Overdrawn at the Blood Bank

Contents under pressure.

"Yet who would have thought the old man to have so much blood in him?"

— Lady Macbeth, Macbeth

The average adult male human body contains roughly five liters (one and a third gallons for Americans) of blood; blood volume is proportional to body size, but you'd be hard-pressed to find an adult with six liters. When donating whole blood, 450-500 mL (16.9 oz) is normally taken, which produces feelings of fatigue and weakness for a while, and you must wait 56 days before doing it again. Red blood cells do not regenerate all that fast; that's why we have transfusions. While people can survive losing quite a bit of blood provided they get prompt medical attention, after losing 40% or more death is pretty much guaranteed.

But who wants to deal with all that when you're writing action (or comedy)? The more blood, the better!

Blood loss doesn't affect fictional characters so much, especially those in Video Games. No matter where they get shot or stabbed, it's "Only a Flesh Wound", even if it results in a geyser of High-Pressure Blood that releases several times the blood volume of an adult human. Usually it's the flesh wounds that are what hinder the character; blood loss is rarely shown to be a problem to those Made of Iron (maybe they use that iron to make extra hemoglobin?). This can be taken to extremes when the player, protagonist, and enemies are shot so much they paint the walls red and create pools of blood on the floor, all with no ill effects other than a scuffed wardrobe (with little or no blood on it, sorry, White Shirt of Death) and artistically dripping blood. It seems the only ounce of blood (29 mL) that matters is the last one. Compare Killing for a Tissue Sample.

Not to be confused with Overdrawn at the Memory Bank, which features a lot less blood and a lot more stupid.

