And I Must Scream / Anime & Manga

And I Must Scream in Anime and Manga.

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• In Ajin, the treatment of the Ajin at the hands of human "researchers" is this with a heavy dose of Nightmare Fuel. Blindfolded, vocal cords removed and strapped down on a table while various experiments are performed but all the experiments end in death. A fair amount of the experiments are simply done to see how much pain the Ajin can take. Once the Ajin die they wake up back on the experiment table whole and ready to start the whole process over. The Ajin are immortal and near as anyone can find they cannot die.
• Angel Sanctuary has a doubly terrifying version revealed towards the end. The most powerful angel, Adam Kadamon, said to be mother/father of all angels, was imprisoned for probably thousands of years by God because he was afraid of its power and was slowly taken apart to be fed to its children the angels. Yes, you got it right, the cute little angels are fed their mom/dad; no wonder most of them are not so pure. By the events of the books only a deformed head is left which is still conscious and able to talk, but gets finally released by the good guys.
• In Attack on Titan, the true nature of the Titans is revealed to be this. They were all once humans who were somehow transformed into Titans a century earlier. Unable to control their new forms, they're only driven by their basic instincts to feed. With at least some form of awareness left. Many of the characters are understandably horrified by of the implications of this discovery. What's worse is that this can happen to any of the people known as the Subjects of Ymir. All they need is a tiny sample of titan spinal fluid to enter their bodies and they'll transform into mindless monsters. The only way back is to consume the spinal fluid of a Titan Shifter, which will turn you back and give you their powers, but you're now guaranteed to die within thirteen years. Talk about a living hell.
• Ayashimon are unable to die in the natural sense. Their bodies can be destroyed, but their spirits will manifest another one years in 99 years. As such, Chairman Doppo punishes his enemies having them dismembered and turned into living art for his collection.
• Baccano! has a lot of immortal characters, and a couple of them end up like this. Perhaps the most clear-cut case is Dallas Genoard, who really annoyed the Gandor mafia family, overconfidently assuming that since he could regenerate from any wound, they couldn't hurt him. So they did what the mafia does best and gave him Cement Shoes, leaving him to eternally drown at the bottom of the Hudson River until he either got dredged up or died of old age^note Most immortals in the series had Complete Immortality, but he only had From a Single Cell regeneration so he still aged and would die from it.
• Bakugan:
  • This was intended to be the fate of Emperor Barodius by Code Eve, the god of the Bakugan, as punishment for attempting to destroy a peaceful planet in pursuit of power. And she was quite thorough about it. She imprisoned him in armor crafted from his own evil, sealed him in another universe, and left him tied to his throne for all eternity with only his own madness and his equally insane guardian Bakugan to keep him company. By the time we actually see him again, he's gone completely insane, declared his old self dead, and invented a new persona for himself called Mag Mel. Unfortunately, he had a Psychic Link to Dan that let him absorb Chaos Energy to escape, but if it weren't for that, it'd be a rather karmic end.
  • Bakugan sent to the Doom Dimension suffer from this. The place is so inhospitable that they are forced into a dormant state where all they can do is think about how much they hate their situation, except for Reaper who stays conscious, but gets hideously wounded, and all the while, Hydranoid is draining their life force to fuel his evolutions.
• Berserk: Griffith suffers a non-supernatural, realistic version of this: after sleeping with Princess Charlotte out of grief, he is imprisoned by the Midland King and tortured for a year. By the time Guts, Casca and the other come to rescue him, he's horribly emaciated; his tendons have been severed, preventing him from holding a sword or even standing up right; and his tongue has been cut out. All the while he was conscious of it, and speculates whether or not he's still sane... all of this pushes him to both the Despair and Moral Event Horizons to escape from it.
• Bleach:
  • The end of the fight between Mayuri Kurotsuchi and the Espada Szayelaporro Granz. Due to implanting an egg of himself into Nemu to resurrect himself, Szayelaporro ingests a massive dose of a drug that grants superhuman senses, speeding up his perception of time. With seconds seemingly taking centuries for him, and his body unable to keep up, he is utterly incapacitated. Kurotsuchi then stabs him through the hand and chest, not quite piercing his heart. While in real time he died only a couple seconds after the drug took effect, to him it felt like being stuck in place for several hundred years. And by the end of it, he is begging to hurry up and die.
  • The comic in UNMASKED reveals that Ulquiorra was unable to hear, speak, smell, feel, eat, or sleep due to his mask covering everything but his eyes. He was able to move, but since he lived in Hueco Mundo, it didn't matter where he went; each pile of sand was exactly like the one before it.
  • The Vandenreich Emperor Yhwach was born blind, deaf, mute, and paralyzed. However, by transplanting portions of his soul into others and then absorbing their souls when they die, he was able to cure himself. He must constantly absorb souls or else he will revert to his previous state.
  • The existence of the Soul King is implied to be an example. Held frozen inside a crystal in a state that is heavily implied to be neither dead nor alive in order to act as the unwilling linchpin for the balance of souls.
• Blood Alone has a killer who can jump to other bodies when he dies. Unfortunately, the last people he fights are a vampire and rather savvy human. The vampire turns the human, who then breaks his neck just as he turns into a vampire. The killer is now frozen in the body of a permanently broken-necked vampire, and is locked up in a room in the basement of a hospital.
• Case Closed: One sinner is Bound and Gagged and then placed inside a slowly filling bathtub.
• In the Cowboy Bebop episode "Brain Scratch", the electronic 'uploading' cult SCRATCH turns out to be led by a teenaged hacker with a unique form of surfing-induced brain damage. His mind no longer has any connection over his body, leaving him a vegetable with a functioning mind that can only exist on the internet. In the end Jet pulls his connection to cyberspace and traps his mind in his non-functional body, alive and on life support but unable to interact with the outside world for the rest of the 70+ years he's got left of his life.
• In The Demon Girl Next Door, the Light Clan's seal over Lilith, in human terms, translates to solitary confinement with complete sensory deprivation. And remember, as a demon, Lilith doesn't really have a lifetime.
