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Artificial Limbs
aka: Artificial Arm

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Every now and then, you could use a hand. Especially one that's metallic. And totally cool.

"A chainsaw can remove a limb,
or act as a replacement."
Showbread, "Dead By Dawn"

A number of heroes and villains in video games, anime and science fiction either start off with or receive an artificial limb over the course of the story, usually to offset the poignant loss of an appendage. This can either be due to an injury, or in rare cases intentional mutilation. Said prosthetics will almost always function perfectly, as if the character had never lost the limb to begin with, save for malfunctions that relate to the story.

Artificial limbs will often grant superhuman strength, frequently overlooking the fact that even if your arm has the strength to lift a tanker truck, doing so would very probably crush your spine unless it were similarly reinforced. Or, the arm will bend, but follow the path of least resistance, and simply rip itself out of the shoulder joint.

If you're in an era where cybernetics are not just in the future but ridiculously so, never fear: the Rule of Cool allows you to get Steampunk limbs instead. Nevermind that this makes little sense in terms of nerve connections and power source. A fantasy world may substitute magical prosthetic limbs (based on the magic that produces the Golem), but this is rare since such worlds can usually use the same magic to regenerate lost limbs instead.

The darker the setting, the more likely cyber-bits are to cause loss of humanity of some sort—sometimes it's actually called "soul", but you often get workarounds like "essence" or "vitality", and magic wielders, in settings that have both, generally can't have too much cyberware. Especially common in roleplaying games, as a balancing measure so that rich characters can't just have their whole bodies replaced.

Quite fortunately, this is also a case of Truth in Television. While they can't give you superhuman powers, prosthetic limbs are becoming more and more advanced, allowing people who've lost a limb a chance to live more normal lives. As a real-life example of the belief that artificial limbs may be better in some ways than biological ones, the International Association of Athletics Federations has banned certain artificial limbs in competitions it governs, including the Olympics, due to a still controversial claim that certain prosthetics may provide some athletes with an unfair advantage.

See also Brain/Computer Interface for characters getting "jacks" implanted to connect to computers via cable (or even LAN!), and Swiss-Army Appendage for characters who hot-swap their Artificial Limbs. Often a result of the We Can Rebuild Him style of Emergency Transformation. If the limb is awesome enough, it might be a Badass Transplant, and is usually an example of Fashionable Asymmetry. Often can result in Limb-Sensation Fascination when someone explores their new limb. See Prosthetic Limb Reveal for instances where a character is suddenly revealed to have an artificial limb or two despite not looking like they'd have any. Often occurs when the supposedly real limb is shot off or otherwise injured, only to see that it was artificial. For someone who keeps getting prosthetics, see Serial Prostheses.

An alternative is Cloning Body Parts, where the missing organ is simply replaced with a cloned copy. If a species is merely born with strange appendages, that's Bizarre Alien Limbs.

Specific types of Artificial Limbs include:


Example subpages

Other examples:

    open/close all folders 

    Advertising 
  • Dear Alice: The dog resting near the table during lunch has a sleek prosthetic foreleg.

    Audio Plays 
  • In The Elysium Project, Kate has one artificial arm, having lost her real one when she was younger. It's just a simple prosthetic, but the telekinetic powers granted her by the Elysium formula allow her to use it as though it were a real arm.

    Comic Books 
DC Comics:
  • Aquaman: What's that? The Silver Age Aquaman isn't "grim and gritty" enough for the 1990s? I know, let's have piranhas chew his left hand off! Keen! We can give him a cool retractable hook, and he can grow a beard while he's at it.
  • Doom Patrol: Cliff Steele is a racing driver whose brain is salvaged from a horrible crash and inserted into a metal body, causing him some anguish.
  • Galaxy: The Prettiest Star: Kat uses a prosthetic after losing her leg in a drunk driving accident.
  • Green Arrow: Arsenal, formerly Speedy, had his right arm ripped off in a fight with Prometheus in Justice League: Cry for Justice. He now has a cybernetic replacement, however it isn't "permanent" as Roy's arm is still infected with flesh-eating bacteria from Prometheus' blade. The attachment works "around" Roy's nerve endings and actually enhances the pain he already feels. It hinders his ability as an archer to the point that he's stopped using a bow, he can't wear normal clothes over it, and it's a complete eyesore. This was all Retconned away as of 2011.
  • Justice League of America: In Justice League Elite, Vera Lynn Black has two extremely high-tech prosthetic arms, having lost both her natural arms in a childhood accident. The prosthetics are capable of transforming themselves into a variety of different weapons, and are capable of generating full-body disguises for her.
  • Superman:
  • Red Robin villain "Wolf" has a set of four mechanized arms he uses in tandem with his existing two in order to wield six guns at once.
  • Sgt. Rock adversary "The Iron Major," had his right hand replaced with one of solid iron.
  • In the original New Teen Titans, much like a traditional cyborg, only a portion of Cyborg's body was composed of military cybernetic limbs given to him by his father. In the Teen Titans cartoon however, as a result of the series' humorous Made of Iron characteristics, it would appear that his thought process is the only thing human about him. Well, that and his appetite.
  • Wonder Woman'': The villain Cyborgirl has a weaponized cybernetic arm, in addition to the cybernetic alterations to her damaged lungs and eye.

DC Imprints (Wild Storm, Vertigo, ect.)

  • Deconstructed in Global Frequency, in which a woman with a cybernetic arm talks about how she can feel metal grinding against her bones and how she had to have her shoulders and spine reinforced to stop her arm from ripping itself out of her body. A fully-converted cyborg has an even worse time of things.

Marvel Comics:

  • Captain America: Bucky Barnes has a cybernetic left arm to replace the one he lost at the end of World War II.
  • Heroes for Hire: Misty Knight was a cop until she lost her arm in a bombing; Iron Man then designed a new bionic one for her.
  • The Mighty Thor: Early in Thor (2014), Thor Odinson loses his left arm to Malekith. Screwbeard the dwarf provides him with a prosthetic arm made of Uru (the same metal as Mjolnir itself). Various flash-forwards show Thor continuing to use various prosthetics thousands of years into the future.
  • Comic Book/Runaways: Nico Minoru loses her left arm during the events of Avengers Arena, but gains a magical "Witch Arm" following her death and resurrection. This remains the case until Runaways (Rainbow Rowell), where her left arm is now back to normal. When Chase asks her how that happened, she refuses to explain.
  • She-Hulk: She-Hulk (2004) introduced Southpaw/Sasha Martin, a 5'5" (1,65 meters), 110 pound (50 kilos) weakling teenage girl. With a MASSIVE mecha-hand on her left hand which gave her enough strength to crush IronClad from the U-Foes' arm into scrap!
  • Spider-Man: Otto Octavius's problems started apparently when he added four arms of questionable morality to his spine...
    • One story had him developing artificial limbs for amputees among the general public alongside another villain. Villain being the key word as the limbs contained parts of the same tech Ock used to mentally control his limbs, letting him control whatever unlucky sot that had gotten one of said replacement parts.
  • Venom: As Agent Venom, Flash Thompson could use the symbiote to replace his missing legs, amputated while protecting his squad in Iraq. He doesn't use this in public, though. During Superior Spider-Man (2013), Doc Ock-in-Peter-Parker's-body gave him prosthetic legs and took the symbiote for his own — Flash dumped the legs and took back the symbiote. A later mission in Venom: Space Knight forced Flash to don cybernetic legs as the symbiote would get detected.
  • X-Men:
    • Angel has his naturally-occurring wings amputated and replaced with razor-edged metallic wings that can shoot blades. As the procedure is done by an evil mad scientist, there are some side effects.
    • The younger mutant Hellion later gains metal prosthetics that he animates with his telekinesis after his hands are blasted off by a Sentinel.
    • Karma received a prostethetic left leg after her real one had to be amputated due to a severe injury.
    • Forge lost his leg but, as he's a Gadgeteer Genius, he made a new one himself. The reimagination in Ultimate X-Men goes a little further because, rather than a grey leg with lines, this one looks like an actual prosthetic leg.

Others:

  • In All Fall Down, the now-paraplegic speedster, Pronto, resorts to this in order to regain his super speed.
  • British sci-fi comics love this one.
    • Louis Crandell, the "Steel Claw" of 1960s comic "Valiant", who became invisible apart from his artificial hand after a lab accident (he sticks the fingers in an electric socket to produce the temporary effect — you couldn't DO that now) makes it at least Older Than They Think.
    • Judge Dredd himself has bionic eyes, and a popular foe, Mean Machine Angel, has one arm that's been replaced by a giant mechanical claw-thing (he's also got a bionic eye, a metal-plated skull, and a brain implant that means he's only got four emotions: Surly, Mean, Vicious and Brutal). There's also Judge Guthrie, who has both arms and legs as well as an eye and a large portion of his skull replaced with prosthetics, which have to be contained in a bodysuit, and Nate Slaughterhouse, who has everything apart from his head replaced due to a combat injury.
    • Axel Pressbutton, "the psychotic cyborg" had both legs, his left arm and most of his torso replaced after three-quarters of him was eaten by a Man-Eating Plant.
    • Aimee Nixon is only one of many secondary characters in 2000 AD and its spinoffs to qualify, in her case a bionic arm.
    • Lobster Random replaces one of his claws with a mechanical prosthetic at the end of the second story. Averted with his human arms, the left one which has been amputated and replaced three times by means of cloning and medically assisted biological regeneration.
    • Ulysses Sweet: Maniac For Hire has both cybernetic and biological replacement as options. The mechanical option is the cheaper of the two, though Ulysses prefers the biological option. However, due to his Axe-Crazy nature, which results in him killing his clients, he suffers from Perpetual Poverty and has to plump for the mechanical option frequently. In one story, he's fully biological again, only to shoot himself in the head to destroy a court-mandated control chip that was annoying him and winds up as a cyborg again.
  • Deff Skwadron: Killboy has had so many bionik replacements (one for every completed mission, in fact) it makes him immune to death by squig: he simply doesn't have enough fleshy parts left for the vicious little bastards to bite.
  • In Dinocorps, Professor Theodore has two robotic-looking arms, complete with a pair of hands that would be perfect for a claw machine.
  • In the Dirty Pair issue "Run from the Future," the titular duo are hunting for several criminals, including the "Planarian Cannibals;" they ceremonially eat their own arms and legs (and replace them with cybernetics) to concentrate their spiritual essence. Oh, and they eat other people too.
  • Several examples in Invincible:
    • Rex Splode gets a robotic hand after having one bitten off by a lizard man.
    • Bulletproof apparently gets one too, to replace the one he lost while fighting an evil Invincible Doppleganger.
    • Oliver gets a prosthetic arm and jaw bone.
    • Angstrom Levy has a robotic hand replace one that was torn off by Invincible.
    • Conquest has a robotic arm.
  • Scud the Disposable Assassin: The protagonist inverts this trope — he's a robot whose model was discontinued, and when he loses his arm he gets a human one as a loaner until his replacement parts can be ordered in. The problems with his meat arm which once belonged to a werewolf fuel a whole story arc.
  • Sonic the Hedgehog (Archie Comics):
    • Bunnie Rabbot becomes a type of cyborg when she's halfway tossed into a (very fast-working) "roboticizing" machine. Her legs and one arm are turned into robotic limbs. In the rebooted universe, it was changed to having cybernetic prosthetics when Eggman's coup seriously injured a young Bunnie.
    • Additionally, in this comic's universe, the echidna are presented as an advanced people that embrace progress while not forgetting nature and spiritualism. To this end, they shunned over-reliance on technology, something not every echidna agreed with. This caused the expected infighting and social divide, culminating in the formation of the Dark Legion, whose purpose in life was to antagonize their hippie, tree-hugging brethren and to demonstrate their complete embrace of technology... by implanting ALL of their members with bionics, sometimes an eye, sometimes a limb or two, or sometimes their entire body. Talk about hardcore.
  • The crime boss Johnny Woo Woo from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles "Body Count" miniseries had metal hands.
  • In We Stand on Guard, Dunn has both a robotic arm and a nasty facial scar.

