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Violence against humans: unacceptable.
Violence against squid-people: acceptable.

The problem with violence is that people tend to bleed when they are stabbed. Blood is scary. But changing the color of blood to something like black makes everything family-friendly, right? Pools and pools of nice, safe, black blood... Never mind the original violence.

With any luck, this is just something tacked on to fit broadcast standards, with a more realistic color used for the DVD release.

Some opt just to not show blood at all despite any violence.

Black-and-white comic books (which includes most, if not all, manga) generally have black blood (where it's featured) out of necessity.

Not to be confused with cases where the "blood" is supposed to be a different color, like with robots or some aliens, or it's an indication of a severe condition (say, being fatally poisoned). It's worth remembering that a large quantity of blood (especially venous) will look close to black, which is where this colour choice comes from in the first place.

This is common in some video games as a form of Adjustable Censorship, where the player has the option of changing the blood color from red to something less realistic.

If you're looking for high-class aristocrats, you want Blue Blood. Speaking of blue, see Blue Liquid Absorbent, where blood, particularly menstrual blood, is shown in blue to demonstrate the absorbency of maxi pads in advertisements. If you're looking for "black" in the sense of African, you want Pass Fail.

Compare Rainbow Puke, where someone vomiting is depicted with rainbow colors instead of the normal to tone down the grossness.

Not to be confused with Black Blood Brothers, The Blackblood Alliance, or Blood Is the New Black. Or Black Blood of the Earth. Or the other Black Blood of the Earth.


Examples:

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    Advertising 
  • The trailer for Hollow Man edits the color of the blood used in a Jump Scare to find the invisible man to a dark brown color, making it look like the character threw coffee.
  • The trailer for The Mist retouches the blood to a black color on the face of a man who runs into the store for shelter. This is also done for the blood on the safety rope and the bloody hand-print left on the window, despite the split-second nature of these shots.
  • Trailers for Resident Evil (2002) showed zombies doused in blue gore. This was not the case in the actual film.

