And I Must Scream / Western Animation

"He's still out there behind our shed. He'll never move again."

And I Must Scream in Western Animation.

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• In the finale of Action Man (2000), this fate befalls Dr. X, the Big Bad. He's gained superhuman abilities, doesn't need food or air any longer, and becomes Nigh Invulnerable... and then Action Man traps him on an empty rock floating in the immense vastness of space with no means of escape. He actually does scream Action Man's name one last time as the rock drifts away from Earth.
• The Adventures of the Galaxy Rangers episode "Psychocrypt" demonstrates that after having their soul torn out painfully, those tossed in the device are fully aware of what's happened, their Life Energy is used to make a construct the Queen (the person who put them there) can see and hear through, forced to do her bidding. God Save Us from the Queen!.
• Adventure Time:
  • The Ice King's situation is stated to be this when he temporarily returns to his old self in "Betty", to the point that he outright states he would rather die as himself than go back to that.
  • Any candy people doused with Gumbald's dumb-dumb juice will be turned into docile, dumb candy people who seemingly don't remember their past lives like Chicle, Lolly and Gumbald for over 800 years. During "Come Along With Me" when Princess Bubblegum is in a nightmare where she and her uncle Gumbald swap places and see what the other experienced, she tries to help Gumbald after he becomes stressed over trying to keep the Candy Kingdom from falling apart. When she attempts to do so however, she was forced to behave dumb and cried at the realization that everyone under the juice's effects were fully aware and unable to do anything about their situation.
  • Adventure Time: Fionna and Cake reveals this to be the ultimate fate of a version of the Lich that successfully wished for the extinction of all life. Growing disillusioned with his victory, he ends up confronting GOLB and yelling at his god at his lack of fulfillment. GOLB proceeds to rip his body apart and encompass his still screaming skull into a makeshift platform, one of dozens orbiting the God of Chaos. Seeing as how other versions have survived worse, this Lich will likely be entombed forever fully aware of his fate. By extension, it's implied the other platforms are other scholars of GOLB and/or other successful Liches who suffered the same fate.
• "Paralytic fluid" in the Æon Flux episode "Ether Drift Theory". The Habitat laboratory is submerged in a lake of said fluid, which paralyzes those who fall in it, with no hope of rescue. But they are still conscious. This happens to Aeon herself at the end of the episode. The last scene of the episode is of Aeon, paralyzed in the fluid, as the two halves of the item that would neutralize the solution slowly float in front of her eyes, collide, and go in different directions.
• American Dad!: The ninth season episode "Familyland" has a self-inflicted, deliberate example in Roy Family. When he created the titular theme park thirty years previous, he froze his body right in the center of the park in the form of a statue of himself. The entire time, he was fully conscious of his surroundings, which he did on purpose so he could watch the park come to fruition; he nonchalantly admits to Francine upon thawing that "it was awful." He willingly returns to that state at the end of the episode, but unfortunately, he only remembers he has to use the bathroom right before he's frozen again... It's implied that this time, the stasis will be permanent, as Familyland is immediately closed under a mountain of lawsuits after the climax, as Roy Family had imprisoned all the park attendants for a week and forced them to fight to the death for "not appreciating their families" (alongside such sins as gluttony and interracial marriages), which is why he'd thawed out in the first place. With Familyland shut down, there's no one left to release him again.
• Amphibia:
  • The wax museum exhibits in "Wax Museum", made out of living creatures, are still alive and can still see what's happening around them, but they can't move a muscle until they're melted out. The Curator who sentenced them to this fate wholly intends to do the same thing to Anne, coming very close to fully encasing her.
  • While possessed by the series' true Big Bad the Core, Marcy is locked away inside her own mind with no way to control herself. Double Subverted in the penultimate episode, which reveals that Marcy was kept occupied with an endless supply of games and puzzles while the Core has been controlling her body, before the Core spitefully decides to throw Marcy's mind into a featureless black void to rot in sensory deprivation until she becomes an Empty Shell (Marcy is fortunately saved before anything can come of that).
• In an early episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Master Shake wanted to curse Happy Time Harry with immortality after finding out that he's suicidal.
• Avatar: The Last Airbender:
  • The series has the spirit known as Koh the Face Stealer, who does Exactly What It Says on the Tin: steals your face and leaves you as a blank. Imagine being stuck, with no eyes, no nose, and no mouth for the rest of your life. Worse, it's possible that you're stuck like that for eternity in the Spirit World.
  • The Fog of Lost Souls from the Sequel Series The Legend of Korra is another nasty aspect of the Spirit World; a spirit prison for humans, it slowly drives its occupants insane with visions of their greatest fears and failures. Worse, while humans can die of old age and starvation in the Spirit World, the Fog keeps its victims alive and healthy so they can continue to stew in their madness. Zhao has been imprisoned for almost seventy years, and he's been reduced to wandering the fog ranting about how he will defeat the Avatar.
• Ben 10:
  • Alien Force: Paradox found himself trapped in the event horizon of his time tunnel for hundreds of thousands of years, unable to escape or die. The only way out he found was to use all that time to figure out space-time as a whole and map it so thoroughly he could just walk out, turned into a Time Master from sheer study of it.
    Paradox: I went mad, of course. But I got bored with that after a while, and went sane. Very sane.
  • Ultimate Alien: In the episode "Night of the Living Nightmare", Albedo gets a Cassiopean Dream-eater stuck on his head because he slipped on the spilled smoothie that Ben knocked over in the beginning of that episode. As if having a skull-faced alien jellyfish attached to his head wasn't bad enough, the Dream-eater traps him in a never-ending nightmare so it can feed on the chemicals his fear-addled brain produces. Said nightmare consists of an invincible Ben mercilessly beating him down. He gets better thanks to Galvan medicine, though.
  • Omniverse: The ultimate fate of Maltruant, as he gets trapped in a Stable Time Loop where he is doomed to failure and being destroyed for all eternity.
• The Buzz Lightyear of Star Command episode "The Shape Stealer" featured a cloak-like organism created by Zurg's R and D that was able to possess people by wrapping itself around them. It is mentioned by two of its victims (a bus driver and Booster) that individuals possessed by the Shape Stealer are still aware of their actions and can't do anything about it.
• An episode of Captain N: The Game Master featured a villain who turned his victims into living Tetris blocks.
