Nothing but Skin and Bones

Don't worry too much about him—after all, he's Batman.

"He was very tall and as skinny as a beanpole — so alarmingly thin, in fact, that it looked as if his bones were about to break through his skin."

— Jacob about Sergei Andropov, Hollow City

A character is shown as exaggeratedly skinny, usually for any of the following reasons:

• They haven't eaten anything in a long time (or a short time) and it's just a joke to exaggerate how long they've been starving or how hungry they are.
• They're about to be eaten by a monster or predatory animal and they make themselves look this way so the creature won't want to eat them.
• Supermodels, hard-drug addicts, and people stranded on Deserted Islands are often depicted this way.

Most often Played for Laughs, this is usually just a short Sight Gag with no relevance on the plot. Plot-relevant examples are much less common, and are rarely funny.

Sometimes crosses with Lean and Mean. Serious examples may be the end result of Weight Loss Horror.

Examples of incredibly thin characters with no visible bones instead fall under Noodle People.

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Examples:

Advertising

• An ad for awareness of Anorexia Nervosa showed a sadly undoctored picture of an emaciated Isabella Caro.

Anime & Manga

• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: Gyutaro is so emaciated that his ribs and spine are visible through his skin. It doesn't seem to hamper his fighting ability at all, however.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, Alphonse's body has become this, becoming gaunt with emaciation and barely strong enough to stand. When Al is given the chance to get it back (but unable to fight in the final battle as a consequence) he says this line verbatim.
• Soichiro of His and Her Circumstances had a horribly abusive childhood, receiving constant abuse and neglect at the hands of his mother, never once even getting any amount of affection from her. He was constantly starving and desperate for food, not helped by his mother leaving him locked in their home alone for days at a time, with barely anything to eat. By the time Soichiro is rescued from his mother, he is so emaciated he can barely even walk, his mother having decided to leave him to die at that point.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Steel Ball Run: The Holy Corpse of Jesus is shown as almost skeletal, yet has remained in the same state while conferring Stand abilities almost two millennia later.
  • JoJolion: Dolomite looks like a skinny zombie with stumps and jagged teeth. This is the result of using the Locacaca's Equivalent Exchange after a human woman he fell in love with tricked him into using it.
• In My Hero Academia, as a result of a horrific injury that cost him some of his internal organs, All Might's real form has been reduced to a sickly skeletal figure. He's been able to use his powers to hide it from the public, but he can only do so for a few hours a day. After he gives his powers to Deku, that time gradually shortens, which complicates things even more when the League of Villains begins repeatedly targeting U.A. After his final battle with All For One, All Might used up the last embers of One For All left within him, leaving him stuck in his skeletal form and forcing him to retire.
• Nagato, a villain of Naruto, is horribly skinny because of a Dangerous Forbidden Technique of his, which drained his energy. His legs were burned useless just before that. And overall, he uses nothing but techniques that consume huge amounts of Chakra. Here is the result.◊
• Brook from One Piece is of course this, since he is literally only a (living) skeleton, but even when he was an actual human with flesh and blood, he was just as skinny as he is currently.
• "Flighted" Henya, a villain from Rurouni Kenshin, has starved himself down to almost nothing in order to be able to glide freely in the air.
• Tokyo Ghoul:Re uses this trope with two different characters, to very different effect. The Serial Killer Torso is incredibly skinny, likely as a result of killing to satisfy urges other than his Horror Hunger. In contrast, Shuu Tsukiyama is revealed to have wasted away due to three years of grief-induced starvation. Once he begins to emotionally recover, his physical health improves rapidly and he returns to a normal weight.

Comic Books

• Superboy (1994): S-03, the third failed attempt by Cadmus to clone Superman before they got it right with S-13, had his development stopped and was placed in a stasis looking incredibly emaciated due to something going wrong with the cloning and artificial aging process used to create him.
• Superman briefly looks like this in Batman: The Dark Knight Returns after getting caught in a nuclear missile blast, apparently as a result of being almost totally drained of solar energy. He manages to recover though, in part by absorbing the stored energy of a field of flowers.