• Death Note:
  • Light Yagami is implied to have this fate in the film version Visions of a God. He has eternal life as a shinigami with his precious Death Note — everything he wanted. The problem is that a shinigami's life is an endless monotony and meaningless existence. All the excitement for power that Light once had is now gone forever, although it's implied that he travels to the human world for an interesting experience with another human, similar to the one that Ryuk had with him.
  • This was also the punishment that was planned for Light in the original manga, as he was going to be imprisoned in a room without sound or sight for the rest of his life while being aware of his "perfect world" going back to normal. Ryuk didn't feel like waiting that long and just Mercy Kills him.
• Digimon Adventure: Piedmon and his army of Vilemon suffer this fate near the end, when they're thrown into MagnaAngemon's Gate of Destiny, which according to Word of God leads to a pocket dimension from which there's no escape. And since Digimon are functionally immortal, barring being killed by someone else... this was a well-earned Karmic Fate Worse than Death.
• Digimon Fusion: When Digimon are Digi-Fused together, the component Digimon of a fusion are conscious and aware while fused as a new whole. Season 2 explores the implications of that on two occasions:
  • In Vampire Land, NeoMyotismon Force-Fuses countless Lopmon into his body, using their data to grant himself immortality. He even manages to do this to MetalGreymon. All those fused inside NeoMyotismon can only watch helplessly as he uses their power to terrorize others. To make matters worse, they’re slowly being disintegrated inside of his body, slowly becoming part of him forever. It’s as if they were Eaten Alive and then being slowly digested.
  • In Gold Land, Ballistamon is forcibly turned into an evil Digimon named DarkVolumon by Olegmon. When Shoutmon has himself fused with DarkVolumon to try to restore his friend to normal, he finds Ballistamon within the fusion crying, showing that he’s been conscious and aware as Olegmon used him for evil purposes.
• Digimon Ghost Game: Being a Digimon series that focuses a lot on horror, this series has several examples of this trope:
  • Digimon struck by MetalPhantomon’s scythe don’t die, but instead, they get sucked into the scythe itself as living energy, with no means to escape.
  • An evil Digimon named Phelesmon, taking a disguise as a human fortuneteller, lures in unwitting humans before sicking Boogiemon minions on them, terrifying the people to feed on their fear before turning them into statues.
  • A Cherrymon, taking refuge in a forest, captures innocent hitchhikers and workers there, trapping them in trees to slowly assimilate them to create tree rings.
  • A Pixiemon scatters people across different time periods. While a victim is set adrift in time, they encounter a shadowy double of themselves. The double then attacks them, absorbing their features until they resemble the original, while leaving the original as a Living Shadow who cannot speak.
  • A human scientist manages to capture a Morphomon in the internet. The hapless Morphomon, desperate for help, uses a decommissioned satellite to release an SOS signal. However, due to Morphomon’s distress, the SOS emerges in the real world as a virus that turns Digimon feral. The virus infects Angoramon, but unlike its other victims, he remains self-aware as the virus causes him to lose control, begging Ruli to run away from him.
  • A RareRaremon gets trapped beneath garbage, then gets continually crushed by more and more garbage dumped there as they attempt to regenerate. Caught in a Vicious Cycle of breakdown and regeneration, RareRaremon ends up in perpetual agony and goes completely mad. In a vain attempt to soothe their pain, RareRaremon begins turning the bones of dead animals into zombies to capture living creatures it can consume. Realizing that RareRaremon has been broken beyond recovery, the heroes perform a Mercy Kill on them. It’s the first time where the heroes all collectively choose to kill a Digimon.
  • A Piedmon, who made a hobby of turning Digimon into playing cards in the Digital World, does the same to humans on Earth. When Ruli touches one of the cards in Piedmon’s “collection”, she can hear the screams of the girl who was turned into it, meaning all of Piedmon’s victims remain aware while trapped as cards.
• The premise of Dr. STONE involves all of humanity being mysteriously Taken for Granite due to a strange light covering the Earth. They remain conscious for an unspecified amount of time, which can be extended by staying focused on something. The upside to staying conscious is that since thinking consumes energy, it eventually causes a reaction in the stone leading to the possibility of breaking free on your own. Senku, the protagonist, maintains his concentration by counting the seconds: this also allows him to keep track of how long's he's been petrified, and by the time he finally breaks free, it's been over 3,700 years. Taiju also remained conscious the whole time, by thinking about his desire to declare his love to Yuzuriha.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • In Dragon Ball Z: Dead Zone, Garlic Jr. tries to trap Goku in the titular Dead Zone dimension, however, Gohan averts this and pushes Garlic Jr. into his own trap instead. And since he has Complete Immortality, he's going to be trapped there for all eternity.
  • Later in the main series, upon realizing that even after Goten and Trunks have mastered the Fusion Dance that their fused form Gotenks isn't a match for Super Buu, Piccolo decides to invoke this trope by destroying the entrance to the Room of Spirit and Time, where Gotenks and Piccolo were fighting Buu. He even spells it out to Buu in order to get the last laugh. Buu then freaks the hell out at the idea of not being able to eat any more sweets, ever again and his screams of pure rage actually manage to rip open a hole between dimensions which he uses to escape and continue his rampage. The hole closes after Buu gets out, leaving Piccolo and Gotenks trapped inside, unable to save their friends and families from Buu's fury. Fortunately Gotenks has a trick up his sleeve: he manages to turn Super Saiyan 3, and scream loud enough to create another hole between dimensions.
  • As we learn in Resurrection 'F' this is Frieza's fate after he dies. In Hell, he is trapped to a tree for the rest of eternity unable to move while angels and toy-like creatures sing and dance around him. Much harsher than the free roaming Hell from the Z fillers and GT. Later on in Dragon Ball Super: Broly, the possibility of one of these scenarios happening is also what makes him decide not to wish for immortality.
    Frieza: I realized something while I was trapped in Earth's Hell, hanging from a tree unable to move: Not being able to die would likely result in unending misery.