    Anime & Manga 
  • Italian dubs of various anime edit blood in many ways: sometimes they just recolor it in black/brown (as in most of the above examples), sometimes they just make the whole scene either in black and white (Case Closed, One Piece) or in sepia tones (One Piece, only in the Alabasta arc although)... but the most absurd one was in the earlier episodes of Naruto, where they not only made the blood black, but also gave grey skin to the bleeding characters. The scene in episode 6 when Naruto stabs his hand with a kunai becomes very narmful, with a lot of scenes showing his grey skin while his clothes, hair and everything else are still in full color.
  • 07-Ghost uses this from the first episode, when they bother to add in the blood at all. Very frustrating if you've read the manga and know the blood ought to be there when it isn't. Later in the series, the blood displayed becomes neon red, or magenta, but definitely not what real blood looks like!
  • In AKIRA when Tetsuo makes three people explode most of their blood is black.
  • One of the sillier instances of Black Blood happened in Episode 13 of Bamboo Blade for Psycho Lesbian Reimi's nosebleed. There was no reason for it to be black, but it was.
  • In Bleach, blood is only colored red when it drips on the floor. The movies tend to depict blood as red more often.
  • In [C] – Control, during a deal, Entrees lose their money through this whenever slashed or otherwise. However, this is symbolic: black blood could also mean leaking oil.
  • Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba's anime adaptation is usually able to depict blood as red, as it originally aired late at night on several channels in Japan. However, the theatrical release for the Mugen Train movie has a few key scenes where particularly big splashes of blood are colored black, such as Tanjiro's desperate maneuver to escape Enmu's dream world and the final battle clash, though afterwards the home release on Blu-Ray and DVD corrected that, making it red.
  • Like the Transformers comics, this is justified in Digimon V-Tamer 01, where most of the characters are not actual organisms. Red blood does appear occasionally though.
  • Dragon Ball:
    • During the Saiyan Saga, Goku bleeds black during the battle with Vegeta.
    • Piccolo and other Nameks bleed purple blood in Dragon Ball Z, but it should be noted that both Piccolo Sr. and Piccolo Jr. had bleed red blood in some instances before they were revealed to be aliens - the former when he was bitten on the thumb and got a hole in his stomach (triggering his explosive death) and the later when he got his arm severely injured during his fight with Goku on the Budokai tournament, and severed his very own arm (only to regrow it again in a matter of seconds, as well as in the fight with Raditz). In the American censored version of the fight with Raditz, Piccolo Jr.'s red blood was edited to be green, invoking this trope. After it was revealed that he was an alien and his blood was retconned to be purple, it was no longer edited.
    • In the censored TV versions of Dragon Ball Z Kai, all of Goku, Gohan, Krillin, and Vegeta's blood is a brown-ish-black-ish color.
  • In Fairy Tail, most - if not all - blood has been censored out of the anime, replaced with either comical injuries (lumps, red-marks) and thus played for laughs in the less serious moments, or a Gory Discretion Shot and/or darkened streaks or patches in more serious moments to imply where blood had either dried or been wiped away. The only times so far that this was ever solidly averted was in the movies Phoenix Priestess and Dragon Cry, where the injuries were both shown openly and bled freely, and in anime scenes where the characters actually or almost died from blood loss such as with God Serena getting torn open by Acnologia and when Juvia and Gray stab themselves to try and save the other.
    • Of course, this is completely averted in the manga, where characters often bleed during fights.
  • Fist of the North Star:
    • Being a popular Shonen series, and also being produced before the days when violent anime was screened during the night, desaturated, typically-glowing white blood was the only way that Fist of the North Star could air on television at all. Of note is that this decision seems to have satisfied the censors enough to leave the series' trademark martial arts and killing techniques completely intact.
    • There is some genuine red blood in the anime TV series, most notably when Shin cripples Kenshiro in their first fight. You will never see it when Kenshiro makes a random mook's head violently explode, however. As a general rule of thumb, if the wound is minor (such as Kenshiro being subject to Paper Cutting) or if the character in question has finished bleeding, the censors were okay with it - so, red blood on characters or on the floor/other objects was okay, but not if it was in motion.
    • Averted in the 1986 film by Toei Animation in its full-gorifed glory and film series by North Star Pictures.
  • Inuyasha:
    • While the manga always depicts characters' blood as red in colored artwork, the anime makes use of this trope frequently — blood is most likely to look darker on characters wearing darker clothes. This can have the odd effect of making the wounds of the red-wearing protagonist more jarring.
    • Averted in the movies; like in the manga, blood is always red.
  • In Kaiba, blood is green. This is consistent with the fact that 90% of everything in the setting looks like a Picasso painting, architecture included.
  • Gen Shishio from Kekkaishi seems to bleed white blood.
  • King's Game The Animation is a horror series where characters frequently die bloody deaths, but blood is colored dark brown instead of red.
  • Downplayed in Miss Kobayashi's Dragon Maid. The blood from the wound that Tohru had when she first met Kobayashi was black, but the blood sent flying when Kobayashi pulled out the sword was dark red.
  • Moon Phase uses red blood for minor wounds (vampire bites), but switches to black when someone gets a hole dug into their chest.
  • My Bride is a Mermaid opts for sprays of clear/rainbow-tinted fluid, an effect retained in the DVD release. (Probably a Shout-Out to Fist of the North Star which used the same manner of censor and yet still managed to be awesome in spite of itself.)
  • Not all of the blood in Myself ; Yourself is black, just everything greater than a scratch on the finger.
  • Naruto:
    • The anime adaptation rarely uses this trope, but it makes an exception when Gaara kills three competitors during the Chuunin Exams, a scene that featured more blood than the rest of the series combined. The black color of the blood might be a result of the blood thickening the sand.
    • Also, the Brazilian release drastically darkened Hinata's blood on Naruto's hand after her defeat at the Chūnin Exam preliminaries.
    • The German TV release apparently thought Naruto is great for elementary students and decided to censor it, sometimes making the blood black, sometimes censoring it to the point of deleting all the corpses (which ends up quite hilarious in the scene with the memory of Sasuke where he runs through his former hometown, only to find everyone dead, including his parents, since he freaks out over nothing).
  • Pokémon: The Series:
    • In the anime, the few times Ash is cut onscreen he bleeds black. What's odd is that you see the blood fly through the air very dramatically, but his clothes remain uncut. The reason as to why Ash's blood is black is likely because of the animation style.
    • Averted a few other times, like when Misty got cut on a vine or when N got attacked by a Pokemon.
  • Rave Master does this. The most obvious example is the second opening which has short scene with Haru's face covered in black good.
  • In Sailor Moon's first season, Nephrite had a Heel–Face Turn and was quickly hunted down and stabbed through the chest with branch tentacles. His blood was everywhere, but it was green so it was okay to show, even on Western Television. Curiously, the other 3 of Queen Beryl's generals all bled red whenever receiving injuries.
  • Picture above: the heavily-censored "Knights of the Zodiac" English dub of Saint Seiya. Squid-ink blood was actual Dic being subtle, right up there with editing out the blood altogether — other scenes painted the blood neon green and called it "fighting spirit." Since Saint Seiya is a series where many characters become Overdrawn at the Blood Bank, this got silly very, very fast.
  • School Days uses this trope (though it's red for the DVD release). Though for some odd reason, the second murder during the same episode has red blood, even in the censored version.
  • Vampire Knight: In the anime. The manga actually has red blood in the colored pages.
  • In Waq Waq, almost everyone has black blood. Like Soul Eater above, it's not a form of censorship but rather a plot point: red blood is a prophesied trait of the "kami".