Before citing something as an example, keep in mind that five liters is still more than enough to make a HUGE mess. What looks like too much blood to a person who doesn't know what a gallon and a half of liquid looks like when spilled may in fact be entirely realistic.^note If you live in the USA, get a gallon and a half of milk (5,678 mL) and fling it around your kitchen. See? Sorry, cleanup is on you.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Kouta from Baka and Test: Summon the Beasts suffers from this regularly, due to him suffering from nosebleeds, particularly when Aiko is teasing him. Some of them may only be a spurt, but more often than not, he ends up losing quite a bit of blood from seeing the various girls in the show in revealing outfits. In one episode he even hooks up to a blood bag, only to have that drain too fast for it to be of any use.
• Happens to ridiculous extents in Bleach. Partly justifiable in that most fights happen between spirit beings, but they do seem to have anatomy that resembles living creatures. Originally, a Shinigami's body was described as being more or less a thin bag containing nothing but blood plasma. A Retcon and some Real Life years later, and they have much more human-like anatomies but still tend to bleed more than what a normal human would survive (well, they aren't normal humans anyway).
• Several characters in Blood+ receive large injuries and spill a ridiculous amount of blood. Justified in that they're not humans.
• Used more often than not in the anime version of Bludgeoning Angel Dokuro-chan, a series where the titular character often kills the main character with a spiked club only to bring him back from the dead seconds later. The very first death has blood, to quote a magazine review, 'spewing out all over the room like lava from a volcano', after Dokuro obliterates the protagonist's head.
• Burn Up! sees Yuji have a nosebleed severe enough to flood the Coptown Police Tower in one of the omake-scenes in Excess.
• Cells at Work! features a lot of blood splattering around everywhere whenever White Blood Cell or another immunocite kills a bacteria. Despite bacteria not having blood.
• Subverted in Change 123. The author (committed as ever to technical accuracy, if not overall plausibility) comments on the effects of blood loss, and takes pains to apply it to the series' primary fighters, even throwing in some Deaths Of A Thousand Cuts.
• Done literally in one chapter of Codename: Sailor V: Minako first did a normal whole blood donation (in Japan either 200 or 400cc depending on body mass) at least two years underage, and then, the very same day, as part of the infiltration to look for Chuu Chuu she donated again... With the doctor, being Chuu Chuu in disguise, taking 800cc. Minako drank eight tomato juice cans before climbing on top of the hospital where he had his base and annihilating him.
• Deadman Wonderland gives us the titular Deadmen, for whom this is a Required Secondary Power. Though it's still a plot point that Deadmen have finite supplies of blood. And especially that protagonist Ganta has less blood than adult Deadmen since he's still a child, a flaw exacerbated by the fact that most Deadmen make weapons like blades or whips out of their blood, but Ganta fires his blood as bullets and thus can't just pull it back into his body afterward.
• Teru Mikami from Death Note. He got a good three gallons by stabbing himself WITH A PEN.
• The disease from Emerging is most easily spread through the blood of the infected. Fortunately for the virus, its hosts have copious amounts of High-Pressure Blood to spare!
• Excel♡Saga:
  • The Too Hot for TV final episode exaggerated Hyatt's usual death and massive blood loss. She floods the entire planet with her blood.
  • The manga is not quite as absurd, but still provides plenty of this trope in its own right. For example, Hyatt once got caught in a gas explosion in the bathroom, and Elgala looked in horror as her blood kept steadily pumping on the glass door. Then she walked out, completely unharmed.
• Subverted in Fushigi Yuugi. The infamous Episode 33 (Or manga volume 8) where Nuriko dies. Nuriko is badly wounded in a fight with a "werewolf," but is still determined to get the Shinzaho for Miaka, and loses a lot of blood in the process. Much to the ire of the fangirls, Nuriko does not survive.
• There wasn't a fight scene in Ga-Rei where the characters weren't bleeding. The main characters might have a Healing Factor but even the ones that don't never bleed to death.
• It's common in most Gundam series for blood to flow out of a Mobile Suit any time the cockpit is destroyed, usually in quantities great enough to paint the torso of the machine.
• In the Halo Legends short The Duel (which focuses on the Elites/Sangheili), protagonist Fal 'Chavamee duels his much larger clansman Haka. It ends with a Mutual Kill, with Fal's chest exploding into a waterfall of purple blood after being stabbed by Haka's BFS.
• Kill la Kill brings us Ryuko, the protagonist who has downright ridiculous amounts of blood to spare. She literally has enough blood to constantly be venting it like someone cut through a hose for almost an entire episode and loses enough blood to create a geyser on two separate occasions. Her being a Half-Human Hybrid with Life Fibers might have something to do with it.
  • Nui Harime as well. When her arms are cut off, blood pours out of her as if from a hose. For several minutes, even.
  • Earlier, when Ragyo was decapitated by Satsuki, it showered.
• Kodomo no Jikan manages to pull this off with a Nosebleed. It was 10 seconds long and appeared to be a gallon a nostril. Two gallons of blood from a 3-foot-tall 9-year-old. She should be dead from that.
• An episode of Magical Pokaan takes this trope literally by having the vampire girl giving daily blood donations, just so she could get the blood of the handsome guy running the donation cart. Throughout most of the episode, she's on the verge of death due to massive blood loss.
• Negima! Magister Negi Magi:
  • A chapter had Negi coughing up what must have been several gallons of blood, and this is after bleeding profusely from other injuries. Of course, his Black Magic gave him a Healing Factor, and it's magic, but still...
  • Much earlier in the manga, Negi's students were worried that Negi was acting rather woozy and out of it. They eventually discovered that Evangeline had drained some of Negi's blood as payment for her Training from Hell. She actually states that she took "about the same amount you would give at a blood bank" the problem being that she was doing it every day when you're not allowed to give blood again for several weeks. At that rate he'd be exsanguinated within a week; even faster if she wasn't adjusting the amount taken for his size.
• During Neon Genesis Evangelion, whenever anything bleeds it tends to gush out blood in huge globs or jet-like sprays. And the bigger it is, the more it bleeds. Some of these angels happen to be several kilometers/miles long, and when they die, their whole body shoots out tidal waves of the stuff. Logical conclusion: staining the moon in End.
  • Justified with the fact that it would need a lot of pressure in order to get the blood to circulate in the body.
  • Deconstructed in Rebuild. Instead of exploding, the angels liquefy, and the sheer amount of blood floods Tokyo-3 every battle.
• Used with excessive glee in the anarchic world of One Piece: The sword-fighter Zoro regularly loses several pints of blood every time he has a major battle. The record, according to Word of God, is six(!) or about two-thirds of his total.
  • Zoro fits this trope so greatly that a rant at the fanficrants LiveJournal community "about how fanfic authors needed to actually consider the ramifications of them injuring or causing that much blood loss with whatever characters they were writing" actually referenced him as an exception since it is perfectly normal (if not expected) that Zoro lost more blood in a single battle than most people have in their bodies, and Word of God that Zoro lost 3 liters of blood in his first fight with Mihawk, and then 5 liters in his fight only a couple of days later(!) with Hachi and Arlong. The human body, on average, holds 5.6 liters of blood. So yeah. He should be dead. But it's okay! He survives with the power of Heart!
  • With Luffy this is actually justified: the Required Secondary Powers of being a Rubber Man mean his body produces blood at an impossibly fast rate to get to his stretched-out limbs, so he really does have more blood than a regular person.
  • Post time-skip, Sanji is working very hard to match Zoro, initially having regular massive nosebleeds just from looking at a woman. In Chapter 609, after a mild occurrence of Marshmallow Hell, Sanji suffered from a nosebleed so violent that it actually necessitated Chopper to ask everyone in the vicinity for a blood donation. While this may be the One Piece universe where blood floweth freely, Sanji had literally just lost what appeared to be roughly fifty gallons of blood. Through his nose.
  • At another point, back when they were sailing in a resin bubble at an insane depth in the ocean, Sanji had a nosebleed so explosive, it caused him to fly in the air from propulsion and caused him to fly through that bubble and away into the ocean.
  • In Episode 523 of the anime, they have a joke panel with Zoro, and nine pint bags of blood that were being transfused into Sanji. They made it look like they pulled all the blood from Zoro! In reality, it's blood Chopper already had stored on the boat. Sanji has a rare blood type, which becomes a plot point later on when Chopper runs out of stored blood and needs to find a donor. Zoro probably could donate that much blood, though.
• Saya from Onidere once has a nosebleed that flooded an entire room. While she's in it.
• Saint Seiya:
  • Although everyone bleeds a lot, Shiryu is notable for regularly geysering more blood than everyone else in his team has at least once per arc (the only time it's played fairly realistic is when he tears his own wrists open so Mu can fix up his and Seiya's suits. Shiryu went into a coma, and it's stated that he teetered on the edge of death, but he miraculously came back and was ready to fight again right then and there). It gets downright ridiculous in the Scorpio Milo vs. Cygnus Hyoga battle, during which the latter gushes out more blood than his entire body could possibly contain. And not only does he live through it —once Milo has realized the truth and stopped the blood loss via Pressure Point— but he's back on his feet and fighting at full strength not even five minutes later.
  • In Saint Seiya: The Lost Canvas, Capricorn El Cid actually uses this strategically. When fighting Icelus, an enemy that bends space to avoid and redirect attacks back at El Cid, he sprays a geyser of blood from a lost arm all around himself so that he could hear the resulting distortions when Icelus warps space. While he does die to blood loss, it's a good 2 episodes later after killing four gods inhabiting a single body.
• Absurdly overused in the manga Samurai Deeper Kyo. More than half the manga is a long continuous series of death matches for the main characters who receive about a couple dozen serious wounds each battle and usually one or two fatal ones. The is no regeneration factor ever mentioned, and there is only one real healer, and even she can only close open wounds, not internal which almost all the cast get at some point.
• Mostly averted in Shiki. The exact amount of blood in a human's body is referenced often - since it's a series about vampires - but in the end, there is a lot of blood gushing around from staking various shiki, who are stated to have even less blood than a human.
• The Vision of Escaflowne: Thanks to Synchronization with the Escaflowne and his status as the guy wearing red, Van suffers at least one coagulation-free day of bleeding from nearly every inch of his body while his friends futilely attempt to make it stop. While his blood pressure does drop low enough to cause heart arrhythmia and freak out The Medic, losing more blood than is contained in the bodies of all of his comrades combined is apparently not enough to cause any permanent damage. Even knowing that he's half-Draconian pushes suspension of disbelief.
• Wolf Guy - Wolfen Crest brings it up to One Piece levels, if not higher, with the final arc in which Akira—the werewolf protagonist who can take a blast from a shotgun to the face during the full moon with no ill consequences—gets stabbed in the abdomen, then runs dozens of miles to find the base his teacher has been stashed in, jumps an eleven-foot fence, kills two attack dogs by punching them in the mouth, completely wipes out a group of guards armed with AK-47s while simultaneously being shot at by a gatling gun firing 4000 rounds per minute, runs through a field of anti-tank mines, gets some fingers chopped off by the Big Bad, gets sliced up with a katana, loses some more fingers and an arm, and still manages to save the day. Did we mention that this was during the new moon when he is as weak as a human? He does die shortly afterward, though.
• The manga of Zatch Bell! has a bit of this. Look at Kiyomaro's death scene over here◊ for example. Then again, he was dying, and most of it is probably just charring, it is in black and white. Maybe a better example would be reading most any battle chapter in either the Ancient Mamodo arc or the Faudo arc.