• Dragon Ball GT: In one episode, Pan is transformed into a mute immobile doll and remains fully conscious which is shown when we hear her internal monologues about the situation
• The protagonist of Fire Punch, Agni, can only be described as the shōnen Joshua Graham. He had a powerful Healing Factor that essentially rendered him immortal, only for a man with fire powers to destroy his Doomed Hometown with a flame that persists until the victim is dead. As a result, he spent nearly a decade writhing in agony until he learned to simply live with the pain, developing into an Implacable Man on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• Elfen Lied: In one scene in the manga, there's a diclonius who is not much more than a head and a chest within a completely enclosed metal box. The head is covered by the same helmet and mask as the dicloni in the lab. The diclonius' only purpose is to use its telepathic abilities to sense others of its kind and serves as a biological detector device.
  • Not only that, but a device is connected to the girl's spine to make her experience continuous pain in order to prevent her from lashing out at her tormentors.
  • He also stated that after raping her (before cutting her in half), he cut out her vocal cords. This series doesn't have enough generosity to its characters to do it in a clean way, so you must use your imaginations on how that went.
  • Because that isn't enough, her psychic projection of herself is nothing but a scarred upper-body with a faceless, misshapen head uttering only "It hurts", "Kill me" and "Run" over and over.
• Franken Fran: An old, rich woman is seeking to have her youth restored, and has her servants murder any doctor that can't come up with a permanent answer. She's also had herself mass-cloned, only to murder her clones one by one and drink a solution made from their eggs, one of the partially-successful treatments. She hires Fran, who comes up with a treatment that seems to have results... and then has her men cut Fran's head off afterwards. Unfortunately for the old woman, Fran is an Artificial Human, capable of stitching her own head back into place. She confronts the old woman afterwards, and notes an unusual rash on her arm... Turns out, as aging is caused by programmed cell death, Fran had adjusted the woman's cells to be the one type of cell that is not pre-programmed to die... cancer cells. As she says it, the old woman collapses into a giant pile of cancerous cells. And then Fran tells her that, theoretically, she'll now live forever.
  • This is a case of Truth in Television as there is a line of immortal human cells born from the cancer cells of a human. Granted, the human they were born from died from the cancer.
  • Though cancer cells can go into spontaneous remission and if she doesn't die from that, it's pretty unlikely a pile of cancer cells can just survive out in open air forever like that.
  • A deliberate example in the chapter "Twenty Four": A rich girl named Shion is treated utterly horribly by most of her family, who keep her around solely for her money. Her uncle has his brain placed into her body... only to see first-hand how unbelievably awful her life is. He begs Fran to help her, and she does so by placing his brain, as well as the brains of all of Shion's other relatives, into stuffed animals, linked to Shion's original body (while Shion's brain is placed into a clone). They can only move the body if all of them agree on an action... and Shion's uncle always refuses to comply, meaning they're permanently trapped.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, this happens to any poor soul who's put into a Philosopher's Stone to be used as an alchemy amplifier. The victims can scream, but because there is no one to get them out of there, they are always screaming, with no plausible hope of ever getting out of the stone other than being used to fuel an alchemic transmutation, wherein they effectively die. Winry describes it as being trapped in a vortex of anguish. On the plus side, Van Hohenheim, who in essence is a walking Philosopher's Stone, took the time over the many centuries he was alive to talk to and calm down every single soul inside him...all 536,329 of them.
  • Also, at the very end of the climax, Father is dragged back into the Gate of Truth, screaming in abject horror before it shuts, locking him away in a hell he had desperately tried to evade.
  • Greed found himself in this situation in Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), sealed in a skull stuck in a wall for hundreds of years. He chose death in favor of letting it happen to him again.
• Galaxy Express 999: The monk Gyroz deliberately had his mind put into a robot body that is blind, deaf, and dumb — albeit equipped with telepathy for communication and radar for navigation — in order to escape from worldly distractions. When events lead him to doubt his own enlightenment he has his limbs melted down to make false teeth for the protagonist (It Makes Sense in Context) and his now immobile head and torso bolted to the edge of a cliff. The prospect of spending centuries there pondering his doctrinal errors makes him positively giddy with excitement. Gyroz is notably the only person in the series who doesn't go mad as a result of getting robotified, as the madness comes from trying to satisfy human desires while in robot form, whereas Gyroz became a robot in order to escape from them.
• In Godzilla: The Planet Eater, it's revealed that Yuko Tani is technically still alive but it's only due to the nanometal acting as a life-support system and she's left in a permanent braindead state.
• Gundam uses it on occasions.
  • Zeta Gundam might give the idea of Kamille being thrown into one of those (though probably only lifelong) situation at the end, but he gets better in the sequel, Gundam ZZ. Villains like Katejina from Victory Gundam or Shagia Frost from Gundam X end up at least in one way or the other crippled (Katejina is blinded and amnesiac, Shagia is wheelchair-bound — Gundam's not that far into mysticism, so no punishment beyond life so far). Though, Gundam X has Lucille Lilliant a.k.a. Lorelei (a good minor character) being put in a forced coma and locked in a capsule for 15 years or so, mostly cut off from the real world. She manages to contact her ex-pupil Jamil through the body of a fellow Newtype, Jamil's protegée Tiffa, and is saved.)
  • Anyone who is infected with DG Cells in G Gundam. You either become a zombie used to power the Dark Army, or slowly go insane/rabid.
• Haruhi Suzumiya: In the Endless Eight arc, Yuki is forced to relive the same two weeks over and over again for nearly 600 years. And while she's the only one of the SOS Brigade to remember it all (while the others just get an odd sense of deja vu), she's unable to do anything about it because her orders forbid her from directly interfering.
• In Heaven's Lost Property, Chaos is defeated the first time when Ikaros sends her to the bottom of the ocean. Chaos is immortal, but the water pressure is so great that she's pinned. She eventually escapes.