Fan Works

• Astral Journey: It's Complicated: In Part 9, Melanie is taken again after her second escape attempt, resulting in her being strapped to a wheelchair and bed after being sectioned apart from her injuries. Melanie's body was left in this condition thanks to taking very little to fuel her addiction to exercising, which had already given her one of two heart attacks.
• Cheshire (Miraculous Ladybug): Plagg was in a bad state when Marinette found him. He gets better.
• In Coming Back, Broken, Barbara points out that whatever Jim and Claire have been eating in the Darklands lacked a few key nutrients that humans need, being the reason why they have lost an unhealthy amount of weight. A few more months and they would have died of malnutrition.
• In the Highlander fic The Dragon And His Wrath Duncan, Methos and Joe are captured. Only the mortal Joe is supposed to be fed but Joe shares his food with Duncan because the Highlander has the best shot at defeating the insane immortal who captured them. Methos however doesn't eat anything for weeks and by the time they escape, Methos is looking like this. Duncan's internal monologue as he's getting Methos into the barge describes Methos' waist being way too small and being able to feel his ribs as he helps him into the barge.
• Another Highlander fic Welcome Back, has Richie escape from being imprisoned and abandoned. He died repeatedly from starvation and is still bony and way too thin when he's found. Even after a few weeks, the sequel Long Journey Back has him Rage Against the Reflection and nearly driven to suicide-which for an immortal means trying to hack his head off with broken glass)by how people react to his way too skinny frame when Duncan takes him out for new clothes.
• In the My Hero Academia fic Pulse and Void Present Mic is captured by a villain and horribly tortured. The guy has an energy siphon quirk and his stealing Mic’s energy while not feeding him anything leaves him bony and emaciated and looking like he’s been starved for weeks despite only being missing a single week.
• Risk It All: A six-month coma leaves Ren emaciated and so weak that he has to relearn how to walk and stand. Luckily, his ability helps him build muscle quickly by dumping his prestige points into strength, letting him recover and return home within a month of waking up.

Film

• Joker (2019): Arthur is painfully emaciated. There's no explicitly stated reason for it, though it can be assumed it's due to his severe depression and other mental illness.
• In Justice League Dark: Apokolips War, Raven is visibly emaciated. Most prominently, her cheekbones are visible. Though aside from her gaunt face and her powers hurting her, she seems only a bit sickly.
• The Machinist: Trevor Reznik has become a walking corpse over the years due to repressed guilt slowly driving him insane.
• Happens to Mark Watney in The Martian by the time he begins his rover journey to the waiting Mars Ascent Vehicle. Non-comedic example, in that it is the result of nearly a year of subsisting on a reduced-calorie diet of home-grown potatoes on a low-gravity planet, leaving his body only the minimum of fat and muscle as it needs to survive. He's also got visible sores and lesions all over his body, indicating a very weak immune system from the poor diet.
• In Se7en one of the serial killer's victims has been reduced to this after a year spent strapped to a bed. The worst part? He's still alive!
• Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey: In the animated opening, after Christopher Robin leaves, Pooh and friends are left without food. They become thinner and thinner until they're on the brink of starvation, and are forced to eat Eeyore to make it through the winter.