Comic Books

• Subverted in the first TPB of Fables: Rose Red's apartment is found literally covered in her blood. Bigby the sheriff performs an experiment to see how much blood would be necessary to cover the room, and discovers it's over the amount of blood needed in humans to survive. In other words, she's dead... except she actually faked her death, with the help of her boyfriend: they took out a pint of blood at a time for a few months, stored it in the freezer, and when they had enough, used it to give the impression she'd been murdered.
• The Bleeding Monk from Harbinger is... a monk who bleeds. A lot, and constantly. So much so that you can pretty much find him by looking for the red river and then heading upstream.
• Inverted in one issue of The Simpsons. Clones of Waylon Smithers have captured Mr. Burns to draw a sample of his blood so they can clone him, but he's so old and desiccated that their syringes can't get anything out of him, not even from his major arteries. To quote one frustrated clone, Burns is "drier than a New Yorker cartoon".
• Averted in one comic where X-23 attacks Wolverine, severs major arteries, and uses dirt to stop them from closing long enough for him to bleed out sufficiently to pass out from blood loss. Of course most of the time Wolverine laughs at the idea that anything less than skeletonization could stop him. And even that's not a sure thing, while in this case, the fact Logan is kept bleeding at all is what makes her strategy successful in this case.

Fan Works

• The shot of Dio's body spurting blood after he's defeated in JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Abridged is noticeably drawn out. Causing blood to continue shooting out of him like a fountain for over ten seconds. Lampshaded by Jotaro.
  Jotaro: Man, this always happens when I use my Jotaro punch. Guys always turn into like a blood fountain."

Films — Animation

• The bug that Hydia stomps on in My Little Pony: The Movie (1986) literally explodes into a huge puddle of blood that no creature of this size could possibly hold in its body. Of course, that even ignores the fact that insects don't have the same kind of blood that vertebrates do.
• It is told in Ronal the Barbarian that after the legendary barbarian leader Kron was killed, he bled for seven days and seven nights and lost enough blood for his entire tribe to drink.
• Parodied in the prologue for Zootopia; a young Judy pretends to die during her role in a school play and overplays her death scene by using a red ribbon, followed by an entire squeeze-bottle of ketchup, to simulate gushing blood.