• Inuyasha:
  • The Shikon no Tama is formed through a miko and a combination of youkai being locked in a battle. The souls of the youkai and Midoriko still battle endlessly inside the jewel, for the 500 years or so of its existence. Near the end of the series, The Shikon no Tama tells Kagome that she was born to keep the battle inside the jewel going on, that she was born to be trapped inside the jewel and battle inside it forever, that there is no right wish to make, and that it can't ever be destroyed. Thank god that's not exactly true.
  • Kagome ends up going through this herself in the first movie. To clarify, she's brainwashed by the Big Bad and forced to attack Inuyasha with the intent to kill. Throughout the entire experience, Kagome is fully conscious of what she's doing and unable to control her own body.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure has multiple examples. Hirohiko Araki has a real thing for this trope.
  • Part 1, Phantom Blood, ends with Dio Brando, an immortal vampire, stuck as a severed head in a casket at the bottom of the sea enduring the painful process of trying to merge his head with Jonathan's body. He stays there for about a hundred years before being unknowingly fished back up by some unwary sailors at the start of Part 3. Unlike most examples being imprisoned has somewhat improved his sanity as he's a lot more self-reflective and philosophical than he used to be.
  • In Part 2, Battle Tendency, the Big Bad Kars becomes the Ultimate Life Form courtesy of the Red Stone of Aja, immortal in every sense of the word and immune to every means of physical harm, including sunlight and Hamon by derivation. In his final battle with The Hero Joseph Joestar, Kars is thrown out of the Earth's atmosphere via a volcanic eruption. As he tries to return to the planet, all attempts fail as Kars freezes up in the cold vacuum of space, causing his body's Adaptive Ability to twist itself into an amalgamation of organic flesh and hard minerals to survive. He's left to drift through space forever, alive and fully conscious but unable to die or escape his fate, and eventually simply stops thinking altogether.
    Kars: NO! AUUUGH! NOOOOO!!! Don't panic! Just find the Earth! (sprouts air jets to try and push himself toward Earth) I'll use air to change my trajectory. Once I'm back on solid ground, I will tear that boy apart! (begins to freeze over) NO! It's not working! I'm freezing! The air is freezing around me! The moment it comes out of the jets, it turns to ice! (attempts to use his wings, which also immediately freeze) I-I can't change my path! I CAN'T MOVE!!! NNNNNNOOOOOOUUUUUUAAAAAAUUUURRRRRGGGGGHHHH!!!!!
    Narrator: So ended Kars, last and greatest of the Pillar Men... His body turned hard as rock and he floated through space for the rest of time, never to return. He wished for death, but there was nothing out there to kill him. The spark of thought within him went dim...and then, silent.
    • Also in Part 2, Santana (Santviento in the dub) gets inflicted with this after Jojo defeats him by tricking him into jumping into a well with the sunlight shining directly into it. The sunlight causes Santviento to revert back to his statue state. After this, the Speedwagon Foundation takes custody of him. He's held in their Washington headquarters, still alive, but immobilized by UV lights.
  • In Part 3 Stardust Crusaders, the sword Stand Anubis gets half of his blade destroyed, and the other half falls into the Nile River. Since it can only possess people that actually touch it, Anubis is trapped at the bottom of the river until it rusts away into nothing, a process that could take decades, if not centuries. The last thing we hear from him is saying that he's lonely.
  • Josuke Higashikata, The Hero of Part 4 Diamond is Unbreakable, loves inflicting this horrific punishment to multiple villains. Refusing to kill his enemies, instead he makes them wish that he had.
    • His first stance is done to the serial killer Angelo, fusing the man's body to a large ornamental rock in the middle of town, and then transfiguring both to simply being a rock with a face (and for kicks, he puts up a sign instructing people to let their dogs poop near the rock, as Angelo loathes dog poop).
    • Another notable instance is against Terunosuke Miyamoto, where Josuke traps him in the book he was using to activate his Stand Enigma, leaving Miyamoto as a living entity of paper and ink but confined to the pages of his book, stored at the local library. It's even made a rule that one can read, but not check out the book, leaving him trapped until the likelihood that the paper eventually decays.
  • Another example from Diamond is Unbreakable, albeit unrelated to Josuke, is Okuyasu's father. Back in the 1980s, DIO implanted him with a flesh bud, turning him into an unwilling servant. Upon DIO's death at Jotaro's hand, the bud mutated him into a squat, frog-like creature with diminished mental capacity, rendering him incapable of normal human speech — and on top of that he has regenerative immortality, unable to die naturally. And just to cap it all off, there doesn't seem to be any way to cure him, since he didn't respond to the healing powers of either Josuke or Tonio's Stands. The Nijimura brothers' plan in creating Stand users in the town was to find someone with the power to put their father out of his apparent misery. Fans believe that person happens to be the Big Bad serial killer Yoshikage Kira, though no chance is ever given to figure that out by the end of the Part.
  • Played with on several different occasions in Part 5 Golden Wind.
    • Diavolo had his mother Buried Alive underneath his house, her mouth stitched shut and trapped in a space barely bigger than her own body. It's not explained how, but she was somehow kept alive during this whole time, which lasted at least several months if not years. By the time she was found, she had lost all sense of time.
    • The Stand Notorious B.I.G. is practically indestructible, as its user's death activates it and makes it impossible to kill. It automatically attacks our heroes on an airplane they stole and goes after whatever is the fastest moving thing in the area. How do they escape? By crashing the plane into the ocean and dropping Notorious B.I.G to the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea where it remains to this day, driven mad by the constant movement of the tides. Unlike the other examples, this does not render it entirely helpless as it can still attack any ships that come too close to it and it becomes a local legend.
    • Giorno Giovanna uses the newly-enhanced powers of his Stand Gold Experience Requiem on The Don Diavolo, which returns anything to a state of zero. In the case of killing his enemy, the ability traps Diavolo in a "Groundhog Day" Loop of his imminent death, resetting every time he would be about to actually die, and forcing him to live through it, again. Each time the cause of death is different but equally as painful and traumatic; fatally stabbed by a drug-addled homeless man, being awake during his own autopsy, tripping into oncoming traffic, and so on, until we last see him cowering in fear of an ostensibly harmless little girl in an open field, screaming in terror out of knowing that somehow he will die, again, in another horrible way.