    Comic Strips 
  • In Doonesbury, B.D.'s loss of a leg in the Iraq War and his subsequent rehabilitation in a VA hospital is depicted in a series of strips.
  • One The Far Side comic showed a salty old sailor pointing to his peg leg and saying "Well, that ain't a bad story, but lemme tell ya about the time I lost this!" The guy he's talking to, by the way, has a wooden peg for a head.

    Fan Works 
  • The Butcher Bird: Bertram Lauren loses an arm and has it replaced with a mechanical one derived from Cog technology.
  • The Egg Team: Teddy gets an artificial limb, gaining it almost immediately after his first appearance. It's one of the most important parts of his character, as the electric orbs he can create with it is his only method of fighting.
  • Pure Light: Validor's left hind leg is a Magitek mechanical prosthetic below his knee. He controls it using enchanted diamonds that connect directly to his mind, which allows him to move it even when it isn't attached to the rest of his body. Electroy later receives a similar prosthetic foot after his original one is cut off by a dark dragon.
  • Uplifted: Joachim Hoch loses his arm and gets it replaced with one. He keeps it covered at all times with a glove in order to prevent people in 1940s Germany from knowing about it.
  • Ruby and Nora: A girl named Lily has one. It's also a gun.
  • Team LVDR: Lila has a prosthetic leg after needing to get her original one amputated.
  • Christian Humber Reloaded: The main character loses an arm fighting his corrupted self, and gets a robotic arm as a replacement.
  • HERZ: This story features two examples:
    • After her right arm got spliced, Asuka got an artificial limb covered by a harness of latex-like material.
    • Touji also has arm and leg prosthetics to replace his missing limbs.
  • The One I Love Is...: During the Angel War Touji loses an arm and a leg. They were replaced with prosthetic limbs. They were pretty good but they did not quite looked like the real appendages, and they did not grant him enhanced physical abilities.
    I noticed that he also wore black gloves. I was very grateful for that. Even if the advances in bio-robotics had been astonishing these last few years, they hadn't yet managed to make artificial limbs that looked totally like real ones. Touji knew that the sight of his artificial hand tended to make me uneasy. I was over the guilt, but... I just couldn't look at it...
  • It's safe to say that every character in That Guy with the Glasses in Space has these or are complete cyborgs by the time the story starts.
  • Tenten gets one of these in the Naruto/Justice League crossover Connecting the Dots when Cyborg replaces the arm she blew off during her escape from Luthor.
  • In Child of the Storm the Winter Soldier has one. Later, his successor, the Red Son a.k.a. Harry, ends up with one as well.
  • In A Growing Affection, after Shino's right leg is crushed by the Three-Tails Turtle, it is replaced with a colony of beetles that mimic the limb.
  • In Eternal Flowers, there was an accident mentioned involving a limousine that is probably the reason for Amber's legs being replaced with those of a Persocom.
  • This is all too common in the Mega Crossover Crossover Chaos. Killer gets his left lower arm replaced with a robotic one of these after losing it to Project Omnicron/ Beetle. Kyle gets the bottom half of both of his legs replaced with prosthetics getting run down by a car and losing the ability to walk. These are just a few of many examples.
  • Under the Bridge introduces the "Gray Mouse" who is later revealed to be Gadget Hackwrench's twin sister Widget. She was born without a left arm, but being the Wrench Wench she is, she builds herself a quite powerful mechanical one. At the beginning of the story, hardly anyone knows about her artificial limb because she wraps a cape around it and conceals the hand in a glove.
  • In "14,000,606", after Peter loses his left arm performing the Snap (Avengers: Endgame), Tony and Shuri develop a new vibranium arm for him, even equipping the arm with nanobots to serve as an unlimited webbing supply.
  • In The 100 fic "Twisted Steel", after Clarke loses her arms in a traumatic accident up on the Ark, her father and Raven develop a pair of artificial arms for Clarke's use. These arms require them to turn Clarke into a Nightblood based on some of Rebecca's surviving records so that the cybernetic components of the arms won't poison her, and Raven later modifies the arms to increase Clarke's capacity to touch and feel anything with her new limbs, as well as adding an extendable sword to one arm.
  • Origins: The results of Samantha Shepard being Half the Woman She Used to Be — mainly her lower body from about the navel on down was turned into paste and thus had to be completely replaced by cybernetics. Brick loses his arm, but the replacement ends up allowing him to heft even larger weapons meant to be mounted on tanks (though he still has to use a bracing system before firing). Finally, we have the case of Zera Zelit, who ended up on the bad end of a duel with Armando Bailey and lost her right arm for it.
  • A Great Endeavor: Spitfire gets a crude but functional wing as a replacement for one the Nazis took from her.
  • The Gunslinger Hero: Flintlock: Izumi has a robotic arm which is much better than her old one. She came about getting this arm in a past event that has not yet been revealed to the audience.
  • Red Fire, Red Planet has Lieutenant Tiyerissel ch'Kreem, an Andorian who lost a leg when his old ship the USS Hamburg was attacked by the IKS QarchetvI’. The prosthetic didn't knit properly, leaving him in frequent pain that resulted in him not being cleared for field duty. He got stuck running a listening post on the edge of the Sol system.
  • Jack's artificial foot in Cave Story Versus I M Meen, even though it's only part of a leg.
  • Brandon Heat in Betray Me Not gains a conventional artificial leg to restore his ability to walk. However, as Brandon is forced to wear it on the day after having his residual limb patched up, he finds trouble balancing himself and later, the prosthesis also causes skin breakdown to him. Because the artificial leg is created in one night, it is a tad too short when compared to Brandon's good leg and doesn't give him the ability to flex the knee, causing him to walk very slowly with a weird gait and feel tired faster. Didn't stop him from kicking ass though.
  • In Fate/Parallel Fantasia, False Assassin's Noble Phantasm is a prosthetic arm which grants her the ability to grasp spiritual bodies from a distance.
  • After losing all four limbs to a serial killer with a heated cleaver, Nanami Shirotaka of Halkegenia Online Zero Hour designed a set of robotic prosthetics. Which she then upgraded until they qualified as low-profile Power Armor.
  • Lagann of How To Drill Your Way Through Your Problems creates one, complete with drill-fingertips, before deciding 'screw this' and regrowing a new arm. It is as amazing as it sounds.
  • Commander Hildread from Loved and Lost has a completely metallic right wing from which she can throw razor-sharp metallic feathers.
  • Final Stand of Death, Gene Simmons has these thanks to Joey but chilled with it. Spice Girls also receive them.
  • What If I Know Too Many Reasons I Can Be Strong?: Haganezuka makes Tanjiro a prosthetic forearm.
  • Izuku has long since lost his arm to the Moon Prescence in The Bloodstained Hero. His replacement, Isshin, is made of porcelain, siderite, and Hunter's bones.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
    • A handful of fan works feature Scootaloo flying with the aid of prosthetic wings.
    • A Moon and World Apart: Chapter 26 sees Rainbow Dash getting offered, and accepting, a replacement mechanical wing after she finds out she lost one while saving lives during the terrorist attack on the Orion.
    • Under the Northern Lights: Wiglek has a crude one in the form of a spear tip jammed into his leg to replace a lost hoof, held in place by undead flesh grown around it.
  • Becoming a True Invader: Dib gets a cybernetic replacement hand after losing his real one in a Life-or-Limb Decision on Oberox. He insists on having a laser-blade installed in it.
  • A Dip In The Inkwell has Ossie, a newly-hired agent introduced in the oneshot "Mr. and Mrs. O" who has a prosthetic leg that makes her walk unevenly.
  • Oversaturated World: Sunny Flare lost her hands and her parents in a car accident, five years prior to the setting of Blue Sunny Days and Pink Lemonade. She now wears fully functional prostheses with built-in battery packs.
  • The Palaververse: Legends: Lady Charroan has a "rune-engraved prosthetic foreleg".
  • Vow of Nudity: An elven slave in one story has a J-shaped metal slab grafted to his right ankle as a permanent prosthetic. Years later, while Haara's attempting to locate him and a few other long-lost slaves in a dwarven ruin, his metal foot is the main thing she looks out for among the inhabiting skeletal slimes to learn whether he perished or not.

    Films — Animation 
  • In The Book of Life, both of Chakal's arms are mechanical.
  • Gobber from How to Train Your Dragon has an artificial arm and leg, the arm which he exchanges for a hammer, axe, tankard for his booze, etc. Toothless has an artificial half tail fin and Hiccup gets an artificial leg after fighting the Red Death.
  • Invader Zim: Enter the Florpus reveals near the beginning that Professor Membrane has robotic arms (he implies he lost his real ones trying to befriend sharks as a child). During the climax, it's shown that they're capable of firing energy blasts, which he uses to fight Zim's Mecha-Mooks.
  • The LEGO Movie: Metal Beard, by virtue of most of his body being rebuilt.
  • Top Cat and the Beverly Hills Cats: One scene reveals Snerdly has a mechanical hand (covered by his usual butler's glove), which he's seen using all of once to smack a stone wall, leaving his handprint (and then causing a piece of the wall to hit him on the head, resulting in a Cranial Eruption).
  • Silver from Treasure Planet, who has an artificial leg and arm (and eye). Although his leg seems to give him problems at times (especially after Jim stabs it), his arm has a lot of things in it, including a cutlass, a gun, several different tools for cooking, and part of an Arm Cannon (with the other part is stored in his leg).