    Comic Books 
  • Used occasionally in Catwoman. One notable example is in issue #23 — when Hilary shoots Jorge in the head, there is a big puddle of black blood oozing from the wound on the floor.
  • City of Silence by Warren Ellis and Gary Erskine uses black blood, which is weird considering how gleefully Squicky the comic is about displaying a decadent dystopia.
  • Used in Daredevil #181 when Bullseye fatally wounds Elektra by slashing her throat with a playing card and stabbing her with her own sai, although one panel features a trail of red blood as she limps over to Matt Murdock's apartment.
  • In G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero (Marvel) — a war comic, albeit one in which any named protagonist or even antagonist dying is a major plot event — blood is usually black, with the occasional redness in the "glossy patch" (where a bit of white would be on an oil slick to show that it was reflective).
  • This trope crops up in the Green Lantern (1941) origin story. After the bridge he's working on is blown up, Alan Scott retrieves the body of one of his colleagues, absolutely drenched in blood, but looking like India ink.
  • Hard Boiled utilizes black blood, may be justified in the case of the protagonist since he's a robot.
  • My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic (IDW): In issue 3, when Chrysalis kills a kitten, there is black blood. It not being red, coupled with the actual killing being offscreen are probably the only reasons this scene was allowed.
  • Wounds geyser what looks like mud in quite a few Marvel Knights-era The Punisher stories.
  • Superman:
    • The Pre-Crisis story Action Comics #544, introducing the revamped, SkeleBot 9000 version of Brainiac, shows Superman taking what was, at that time, an unprecedentedly graphic beating. His blood is colored black, and frankly, that just makes it creepier. Then again, this was the brief period in the mid-'80s when Gil Kane was inking his own work, lending a very surreal look to his normally very realistic pencils. The black blood is just one more factor making the already weird images start to veer into nightmare territory.
    • At some points in The Death of Superman, Superman's blood is black as Doomsday cuts him, but not all the time.
  • In Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles Adventures #54 after The Mighty Mutanimals are shot to death by The Gang of Four, black blood is seen oozing from their bodies.
  • Used when Tintin is shot in the shoulder in The Blue Lotus; the adventure was drawn and originally printed (both in Le Petit Vingtième and in album form) in black and white. When it was republished in a colorized version over a decade later (in 1946) most of the original linework was left untouched.
  • The Transformers (Marvel): Justified, since most of the important characters are robots.
  • Ultimate Spider-Man had Peter Parker come home to find Uncle Ben dead and black bloodstains on the carpet.
  • In Issue #8 of West Coast Avengers (2018), when Gwen cleaves through a dozen Masque minions with her katanas, all their blood is black. Gwen lampshades this, noting "this will be way less bloody than usual... probably."
  • The Wolverine series is kind of notorious for it. In the hands of a bad artist, it can look like just blotched inking.

