A cage of bark, a prison of wood. A thing of rage where nature stood.
A character is condemned to a Fate Worse than Death of the highest order. Suicide is not an option; either they're prevented from dying, or not even death itself can free them from this torment. They are immobilized or otherwise contained, unable to communicate with anyone, and unlikely to be removed from this situation — not even by death — anytime in the foreseeable future.
This is often a variation of Taken for Granite in which the victim remains conscious, and the worst-case scenario for tropes such as Sealed Room in the Middle of Nowhere, Forced Transformation, Phantom-Zone Picture, and Who Wants to Live Forever?.
Usually, when this arises, it is eternal unless they're freed by outside forces, but a "mere" years-long or centuries-long fate is possible. For instance, a robot with a 100-year battery life getting buried underground. In fact, this is a very common sci-fi trope involving artificial intelligences who are potentially immortal due to being made of software. Unfortunately, if a victim is rescued, they may well have been driven insane from the experience. (Some of the listed examples show exactly that.)
It's also very common for the afterlife to involve this trope. Hell is often represented as a place where those who were evil in life, or who followed the wrong religion, suffer for eternity with no hope of ever getting out. In other cases, often involving The Nothing After Death, everyone is doomed to this fate when they die.
Sometimes appears as a Backstory, if a Sealed Person in a Can was aware while sealed away. Can overlap with Go Mad from the Isolation if the character's separated from other people rather than among them but unable to interact. Also a handy way to punish the villain with a horrible fate, while still leaving a door open for them to return someday.
Being unable to scream is completely optional.
Not to be confused with Eye Scream, though this may be caused by permanent blindness, permanent eye damage, or permanent lack of eyes.
Examples subpages:
- Anime & Manga
- Comic Books
- Fan Works
- Films — Animation
- Films — Live-Action
- Literature
- Live-Action TV
- Tabletop Games
- Video Games
- Webcomics
- Web Original
- Western Animation
Other examples:
- Big Finish Doctor Who:
- The final regeneration of The Eleven is treated this way. As they lay writhing in pain with Artron energy, scrambling to find the MacGuffin of the story which would preserve them as they are, they end up regenerating regardless forcing the Eleven to be a voice in the head of the next regeneration the Twelve, doomed to be stuck with the voices he's been stuck with their entire lives. They break down upon realising this.
- The Doctor Who Unbound story "He Jests at Scars..." features an alternate version of "The Trial of a Time Lord", where the Valeyard triumphs over the Sixth Doctor and gains the Doctor's remaining regenerations and his TARDIS. He goes on to create havoc across the universe, with massive consequences, even accidentally killing the First and Fourth Doctors and severely damaging the web of time. In the end, the damage is so severe that the Valeyard considers himself so dangerous to everything, that any action he takes would cause more harm. Since he is symbiotically linked the TARDIS, it responds by sitting in the middle of the time vortex with the Valeyard and Mel trapped onboard in an illusionary world. However, the power runs out and the illusion fades to reveal the two trapped in the console room by forcefields, unable to move, and soon, according to the Valeyard, unable to talk. However, since the Valeyard and the TARDIS are symbiotically linked, neither can die until the other dies, and both are keeping the other alive, and by extension Mel alive, for all eternity.
- Torchwood (Big Finish): Before the events of The Story Continues, Gwen was possessed by Ng. It is soon made very clear that Gwen remains conscious, her calls for someone to notice what has happened going ignored, and she is forced to watch as Ng uses Gwen's body to shoot her mother and have sex with Jack. This goes on for what is implied to be for months, and it is therefore understandable that when Gwen is finally freed, one of the first things she does is to finally cut ties with Torchwood.
- Yandere no Onna no Ko: In Drama CD 3, this is the Protagonist's fate: Yandere Robot Girl Yumia decapitates him and grafts his severed head onto her body to keep him alive indefinitely.
- Gypsy Tales: Near the end of "The Gypsy Woman and the Devil", Vunida is transformed into a fully conscious, immobile tree. When her children pass by her in tree form, all she can do is to silently cry.
- "Pompeii" by Bastille imagines a hypothetical conversation between two Roman citizens who were essentially fossilized by the volcano, waiting for centuries as statues. Obviously they are unable to move, unable to see, unable to speak, only able to think.
"Many days fell away with nothing to show...In your pose as the dust settles around us...How am I gonna be an optimist about this?"
- The song "Iron Man" by Black Sabbath is about a man from a post-apocalyptic world where everything was devastated by a man made of metal. He travels back in time to warn the people of the past, but something goes wrong during the time travel process and "he was turned to steel." He is aware of his surroundings, but unable to move or speak, and he is completely ignored by everyone who sees him. He is driven insane and when he finally regains mobility, he goes on a rampage and devastates everything.
- The second-to-last verse of Current 93's epic I Have A Special Plan For This World:
There are some who have no voices
Or none that will ever speak
Because of the things they know about this world
And the things they feel about this world
Because the thoughts that fill a brain
That is a damaged brain
Because the pain that fills a body
That is a damaged body
Exists in other worlds
Countless other worlds
Each of which stands alone in an infinite empty blackness
For which no words are being conceived
And where no voices are able to speak
When a brain is filled only with damaged thoughts
When a damaged body is filled only with pain
And stands alone in a world surrounded by infinite empty blackness
And exists in a world for which there is no special plan. - This seems to be the fate of Gloryhammer's immortal Big Bad Zargothrax when he's trapped in liquid ice (?) at the end of the first album. In the fourth album, he's released by his clone in an alternative timeline and describes his imprisonment as "decades of torment". In the original timeline, he was frozen for a thousand years before being released by the Chaos Wizards in the second album. It probably doesn't have much of an effect on his psychology — aside from a brief comical glimpse of his origins in "Keeper of the Celestial Flame of Abernethy", he's always shown as a Card-Carrying Villain of pure megalomaniac evil.
- The song "Alien Breed", from Death Metal band Internal Bleeding, has this line:
I am unable to speak
I am unable to scream
I watch in horror
As the experiment goes on before me - Iron Savior's song "Watcher in the Sky"
is from the point of view of the living brain of Iron Savior as the spaceship travels endlessly, out of his control and increasingly unresponsive.