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 127 Hours is the fictionalized retelling of the events that led up to Aron Ralston's (see Real Life below) forced amputation.
  • Anastasia from Adventures In Public School had her leg amputated due to an extremely rare cancer.
  • One gag in Airplane! has a guy setting off a metal detector, and removing first one of his hands, then one of his legs.
  • In Captain America: The Winter Soldier flashbacks show how the titular Winter Soldier lost his left arm which HYDRA then replaced with a metal one.
  • Collective: A documentary with a Real Life example. A woman suffers horrifying injuries in a nightclub fire that include the loss of her right hand. Soon she's shown receiving what appears to be a state-of-the-art electronic hand that allows her to grasp and lift objects.
  • The Dark Crystal: The Skeksis Slave Master has a hook for a hand while the Scientist has a mechanical arm and leg. Their Mystic counterparts have wooden limbs in the same places.
  • In Evil Dead 2, Ash must cut off a demon-possessed hand, and replaces it with the chainsaw he cut it off with. In the sequel, Army of Darkness, it gets replaced with a Steampunk artificial hand.
  • Augustus Waters from The Fault in Our Stars has a prosthetic leg due to osteosarcoma.
  • Lieutenant Dan from Forrest Gump. His new "magic legs" are made of the same titanium/steel alloy that's used on the space shuttle.
  • The Hand: After losing his right hand in a freak accident, Jon is given a prosthetic hand that works fine for most purposes, but lacks the fine control he needs to be able to draw properly.
  • In The Hands of Orlac, Vasseur wears metal prostheses to replace his hands and forearms which were amputated. Actually a case of Obfuscating Disability as the man is not Vasseur at all.
  • Lindsay Lohan's character gets two in I Know Who Killed Me. Granted, the movie's a thriller, so they're the more realistic version, which is still able to cause some injury.
  • In Enki Bilal's Immortal (in both the comic and the film) Horus forges a new leg for Nikopol out of a subway rail. It still needs Horus' power to function.
  • James Bond:
    • Dr. No from the first James Bond movie Dr. No has mechanical hands, having lost his hands in an accident during his research into radioactivity. His mechanical hands could crush stone to powder, but could not grip a vertical beam well enough for him to lift himself out of the reactor's cooling tank.
    • You Only Live Twice — Dikko Henderson, Bond's contact in Tokyo, has an artificial leg from a war injury. Bond confirms it's him by smacking the leg hard with his cane. Henderson expresses relief that he'd chosen the correct leg.
    • The henchman Tee Hee from Live and Let Die had a mechanical right arm strong enough to break Bond's Walther PPK, but he fell afoul of a simple pair of nail clippers...
  • Johnny Mnemonic: The bartender at Ralfi's club, Hooky, has an electronic arm.
  • Gazelle's legs, from Kingsman: The Secret Service, are what you get when combining a pair of normal prosthetic legs and Absurdly Sharp Blade.
  • In The Last Queen, 16th century Ottoman corsair Aruj "Barbarossa" (Dali Benssalah) replaced his missing left hand with an iron hand, not unlike his contemporary Götz von Berlichingen.
  • Pearce from Logan has one.
  • Furiosa of Mad Max: Fury Road, in keeping with the aesthetic of the franchise, has a rather ramshackle Used Future one for her missing left arm. Quite a realistic take on it as well, as it's strapped to her shoulder and she can attach or detach it as the situation calls for it.
  • Mad Scientist C. A. Rotwang from the classic Metropolis had an artificial right hand.
  • Nobody Sleeps in the Woods Tonight: The old man that Julek and Zosia run into has metal legs to replace his real ones after he lost them in his last encounter with the twins.
  • In None Shall Escape, Wilhelm has a prosthetic leg after losing his real one in World War I.
  • Pirates of the Caribbean:
    • Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has this. Davy Jones has two legs as a human, but his mutated form turns one of them into a lobster/crab leg that evokes the image of the stereotypical pirate peg leg. While we're at it, his lobster-claw hand evokes the image of the stereotypical pirate hook hand.
    • This wouldn't be a proper pirate movie series without at least one wooden leg. It shows up in Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, attached to Barbossa. Kind of appropriate, since he's the most stereotypical (yarr!) pirate of the bunch. He can also remove it to access the bottle of rum hidden inside. (Jack is quite jealous of that particular feature.)
  • In Planet Terror, dancer Cherry Darling's leg is replaced with a wooden table leg after it's eaten by zombies. Later, she trades that in for an M-4 Carbine (with underslung grenade launcher). And at the end of the movie, she trades THAT in for a minigun.
  • Reach for the Sky is the dramatisation of the story of Douglas Bader, a double amputee who still proved a better fighter pilot than many Germans. After Bader's capture by the Luftwaffe, an unprecedented local truce was concluded so that a British pilot could courier Bader's best set of false legs to German-occupied France...
  • In Repo Men, one of the past-due artiforg recipients whom Remy and his partner chase down on the cargo ship has a robotic arm, and uses it to put up quite a fight.
  • RoboCop (1987) performs the ultimate version: in the words of OCP's project manager, "total body prosthesis". They even mention how useless the reverse situation would be: when one of the doctors notes they were able to save one of Murphy's arms, the project manager promptly orders it thrown out and the originally planned robotic arm installed in its placenote .
  • Rust And Bone: Stephanie is fitted for prosthetics after losing both legs to a killer whale attack, though she uses a cane while walking on them as a visual reminder to the audience of her changed life.
  • Two characters in Saw films have Artificial Limbs because of a Life-or-Limb Decision:
    • Dr. Gordon has one after he escapes from the bathroom in Saw. It is of the realistic variety, with Dr. Gordon needing a cane to walk with the prosthetic foot.
    • The woman who survives the opening trap from Saw VI has a prosthetic arm and complains of needing to use handicapped parking because of it.
  • In The Sign of Four: Sherlock Holmes' Greatest Case, Jonathan Small has a wooden leg which he is adept at using as a weapon.
  • Soul Surfer is another fictionalized retelling of what happened to a famous amputee, this time about teen surfer Bethany Hamilton.
  • Starship Troopers: Lieutenant Jean Rasczak (Michael Ironside) gets fitted with one when he re-enters service. The recruiting officer has one as well.
  • Interestingly enough, the Star Trek: The Next Generation movie First Contact does this backwards with the android Data having living flesh grafted onto his body by the Borg queen. It doesn't last.
  • Star Wars:
    • Both Anakin and Luke lose limbs to lightsaber injuries, showing off their natures. Star Wars tech being what it is, they have replacements within 10 minutes of screen time. However, Anakin's replacement hand is very obviously artificial, while Luke's is very close to looking and acting like the real thing, in a rare example where the series averts Cosmetically-Advanced Prequel. By The Force Awakens, however, the synthetic flesh on Luke's hand has worn off over the years, leaving the metal that was underneath completely exposed.
      • This is actually to the point where fans mockingly or not say certain individuals aren't Skywalkers because they haven't lost a limb.
    • In Revenge of the Sith, General Grievous has two robotic arms that can split into four when Dual Wielding his lightsabers.
  • Jinx has a robotic arm in the stinger of Steps Trodden Black.
  • In Terror in a Texas Town, The Gunslinger Johnny Crale had his right hand shot off, and replaced with a steel prosthetic that he uses a bludgeon.
  • In the Spaghetti Western Vamos A Matar, Companeros, John the "Wooden Hand" is named precisely for having an artificial right hand, the result of the protagonist having betrayed him in the past.
  • The documentary Warrior Champions is about various disabled Iraq/Afghanistan war veterans and their attempts to transition to lives as athletes. Some of these vets are amputees and one (Melissa Stockwell, the first woman to lose a limb during the Iraq War) makes it as far as the 2008 Beijing Paralympic Games.
  • Young Frankenstein: Inspector Kemp's wooden arm, a spoof of Inspector Krogh's wooden arm in Son of Frankenstein.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In All The Small Things, Olive has an artificial leg.
  • Almost Human: Detective Kennex lost a leg in an ambush, and now uses a synthetic replacement.
  • Arrested Development: George Sr. enlists his friend, J. Walter Weatherman, to use his prosthetic limb to teach his kids lessons by creating excessively dramatic arm-removals. The trope is used again later in the show when Buster loses his hand.
  • In Arthur of the Britons, Arthur's adoptive father Llud has a silver hand to replace one he lost in battle.
  • Ash vs. Evil Dead: Due to rights reasons, Ash can't have the steampunk metal hand he got in Army of Darkness, instead having a wooden one. When he loses it a few episodes into the first season, Pablo builds him a new metal one, based on a Nintendo power glove.
  • The Arrowverse has a few glaring examples:
    • Arrow: Malcolm Merlyn gets his left hand chopped by Oliver in a duel for the title of Ra's al Ghul. He gets a cybernetic replacement a few episodes later.
    • Legends of Tomorrow: In the Bad Future of Star City 2046, Oliver lost his left arm to Grant Wilson/Deathstroke II. He replaced it with a full cybernetic one, which looks a lot like the ATOM exosuit.
    • As a nod to the comics, Roy Harper gets a similar one to the above by the finale of Arrow, after he is forced to get his right arm cut off in a Life-or-Limb Decision a few episodes earlier.
  • Battlestar Galactica (2003): Felix Gaeta is shot in the leg by a twitchy crewmate, and doesn't get to medical care in time to save the limb. He is given a prosthetic leg not long after the amputation; however, the prosthetic is the wrong length, doesn't fit correctly, and aggravates his healing surgical scars, making them more susceptible to infection. The series also shows Gaeta becoming more accustomed to the prosthetic and less dependent on crutches gradually, over the course of several episodes. In another startlingly realistic touch, his stump itches. He can't find a suitable lotion; the itch may be partly psychosomatic. Just before the end of the series, after he commits mutiny with Tom Zarak, Adama's forces retake the Galactica. When Zarak and Gaeta are standing in front of the firing squad, he smiles and says, "It stopped."
  • The Book of Boba Fett: Most of the Mods have cybernetic arms equipped with useful gadgets.
  • A bit of a recurring theme in Charité at War because of all the crippled soldiers who return from World War II; the first episode features a leg amputation, and the patient angsts about being a cripple but is reassured by the medical staff, especially orderly Martin, a veteran himself whose right leg is a prosthesis. Thanks to the rather sophisticated prosthetics techniques, it's a pretty good one, too; Martin barely even limps (and is able to carry someone his own weight down a ladder and a staircase). Later in the series, Graf von Stauffenberg shows up at the hospital after he's lost his hand, and him getting a prosthetic for the right hand and a few new fingers for the left is discussed between him and the doctors.
  • Truth in Television example: Dr. Albert "Al" Robbins of CSI lost both legs in a childhood accident, so uses prosthetic legs and crutches to move about. This mirrors a Real Life accident which Robert David Hall, the actor who plays Dr. Robbins, suffered as a grown man.
  • Truth in Television example for a Character of the Week: In CSI: NY's "DOA for a Day," a Navy Seal who was discharged after becoming a triple amputee in combat is played by Sgt. Bryan Anderson, who has prostheses for both legs and his left hand, all of which he lost in the Iraqi War.
  • In The Devil's Whore, Sexby gets his arm lopped off while fighting in Ireland. He returns with a badass metal arm and is not afraid to use it.
  • In the Doctor Who story "Revelation of the Daleks", Evilutionary Biologist arch-villain Davros gets his right hand (his only unparalyzed limb) shot off. In the following story, he's only seen from the neck up due to heavily upgrading his wheelchair, but when he returns in "The Stolen Earth"/"Journey's End", he has a rather Freddy Krueger-esque metal hand with clawed fingertips. He has the talent to make something more realistic, so one can only assume he thinks it looks cool.
  • Dr. Romano on ER ended up with a prosthetic arm, effectively ending his career as a surgeon.
  • Extant has amazingly realistic ones that basically do everything a normal limb can do (and they can withstand fire).
  • Nina Sharp on Fringe has a bionic arm that replaces the one she lost due to cancer. Which she actually lost in an interdimensional portal, but you don't tell that to everyone you meet.
  • A Get Smart episode set on a ship had a captain with a wooden peg leg, a major clue.
    Captain: What are you looking at? It's my leg, isn't it?
    Smart: No, legs I've see before, it's that wooden thing I'm looking at.
    • Naturally there's a colorful story behind it, right?
    Smart: Great white whale?
    Captain: Little blue convertible.
  • Game of Thrones: Jaime receives an ornate golden prosthetic when he returns to King's Landing in Season 4 following the loss of his hand. Subverted in that it doesn't function as anything but a display and Jaime remarks that a hook would be more practical, but much to his luck, he does manages to use it as a life-saving improvised shield. It's also an effective tool for slapping, as the Freys learned the hard way during Season 6.
  • Arizona Robbins on Grey's Anatomy gets a prosthetic leg after losing hers in a plane crash; she eventually discovers that she can cure her phantom pain by having someone stab her in the (fake) foot.
  • Highlander:
    • Xavier St. Cloud, a recurring villain who after his first appearance got his hand chopped off. He replaced it with a Hook Hand.
    • Also series regular Joe Dawson had two prosthetic legs, having had his own blown off in Vietnam. This is because Jim Brynes who played Joe lost both his legs in a car accident as a teenager. This has never stopped either of them from being completely badass.
  • In JAG, Lt. Bud Roberts lost his leg to a landmine in Afghanistan. Much of that season was devoted to his learning to use a prosthetic leg and regaining his strength so he could remain a JAG officer.
  • The Kamen Rider franchise in the Showa era is all about this. One of them has electric coils for hands and another has a prosthetic arm/hook/grappling hook/machine gun/drill/mini-laboratory/et cetera. The rest of them do not show outward signs of being cyborgs. They are still pure, undiluted badasses.
  • La Brea: Izzy uses a prosthetic leg to replace hers, which was amputated due to her injury in a car accident.
  • Le Bureau des Légendes: In Series 2, Raymond has his left foot amputated by ISIS and uses a prosthetic thereafter. This act drives the plot for the rest of series two. It's not given heavy emphasis afterwards, but is periodically referenced through the subsequent series.
  • The prosthetic arm of François Chau's variably-named character on Lost is the subject of much speculation. The character is only seen in Dharma films/tapes. In some he has both arms, but in some he has a prosthetic. In the latest video, he refers to having information about the future, then looks sadly at his still-real arm.
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe:
    • In Agent Carter, Agent Daniel Sousa was injured in WW2, and subsequently has a prosthetic leg, which he needs a crutch to properly walk on.
    • The Defenders (2017): Misty Knight loses her right arm when Bakuto slices through it while she's providing interference for Claire Temple and Colleen Wing. She is later seen in the hospital with Colleen telling her that Danny Rand is using his connections to arrange for Misty to get a new bionic arm. She subsequently receives the arm during Season 2 of Luke Cage (2016).
    • Semi-Example: In the second season of Iron Fist (2017), Danny — the same one mentioned above — breaks his leg after a grueling fight, but has access to an experimental leg brace that somehow lets him get back on his feet and keep fighting while his leg heals whereas anyone else would have to spend months convalescing. It becomes Hilarious in Hindsight with his previous guest appearance in Luke Cage, where Danny gets annoyed when Luke says Danny can just use his money to solve anything.
    • An inversion occurs in The Punisher. Curtis lost his left foot while working as a field medic in Afghanistan. He's given an ordinary prosthetic by the VA, which renders him Dented Iron along with some serious psychological trauma.
    • Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. loves this:
      • In Season 1, Mike Peterson is caught in an explosion, and injured the the point where he loses both an eye and a leg. The leg, while advanced enough to keep up with his superhuman body, does not remotely pass for the real thing, while the eye is indistinguishable. An x-ray later that about half of his skull has also been replaced.
      • In the Season 2 finale, Coulson grabs a Terrigen Crystal to stop it from breaking and releasing a gas that would kill everyone within the area. The crystal begins turning him to stone starting from hand arm but Mack stops the infection by amputating Coulson's hand with an axe. Fitz built Coulson a prosthetic hand which was upgraded repeatedly as the show kept going though he had trouble adjusting to his new limb.
      • In Season 5, Elena "Yo-Yo" Rodriguez has her arms cut off at the elbows by Ruby Hale. She receives cybernetic arms to replace them but like with Coulson these come with issues at first. The arms themselves were initially incompatible with her Inhuman powers and they overloaded her nervous system because they were not designed for extreme speeds. Fitz recalibrated them so she could her powers without issue. They also grant her a degree of super strength.
      • In Season 7, the above mentioned Sousa joins the team, and he has gotten used to in the decade since Agent Carter, being more mobile, and able to walk on it unaided, but preferring to carry a cane. Simmons, having had experience with high-tech prosthetics after helping Coulson and Yo-Yo, eventually develops a new leg for him (with the help of some seriously advanced Chronicom tech). This lets him take a serious level in badass.
  • My Name Is Earl:
    • Earl had a one-night stand with a woman named Didi. When she got up to make them some breakfast, he noticed that "one of her legs didn't go with her." He was shocked and upset, and decided to run away. He stole money from her purse, as well as her prosthetic leg and her car. She (understandably) holds an enormous grudge against him, in particular because she couldn't afford a new prosthesis, and has been getting around by hopping ever since. (Which, since this took place before Earl's Accidental Marriage to Joy, had to be at least seven years.) She makes Earl spend a day doing everyday tasks on one foot. She is played by Tracy Ashton, who also has only one real leg.
    • The same day Earl found the lottery ticket, Didi acquired a boyfriend while she reached for the ticket (which Earl hadn't gotten back yet). Her boyfriend is missing both legs and one of his arms, and uses artificial legs that are designed for running and has a hook replacing his missing hand.
    • In a flashback to Earl and Joy's first wedding anniversary, Randy invited everyone in Joy's address book (which turned out to be a list of all the men she'd slept with before Earl. Joy tries to make Earl jealous, but it doesn't work because Earl already knows the guy. Earl goes in for a "handshake," and pulls off the guy's fake hand.
      Joy: How did I not notice that?!
  • Ninja Sentai Kakuranger: One of the Youkai, Amikiri, lost her arm to the Blue Ranger's ancestor and had it replaced with a claw weapon. Some other youkai who fell in early episodes were revived with artificial limbs by the efforts of Tengu and Prof. Yugami.
  • Power Rangers Cosmic Fury: As a result of losing his arm activating an altar to summon the Cosmic Fury Zords, Javi is given a new arm made by Billy and Solon, but has difficulty controlling it at first.
  • Red Dwarf:
    • Lister loses an arm in one episode and is fitted with a robot arm. This being Red Dwarf, it's a very cheap and basic robot arm and requires a full minute worth of extremely strenuous concentration to pick up a ball. In an additional subversion, turning up the sensitivity simply causes him to punch Kryten in the face repeatedly — it's being controlled by his subconscious, and he's angry at Kryten for amputating his arm.
    • The future echo of Lister has a prosthetic arm with a bottle opener built into it.
  • The Six Million Dollar Man, based on Martin Caidin's 1972 novel Cyborg, embodies this one, as does its spinoff The Bionic Woman.
    • Parodied by Family Guy: "Gentlemen! We can rebuild him! We have the technology! But we don't want to spend a lot of money." Cue a cyborg Peter with a bucket for a leg, a TV for a head and... yeah.
  • Star Trek:
  • In The X-Files, Krycek loses his arm in Season 4 and in all subsequent appearances has a prosthetic. This ultimately is his undoing, as he is unable to grab his gun when his other arm is injured.