Literature

• A serious example: By the time the Golden Ticket tour day arrives in Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Charlie and his family have been subsisting on so little food for weeks on end that the boy is described as this in the narration and other characters notice—including Grandpa Joe, who along with the other grandparents was this at the start of the story ("They were as shriveled as prunes, and as bony as skeletons"). Another character who notices is Willy Wonka; during the trip down the chocolate river in the Cool Boat, he gives each of them a mugful of the melted chocolate precisely because they "looked starved to death!" This trope is dropped in adaptations, probably because it's hard to visualize with live actors (especially child actors).
• The children Ignorance and Want from A Christmas Carol.
  Scrooge: Forgive me if I am not justified in what I ask, but I see something strange, and not belonging to yourself, protruding from your skirts. Is it a foot or a claw?
  Ghost of Christmas Present: It might be a claw, for the flesh there is upon it. Look here. [reveals the children]
• A Court of Thorns and Roses: Before coming to live in Prythian, Feyre is underweight due to frequently lacking food. She also loses a lot of weight throughout the beginning of the second book, although in this case it's not because of poverty but due to trauma and depression.
• The dead gluttons in The Divine Comedy's Purgatory are starved to the point that each of them looks like a skeleton made out of skin with hollows, uncolored eyes. Their emaciation is so extreme that when The Protagonist, Dante, comes across one of his best friends in childhood and adulthood, Dante can't distinguish the friend from any of the other husks without hearing his voice.
• In Dragon Bones, the heroes look like this after traveling in a country where they are so disliked that no one will give them food, and fighting bandits on top of it. Not played for drama, as they get something to eat in time, but no one finds it funny, either.
• Fantastic Mr. Fox: Mr. Bean is the Lean and Mean member of the Big, Thin, Short Trio of antagonists. By all accounts, he never eats but subsists solely on the cider he makes on his farm.
• Gaunt's Ghosts: Gaunt notices that Curth looks emaciated after her return from the Gereon mission, where she had suffered many hardships while fighting the Chaos occupational forces. He still finds her attractive, though.
• In The Goblin Emperor, Maia frequently refers to himself as skinny, with the implication that this makes him ugly. It is not clear whether he is just a rapidly growing teenager, or whether his abusive guardian has been starving him.
  • Thara Celehar combines this with Exhausted Eye Bags. Implied to be the result of stress, depression, and probable lack of self-care rather than a physical ailment.
• In the German novel Gottes Bodenpersonal: Eine unwahrscheinliche Liebesgeschichte (God's Ground Personnel: An unlikely love story), this is played for drama; one of the characters steps out of the shower in nothing but a towel, and is described as very, very skinny. His lover is concerned about his health, as he's been neglecting self-care in general.
• Guards! Guards! has the narrator stating that even if someone tried to assassinate Lord Vetinari, they wouldn't have found enough flesh to stick the knife into. As Vetinari's character is more revealed, the audience comes to learn that he eats a strict, limited diet (all the better to avoid poisoning), but he's not unhealthy either.
• Kurtz in Heart of Darkness, who is dying of an unspecified illness, is described this way.
  "I could see the cage of his ribs all astir, the bones of his arm waving."
• In The Hunger Games, most of the people from the poorer Districts are systematically underfed and many are reduced to this sort of condition, including Katniss and Prim after their father died and their mother fell into a severe depression.
  • In the prequel, The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, Iphigenia Moss is described this way and frequently gives her lunches away to her fellow students. The narration cryptically mentions that she starves herself as a form of revenge against her father, the head of Panem's Agriculture Department who oversees food supplies.
• Johannes Cabal the Necromancer: Much to his displeasure, Bones is almost literally nothing but skin and bone, as he's an Artificial Human whose creator forgot to include fat and hair in the Eye of Newt. He doubles as Lean and Mean due to the satanic power that animates him.
• Knights of the Borrowed Dark has Grey described this way when he returns a year after being Put on the Bus following his crossing of the Despair Event Horizon.
  Grey had always been slender, but now he was thin to the point of worry, his cheekbones knife blades poorly sheathed under skin.
• Gollum spends most of The Lord of the Rings traveling at a fast pace through the wilderness with no provisions of his own and is already famished when he first meets Frodo face-to-face. But he's explicitly described as skin and bones near the end, after crossing the desert plateau of Gorgoroth alone, when even the starving Frodo is able to briefly overpower him in a fight.
• Played seriously and for laughs in Loyal Enemies with Veres, who becomes nothing but skin and bones after being beaten almost to death and taking weeks to recuperate enough to even be able to eat on his own. Additionally, he uses a long-time healing spell on himself that accelerates his metabolism, turning him into a Big Eater and creating a Running Gag where Veres eats all the party's food without ever looking any better. The spell wears off towards the end of the book, culminating in Shelena's assessment that he ain't all that skinny anymore.
• Nettle & Bone: The Northern Kingdom's Fairy Godmother is so old that she's gone past wrinkles and on to translucent skin stretched taut over her skull. When she's finally able to die, the skin simply crumbles off the bone.
• In The Quest for Saint Camber, Nigel is described as wasted and frail some two weeks after Conall attacked him with magic and left him in a coma. Since Nigel got no solid food for that period, it's entirely plot justified and not pretty. Morgan and Duncan leave Rhemuth to search for Kelson and Dhugal partly to avoid watching Nigel starve to death.
• Skulduggery Pleasant:
  • The titular Skulduggery is ridiculously thin as a result of being a literal re-animated skeleton. He has to get his clothes made by his tailor friend just so that they don't hang off him.
  • Carol describes her twin sister Crystal as this, comparing her to Skulduggery above. It's Played for Drama, as her forced loss of weight greatly concerns Carol.
• A Song of Ice and Fire: Theon was a tall, good-looking youth of a healthy weight. After spending a little vacation time in the Dreadfort, he comes out some 3 stone (that's 42 pounds or 19 kilograms) lighter both due to muscle atrophy and starvation.
• Vanas Heritage: When Nirvy is finally rescued, she is so emaciated that it is apparent that she was only days from starving to death. She herself estimates that she had lost more than 5 kg of weight, which would drop her below 32 kgs.
• The Wheel of Time: Mat spends a little while looking like this while recovering from a deadly Curse, both because of the curse's degenerative effects and because the magical healing that saves him draws heavily on his body's energy to do so. It also gives him an insatiable appetite, so several characters are startled to watch such a sickly-looking beanpole scarf down a whole roast chicken and go back for seconds.
• Thinner's Billy Halleck reaches this point as the book progresses, with his lowest stated weight being 118 pounds (53.5 kg), with a stated height of 6'2" (188 cm).

