Agony of the Feet in Literature
- Between Heaven and Earth: After treating a kid's scraped knee soon after coming to Africa, DJ discovers some other kids stile his bags when he set them on the ground. He can't chase them to good in the too-small sandals he got at the airport, so he takes them off to run after them. As a result, he steps on a piece of glass that injures his foot. He doesn't treat it until he gets to his hotel room.
- In The Casual Vacancy, the book Rowling wrote following the Potter series, this happens deservedly to Simon Price after he aims a kick at his son and misses.
- The Chronicles of Narnia
- In Prince Caspian, the Narnian mice weaponize this toward the Calormene soldiers. Justified because they cannot reach higher than the belt.
- In The Horse and His Boy, Aravis has to let Shasta ride all the way across the desert because the hot sand burns his bare feet.
- Curiouser: During her fight with Diana, Aidan steps in broken wine glasses with her bare feet and bleeds profusely.
- Discworld:
- One of Adora Belle Dearheart's favorite tactics against people who makes sexist remarks, or try to stop her from smoking her ever-present cigarettes. It helps that she wears stiletto heels; she herself is very certain she could stab the heel all the way to the floor if the target's soles aren't too thick. Though she suffers the effects of this trope herself as well when she decides to spike the foot of a City Watch officer who's made of rock.
- In Making Money, Cosmo Lavish, the novel’s antagonist who’s obsessed with Vetinari, gets a pair of shoes stolen from the palace and suffers Agony of the Feet because they’re much too small as Cosmo is very large, while Vetinari and his clerk, who the shoes may have actually belonged to, are both thin.
- Older Than Print: In The Divine Comedy, simonists are punished in hell by being trapped upside-down in pits while their feet are on fire.
- In Dragonsong, lead character Menolly runs for her life from an approaching wall of lethal Thread and ends up running the very skin off the soles of her feet. The nerve damage is so extensive that Menolly has pain in her feet not only for the remaining two books in her trilogy, but for the entire series.
- Earth's Children: While attempting to cross a glacier in The Plains of Passage, the ice is so sharp it cuts Whinney and Racer's hooves. They are unable to go on until Ayla makes booties out of leather to protect their feet.
- In The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest, tiny-but-fierce protagonist Lisbeth finds herself fighting a giant with congenital analgesia. To even the odds, she hides under some furniture with a nail gun and literally nails the giant's feet to the floor. He can't feel the nails, but he can't move, either.
- Happens in all seven Harry Potter books to all three main characters. Justified to an extent — their robes makes it rather easy to stomp someone's foot without it being noticed, so it's the main way they get each other to shut up.
- In the sixth book, Harry breaks his pinky toe by kicking a wall trying to enter the room of requirement
- In book three, Ron steps on Hermione's foot (to be fair, their environment is dark, so Ron can't see well).
- In book seven, Ron accidentally nudges a piece of white-hot cursed metal with his foot (long story).
- In Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Hermione tries to kick Ron under the table when he makes a tactless comment to Luna during Bill and Fleur's wedding but strikes Harry by accident.
- In Order of the Phoenix, when Ron starts to make a blunder while they're out in public, Harry actually mentally laments that they're in Muggle clothes and thus it would be too noticeable to stomp on his foot.
- In The Impossible Virgin, a Modesty Blaise novel, the villains use toenail-pulling as one of their interrogation techniques. Giles Pennyfeather loses half his toenails before Modesty manages to engineer an escape.
- In the Junie B. Jones book Junie B., First Grader: One Man Band, Junie B. accidentally breaks her toe when she kicks her mother's watering can that has a picture of a cow. Her sore toe became important afterwards.
- Michael tries to break a thick wooden rod he's been chained to in the Knight and Rogue Series by kicking it over and over. While this works in the long run, during one particular moment of panic he slams his foot into it so hard that he thinks he's broken his own bones for a minute.
- In one of his stories, humorist Patrick McManus discusses this trope, commenting on the somewhat magical propensity of already-injured toes to attract further damage.
- In Miss Bindergarten Has A Wild Day In Kindergarten, Noah accidentally drops a rock on his foot while trying to move his said rock.
- Mr. Men: In Mr. Grumpy, the eponymous character stamps on Mr Happy's foot after the latter tells him that he needs to change his ways.
- Causes serious problems in Neverwhere when the Marquis de Carabas (left barefoot after his boots were stolen while he was dead) steps on a broken ribcage and has a shard of bone stabbed deep into his heel. He's had worse and can ignore the injury, but the sudden pain causes him to drop and lose the token granting them safe passage through the Labyrinth, and they're soon attacked by the Great Beast of London.
- Septimus Heap: It is mentioned that Spit Fyre likes to do that with people, so that Jenna cautions Wolf Boy against getting too near when they're fetching the dragon.
- In the Transformers: Shattered Glass story "Blitzwing Bop", a shopkeeper gets annoyed at Soundwave for accidentally chasing off his star attraction, and kicks him in the ankle in anger. Seeing as how, well, Soundwave is a giant solid metal robot and all, it hurts the shopkeeper's foot a lot more than it hurts Soundwave. (Though Soundwave does consider it "Most bogus!")
- In V. C. Andrews' Petals on the Wind: During an argument with Cathy, her boyfriend Julian jumps on her feet, breaking almost all of her toes and forcing her to give up a starring role to another ballerina. Cathy notes that if her big toes had not been spared, she might never have danced again.
- Mercedes Lackey's Arrow's Fall: After being caught trying to escape Hardorn, Kris is killed and Talia is captured and tortured. Among the tortures is severe bone-crushing torture to her feet. Healing her broken feet after she is surprisingly rescued is also incredibly painful, because she has to help and can't use pain killers or anaesthesia.