    Manhua 
  • In the manhua Oldman, the titular Billy Oldman rescues a former general, Rebekah, who had her limbs cut off when she was captured. He then brings her to a doctor who gives her a set of artificial limbs. In addition to letting her move under her own power again, they're designed with a weight system that lets her temporarily increase her speed and strength. (Because the doctor is a pervert, the switch to activate this effect is at the top of the legs.) When Oldman becomes a stage magician, Rebekah serves as a "living doll" in his act.

    Manhwa 

    Music 
  • Played for Laughs in the Russian song Batalyon Boevye Protezy ("Battle Prostheses Battalion") by the band Belomors, about disabled people conscripted into the Russian army during the Second Chechen War, replacing their garden variety prostheses with sharp stuff like hooks and scythes and kicking major ass. The battalion commander, for example, has no hands but sports a single armor-piercing titanium hook.

    Myths & Religion 
  • Celtic Mythology examples:
    • The Battle of Magh Tuireadh relates how Nuada, king of the Tuatha Dé Danann, lost an arm in combat and received a functional replacement crafted of silver.
    • The same tale is ascribed to Lugh Llaw Ereint in the Welsh mythological cycle Y Mabinogion and may spring from the same Ur-Root.
  • Similarly, the Aztec god Tezcatlipoca lost a foot fighting a gigantic earth monster; depending on which version of the story you hear, he either replaced it with a snake or a smoking mirror with magical properties.
  • The Brothers Grimm tale "The Armless Maiden" features a girl whose hands are replaced with silver after her father chops them off to appease the devil.
  • There is a variation of a Norse myth involving Sigurd and his battle with the dragon Fafnir. During the fight his hand is bitten off, but he afterwards receives a fully articulate metal replacement with intricate wiring in place of tendons.
  • The earliest known recording of the concept comes from the Rigveda, where the warrior queen Vishpala was granted a "leg of iron" after losing her own leg in battle.

