Eat Me

Drax, the (Bowel) Destroyer.

"You're nothing but a smear on the Sports page to me, you slimy, gut-sucking, intestinal parasite! Eat me! EAT ME!"

— Agent K, Men in Black

This is a strategy by which a character intentionally allows their enemy to consume them so that they can attack it from the inside.

There are two basic variations on this. The first type is typically used against Extreme Omnivore monsters which have no compunction against just eating the hero. The hero allows the monster to swallow him whole so that he can blast its unprotected insides. The second type is used against villains in The Assimilator mold. The hero lets the villain assimilate him or absorb his powers, which turns out to actually hurt the villain by in some way; through poisoning, or passing on an infection or curse, or by being just so Blessed with Suck that gaining his power is actually a hindrance to the villain.

This strategy can also be used by villains, but is much rarer, mainly because as a result of Bad Powers, Bad People few heroes have abilities that involve eating or assimilating their opponents.

When the result is unexpected rather than planned or is played for laughs, that's Too Spicy for Yog-Sothoth.

Let's Meet the Meat is the trope for when the meal really does want to be eaten, and presumably what this one looks like from the eater's perspective, until they start having trouble digesting it.

For the explosive version, see Feed It a Bomb. For versions where the hero wasn't counting on getting eaten but busts out anyway, see Kill It Through Its Stomach. If Satan or a senior member of the infernal hierarchy is doing the eating, this can lead to a tour of the Bloody Bowels of Hell.

Not to be confused with Schmuck Banquet. Contrast Regret Eating Me. Compare Protection in Mouth, for a benevolent version of this.

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Examples of being Physically Eaten:

