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Minor Injury Overreaction
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In dramatic settings, no matter how much punishment a villain takes all that seems to really get them riled up is deliberate albeit minor injury, especially across their face. Extremely potent with egotists, this tends to send the White Haired Pretty Boy into a foaming rage.
Can (un)intentionally coincide with the Rant Inducing Slight and/or Afraid Of Needles.
Examples
Anime
- In Kanokon this happens when an attack causes a slight rip in a villains jacket. "YOU WILL COMPENSATE WITH YOUR LIVES!"
- Frequently happened with the villains in Dragonball (mainly in Z and GT), and was most often prompted by outrage that Goku or whoever was fighting them actually managed to not only hit them, but do some damage. (In Frieza's case it made sense, as by the current scale he was so stupid powerful that he hadn't had a decent fight in decades.)
- Dilandau in Vision Of Escaflowne descends further and further into madness as the show goes on after receiving a wound from Van that resulted in a facial scar. Given that he started out an Ax Crazy Psycho For Hire....
- Yzak Joule in Gundam SEED for a time keeps a facial scar that could be easily removed, planning on keeping it until he defeats the enemy pilot who gave it to him (Kira Yamato). Though this isn't really about the scar per se, it's the fact that Kira defeated him fair and square that bothers him the most. Also, he never really gets to settle the debt to Kira but his scar is removed two years later, in Gundam SEED Destiny.
- During the Baratie arc of One Piece, one of Don Krieg's crewmates, "Invincible" Pearl, boasted about never having spilled a single drop of blood... whereupon Luffy fell out of the sky and smacked Pearl's head into his armor, giving him a nosebleed. Pearl's response? Panicking and lighting his armor on fire.
- In the Record Of Lodoss War OVA, Ashram — who has gone through an entire battle untouched due to his skills — gets very angry when Parn manages to scratch his cheek with his sword.
- In the Cowboy Bebop episode "Pierrot Le Fou", Tongpu is an insane super soldier who's Immune To Bullets. When someone manages to injure him for what's probably the first time since he snapped, he's so shocked from experiencing pain that he can't continue the fight. Of course a throwing knife wedged in your shin isn't exactly a minor injury, except maybe relative to what Tongpu has been dealing out all episode.
- Actually, it was because the guy's insanity had degenerated his mind to that of a child. Considering that, it was more of an under-reaction than anything.
- A similar case is seen with Gaara in Naruto; due to his abilities, Gaara had never gotten so much as a scratch in his life, and finally seeing his own blood sends him into a screaming fit.
- It would be more accurate to say that Gaara had never been injured by other people in his life. When he realized as a child that even his beloved caretaker feared him and wanted to kill him, he carved the kanji for "love" in his forehead, the only time his sandshaping powers had allowed him to be injured.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!'s Yugi had an extreme case of this. It didn't even have to be a corporeal wound; several times, when his opponents would take a chunk out of his Life Points, he'd act like he was having a heart attack.
- Let's not forget Bakura's infamous "Check his pulse!" line in the dub.
- Fist of the North Star has two notable characters like this — the fat man, Mr. Heart, is almost invulnerable to most attacks, but the mere slight of his own blood changes him from genial and polite into a bloodthirsty psychopath. Juda, a Red Haired Pretty Boy, similarly goes berserk when his face gets some minor cuts.
- While Vita of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is naturally aggressive, she but gets especially pissed off when one of Nanoha's attacks damages and knocks her Nice Hat. Cue Nanoha's "uh oh". It has sentimental value.
- In Outlaw Star, Harry MacDougal goes absolutely apeshit when Gene grazes his shoulder with a bullet. The fact that he later lops off the whole arm and replaces it with a cybernetic one just serves to drive the whole point home.
- In one episode of Jigoku Shoujo Futakomori, a man sends a total stranger to hell for accidentally dumping coffee on him.
- Bambi from Bambi and her Pink Gun overreacts tremendously to any kind of injury or even possible injury that might be inflicted on her; she, at one point, nearly killed a man for smoking near her. Of course, here it isn't exactly vanity: Bambi's a health nut (and Psychopathic Manchild) who is obsessed with keeping her body "perfect."
- In the Gunsmith Cats anime, Radinov the Chaotic Evil Renegade Russian tries to torture Rally to death because our heroine shot her earring off. Then again, Radinov isn't the sanest person around.
Comic Books
- Western example: In the Marvel Universe, Doctor Doom's entire hatred of Reed Richards stems from an exploding experimental machine that gave Doom a pronounced, yet relatively minor, scar on his face; the marring of his perfect face also caused him to become so eager to cover it that he put his armored mask on while it was still hot off the forge, disfiguring himself for real. To make matters worse, it wasn't even Reed's fault in the first place; he had merely warned Doom about a design flaw in the machine, and when the device failed catastrophically (as Reed had predicted), Doom, unable to consider even for a moment that he might have made a mistake, instead drew the conclusion that Reed had sabotaged the machine out of jealousy.