    Pinballs 
  • The Ringmaster in Cirqus Voltaire has a spring for a neck, while the acrobat depicted in the backglass has her legs replaced with a giant coiled spring.
    Ringmaster: "You'd be cranky too, if you had a spring for a neck."
  • The Seer in Magic Girl also has a spring for a neck, as a reference to Cirqus Voltaire.
  • The backglass for Popeye Saves the Earth replaces Popeye's signature forearms with pinball flippers.

    Podcasts 
  • In The Adventure Zone: Balance arc "The Crystal Kingdom", Merle gets their arm turned into crystal and has to have it amputated before the rest of their body follows. Lucas is able to replace the limb with a magical plant.
  • In the Gemini arc of Sequinox, Vivaldi and Chell have a robotic arm and leg, respectively, in the post-apocalyptic world.
  • In Trials & Trebuchets, Artis gets two prosthetic fingers after losing them to being forcibly experimented on in Patter, and Mira gains a prosthetic right arm after Neska bites hers off.
  • The Japanese teenagers from the Twilight Histories episode “Project Gliese” have augmented their bodies with cybernetic enhancements. You also receive a robotic arm. Kaisa from the episode “True Aztec” has a steam-powered prosthetic leg.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Kerry Von Erich had to have his foot amputated after a 1986 motorcycle accident and continued to wrestle wearing a prosthesis. As kayfabe was still in effect, they said Kerry had had to have his ankle fused into walking position rather than it had to be removed. In the late-1980's, Kerry's prosthetic foot came off in the middle of a match.
  • Tenacious Z Zach Gowen would wrestle with a prosthetic leg and detach it to use as a club against opponents while the referee wasn't looking. He didn't need it, his balance was good enough to move around the ring and do top rope moonsaults on one leg. All the same, he joined The Age Of The Fall's campaign to take up as much of Ring of Honor's time as possible so Jimmy Jacobs could rant about the short comings of the American healthcare system.
  • Chris Melendez, who made his pro wrestling debut with TNA in 2014, wrestles with a prosthetic limb, which he got through the Wounded Warrior Project.
  • Maurice "Mad Dog" Vachon saw his career end after a car crash where he lost his leg. That didn’t stop him from appearing in the audience at an In Your House event where, during a No Disqualification match between Diesel and Shawn Michaels, Diesel went and removed his prosthetic leg to use as a weapon. Michaels fought back with a low blow and then used the leg on Diesel.

    Radio 
  • Sergeant McGurk in Revolting People has a wooden leg and a metal arm. The arm has a whisky flask built into it (and in sillier episodes will also dispense soda water and ice).

    Roleplay 
  • In the universe of Einsteinian Roulette, lost limbs are usually replaced by prosthetics with metal muscles and bones, with the convicts who have more tokens to spend buying synth-flesh prosthetics instead.
  • Equestria Chronicles has Nova Storm. Interestingly, she was born with three legs and had to get a fourth in order to join the guard.
  • Pretty commonplace in Nexus Gate.
  • Little Red Riding Hood from We Are Our Avatars has a robot arm thanks to her arm getting frostbitten. It actually would have recovered, but luck conspired against her.

    Tabletop Games 
  • The BattleTech RPG MechWarrior has rules for characters getting prosthetics, ranked in four tiers, from crude hooks and pegs to full cybernetics sheathed in synthetic skin, as well as eye and ear replacements. However, there's no real advantage to them — at their best (and most expensive), they only allow a character to perform as well as they would with the original parts.
    • It's worth noting, though, that the novels feature two prominent characters who have weapon-grade lasers built into their artificial forearms, and a third whose prosthesis includes a hidden short-range communications device that allows him to safely exchange information with his contact under the guise of an innocuous meeting. There are also the Jihad-era Manei Domini (the Word of Blake's combat elite), who appear to be routinely equipped with various cybernetic enhancements.
  • The Cyberpunk 2.0.2.0. game has this as well. Its chapter on replacement parts? Named 'Putting the Cyber in the Punk'. As per some of the examples above they are unable to give superstrength... without ripping you apart. However, later supplements have added borgs (full-body conversions a la RoboCop).
  • Deadlands has loads of fun with artificial limbs, starting with Steampunk limbs for living and undead [who take the advantage of the fact that most of their intestines can be removed (since, as undead, they no longer need it)], and their cyberpunk equivalents, again, for both living and undead. Having steam- or cyber-ware installed still lowers a character's Spirit attribute. Though that's probably justified in this case given that the limbs run on ghost rock, a fuel source made of damned souls. Or the trapped energy of a Harrowed's Manitou co-pilot. Only Harrowed can "survive" full-on cybernetics outside the odd limb or the like.
  • Being fairly Trope Overdosed, Dungeons & Dragons has their own. Half-golems are humans with replacement limbs crafted from iron, clay, or stone (or someone else's flesh...). Warforged limbs are Exactly What It Says on the Tin. There are hundreds of grafts available for various editions, including demonic claws and skeleton hands on fire.
    • There's also a third-party Dungeons & Dragons setting which has fantasy meet steampunk, with giant clanky ponderous mechs being used to fight sometimes. One of the classes is the Steamborg, who gets a small steam engine attached to himself, and slowly can change out limbs for mechanical replacements which give bonuses.
    • Pathfinder went beyond the magical overlay and has outright pure-technological cybernetics. You obviously won't find anyone capable of making them in most campaigns, but the rules are there and the default setting has places where they can be found and even class modifications geared towards using them. This can also provide a nasty surprise to players — the default state of the example cybertech is to be at best very hard to see, and while there are technology-detecting magic that can pick them up, magic-detection is far more common.
  • The Frickster, Zachary, Fullmetal, Zed Provhezor, and Paulie Gonepus from Dino Attack RPG.
    • While he does not have any confirmed artificial limbs, Kareem Nazareno specializes in creating these.
    • Dr. Cyborg not only has artificial limbs, he also has an artificial trunk and artificial half-face!
  • Cyberlimbs in Eclipse Phase, which range from "functional but not particularly awesome" to "I built myself as Captain Reputation and decided to go to town spending favours on cool upgrades". Actually, given the ubiquity of Brain Uploading you can get an entire artificial body.
  • It just wouldn't be Exalted if you couldn't get powerful cyberlimbs made of the magical materials. The Alchemicals stand out in this regard, though, as their Charms are "installed" and the more obvious ones take on the appearance of cybernetic augmentation.
  • Several character archetypes from the 2056 juncture of Feng Shui have the option of starting with one or more Robot Limbs. They are not true cybernetic hardtech, but are instead examples of arcanowave technology. Given the dangerous nature of such technology, most Robot Limbs can be found on Abominations, the altered demons that the Buro uses to fight its wars. If you have the Jammer supplement "Gorilla Warfare," you can instead start off with a set of regular hardtech Robotic Limbs as a Hardware schtick, which is favored by many Jammers who won't have any truck with arcanowave gear.
  • The "Fudge 10th Anniversary Edition" book for Fudge contains rules for all sorts of implants, and by default there is no reason other than money not to have them. That said it also notes that just having arms and legs won't let you have super-strength because the human body can't support it, right before presenting a body frame that does let you do this.
  • Games Workshop games:
    • Warhammer:
    • Warhammer: Age of Sigmar:
    • Warhammer 40,000:
      • "Augmetic" limbs are very common in the setting. Curiously for such an otherwise over-the-top setting, in Dark Heresy it's explained that human bionics don't impart superhuman strength, exactly because it would tear the user apart. It's not entirely impossible, though — but the money needed for that kind of expert gear could buy you a much more effective suit of Powered Armor. Also, considering the partially poor understanding of technology, implants may work somewhere between phantastically (cortex implants from several thousand years ago that grant Dune Mentat-like intelligence), operational (bionic limbs for average soldiers that mostly work as they should, as long as the Tech-priests observe the necessary rites) and clumsy (bionic eyes that produce grainy and black/white pictures). Finally, there are servitors, lobotomized humans or animals stuffed full with bionics to serve essentially as robots. Notable examples include:
      • The Space Marines think nothing of using replacement limbs. Most notably the Iron Hands chapter, who are often seen sporting several bionic limbs and favor them over flesh and blood. This belief leads the Iron Hands marines to replace their right hand with a mechanical one upon initiation via religious ceremony.
      • Tech-priests believe that becoming more mechanical brings them closer to the Omnissiah, and thus voluntary replacements are not just accepted, but essentially mandatory to be able to function in society at all.
    • Ork doctors, known as Painboyz, are born with instinctive knowledge of the Ork anatomy, so they are always experimenting. The most famous, Mad Doc Grotsnik, gave several Orks exploding heads and regularly cuts off his own limbs and replaces them with 'cybork' parts or 'donations' from customers out cold on the slab.
      • While many Chaos Space Marines welcome mutations as gifts from the Chaos Gods, Traitor Marines of the Iron Warriors prefer to remove the offending limb and replace it with bionics.
  • Genius: The Transgression naturally features a lot of options for doing this; any wonder small enough can be grafted on to your body, giving you artificial limbs of every shape, size and purpose in any style imaginable. However, the further away the Genius gets away from the bog-standard human form, the more they risk damaging their Obligation - as a Genius becomes less human, they can begin to stop caring about humans in general. (Note that this is a risk, not a certainty - Obligation loss is determined by dice rolls, so a lucky or careful Genius could replace everything in their bodies and still have high Obligation.)
  • GURPS has a few. Ultra-Tech features artificial replacements or improvements for everything. One issue of Pyramid, Zauberpunk listed all sorts of crazy magical replacement arms including one with no physical substance.
  • In Hc Svnt Dracones artificial limbs are kind of in fashion for employees of Applied Sciences and Robotics. However they cost five times as much as cloned limbs and have no special game rule advantages aside from concealing small weapons.
  • In Ironsworn: Starforged, prosthetic limbs are common technology in the Forge. One of the example looks for player characters "has a prosthetic leg also adorned with art." Beyond flavor, the Augmented asset applies game mechanics to more advanced prosthetics, making the augment both a benefit and a potential complication when the prosthetic breaks.
  • Magic: The Gathering:
    • The Alaran shard of Esper features Etherium, an alloy infused with pure aether. The Ethersworn have vowed to infuse every living thing on the plane with the substance. This is most readily seen in game as artificial limbs. [1]
    • Phyrexia also makes use of artificial limbs, to help their kind become closer to the Father of Machines, thus making them Borg-like in their ambitions. To wit, Mishra, Urza's brother and antagonist in the great Brothers' War, eventually is given an exoskeleton with only his head remaining from his original body. Later, Geth of Mirrodin gets the same "gift".
    • Done in card form with the Living Weapon ability from New Phyrexia; artifacts with this ability spawn a 0/0 Germ Token when they hit the field and automatically equip to it, but can attach to another creature at will, which kills the token. The most basic Living Weapon artifact, the Flayer Husk, is a four-fingered mechanical hand.
    • In Otaria, the Cabal replaces severed limbs with new ones, albeit usually involving some level of Body Horror. Chainer, for example, receives a very expensive metal replacement after losing a hand in a fight against Jeska and Balthor.
    • Played for Drama in Chainers Torment when Chainer, trying to heal his wounded friend, uses the Mirari to give Kamahl scaly, snakelike replacement limbs; Kamahl is horrified when he wakes up, and it ends up driving a wedge between the two.
  • Rifts makes a number of distinctions between cybernetics: Limbs and implants designed for civilian uses are simply called cybernetics, while armored limbs and weapons are called Bionics. Most characters, expect for Psionics, Mages, and supernatural creatures can get cyberneticsnote , or go for Partial (all limbs replaced, plus some torso or head implants) or Full (Everything but the central nervous system) Bionic Conversion. Full Conversion 'Borgs can take a number of shapes, such as the Dragon-shaped 'Borgs found in Japan. They also have "bio-systems," which are designed to look and feel like natural limbs, and are usually used as replacement for missing or defective limbs. They are so close to the real thing that they don't impair magical or psionic abilities.
  • In Rocket Age one of the only ways to buy off the Missing Limb trait is to acquire or build a cybernetic replacement.
  • Shadowrun has a whole suite of cybernetics that modifies everything and anything, from limbs, to bones and skin, to the central nervous system, to grafting entirely new appendages onto the body. There's even bio-engineered organic enhancements. The game's sourcebooks do explicitly mention that the rest of the body needs reinforcing for the technological enhancements, though. However, any enhancements alter the body's natural process, meaning they eat into Essence, meaning a hard cap that prevents you from replacing everything. (At least, with off-the-shelf stuff.)
  • Traveller:
    • Most prosthetic limbs are just replacements for the originals, with no mechanical effect beyond restoring the stat points lost with the original limb. An unlucky player character might end up needing one (and paying off medical debt for it) during character creation.
    • A combat arm is a specialized prosthetic that is armored, stronger than normal, and can have a melee weapon attached.