      Diavolo: How...How many deaths must I die?! What'll happen to me next? How much longer will I have to wait for the end?! (to a little girl) S-Stay back! Leave me be! Don't come closer. STAY AWAY!!! LEAVE ME ALOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNNNNNNNNNE!!!!!!
  • Steel Ball Run:
    • Magent Magent's Stand 20th Century Boy makes him impervious and functionally immortal so long as he crouches down so his hands touch the ground. The heroes wrap him in wires, tie him to a wheel and throw him into the Delaware River, and he can move just enough to activate 20th Century Boy to keep himself from drowning. He waits for his ally Diego Brando to rescue him, but in a Call-Back to the ultimate fate of Kars:
    The water of the Delaware kept up its constant rhythm as it flowed past the river bottom... and as time passed, Magent Magent...
    Stopped waiting...
    And stopped thinking.
    • Anyone who fails to spend everything they gained through Sugar Mountain's Spring's Honest Axe test is absorbed into the tree and turned into a face in the wood. In this state, they're still aware of the passage of time, but completely immobile and unable to die. Thankfully, it's not eternal, but the only way to be freed is for someone else to fail the test and be trapped, which will result in one of the trapped people being freed to act as the tree's guardian (who is immortal, but unable to go too far from the tree), while the current guardian is completely freed. The tree's current guardian has been in this role for 50 years, so being freed will take a very long time. Thankfully, Johnny and Gyro managing to escape this fate is implied to have freed every person, since they proved themselves worthy of the Corpse Parts the tree was guarding, so it no longer has any purpose.
  • In Part 8 JoJolion, as the disfigured Rock Human Dolomite prepares to use his Stand Blue Hawaii to drown our hero Josuke Higashikata, our heroine Yasuho Hirose appears and starts beating him with a metal rod and threatens to push him into a muddier part of the lake he calls home until he frees Josuke of his control. He would have been completely immobilized in the mud and reverted to his stone state, if not dying entirely, if he did not acquiesce and free Josuke and give up his part on the whole scheme over the Locacaca fruit.
• In Jujutsu Kaisen, one of Mahito's — the humanoid curse — powers is killing people by contorting their bodies and keeping their consciousness intact while they act as a personal attack dog for him.
• Kakurenbo:
  • While we cannot be sure how aware they are, the children captured by the demons are used as living batteries, like The Matrix but without the potentially cheerful virtual reality. It gets worse at the very end, as the numbers of child-batteries are revealed, each hooked up with a light above them. And then we see a little boy, whose light flickers, and then goes out.
  • The "winner" of the game is possessed by the demon fox and lures the next group of children. Made worse by the fact that the fox goes from possessing a young girl to taking over the brother who came only to save her.
• Lazy Dungeon Master: At one point, Haku manipulates an evil hero into raiding the Cave of Greed so that Keima and Rokuko can use the opportunity to assassinate him. The problem is this hero has the ability of Super Healing, which lets him regenerate from nearly any wound and even prevents exhaustion and the need to sleep. So, how do you take out someone like that? Keima traps him in a respawned dungeon wall, which is then sealed away where no other adventurers could ever rescue him. He's still alive, as he's so scared of death that he keeps continually using his ability to keep himself alive and healthy despite being literally unable to do anything else, but that just makes him an excellent source of continuous DP collection for the dungeon.
• In Life is Money, the characters play "The Nightmare Game," in which they must roll a die every day to determine which of their senses will be restricted. Depending on their roll, they will either be blindfolded, nose-plugged, forced to wear soundproof headphones, gagged, or paralyzed from the neck down.^note The sixth possible outcome, "Spirit," removes all current afflictions. The rolls are accumulative; a player may have all five restrictions at once. Additionally, a player dies whenever they suffer a Despair Event Horizon, and being alone in one's mind is considered one of the worst ways to reach this.
• What happened to Kate's father in Love Is in the Bag, specifically being stuck as a portrait of himself for fifteen years. And it's implied that it'll happen to Kate as well.
• Made in Abyss:
  • The Hollows — humans afflicted by the curse to the point of losing their humanity. In a human experiment, Nanachi's friend Mitty became a Hollow who was unable to die. Even after the most brutal violence, Mitty's body would regenerate. This is a child who was manipulated into being a test subject in an experiment which mutated her into a deformed lump of flesh unable to communicate, able to feel pain and unable to die. Nanachi watched all of this, knowing that it could have been them if their randomly assigned roles in the experiment were switched. Nanachi became Mitty's caretaker afterwards, seeking a way to kill Mitty and relieve her suffering. Reg's Incinerator was successful.
  • There are also Cartridges, designed as a means of preventing the Curse of the Abyss by Bondrewd. It is revealed that they were Powered by a Forsaken Child subjected to a process in which they were stripped of all "unnecessary" body parts and crammed into boxes the size of lunchboxes, while still alive and subjected to a cocktail of drugs placing them in a constant state of ecstasy and terror in order to ensure the curse is directed away from the user. They then would experience all the effects of the curse in place of whoever carried them (in this case, Bondrewd). Thankfully, according to Nanachi they only survive in this state for a few days.
• In Magical Record Lyrical Nanoha Force, this is the eventual fate of someone who tries to resist the insatiable hunger given by the Eclipse infection. Its Healing Factor will go out of control, and eventually, the infected will be reduced to a lump of flesh similar to those brain-like things in the Abandoned Lab that Lily came from.
• In Mermaid Saga, it's unclear whether Akiko from "Mermaid's Gaze" died or was left petrified and conscious for a hundred years. All that we do know is that her eyes still work. Mana claims that Akiko was dead all along, but it's clear she's just trying to make Yuta feel better.
