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time, this is the fate of a zombie that gets blown up by a Potato Mine or Primal Potato Mine. Their body instantly vanishes and all that's left is their head dropping to the ground. In the original game, Potato Mines completely disintegrated the body, head and all.
  • In Tony Hawk's Underground, your player character is planning a stunt that will put you on the map: a McTwist over a helicopter hovering between two high-rises. Eric, concerned, remarks that if you miss your Ollie they'll have to send you home in a coffee can.
  • ULTRAKILL: Upon being defeated for a second time in the Greed layer, V2 falls to their death from such a height they explode into a puddle of blood upon landing, leaving only their Whiplash arm behind (which V1 promptly takes for themself). V2 is absolutely not coming back after that, no matter what the fandom says.
  • Both enemy aliens and your own soldiers in Xenonauts can be "overkilled" if enough damage is done by the killing shot, totally destroying the body and any equipment it might have been carrying. Obviously, this is most noticeable when using explosives.

    Web Animation 

    Webcomics 

    Web Original 
    Websites 

    Western Animation 
  • In Beast Wars, when Dinobot makes his stand against the Predacons and calls for Maximal backup, Rattrap half-jokes: "Dinobot versus six Preds ... there won't be enough of him left to make a toaster!" They do actually find Dinobot in one piece, though the damage he took is still fatal.
  • Futurama:
    • In the pilot, Professor Farnsworth hires the protagonists as his new delivery crew and gives them their career chips, which he pours from an envelope labeled "Contents of Space Wasp Stomach".
    • A background joke continues this theme with one half of a phone conversation:
      Farnsworth: Oh, how awful. Did he at least die painlessly? [beat] To shreds, you say? Tsk tsk tsk. Well, how's his wife holding up? [beat] To shreds, you say...
  • This was sometimes what happened to Manfredi and Johnson, Those Two Guys often mentioned on The Penguins of Madagascar (although they never die the same way twice). On one occasion they were eaten by flying piranha and what was left was buried with a teaspoon. In another, their remains fit in a manila envelope.
  • A humorous G-rated variant occurred in Rugrats after Suzie becomes a doctor for toys.
    Suzie: Which toy is the brokenest?
    Phil: Jelly Bear.
    Suzie: Where is he?
    Lil: [pointing in various directions] Over there and over there and over there.
  • Wakfu: The Creative Closing Credits of the Season 1 finale show there's nothing left of Nox but his armor, bandages and a pile of dust.


 
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Wonder Woman Dies

Injured from the heat vision of a brainwashed Superman's heat vision, Wonder Woman succumbs to her injuries, and her body becomes ash.

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