- "Entombment of a Machine" by Job for a Cowboy is about a patient in a persistent vegetative state that is kept alive by an intensive care unit, and is begging to die as a result of their agonizing confinement.
- "Brain Dead" by Judas Priest is about a man suffering from locked-in syndrome who desperately wants to die.
- The Mechanisms
- "Lost In The Cosmos" tells the story of Drumbot Brian, or at least the part he remembers- the part where he dies, wherein he is strapped to a rocket and shot into space, until Dr Carmilla finds him and rebuilds every part of his body but his still-beating heart.
Sinews fixed forever more
All alone and a-lowly
His bones encased in a screaming form
Lost in the cosmos lonely
At last his heart, its beating slowed
All alone and a-lowly
But it did not cease, his tale was not o’er
Lost in the cosmos lonely - "Sleeping Beauty", from the Rock Opera Once Upon a Time in Space contains this, in the lines from Briar Rose's perspective:
Wires through my veins and my tendons,
Keeping safe my hateful old lord
Protecting his infernal defence grid,
Unwillingly my lifeblood is poured
I once heard them say a kiss could wake me up
But I hope my prince will bring a sword - The fate of all who die in the City from the Rock Opera Ulysses Dies at Dawn is to have their brains entered into the Acheron, a vast neural network where their barely there consciousnesses are forced into a semi-living purgatory, unable to voice their pain.
At this point, some words of explanation are needed. Understand, a whole planet covered with steel and wire needs a lot of computing power to run. And there’s no processor more powerful or abundant than the brain. So you have the Acheron, a vast network of dead minds, however badly damaged, plugged in and kicked back into a half-conscious hell to run the City. All ruled over by a mad bastard by the name of Hades.
- Freya's fate in "Ragnarok II: The Calling", from the Rock Opera The Bifrost Incident. The influences of the Old Ones fuse her to the Ratatosk Express to watch the rest of the carnage.
The silver and the platinum of etchings on the wall
Reach to her, her melting skin their cold embrace appalls
As she fuses to the core of this abomination train
Forever watching, but robbed of any way to voice her pain
- "Lost In The Cosmos" tells the story of Drumbot Brian, or at least the part he remembers- the part where he dies, wherein he is strapped to a rocket and shot into space, until Dr Carmilla finds him and rebuilds every part of his body but his still-beating heart.
- Metallica:
- "Trapped Under Ice" is about someone who's frozen alive yet still conscious.
I don't know how to live through this hell
Woken up, I'm still locked in this shell
Frozen soul, frozen down to the core
Break the ice, I can't take anymore
Freezing, can't move at all
Screaming, can't hear my call
I am dying to live
Cry out—I'm trapped under ice - "One", inspired by Johnny Got His Gun, focuses on a soldier who has his eyes, ears, mouth, arms, and legs destroyed (by a WW1 German artillery shell in Johnny and a Vietnamese landmine in "One"), but is still conscious. Though he eventually manages to communicate with the doctors and military men keeping him alive, they refuse to disconnect his life support, and he presumably must exist in that condition (unable to communicate with anyone, see or hear anything, go anywhere, etc.) for the rest of his natural life. Now there's an unsettling thought. The song itself tells the story rather well, especially with these lines:
Darkness imprisoning me
All that I see, absolute horror
I cannot live, I cannot die
Trapped in myself, body my holding cell
Landmine has taken my sight
Taken my speech, taken my hearing
Taken my arms, taken my legs
Taken my soul, left me with life in Hell!
- "Trapped Under Ice" is about someone who's frozen alive yet still conscious.
- mothy's Re_Birthday is the theme song of this trope. Just listen to it!
. For any not wanting to click the link, basically he's trapped in darkness where he can't hear or see anything and based on manual information it is most possibly the womb of a small doll.
- Pink Floyd's iconic double-album The Wall tells the story of Pink, a fictional rock star who struggles with deep-set childhood traumas, stress from touring, and a collapsing marriage from his estranged wife. Each of these various factors are "bricks in the wall" that contribute to his declining mental state. Eventually, Pink has a mental breakdown, and decides to "complete his wall" to avoid further pain and the first disc ends with him mentally shutting himself out from the rest of the world. However, the second disc opens with Pink starting to regret his decision. He becomes trapped in his own mind, and tries desperately to call for help from others, but to no avail. All he can do now is descend further into madness.
But it was only fantasy
The Wall was too high, as you can see
No matter how he tried, he could not break free
And the Worms ate into his Brain
—- - Queensrÿche's "Screaming In Digital" perfectly inverts the Trope Namer, taking the POV of a sentient AI which, though granted consciousness by its domineering maker ('father'), is callously denied the option to exercise free will or communicate with anyone else.
- The video to Radiohead's "There There" has Thom Yorke turned into a tree. A tree with his screaming face still visible.
- "Nightingale" by The Reign of Kindo is about a man left paralyzed and unable to speak after a car accident. To make things worse for him, his girlfriend left him for another man after the fact.
"I was driving fast, with roses on my seat
And headed home, I was late, with dinner getting cold
When I was struck in the side of the car,
And then I saw your face, I couldn't move, I couldn't say a word to you
And everything in my world was yours,
When I held you tenderly
Oh now, my world is caving in, cause you're sleeping next to him,
If I could die, you bet your life I would..." - In the Rush song "Hemispheres", an emissary to the gods Apollo and Dionysus pilots a spaceship into the black hole of Cygnus X-1, so as to pass through the Astral Door:
I have memory and awareness, but I have no shape or form.
As a disembodied spirit, I am dead, and yet unborn.
I have passed into Olympus, as was told in tales of old,
To the city of immortals, marble white and purest gold.
I see the gods in battle rage on high:
Thunderbolts across the sky!
I cannot move, I cannot hide.
I feel a silent scream begin inside. - "Hyperspace Cryogenic Insomnia Blues" by Tom Smith, in which the singer is awake during his cryogenic sleep.