• Mouryou No Hako has several truly chilling instances, the most awful being the fate of Yuzuki Kanako. She would have been better off had she died the night she was run over by that train. Instead of that happening, however, her mother/sister took her to an experimental 'hospital', where her ex-Unit 731 dad/grandpa proceeded to cut off all four of her shattered limbs and keep her hooked up to a warehouse-sized room full of life support machines. Then she's stuffed into a box by a man who loves her, and dies one hour later. All while being aware and awake.
  • There's also Kubo Shunkou, the disturbed perpetrator of the severed-limb murders. Almost religiously obsessed with boxes and closed spaces since childhood, he ends up offering himself to Kanako's dad/grandpa as another guinea pig. When Mimasaka and Youko decide to escape with him (now nothing more than an upper torso and head) in a box, he somehow escapes from the box and kills Mimasaka by chewing his neck. Kubo seemed happier in the box than outside of it. He was still insane, though.
• Naruto:
  • Hidan's fate. After getting blown to pieces, his severed head is still alive and buried in a hole, slowly rotting away until his immortality curse runs out.
  • Itachi traps Orochimaru into a previously thought to be inescapable genjutsu that was meant to go on for eternity. Takes a few hundred chapters, but Orochimaru eventually gets out. Itachi later traps Nagato in the same genjutsu after both of them are revived by Kabuto.
  • The Third Hokage reveals this to be the punishment inflicted by the Reaper Death Seal; all of the souls consumed by the Reaper end up locked in eternal, tortuous combat against one another. This happened first to the Fourth Hokage (who also sealed the Yin half of the Nine-Tails chakra into himself), then the First and Second Hokages. The Third intended to do this to Orochimaru as well, but Orochimaru weakened him before he could do it, but the Third was able to take his arms before he himself was sealed in the Reaper too. This is undone in Shippuden when Orochimaru undoes the Reaper Death Seal and Reanimates the past Hokage so that Sasuke could speak to them. Later, the Sage of Six Paths then releases the past Hokages’ souls to the afterlife, finally granting them peace.
  • This was revealed to happen to those brought back by Kabuto's Edo Tensei spell who are placed under the direct control of Kabuto.
  • Quite fittingly this is also Kabuto's fate, forced to repeat an endless "Groundhog Day" Loop within Itachi's genjutsu for eternity...or at least until he admits his mistakes and tries to achieve greatness on his own and stop copying other people.
  • This is also the case for every sealed Bijuu (Tailed Beast).
  • During Naruto 5: Blood Prison, Muku (The son of the Big Bad, Mui) was trapped in the Box of Ultimate Bliss for ten years after attempting to open it for his Village. Trapped in the box, he went mad. The fact that the Box was indestructible from the inside didn't help. The first thing he does upon being freed is to stab his dad in the chest before morphing into Satori, going on a destructive rampage. He's eventually freed from this fate for good when he incinerates himself.
  • Might Guy's 8th gate is kept intact by Naruto, keeping Guy from succumbing to its final result. Despite the otherwise instantly fatal damage his body sustained.
  • Over the course of years, humans trapped in the Infinite Tsukuyomi and tethered to the God Tree slowly lose their personalities and defining features before they are transformed into White Zetsu.
  • Kaguya Otsutsuki gets this twice. The second time it happened, it was done in a different dimension that only she could access, with no hope of being unsealed. And since she is immortal, there's no chance of death being an escape for her. Black Zetsu shares this fate with her after Naruto pins him to the moon sealing her up.
• In Negima! Magister Negi Magi, this is the final fate of nearly all of the puppets of the Lifemaker. Being annoyingly hard to keep dead and protected by several layers of barriers, Evangeline devised a spell that completely froze their surroundings instead, keeping them trapped yet conscious for all eternity.
• In Nightmare Inspector, while Hiruko was still Chitose Kurosu, his masters broke all of his limbs. All he could do was scream.
• Ninja Scroll: The immortal, regenerating bad guy gets encased in molten gold, gold which he had schemed and murdered to claim no less, and sinks to the bottom of a lake. It's implied, however, that his regeneration/immortality is a technique of his will and therefore something he can control. More than likely, he can choose to die once he realizes he really can't get out.
• The Noozles: The soul of Sandy's grandfather is doomed to spend the rest of eternity trapped inside a crystalline orb in another dimension.
• One Piece:
  • This is the fate of anyone who loses in the Colosseum of Dressrosa. They are dumped into a pit and turned into toys. While they maintain their memories, are unable to do anything but the bidding of the Donquixote Family and are, for the most part, unable to say anything about it. Also, almost everyone else the toy-people ever met forget the toys ever existed as humans.
  • Jack the Drought seems to be suffering a fate like this. Like any Devil Fruit user, he's utterly paralyzed when entering seawater, unable to even move. Unlike most Devil Fruit users, he can still breathe down there, perhaps due to Fishman heritage. Since the circumstances in which he sunk make a rescue unlikely, he's going to be stuck there at the bottom for the foreseeable future, perfectly alive and aware beneath miles of sea but unable to lift a single finger. Ultimately saved from this fate when his master Kaido has him retrieved from the sea bed.
  • Killer is revealed to have been force-fed a dud SMILE Fruit, which causes him to constantly laugh and express no other expression other than smiling. For Killer, who never laughs due to despising the way he laughs and even wears a mask to hide his face, this is pure torture as he now can't do anything but laugh.
• Overlord (2012) is incredibly fond of this trope in all its iterations. To provide some examples, several characters are given to Neuronist Painkill, the interrogator of the Sorcerer Kingdom. To give an idea of their cruelty, when she gets a captive she tells him she's gonna shove a kidney stone-shaped rod up his urethra and bladder, and then said that was only the beginning as she has much worse in store. As for other examples, a few characters are eaten alive by roaches from the inside out, some are given to be nests for a parasitic being's offspring, many offscreen are made a Sex Slave of a sadistic vampire, one is kept to be personally used as torture practice by Albedo, one has his mind warped non-stop and finally several people are repeatedly skinned alive and used as breeding slaves alongside other terrible experiments done to them by Demiurge. The catch with all these? The servants of the Sorcerer Kingdom are all well-versed in healing and resurrection magics, meaning all these could potentially be extended indefinitely.