Anime and Manga

• Dead Leaves has this happen at the end of the film, with the giant space caterpillar eating Pandy's rapidly aging baby, and the baby blows it up from the inside and sacrifices itself. It... actually makes even less sense in context.
• In Digimon: The Movie, Magnamon and Rapidmon let Cherubimon swallow them so they can attack the virus within it. Though this only happens in the Dub. In the original, Cherubimon tricked them into thinking they beat him, but instead materialized behind them and munched them. However a nose variation was used by War Greymon to finish off Metal Seadramon, even cooler though is that he deflected another attack before doing this.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In Dragon Ball, Piccolo had sealed Kami-sama in a bottle and then swallowed it. Therefore, Goku couldn't attack him at full power. When Piccolo shows his ability to become a giant, Goku provokes him to grow to his maximum size, and then shoots himself down Piccolo's throat. Piccolo vomits him as quickly as he could, but not before Goku hits his insides and recovers the bottle.
  • In Dragon Ball Z, Super Buu turned Vegito into candy and made the mistake of trying to eat him. Super Buu was also fond of pulling a forced Eat Me on his opponents, turning himself into goo and flying down their throats until they explode. This backfired on him when he tried to go down Vegetto's throat; Vegetto was able to contain him and beat the crap out of him from the outside by punching himself.
  • In Dragon Ball GT, Majuub has his own attack reflected against him by the Big Bad, Baby, turning him into chocolate. Baby promptly swallows him whole. Later, when Baby has The Hero Goku on the ropes, Majuub reveals that he planned for that to happen, so he could attack Baby from within his own body.
• Doraemon films:
  • Towards the end of Doraemon: Nobita and the Castle of the Undersea Devil, with most of the heroes except Doraemon a dShizuka defeated and captured alive by Poseidon, Doraemon's last attempts to take down Poseidon with a grenade fails. But Buggy, the Sentient Vehicle hiding in Doraemon's Fourth-Dimensional Pocket who had grown close to Shizuka during the adventure, sees her crying and in a rage, shoots himself out of the pocket towards Poseidon. One of Poseidon's mooks managed to fire a shot at Buggy, but Buggy forced himself into Poseidon's mouth before he explodes, taking down the villain in the process.
  • Professor Napogistra from Doraemon: Nobita and the Tin Labyrinth, the mad AI controlling all the hostile robots on Mechatopia, was taken down when Doraemon fires a disc - with Doraemon's Mini-Me, Mini-Dora sitting on it - into Napogistra's mouth. Cue Napogistra coughing out Mini-Dora seconds later, and Doraemon and Nobita collecting Mini-Dora before leaving as Napogistra and his robots began malfunctioning in a few minutes.
  • Doraemon: Nobita and the Windmasters have Nobita's pet, Fuuko, sacrificing herself to destroy the all-powerful elemental dragon, Mafuga, by absorbing the heat from a volcano and entering Mafuga's mouth while being enforced by the Wind Tribe. She ends up separating the parts Mafuga are made of permanently, destroying the monster but at the cost of her life.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency, Joseph Joestar lets Santana partially absorb him so he can activate his ripple inside Santana's body, bypassing Santana's impervious skin.
• In King of Thorn, Marco and Kasumi have to jump down the mother monster's throat to reach the Big Bad, Zeus.
• In Mythical Detective Loki Ragnarok, as part of a Cooking Duel episode, the villains try to feed Loki a shapeshifted monster (one of the four stags that eat the branches of Yggdrasil), as Loki will be unable to block an attack from within. Loki spots it right away, though, and doesn't bite.
• Kinkaku and Ginkaku of Naruto seem to have had this plan. Two warriors of Kumogakure who engaged the Kyuubi in battle long ago, we find they were eaten by the Kyuubi. Looking at some panels in the manga, it looks as if they basically went into his mouth on their own. While inside, they ate the meat of his stomach for two weeks before the creature regurgitated them. This event allowing them to acquire some of it's chakra for themselves, which allows them to don a bijuu shroud like that of a Jinchuriki, though we only got to see Kinkaku use his.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has Unit-02 hold open Gaghiel's mouth so that two battleships can smash into it and fire their guns into its soft insides.
• One Piece,
  • In some of the mid-Alabasta arc filler in Portgas D. Ace hops into a giant lizard's mouth so he can roast it from the inside.
  • Vice-Admiral Momonga allows a Sea King to eat him, and just cuts his way out in the most badass way possible.
  • In the 12th movie, Lily's plan to defeat Shuzo is to shrink herself to the size of a pebble so Usopp can use his slingshot to propel her into the villain's mouth. Then she plans to expand. (A rather gory idea, but effective.) However, Usopp misses, and Luffy swallows her. Okay, Time for Plan B; Lily decides to expand anyway, and due to Luffy's own stretchable nature, he grows to giant size (uh-huh, Sure, Let's Go with That...), and is able to fight Shuzo mano-a-mano.

Comic Books

• In DC: The New Frontier, Death Seeker Joe kills the T. rex that murdered his friends by jumping down its throat while holding live grenades.
• The Fantastic Four's very first battle with the Sub-Mariner ended this way, with the Thing volunteering to carry an A-bomb into the stomach of Namor's prize Kaiju.
• Melaka Fray gets swallowed by a giant demon creature. Rather than hack her way out of the stomach as per usual for this trope (which would be a death sentence), she gets caught in its throat and hacks her way to the brain, then exits via the eye.
• The Incredible Hulk: The Hulk let the Galaxy Master eat him, so that he can smash it from the inside.
• During the "Return of Hawkman" arc in Justice Society of America, Atom Smasher is swallowed whole by one of the main villain's lieutenants. He gets free by literally bursting him open from the inside.
• In Nextwave Machine Man lets Fin Fang Foom eat him, the better to defeat Foom from the inside.
• Nightwing does this to defeat the final monster in Night of the Monster Men. Once inside, he injects it with a serum that dissolves it.
• Spider-Man once defeated a one-shot villain named Skinhead this way, a white supremacist gang leader who could turn himself into a Blob Monster after a chemical accident. Once Spidey realized that what his body was consisted of his skeleton surrounding a mass of protoplasm, he let himself be absorbed, and then punched him in the jawbone from the inside, knocking him out and shocking him back to human shape.
• Wolverine:
  • During the Messiah Complex X-books crossover, Wolverine let the Predator X swallow him because his claws couldn't cut through its metal hide. So he tore it apart from the inside.
  • In the Old Man Logan story arc, Logan let the Hulk eat him so that he could kill him from the inside.