Live-Action TV

• 1000 Ways to Die: One segment is about an Islamic terrorist who escapes prison by starving himself until he's so thin that he can slip through the cell bars. When he returns to his terrorist cell, they hold a feast... which promptly kills him due to refeeding syndrome (put simply, it takes energy to convert food into energy, so overeating after an extremely long fast can cause sudden organ failure).
• Subverted in an episode of The Drew Carey Show. Drew is on a hunger strike and when Mr. Wick comes to see him at home, Wick finds Drew lying on the couch due to a lack of energy and is now extremely skinny. But it turns out that Drew knew Wick was coming over and he got an assist from a pizza delivery man who is naturally extremely skinny. The pizza guy is willing to help because Drew on a hunger strike is costing him business. They lay on the couch together, covered by a blanket, arranged in a way that it looks like Drew's head is on the other guy's body. Wick is initially suspicious that Drew's head is still as fat as always, which is brushed off by explaining head fat is the last thing you lose, which he falls for.
• Though an unseen character, Maris Crane of Frasier is repeatedly described as being unhealthily thin, to the point she remained unseen because no actress could possibly fit her physical description. She was once mistaken for a coat rack, is so light she doesn't leave footprints in snow, and Frasier once expressed disbelief at how someone could weigh what she does and still be alive.
• Seen on Intervention either because the person has been consuming mostly drugs and little food, or has an eating disorder.
• Kamen Rider Gotchard: In order to pass an alchemy exam to join the Alchemists' Academy (that being to get two select Chemies to weight the same on a set of scales), Hotaro begs the already thin Odorippa to lose weight alongside Kamantis to gain weight, resulting in Odorippa's bedraggled appearance in contrast to Kamantis' Balloon Belly. This works.

Music

• Bleed Like Me by Garbage.
  And the kick is so divine when she sees bones beneath her skin.
• 4st 7lb by Manic Street Preachers.
  A week later all my flesh disappear [sic]
  Stretch taut, cling-film on bone

Mythology

• Classical Mythology: Limos, the spirit(s) of famine and starvation were described as women with emaciated, gaunt faces and dehydrated skin.
• The Wendigo of Algonquian mythology is often depicted as this since it's the spirit of cannibalism. No matter how much it eats, even if it swallows something bigger than itself whole, it'll never get fatter thus it's never satisfied.
• Mabinogion: In Math fab Mathonwy, Blodeuedd conspires with her lover Gronwr to murder her husband Lleu, but he escapes by transforming into an eagle and disappearing. When Lleu's uncle eventually finds him, he was very weak and thin, with his flesh rotting away from the injury, and being half-eaten by maggots.
  However, no-one had ever seen a man in a sorrier state. He was nothing but skin and bones.

Newspaper Comics

• A short sequence of some early Dilbert strips observed Dilbert's date with a supermodel, who was drawn as a literal skeleton, and did not eat on their dinner date but instead simply sniffed the mints.
• In Peanuts, Snoopy's desert-dwelling brother Spike was like this initially. In the first strip where he appeared, he woke up after traveling a long time, and Snoopy announced, "Eggs benedict for my brother Spike!" To which Lucy replied, "Better make that ten pounds of buffalo steak" before he was actually seen. (In later stories, Spike was simply thin.)

Roleplay

• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
  • Harriet is skinny to a concerning degree, her features described as angular and bony. This is because she's deeply depressed and does little to take care of herself.
  • Ivan's physical description emphasises how skinny and frail he looks, describing his skin as porcelain and his arms as twigs. This can be unnerving for other characters, even though Ivan is actually a Nice Guy.