Films — Live-Action

• Parodied for Black Comedy in The Addams Family when Puggsley and Wednesday, with the help of Uncle Fester, set up their sword fight on stage where the two give each other a Mutual Kill with Puggsley losing his arm and Wednesday getting a Slashed Throat, the two of them splashing the blood all over the stage and all over the shocked audience. The only ones cheering and giving a standing ovation are their family. Even when they take a bow, the blood's still gushing.
• Army of Darkness played up the blood fountains for Rule of Cool.
• Christmas Blood: When Annika gets chopped in the face and lifted above her friends, they get drenched in more blood than should have reasonably been pouring out.
• Dracula: Dead and Loving It:
  • Jonathan Harker is instructed to hammer a stake through the heart of a vampirized Lucy Westenra. At the first blow, he is utterly drenched over several seconds by a geyser of blood from the coffin (which is why Van Helsing took cover behind a pillar). Van Helsing handwaves it by saying she just ate and directs Harker to hammer the stake again. And Jonathan does so. With the exact same result. Understandably, he declines to repeat the process a third time:
    Van Helsing: She's almost dead!
    Harker: She's dead enough!
  • And in real life, his actor was not told that he would get hosed down with stage blood, and is visibly struggling not to laugh.
  • Also, Renfield gets a paper cut that results in a fountain of blood erupting from his finger.
• A few Godzilla films feature this trope.
  • In Godzilla vs. Hedorah, Hedorah's blood is highly toxic and corrosive, and the only part of his body that his blood can actually injure are his eyes. When Godzilla punches Hedorah in the right eye, the large amount of blood released means that he has to shut his eye to prevent it from being damaged. He also shuts his eye over Godzilla's hand, burning his flesh right down to the bone. Godzilla also bleeds after losing an eye of his own to some of Hedorah's acid.
  • In Godzilla vs. Gigan, Godzilla gets slashed in the shoulder and around his eyes several times, ejecting blood everywhere. This gets repeated to the point that he actually begins to suffer from shock. Anguirus also gets Gigan's buzzsaw pressed into his face, splattering blood over the screen.
  • In Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla, Godzilla sprays High-Pressure Blood everywhere after getting shot in the neck by Mechagodzilla's finger missiles.
  • In Godzilla vs. Mechagodzilla II, Godzilla gets hit with the G-Crusher, making his secondary brain rupture so violently that it covers the screen in black blood and ooze.
  • In Shin Godzilla, Godzilla's forms all generate massive amounts of blood. Its initial emergence ruptures the Tokyo Bay Aqua-Line, pouring in hundreds of gallons of blood. Its first form leaves an enormous trail of blood in Tokyo Bay before making landfall, and its second form spurts superheated blood from its gills every few steps. Later, after its fourth form is hit by the MOP bombs, it sprays out what seems to be a small tidal wave of blood from his back. Also, an unfinished deleted scene showed its third form vomiting up a torrent of blood that would have covered several city blocks.
• In keeping with the film's source material, this trope is in constant use in Hobo with a Shotgun. Perhaps most obvious when Logan has his head ripped off, and the blood sprays from his severed neck at a ludicrous velocity for several minutes without any decrease in volume or speed.
• In The Jerk, at one point Steve Martin's character has been giving blood for juice and popcorn so often that he cut himself shaving and nothing but air came out.
• Kill Bill:
  • The Bride chops Sophie Fatale's left arm off above the elbow, presumably severing all the brachial arteries, and she's left bleeding copiously on the floor without medical attention while the Bride fights Gogo Yubari, the Crazy 88, and O-Ren Ishi. According to a deleted scene, the Bride later severs Sophie's other arm below the elbow, before dumping her down a steep slope to a hospital emergency department. Somehow Sophie doesn't bleed to death...
  • During O-Ren Ishi's presented-in-anime origin story, her father is stabbed from behind by a thug (which O-Ren witnesses). Her father seems to swell before a cannon of blood spews out.
• The Naked Witch: When the witch pushes the miller into the stream, more blood flows into the water than should have been in his body. However, it is implied that this might be a magical effect cast by the witch.
• A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) played up Glen's death scene for Rule of Cool so bloody that it was bloodier than blood.
• In The Passion of the Christ, Jesus sheds an inhuman amount of blood when he's flogged, then sheds even more when he's crucified.
• Playing With Dolls: When the killer makes a cut above his first victim's breast, a LOT more blood starts pouring out than one should expect.
• Everyone who is wounded in Revenge (2017) loses a huge amount of blood. The film features so much blood that, according to director Coralie Fargeat, the prop team would often run out of fake blood. Jen should have bled out somewhere between the canyon and the lake, judging from the Trail of Blood her pursuers follow. Richard is even worse. While playing cat-and-mouse with Jen in the house, he loses so much blood that it pools deeply on the wooden floor and makes it impossible for Jen to maintain her footing in the corridor.
• Riki-Oh: The Story of Ricky, being a Bloody Hilarious Gornfest has this, especially when the warden is put in a meat grinder (the actor playing Ricky spent three days covered in fake blood after shooting that!).
• This happens at the climax of Sanjuro in part due to Production designer Yoshiro Muraki adding 30 pounds of extra pressure to make things more dramatic. When Sanjuro slashed his opponent, the rival samurai was supposed to spurt blood right afterwards. However, the hose for the machine blew a compressor and led to a slight delay and a massive blood spurt lasting for a second. When Muraki nervously looked toward director Akira Kurosawa, Kurosawa nodded his approval (partially due to the difficulty of filming it twice).
• The Saw films, shockingly, avert this. Throughout the series, the blood splatters are pretty realistic in size. Also, victims who survive massive blood loss without dying (e.g. Lawrence in Saw and Brit and Mallick in Saw V) visibly show common effects that are consequences of blood loss.
• Played for drama in Steel Rain when a North Korean woman gives a blood transfusion to save the life of her Glorious Leader. When assassins turn up to finish the job, she catches a stray bullet and bleeds out because she has none to spare.
• The end of Tokyo Gore Police. After getting his legs cut off by the main character and injecting himself with something, the villain spends the remainder of the film airborne on twin high-pressure blood jets.
• Played for laughs at the beginning of Tropic Thunder where a soldier suffers a headshot through his helmet and proceeds to spout a three-foot-high fountain of blood into the faces of his comrades, probably about three gallons in total.
• Vampires Suck parodies the trope. Becca gets a paper cut and her finger starts shooting a stream of blood. She later suffers another cut on her arm that makes her bleed enough to fill a pyramid of glasses.

Literature

• In Battle is an Art, the MC, Herah, gets her arm torn off and had it emerge as a geyser of blood but even used it to make several tattoos. Justified in that her alien body will function properly till her flame goes out no matter the damage.
• In the Creepypasta "DAY OF ALL THE BLOOD", the protagonist (later revealed to be the reader before they forgot about the incident) begins bleeding profusely all of a sudden. It never stops, and everyone is forced to send him into space so that he stops getting blood everywhere.
• In Halo: The Flood, an Elite is sniped in the head by a Marine with an anti-material rifle. The book lovingly describes a fountain spewing from where his head was for a good ten seconds before toppling over.
• Laughing Jack: Implied. Just before his mother steps into James' dark room and finds her son pinned to the wall with his guts spilling out, she can feel warm thick liquid at her feet. Presumably, she stepped into a pool of her son's blood.
• Lampshaded in Mistborn. When Vin and Kelsier discover Marsh's flayed body in a room drenched in blood, amid the horror, Vin wonders if one body could have produced that much blood. No, it couldn't. Several people died in that room, and Marsh was not one of them.