    Fan Works 

    Films — Animation 
  • The animated movie The Batman vs. Dracula, while it had a few drops of red blood, but switched to black when Vampire Joker spilled the entire contents of a blood bank's vault.
  • In The Little Mermaid Ursula has black blood first seen when Eric shoots a spear at her cutting her arm, then when he kills her by ramming her with the mast. Somewhat justified - Ursula's top half is human, and her bottom half is octopus-like. Cephalopods like octopi and squid have blue blood, which when mixed together with red human blood, might in fact come out somewhere close to black.
  • Wreck-It Ralph: Unlike the liters of bright red blood from his source material, Kano ripping the zombie's heart out online sprays a few drops of purplish goo.

    Films — Live-Action 
  • 300 had incredibly dark blood.
  • Played for Horror in Color of Night. Psychiatrist Bill Capa suffers from a psychological condition where he is no longer capable of seeing the color red after a traumatic experience. Unfortunately, a serial killer starts targeting his new patient group. While investigating the home of one of the victims, who happens to be an erotic painter, Capa sees a pool of black paint on the floor in his studio. You can see where this is going.
  • It might not really be blood, but when Silent Bob breaks open Azrael's chest in Dogma, there's lots of black evil.
  • For Evil Dead 2, director Sam Raimi attempted to keep his R rating by filling the Deadites with every color of fluids except red. And then splatter it all on Bruce Campbell at once. It didn't work and the movie got slapped with an X rating anyway, so they opted to release it unrated instead.
  • Parts seven and eight of the Friday the 13th series have much darker blood that the previous films, probably because the MPAA was really cracking down on horror films in the late 80s.
  • From Dusk Till Dawn features buckets and buckets of blood, but the vampire blood is green and not red. According to Word of God (on the DVD commentary), this was because the censors were OK if the blood was green.
  • The Gamera films feature different colors of blood depending on which monster is bleeding. Gamera himself bleeds green, while Space Gyaos bleeds purple, to name two examples.
  • The trailer for Kill Bill Volume 1 digitally retouched the blood on the Bride to a black color for the scenes from the fight with the Crazy 88, just to get an All Audiences rating for it. In the movie itself, that fight scene was partially turned to black and white for the US release for a similar reason; audiences elsewhere got to see the gore as Tarantino intended. A few shots from the black and white sequence were shown in full color during the end credits for Volume 2.
  • In George A. Romero's Land of the Dead, a lot of the blood was actually digitally colored black in order to work it's way down to an R-rating for theaters. The Uncut DVD fixes this, and shows young girls a reason why navel piercings are a baaaad idea.
  • The Princess Bride uses copious amounts of Black Blood, particularly during Westley's fight with the ROUS and Inigo's duel with Count Rugen.
  • Alfred Hitchcock famously shot Psycho in black and white, specifically so he could use chocolate syrup to represent Janet Leigh's blood in the shower scene.
  • In Run Sweetheart Run when Ethan is exposed to sunlight he is shown to have black blood.
  • Saw 3D is infamous for having pink blood, an especially egregious characteristic given that this film is also Bloodier and Gorier than previous films in the Saw series. This, instead of being a form of censorship, was a deliberate choice by the filmmakers to ensure the blood looked red in 3D, but for whatever reason it was not colour corrected back for the 2D release.
  • Meanwhile, Sin City has white blood. Or, in one particular case, yellow blood. This is an artifact of the comics it's based on, which are entirely black and white (no gray!) except for the yellow Junior (and his blood). It's worth noting however that it changes from shot to shot and story to story. In "That Yellow Bastard" the blood is always white, save for the Bastard's, but in "The Hard Goodbye" pretty much all the blood is bright red (in the commentary the directors noted that the black blood just made Hartigan's face look muddy instead of beaten to a pulp, so they had to make it red). "The Big Fat Kill" throws consistency out the window in favor of interesting visuals. One character is shown with his hand blown off and spewing white blood, but when his throat is slashed, red blood splashes on another character's face.
  • Stardust: When Prince Primus' throat is slit he turns out be a literal Blue Blood. Matthew Vaughn confirmed that they had to use a different color for ratings reasons and decided to go with the pun.
  • Taxi Driver uses foamy pink blood during the climactic scene where Travis Bickle goes on a one-man killing spree. Actually, it's the entire scene that had been desaturated to make the blood less offensive.
  • The New Zealand psychological thriller The Ugly had literally black blood. According to TOW: "Author John Kenneth Muir writes in his book, Horror Films of the 1990s, about how this visual cue may suggest that Simon (the film's serial killer) never saw his victims as being human, making it easier for him to kill."
  • Seen in The Witches (2020) when The Grand High Witch cuts her hands on the fans when trying to grab the children who were turned into mice through the vent.