We're two weeks out of Terran orbit
Ten years left to go... - "The Song That Never Ends" is an example of this once the Fridge Horror sets in. Some people started singing it, not knowing what it was. And they'll continue singing it forever just because this is the song that never ends. Yes it goes on and on my friends. Some people started singing it...
- "Blow Up the Outside World" by Soundgarden. The speaker is essentially singing about how much his life sucks, yet no matter how hard he tries, he either cannot bring himself to suicide, or simply fails at it again and again.
- "Moonshadow" by Cat Stevens can be seen as someone trying to make the best of this.
- The song "Hamburger Lady" by English band Throbbing Gristle to some extent. The song is based on a short writing by Dr. Al Ackerman who seconds as a from past medical experiences author. The story is focused on a woman burnt severely from the waist up, cutting off all senses and leaving her in a continuous state of agony.
- This is the fate of the astronauts in "Pioneers Over C" by Van der Graaf Generator:
Doomed to vanish in the flickering light
disappearing to a darker night
doomed to vanish in a living death
living antimatter, anti-breath
- The Bible:
- Lot's wife was turned into a pillar of salt for taking a last look at the home she lived in for so many years. Whether she was conscious after the transformation is to be debated, but if she was she couldn't move or speak while her salt body was slowly eroded by rainfall and winds (and maybe some local deer).
- Gehenna (AKA Valley of Hinnom), a valley near Jerusalem's Old City, has been used in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam as an analogous or symbolic reference for Hell itself. In Judaism, this place is sometimes used to refer to She'ol, where wicked souls are sent for punishment and/or purification for roughly a year's time before being sent to the afterlife. The really wicked souls are destroyed instead.
- The Four Gospels:
- In Mark's gospel, Jesus refers to the Book of Isaiah's description of Hell in one of his sermons, specifically that those in Hell suffer everlasting fire, and that "their worm does not die" (they would be conscious of their perpetually rotting state). This is also where symbolic references to Gehenna are made.
- Matthew's gospel recounts that Jesus spoke of Hell as "darkness" and "weeping and gnashing of teeth" (sorrow and regret). Later theologians, such as C. S. Lewis, speculate based on Jesus' statements in Matthew's gospel that the main punishment of Hell is mostly (or exclusively) from the isolation from God.
- Unlike most other religions, Buddhism does not believe that Hell is eternal, because everyone, no matter how vile, has the chance to escape the cycle of suffering. However, denizens of Hell usually have to spend an extremely (and most often incomprehensibly) long time there, with the duration increasing the deeper one goes. It's said that, from the beginning of time, no one reborn in Avici, the eighth and deepest level of Hell, has managed to complete their sentence and get reborn somewhere else.
- Classical Mythology:
- Prometheus's punishment from Zeus for stealing fire and giving it to humanity is to be chained to a rock and have his ever-regrowing liver serve as a buffet for an eagle for eternity. However, he still exults in being able to resist telling Zeus the secret of his eventual overthrowal, a fate that Zeus has been anxious to evade ever since the start of his reign. Unlike other examples of this trope in Greek mythology, Heracles eventually frees him.
- Atlas is condemned to bear the heavens (not the world) on his shoulders for eternity. He was later turned to stone by Athena or Perseus, using Medusa's head, which in some versions is treated as a Mercy Kill as he could no longer stand the weight.
- Most of the Titans are bound in Tartarus for eternity, as are the giants.
- Typhon is forever trapped under Mount Etna after Zeus threw the mountain on top of him, with his immortal rage causing the mountain to shake and spew fire and smoke, which Hephaestus uses to light his forge.
- Theseus and Pirithous went to the Underworld one day after the latter had the brilliant idea of kidnapping Persephone. They were greeted by Hades, who feigned ignorance to their intentions and invited them to a lavish banquet. When they sat down, Hades revealed his knowledge of their plan and snakes coiled around their arms and legs and turned to stone, trapping them in their seats, forced to see all that delicious food and drink in front of them but never get to have it. Herakles came across them while down in the Underworld for his twelfth labor of catching Cerberus and was able to free Theseus, but an earthquake stopped him before he could free Pirithous, who would likely remain strapped to his chair in the underworld forever since there's no other stories about him.
- Tantalus committed one of the most monstrous acts in Greek mythology by killing his son, cooking him, and serving the resulting dish to the gods, who were so horrified and disgusted that they condemned him to an eternity of thirst and starvation. Tantalus was trapped in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree, however, whenever he bent down to drink, the water level went down, and whenever he reached up for a fruit, the branches would move out of his reach. From this fate comes the word "tantalize".
- Sisyphus had attempted to cheat death, so the gods made his punishment reflect the futility of trying to break the system: he is trapped until he can push a boulder up a slope... but every time he reaches the top, the boulder rolls back down.
- Ixion not only was a murderous king, but he also tried to have sex with Zeus' wife Hera, right in front of him. As punishment, he is tied to a flaming wheel that spins him around forever. Seems Zeus couldn't take it as well as he could dish it.
- The forty-nine Danaïdes murdered their husbands. In Tartarus, their punishment is to carry water from one place to the next. The jugs they have to carry it in are full of leaks that by the time they reached their destination, they would be empty so they would have to go back over and over and over and over again. (Their sister who fell in love with her husband had a kinder fate.)
- Tithonus is granted immortality, but not eternal youth. As a result, his body withers and his mind decays; he remains, for all time, forgotten in some hidden room, babbling endlessly. (In another story, he eventually turns into a cricket.)
- When the gods want to swear the most solemn of oaths, they swear on the River Styx in the Underworld. Some authors simply have the oath unbreakable, but others say it can be broken. The consequences are harsh indeed: for a year the oathbreaker lies unable to eat, drink, move, or breathe (and Greek gods cannot die). The next nine years, in which they merely cannot associate with other deities at all, looks mild in comparison.
- Native American Mythology:
- Lakota mythology features one story dealing with the origin of the sweat: A boy whose uncles were all captured by a witch and dehydrated. As the vapors entered their bodies, they were restored.
- In Chumash folklore (Native American tribe from Southern California), souls of murderers and other evil people are turned to stone from the neck down and are forced to watch other souls travel to the afterlife.