• In PandoraHearts, this is the backstory and sin of Oz Vessalius. Oz, originally a Living Toy, was made into a Chain called B-Rabbit and tricked into contracting with an Omnicidal Maniac under the impression that he was simply going to guide the man to visit his lonely friend. He was subsequently stripped of free will and forced to slaughter and destroy the human city he had lived in as a plush rabbit, including people he recognized and loved, while still being mentally himself and all too aware of what was happening around him. Then his owner and Platonic Life Partner, Alice, committed suicide in front of him to stop this. This event was so traumatic that reminders cause him to have incredibly destructive Freak Outs, even while suffering from Trauma-Induced Amnesia and living under the impression that he's a fifteen-year-old human.
• Panorama of Hell features the Narrator's older brother, a "fight freak" gangster who becomes comatose and later becomes a mewling, "moving bag of flesh". The book ends with the Narrator killing his family to save them from hell. They all turn out to be dolls and puppets — except for the brother, who is the corpse of a pig.
• Panzer World Galient: Queen Felia — The Hero's mother — was captured by the Big Bad, frozen alive, framed and set in Marder's private chambers to adorn them like a strange blend of living painting and statue. She is aware, but she can't move, talk or even blink.
• Pokémon: The Series:
  • This was the punishment dealt to Team Rocket in episode 24. They fell into a a pit of cement, became covered in it which turned them into living statues. (although, they were eventually saved, thanks to a between-episodes Reset Button)
  • Sabrina's dolls. While they couldn't move or actually talk, it was pretty clear they were conscious. Good thing Ash found a way to beat her.
  • Hunter J captures Pokémon by turning them into statues.
  • A relatively early episode of Diamond and Pearl featured the cast searching for a Sandshrew that was trapped in its Poké Ball, inside a locker at the bottom of a flooded town. Pokémon are completely aware of the outside world while in their balls.
• Pokémon Adventures:
  • In the manga's FRLG arc, Silver gets turned into stone along with four other Dex Holders and he alone stays conscious throughout the series until he gets unfrozen along with the rest of them.
  • The BW arc ends with Black sealed into the Light Stone, and he stays trapped for an entire two year Time Skip.
• Pretty Cure:
  • Michiru and Kaoru Kiryuu spend nearly half of Futari wa Pretty Cure Splash★Star paralyzed at the bottom of a lake. Fortunately, during the final arc, as the Cures battle Karehan and Dorodoron, the two will themselves back into being able to fight and rejoin the Cures.
  • At the start of Yes! Precure 5, Nuts was trapped inside the then-unopenable Dream Collet. Fortunately, he is freed.
• Puella Magi Madoka Magica: This is the true nature of Witches, magical girls who fell into absolute despair and mutated into insane eldritch abominations trapped in their own Self-Inflicted Hell.
• Rosario + Vampire: The art teacher Hitomi Ishigami enjoys doing this to her students, for the sake of "true art". She picks out girls to be her "models", then Takes Them for Granite and lets them cry as much as they want (their tears stream down their stone faces to get this across).
• Rurouni Kenshin: What happened to Kaoru in an early mini-arc, thanks to Kurogasa. An extremely Ax-Crazy swordsman and hypnotist who wants to fight male lead Kenshin and kidnaps her to force him to, as soon as Kenshin reaches for them Kurogasa hypnotizes the poor girl into complete paralysis. This means, not only she can't move her limbs or talk... but is slowly, painfully and inexorably asphyxiating, since her whole respiratory system is under paralysis too. And she's fully conscious, helplessly watching how Kurogasa and Kenshin fight it out and Kenshin is reverting to his Knight Templar Battousai side only to save her, since the only way to break that "spell" is to kill Kurogasa himself before she kicks it... There's another way, though: to have Kaoru overpowering the hypnosis with a strong will to live. And she does it in the nick of time. Kurogasa still committed suicide in the end.
• Sailor Moon:
  • Queen Beryl doomed Jadeite to "eternal restless sleep" after his repeated failures. Which meant trapping him in a giant crystal and sealing him away somewhere. It's a very popular starting point for Fan Fiction. And lest you think this is an example of Never Say "Die", Beryl had no qualms with outright killing her failed henchman, leaving this punishment as particularly gruesome in retrospect.
  • Later on, another villain, Mimete, is transferred into energy in order to enter a computer where her power is amplified... only for a backstabbing cohort to pull the plug on the computer, leaving her trapped as energy inside the computer, falling into an endless void for all eternity.
• In Saint Seiya, Cancer Deathmask binds the faces and souls of those he kills to the walls, ceiling and floor of his Temple, where they stay as proof of his blood lust. The faces are seen silently screaming, trapped between this world and the next one, always feeling the pain of their sort-of "imprisonment"; Seiya freaks the Hell out when he and Shiryu realize this, and no one can blame them. And once Deathmask is defeated and killed, the Temple's walls/floors/ceiling are completely empty and clean, meaning his victims have been released and can now pass on to the afterlife.
  • Not that this is any better when you know what the Underworld looks like and WHO rules it...
• In Shaman King, Yomi's Hole is a cave where you lose all senses: you can't see or hear anything, and you enter some kind of existential panic; we actually see what it's like when Ryu enters it for just a minute. It has been mentioned that many young shamans wanting to enhance their furyoku lost their sense of direction inside and stayed the rest of their lives in there.
• The Mazoku from Slayers have Raugnut Rushauvna, a very, very nasty curse that makes its victim completely immortal... while also turning their body inside out and causing it to continually devour itself and regenerate, over and over and over again, for all eternity.