    Literature 
  • Bone Song by John Meaney is set in Tristopolis, a City Noir where humans live side by side with fantastic creatures, including black-blooded Revenant Zombies.
  • Orcs and other evil creatures in the The Lord of the Rings universe are sometimes described to have black blood, though whether this is literal or figurative is left as an exercise to the reader. (It's probably not figurative, since the black blood of Gothmog's troll guards caused Hurin's axe to smoke and wither in The Silmarillion.)
  • Blood is sometimes described this way in The Red Tent, particularly when it results from particularly tragic deaths, such as Death by Childbirth.

    Live-Action TV 
  • In The 100, 'nightbloods' are people with black blood who can withstand radiation. It is both genetic and can be made in a lab.
  • In Helix, this is justified as a marker of infection with the viruses NARVIK-A and NARVIK-B. NARVIK-A infectees hemorrhage to death and liquefy into a black mess, while NARVIK-B infectees develop highly visible Tainted Veins and begin to excrete black mucus and Bad Black Barf from their mouths.
  • Smallville is guilty of this in at least two episodes. In the first, it was justified in that the guest character was Cyborg of Teen Titans fame and it wasn't blood but mech fluids (keeping in line with the comics). In a later episode that pitted General Zod against Clark, Clark gets a bloody lip that bleeds black blood (which is odd, as Clark has been shown to bleed red blood several times before).
  • In True Blood (ironically), you can see Maryann's black blood (and heart) when Sam kills her.

    Professional Wrestling 
  • Papa Shango, the voodoo practitioner of the early 1990s WWF, literally could as part of his gimmick make his opponents (or, at times, Ultimate Warrior or "Mean" Gene Okerlund) ooze black blood ... and he didn't have to be anywhere near the arena to do this!
  • Mostly seen in the late-90s and up, recaps of bloody matches would be shown with the color out.
  • And oddly enough, a forgotten character in early-'90s WCW was called "Black Blood."

