Basic Trope: A character receives a disfiguring injury, which marks them for death.
- Straight: Alice gets a third-degree burn that covers half her face. Not too long after recovering from the burn with a horrific scar, she is killed in an unrelated incident.
- Exaggerated: As soon as Alice gets a third-degree burn, the ceiling collapses and crushes her to death.
- Downplayed: Alice's physical beauty fades as she gets older, and she eventually dies of old age.
- Justified:
- Alice's injuries were quite serious.
- The disfigurement is part of a serious disease.
- In a World… that equates beauty with goodness, and presents beauty as a woman's "hat" (and thus a measure of her worth), Alice is Driven to Suicide as a result of having to live with that scar and the stigma that goes with it.
- People avoid Alice because of her injury, or some aspect of it, and she ends up living on the fringes of society, unable to get what she needs to survive.
- Inverted:
- Alice has a horrific scar from one of her adventures, but she is the only character who doesn't get killed off by the end of Long Runner.
- Alice dies after receiving a makeover at a department store makeup counter, or a spa treatment, or plastic surgery.
- Subverted: Burn victim Alice almost crashes her car but swerves at the last minute.
- Double Subverted: She is then hit by another car.
- Parodied: Alice wakes up one day with a big zit on her forehead, and immediately dies of a Hollywood Heart Attack when she sees it in the mirror.
- Zig Zagged: Alice survives the car crash only to die of complications.
- Averted:
- Beauty Is Never Tarnished
- Alice doesn't die
- Enforced:
- Women Are Delicate, Rule of Drama
- Having to replicate the burn scars in each episode would be too difficult and expensive, so Alice is killed off to spare the make-up budget.
- Lampshaded: ???
- Invoked: ???
- Exploited: Bob, who is angry with Alice for turning him down, throws concentrated sulfuric acid on her face, hoping to make her suffer or drive her to suicide, or to get others to kill her or ostracize her because they know what she did.
- Defied: ???
- Discussed: ???
- Conversed: ???
- Implied: Alice suffers disfiguring injuries and is never seen again, although it is left ambiguous if she is alive or dead.
Back to Death by Disfigurement