Live-Action TV

• Baltar in Battlestar Galactica loses quite a bit of blood in "The Hub" due to shrapnel before getting medical attention from Roslin. Then she takes off his bandages and lets him bleed some more in order to kill him (it's complicated). By the time she has an epiphany and tries to save him by reapplying the bandages (with no plasma on hand), there was a nice puddle on the deck floor. Baltar is nothing if not a persistent survivor.
• CSI: NY:
  • In "Cool Hunter," a young woman's bleeding body is found in an apartment building's rooftop water cistern. The cistern is big enough that it probably holds several thousand gallons of water, yet a single body's ~10 pints of blood somehow turns the water flowing from sinks and showers on the floors below a brilliant red, rather than it being diluted beyond visual detectability. Her neighbors who are affected scream when they see all the bloody water.
  • Done similarly, albeit more subtly, with the second victim in "It Happened to Me." She's found dead in a large pool of too-red water in her sunken living room, having bled out through all her orifices.
• In an episode of Dexter, Dexter has to investigate a crime scene in which at least 50 gallons of blood is splashed around a hotel room. (It's made even more confusing by the absence of any bodies.) The normally unflappable Dexter is made violently queasy by the scene and practically passes out. It turns out it's justified because the Ice Truck Killer had exsanguinated his previous victims and saved their blood to create the scene.
  • Dexter's mom, when killed, supposedly flooded the shipping container in to a depth of an inch. Even a short shipping container is 20 feet x 8 feet; that's 23,040 cubic inches, or almost 100 gallons (378.5L) of blood! It's more likely the sheer trauma of seeing her death colored his childhood memories.
• Grey's Anatomy: Justified several times.
  • In the two-parter episode "Crash Into Me," a patient has ruptured his carotid artery, squirting large amounts of blood everywhere. While waiting for an operating room to become available, they're pumping blood in as fast as it's going out, and poor Lexie ends up wearing most of it.
  • When Dr. Reed Adamson is killed during the hospital shooting, she bleeds massively. After April literally stumbles across her friend's body, she gets covered in blood and starts gibbering to Derek about how she didn't realize humans even had that much blood
  • In "Out of Nowhere," an ECMO (blood oxygenator) machine has a hose come loose on a helicopter, drenching Jackson and Maggie in blood. Maggie later admits she's more excited about showering it all off than saving the patient.
• In Married... with Children, Al Bundy once sold a ludicrous amount of his blood to let Kelly play pool competitively. She was good. Ultimately, she lost because Al fainted in the path of her winning shot.
  Al: (Drinking beer) The brain doesn't need blood. It just needs to be kept wet.
• A Defied Trope on two separate occasions in NCIS: Los Angeles. In one episode, Sam and G notice an unusually large puddle of blood from a victim and figure out he was an MMA fighter transfusing himself with excess blood to give himself an advantage. In another, the inside of a car is smeared (though not drenched) in blood, and the characters still note "nobody loses this much blood and survives." They're right, but there were also two sources.
• The Red Green Show: Possum Lodge once competed in a blood-donating competition with Caribou Lodge. Harold, with a little convincing from Red, donated enough to beat out the total donations of Caribou Lodge by himself. He was barely able to walk and talk after that but was fine by the next episode.
• True Blood:
  • Vampires tend to vomit up geysers of blood when killed, and then promptly melt into puddles of bloody gore. May or may not be justified by their... unique biology, however.
  • Another, much more subtle, example: During the first 3 seasons, Bill feeds on Sookie roughly every other episode. The first three seasons take place over the course of, roughly, 2 - 3 months. Either Bill is drinking a teaspoon of blood each time he feeds, or she is regenerating blood at an absolutely ridiculous speed. Possibly justified by Bill's habit of healing the fang marks by dabbing a drop of his own blood on them—given the miraculous healing properties of vampire blood, this may trigger rapid blood regeneration in addition to healing the visible bite. Alternatively, something about the vampire feeding process (vampire saliva?) may naturally stimulate supernaturally fast blood production, enabling long-term feeding on a single human.
  • The scene at the end of season 3 where Russell and Eric both feed on her for a while before walking out into the sun is especially noticeable since she apparently has the strength to go out and retrieve their charred husks only a few minutes later.
• Tori in the Victorious episode "Tori Gets Stuck." She donates half of her blood amount (3 pints out of 6) to Robbie's operation. She lost the first 2 pints, but the third is used successfully. It does leave her feeling drained and tired.
• Usually averted in anything involving Joss Whedon... despite the copious use of bladed weapons, even non-human blood is thin on the ground (*ahem*) - see for example the final battle in Serenity where River ends up surrounded by Reavers that she has hacked to death with scarcely a drop of blood on the floor. Probably one to pin on the Moral Guardians.
• Averted in The Wonder Years. When Kevin and his friends get caught skipping class and avoid punishment by offering the lie that they were going out to give blood, the show time-skips to the aftermath of their blood donation: each one of them is completely exhausted and barely able to stay awake.

Manhwa

• In Priest, Ivan Isaacs loses absurd amounts of blood during battle. He may be undead, but he's still losing more blood (in liquid volume) than his body could ever conceivably carry.

Music

• The music video for Papa Roach's "Hollywood Whore" initially features said whore "passed out on the floor," as per the lyrics. Towards the end, however, she stands up and appears to sing along to the lyrics—then she starts to cry blood from one eye, which soon catches fire and burns off her entire face as she vomits enough blood to cover the stage (and the singer, who begins to resemble Bruce Campbell in Evil Dead.) It's . . . unnerving, to say the least.

Tabletop Games

• Invoked in the Innistrad storyline in Magic: The Gathering. On Innistrad, there exists a cursed blade called the Bloodletter. This item is particularly coveted by the vampire tribes on the plane, because a wound inflicted on a person by the blade will bleed infinitely, even after death. It doesn't actually kill the person, it just seems to make their body produce an infinite amount of blood on a wound that will never heal. On vampires, it seems to cause an inverted effect whereupon the cut vampire will be drained of all their blood and wither into an empty bag of dried skin.
• Vampire: The Masquerade has an odd reversal of this: stronger vampires could drink multiple times the amount of blood their body could possibly contain.
  • In the supplement Time of Thin Blood, a vampire scientist explains that vampires contain the same amount of blood regardless of power, that stronger vampires "burn" less blood than weaker vampires when using the same supernatural powers. That still doesn't explain how they can consume so much blood in the first place.
  • According to the healing rules, humans could survive losing three quarters a gallon of blood on a pretty much weekly basis indefinitely, but the rules aren't meant to simulate reality anyway. Vampire still follows reality in one aspect, in that a human can only lose three blood points (about half a gallon) with no mechanical ill effects; any more, and medical attention is required to survive. The video game, on the other hand, does away with this, and humans will survive without issue as long as they aren't drained completely.