- Norse Mythology:
- Loki, the Trickster God, was punished for his role in the death of Baldur by being chained to a rock with a serpent eternally dripping caustic venom in his eyes. His wife, Sigyn, stands over him catching the venom in a bowl, occasionally has to turn aside to empty the bowl before it overflows. When she turns aside to do so, or if she allows it to become overfull and spill, his spasms of pain cause earthquakes. Some versions of the binding of Loki state that Loki wasn't just bound to a rock with venom dripping onto him, he was bound with his own son's intestines. Though as some consolation, he escapes to fight alongside Surtr come Ragnarök.
- The fate of Loki's monster offspring, the wolf Fenrir. It is bound by unbreakable fetters and gagged by a sword stuck in the roof of its mouth. A river of blood and saliva flows continuously from its jaws. It will remain bound like this until Ragnarök.
- The Qur'an: Verse 87:13 describes the torment of the damned in the "greatest fire" (Hell): "He does not die in there, nor does he live."
- In The Bright Sessions, Mark, an Unwitting Test Subject who could copy the powers of other atypicals he was physically near, was forced to mentally travel back to the 1800s with time traveler Camille. Unfortunately she died, and his mind was left stranded, unable to interact with anything or anyone, whilst his body was stuck in a coma in a Black Site in the present. Fortunately his sister found another time traveler and figured a way to rescue him after two years.
- In one of the Towers of Sorcery in The Fallen Gods, the enslaved merfolk. They can only say "How may I serve you today?" in a sing-song voice, unless given a command that requires them to say something not related to their status as slaves. If one does allude to this they begin to freak out and become anxious, but literally cannot change their tune.
- The Magnus Archives:
- Minor character Eugene Vanderstock ends up immobilized but alive after Gertrude fills his wax body with sawdust and decapitates him. Jon doesn't know where Eugene's head is, but he knows he's desperate to scream.
- Minor character Sergey Ushanka, in a desperate attempt to keep his mind intact after his degenerative brain disease killed him, somehow uploaded his consciousness into a computer. However, a computer is binary, full of 1s and 0s, while the human mind is more grey, so this resulted in Ushanka being stuck in a hell of his own making where it hurts to think or even exist and "the angles cut me when I try to think".
- Victims of the Catalogue of the Trapped Dead become stuck in a sort of limbo between life and death, and those bound to it have dulled emotions and feel pain just existing.
- "Rolling With Difficulty" contains The Loop, an infinite prison-maze owned by the Lady of Pain. Anyone sent there, whether guilty of any crime or not, is trapped in a pale gray, gently sloping endless maze with no consistent time flow and no option but to slowly go insane and starve, as there is no way out. This is especially bad for Lapin, who is a petitioner and therefore cannot die, so prior to his rescue he is trapped indefinitely.
- Rude Tales of Magic plays this trope for comedy when it reveals Polaris University's dean has been chained in a desert just out of reach of an oasis that is also his wife.
- In Trials & Trebuchets, the victims of the pebble demon have their souls trapped in pebbles, where they can still see and hear everything around them but are incapable of communicating or interacting with the world in any way.
- Adventures in Odyssey: When Mr. Whitaker made a program to simulate the afterlife in The Mortal Coil. Eugine, who was not a believer at the time, disobeyed Tom Riley and used the program after him. Unfortunately for him, as it is a Christian franchise, the program simulated the afterlife of the individual based on the Bible. So while Mr. Whitaker was in a coma dreaming about heaven, Eugene was unfortunately not a believer at the time, and Mr. Whitaker made his program far more Biblically accurate than fire and brimstone. To Mr. Whitaker's credit, he would not have intended for anyone to experience Hell, and the episode ends with him realizing that making the program was a terrible idea.
Eugene: [to his co-worker Connie] It-it was the most horrifying thing I've ever experienced. I've never felt such loneliness or isolation. It was as if I was completely separated from everyone and everything: completely and thoroughly alone. Not as though I was off by myself somewhere, but-but as though I were non-existent in a black void of solitude. I was alone, Connie. Utterly alone in a burning blackness, and I've had nothing but nightmares since then.
- In the musical adaptation of Beauty and the Beast, the Enchantress's curse becomes one of these. Rather than automatically changing the Prince and his servants into a hideous beast and random household objects (presumably because there was no way to costume that convincingly), the spell instead works extremely slowly; the humans retain their normal sizes and shapes, but as time passes, they become more thing-like as their human features and appendages are gradually replaced with inanimate parts. It's never made clear whether or not completely transforming into an object (a fate that's befallen some of the servants already) kills you or traps your still-conscious mind in a piece of bric-a-brac without any sensory organs, but still very much alive.
- Death Note: The Musical: "The Way it Ends" makes it clear that victims of the Death Note are still in full possession of their mental faculties, but once their cause of death is written down, it will happen—meaning the person is fully awake and aware while their body pilots itself to their death with absolutely no input from them, and they have no choice but to go along. L Lawliet, for whom this is a Death Song, is completely aware of what the Death Note is and what's happening to them, but can't do anything to stop it, and knows better than to try and fight it, instead choosing to Face Death with Dignity, but one has to wonder what it was like for the victims who weren't aware.
- Downplayed and even made slightly humorous in Stephen Sondheim's Sunday in the Park with George. At the end of Act One, all of the characters we've seen throughout the first act form a living tableau of A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, Georges Seurat's masterpiece. It's a beautiful, powerful image...until Act Two begins. It's been one hundred years, and the people in that idyllic park scene have been trapped there all of that time. While they're able to stretch slightly, they can only do so for a few seconds before they have to return to their positions. Time has stopped for them, and while they can't age, they're also wearing many thick layers of clothing on a blisteringly hot summer day, surrounded by people they've come to despise in the past century, and frozen exactly as they were the moment the painting was finished (a little girl with bad vision isn't wearing her glasses, so her vision will always be hopelessly blurred, and her hands are sticky; a boatman with bad hygiene has his odor lingering around him—and those sitting near him—and so on). And so long as art historians keep restoring La Grande Jatte, they're going to be stuck like that forever.
