Basic Trope: After obliteration, a character's skeleton is all that remains.
- Straight: Alien Lord Evulz shoots Alice with a Death Ray, stripping her of all her items, clothes, flesh, and organs, and reducing her to nothing but a skeleton.
- Exaggerated:
- Evulz destroys an entire city with his Death Ray, leaving behind hundreds of skeletons in the wreckage.
- Evulz becomes God and deletes all flesh from existence, creating the ultimate skeleton army.
- Downplayed:
- Justified:
- Evulz's death ray is powerful enough to kill someone and nearly vaporize them, but too weak to destroy bone.
- Evulz is a collector, and plans to add Alice's skeleton to his collection.
- Evulz acid gun cannot withstand acid strong enough to dissolve bone.
- Inverted: Evulz's death ray passes through Alice's body and melts just her bones, leaving her a throbbing, boneless mass.
- Subverted: The death ray vaporizes Alice layer-by-layer, with her skeleton being prominently shown, before she is reduced to a burn mark and a pile of ash.
- Double Subverted: The incineration burns an image of Alice's skeleton on the ground.
- Parodied: In this universe, everyone is a somehow a superhuman with a skeleton made of indestructible substances.
- Zig Zagged: ???
- Averted: Alice is incinerated completely.
- Enforced: Alice was intended to explode into a bloody mess, but this was way too disgusting for the executives, so a cleaner alternative was included instead.
- Lampshaded: Alice: "Omigosh! Why are my legs turning to BONE!?"
- Defied: Evulz has set his ray to max power, to avoid leaving behind any evidence.
- Discussed: Bob: "This is all I have left of my girlfriend." Charlie: "Well, at least you have an entire skeleton left to bury."
- Played For Laughs: Alice learns to adjust to her new life as a living skeleton.
- Played For Drama: Alice's boyfriend Bob finds her skeleton, buries it, and vows revenge on the aliens.
- Played For Horror: Alice is not turned into a bleached skeleton from science class, but rather a blood soaked skeleton with the gruesome remains of her muscles, ligaments, and tendons.
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