His name is "Toothy" after all.
You are looking out through a window at night. Candlelight near you allows you to see your reflection. You watch as your teeth begin to elongate: slowly, rather comfortably, like the growth of a tree-branch in spring.
—"A dream about a window at night" storylet, Fallen London
Teeth are an important part of the human (and animal) body. Their main function is to cut off chunks of food for easy consumption. Losing a tooth or two wouldn't be an issue, but losing most, if not all, teeth is a different story. If humans lose their teeth for various reasons, they will be fitted with dentures. Unless they have dentures or have the ability to swallow their food whole, if animals lose their teeth, they might as well wait for death to take them.
In fiction, when a character loses their teeth, they will regrow their teeth faster than realistically possible. Depending on the writer, teeth will either grow rapidly, or retract/detract their fangs, either in a day or in seconds. Not only that, their tooth enamel might harden in seconds as well.
Sometimes, this trope is used for comedic effects in cartoons or for dramatic effects in comics and manga.
Compare hyperdontia
, a condition that causes a person to have more teeth than normal. In Troperspeak, it's called More Teeth than the Osmond Family.
Examples
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Anime & Manga
- Beastars: Legoshi's removed teeth grow back after he's bitten by a Komodo dragon, the venom supposedly activating his own latent reptile genes.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Diamond is Unbreakable: This happened to Okuyasu after he consumed one of Antonio's dishes. As soon as his cavity-riddled teeth flew out of his mouth, they were quickly replaced with new adult teeth.
- In My Hero Academia, a villain called Moonfish has a quirk that gives him the ability to enlarge, extend, and change his teeth into blades.
- In One Piece, shark fishmen like Arlong and Hordy Jones can grow new teeth at a rapid rate.
Comic Books
- Wolverine: One story that dealt with the childhood and early life of the mutant assassin/raging psychopath Sabretooth showed how during his childhood, his parents kept him chained up in the basement due to his violent ferocity. His father mentioned that he used pliers to pull Sabretooth’s fangs out, but they kept growing back.
Film — Animated
- In the climax of Hotel Transylvania 2, the first sign of Dennis' vampire powers finally emerging is his fangs popping out.
- How to Train Your Dragon: Toothless was named after his retractable teeth.
Literature
- In The Algebraist, by Iain Banks, a dictator has a man in his torture chambers whose teeth had been genetically modified as an assassination weapon to get past the dictator's security. The assassination attempt failed and he was taken alive, so For the Evulz the dictator has his gene's tweaked so the teeth keep growing long that they come round in a circle and impale the assassin.
- Harry Potter: Densaugeo is a hex that makes the victim's front teeth grow rapidly. In Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Malfoy uses it when fighting with Harry, but accidentally hits Hermione instead. This actually ends up being beneficial—her front teeth were already slightly overlarge to begin with, so when she has the hex undone, she's able to restore them to a normal length.
- In the short story "One-Shot Toothpaste" by Paul Jennings, Mr. Bin defeats his evil neighbor by brushing the neighbor's one tooth with a supernatural type of toothpaste that causes him to shrink and his tooth to grow, until there's nothing left of him but a giant tooth.
Live-Action TV
- In one episode of Mutant X, there is a mutant whose power is stated to be invulnerability. However, Adam knocks out one of his teeth and sees another one grow out in seconds, making him realize there was a Power Misidentification; he actually has a very rapid Healing Factor, which provides a solution to the problem faced in this episode.
- What We Do in the Shadows (2019): Vampires' fangs regrow within a day if they ever lose them. In the season 3 episode "The Wellness Center", Nandor joins a group of vampires who try to regain their humanity, and have their fangs pulled for this purpose, but they have to pull them every night as they just grow back.
Mythology
- In one African myth, a man obtained a mystical powder that he rubbed over his wife's teeth, which made them grow into massive tusks, after which he pulled them out and sold them for money. Eventually, one day, the wife finally had enough of her husband's abusiveness, and once her teeth grew, she refused to let him pull them out, and ran off into the forest, where she became the first elephant.
Tabletop Games
- Warhammer 40,000: The Orks have teeth that fall out and regrow rapidly. This, of all things, forms the basis of their economic system; they use their "teef" as currencynote , so the only way to have more cash (and thus bigger SHOOTAS and MORE DAKKA) in Ork society is to claim them from other Orks, usually by bashing them in the face.
Web Animation
- Happy Tree Friends: In "An Inconvenient Tooth", Toothy accidentally drinks plant fertilizer, and it makes his front teeth grow at a very rapid rate, so he spends the rest of the short trying to get them back to their normal length in very painful ways.
Webcomics
- Unsounded: Sette's sharp teeth came in by abruptly pushing out her normal human teeth in a bloody mess, and then she took a long time to adapt and not cut her tongue on her teeth constantly.
Web Original
- SCP Foundation: SCP-4910 is a cognitohazardous quadruped that causes very rapid and painful dental growth in humans that see it. It is also capable of spreading its cognitohazardous properties to humans, and these infected humans can cause an even more severe tooth-growing effect on observers.
Western Animation
- In the Angry Beavers episode "Long in the Teeth", Daggett reminds Norbert that beavers have to chew to whittle down their long incisors, or it could lead to some dire consequences. But, due to being jealous of his brother's popularity, Daggett decides to grow out his teeth too. Eventually, the brothers' teeth grow to the point they wrap around their bodies.
- The Simpsons: In "Last Exit to Springfield", Lisa's dentist shows a prediction of what will happen to Lisa's teeth if she doesn't get braces. A series of pictures shows her lower incisor growing larger and larger, until eventually piercing through her cheek and skull by age 18. Bart, of course, advocates for letting nature take its course, because then Lisa would be a freak who could make money on the carnival circuit.
- Wild Kratts: In "Build it Beaver", when Martin explains to Alveda that beaver teeth can grow long, she imagines Martin's two front teeth looking like a beaver's and growing very long.
Real Life
- Rabbits and rodents like mice, rats, squirrels, hamsters, guinea pigs, beavers, and capybaras have incisor teeth that constantly grows, due to not having roots. To alleviate this, they have to constantly grind their teeth and chew on any hard surface.