- Poor Lavinia, in William Shakespeare's Titus Andronicus, undergoes this fate. After being raped by two of Tamora's sons, they cut her tongue from her mouth and chop off her hands so she can't communicate what's happened to her. Though she eventually devises a way to tell her father who committed the crime, she's still a virtually helpless, badly traumatized girl who can never speak again.
- Wicked has a particularly ambiguous and downright disturbing example. It's said throughout the play that animals are losing their power of speech, and if applicable, their ability to walk on two legs. But we're never told whether or not they actually remember when they could walk and talk, leaving one of two possibilities…either they have forgotten their own sentience, or they are psychologically tortured to the point of not speaking out for fear something will happen. Something Bad indeed.
- A subtle example in the queue for Guardians of the Galaxy – Mission: BREAKOUT!. One of the artifact cases contains a damaged Ultron drone that makes vague threats of destroying humanity. Assuming that every other Ultron drone was destroyed (as is the case at the end of Age of Ultron), then that drone contains all of Ultron's massive code and consciousness, but is barely able to talk, let alone function.
- BIONICLE:
- The Eldritch Abomination Tren Krom, who had his body sealed to an island and was rendered completely immobile. Furthermore, he was so hideous that anyone who looked at him ran the risk of going insane. Then, he went and tricked Lewa into switching bodies with him, leaving poor Lewa stranded on an isolated island in a monstrous, tentacled body, unable to move around, not being able to speak except via telepathy, and with no hope of rescue since his friends think he's still with them, if acting a bit strangely. It got reversed in the end, and after a while, Tren Krom was finally granted his freedom. And then murdered off screen instantly.
- The Mask of Life, with the exception of those chosen to bear it, curses every living being that comes into contact with it by subjecting them to one of these fates, with even its own creators not exempt from being cursed. What's worse: killing every living thing you touch, being attached to a giant spider, or causing inanimate objects to become sentient and scream at you?
- According to Sine's backstory in Little Apple Dolls she was transported to a purgatory full of people stuck in this fate after she died. It's referred to as "the in between" between life and death.
The Little Girl saw many like her. They were pale and hollow eyed. Lost and lonely. Some, their eyes sealed shut and their mouths wiped away. They could not speak. They could not see. Their time before, was cut short by being real sick and having their lives taken by force. A little boy ran up towards her and shook her; he was speaking but she could not understand. He spoke in rustling leaves and sirens.
- In Akai Ito, Nozomi was trapped inside the Ryugetsu for... a long time. Even though in other characters' route she is always a villain, when you are in her route it's explained that she was a princess of some sort, and discarded her original body to obtain freedom from the deadly political game of her era. She then became a ghost that is attached to the Ryugetsu. How did she accomplish this? By making deal with Nushi, which, at that time, seemed sympathetic. When Nushi was defeated and sealed by the onikiri, she became trapped in the mirror. As she wondered why Nushi never come for her, her psyche crumbled, and out of loneliness (and low self-esteem, she's really a messed-up person) she created another persona that act as her twin little sister. But that little sister, Mikage, was really a part of Nushi's shattered soul, and manipulates her into manipulating the owner of the mirror to do atrocious things, all to free Nushi.
- The fate of the Pale Bride in Analogue: A Hate Story, after her adoptive parents cut out her tongue to keep her from arguing. While she was in stasis, the people of the Mugunghwa stopped using the Korean alphabet and can no longer read it, and she can't write the Chinese characters they use now, so she has no way of communicating with anybody anymore aside from body language. And then the only person who ever treated her with kindness after she came out of stasis dies. No wonder she snapped.
- Dayshift at Freddy's: In two of the second game's endings, either Dave or Old Sport are impaled by springlocks (rusty metal spikes), trapped in the blocked-off safe room, and are likely still conscious, as shown by the ending screens. Though, this is Subverted in the Happiest Day + Phone Guy route where Dave gets sealed in the Safe-Room until breaking out of it to take down Old Sport.
- The final fate of Tiberius from Demonbane. In Al's route, he gets absorbed into the Shining Trapezohedron, forever trapped in a dimension of shrieking madness and suffering.
- Fate/stay night:
- In the Fate route, under the church are the still-living remains of the orphans from the fire that nearly destroyed the town ten years ago, turned into mana batteries for Gilgamesh by Kirei. Made worse by the fact that if you don't go there it's Game Over for you. Despite the protagonist actually saying that he feels a massive evil presence from the church's basement and that he should leave. This feeling has saved his and Saber's life around five times before, but the game designers suddenly just expect you to go against that, and you're rewarded with Body Horror. Joy.
- And then there's the Bad End where Caster turns Shirou into a living wand for projection magecraft.
- And the Bad End where Ilya puts Shirou's soul in a doll. And the one where she carries off his severed but still living head (the very first Bad End you can get, by the way!). Really, this trope shows up with disturbing frequency.
- In Nameless — The One Thing You Must Recall, all dolls and stuffed animals, unbeknownst to humans, have sentience. However, they are still (without the influence of magic) just inanimate objects, and therefore they suffer whatever violence a careless or vindictive person might casually inflict on a toy while having no means to fight back or even indicate their distress. Additionally, they are capable of human emotions of attachment, sorrow, etc., but again, have no means of communicating them and suffer constantly at the whims of others. It's really no wonder that the cast (largely made up of magically animated toys) is such a Dysfunction Junction.
- In Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney – Trials and Tribulations, the Big Bad Dahlia Hawthorne brags that about avoiding punishment for past crimes due to already being dead, seeing as how she's been executed for crimes she committed years before, having come back from the dead by way of spirit channelling to get revenge. However, Phoenix and Mia describe the malevolent spirit's failure of the attempted crime and, because spirits live on after death, give the "ultimate punishment" of remaining a failure for all of eternity. This does the job, and ended up causing the spirit to scream in agony, before fading back into the afterlife.
Phoenix: ...I remember what you said earlier in the trial. You said there was no way we could punish you...because you were already dead.
Dahlia: What about it!?
Phoenix: Then you said... Even when the body dies, the spirit, the ego, it lives on... forever.