Video Games

• Subject 16/Clay Kaczmarek of the Assassin's Creed series managed to cover an entire room with paintings using his own blood as a medium. While the human body does have enough blood to make that kind of a mess, it's a bit of a stretch to believe that he managed to finish without passing out. And even if there was some time where he took breaks you have to wonder how Abstergo missed what was going on.
• Bloodborne: Blood plays a very crucial role in the story (as the name suggests), as it is supernatural (getting hurt causes your blood to heal your body at the cost of draining out, your health bar determines how much blood you can still lose before you die from blood loss), therefore most enemies will bleed and bleed and bleed with every strike. Eventually, The Hunter themselves can become absolutely COVERED in the blood of their foes!
  • The story also takes place in a city that is being haunted by eldritch cosmic entities, who also bleed profusely when attacked.
  • The DLC expansion, The Old Hunters, also introduces the boss Lady Maria of the Astral Clocktower. As a distant relative of the Cainhurst nobility, she could use their Blood Magic, but absolutely hated to do so, and instead used the Difficult, but Awesome trick weapon Rakuyo. When you fight her, she'll start out just using her weapon but at the beginning of the second phase, she'll stab herself to use said blood magic out of sheer desperation. She'll then toss Sword Beams made of her own blood around quite liberally (and in the third phase, the blood trails left behind start to catch fire). None of this actually hurts her, and by the end of the fight, she will probably have coated her boss arena in more blood than even someone as tall as Maria could possibly possess. This is heavily implied to be because Maria is actually dead in the real world (probably via suicide), and you're fighting a shadow of her in the Hunter's Nightmare.
• Borderlands: One of the optional bosses in the game is a Scithid (basically a giant flying slug) called Bleeder. As the name implies, Bleeder is constantly bleeding huge quantities of blood. All the time. It bleeds about its entire body's worth of blood in about five seconds, and no matter how long it takes you to kill it, it will always have a seemingly infinite supply of the stuff.
• In Dead Space 2, Isaac Clarke, the player-controlled character, gets slashed or grappled regularly (depending on your skill), losing gallons of blood each time.
• Deus Ex: After taking so much damage, your character will start bleeding, and will leave a trail on the floor. Yet as long as you have some health left, you can bleed all you want with no ill effects.
• Diablo II: When hit with a weapon causing the "open wounds" status effect, the target bleeds uncontrollably, leaving quite a large trail wherever they go. Of course, nothing actually affects their ability to fight until the Critical Existence Failure happens.
  • There's also the Paladin skill "Sacrifice", which gives a noticeable increase of damage and attack rating (i.e. how likely you are to hit) at the cost of some of your health, which is represented in-game by the character bleeding about a gallon of blood. Of course, with a decent set-up, one can keep using this skill indefinitely and clear out entire areas full of monsters with no ill effect.
  • Enemy corpses explode if they either spawn with the Fire Enchanted modifier or are subjected to one of several skills after their death (the most famous being Corpse Explosion. Since there is only one animation for it, smaller enemies look like they have more blood than their bodies could physically contain, even if they'd been hollowed out and filled with nothing but blood and Ludicrous Gibs.
• Doom, played with source ports with decals enabled^listZ Doom and its derivatives (Skulltag, GZ Doom, LZ Doom and Zandronum) and the Eternity Engine, has every hit on an enemy near a wall will leave a blood splat on it. The shotgun is essentially several hits with one blast. Since some monsters have incredibly high Hit Points, you can basically paint the map red when fighting one with the shotgun. Certain gore mods supported by these source ports^listKetchup, Bolognese, Nash's Gore, Droplets, etc. can take the bleeding even further with splatters on flats (floors and ceilings), pools under corpses, and even footprints a la Duke Nukem 3D.
• Bad guys in the Dragon Age series seem to have far, far more blood than they really should, and delight in taking every opportunity to leave the scenery (and the player) drenched in it. The blood that gets on you tends to stick around for a while, but nobody ever seems to particularly care. This is especially odd when you consider that Dark Spawn blood is supposed to be poisonous.
  • The amount of blood is lampshaded at one point in the city elf origin. You're said to have enough blood on you to "fill a tub". During Zevran's cameo in II, you can point out that you're still covered in assassin blood while he and Isabela are flirting. "Invigorating, isn't it?"
  • And then there are Blood Mages, who regularly cut themselves and gush out at least a half-gallon of blood every time they cast their spells. At least there you can say A Wizard Did It. It also tends to float and swirl around, so it could be less blood than it appears to be if it's coating a magical effect (which is to say, it could be like oddly shaped bubbles of blood - like an inflated balloon which is more air than plastic).
• Although bleeding your enemies out is one of the ways you can kill an enemy if Dwarf Fortress (the others being bisection, decapitation, and suffocation), the amount of blood a creature loses before finally dying can be surprisingly large. Especially with the glitch that causes infinite blood tracking; the blood of a single groundhog can theoretically be used to paint the floors of an entire fortress blood-red by getting stuck on a dwarf's boots and spread around without actually decreasing.
• Though quite gleeful in its use of Bloody Hilarious Ludicrous Gibs, Fallout is usually pretty good about the volume of blood in a human being or random wasteland critter; occasional glitches in the game show that even a completely gibbed individual still has roughly the same volume of component parts flying everywhere, with one odd exception: the ravens of Fallout: New Vegas. They are completely ordinary birds and die in one hit from anything. When they die, however, the resultant death animation has them disintegrating into several bloody chunks that go flying while a five-second-long blood-spraying animation plays, continuing long after the raven has ceased to exist. There is no way that a two-pound bird can contain that much blood.
• FEAR, in the first game there are several locations (including a large multi-level elevator lobby) that are literally drenched in blood, far more than could be explained by the admittedly large number of corpses lying around. Then again, all that is left of some of the people are skeletons. So it's more like their entire bodies were liquefied and then sprayed out all over the place. It also isn't clear how much of the blood is a hallucination (Alma's psychic visions tend to include lots of blood).
• Here's a fun activity: Log on to Final Fantasy XI with a high-level character. Pick a fight with a lower-level Notorious Monster of the Monk job. Now watch it use Hundred Fists and hit you countless times for minimal to no damage while each hit causes you to bleed like a geyser. You could lose under a hundred HP, yet appear to have lost bathtubs full of blood.
• Galerians deals mainly in blunt-force trauma and is pretty staid about blood 'n guts overall...until the player triggers the Limit Break head exploding mode lifted straight out of Scanners. Any opponent with a vascular system will turn out its contents into an impressive fountain the moment the protagonist draws near.
• There's a certain add-on in Garry's Mod that combines this with Ludicrous Gibs. There's even so much blood that the Source engine is reaching the decal limit, thus overwriting previous blood splatters from, ahem, earlier blood debts.