• In Castlevania (2017), Trevor mentions that the victims of Stone-Eye Cyclopes remain conscious after being Taken for Granite, and the cyclopes feed on the resulting fear.
• In one episode of Challenge of the GoBots, Cy-Kill tricks Leader-1 into wearing a powersuit that forces him to turn evil against his will. Leader-1 initially tried to break free and was presumably conscious the entire time.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: The Delightful Children from Down the Lane are in reality the permanently Delightfulized Sector Z, who disappeared prior to the series. When they are briefly reverted back to their original forms, they make it all too clear that they are perfectly aware of what has happened to them.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog: In "King Ramses' Curse", Eustace greedily refuses to return the slab to Ramses, so his house suffers three plagues. Once all of the curses have passed, Eustace points out that Ramses doesn't have anything left to use against them... which he subsequently proves wrong by turning Eustace into a carving on the slab. He can be heard screaming even after the slab has been returned to Ramses' pyramid, where it's said it will remain for all time. Thankfully, Negative Continuity happens and he's free again in the next episode.
• Dark Danny's ultimate fate in the Danny Phantom special "The Ultimate Enemy". He's trapped in a Fenton Thermos and exists outside of time, for all eternity. Hopefully.
• In an episode of Darkwing Duck, "U.F.Foe", Darkwing finds his brain taken out by aliens and his body controlled by remote. Although he has no mouth (or beak) and we "hear" his screaming thoughts, amazingly he can still kick ass as he destroys the computer brain and saves Launchpad from the same fate!
• The Dexter's Laboratory episode "Photo Finish" had a villain named Red Eye attempt to use a camera to turn Dexter into a photo of himself. Dexter ends up escaping by deflecting the camera's laser back to Red Eye, turning him into a photograph instead. Red Eye's alarmed reaction seen in the photograph indicates that victims of this transformation are still conscious.
• The fate of Donald Duck at the end of "Donald's Snow Fight", where he gets frozen alive. It comes off as Karmic Overkill considering that all Donald did was wreck his nephews' snowman for his own pleasure and then beat them fair and square in the snowball fight before they got their act together.
• In the Double Dragon (1993) Animated Adaptation, the Big Bad's favorite punishment for underlings who have screwed up once too many is to make them part of his mural.
• Similarly, in an episode of DuckTales (1987), the Beagle Boys manage to take control of Gizmoduck's armor by remote — while Fenton is still wearing it. He's not at all happy with being forced to rob his own employer in broad daylight... or stealing his crush's car, for that matter.
  • It's also the final fate of the Jackass Genie, or eponymous "Master of the Djinni."
• In The Fairly OddParents!, it is eventually revealed that everything a child wishes for are put into "storage" in giant lockers. This includes any wishes that result in sentient creatures. And since they are immortal, they are stuck in a small, dark area forever. The fact that no one bats an eye at this says something.
  • Timmy's undone wishes are even worse, given that they had to abandon the locker concept entirely and port them all to an island (possibly a commentary on his tendency to hit the Reset Button every episode). It's revealed that the leader of this island is Timmy's imaginary friend Gary, who also fit this trope in his first appearance. After Timmy got Cosmo and Wanda as his fairy godparents, he forgot about his friend... but Gary never forgot about him, and was trapped inside Timmy's imagination, fully aware that he was being ignored. It's no surprise that he went for the revenge route. Luckily, at the end of the episode Timmy has turned the island into a luxury resort for the undone wishes, where all the employees are Timmy clones that they can abuse as much as they want.
  • The fate of Turbo Thunder's parents in Wishology. Luckily, Timmy saves everybody in the end, including them.
• Family Guy:
  • Although not taken seriously, in the episode "Road to the Multiverse", Stewie and Brian are still conscious while they are in a block of ice.
  • Another gag in the episode "Back to the Pilot", one pair of time traveling Stewie and Brian’s appear on the lawn and for whatever reason are confined to life inside barber poles and because they won’t stop spinning they end up puking inside them.
  • In "Quagmire's Mom", Peter gets a birthday surprise party at Bennigan's and is so elated that he's unable to move or talk. He gets placed in a section of the restaurant where others suffered this. When a waiter starts hitting on Lois, a tear runs down Peter's face.
• In Fantastic Four: The Animated Series, Doctor Doom uses his new cosmic powers which he stole from the Silver Surfer to inflict this on Ben Grimm by slowing his metabolism down to the point where he can't move or speak, but is still aware and becomes in Doom's words a "living statue" for the rest of his life. Fortunately, Crystal reverses it when she finds him.
• In the Joe Oriolo Felix the Cat cartoon "Stone Making Machine", The Professor tries to pull this on Felix just for the heck of it — he tries to capture Felix and turn him into a stone statue with the eponymous machine. But when Rock Bottom goes off to kidnap Felix, he accidentally grabs a stone statue an artist made of Felix in his house (it was dark, so Rock couldn't see that well) and Felix, who thinks he's stealing his statue, trails behind him. They find out their mistake and capture Felix (who had snuck into the lair) and try to turn Felix into a statue for real, but Rock Bottom, who was supposed to keep Felix from stepping outside the machine, turns his back because he can't bear to watch Felix get turned to stone, which gives Felix a clear shot at an escape before the machine activates.
• Final Space:
  • Bolo has been imprisoned for thousands of years inside a cube only just big enough to fit his whole body, restricted to a singular curled-up position, within Inner Space. Although he seems sane enough, he drops some strong hints in Season 3 that his millennia trapped in that state have significantly traumatized the ancient Titan.
    • At the end of Season 3, Invictus seals the Lord Commander inside the same cube "to rot away for an eternity" as punishment for betraying Invictus, and the last that's seen of him is the cube falling into a dark abyss at the heart of Final Space.
  • Everyone who's consumed by Werthrent, instead of living in eternal joy as the inhabitants of Serepentis were led to believe, are reduced to putrid, disease-ridden zombies who are wailing and begging for death and retain only fragments of their psyches in Werthrent's pocket dimension.
  • When one of the undead alternate Gary's in Final Space is briefly revived by being freed of Invictus, his jittering dialogue heavily implies he's been conscious the entire time since he entered Final Space, died in the vacuum, and got possessed by Invictus, and he's visibly traumatized above and beyond the prime Gary's own near-death experience.
• Futurama:
  • The famous "Roswell that Ends Well" episode has Bender falling off the back of the Planet Express ship as it was returning to the present, causing him to be buried under the New Mexican ground for 1000 years until the crew picked him up. He was enjoying it until Planet Express found him again.