    Theater 

    Toys 
  • In BIONICLE, Lariska has one completely mechanical arm (as opposed to being biomechanical, like everything else), as her original arm was removed as a punishment by the Shadowed One.

    Visual Novels 
  • For a Visual Novel that deals with the protagonist losing an arm, surprisingly only one of the four routes in Brass Restoration has Ryo get an artificial arm. Maybe not so surprisingly, the route it happens in is Yoshine's. After all, artificial arms can be rather expensive, so if you're not rich yourself, you do kinda need a rich girl who likes you enough to pay for it herself.
  • C14 Dating: Hendrik lost a hand in a car accident and has a fairly mundane replacement. The hand part of his forearm-covering prothestic seems to be mostly cosmetic and he sometimes needs to detach it to use the Hook Hand he has underneath. His route includes an event in which he asks Melissa to hold his hand while she is assisting him with a task and quickly turns out to mean the removable one.
  • In The Eden of Grisaia following the bus accident, Kazuki's left arm was injured. Later, she was found and rescued and then connected to the Thanatos computer system. When she comes out of it she has a grasping claw instead of a lower left hand. But she actually just has an atrocious sense of humor. After nobody comments on it through the entire main story, she pops it off casually in front of Chizuru with a normal hand beneath and causes her to splutter out her assumptions that Kazuki's injured arm had to be amputated. It was just a toy.
  • In Fate/stay night's final arc, Heaven's Feel Shirou gets a replacement arm from Archer, but as that's organic it doesn't really count. However, in the good ending, he gets a replacement body doll which becomes a normal body as long as he possesses it. He needed it due to having died destroying the true Grail and being resurrected as a spirit by Ilya's sacrifice.
    • In the related Fate/hollow ataraxia, Bazett's arm was cut off by Kirei in order to control Lancer. After the events of the main story, Bazett replaces it with an artificial arm.
  • Emi of Katawa Shoujo has these, probably not surprisingly. Having lost her legs below the knee in a car accident, she uses prosthetics. This does not impede her ability to run in the hallways in the slightest.
    • Emi's prosthetic legs are of the realistic type: inert, not entirely functional, obviously artificial, and require constant maintenance (she also has another pair of carbon-fiber running blades of the type used by paralympic athletes, which she uses for sports). Emi shows us exactly how a person with enough conviction can be more than awesome enough with just those, without needing any fancy bionics.
  • In Marco & the Galaxy Dragon, Dosgoro gets a cybernetic arm to replace the one that Gargouille sliced off at their first meeting.
  • Snake in Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors has a prosthetic left arm, which ends up being quite useful in two different ways. It lets him remove his bracelet at will, bypassing the RED/DEAD system as he pleases, and it proves that the dead "Guy X" isn't him, as the corpse has an ordinary flesh arm.
  • In VA-11 HALL-A, Dana's left arm and both of Alma's are replaced with cybernetic prosthetics. Alma replaced her arms to make her job as a professional hacker easier, typing faster and never getting carpal tunnel, while there are conflicting stories on why Dana's arm is artificial. Additionally, Jamie notes that while he's still organic enough that his skin heals on its own, enough of his body has been replaced that he's disqualified from hiring Dorothy due to her 40% organic policy.

    Web Animation 
  • DEATH BATTLE!:
    • Co-host Wiz has a cyborg arm that suffers from glitches, such as "accidentally" punching Boomstick. The reason for having his arm was revealed in "Shredder vs. Silver Samurai", where Boomstick cut off his real arm while playing with a tachyon table saw.
    • And as for Boomstick himself, his left leg is a shotgun, specifically the Super Shotgun from Doom II.
  • Lobo (Webseries): Stumpy, an arms dealer has robotic arms.
  • The defining feature of the namesakes of Meta Runner, with the arms specifically designed to enhance their gaming performance.
  • Deandra The New Girl from The Most Popular Girls in School has a robotic left arm from Episode 14 onward. And yes, Fullmetal Alchemist has been referenced a hundred gazillion times by the fans (and twice by the In-Universe characters) because of it.
  • Arthur of Mystery Skulls Animated built himself a functional metal prosthetic arm to replace the one that got torn off in the cave.
  • In the music video for Nightrunner's Magnum Bullets several characters are cyborgs. Star has a pair of prosthetic legs, with the thighs floating a couple inches above the knees; Square loses his left arm and eye in the beginning and replaces them with clunky prosthetics, including shears on a retractable cable; while Big Bad Stag has a hologram in place of his head.
  • Demo Man shows up once again in the flashback portions of Red vs. Blue Season 10 after getting hit by a MAC round fired from the main cannon of the Mother Of Invention from orbit, with the only visible damage being that he now has cybernetic arms. Crosses over into Artificial Limbs Are Stronger territory when he's shown firing a shotgun one handed, knocking Agent Carolina to the ground with a single punch, and catching a grenade fired by Agent Maine's Brute Shot.
  • RWBY:
    • Mercury's legs are cybernetic from the knees down. How he lost his original legs has yet to be revealed, although his origins episode with Cinder and Emerald heavily suggests he had them amputated and replaced after he killed his abusive father, since his legs were shown to be badly injured and he could barely stand on them.
    • James Ironwood takes this trope to an extreme: his right arm, right leg, and a good chunk of the right side of his torso are cybernetic. He really is more machine than man. Like Mercury, no word at the moment on what led to this.
      • In volume eight Ironwood replaces his left forearm with a cybernetic limb. Notably he might not actually have had to do this; the injury that spurred the decision appeared to be a debilitating but not necessarily permanent burn, and he apparently opted to simply replace it rather than take time to heal...
    • In Volume 4, Yang gets an artificial right arm to replace the one she lost to Adam. It's eventually revealed that it was made by Pietro Polendina, and the man helps her upgrade it once she meets him.
    • Cinder loses her arm to Ruby and gets it replaced, but unlike the other examples on this list Salem had it replaced with a Shadow Arm, a Grimm appendage with claws, super strength, extreme stretchiness, regeneration and the ability to steal Maiden powers. However, it can't be protected by aura, the regeneration is painful and it seems to be consuming more and more of Cinder's body, not to mention it seems to have a consciousness.
    • Maria Calavera uses prosthetic eyes to see, though they aren't new and better replacements since they need to be taken for maintenance up every ten years or she's basically blind, and are prone to shutting down if hit with electricity. It turns out her prosthetics really aren't as good as her eyes were, considering they were lost because she was targeted for having Silver Eyes.
    • In an interesting twist on this trope, Tyrian Callows, a scorpion faunus, gets a cybernetic stinger after Ruby cuts the original one off in retribution for stinging her uncle Qrow.
  • Supermental: Pent's right foot is a metal bar. Smack removed his foot for unknown reasons.
  • Super Smash Adventures: Erpain the Python has a set of Doctor Octopus-style robotic arms that he can remotely control.
  • Played With with Zetto in TOME. After Zetto's first encounter with The Forbidden Power, Zetto's character model's left arm was permanently destroyed, forcing him to replace it with a digital metal arm. However, Zetto's arm in real life remains intact, although in TTA it's stated that Zetto still feels pain in his left arm from time to time.