• The God of War series has the typical "enemies bleed a set amount from weak attacks, and you can often hit them over and over without killing them" variety. This can get a bit absurd when you're making rotting zombies bleed twice their weight from Cherry Tapping.
• In Half-Life 2, there are points where you might get pinned against a wall (or any static/physics object, for that matter) and get repeatedly shot by opponents. Turn around after you have finished them off, and you can find a magnificent smear of blood coating the wall behind you.
• In Halo: Combat Evolved, on the first level, if you kill Captain Keyes or any of the people operating on the bridge just for the hell of it, Cortana will seal the bridge and call in invincible marines to kill you. The marines are invincible but still bleed when shot or pistol-whipped. This can lead to situations where there's buckets of blood on the ground from one guy, and if you let up on your attacks for a second, he'll be shooting and cussing like you didn't do anything. Hell, this goes for anyone in the game; shoot up any dead body, and blood will squirt out, but you can make a lake of blood and still have plenty left.
• In Hitman: Blood Money, a puddle of blood slowly forms under dead NPCs. However, there are also a few animals in the game you can kill, and these get exactly the same size blood puddle. Since these animals include a tiny dog and rats, these get a hilariously huge puddle of blood.
• Jagged Alliance avoids this in every possibility, by decreasing the performance of wounded mercenaries/soldiers and causing them to slowly bleed away their hit points unless the wound is properly treated. A gravely wounded soldier/mercenary will bleed to death within less than two minutes, and such wounds can only be treated by a medical expert. In Jagged Alliance 2, Enemy soldiers groan as they suffer from blood loss, giving away their positions, and every mercenary in the game has responses when they are moderately bleeding, and when they are about to die from exsanguination, complete with full voice recording. One custom player mercenary even lampshades this trope; "I have a rare blood type." Dead soldiers/mercenaries do die in a pool of blood, but the amount of blood coming out is quite reasonable◊.
• In Legend of Mana, there is a scene before a boss fight with a vampire where the protagonist is talking to an NPC with a bat on the ceiling above. About halfway through the conversation, the NPC will mention the bat, who begins to drain blood from the protagonist. So long as you don't proceed with the conversation, the bat will never stop draining the protagonist's blood. Also, several techniques will cause those hit by them to spatter what looks to be gallons of blood with no effects other than the damage the skill causes.
• Let It Die: Killing human enemies (unless you used heat-based executions) tends to cause an excess of blood to spontaneously eject from their pores. Crush their skulls with a hammer? Blood explosion. Shoot them with a nail gun? Blood explosion. Poison them and watch them die? Blood explosion. Stomp their heads in? Struggles, followed by blood explosion. Chop their hands off? Blood splatters out of their arms, followed by yet another blood explosion.
• In the DOS game Liero, your worms will begin bleeding at low health. If you manage to survive for a long time, you would eventually produce far more red pixels of "blood" than could possibly fit in the worm.
• When Meat Boy walks, jumps, and runs, blood splatters around him, leaving bloodstains everywhere.
• Mortal Kombat, from the very beginning, was known for the sheer volume of blood that would splatter during a match even without Fatalities.
  • In MK: Deadly Alliance, there are certain "missions" in which you have to make your enemy bleed a certain number of pints of blood within a certain time limit. The number was generally somewhere between 40 and 80. And they were still alive and well at the end of it.
  • And some gamers actually claimed the violence made the game more realistic.
  • Forget the blood, how about when the Fatalities cause the characters to explode with multiple rib cages and skulls and about 20 arms and legs flying out from one single mutilated body? (For example, Sub-Zero's freeze-and-shatter fatality in the arcade version of MK2.) More like Overdrawn At the Skeleton Bank.
• The amount of blood lost to any attack in Neverwinter Nights seems to be constant, so it adds up to this over time on "Normal" violence level. On "Special," it's this within seconds (and Ludicrous Gibs when you land a finishing blow.)
• The "Maelstrom-engine version" of New Horizons, includes quite big bloodsplatters with every hit, regardless if it inflicted damage or not: dueling a captain and keeping blocking very will soon paint the entire cabin with blood.
• Shades in Nier gush out awe-inspiring fountains of blood, and the bigger the Shade, the more blood there is to gush. It has a certain internal logic —Grimoire Weiss uses Blood Magic, and thus absorbs the blood of any Shade slain by the main character (though not those slain by his companions) in order to create his magical constructs.
• No More Heroes. In the North American version (the only version of the game to be uncensored), every Mook practically explodes with blood to the point where it loses all seriousness and can even be viewed as a form of Black Comedy. Bosses also do the same, except in more...creative ways.
• The support character from No Time to Explain spends a lot of time in the gullet of some monster or other, constantly spraying blood in all directions. One of his randomized lines when a new screen starts is "WHY DO I HAVE SO MUCH BLOOD?!"
• Outlast has a lot of bloodshed throughout the game. There was a scene that was filled with blood.
• In Portal, Chell can take tons of turret shots, and leaves large blood smears on walls when hit. 5 seconds, and you're okay again, ready to lose another three pints. Valve eventually revealed (when people wondered why the blood was gone in Portal 2) that this had been a mistake; they'd forgotten to turn off the blood decal effects that were built into the engine for Half-Life 2, which didn't feature regenerating health.^*For those wondering why Chell wasn't supposed to bleed at all: the turrets "fire the whole bullet" with a spring-loaded mechanism rather than actually using gunpowder.
• The Splatterhouse series, but its reboot/remake takes the proverbial cake. If the name alone wasn't hint enough, you'll know what you're in for when just punching a single enemy spews enough blood to make even Mortal Kombat seem tame.
• Team Fortress 2 has standard First-Person-Shooter blood 'decals', that appear every so often. When combined with the recuperative effects of a friendly Medic though, you can lose a lot of blood without ill effect.
  • Additionally, a few of the weapons added post-release cause a "bleeding" effect that lasts for eight seconds or until the player has been healed and, unusually for such a cartoony game, does cause their health meter to tick down constantly. It's basically just a cosmetic reskin of the "being on fire" status effect.
  • The Medic's Crusader's Crossbow allows you to shoot several arrows into your teammates to heal them causing bleeding wound decals and visible arrows to be left behind. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In the promotional video Meet the Sandvich, the Heavy beats up an enemy Scout, who cries out "My blood! He punched out all of my blood!" Despite having all of his blood punched out, he still manages to scream shortly afterwards.
• They Bleed Pixels measures the player's score in "pints". Just smacking around one shambler without any combos will give you nine pints, which is a fair value given their body size, but some of the combos can cause ludicrous blood spray, both score-wise and graphics-wise.
• The Blood Pack DLC for Total War: Shogun 2, which changes the game's previously Bloodless Carnage into "oh goodness that is a lot of blood spilling on everything and oh you've gotten it on the camera too."
• Rimworld has a blood-loss mechanic, but the amount of blood that can get splattered over the surroundings even before the blood loss mechanic kicks in is impressive. Seriously wounded characters can leave a trail of large blood splatters across the map as they stagger or are carried around.