  • Bender seems to be programmed to not be bothered by this sort of thing. Besides the "Roswell That Ends Well" example, in the "Bender's Big Score" movie, Bender is perfectly happy to spend a total of millions, possibly billions of years hiding in a cavern with only his own time duplicates for company. A holiday What If? episode also had him buried underground for 500 million years and coming out completely unaffected.
    • It could also be that Bender's intense narcissism enables him to spend however long he needs spending quality time with only Bender for company.
    • However, in "Godfellas", Bender talked about going mad from the isolation when he was drifting alone in the abyss of space.
  • "A Head in the Polls" begins with the collapse of a titanium mine, trapping all the robot workers inside (some of whom are seen pinned in the entrance, still twitching). The proposed rescue plan is to "pave over the area and get on with our lives."
  • The victims of the Brain Slugs are implied to be conscious.
  • "Jurassic Bark": Although it's not exactly this trope, as it was consensual, not forced; Fry's dog Seymour, from the past, spends the last twelve YEARS of his life doing absolutely nothing but sitting in front of Panucci's Pizza, waiting for Fry to come back. During this scene, Connie Francis's "I Will Wait for You" plays, with its lyric, "if it takes a thousand summers...", which is what it WOULD take, as that is how long Fry was frozen. In the end, he dies without ever knowing what happened. The most horrifically tragic part about it is the fact that Fry actually found his preserved corpse a thousand years later, and had the opportunity to revive him, memories and all. He decided not to because he thought that Seymour forgot about him, and lived a long and happy life and deserved to be left alone. If only he knew...
  • Lampshaded in "Raging Bender" when George Foreman says, "As a head without a body, I envy the dead."
  • In the above mentioned What If? episode, the third short ends with the crew attempting to get beeswax from giant bees to make candles only for the bees to encase them in wax and use them as candles.
  • "Mobius Dick": The Space Whale feeds on obsession, which it prefers to get from space captains. Leela finds Lando Tucker fused and half-decomposed within the whale's stomach, where he's been for fifty years. She would have suffered the same fate, had she not been able to hijack the whale's nervous system.
• In Gargoyles, the Gargoyles whose bodies composed the Cyborg Coldstone are given a moment of freedom by a spell that allows them to possess the bodies of their living brethren in the clan. Coldstone and his mate briefly contemplate keeping the bodies, but eventually give them back up shortly after it's discovered that the Gargoyles they're possessing are still conscious in their bodies. Fortunately, this was part of Puck and Xanatos' plan to transfer two of their consciousness' into new android bodies, leaving Coldstone in sole control of his own.
  • Xanatos narrowly avoids this when he acquires a large magical pot which is said to grant "life as long as the mountains" to anyone who bathes in it. Xanatos hesitates to plunge in and Owen offers to test it for him, plunging his fist... and seeing it turn to solid stone.
• This is the terrible fate Van Kleiss suffers in Generator Rex. His attempt to control time misfires when Breach interferes, knocking him through a vortex that sends him all the way back to Egyptian civilzation. In order to get back to the present, he constructs a "hibernation" chamber that uses his Nanites to halt the aging of his body while staying fully conscious for 4,000 years. Worse, he's forced to recreate the chamber each time it cops out too soon all the way up to the present, painstakingly waiting through era after era for his exodus. If that wasn't bad enough, a spectral entity is chasing him though it's revealed to be a mutated Breach being dragged along each time he sits in dormancy. Eventually, it takes so much of a toll on Van Kleiss, nearly all of his Nanites have died and the isolation drives him to insanity, causing him to forget his own identity and purpose. When he finally makes it back to present day, he manages to recover his sanity little by little after Black Knight meets with him and tells him to get a hold of himself.
• Gravity Falls:
  • A Black Comedy moment in "The Deep End" shows a little boy trapped in a pool grate having to watch all the other kids have fun in the pool while he remains stuck. The end of the episode shows how he has been in there for over a year.
  • After his Deal with the Devil in "Sock Opera", Dipper is forced to watch his own body be controlled by Bill Cipher, and no one can see or hear the real him.
  • Played for (dark) laughs in "Little Gift Shop of Horrors" when Stan drugs and traps a lost tourist as an exhibit after the tourist refuses to buy anything from the Mystery Shack gift shop.
  • In "Northwest Mansion Mystery", the people at the mansion's party are turned into wood by the Monster of the Week; in particular, Dipper gets frozen mid-scream, knowing what was happening to him. Even after the effects are reversed, he takes in a large gasp of air.
  • And then there's "Weirdmageddon Part 2", in which Bill Cipher turns the inhabitants of Gravity Falls to stone and then assembles their contorted bodies into a "massive throne of frozen human agony". "Don't worry! They're not conscious anymore. Probably." Yes they are.
  • In "Weirdmageddon Part 3", the non-Pines members of the Zodiac are transformed into six tapestries hanging on Bill Cipher's wall. All six are shown screaming in agony while on the tapestries, suggesting that they're fully conscious while trapped.
• In Grizzly Tales for Gruesome Kids, Episode 12 of Season 1, "Sweets", Thomas Ratchet is a misbehaving child that gets dipped in papier-mache that paralyzes his body where only his eyes can move, turning him into a shop window dummy so he can't ever misbehave again, along with 6 other children who were also subjected to this fate.
• Hot Wheels: Battle Force 5: This ends up being the final fate of Krytus. When the Red and Blue Sentient collectives are restored in the finale of “Fused”, Krytus discovers that, for all their differences, the two sides now have something in common: they’ve grown completely tired of warring against each other. And as a consequence, they’re extremely pissed at Krytus’ antics. Sage then appears and delivers final judgment on her Evil Twin, sentencing him to exile, frozen forever on a remote ice moon. The series epilogue “Full Revolution” reveals that all of Krytus’ followers were sentenced to the same fate.
• Red Rush in Invincible (2021) was an expy of The Flash whose Super-Speed caused him to see the world around him in slow motion, but unlike Flash, he lacked the Required Secondary Powers to turn it off. Like in the song "The Ballad of Barry Allen" his life was constant agony as the briefest conversation required him to spend "hours" to process each syllable. If his death at Omni-Man's hands weren't so horrific, it would've been a favor.