    Video Games 
  • If you turn off the "Gore" option in Alien Hominid, enemies spray flowers when stabbed.
  • In Alien Quarantine, aliens bleed green blood.
  • ANNO: Mutationem: In a Pensieve Flashback when Ann sees the memory of her Superpowered Evil Side emerging that caused her to lose control, attacked Ryan and struck his eye, the blood from the injury is colored white.
  • The halls of Arkham Asylum in Batman: Arkham Asylum are liberally decorated with black smears and splatters. This was originally intended to be blood, but was changed prior to release so that the game could get away with a T rating.
  • In Bendy and the Ink Machine, black ink is used as blood for the ink monsters.
  • Appropriately (yet strangely for an M-rated game); the game Black has no blood at all, but rather sparks and black fragments (shredded kevlar?) emit from enemies.
  • Castlevania:
    • In the European and Australian versions of Castlevania: Bloodlines, all of the blood is replaced with what appears to be water. Also the realistically gross-looking reddish zombies were recolored a comical shade of green.
    • The Scarecrow enemies in Castlevania: Symphony of the Night have green blood instead of red, the only such example in the entire game, in fact. Perhaps done as a minor concession to good taste, since the enemy —a male or half-naked female corpse, gorily impaled on a pole— is already rather gruesome even with green blood.
    • Castlevania: Harmony of Dissonance features pink blood. Rather than censorship, this is most likely due to the game's rather garish color palette note 
  • Danganronpa uses neon pink for its blood, though characters still describe it as red; contrary to common misconception by the fanbase, this wasn't to avoid any ratings issues (as the game already gets a high content rating for many other reasons) but was a conscious decision on the part of the devs to make the atmosphere less grim and more "psychopop". However, this only applies to fresh blood. Dried blood is depicted as dark red. This carries over to all titles in the franchise with the exception of Danganronpa 3 - Future Arc, where the comparatively more grim atmosphere is accompanied by more naturally red blood. Early builds of the first game can also be seen with red blood as well. In Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair, this even applies to Mechamaru bleeding oil, which is colored light blue.
  • Dark Souls: The Souls games give you the option to change the blood to "mild" (black), or "off."
  • The US console release of Darkstalkers 3 uses white blood, which, at best, makes it look like sand or kitty litter. And, just to make things utterly nonsensical, Jedah's blood-based attacks are still rendered in the same color they were in the arcade. The effect this had on Dmitri's super attack is legendary. First he turns his opponent into a pretty female (if necessary), then he bites their neck, which causes a pool of blood to form directly under them. But in the censored version, it forms a pool of white fluid. The result looks nearly pornographic.
  • Doki Doki Literature Club!: The PlayStation 4 and PlayStation 5 versions of Plus change the scene where Yuri stabs herself to death to have black blood instead of red, as is the case in every other version of the game.
  • The international versions of the Nintendo Entertainment System port of Déjà Vu (1985) changes the dead alligator's blood from red to black.
  • Destroy All Humans! usually opts for Bloodless Carnage instead, but when you use the anal probe to make someone's head explode, it bursts in a shower of green blood.
  • Digimon:
  • Dragon Age: Origins inverts this, for some reason. While many characters will remark on how the Darkspawn's tainted blood is black, all blood effects are rendered in bright red, no matter the race or species of the victim. The Warden can claim that this is a common misconception and it's actually red, but it burns when it touches you. This doesn't happen either.
  • The PS2 port of Higurashi: When They Cry had this in all cases of blood in order to avoid a 18+ rating at a time where the CERO system was being reclassified. Oddly enough, the DS port restores the blood as red and still has the same rating as the PS2 version.
  • House of the Dead does something similar with its "censored" release. All of the red bits that are result of the gore effects (so flesh, blood as well as some of the giant maggots) are changed to Green instead of red. However, bloody marks that appear on-screen upon getting hit are still red. Strangely, the Dreamcast port of House of the Dead 2 lets you switch between red and green blood, but the damage marks are permanently set to bright orange either way.
  • I=MGCM uses neon pink for the blood color. Especially in demons' death sprites in the gameplay, the CG of woman's corpse in Demon's Tower dungeon intro, and heroines' onscreen deaths scene in Chapter 6 Episode 5 in the first arc of the main story. Another one is an aversion, due to unusual color contrast of the CG scene. In the Chapter 12 Episode 5, the blood color is red in the scene where the main universe Iroha gets brutally impaled by Nemesis Iroha a.k.a. her Ultimate Magica Self, who has become a raging Fallen Hero.
  • Inazuma Eleven didn't had characters bleeding at all for most of its run, being aimed at kids. The first character who ever bled in the anime adaptation was Sakanoue Noboru in episode 6 of Orion after Luci Fanos cut his leg with a knife hidden in his cleat. The color of Sakanoue's blood was black.
  • JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • The Legend of Zelda:
    • Ocarina of Time: Famously, the original gold cartridge version had Ganondorf vomit red blood when Link killed him, but this was changed to green in later releases, among other changes (Link still bleeds red when taking damage, however).
    • Twilight Princess displays a brief but rather large gush of black blood when attacking Shadow Beasts.
    • Tears of the Kingdom: When Ganondorf tears the implanted Secret Stone out of his head in preparation to swallow it and undergo the forbidden draconification rite to gain enough overwhelming power to crush Link, the wound left in his forehead is filled with bubbling black ichor, indicating his Demon King form has this.
  • LEGO Star Wars: The Force Awakens replaces the bloody handprint on Finn's helmet in the film with a green stain to help keep an E10+ rating.
  • In the The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers game for PlayStation 2 and Xbox, not only do the orcs and trolls bleed black blood, but so do the heroes. However in the Return of the King game, the enemies bleed but the heroes don't.
  • Initially played straight in Mad Rat Dead, with the Mob Rats and the Doctor bleeding yellow blood. Eventually it's revealed that the deaths of the Mob Rats and the Doctor were just hallucinations. From then on, every character is shown to bleed red blood.
  • In Marvel vs. Capcom: Infinite, the blood Jedah uses in his attacks was changed from red to purple.