Web Animation

• Happy Tree Friends: In Giggles's Valentine's Smoochie, Giggles slices her tongue off when trying to lick an envelope. She bleeds out and dies in an ankle-deep pool of her own blood.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater combines this with High-Pressure Blood to make some truly epic gorefests, although in fairness, most of the cases of people spurting that much blood are actually fatal, even if it's far more than could possibly be in their bodies.
• Air Ride Adventures has Orange Kirby with his infinite blood supply, making him immortal if you think you can kill him slowly with wounds on him.
• Bob and George provides the page image, where an unfeasibly large amount of blood fountains up from the Helmeted Author's chest wound. This example crosses over with Bloody Hilarious.
• Cherrys Cure: The main character Cherry draws enough blood to keep a hungry vampire fed on a consistent basis.
• In Homestuck, Vriska shows this after being curb-stomped by Aradia. She manages to bleed out like, ten gallons of blood before she dies. Andrew Hussie being, well, himself, it gets a Lampshade Hanging.
• Paradigm Shift has the heroine, Kate, get shot and bleed out far too much to have walked it off like she did. However, this is intentionally done to highlight her Healing Factor and the eventual reveal that she's a werewolf.
• White Rooms: When Andre removes his necklace, he suddenly begins forcefully spewing gallons of High-Pressure Blood from his mouth, only able to stop when Ed puts the collar back on him.

Web Original

• The DAY OF ALL THE BLOOD (joke) creepypasta. "THERE WAS SO MUCH BLOOD THAT IT FILLED UP AN ELEVATOR."
• The Onion presents "Blood...Blood Everywhere." In this case, the large amounts of blood are treated as something unnatural and of unknown origin.
  "Just make it go away, I beg you," said David Mitchell, who added that he and another passersby were amazed by the unusually large amounts of blood.
• The Rules of Anime talk about this, among other reality-defying feats in anime. It's called "The Law of Hemoglobin Capacity," and goes something like this: "The human body contains twelve gallons of blood, sometimes more, under high pressure."

Western Animation

• Combined with Hilarity Ensues and Artistic License – Biology, in an episode of 6teen, Jude Lizowski donated blood 17 times in one day, for the sake of free doughnuts and with the help of a few costume changes and a lame accent or two, but is thankfully medically helped and okay by the end of the episode. In reality, Jude wouldn't be to donate blood 17 times in such a short period of time for a few reasons:
  1. You can only donate blood once every eight weeks — and Jude probably would've died around the fourth or fifth donation.
  2. If he only had three pints, realistically, he wouldn't have been able to actually move.
  3. While it ultimately depends on how big someone is, on average, the human body only has about nine to eleven pints of blood, maybe twelve at the most. In Canada (where the show is set) Canadian Blood Services takes about one pint max, so donating 17 times would involve losing 50 to 70% more blood than would exist in his body!
• Taken to ridiculous extremes in the early Beavis and Butt-Head short "Blood Drive" in which the duo give blood, the nurse never takes out the needles and all of their blood is sucked in the enormously engorged bags and they are skinny shriveled husks.
• Dilbert: One episode had a bizarrely literal example, the company had a blood drive that everyone else but Dilbert was disqualified from for whatever reason, too bad about the quota.
  • Amazingly the only symptoms he suffers afterwards are the same as having one too many.
  • "Driving without blood is surprisingly difficult."
• In Disenchantment, Bean drains the blood from a pig in order to save Elfo from exsanguination. The pig has enough blood to fill the beaker and cover the lab's floor about six inches deep.
• Peggy and Minh of King of the Hill get into a blood-donating spree during one episode, trying to beat the other to a free coffee mug. They both spend the episode anemic and weak from so much donating. Peggy wins, even though she can barely move and has to literally drag herself into the backyard to brag to Minh about her "victory".
• One of the shorts that make up Don Hertzfeldt's Rejected. "For the love of God, my anus is bleeding!" The cloud-thing that says this line then goes on to bleed so much that it fills up the room (or the screen, anyways, given the lack of backgrounds) and the last shot is of the character struggling to stay afloat. There's also the scene where a guy's eye pops and the jet of blood from the socket sprays all over his friend.
• Robot Chicken co-creator Seth Green admitted in one DVD Commentary that they often use too much blood on the show when somebody gets shot or otherwise maimed- right before a scene where Lionel Richie blew his head off and the entire room was covered in blood.
• Robotomy had this on the second episode, "Bling Thing," only instead of "blood," it's "coolant" (since Blastus and Thrasher are robots), and donating too much causes such bizarre side effects as jitters, paranoia, fire blisters, and rectal whistling.

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