- Young Bond: As Bond and Amy wade to the surface after Skinny Dipping at the end of Blood Fever, Amy suddenly steps on a sea urchin. Bond knows exactly how to remove it.
- Congo Mercenary by Mike Hoare. After a mercenary rapes and murders a woman, he's brought to Hoare for court-martial. There's an argument over sentencing — one officer wants him shot in the same manner as his victim, another wants him thrown out of the unit. Hoare decides to Take a Third Option as they're not a properly constituted court for inflicting the death penalty. He has the mercenary held down and shoots off the big toe on each foot with his .45 pistol.
- River Of Stars: In the young noblewoman Lin Shan's first major Silk Hiding Steel moment, she subdues an assassin in her house, then asks the attending police officer if she could strike him once before he's taken away to his death. He allows it, so she shatters his feet with a heavy walking stick in retribution for the attack on her family.
- Beloved: When heavily pregnant slave Sethe tries to run away, she's deadly tired and just lies by the river. Her feet are badly battered and swollen. A white girl called Amy Denver finds her and offers to help her. Amy begins to massage Sethe's feet but it hurts like all hell. Amy tells Sethe that it is a sign that she's alive and that she will heal.
- The "deliberate mutilation" version happens in Son, where Trademaster chops off part of Einar's right foot for refusing to make a trade. Einar survives but has to walk with a cane for the rest of his life.
- Among the multitude of torture methods inflicted on Theon Greyjoy by Ramsay Bolton in A Dance with Dragons is having his toes flayed and left to fester for days on end to drive him mad with the pain, so Ramsay can get a cruel kick out of forcing Theon to beg for the flayed toes to be cut off when the pain gets too much.
- Seven Brothers: The brothers must run barefoot through freezing-temperature snow to seek shelter after their Impivaara house burns down on Christmas night.
- Shadow of the Conqueror.
- Daylen ends up accidentally exploding his feet early on when an experiment with altering his mass goes wrong.
- Daylen's snarking during his interrogation pisses Lyrah off enough that she crushes a couple of toes on one of his feet. Daylen responds with indulgent approval, regenerating the damage, thinking that it was Worth It, and joking that all he's suffering is "a little pain in the ass." This is, of course, a good example of what Daylen is like in the "juvenile playfulness" phase of his wild mood swings.
- Warrior Cats:
- Happens to cats occasionally: sometimes they'll step on a thorn, or tear out a claw in battle, or otherwise injure their paws.
- In Thunder Rising, Frost's paw is injured in a fire, and with no cats with healing knowledge in the group, it refuses to heal on its own and becomes infected. Clear Sky kicks him out because an injury weakens the group.
- Dark Shores: Upon arriving in Mudamora through a xenthier, Lydia is wearing only a bathing gown and has to walk quite a long distance upon rough land on bare feet. And then her foot falls through a sewer grate and she also hurts her ankle.
- In Where the Crawdads Sing, seven-year-old Kya leaps from a run-down tree house and lands on a rusty nail. She's heard of lockjaw but doesn't know where she could get a shot, so instead she spends the next few days soaking her foot in saltwater and mud while exercising her jaw. She's lucky enough not to get sick.
- Iron Widow: The country of Huaxia is inspired by Imperial China and many families practice footbinding. The protagonist, Wu Zetian, was forced to undergo this process at the age of five. Her grandmother ordered her to run barefoot across an icy lake, then soaked her feet in pig's blood and medicinal herbs before breaking every single bone and folding her feet in half. This has left Zetian unable to walk properly, often relying on a cane or wheelchair, and her feet still cause her intense pain with every step.
- Roys Bedoys: In “That’s Dangerous, Roys Bedoys!”, Roys’s foot ends up feeling sore when he lands abruptly on it.
- The Boy from Aleppo Who Painted the War: After Adam's window is broken, he steps on a large shard of glass. Khalid bandages his foot, despite Adam's complaints that it hurts more with the bandage.
- Livvie Owen Lived Here: When Livvie first hears the whistle, it startles her so much that she drops her favorite mug, which shatters. Livvie steps on one of the shards and cuts her foot. For the rest of the book, she has trouble walking on her sore foot.
- Into the Bloodred Woods: Albrecht peels the skin off Greta's feet to punish her for humiliating him during their wedding. This proves fatal.
- Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day: At one point, an elevator door closes on Alexander's foot.
- Dr. Seuss's Sleep Book: The zizzer-zoof seed salesman's feet are said to be sore.
- In The Pillars of the Earth, the villainous William Hamleigh tortures an enemy knight into confessing treason by hanging him from a tree limb and setting a fire under his bare feet.
- In Year of the Dragon a Triad youth tries firing a full-auto shotgun, but the recoil knocks him off his feet and he shoots off his own toes. In the movie adaptation he's shot in the foot by the police captain who's the protagonist, and later eliminated by his Bad Boss because they can't take him to a hospital with a distinctive gunshot wound.
- South American Jungle Tales: In "How the Flamingoes Got Their Stockings," the snakes give a costume ball and dress up in beautiful dresses. The flamingoes are jealous of them, and decide to get stockings for their legs the same color as the snakes' dresses, and get "stockings" from a barn owl which are actually the skins of snakes she killed and ate previously. The flamingoes return to the ball wearing the stockings, and everyone admires them, but the snakes get suspicious. When they find out the flamingoes are wearing snakes' skins as stockings, they are furious and bite the flamingoes' legs, turning them from white to red. They run into a nearby river in a panic, trying to wash out the venom, and that's why flamingoes have red legs and always stand in the water.