• Jackie Chan Adventures:
  • Shendu makes it clear that he considers being trapped as a sentient, immobile statue for 900 years to be this from firsthand experience.
  • Likewise, Shendu's seven siblings have spent centuries trapped in a Prison Dimension where there's only rocks floating amidst a void, and they're pretty desperate to escape permanently. By the end of the series, Shendu and his son Drago are consigned to the same fate.
  • The Monkey King, unlike his puppet-fied minions, appears to remain aware in his inanimate, sealed puppet form. In his second appearance in Season 3, he ends up trapped in puppet form beneath cooled magma, meaning he'll probably never be discovered by anyone again, meaning he's trapped forever.
• Jimmy Two-Shoes: First off, it's implied that the other members of the Heinous family are still conscious in their Human Popsicle state. There's also a throw-away joke about a gnome being completely encased in gold while still conscious.
• Kim Possible gives us Monkey Fist's fate — as a statue.
  • Also, after being subjected to the stolen mind-control chips, Shego yells at Drakken that while she was compelled to obey, she could still feel and see everything he made her do. The same is implied for the emotion-control chips in Season 3, since Drakken stole them from the same scientist, Dr. Cyrus Bortel. One wonders how Dr. Bortel kept his funding while creating such immoral technology.
  • It's implied that Senor Senior Sr.'s mind-controlling, dance-inducing disco ball also did this.
• In the final episode of Kong: The Animated Series, De La Porta's life force is sucked out to free Chiros. Though his life force is returned when Chiros is killed, his spirit has been broken by the ceremony, leaving him in a permanent state of shock that his doctors don't think he'll ever recover from.
• During the final battle in one episode of The Mask, the Mask takes off a device that trapped him in a "Groundhog Day" Loop, resets it so the loop lasts a few seconds, and slaps it on Amelia Chronos, the villain who'd put it on him. He then drops a grandfather clock on her face, which (from her perspective) repeats over and over and over... The next time Amelia Chronos shows up, she angrily informs the Mask that, subjectively, it took her one thousand years to get out of the loop. Which is why she probably didn’t appreciate getting caught in another time loop, this time with an exploding brie bomb.
• Murderface's grandfather in Metalocalypse. Thunderbolt Murderface (that is his name) has had a massive stroke and was being pulled around in a wagon by his wife who rides a mobility scooter. After his grandmother guilt trips him into it, Murderface buys him his own blink operated wheelchair. Which he uses to say: "I've not had an erection in 30 years" and "I just used my underpants as a restroom" before just saying "Kill me." repeatedly.
• Played for Laughs in an Mike Tyson Mysteries during a Big-Lipped Alligator Moment where the Mystery Team is brought into a Pocket Dimension by a 19th-century farmer who explains that a Wicked Witch with control over time has been butchering his family in front of him over and over again and feeding them to him, and that he was going to offer the gang in their place. When Marquess questions why he didn't just escape instead of bringing them there, he says "What?" with a shocked expression only for the witch to appear and restart the cycle while the Team runs back through the portal.
• In Mummies Alive!, Scarab murders the son of the Pharaoh in order to obtain immortality; since Pharaoh cannot execute Scarab, he has him entombed instead. The modern-day archaeologist who accidently frees Scarab from his imprisonment many centuries later notes that the walls have multiple tallies scratched into them, caused by Scarab counting out the days of his immortal existence.
• In the original My Little Pony 'n Friends, ponies were at various times turned into glass, turned to stone, and frozen in ice.
• My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
  • In the backstory to the series, Nightmare Moon was imprisoned in the moon for a thousand years, and it's implied she was aware the entire time. However, her sanity doesn't seem to have suffered from the experience.
  • There have been fanfics written that try to describe what her isolation must have been like, especially considering that the reason she turned evil in the first place was because she was lonely. Some of these fics imply that Celestia offered her an early release if she reformed; others aren't so generous.
  • In the Season 2 opener, this is basically what the Mane 6 being corrupted by Discord is like, Twilight experiences this when she turns grey and crosses the Despair Event Horizon, but all she could do was to shed a Single Tear, and Post-corruption Fluttershy Lampshades this when she states that being her opposite self is her worst dream.
  • Discord, somewhat offhandedly (though it's implied that he's more embittered about the incident than he lets on), mentions that "it's quite lonely being encased in stone." Unlike Luna, there's considerably less sympathy to be had for him considering he's a Manipulative Bastard who desires nothing more than ruling Equestria in never-ending chaos, tormenting everypony for his own amusement.
    • A later episode confirms Discord, when encased in stone, is able to observe the world around him, which is probably why he was placed in the middle of an empty garden where nothing important happens.
      Discord: Being turned to stone doesn’t keep me from hearing every word Celestia says. Although I admit it makes rolling my eyes a challenge.
  • There are also the Windigos, spirits of cold and hatred that feed on hatred. They cause ponies to hate each other and then freeze them alive so they'll have a continuous food source.
  • King Sombra of Season 3, trapped in a glacier for 1000 years while he also cut his kingdom off from the outside world for that long.
  • In the Season 6 finale, the Mane Six, Spike, the Royal Family, Discord and Trixie are all kidnapped by Chrysalis and trapped in cocoons, unable to move around, talk or even speak. The only thing that they can do is move their eyelids and twitch their hooves.
  • In the second part of the Season 9 premiere, King Sombra's brainwashed victims seem to be fully aware that they're being mind controlled, as once they're free, they all have happy looks on their faces instead of saying stuff like "what happened?"
  • In "The Ending of the End, Part 2," this becomes a source of Ironic Hell for Cozy Glow, Tirek, and Chrysalis when Discord himself proposes the Taken for Granite approach to Celestia and Luna. And since he's only too familiar with its effects...although its worth to note he says 'would' want so it's to interpretation.
• Oggy and the Cockroaches: Oggy is a victim to this, especially certain things like being trapped in a piece of paper, becoming part of the cockroaches' train track, or turned victim of a voodoo doll made out of clay,and the fact that him and the roaches screamed to hell after monsters come out of the floor due to sitting on an enchanted carpet in "the Ghost Hunter"
  • Occasionally, Jack too, especially in "The Patient", "Jack in a Box" and "Oggy's Puzzled".