Tabletop Games

• In the Dungeons & Dragons Splat book The Book of Vile Darkness, there are several Willing Deformity Feats that the evilest of characters can take, including Gaunt, which makes the character disturbingly thin (and actually grants a few benefits, but a few liabilities too).
• In the Forgotten Realms setting, Chosen Ones are humans transformed into humanoid monsters by the Red Wizards of Thay. They are downright morbidly thin◊, to the point where basically look like flesh-colored skeletons.
• Princess: The Hopeful: Darkened with the Hunger Means Nothing Umbra will not die from deprivation, but they do grow inhumanly emaciated and are somewhat weaker than a properly fed human.
• In the Scarred Lands campaign setting, worshippers of Gaurak the Glutton become fatling, obese abominations reflecting the titan's appearance. However, fatlings who prove failures turn into gauntlings, which are even more hideous, tall, impossibly thin, and gaunt, nearly mindless beings who more successful fatlings use as slaves.

Video Games

• In American McGee's Alice, several characters, including the Cheshire Cat and White Rabbit, look horribly gaunt and malnourished, due to The Corruption that has blighted all of Wonderland.
• ANNO: Mutationem: Hapi, a resident of Skopp City is shown to be quite skinny with a few visible bones after living in the sewers for an unprecedented amount of time without decent meals.
• Overlaps with Lean and Mean for Bendy and the Ink Machine's Big Bad, Ink Bendy, whose ribs can be seen and whose spine juts out of his back.
• EarthBound Series: All zombie enemies encountered are entirely deprived with just being dead skin and bones.
• Fans were a bit surprised when a trailer for Final Fantasy VII Remake showed Cloud, who's normally depicted as being fairly well-built, had been redesigned to look unsettlingly thin, sinewy, and sickly. Some of the fanbase were not happy with the change, while others thought it was a perfect fit for his characterization at that point. For those not in the know, prior to the start of the game, Cloud had spent years locked in a jar as a lab specimen.
• The Sheikah Shrine Monks in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, who have spent 10,000 years meditating in their chambers to give Link their Spirit Orbs, are portrayed this way. What with Sheikah culture having a fantasy Japan inspiration, they are meant to be a reference to real-life Sokushinbutsu monks who starved themselves to death while meditating and underwent self-mummification.
• Six's legs and severe starvation in Little Nightmares leave no doubt that she is extremely skinny.
• Metroid: Ridley, in many of his non-robotic incarnations, is an example Played for Horror. His body is positively gangly in appearance, with his lack of defined muscle gruesomely emphasizing how Lean and Mean he is. Though since he's a space dragon, this doesn't stop him from posing a serious threat that can effortlessly grab Samus with his claws. His playable appearance in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate is an especially notorious example.
• A dramatic example comes with Red Dead Redemption II. Arthur Morgan starts out as a powerfully built, broad-shouldered man in the prime of his life. After he contracts tuberculosis, it becomes harder for the player to maintain his 'perfect' weight. In the terminal stages, it becomes impossible for Arthur to keep any weight on at all, and he becomes painfully thin and frail-looking. All of this is reflected in his health and stamina cores, which gradually diminish as the TB ravages his physical condition.

Web Comics

• Issue 8 of Flying Suit Reiko has Reiko getting her overweight friend Potchari to take a fitness test for her so she can take diet pills she's ineligible for and throughout the story, she gets skinnier and skinnier.
• Problem Sleuth: One of the Fan Commands reveals Pickle Inspector has exposed ribs when naked.
• Slimy Thief: Absorbing water can cause Aisha to swell up but losing water, especially a lot of it, can cause her to shrivel to an emaciated state. After some adventuring and drinking, Aisha comes in her fat form but after an extremely long bathroom break, she walks out of the toilet just skin and bones much to Camilia's horror since she is unaware of Aisha's power.
• SWAP Ensemble: Patrick Tempo is tiny for his age and always wears a thick black coat. He is visibly irritated when his sister takes off his jacket, but he is wearing long sleeves that time. Someone on the smaller side can completely wrap a hand around his arm. The next time his jacket is off, he is wearing short sleeves. The skin on his forearms sinks between the bones.
• Sinjal/Crippled from Wurr is very, very skinny. While not underfed per se (not any more than, say, Morri) he has severe digestion problems.