  • Master Detective Archives: Rain Code, the spiritual successor to the Danganronpa games, follows in its footsteps with neon pink blood for its victims. This time, though, the blood is actually acknowledged as pink in-universe, and it isn't until near the end of the game that the main characters realize just how strange that is. Then you start to wonder why Yuma's blood is red whenever he bleeds during the mystery labyrinths... setting up the twist that most of the murder victims were actually homunculi.
  • Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance changed its red blood to white blood for the Japanese release. However, this does make fit as the cyborg character from Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots had artificial white blood. One character in the Japanese version did keep red blood - Samuel - which helped reinforce the division between him, a human with a robot limb, and the full-body/almost full body cyborgs battled in most of the game.
  • Metal Slug has a "censored" setting, which features water for most enemies instead of blood. Zombie blood becomes green, the pirates from Metal Slug 4 bleed black, and the Amadeus Syndicate soldiers (also from 4) have their blood removed entirely.
  • To match the source material, in Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor and Middle-earth: Shadow of War orcs have black blood (although the lightning sometimes causes it to look blue), while humans have red blood.
  • Monster Hunter 3 (Tri) has an option allowing the player to turn off the blood splashes and the green splashes (or whatever bugs bleed) and possibly some other visual effects. This is actually justified by the game as it hints that it helps the Wii in the performance of the game if it's turned off. Either way, the blood effects are on by default.
  • In Monster Party, the title screen is drenched in green stuff that was originally red in the unreleased Japanese version. Somehow, the level start screen and the entire second half of the first stage are still covered in red blood.
  • Mortal Kombat:
  • NanoBreaker has a setting that change blood into a colourful kaledioscope of rainbow-sprays.
  • The Japanese and European releases of No More Heroes turned all the blood black, which wouldn't be so bad if it wasn't close to being a playable Tarantino movie. A scene involved the sequence where, after defeating a woman in battle, she commits honourable suicide by depinning a grenade and holding it in her mouth, with predicable results. Since, just before, she told the main character that she was attracted to him, he awkwardly hugged her dead, still-standing, headless body. In the censored version, her head and shoulders were still attached, but completely black, ruining the impact. The game's sequels remain uncensored, however.
  • Onimusha series:
    • Averted in Onimusha 3: Demon Siege, where there's an option for making fights even gorier (namely it allows you to bisect enemies with critical hits, though the corpses vanish almost istantly leaving no blood behind).
    • In Onimusha: Dawn of Dreams enemies bleed red, but you have the option of changing it to green blood or to bloodless.
  • Paradox Interactive couldn't feature blood in their games for the Chinese releases and they couldn't remove the blood completely so they had a hard time to figure out a solution for the Chinese censorship. It ended up with a decision to make the blood black instead.
  • In Resident Evil: Deadly Silence, the Nintendo DS port of the original Resident Evil, blood is colored green. Fortunately, it can be switched back to red in the options menu, but green is the default for some reason.
  • The Serious Sam games allow you to change the blood from red to either green or "hippie", which replaces blood smears with images of flowers and the gibs with watermelons and other fruits. You can also disable the blood (and/or gibs) entirely. The "kids" option in the HD makeover has the blood replaced with sparkley stars, and gibs are now candy.
  • The Colossi in the T-rated Shadow of the Colossus all bleed black blood when stabbed or shot. Then again, it might have looked weird if they had bled anything but black, given the aesthetic of the rest of the game. "Black Blood" is actually the name of one of the tracks on the OST. Wander also vomits black blood after each Colossus battle, as well as spraying a bunch when he's killed by Lord Emon's troops near the end of the game.
  • Early Shadow the Hedgehog trailers showed enemy alien characters spewing red blood when hit, but when ESRB announced a middle rating between Everyone and Teen, the developers changed the color to green. Of course, the aliens themselves are still reddish, not to mention the similarity of our titular hero's red blood to his otherworldly creators.
  • A hidden setting in Silent Hill 1, 2 and 3 lets you change the enemy blood to green, black, or purple if red was making you feel too squeamish.note  The first game is actually a bit more disturbing with black blood, because the default color is a not-very-realistic looking bright, translucent red like Kool-Aid.
  • In perhaps the weirdest application of this trope ever, in 'Splosion Man, people bleed meat. And no, not as in gibs or "bloody chunks of meat" — things like steaks, ribs, hams, sausages, and... donuts?
  • The Korean and Japanese releases of Starcraft have black blood spatters in death animations, even on Terrans. This makes some of the pro-gamer videos from South Korea look odd to western eyes.
  • The German release of Team Fortress 2 and the Meet the Team shorts has the classes bleed oil instead of blood. However, the German version of the Meet the Sniper short still contains the red blood.
  • The SNES Total Carnage port had green "blood".
  • In Turok 2 there is an option to change the enemies' blood from red to green. Germans did not get that option.
  • Wizard101: The Blood Bat spell spits green blood. According to Word of God, it was originally meant to be red, but it was changed in order to ensure an E or E10+ rating.
  • Xenoblade Chronicles:
    • In the original release of Xenoblade Chronicles 1, splatters of blood shown in some cutscenes were colored red. However, in the Definitive Edition, these were recolored to be black. Oddly enough, the blood on Metal Face's claws after he stabbed someone remained red.
    • In Xenoblade Chronicles 3, nearly all blood depicted is colored black. Examples include: Vandham getting shot through the chest at the start of the game, leaving black blood staining his clothes; the full flashback showing Joran's fate in which he is crushed under debris, with his blood pooling out from underneath; and Cammuravi gouging his own eye out to prevent himself from being controlled by Moebius, leaving behind trails of black blood pouring out from his empty socket.
  • In the SNES version of Zombies Ate My Neighbors, all of the blood that was present in the Sega Genesis version is replaced with an unidentified purple slime.