    Webcomics 
  • Alice and the Nightmare: Professor Trevols has an artificial hand to replace one he lost to a Jabberwocky. It seems to be just a simple replacement.
  • Angels 2200: Both Pronto and Toat sport cybernetic prostheses.
  • Angel Down: Ariel has a cybernetic left arm, wich replaces the one she lost in an explosion.
  • Archipelago: The Arm is actually an artifact created by legendary heroes as a key to seal The Big Bad. It holds several potent magic powers, including Healing Factor, which comes in handy (har, har), since the current user, captain Snow, keeps getting more and more injured, and the Arm keeps replacing more and more of his body. He ends up almost entirely mechanical.
  • Bicycle Boy: The majority of Poet's body is mechanical.
  • Binary Stars: Joana lost her arm in an explosion, and now has a robotic prosthesis in its place.
  • Blood is Mine: Fuse loses his leg when he's injuried severely enough that even Jane can't repair the damage. Fortunately for him, cybernetic replacements are very common and relatively easy to get. Fuse chooses a combat-grade prosthetic, which he can use in conjunction with his pyrokinesis to make very strong flaming kicks.
  • City of Reality: Clubber has an artificial arm that incorporates a variety of useful tools, including an Arm Cannon.
  • Commander Kitty: Nin Wah the red panda has a cybernetic right arm that also happens to be a powerful Arm Cannon.
  • Dominic Deegan: Dominic has an artificial leg. He lost the original limb in an explosion set off by his Evil Counterpart. Unusually, it's a standard prosthetic limb with no special powers.
  • Dresden Codak: Kimiko Ross replaced her ''own'' arm, legs and eye shortly after losing the originals in a battle with time-traveling luddites (lucky for her she was already a transhumanist) and that's after she escaped from the hospital using thermite, a parachute, and the one arm she had left.
  • Drowtales: Characters have two options — golem limbs or demon limbs. The latter is rare and seen only in a private section (at least so far). A notable example is Nihi'Liir here after she lost it here
  • El Goonish Shive: Lord Tedd has what appears to be a prosthetic arm that can shoot energy blasts.
  • The Ends: Jason gets a cyborg arm to replace one that was torn off by a monster.
  • Everyday Heroes: Mecha-Nicole is a former mad scientist who gave herself an artificial head.
  • Exploitation Now: Jordan lost her left arm in a car accident when she was little. And replaced it with a mechanical one armed with all sort of gadgets.
  • Exterminatus Now: Lothar Hex has two prosthetic legs with rocket boots built in, a bionic right arm with a plasma blaster and power saw, and a cybernetic eye that he uses to record daemon girls making out. He also mentions having a robotic spine one time they're dumping bodies.
  • Foot Loose: Iordan becomes a cyborg when the desperate healing magic required to save him after his Heroic Sacrifice converts the mecha battlesuit he's wearing into a bionic left arm that unfortunately has not just one but two minds of its own.
  • Gifts of Wandering Ice: Faith, one of the Norns, has a cyber-arm and a cyber-leg.
  • Girl Genius:
    • Dimo loses an arm in Sturmhalten. Maimed Jägers traditionally take up residence in Mechanicsburg to wait for a Heterodyne to repair them. This option not being available during the time the Baron time-froze the town, Dimo somehow acquires a mechanical arm. (It's possible that it is built by the construct Punch, who is a skilled blacksmith.)
    • Martellus cuts his left hand off after a rebel Smoke Knight poisons it. Agatha helps him build a mechanical replacement, in her sleep. He eventually shows up sporting, without comment, a more biological version.
  • Grrl Power: Cora was born without limbs and has hard light artificial ones.
  • Gunnerkrigg Court inverts this, by giving Robot S13 a replacement arm made of magic wood. While Ysengrin's arms initially appear to fall under this trope, they're later shown to be Powered Armor.
  • Harkovast: Shogun has a mechanical hand (and forearm) which is strong enough to crush the blades of swords.
  • Heroes Unite: Bombshell has a cybernetic arm that functions like a real one as well as being able to deliver a nasty electric shock.
  • Homestuck:
    • The robotics expert Equius gave his crush Aradia (a Dead to Begin With character) a robotic body. His other works have been (in flashbacks) Vriska's robotic arm and replacement eye after she lost both to Terezi's Batman Gambit, which caused her future-seeing cueball to explode in her face, and Tavros's legs after having been a wheelchair- and then hoverchair-bound paraplegic throughout their game session (since Vriska psychically coerced him to jump off of a cliff).
    • Spades Slick progressively gains more robotic parts as he suffers greater injuries. He first acquires a robotic arm after Snowman whips his first arm off, and, after surviving the destruction of his universe, nearly all parts of him are artificial except for half his face.
    • Lord English has his own golden peg leg, which is inspired by his younger self's use of one of Dirk's spare robot legs, which somehow works as it's supposed to even though he simply sticks it onto his self-inflicted wound without any further procedures.
  • The Horrifying Experiments of Dr. Pleasant!: Isabelle has artificial legs jointed at an artificial pelvis AND an artificial left arm. She also has an artificial tail, but that isn't replacing anything. (Probably?)
  • The Incredible and Awe-Inspiring Serial Adventures of the Amazing Plasma-Man: Crustaceo has a bionic crab claw in place of his right arm.
  • Kiwi Blitz:
    • Steffi has a robotic leg due to an injury she suffered in early childhood jumping in front of a bullet aimed at her dad.
    • Gear has a prosthetic arm and leg, plus a patch over her missing left eye
    • Reed Bahia acquired a prosthetic arm after Gear cut off his arm.
  • Last Res0rt: Daisy Archanis gets one of these as part of the Backstory just before the show begins, after having her left leg amputated while in Celigo's custody. It's heavily implied that Veled had it removed to prevent her from being able to teleport.
  • Leif & Thorn: Birch has a prosthetic leg from dragon-induced injuries.
  • Lighter Than Heir: New mechanical limbs are seemingly a specialty of Steinbech's technology, not counting their weapons tech. And they don't just do replacements. Vogel gets a "cast" over his broken arm which is basically a gauntlet, and he's shown being able to move it almost like normal while it's healing.
  • The Motley Two: Kaogin has a robotic arm and leg, replacements she had to get after a Noodle Incident. The arm grants her Super-Strength, enough to tear down a wall. Also, she's got a vocal implant that allows her to autotune while singing.
  • NIMONA: The Black Knight Ballister Blackheart has a robotic right arm. His arm was shot off by his best friend Goldenloin after Blackheart won a joust with him.
  • Pilot: Robotic arms, legs, and even eyes are extremely commonplace.
  • Questionable Content: Clinton has a robotic right hand, which he got following a fireworks accident as a child. His sister mentions that he took the loss of his original hand well and actually prefers his robotic one, noting the unfortunate moral of the story seems to be "playing with fireworks gets you cool robot limbs".
  • Sarilho: Filipa has a prosthetic leg after an incident in chapter 3.
  • Schlock Mercenary:
    • Action Girl Ellen Foxworthy ("Elf") loses her legs due to an antimatter explosion going off under her. She spends two weeks real-time (a few hours comic time) being carried, then gets a set of massive prosthetic legs cannibalized from power armor.
    • And then there's Lieutenant Der Trihs, who essentially has a prosthetic head. He has been reduced to a head in a jar no less than three times, his survival courtesy of the universe's well-nigh-indestructible material that he had his skull reinforced with. He's gone through one prosthetic arm, a prosthetic whisk, and a robot body connected to his jar. The chef now wears his "hand-me-down" limbs.
    • Both characters eventually had their bodies regenerated properly.
  • Sleepless Domain, which, note, is done by the same person that does Kiwi Blitz:
    • Steffi's counterpart, Pop Blitz, also has a mechanical leg that either transforms into a magical construct or simply changes to a pink color when she's in her magical girl form.
    • Mingxing has a prosthetic arm, and it's implied to be at least her second one. The arm she had before her current one was made by a magical girl named Steampunk Princess, but when she aged out and the prosthetic stopped working (implying that the limb was powered by SP's magic abilities), she got a new one from (the Alt Text suggests) Techno Blitz.
  • S.S.D.D.: CORE marines have a certain saying. "If you still have all your limbs... you're not trying hard enough!"
  • Stubble Trouble: Ally has a prosthetic leg to replace her original leg which was severely damaged in a car crash.
  • The Sunjackers: This is very common. Of the main characters, Atom Smasher has all four legs replaced due to a car accident, and Candy Chip has her right hoof replaced after losing it to diabetes.
  • Sweet Dreams: Tabitha sports a prosthetic arm, similar to real-world pincer handed ones.
  • Trying Human: When EBE1 first crashed on Earth (in the Forties), they amputated his arm and replaced it with one made of the metal from his ship, which he retains in present-day storyline.
  • Unsounded has Magitek prostheses of various levels of quality and function. Duane's artificial eyes are nearly as good as the real thing, and Crescian soldiers get top-rate prosthetic limbs with extra features that range from cigarette-lighting to self-lubricating.
  • Val and Isaac: Minnow has cybernetic arms. At one point she swaps arms with her robot girlfriend.
  • Vegfolk Fables: The majority of the Vegfolk have a metallic prosthesis with two poseable arms wrapped around their body. They use their telepathy to move these poseable arms as a way of having functional limbs.
  • Wake of the Clash: Cirrus is seen in flashbacks using her cloud-forms to simulate a prostetic arm. She does this again during the main story when she insists she is no longer Cirrus, but instead just Abigail Hoang.

    Web Original 
  • Tails of the Bounty Hunter: Cale Tomlik's right arm is made of metal and has false fur and flesh covering it. It's also mentioned in chapter 5 that many residents in LynKaster City also have cybernetic limbs.
  • Simon Heller, a character in the Unwaking setting of The Wanderer's Library, has an artificial hand after he traded the real one for better eyes.
  • There is a whole group of side-character students like this in the webfiction Whateley Universe at the Whateley Academy. She-Bot was born a thalidomide baby, and took to robotic limbs far better than anyone could have expected. Because she's a mutant. She's upgraded her own limbs several times. Rack is a dwarf who has built himself a normal-sized super-suit. Techno-Devil, the son of the notorious supervillain Dr. Diabolik, has replaced one of his own eyes with a glaring red cyber-implant, and has cybernetic input jacks on both side of his skull. There are characters who have deliberately done even more disturbing cyber-things to their bodies.