• The Owl House:
  • Being possessed by Belos feels like this for his victims. They remain fully conscious and aware of what he's doing with their bodies, but are unable to move or speak. Worse, Belos spends the entire time consuming them from the inside out, meaning they only have a short window of time to struggle before the Possession Burnout renders them too weak to fight back as they're slowly eaten alive. Hunter got the brunt of this — he was possessed in "Thanks to Them", and could only watch as Belos revealed Luz's deepest secret, fought and nearly killed his friends, impaled his Palisman Flapjack on his claws, and tried to make Hunter eat him.
  • The Collector is introduced as a shadow imprisoned in a round mirror, able to project himself into the world but unable to interact with anything. In "King's Tide", King sees their actual prison — a tiny, impenetrable sphere in the Inbetween, surrounded by mirror shards. Given that the Collector is mentally still a young child, this is extra horrific. "Watching and Dreaming" reveals that being imprisoned wasn't even necessary, but instead a case of mistaken identity — the Titan thought the Collector had killed the rest of his kind, when in reality, the Collector's siblings — the Archivists — were responsible for the death of the other Titans.
  • The Titan has been trapped in the Inbetween for millennia, unable to interact with the outside world except to watch. He had to watch Belos's rise to power and the abuses carried out in his name, and he watched his son King grow up believing his dad had abandoned him at birth.
  • Pretty much anyone who gets turned into a puppet by the Collector, as Amity can be seen to be able to twitch her hand a bit to make a Light Glyph while in puppet form.
• Pantheon:Heavily implied so far to be the case for U Is. Logorythims trapped David Kim and another subject in their databanks to use their minds as resources, and in turn given them every reason to rebel. And it only gets worse by episode 3, where Chanda discovers those who fail the process are trapped in the grid as amorphous, mute wraiths, yet fully remember their human lives.
• The Penguins of Madagascar has Skipper's previous teammates, Manfredi and Johnson, as exhibits at an aquarium... and when he flies past them, he can't hear them.
• Phineas and Ferb
  • After coming back their first experience with the time machine, they bring back a T. rex which tries to eat Candace only to be hit by Dr. Doofenshmirtz's freeze ray turning it into a living statue. He wanted to use the same ray on Perry the Platypus and other secret agent animals.
  • In the alternate dystopian future seen in "Phineas and Ferb's Quantum Boogaloo", kids are kept in People Jars until adulthood for their own safety.
• This would've been the fate of Raggedy Arthur in the Raggedy Ann Christmas Special The Great Santa Claus Caper. The villain, Alexander Graham Wolf (kind of an Expy of Wile E. Coyote is using a machine to encase Christmas toys in "gloopstik," and at one point, poor Arthur goes through the machine. The poor pooch is completely encased in a block of gloopstik from the neck down. Although he can breathe and bark (although why a rag doll dog would need to breathe goes unexplained), he is incapable of moving under his own power. Alexander claims gloopstik is incapable of being broken, meaning Arthur is effectively stuck this way for all eternity. Fortunately it makes no difference to Raggedy Ann and Raggedy Andy; after getting over their initial horror and anger and defeating the villain, they tell Arthur they'll always love him no matter what, whereupon the gloopstik shatters thanks to The Power of Love.
  • This would've also been the fate of Alexander G. Wolf himself, since he, too ends up being put through the machine. Like Raggedy Arthur, he winds up encased from the neck down and unlike Arthur this is a good thing since he is a living biological character who needs to breathe and eat. Since the machine had been on its Christmas tree setting, Alexander ends up in a chunk of gloopstik shaped like a Christmas tree, with lights and a star and everything, which allows the special to downplay the true horror his situation: rather than focusing on the fact he'd die a slow, agonizing death from being unable to excrete his own bodily waste, the defeated villain merely bemoans that now he'll have to live his life as a Christmas tree, wailing, "I don't know how to be a Christ-mas tree!" Despite this, it's still rather disturbing seeing the special's bad guy sobbing his eyes out at his predicament, and fortunately for him, Raggedy Ann and Andy agree, as he, too, ends up being saved by The Power of Love.
• ReBoot:
  • Upon losing a game, sprites and binomes alike can get "nullified" — in-universe, that means reduced to a deformed, slug-like creature that can't make any noise above a squeak.
    • Luckily, right at the end of the series, Phong almost perfected a cure. Until Megabyte takes over and the show is cancelled
  • The Medusa Bug episode, which proceeds to turn everything in Mainframe into stone.
• Regular Show:
  • In "Country Clubbing", a snooty country club owner has a machine that transmogrifies any object into a toilet, which he does to all the things he steals from the park. When Mordecai and Rigby show up to get their stuff back, he decides to use the machine on them, then launch them into space on a private space-shuttle. It backfires in the ensuing struggle when he gets transformed into a toilet and blasted into space himself. Rigby wonders if he can survive up there, but the last shot is the country club owner in space, presumably doomed to float as a sentient piece of space junk. Forever.
  • Regular Show: The Movie: Ross's time collar keeps bringing him back to life after his head is cut off, and the only thing he can repeat is "Noooo!"
• Rick and Morty:
  • The Morty-Dome from "Close Rick-Counters of the Rick Kind". Hundreds of Mortys are strapped to a huge dome and have their sides repeatably stabbed in an attempt to hide the rogue Rick who had been murdering other Ricks across realities. They can scream, and in fact their screaming is the reason why this Rick is getting away with it. What makes this worse is that our Rick acknowledges that only five Mortys and a jumper cable could achieve the same effect (and even admitted that he thought of an idea like this before), and that a Morty is behind all of this.
  • In "Big Trouble in Little Sanchez", Rick Sanchez puts his mind in a clone of a younger version of himself, which takes complete control and shoves our Rick to the back of the mind. While in this state, he can only communicate to the outside world through the clone's angst. This gets fixed at the end of the episode, of course.
  • In "Mort Dinner Rick Andre", Jessica gets captured by the Hoovians and imprisoned in goo. Because of Narnia Time, she's been frozen for centuries by the time Morty comes to rescue her, but while Morty believed she was asleep, she reveals that she was still conscious the whole time, and appears to have gone slightly mad from the experience (which also causes her to rethink her plans of becoming Morty's girlfriend).
  • In "Mortyplicity", Glockenspiel Jerry is willing to do anything to continue living, to the point of leaving his family and the other decoys at the mercy of the hostile decoys in order to hoard wood varnish to cross a river.. His plans quickly go sideways when a family of beavers tear him apart and use him as a nest, he is pecked by a humanoid woodpecker, alien cowboys turn him into a mirror frame and then set him on fire, and he is finally nailed to the cross of an alien Jesus, all over the course of an untold number of centuries, unable to die.