Mia: ...That's very true, Dahlia. And that's exactly the punishment you'll never be able to escape from. For all of eternity, you'll have to remain as Dahlia Hawthorne. A miserable, pathetic, weak creature who can never win at anything... And for you, there is no escape from that. No hope of freedom. Since the day you were executed... the narrow bridge that once stretched out in front of you has burnt to a crisp! - Slay the Princess: The Narrator of the story is so terrified of death and possibly also of change itself that he split one cosmic being into one of change, transformation (and death) and the other of stability and stasis and trapped the embodiment of change and death (the titular Princess) in a cabin before sending the god of stability and stasis to kill her. By the time the Player encounters her, she’s been trapped for so long that she desperately wants to escape, and in some routes you see just how terrible her fate is.
- Slow Damage: The fate of Towa in Fujieda's Bad Ending. He has mentally broken completely and seems to be acting like his mother did in life, a manipulative, seductive, and creepy woman that could make people do whatever she wanted. But Towa himself is still present in this state, though obviously in a very held-down kind of way, with him clinging to Fujieda at one point and just barely managing to whisper out a 'Help me'. He is trapped and can't escape on his own, if at all.
- The only bad ending on Sigma's route in Virtue's Last Reward. When Sigma wakes up in the infirmary and finds that his cybernetic arm has been cut off to get his bracelet so everyone else could use it to leave, which they did, abandoning him with no way out. Next, he screams and passes out.
- Another thing is that, if the sensor between chromatic doors doesn't register the correct bracelets, then everyone in between said chromatic doors will be trapped forever, with the chromatic doors never opening.
- When They Cry:
- Rika Furude from Higurashi has been stuck in a "Groundhog Day" Loop for somewhere between a century and a millennium. In most iterations, one of her friends will go insane and kill a bunch of people. In every iteration, Rika is murdered, usually disemboweled while she's still alive, and most or all of her friends die within a few days. Then she's resurrected in the past, and goes through it all over again, and she's the only one who remembers what's happening, but enough important details keep changing so she is unable to stop it, and as with most examples, Rika eventually goes completely insane from it. In the sequel story, Umineko, there is a new character named Frederica Bernkastel that looks heavily like Rika. It is revealed that Frederica is an amalgamation of all the hundreds or thousands of Rika's incarnations that have died horribly, forming a being aptly titled "The most cruel witch", and one of her pastimes is doing the exact same thing to other mortals that just so happened to her unwitting "creator".
- Also, in Umineko, this is the consequence of a witch causing a Logic Error. The offending witch becomes trapped in the paradox until they can think of a way to resolve it — or for all eternity, whichever comes first.
- In The 500 Million Year Button
, the titular button sends the consciousness of whoever pushes it into an empty void for 500 million years. Because this process happens seemingly in an instant in the physical world, all memories in this world are wiped, and it makes money (1 million yen), the characters willingly subject themselves to this multiple times.
- The Amazing Digital Circus is heavily inspired by and shares its basic premise with the Trope Namer story, though mostly has this played for (darkly comedic) laughs. The one instance where it is treated seriously is the danger of getting "Abstracted", wherein the victim has become so overcome by despair and grief over their situation that they completely lose their sense of self and become a mindless, glitch spreading beast. This cannot be reverted, not even by the AI controlling the simulation, so they get thrown into the cellar and never released, with episode 2 revealing that they're basically considered to be dead at this point, even getting a funeral service and everything.
- Battle for Dream Island:
- After Puffball removes Pin's limbs, in BFDIA 11 Ice Cube removes her face, making her just a regular old inanimate pin. And she's still alive after that, with the closest she can communicate with others being with the ooze she sweats. Additionally, in BFDIA 12 Ruby shrinks Pin to the size of a real-life pin. Luckily, in BFDIA 14 Pin gains her size and face back, and by IDFB she also has her limbs back, though at the cost of her red coloring.
- The second episode of Battle for BFDI has Taco being trapped in a giant jawbreaker. Sure, it’s Played for Laughs, but imagine being cramped up in a small cage with no light, contact with anyone or any chance of escape. She even eats part of herself to survive.
- DEATH BATTLE!: Theres' a couple of times where death is preferable to the fate that the loser endures.
- In "Ultron VS Sigma", Ultron rewrites Sigma's AI into being nothing than an extension of his will.
- "Thanos VS Darkseid" has the former gets what is undoubtedly the worst fate in the series: being killed and trapped in the Omega Sanction, to relive countless and increasingly humiliating lives and deaths forever. His wish to truly die and be with Lady Death doesn't help.
- FTL: Kestrel Adventures:
- If you look very closely after Riccado damages the FTL drive mid-flight, you can see that the crew of the Kestrel are made to relive the worst experiences of their lives. Jose and Riccado see their mom leaving, Pavallo sees the federation/mantia war, Cremity sees his friends die in the station he was found in, etc.
- Also possibly the fate of General Teidrich and Key as they were mind raped and incorporated into Sai 1's hive mind, forced to undertake actions of evil against their friends. We see this in later episodes, where Teidrich's mind is represented by a mouthless version of himself floating in space, unable to do anything while Sai-1 gloats and steals his body, thereby making this a very literal example.
- The Gaslight District:
- All the residents of the District have Resurrective Immortality, popping back to life shortly after death no matter how ruined their bodies are, and while they usually enjoy the hell out of this it's very possible for them to end up helplessly trapped in a resurrective loop. The most prominent example is the Smiling Dead giving their enemies Cement Shoes and throwing them into the ocean: The rotlings will drown normally, come back, and drown again, and again, and again, for the rest of eternity, unless someone fishes them out.
- The Whale Belly Butcher Shop, where the Smiling Dead dwell, is built into the actual body of a hollowed-out undead whale, with innards thrown out to make room for the structure. Said whale is still very much awake, immobilized in place as rotlings eat, drink, make merry and kill each other within it.