    Western Animation 
  • In Adventure Time, there have been three alternate versions of Finn to have an artificial arm. In the episode "Finn the Human", when Finn is teleported to an alternate timeline where the Lich never existed he can replace his arm with a sword. As of the Season 6 premiere, Finn's arm is torn off in the main timeline, necessitating one of these. When it grows back and is later torn off again in the Season 7 finale, he gets a robotic arm that later turns out to be a Swiss-Army Appendage. Amusingly, in the Season 8 intros that include Finn's metal arm, when Jake and Finn do their intro fist-bump, Jake winces in pain when he punches Finn's now-metal fist.
  • Professor Tite-Gripp from Atomic Puppet has two huge bionic arms that give him superhuman strength and make him a formidable member of the Rogues Gallery.
  • Combustion Man from Avatar: The Last Airbender has a prosthetic right forearm and lower leg, purportedly from injuries sustained when still learning to control his technique. Toph can detect his approach via her Seismic Sense and describes it as sounding like a "metal man".
  • Grim Reaper in The Avengers: Earth's Mightiest Heroes has one that turns into a scythe.
  • Big City Greens: Gramma Alice Green has a prosthetic right leg. She sometimes unscrews it to use it as a tool/weapon or to gain some sort of advantage.
  • Modo from Biker Mice from Mars has a cybernetic arm to replace the one he lost on Mars to the Plutarkians.
  • In Boo Boom! The Long Way Home, Cristopher the rooster lost his tail some time ago, so he uses a broom as an improvised replacement. It's mostly played for laughs.
  • In the Bump in the Night episode "Farewell, 2 Arms," while Molly's left arm is detached and under repair, she finds a stronger replacement and feels the need to replace her right arm too. Over the course of the episode, she has her entire body replaced, creating a completely new entity. She comes back after Squishy puts all her original parts back together.
  • In Buzz Lightyear of Star Command, Commander Nebula's artificial left leg functions as a Leg Cannon. Warp also has an artificial right hand.
  • DuckTales (2017): Della Duck gets her left leg trapped under debris after her rocket ship crashed. The next scene shows her with a metal leg.
  • Exo Squad: Artifical limbs are present and treated more relaistically than many other depictions, at least with regard to the time it takes to adapt to them. James Burns received an artificial arm to replace the one he lost in battle. It takes some time to get used to it. When he tried to flip a page from a book, he ended up ripping it and he mentioned that brushing his teeth isn't any easier.
  • Final Space: Gary has his arm ripped off by the Lord Commander in the second episode and uses an arm taken from a robot for the rest of the show.
  • The Futurama episode "The Devil's Hands Are Idle Playthings" features Fry winning the Robot Devil's hands. When the Robot Devil stalls for time, Fry impatiently says, "Stop being such a baby and cut off my hands."
  • The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy has Hoss Delgado, a "spectral exterminator" as a recurring character. Hoss has a mechanical right hand, which can transform into a variety of gadgets including but not limited to an ectoplasm cannon, a box of tic-tacs, a chainsaw, and in the Underfist special he can be seen with an attachment that looks suspiciously like the energy sword from Halo.
  • Inspector Gadget. What bits of him are real in the original cartoons? The Movie makes it clear that the only thing still real about Gadget is his brain.
  • In the Justice League episode "The Enemy Below", Aquaman cuts off his own hand to save his son. It is later replaced with a hook that resembles a harpoon.
  • Just like in the post-Zero Hour comics above, in Legion of Super Heroes (2006), the episode "Chained Lightning" sees Lightning Lad loses an arm to an attack by Imperiex; Brainiac 5 gives him a new cybernetic arm. He can still channel his powers through the arm and it comes with some cool other features, but the whole thing is a bit unnerving for a couple of reasons. First off, Lightning Lad was knocked unconscious by the attack, and Brainiac 5 just started working on him without, you know, asking if he wanted a cybernetic arm in the first place. Second, Lightning Lad doesn't even spare a second lamenting the loss of his freaking arm; he says "Cool" and hops out of bed to go fight the bad guys. Sorry, but losing a freaking limb isn't the slightest bit traumatic?
  • In Mummies Alive! Armon has a prosthetic arm that's only usable in his powered up form.
  • Shows up in My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic of all places. The Season 5 finale The Cutie Re-Mark involved time travel which created alternate timelines, the very first of which had Rainbow Dash, one of the core cast, shown with a metal replacement wing.
    • In the Rainbow Roadtrip special, the pegasus Kerfuffle has a prosthetic left hind leg made from carved wood and brass.
  • Phineas and Ferb: "Road to Danville" revealed that Dr. Doofenshmirtz lost both his arms in two separate incidents and replaced them with titanium prostheses.
  • In Randy Cunningham: 9th Grade Ninja, Hannibal McFist is easily recognized by his mechanical right arm, which also contains its own brain with a pair of eyes.
  • The Scotsman of Samurai Jack has a machine gun in place of his left leg.
  • Sonic Prime:
    • Nine named himself after his nine tails, seven of which are artificial prosthetics. He uses them to wall crawl (as he doesn't fly too often), sit, do extra tasks that require hands, fight, hack systems, and more. Oh, and they're retractable too.
    • Sails has made himself a third arm which is tied to his waste with a belt, though he mainly uses it to wield his cutlass. Impressively, he accomplished this in a world that has18th century level tech.
  • Dr. Robotnik had a robotic arm in the Sonic the Hedgehog (SatAM) cartoon because he accidentally roboticized it.
  • In The Spectacular Spider-Man, Curt Connors has an impressive robotic prosthetic arm, while Doctor Octopus is fused at the spinal cord to a harness with four superstrong robotic arms. Doc Ock uses these as extra arms and feet, and to batter and throw opponents. The three claws at each end can rotate like miniature buzz-saws.
  • In Steven Universe, it's eventually revealed that Peridot wears "limb enhancers" which have several functions such as a laser cannon, hologram projector, and helicopter. She's not actually lacking any limbs (being a Gem, she could reform and regenerate any missing parts); rather, they serve to compensate for her weak body similarly to Powered Armor since her caste was made from weaker materials due to a shortage of resources. After losing the enhancers, she's much smaller and weaker than before.
  • In Super Robot Monkey Team Hyperforce Go!, Scrapperton originally just had a prosthetic leg, but then made a matching one and eventually replaced his whole body with mechanical parts.
  • In Thunder Cats 2011, Panthro gets a double lower-arm set after kicking Grune's tail.
  • Total Drama Island (2023): Zee was born without a leg and thus has a prosthetic, revealed in one episode when a shark gets a hold of it. He makes up stories about how he allegedly lost his leg to entertain people. It comes in handy quite a few times in the season, such as when he uses one in the dinosaur challenge to save himself from a velociraptor and again to lose extra weight in the catapult challenge.
  • Angry Archer in Transformers: Animated has a robotic arm, although it might just be a gauntlet rather than a replacement limb.
  • Shiro from Voltron: Legendary Defender has a robotic arm that he acquired during his time as a prisoner of the Galra.
  • The moment Qilby reveals himself as the Big Bad of Season 2 of Wakfu, he turns the Eliacube into a replacement arm made of pure wakfu.

    Real Life 
  • Needed by people in real life, of course, due to various types of traumatic injuries, illnesses, and congenital conditions.
  • Royal Air Force pilot Douglas Bader lost both legs in an ill-advised bit of stunt-flying a year or two before WW2 broke out. He fought his way out of an invalidity discharge and proved himself capable of being a fighter pilot, knocking down several Germans in the Battle of Britain. Captured in 1942 he made a series of escape attempts, despite the obvious handicap, and was eventually sent to the special camp for persistent escapers, Colditz. He still begged for a place on the emergency escape glider prisoners built secretly in 1945.
  • Götz von Berlichingen, a German knight in the 1500s who lost a hand at 24 but with an articulating prosthesis continued to fight in several wars over a 47-year career.
  • Oscar Pistorius, a runner, became the first double amputee to compete against able-bodied athletes in the Olympics, coming second in his heat but losing the semi-final. There was a fair bit of controversy over the matter, to the point that he was initially barred from the games, not he had an unfair disadvantage, but because there were worries that his prosthetic legs were more effective than biological ones.
  • There's at least one runner who was barred from competing not due to unfair competition but because his foot blades could endanger other runners.
  • In the 2008 summer Olympics, one competitor of the woman's free swim had a prosthetic leg with a "flipper" on it.
  • The woman with a full-on mermaid tail. Get her a laser-shooting trident and she can cosplay Splash Woman!
  • After miniature sculptor Michael Perry lost his right hand in an accident with a cannon, he not only learned to sculpt left-handed but had a prosthesis specially built to aid in his sculpting.
  • Aron Ralston replaced the arm he cut off (having gotten it trapped under a boulder) with an ice pick.
  • Athlete and model Aimee Mullins can make herself taller by swapping out her traditional artificial legs for a longer pair (similar to how people make themselves taller by putting shoes on) — her height can vary between 5 ft. 8 in. and 6 ft. 1 in. Granted, Ms. Mullins does have some very pretty prostheses, including a set of hand-carved, solid ash wood "boots" with integrated heels designed by Alexander McQueen.
  • Similar to the above, the Finnish cartoonist and politician Kaisa Leka had her lower legs replaced with prosthetics due to a deformity that caused her severe pain when walking.
  • Canadian Harold Russell lost both hands in a WWII training exercise — he was outfitted with articulated hooks and, while working in a training film, was chosen by director William Wyler to co-star in The Best Years of Our Lives about three returning servicemen's difficult adjustments to home life.
  • Alexei Maresiev, Soviet WWII ace pilot. Lost his lower legs in the war, replaced them with prostheses, and continued flying and fighting. Became a very decorated serviceman. A well-known Soviet novel, Story of a Real Man, was based on his biography. Maresiev's endeavor was inspired by a similar but lesser-known story of Alexander Prokofiev-Seversky, the Russian WWI one-legged ace pilot (who would leave Russia during the Red October and become more famous in the United States as the founder of Republic Aviation, indirectly responsible for such airplanes as the P-47 and A-10).
  • Nazi Germany's Stuka dive bomber ace Hans-Ulrich Rudel flew with an artificial lower leg and became the highest-scoring ground-attack ace ever.
  • Filmmaker Rob Spence lost his eye in an accident on a firing range. For equal parts novelty and science, he had it replaced with a miniature working camera. Later on, as a tie-in to Deus Ex: Human Revolution, he decided to interview other people with similar "breakthrough" prosthetics.
  • Robert Downey Jr. once visited a young boy born with an underdeveloped arm in order to present him with a red-and-gold Iron Man-themed prosthesis.
  • Right now the state of the art is the DEKA "Luke Arm" while the open-source Robohand leverages 3D printing technology to custom-build a prosthetic at low cost. The latter do not look exactly beautiful, but they are a revolution when it comes to children as few families are able to stem several thousand dollars every few years when their child outgrows their previous prosthetic.
  • Archaeologists have analyzed a 3000-year-old prosthetic big toe that was found, still in place, on the skeleton of an Egyptian priest's daughter. Custom-wrought from hardwood, plant fiber and leather to replace an amputated digit, the prosthetic has multiple parts allowing flexibility, and shows signs of having been adjusted for a better fit at least twice. It would've allowed its wearer a normal gait and to wear the sandals typical of her New Kingdom culture.
  • UK-based company produced a prosthetic arm based on Adam Jensen's bionic arm from Deus Ex: Human Revolution.
  • Young British amputee Tilly Lockey (who was amputated of both hands that were necrotizing due to meningococcal septicaemia when she was an infant) demonstrates prosthetics made by Open Bionics. She received bionic arms the designs of which were inspired by Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Alita: Battle Angel, most notably.
  • Somewhat averted for some amputees, as seen here. Basically, more advanced and complicated prosthetic limbs are often very heavy, more difficult to use, and ultimately don't really improve on simpler prosthetics like "hook" limbs for day-to-day living.


 
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Alternative Title(s): Artificial Arm, Robot Hand, Artificial Limb

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Irontail

January Q. Irontail, as his name implies, has a tail made of iron, due to his old tail being run over by a child years ago.

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