Mutilation Conga

• Main
• All Subpages
• Create New

A character gradually accumulates Amusing Injuries over the course of a story, but rather than shrug them off, he shows the traces of every one of them, and ends up a bleeding, black-eyed Implacable Man limping toward his goal. He quite literally looks like the world has chewed him up and spat him back out.

Expect a lot of Clothing Damage, and an attitude of Tranquil Fury. Can be just as easily Played for Laughs or Played for Drama - the latter can work as a subversion of Just a Flesh Wound, as it shows that what doesn't kill you can still slow you down a hell of a lot.

Rasputinian Death is a subtrope where the injuries are each of the No One Could Survive That variety, and the final fatality actually sticks.

Compare: Crush Parade when characters and objects are repeatedly run over and trampled by different things; Scars Are Forever when a character bears the marks of past injuries for the rest of his life.

Examples of Mutilation Conga include:

Anime and Manga

• Happens to virtually every male main character in Ranma One Half at some point in the series.

Comic Books

• Herr Starr in Preacher (Comic Book).

Fanfic

• Happens to the hero of Sleeping with the Girls over the course of his adventures, and manages to be played for both Drama and Laughs at the same time.

Film

• Ferris Buellers Day Off has the Dean Bitterman go through this.
• By the end of Fargo, Showalter is not only fuming from the Plethora of Mistakes, but also limping from Shep's No-Holds-Barred Beatdown and bleeding heavily from a gunshot to the jaw.
• Brendan gets repeatedly beaten up in Brick; by the end of the movie he's limping and coughing up blood.
• Ash during the course of the Evil Dead trilogy.
• John McClane was pretty beat up by the end of the first Die Hard movie -- the three sequels, not quite so much.
• The whole premise of Death Becomes Her: Who Wants to Live Forever? if you stop healing from your injuries? Taken Up to Eleven in the final scene.
• Boris the Bullet Dodger in Snatch.
• Ken suffers from this in A Fish Called Wanda
• This happens to Carl's police car in Jumanji, until it gets eaten by the giant carnivorous vines.
• The T-800 in Terminator 2: first he cuts off the outer flesh of one arm, then he gets shot up by the cops and beaten up by the T-1000. By the end:

T-800: I need a vacation.

• Lisbeth in The Girl Who Played With Fire, after a gunshot to the head, being Buried Alive in a shallow grave, and survivng an epic fight with her father, is so bloodied up that her Badass Dumb Muscle half-brother takes one look at her and runs for his life, thinking she's a zombie.
• Eric Idle's character from National Lampoon's European Vacation, who repeatedly runs into the Griswald family. Hilarity ensues, and Idle's character becomes progressively more injured.
• Damon Wayans' & Kadeem Hardison's characters in I'm Gonna Git You Sucka suffer a series of injuries throughout, mostly by being repeatedly captured and thrown down flights of stairs.
• Both of the Implacable Man main characters in No Country for Old Men. They repeatedly manage to wing each other, escape, take cover and perform horribly squirm-inducing self-surgery on their wounds before limping back into their game of cat-and-mouse.

Literature

• Tim Powers, pick a book, any book, and 4 of 5 times this happens to the main character.
• Vlad Taltos also seems to be accumulating injuries, to the point that Steven Brust Lampshaded it with a Tim Powers Pastiche as part of an extended joke at the end of Iorich.
• Tlan Imass in The Malazan Book of the Fallen. Being Undead, this doesn't necessarily slow them down much.

Live Action TV

• Barney in the How I Met Your Mother episode "The Murtaugh List" tries to live like a 21-year-old for a weekend, and this is what happens.

Professional Wrestling

• WWE's revival of ECW had Colin Delaney, a Jobber who would take brutal beatings and come out wearing more and more bandages every week.

Video Games

• The health meter in Doom was a picture of a guy's face getting progressively bloodier and beaten up the more damage the player took.
• The gun-toting mugger in Deja Vu suffers from this. Each of his first three confrontations can and should end with a punch to the face, and he gets both eyes swollen and a bloody nose before the fourth time, when such a punch gets you shot.
• Max Payne is a non-comedic example.
• Recurring Boss examples include Klungo in Banjo Tooie and King Bulblin in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess.

Web Original

• The main character of The Horribly Slow Murderer With the Extremely Inefficient Weapon.

Western Animation

• Homer Simpson has this happen multiple times, from the classic "Springfield Gorge" aftermath, and the time he tried to prove to Marge he loved her and ended up going through a bed of roses before falling out the aeroplane.
• This sometimes happened to Finn in Adventure Time.
• One Tom and Jerry cartoon had Tom showing the cumulative effects of each bit of comic mayhem befalling him - completely atypical of the usual business.