- Subverted in The Venture Bros, where Baron Underbheit, a Doctor Doom Captain Ersatz, has suffered a truly horrendous injury at the hands of Doctor Venture in college. Though Venture never was proven responsible (a fact he's quick to remind everyone), he does not think Underbheit could still harbor a lethal grudge against him. Despite the fact that Underbheit lost his entire bottom jaw in the incident.
- We later find that this incident was caused by the Monarch attempting to kill Rusty Venture.
- Subverted in Johnny The Homicidal Maniac: Johnny explodes regularly; when even slightly insulted he starts to scream and rant. However, injuries don't interest him much. Although he poured a bottle of Bactine over his head once, but that's because he's nuts.
- Xerxes from 300. Turns out that God-Kings do bleed after all, but he didn't believe it either.
Film
- A hair-related version in Spaceballs: after refusing to handle a gun, saying she hates them, Princess Vespa's hair is shot... the resulting reaction? "My hair! He shot my hair! Son of a bitch." [promptly mows down their opponents] Her 'droid-of-honor' calls the victory "pretty good for Rambo".
- The Big Bad in the movie The Chronicles of Riddick subverts this. After the main character rejects the "Join me or die" offer by throwing a dagger to the villain's face the superpowered bad guy simply says:
It's been a long time since I saw my own blood.
Literature
- American Psycho's Patrick Bateman reacts like this to being kicked.
- Cross-reference White Haired Pretty Boy Draco Malfoy with getting slashed (huh-huh "slashed" *snerk*) by Buckbeak the hippogriff in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, resulting in the beast's apparent execution after Big Daddy Malfoy freaks out.
- Although it could be interpreted that neither Draco nor his father were really all that traumatized by the injury, and getting Buckbeak executed was just the Malfoys being gigantic pricks.
- Soto, a History Monk in Thief of Time who believed in the sanctity of all life and the ultimate uselessness of violence, decided to kill three Auditors posing as humans when a wild axe swing accidentally sliced off a thick lock of his hair.
Live Action TV
- Played with in a episode of Scrubs where JD talks about the "Pain Chart", noting that gender can affect the perception of pain. Cut to a woman giving birth and her husband whining about how he just bit his finger out of nervosity.
- Michael Scott burns his foot on a George Foreman grill and is dismayed when nobody takes his injury seriously. He even tries to monopolize the doctor's attention at the hospital when Dwight is taken there with a pretty serious concussion.
Professional Wrestling
- At one point in WWE's history, Chris Jericho and Kane had a long and bloody feud over the fact that Jericho had accidentally spilled coffee on Kane at the catering table backstage. Seriously.
Video Games
Web Comics
- In Gunnerkrigg Court Ysengrin flips out and attempts to skewer a 12-year-old girl over a perceived slight to his master. (For the record, his master thought nothing of the slight.)
- Starcross'd Destiny has Juno warning the cops not to scratch or dent her Shelby Daytona, or else...
Western Animation
- The original Hunter in Gargoyles was just someone that Demona scratched in the face when he was a kid. Granted, this was a major injury, with his face ending up deeply scarred for the rest of his life, but it still seems like a bit of a flimsy pretext to start a centuries-long genocidal blood feud that consumes every single one of your descendants.
- Spoofed in Drawn Together when Xandir, while trying to escape from a Terminator spoof, sprains his ankle, acting as if it were life threatening (despite the fact that over the course of the show Xandir has suffered some of the worst injuries to any of the main characters).
- Completely subverted in the episode "Orphan Hero", when Captain Hero during his childhood montage, falls off of his bike and scrapes his leg. When he reveals his scrape, it turns out that a large section of his leg is missing, but his mother treat it as a minor injury anyway.
Other
- According to Joseph Campbell, mankind being cast out of the Garden of Eden falls into this category.
Truth In Television
- Biologically speaking, men in this day and age are not normally accustomed to seeing their own blood. Where woman have their menstruation as part of their lifestyle, to men seeing their blood logically must mean something is wrong. Hemotospermia, for instance, is actually a common experience and almost never anything serious to men under 30. However, any man who suddenly discovers blood dripping out their penis will surely FREAK OUT until they learn the truth.
- This troper feels that concern is a natural reaction whenever blood comes out of something that doesnt often bleed, like when your bleeding from your ears or mouth.
- This. This troper is female and she'd still go OMGWTF if she saw blood coming from somewhere that wasn't her nose (she gets a lot of nosebleeds), a cut, or, uh... the female bits.
- Some people regularly find themselves with large bruises and cuts that they never noticed happen, the kind that make other humans ill just looking at them, but that they never even felt. However, when one stubs his toe or gets their finger crushed by a closing door, people generally assume a severed limb based on the screaming..
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