• Sword Art Online: In the climax of the Alicization arc, Kirito subjects PoH to this. PoH fully expects Kirito to just kill him in-game, remarking that he'll just keep coming after Kirito and Asuna again and again until he finally kills them in real life. This is the final nail in his coffin; rather than kill him, Kirito declares that PoH will never log out of the Soul Translator, instead trapping him in the form of a tree and leaving him to rot in Underworld forever. It's made even worse by the fact that time in Underworld runs on Year Inside, Hour Outside; years can pass in-game while mere days pass in the real world.
• Texhnolyze started off with this and then it just goes downhill from there... ending in what could be referred to by some as Brain Bleach.
• Tokyo Crazy Paradise has a scene in which exhibits on display in cabinets turn out to be human beings, posed like famous works of art. The cabinets contain machinery that keeps their occupants alive and immobile. They are intended for sale to rich collectors who are perfectly aware that the exhibits are alive and helpless, and quite happy to leave them that way. The heroine Tsukasa attempts to free them, but is caught and ends up frozen in a cabinet herself. Fortunately for all of them, the auction is raided and the exhibits are set free.
• In Tokyo Ghoul, this is what really happened to Rize. While reportedly killed in the accident, she was actually imprisoned in a secret laboratory by Dr. Kanou and used for his experiments. For nearly eight months, Dr. Kanou kept her heavily restrained and harvested her kakuhou 1200 times to use in his experiments, forcing her to endure an endlessly cycle of removal and regrowth. By the time she's rescued by Yomo, the torture and starvation have driven her completely insane. The once-proud Femme Fatale is reduced to a husk of a person, constantly screaming and begging for food and kept in restraints for her own good. Kaneki is speechless in horror when he sees what has become of her.
• Utawarerumono: Near the end, the main characters enter a partially-technological dungeon and find it infested with standard-issue Slimes, which they soon get bogged down fighting — swords and arrows don't seem to do much to impede them, but on the other hand, they don't seem able to do much to harm the heroes, either. In the next episode, however, it turns out that those blobs of reddish goo are actually the previous occupants of that 'dungeon' — actually an underground laboratory from Before the End, and that they were transformed by the titular demon-god as punishment for dissecting his lover in an effort to find a way to strengthen their bodies so that they can return to the by-then poisonous surface. So, in the true spirit of an Utterly Pissed-Off Genie, he decides to fulfill their wish for a 'body that will never die'. And they've been there ever since. For what must be several thousand years by the time the story takes place. They deserved it, but still...
• Vampire Knight:
  • Kaname kills the vampire senate by manipulating them into ripping off their own heads.
  • Aido is unable to resist Rido calling him with mind control with the intent to eat him. Thankfully, Yuuki saves him at the last minute.
  • The pureblood Hanadagi pulls the same on Aido's father, who is then saved by Kaname.
• Vampire Princess Miyu:
  • In "At The Next Station", this is the fate of the women who fall prey to the temptation of the Shinma Rho-Ah and take him up on his offer of enhanced beauty... only to end up frozen in time, like beautiful mannequins dressed in expensive clothes, never to age or decay... at the end, even the one who got decapitated during the battle between Rho-Ah and Miyu is still alive, just like the rest of them — whimpering and sobbing quietly through paralyzed lips.
  • In the second OVA, it's downright stated that Ranka's victims end up in a similar state, transformed into bare and listless mannequins that she keeps into her school's warehouse. She even uses one of them as a shield during her fight with Miyu, and Miyu is horrified when Larva accidentally hits the doll with his Razor Floss and not only it emits a whimper of pain, but it bleeds. This is lampshaded earlier, in this conversation that takes place during Ranka and Miyu's first encounter:
    Ranka: (pets her newest doll, erm, victim): No longer will you age or grow decrepit. You can live forever, looking the way you do now...
    Miyu: (steps in) And thus... will the life energy that you emit become my sustenance...!
• In Yaiba we have Dark the Darkness Demon who can use his Delta Zone and Super Delta Zone attacks to engulf his opponents into a dark pyramid and send them into another dimension forever. The victims include two Mooks, Ryujin the Dragon God and Dark himself.
• Yu-Gi-Oh!:
  • Characters frequently get their souls taken from them and imprisoned in cards or in the Shadow Realm. No idea what they can feel while they're inside either one.
  • According to the Word of God, Yami was aware of time passing when he was sealed in the puzzle for three thousand years. There's a reason he was not entirely sane when he first awakened.
  • Demonstrated quite nicely in Season Zero; he had a tendency of inflicting punishments like this to those who cheated in his...games. And there are very few who didn't cheat.
• Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: The vampire Camula did this to herself voluntarily, sealing herself in her coffin to save herself from being killed in the genocidal war that killed the other vampires. She was found by Kagemaru in the present day, who offered her a choice of staying there forever or working for him. She chose the latter, but her final fate, after falling victim to her own rigged Shadow Duel may have been much worse...
• YuYu Hakusho:
  • Kurama traps Elder Toguro in a plant that drains the energy of its victims until they die, while showing them a hallucination of their worst fear... but since the latter can't die, he's stuck seeing his worst fears for eternity.
  • Mukuro's father met a similar fate thanks to a conjoined effort by Kurama and Hiei, the latter of which donated him to Mukuro as a gift. The parasitic plant binds him completely, but also sustains him so long as his head remains intact. So, all he has to do to get out of it is convince her to break his skull open... good luck with that.
  • During the "Chapter Black" saga, Koenma threatens Shinobu Sensui with this fate using his Mafukan, a special weapon that can generate a force field capable of trapping even the most powerful demons. It doesn't work.
    Koenma: If I engage this Mafuken, it will first seal the precious tunnel that you've poured your life into creating. Then I'll trap you inside the net, and you'll never move again.
• In Zatch Bell! during the previous tournament a demon by the name of Goren had sealed most of his competitors into stone, being completely aware of this. With most of them being children going as young as six, mind you. They are only freed a thousand years later by Zofis, who uses them as minions, controlling them by threatening to turn them back into stone, though it turns out he actually doesn't have the ability to do this as the cure for the stone curse not reversible, he only made them think he could turn them back into stone with his mind control abilities.

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