Tentacle Rope

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Looks like Ariel is all tied up at the moment.

ROPE! We said ROPE!

Basically when tentacles are used to grab and restrain.

This is often Fetish Fuel because of the common concept of tentacles used for sexual assault by monsters to humans, but it's still clean enough for many ratings standards, mostly because it is impossible in real life.

Related to Combat Tentacles, only these are for grabbing and binding, not for assault.

Often part of Typical Tentacle Tactics.

A Sub-Trope to Bound and Gagged.

Compare Variable-Length Chain, Whip It Good, Standard Female Grab Area, Spider Limbs.

Examples of Tentacle Rope include:

Anime and Manga

  • Keroro Gunsou has tentacle-like creatures which are used as living rope to capture prisoners.
  • Haruna from Mahou Sensei Negima! uses it on Nodoka and Yue to prevent them from fleeing before a misunderstanding could be cleared.
  • Bleach gives us a Played With example with Luppi, who captures the buxom Matsumoto this way, then appears to want to do bad things to her, but then his tentacles grow spikes.
  • In Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's, the Sand Worm's tentacles that almost crushed Signum earlier were later used on Nanoha and Fate as a restraining device by the Book of Darkness.
  • Used a lot in Sailor Moon.
  • Mammon (née Viper) from Katekyo Hitman Reborn is a particularly... interesting example of this trope. S/he is, physically, a baby—somewhere around one or two years old—and carries around what looks like a roll of toilet paper, using illusions to turn the paper into what is a cross between this trope and Combat Tentacles.
    • Mukuro Rokudo, who, while not usually a practitioner of this trope, finally defeats Mammon by turning into a suspiciously tentacle-like black mass, forcing himself into her mouth, and making her explode. All while s/he screams for mercy.
  • Used in an episode of Weiss Kreuz when Mad Scientist Masafumi Takatori mutates into a be-tentacled ape-creature and uses his new appendages to restrain most of the rest of the characters in the room.
  • Demon City Shinjuku: One of the three demons used tentacles to grab Mephisto.
  • In Digimon Tamers Jeri is tied up by the tentacles of the D-Reaper. In the original she is tied in a cross shape. This was edited (badly) in the dub to be less religious looking.
  • Squid Girl: In one instance, Squid Girl does this to Eiko when she wanders into Eiko's room and falls asleep there.... Rather, her tentacles did this all on their own. Squid Girl herself was already long asleep.
  • In Pokémon Special, during the finale of the RS arc, Winona ends up captured by Maxie and Archie, held by Archie's Tentacruel. She ends up nearly suffocating to death as well.
    • Various grass types' Vine Whip ability has been used as rope to pull other people up from cliffsides all throughout the entire anime.
  • Mawaru Penguindrum features the three penguins, in the background, fighting three octopus to make takoyaki (fried octopus). Naturally, one of the octopus manages to hold two penguins up with its tentacles at one point.


Comic Books

  • Aquaman is in the habit of using octopuses to bind up his foes.
  • The Umbrella Academy has Benjamin Hargreeves, AKA The Horror, who possessed tentacles coming out from his stomach. His generally sweet demeanor meant that there were no Naughty Tentacles, and not even any proper Combat Tentacles, instead he settled for grabbing and constricting his foes. Or more often than not, just using his tentacles as handy rope for pulling and holding onto things.
  • Freex, a series from Malibu Comics. One of the shy teens, a female, was just full of all long, fleshy tentacles. Fortunately they wrapped around her body so a loose t-shirt meant she could pass.
  • Doctor Octopus humiliates Spider-man this way during their first encounter before throwing him out a window. The Hulk turned this against him.


Films


Literature


Live-Action Television

  • In the Doctor Who episode The Pandorica Opens, a Cyberman's severed head attempts to grab Amy with some metal cables from its neck.


Toys

  • In Bionicle, the characters Kalmah and Nocturn both have Combat Tentacles, but they haven't really used them memorably for grabbing people. Kalmah did have, however, an army of gigantic squids who had done this to a mutated Brutaka. In earlier books, Gali also got assaulted by a giant squid, which later reappears in a Prequel story told by the village elders.


Video Games

  • There are tentacles in Resident Evil Code: Veronica and The Remake of the first game, which grab the female protagonist at one point in each.
    • In Resident Evil 4, the flower-ish growth that devours and assimilates Salazar and his "left hand" does so by wrapping tentacles around them and pulling them into itself.
  • The boss Smorg in Paper Mario 2 is both this AND Combat Tentacles, being some weird tentacled creature that kidnaps pretty much all the passengers on the Excess Express in this way and attacking with its tentacles and whatnot.
  • The Warmup Boss of Beyond Good and Evil captures heroine Jade in a long column of chitinous tentacles, capturing her from the legs up and then trying to Mind Rape her.
  • Most of the creatures from the Pokémon series that learn Wrap, Bind, or Constrict, such as Tangela and Tentacool, are this way when they use those attacks, binding their foes in their tentacles. Needless to say, much illicit fan art has been made of this very concept.
  • Dead Space has these as a very annoying mini-boss to defeat. If Isaac doesn't shoot and defeat the tentacle that grabs onto him by the time he's pulled to the hole, it's instant death.
  • Although more of a Grappling Hook Pistol than a Tentacle Rope in Prototype, the Whipfist power enables such a utility in order to latch onto distant objects, but does not in anyway tie them up. Similarly with the consume-tendrils that hold onto lesser organic beings, which take a moment to be assimilated.
    • In the the sequel, Heller gets the "Tendril" power early into the game, which he uses as Combat Tentacles in addition to this.
  • In the Left 4 Dead series, the Smoker's main attack is doing this with his tongue.
  • In Halo 2, the Master Chief wakes up to find himself wrapped up in Gravemind's tentacle arms after it saves him from death. Then The Arbiter and Monitor 2401 are also brought into the mix.
  • The Lurking Horror has a very literal example. You climb down a rope and then realize that it's a tentacle.
  • Morpha in The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time has a tendency to grab Link and throw him across the room.
  • Several of the tentacles used by the Watcher in the Water from The Lord of the Rings Online are strangling tentacles which a DPS character must destroy.


Web Comics

  • Magical vines tie up Ecta in The Fourth. In her indignation, she claims never to have been "violated" in such a way.
  • Many 'Cubi in DMFA use this, or at least something like it. Their fighting style and the context often blurs the lines between Tentacle Rope and Combat Tentacles. Some of them like Dan's mom also bring in elements of Romanticized Abuse. All three aspects are shown in Abel's (spoilerific) confrontation with Destania. Starts here.
  • In Homestuck, Jaspersprite is introduced grabbing Rose this way to save her from falling to her doom.


Web Original

  • The Slender Man has the ability to sprout tentacles or branchlike appendages which he sometimes uses to give his friends (victims) wonderful hugs.
  • In the Whateley Universe Carmilla has used her tentacles like this. She once wrapped up Shadowolf complete with a tentacle Neck Lift and scared him so bad he wet himself.
  • From SCP Foundation, Dr. Bright is not allowed to create tentacle monsters and assault co-workers with them, not even if one of them asks him to do so.

Western Animation

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