Western Animation

• In Adventure Time, The Ice King is actually very skinny under his robe. Though sometimes he's very fat, depending on what's funnier or more pathetic. In a rare serious example of the trope, "All Your Fault" features two frighteningly gaunt, starving Lemongrabs.
• In The Amazing World of Gumball, whenever Mr. Small is either shirtless or wearing something skin-tight, his ribcage is jutting out and his limbs (barring his cloud-life fur) are pencil-thin. Several episodes explain this as being because he deprives himself of meat due to his Straw Vegetarian beliefs, and "The Job" also mentions he's attempted breatharianism (the idea that one can live off only sunlight).
• In American Dad! Stan becomes extremely worried about his weight and image after the family points out that he's arguably just as fat as Steve's new girlfriend, Debbie Hyman (an overweight goth girl), and he goes on an extreme diet and exercise regime, even getting a verbally abusive fitness trainer named Zack (later revealed to be just a figment of his imagination). At first glance, Stan's regime doesn't seem to be working, as he's somehow getting progressively fatter, and it might be due to his family sabotaging his diet as payback for mocking Debbie. But, after the family does some research, it turns out that the episode was seen Through the Eyes of Madness and that Stan had actually developed anorexia (and had been wasting away to nothing).
  Francine: It's worse than we thought.
  Stan: I know! I'm a huge tub of lard!
  Francine: No you aren't! You're just suffering from a delusional state!
• Aqua Teen Hunger Force: In the episode "Shaketopia", after having spent two months in virtual reality, Shake's body has degraded to the point his back breaks and exposes his spine when he stands up.
• In the Brandy & Mr. Whiskers episode "Wolfie: Prince of the Jungle" Brandy has a bunch of fashion magazines on the floor. One of them has a literal skeleton on it.
• Looney Tunes:
  • Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck have been known to show skinnier frames under their skins to try to deter those who wish to eat them.
  Bugs: (To Taz) Look! No meat!
  • The earliest example of this in a Looney Tunes cartoon is probably 1939's "Hare-Um Scare-Um", where Happy Rabbit (Bugs Bunny's prototype) shows the hunter his frame in full◊.
  • Foghorn Leghorn tries to convince Henery Hawk that he's all gristle in "The Leghorn Blows at Midnight", though he doesn't try to look skinnier.
    Foghorn Leghorn: I'm too tough, son. No white meat, just gristle. Feel my wing. I used to be young and tender once — Feel my wing like I toldya, boy! — but that was a long time ago.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Hearts and Hooves Day", the Cutie Mark Crusaders have an Imagine Spot where a famine strikes Ponyville and when background pony Lily Valley momentarily stands up right in front of the "camera" she suddenly has protruding ribs and a concave stomach.
• In Jack Stauber's OPAL, the titular character is very thin looking, especially when compared to the other characters in the short film. Justified because it turns out she was actually getting abused and neglected, which implies that she's actually malnourished and starving.
• In one Quick Draw McGraw cartoon, a wild mountain lion (an early version of Snagglepuss) steals one of Quick-Draw's biggest, fattest sheep, then shears it down to prepare it for dinner. It is then that he discovers that the sheep is rail-thin underneath its wool.
• In an episode of The Ren & Stimpy Show, the duo are starving and Ren opens his skin to show there's literally no fat, just bone. Then Stimpy opens his skin to show he's nothing but skin and fat.
• Happens to Cartman, of all people, in an episode of South Park. To elaborate: the kids were setting up a play on the Passion of the Christ, and Cartman insisted on playing Jesus. Since it's Passion of the Christ, crucifixion is customary, and eventually Cartman gets crucified, but Stan and Kyle end up forgetting him there for days. When Cartman manages to get down from the cross and his friends see him again, he's looking pretty malnourished, even by normal standards.

Real Life

• The victims of Nazi Germany, Josef Stalin, and other notorious regimes throughout history have been found in this condition. Systematic starvation is a common tool employed against people targeted by such regimes.
• Tuberculosis wasn't known as Consumption for nothing.
• A very unfortunate case of Truth in Television, victims of prolonged starvation or illness (e.g. cancer, AIDS) will really wither away down to a flap of skin over a malnourished skeleton. This is also the case for people with anorexia.
• An unfortunate side effect of a number of commonly abused drugs (commonly cited examples include meth and heroin) is that the user becomes emaciated and skeletal from a combination of the drugs' affects on the body and personal neglect in favor of getting more drugs.
• "Shrink-wrapped dinosaur syndrome" is a phrase that refers to the tendency for paleo-artists to depict dinosaurs this way because they use the skeletons as reference and forget to account for muscle and fat. The resulting animal looks bony and emaciated.
• The late Filipino comedian-actor Palito capitalized on his thin, "walking corpse"-like appearance to deliver laughs during the seventies and eighties^note His screen name means "stick" in Spanish, befitting his appearance.. He even starred in parodies of Western action films such as Rambuto^note lit. Ram-bone and James Bone.

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