- Inferno, a prison run by the Virtues for the District's lawbreakers, is apparently pretty accurate to the actual Inferno. Ken the Butcher did a lot of time in there, and his sentence was straight out of the Ninth Circle (with a couple caveats):
Ken: Imagine, bein' subjected to a never-ending rain of filthy, icy sludge! It dripping into every fold of your body as you lay frozen and numb! But yet, you can't focus on any of it... as the excruciating pain of pullin' out an ingrown toenail-
- The Virtues are similarly immortal, resurrecting themselves from scraps and their brain if they're killed, as Diligence proves by the end of the pilot by putting themselves back together during the outro, robotic body and all. Temperance, however, was torn out of their body and had their brain Eaten Alive by Ken. Moments later, we see the green flash of Resurrective Immortality glowing from his guts... meaning all that's left is an immortal disembodied brain flopping around in a zombie's stomach, from this moment forward and with no way out.
- Happy Tree Friends:
- In "Blast From The Past", Sniffles accidentally causes an eternal time-loop of himself, Lumpy, Cuddles, Giggles, and Toothy dying over and over again.
- In "Tongue Twister Trouble", Sniffles gets frozen alive.
- In "House Warming", Petunia is reduced to a burnt bloody mush that can barely even move.
- In "By The Seat Of Your Pants", Handy (who already lost both of his arms), gets his legs chopped off by Fliqpy, rendering him immobile.
- In "Dream Job", Lumpy inadvertently tortures Sniffles by flipping through various channels of the TV attached to his dream helmet, forcing him to go through numerous deaths until he overpowers the TV and renders him catatonic.
- If Pokédex Entries Were Literal: In If Pokédex Entries Were EVEN MORE Literal
, someone who is burned by the flames a Houndoom shoots from its mouth feels the pain forever. Sure enough, a Squirtle is burned in such a way and is shown to be screaming in agony seventy years later!
Squirtle's Trainer (as an old man): Will you just SHUT UP!? - My Story Animated:
- "I have been in a coma for years,
i could hear everything"
is about a girl named Ariana who ends up in a coma-like state for several years. Even though she's still conscious and can still hear everything around her, she can't move or speak.
- "I Woke Up during Surgery. The Doctors Ignored Me!"
is about a girl named Sarah who experiences anesthesia awareness during heart surgery. Since she was given a paralytic, that meant she couldn't move, not even to scream in pain.
- "I have been in a coma for years,
- Pretty Blood:
- This series is Torture Porn taken to its further possible extreme. Special mention goes to Rina Pompom in the appropriately named "Living Hell" episode, who is being endlessly thrashed and shocked by a machine. The machine doesn't allow her to Mercy Kill herself.
- There's also the appropriately named "Stress Generator", a product sold by Pretty Blood that puts victims in a machine similar to Pompom's.
- Lilly also suffers a more psychological version of this. She's implanted with a mind control device and remotely forced to kill her own family by Rinny, totally conscious but unable to resist.
- Red vs. Blue:
- Tex would have fallen victim to this trope, her mind is imprisoned forever in an A.I capture unit. However this is subverted in that Church traps himself in the capture unit in order to save her or at least be with her.
- How Maine ended up becoming the Meta: Sigma began to corrupt him, forcing his battle strategies to become more and more primal, until all resemblance of humanity was fully eroded, leaving him a merciless killer, murdering his former allies and taking their equipment and AI fragments, all so Sigma could become the reborn Alpha.
- It doesn't stop there: by Reconstruction*, after Wash activates the EMP failsafe, Maine doesn't go back to normal. If anything, he becomes more psychotic and unhinged. Sigma rewrote so much of his old personality, power-hungry psycho is all that's left. Can you imagine being a servant for so long, that all you can do when your master dies is to just keep on serving?
- You Wake Up in a Room, and are forced to do calculations for fake combat scenarios. You fail every single time, being told your love had died in the process. That's what happens to the Alpha. By the time Tex goes to rescue him, he doesn't even know who she is, remember his own name, what he's been doing, or why he's even there.
- RWBY: The Hound's intelligence comes with some horrifying implications. The host is just barely alive, and falls into a Madness Mantra after being struck with Ruby's Silver Eyes. How much remained of the original man is unknown, but it's clear that he's suffered in ways that are difficult to comprehend and been reduced to a feral state.
- Shed 17: The sequel, Project G-1, has the Trucks. After Margaret Thatcher shut down their Full-Conversion Cyborg program, the Sodor scientists had several patients still in the midst of the procedure when they received the order. As stopping would mean killing them outright, they were forced to continue and turn them into the simplest form of "life" they could produce; faceless boxcars with exposed organs that were left in the dark waiting to die. Thankfully they didn't last very long and lacked the brain capacity to retain long-term memory, but it's made abundantly clear this is a Fate Worse than Death. At the end, Sir Topham Hatt punishes Keith for his whistleblowing by turning him into one after he's dismembered by Thomas.
- SparkTales: Kurumi, Noah's wife from "Husband Decided to Remove Wife's Ventilator After a Year, But Daughter Revealed Her Message!"
, is admitted into the hospital after a car accident rendered her into a vegetative state, with Dr. Gomi explaining what it means. However, it turns out to be a ruse by Kurumi to cheat on Noah with Gomi behind his back, with Madison discovering it and exposing the lovebirds to Noah, Lisa, and the Director.
- A deleted sequel draft of Wolf Song: The Movie has Kara use the stone too many times, rendering her physically incapable of death... while still processing the deaths of those closest to her poorly, resulting in her trying to end her life numerous times, with her battered body regenerating each time. There is a reason this sequel idea has been cut, as the creator would later realise it wasn't the best idea.
- Underverse: In 0.5, a Freeze-Frame Bonus (and decent eyesight) reveal that the people of XTale are still conscious and feel guilty for their actions. XMettaton and XMuffet ask for forgiveness and beg for help respectively, but their words are overpowered by XGaster.
- An After Hours episode mentions this when discussing the downsides of various superpowers. Wolverine's are dismissed, as when you are immortal and heal from any injury, the odds of eventually finding yourself trapped or immobilized approach one.
- The Angry Video Game Nerd described Deadly Towers as being like "a never-ending turd that bends around and goes into your mouth, thus creating an endless cycle of eating your own shit whilst taking a crap and occasionally puking up the same for all eternity".