  • Twice in "Solaricks:"
    • It's revealed that Main Rick constructed a "Groundhog Day" Loop in his original dimension, presumably as a way to ensure that once he found and killed Rick Prime for killing his family, then found another Diane and Beth and brought them back, he could seamlessly resume his family life. Unfortunately, Rick was in such a terrible mental state even then that the loop was incomplete: the same day has been repeating constantly in the eyes of everyone in that universe, but they are still aging normally. After so many loops, some have started to notice that something's wrong, but they never are able to figure it out before the next loop. Based on the enormous presence of elderly people, this has been going on for a very long while.
    • In the same episode, Hermit Jerry, Main Morty's original father, kills and dissects a Cronenberg creature and finds that it still has a perfectly unmutated human brain inside. He nonchalantly says that this is rather common and muses over the possibility these particular Cronenbergs are still fully conscious and aware of what horrid, twisted beings they were turned into, but helplessly "trapped in the horror."
      Jerry: Anyway, it's awesome protein.
• Samurai Jack:
  • "Jack and the Lava Monster": the titular creature is actually a Viking warrior who fought Aku many years ago and unsurprisingly got his ass handed to him. Since Vikings consider death in battle to be very desirable, Aku chose not to kill him, and instead sealed him in a magic crystal for eternity, and then hid the crystal inside of a mountain to ensure it would never be found and the Viking would never get the warrior's death he desired. During his imprisonment, the Viking managed to Charles Atlas his way to being able to earthbend, and constructed the lava monster body around his crystal so that he could move around and fight. He also turned the mountain into a Death Course to ensure only the mightiest warriors could ever reach him. Jack, of course, finally puts him out of his misery, and he happily goes to Valhalla.
  • In the penultimate episode, Ashi is twisted into a demonic version of herself by her father, Aku, and is forced to fight against Jack. She can't break free, and Jack's attacks hurt her just as much as they would hurt Aku, and she is forced to watch as Jack emotionally crumples and surrenders his sword to Aku.
• The Secret Saturdays: In one episode, the family face against a warrior king whose thirst for power long ago could not be quenched. Seeking to use the Methuselah tree, which makes all the water on Earth, he ended up entombed in salt due to the tree protectors (giant insect-like crab cryptids) causing an earthquake. Years later he breaks out of his imprisonment when the salt crystal gets exposed to water. Anything that he touches with his right hand turns or gets encased in an unbreakable layer of salt, which he uses to almost accidently turn the tree itself into salt. In the end it's revealed his thirst for power has now became a literal, unquenchable thirst, yet unable to touch water to quench it. He demands Zak retrieve the sap from the tree to finally end his suffering. Later he uses a flower from the tree to finally quench his thirst. As it turns out, he became nothing but living salt and drinking the sap from the flower reduced him to a pile of salt, finally ending his suffering.
• One episode of The Secret Show ends with Doctor Doctor being tricked into sucking the entire universe into the Trousers of Doom! Because she happens to be wearing them, she is forced to float through the void all alone where no one can hear her.
  • In fact, one could argue that several things, such as the dinosaurs and the Atlanteans, that were sucked into the Trousers of Doom suffered this fate before the universe was added into the mix.
• The ending of the Silly Symphonies short Peculiar Penguins, ends with the shark, who was chasing the protagonists for half the picture, with a very large rock falling into his belly, trapping him at the bottom of the ocean to possibly starve to death.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Children of a Lesser Clod", Hans Moleman gets trapped inside of a morgue. When he tries to tell them that he's not dead, they just dismiss it as "gas escaping".
  • In another episode, Mr Burns punishes one of his employees by turning them into a human speed bump.
  • Bart's fate at the end of the Treehouse of Horror XXXI segment "Toy Gory", Bart is brutally killed by being hollowed out by the toys he unwittingly abused and had his vital organs replaced by toy mechanics. Considering the fact that the voicebox he was fitted with uses his voice, and he obviously wasn't asked to record lines by the toys before they killed him, this could mean his soul is still in his body.
• Sofia the First:
  • We learn in a special halfway through the series (leading to the Elena of Avalor spinoff) that Sofia's amulet, the Amulet of Avalor, contains Elena, the missing princess of Avalor, who had been sealed in the amulet when the evil sorceress Shuriki struck her with a magic spell intended to kill her. She'd been trapped in there for forty-one years (at the very least, she finds out that her same-aged cousin had grown into an almost elderly man) and was completely aware of her surroundings but was unable to communicate to anyone.
  • The same thing happens to Sofia and Prisma during the final battle against Vor in the Series Finale, but fortunately, Cedric and the others manage to rescue them soon enough.
• In the Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) Saturday morning cartoon (as well as Sonic Underground, and the Archie comics), roboticizing a person meant turning them into a machine, eliminating their free will. However, their minds still function, causing them to be used as slaves to Robotnik, knowing what's happening but incapable of doing anything about it.
• South Park gives us unfortunate kindergarten teacher Mrs. Claridge, who is burned so horrifically in an accident caused by the boys in pre-school that she's confined to a mechanical wheelchair, unable to move or speak, except beeping one time for yes, and two times for no (in a direct Shout-Out to Captain Pike from the Star Trek episode "The Menagerie"). This earns her the sympathy of her fellow civilians, but things really go downhill for her when her chair's batteries go dead.
  • ...in the middle of the street, and the townspeople think she's trying to commit suicide.
  • Since Kenny dies again and again, only to wake up in bed absolutely fine, so he could count as this. He remembers each and every one of his deaths, no matter how painful, and furthermore, no one remembers when he dies, even when he tries to prove it to them.
• Happens to Johnathon Ohnn in the Spider-Man: The Animated Series episode "The Spot". A scientist who gains the ability to open portals using his body discovers a giant super-portal in the sky, which he can only close from the inside. Slightly lessened (or increased depending on your view) because his lover refused to let him do it alone, and entered the portal with him. Both vanish inside, the portal closes and we never see them again in the show.
• The "Squid On Strike" episode of SpongeBob SquarePants ends with Mr. Krabs punishing SpongeBob and Squidward by making them work for him... FOREVER. The next scene cuts to them reduced to skeletons and they're still working, leading to a total Downer Ending.