    Web Animation 
  • Season 10 of Red vs. Blue feature the Chaingun Twins as new additions to the Insurrection's Quirky Miniboss Squad. They're able to pin down the Freelancers while the leader and C.T. make their getaway, until Agent Florida regains consciousness and drops a crane on them, causing a massive yellow splatter. Word of God says this is paint and that they're (probably) human, but it's clearly intended to have this effect.
  • In RWBY, any amount of blood more than a small trickle is visually represented as a burst of rose petals, ironically keeping the gore level minimal while still featuring a ton of red.
  • Helluva Boss: When Blitzo is shot in Murder Family, he bleeds black. This is reinforced in Season 2's Exes and Oohs where every demon killed on screen is shown to have black blood. Humans still bleed red though (and a lot of it).

    Web Comics 
  • In Denma the Quanx, usually this work depicts blood red. But once the people infected the Space disease, their blood turns black. It's apparently somewhat of a case of censorship.
  • Averted in Ears for Elves here, which is surprising for a black-and-white comic. It's the only time color has been used in the main comic; the artists said that a great thing about making a webcomic was the ability to experiment.
  • Nan Quest uses this in a strange way. Freshly-spilled blood from wounds is black, but atmospheric bloodstains (including Anna's dismembered corpse) are red. In an otherwise black-and-white comic, this is quite striking.

    Western Animation 
  • There was a censored version of the Captain Planet and the Planeteers episode "Mind Pollution", where Linka's cousin Boris cuts his arms on broken glass... and incriminating recolored puddles could be seen. (However, a different shot or two with red blood remained!)
  • Gargoyles: When the Disney Channel was finally convinced to show the Banned Episode "Deadly Force", Elisa's pool of blood was changed to be black.
  • Over the Garden Wall: The giant dog in the first episode gets crushed between a rock and the turning mill-wheel of the Woodsman's mill, complete with a Sickening "Crunch!" and vomiting a massive spray of Black Blood.
  • Spongebob Squarepants: When "SpongeBob in RandomLand" references Squidward's Suicide, the image of Squidward used only has red pupils while the running fluids are black.

 
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