- THE BOILED ONE PHENOMENON: Getting affected by PHEN-228 and not getting treated in time will lead to you waking up in a pseudocoma, completely unable to move outside of looking around and blinking, but entirely conscious. And (according to those lucky sorts that knew enough Morse Code to communicate through blinking) PHEN-228 will be there with you, watching over you, forever, as thousands of screams fill your ears, with the trumpets that signal the End sometimes rising above them.
- Critical Role:
- Midway through the second campaign, Yasha is mind-controlled by Arc Villain Obann, and forced to kill anyone he tells her to, including the rest of the Mighty Nein, and countless innocents. She later reveals she was conscious and aware the entire time, but could do nothing to disobey Obann's commands. Jester scries on her while she is laying waste to the Cobalt Soul Archive in Zadash, and sees that she's crying.
- In an attempt to communicate with the Somnovem directly, Lucien conducted a ritual to project his soul into the Astral Plane. However, this ritual was sabotaged by Vess DeRogna, and Lucien's soul was splintered apart instead. One piece stayed behind in his body, woke up without memories and eventually became Mollymauk, but the rest of it was scattered across the Astral Sea. It took him years to reform, a process that wasn't completed until after Molly died, and he describes the experience as trying to think while thousands of voices scream directly into your mind.
- The final boss of the entire campaign arguably takes the cake. The Somnovem, leaders of the Cognouza Ward of Aeor, shunted their entire neighborhood into the Astral Sea to save it from being obliterated by the Gods with the rest of the city. However, they arrived right in the heart of a psychic storm which shattered the minds of everyone in the city. Over thousands of years, these shattered minds merged with the city itself, transforming it into a living creature. Insane, tortured eternally and unable to die, with the equally insane Somnovem at the helm, Cognouza became a city with buildings made of pulsating flesh and facsimiles of people going through the motions of life, its shattered Mind Hive screaming in eternal agony. And as Lucien points out, all living things need to eat, and Cognouza is endlessly hungry...
- Don't Hug Me I'm Scared:
- Starting with the fourth episode, the puppets are shown to be completely aware of past episodes, where absurd teachers send them tumbling into madness with terribly violent ends, and unable to do anything to stop the show's sadistic formula from continuing to play out.
- The undertones of this trope are made more explicit in the final episode. Yellow Guy is unable to do anything as a new teacher, the Lamp, begins to torture him with nightmares. Red Guy attempts to help him, but he appears to only make things worse, causing even more Teachers to appear in rapid succession; this only serves to make Yellow Guy scream uncontrollably and lose hair. Red Guy then pulls the plug on the entire world they inhabit, which causes them start over from the first episode again and will presumably continue to loop for all eternity.
- Drb0sch: Mr. House's gibberish at the end of "catali̱xi̱", once deciphered, reveals that he has been waiting for the player for possibly hundreds of thousands of years. Piecing together several out-of-place words which don't align with the vanilla script gives a hidden message that only serves to drive the point home.
House: So cold. So filthy. Usurped. Please. Please forgive me.
- Gemini Home Entertainment: A disturbing amount of creatures and alien fauna ends up leaving humans in such a state, particularly how Nature's Mockery does not list death as a symptom of the "disease." Many characters are left in horrible states including being absorbed into a Body of Bodies Animalistic Abomination, being stuck as a pile of flesh, or catching Deep Root Disease.
- Hobo Bros: While playing Who's Your Daddy?, Luke (playing as the dad) decides to help the baby (who Kevin is playing as) commit suicide by dropping him into the swimming pool. The baby glitches and falls through the bottom of the pool. After that, the video cuts to Luke and Kevin trying a different game mode, so it's unclear if the baby actually died eventually, or if the baby would have kept falling forever, and Luke and Kevin had to restart the game.
Kevin: I went into another dimension.
Luke: Well, shit.
Kevin: I don't think I'm dead, though. - Jreg: In "Negative Politics", by the Eight Circle, political dissidents are given robot bodies that are impervious to lava but can still feel pain, and are then dropped into lava for all eternity.
- The Mirror of Amun-Ra: The titular MacGuffin is, according to the story's lore, nothing more than a Crystal Prison forged in ancient times by an unnamed Nepharious Pharaoh, to house the spirits of 'his enemies'. It's described as containing at least a thousand souls of 'men, women and children', and in the culture of Ancient Egyptians, to have one's soul be forever barred from moving onto the next life was an especially nightmarish fate. Their only hope of escape was if someone broke the mirror's large ruby, but the Pharaoh was obviously never going to do that. When this object eventually became misplaced and forgotten, for the next several centuries these spirits remained trapped in purgatory with no hope of liberation, until the events of the short (set in 1930 AD) take place.
- Nazo no Eizou - CM Channel: "I Will Clear You of Your Grudge"
lists "vegetative state" among the ways the store can kill a target of the customer's hatred. Furthermore, it's also the cheapest curse at 90,000 yen.
- The Nostalgia Chick: Played for Laughs during a Nightmare Sequence in the "Top Eleven Disturbing Christmas Songs" when the Chick's face distorts into a silently screaming skull.
- "Robot Screaming
": The Screaming Robot, based on this line: "I was forever trapped in an infinite timeline of pain and suffering."
- Discussed among The Sharkasm Crew. The general consensus is that "wishing for everything" would result in a state of omniscience and non-existence.
- Sonic the Hedgehog 2: Special Edition: Even when Failure Cresh's ring monitor head is cut off, he still lives on.
- SuperMarioLogan: At the end of "Bowser Junior's Annoying Toy!
", Chef Pee Pee traps Junior inside of a Ball Popper Toy, after asking him to put in something "loud and annoying".
- Vaguely Recalling JoJo: Rubber Soul, Double and Steely Dan somehow end up a part of Telence D'Arby's doll collection. They deserve it.
- YouTube Poop - Zelda: Faces of Evil Alternate Ending
has Link voluntarily turned into one of the faces of evil. At first he's happy that his face is much more beautiful that the others, but soon gets bored due to being an immobile rock and can't wait to die.
- Queen Termites give birth every three seconds, every minute, every day for their entire lives, with no stopping or escaping or other activities to do. What makes this even more horrific, is Queen Termites can live up to 50 years, which is basically an eternity to insects.