  • "Perfect Chemistry" ends with Plankton being stuck in a corked bottle, in Mr. Krabs' safe, where no one can hear him.
  • Squidward effectively paralyses SpongeBob and Patrick with his "The Reason You Suck" Speech when he goes batshit in "Good Neighbors", rendering them unable to defend or flee. Justified by it being Nightmare Fuel for them. The two recover their wits enough to leave when Squidward finishes, but are so scarred they resort to making amends.
  • In "Krabs a la Mode", Mr Krabs traps Plankton in an ice cube.
  • The episode, "Home Sweet Pineapple" ends with Squidward trapped under Spongebob's house, unable to see anything or move.
  • In "SquidBob TentaclePants", Squidward messes with a molecular ray device causing himself and everyone around him to be trapped in a hideous flesh-colored blob with random moaning heads sticking out of it.
  • The episode "The Thing" features Squidward trapped in a cement cocoon.
  • At the end of "Hooky", Patrick suffers Laser-Guided Karma for his negative peer pressure: he gets sealed in a can with nobody nearby to help him get out.
  • In "SB-129", Squidward finds himself trapped in a walk-in freezer and gets frozen for 2,000 years.
    • Also in the same episode, there's also the Blank White Void that Squidward ends up in after his time machine malfunctions, where there's literally nothing but random colored tiles and ambient, creepy voices. Squidward thinks of this as paradise at first, until this trope sets in at which point he regrets it and tries to escape.
• Star Wars: The Clone Wars: In "A Distant Echo", when Rex and Tech find the previously-believed-dead Echo, he's in a stasis pod. It's indicated he's been stuck in there since shortly after his "death" and capture, and he's been reliving his last moments at the Citadel, where he was caught in an explosion that nearly killed him, over and over.
  Echo: We have to get to the shuttle... escape the Citadel... No! I'll go first...
  • Later, in "Shattered", Rex reveals that he, and by extension the other Clone Troopers who carried out Order 66, were fully aware of what they were being made to do and couldn't do anything to stop it, no matter how much they tried Fighting from the Inside.
• Strawberry Shortcake: Just like in the original The Wizard of Oz series, where the Tin Woodsman, Nick Chopper, first appeared, he suffers from this fate (to the point of being unable to communicate properly, although he can still emote). Blame those rusty joints of his for it. Fortunately, Strawberry Shortcake uses an oiling can nearby to lubricate his joints, freeing him from his immobilised state.
• Steven Universe:
  • The fate of a shattered Gem. Every single shard is still alive and conscious, with a fragment of the Gem's mind in each shard and driven only to become whole once again, sometimes even able to project loose limbs. They can only regenerate into singular body parts, and from what we've seen so far, they cannot be fixed. All of these are reasons why shattering a Gem is treated as a very serious issue among the cast.
    • Worse are the Cluster Gems, gem shards forcibly fused together by Homeworld during their fusion experiments. The gems that form from these shards are more like collections of loose limbs than anything resembling a person, the only sounds they make appear to be shrieks of agony, and they seek out other lifeforms in a desperate attempt to be whole again. There is nothing the Crystal Gems can do for these gems except poofing and bubbling them, the equivalent of a Mercy Kill. The Cluster itself is this multiplied by a million — a collection of gem shards the size of a small mountain embedded in the Earth's core, desperately trying to resist forming no matter how badly it wants to, because forming would tear the entire planet apart.
  • Lapis was imprisoned in a mirror for centuries, being used as its magical power source and could only speak if spoken to, which only Steven did in the episode she was introduced in.
  • Lapis later fuses with Jasper to form Malachite. Although Jasper intended for this to be a power booster, Lapis uses her power over water to drag them to the bottom of the ocean. Since Lapis can (presumably) end that at any time by unfusing, this trope doesn't apply to her, but rather Jasper, who doesn't seem to be able to unfuse.
  • In the movie, this trope is crossed with Self-Inflicted Hell. 6,000 years ago Pink Diamond asked Spinel to wait in her garden. Since Gems tend to obey any order from a Diamond without question, she stood motionless in that one spot the entire time slowly going insane while the plants decayed around her. It only occurs to her to move again when a Homeworld news broadcast reveals that Pink Diamond has been dead for years.
• In Tangled: The Series, Quirin becomes encased in magical amber and rendered completely immobile in the middle of Season 1. He's not freed until the Season 3 premiere, meaning that he was frozen in place, but alive, for almost two years.
• The fate of Ch'rell the Utrom Shredder in the 2003 Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon. After having battled and defeated him many times in the past only for him to return for a rematch later every time, Splinter and the turtles, despite an interruption by Ch'rell, who beats such stuffing out of them that they spend the next episode recovering from their wounds, successfully destroy his spaceship and, along with him, Karai, and Dr. Chaplin, are transported to the safety of the Utrom homeworld by the Utroms themselves just before the ship explodes. There, everyone is attending as the Utrom council places Ch'rell on trial. The council finds Ch'rell guilty and sentences him to eternal exile to his new home on the ice asteroid belt of Mor Tal, where he does very little but let loose a furious Big "NO!". Later, he was found frozen in ice by the Laughably Evil 1987 Shredder in Turtles Forever, which was proof that this was Ch'rell's fate, a fate eventually undone by the 1987 Shredder himself.
  • In the original cartoon, this was Baxter Stockman's ultimate fate - trapped in limbo between dimensions.
• One wonders how Teen Titans (2003) villain Malchior took being imprisoned in that book for a thousand years.
  • Not to mention that there were superheroes being frozen and held captive by the Brotherhood of Evil during a portion of the final season, and a later addition to this group is Robin.
• Thomas & Friends:
  • In "Granpuff", Duke warns Stuart and Falcon with the story of a misbehaving engine named Smudger that was turned into a generator, immobilizing him forever. It gets even more horrifying when the Fridge Horror sets in as he was presumably buried alive along with the rest of the old railway, trapped underneath several feet of dirt and unable to call for help.
    • Later on the episode, Duke himself was abandoned in his shed, which was covered over by nature and buried for many years, until he was unearthed in "Sleeping Beauty".
  • "The Sad Story of Henry" ends with Henry bricked up in a tunnel for "always and always and always". The narrator even mentions how Henry has no steam left to answer with. However, in the following episode, Henry is freed from his prison.
  • In the special Misty Island Rescue, Thomas and the three Logging Locos get trapped in an underwater tunnel (Bash, Dash and Ferdinand running out of fuel) with nobody knowing where they are.
• Alejandro in Total Drama, after being trapped in the robot suit. Initially, he is able to speak through a communication chip, but it soon breaks, leaving him unable to communicate with anyone for a year.
  • Scott, the main antagonist from Season 4 gets a similar fate. He is paralyzed by Fang and is put in a trauma chair that only lets him communicate via flashing lights for yes or no. What makes it worse is that the rest of the players laugh at him and he can't do anything about it.
  • Both of them get better for Season 5. While Alejandro is freed from his suit after it lands in the ocean and short-circuits, thus exploding and freeing him, Scott is somehow better on his own. No official explanation is given for his recovery.
• Transformers:
  • Swindle's Karmic Death in Transformers: Animated, as he was hauled away to be broken apart at a police auction after being immobilized by his Slo-Mo device. "Five Servos of Doom" reveals that Swindle is Not Quite Dead, and he gets freed in "Decepticon Air".
    • Also, the fate of Blurr. He was crushed into a cube by Shockwave and was confirmed to still be alive, then he was supposedly put into an incinerator. However, one of the comics shows Cliffjumper carrying the cube around with him, so he was apparently saved from that last bit. Unfortunately, Cliffjumper doesn't seem like he knows how to get Blurr back to his old self...
  • In Beast Wars, and thus throughout the rest of the Transformers: Generation 1 continuity, it is revealed that Starscream has a mutant, immortal spark. After being killed by Galvatron, Starscream spent countless centuries as a disembodied spark, drifting through the cosmos, before finding a way to go back in time, through the same Transwarp time hole that brought the Maximals and Predacons of Beast Wars into prehistoric Earth. After being killed (again), his spark returned to space to helplessly wander the cosmos until it can possess another being.
• In Trollz, Zirconia was turned into a tree for 3,000 years. It's a bit more complicated than that, though; at first, she was simply imprisoned within the tree. As time passed, she became part of it. She was conscious the entire time.
  • Spinell, her husband, was trapped in the form of a dragon. That couldn't talk.
• The Venture Bros.: In the episode "Return to Spider Skull Island", Doctor Orpheus deals with two Jerkass rednecks by trapping their souls in a Homeboys figurine. They can actually be heard screaming.
• Wakfu: Qilby the Traitor already considers his eternal reincarnation cycle and inability to ever forget across his reincarnations to be this. In order to punish and contain him, his brothers locked him in a Blank White Void between dimensions where his body can't age or die (and therefore his soul can't escape back to his Dofus to reincarnate) and where he was in perpetual sensory deprivation, for thousands of years. He escapes in Season 2, only to be reimprisoned in the void by Yugo. Qilby's fate is made all the more horrible by the fact that he, as an immortal who remembers everything, is motivated to stave off monotony, making the Whirte Dimension an absolute Ironic Hell for him.
• The Wander over Yonder episode "The Wanders" has Wander accidentally getting split into 420 aspects of his personality, leaving the real Wander to just stand there with Blank White Eyes. After Sylvia puts them all back together, Wander seals up the cave and remarks that he'd hate to see anyone else go through what he went through, implying that on some level he was aware that he'd been shattered into fragments of himself and was incomplete and in danger of fading from existence.
  • Another example of this is seen when Sylvia Unwittingly begins talking to Dominator about having fun. She states that she knows exactly what Sylvia means and begins talking about blowing up a sun so that the inhabitants of the planet that orbit it freeze and are stuck in their agonizing and final positions forever.
• Episode 4 of What If…? (2021) focuses on an alternate Doctor Strange who lost his girlfriend Christine Palmer instead of the use of his hands. All the same events of Doctor Strange (2016) happen, but afterwards, Strange begins experimenting with the Time Stone, hoping to save Christine, but every attempt sadly results in her dying another way. As the Ancient One explains to Strange, Christine's death is an "Absolute Point", a pivotal moment in time that shapes a person's destiny, meaning it must happen and therefore can't be altered because doing so would cause a Reality-Breaking Paradox. Strange, however, spends centuries gaining enough power to change Christine's fate while ignoring every warning he's given that doing so is a very bad idea and that she isn't worth it. Indeed, once he finally undoes her death, it triggers the paradox he was explicitly told would happen: With Christine alive, Strange no longer had any reason to pursue the mystic arts and become Sorcerer Supreme, and thus would never be able to save Christine in the first place. The resulting Time Crash erases his entire universe from existence, and Christine along with it. The only thing left is a tiny crystal bubble the size of a house, inside of which is the now-immortal Strange, who realized the consequences far too late and is all alone with the knowledge that it's all his fault. Forever.
• Wild Kratts has Donita Donata who specializes in "living jewelry", i.e. living animals frozen in suspended animation and attached to horrendous fashion. And yep, they're still conscious.
• The fate of the Trix at the end of Seasons 1 and 3 of Winx Club. They are trapped in a virtual world full of positive atmosphere that they hate, which is shown to be driving them mad at the beginning of Season 2 before they are rescued by Darkar. Also of note, while the Trix return in Season 5 in most versions, the 4Kids dub ends with Season 3, so in its continuity the three witches presumably remain there for the rest of their lives.
  • The Army of Darkness (Army of Decay in the 4kids dub) from Season 1 subjects its victims to this, imprisoning them in gross cocoons. When the Winx and Specialists travel to Magix City to confront the Trix, Sky sees dozens of these cocoons scattered across the city. And when he looks into them, he realizes, by the people’s expressions inside, that they’re alive and aware.
  • Then there's Valtor/Baltor, who among many unnamed convicts is frozen in the Omega Dimension at the beginning of Season 3 before being released by the Trix. This was intended to last for eternity, and he was awake the entire time he was frozen.
  • Valtor inflicts this upon Faragonda when he battles her during Cloud Tower’s siege on Alfea, casting a spell to turn her into a tree, a spell that was slowly becoming irreversible. As the spell was based in hibernation magic rather than dark magic, fairy dust could not break it, forcing the Winx to travel to Lynphea, the planet of nature, to find a cure for Faragonda.
  • Anyone branded with Valtor’s Mark is brainwashed into becoming one of Valtor’s servants. However, according to Sky and King Radius after they’re set free, the Mark also induces this trope on people. The Mark effectively imprisoned them in their own minds, as they were aware of everything the Mark forced them to say and do, and they were completely horrified the entire time.

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