Fan Works

• Avengers: Infinite Wars;
  • When Steve Rogers is briefly forced to act as a gladiator on an alien world, when fighting the Gorog (a larger kind of rancor), he borrows a lightsaber from Aayla Secura and lets the creature eat him so that he can cut at it from the inside, where its metal armour isn't a defence.
  • During her campaign against Queen Zalem on Dathomir, Wanda kills a Whuffla worm that just swallowed a friend of hers by letting the worm swallow her as well so that she can attack it from the inside with her new lightsaber.
• No stars in sight: While fighting a Nïdhwal underwater, Ikharos charges into its jaws armed with only his glaive and kills it by attacking its insides. The experience leaves him slightly traumatized as he can't bear dissecting the beast "while the memory's still fresh" and has to suppress a shudder while thinking about what he went through.
• Rocketship Voyager: When the cube-ship of the Psiborg Collective tries a Mega-Maw Maneuver, Voyager doesn't wait to be subdued but instead flies straight in and opens up with its rapid-fire autocannon on the inside, which isn't protected by the meteor-proof double-armored exterior hull.

Films — Animated

• The Ant Bully: Zoc saves Lucas after he gets eaten by a frog by getting the frog to eat him while he's carrying an alka root (gives one serious gas).
• FernGully: The Last Rainforest: Krysta flies into Hexus's mouth, carrying a single seed. With everyone's help, that seed sprouts into a tree in a matter of seconds, and Hexus is sealed away once again.

Films — Live-Action

• The Avengers (2012): During the final battle scene Iron Man asks Jarvis if he has ever heard of the story of Jonah and flies into the mouth of the Leviathan and blasts his way out.
• Godzilla in Godzilla 2000: When Orga tries to swallow him, Godzilla obligingly sticks his head in the monster's mouth — then blows Orga up with a supercharged blast.
• Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2: Drax the Destroyer has the brilliant idea of killing the extradimensional monster through its stomach when its skin proves too tough to puncture. Gamora points out to Drax (or at least tries to) that the skin would be just as thick as it would be on the inside (which Star-Lord helpfully points out to Gamora). When Gamora guts it by using a tiny wound to get in, Drax pops out of the belly covered in Alien Blood and other fluids and full of the idea that he was the only one who killed it.
• Hellboy (2004): Hellboy is swallowed up by the Ogdru Jahad monster and blows it from within with a handful of grenades.
• Subverted in Kong: Skull Island. One character carrying a bandolier of grenades decides to make a Heroic Sacrifice this way, only to get smashed aside by the creature's tail instead.
• Mega Snake: This is the only way the Mega Snake can be killed; by standing completely still and calm, allowing it to swallow you whole so you can cut its heart out.
• Men in Black, the Trope Namer: Agent K goads the Bug into eating him so that he can retrieve his gun at the climax of the film.

Literature

• In Tangled Webs a berserker with a BFS was devoured by a giant squid — not as a deliberate provocation, he just didn't care in his battle frenzy. It was a very unlucky squid.
• Jonas tries this on the giant shark in Meg: A Novel Of Deep Terror. It works.
• In The Nightside novel Nightingale's Lament, John lets the Primal swallow him, knowing they'll try to possess his body and won't be able to handle it.
  • Also used in Sharper Than A Serpent's Tooth, when Razor Eddie lets a gigantic centipede-monster from the Street of the Gods swallow him so he can tear it up from within
• In Observation On The Spot by Stanisław Lem it is mentioned as a method of fighting some huge monsters.
• In Gateways, Oyv is swallowed whole by Devil the mutant alligator, then fatally wounds it by chewing his way free. At least on the surface, Oyv looks like a chihuahua, but is definitely something more.
• In The Strain, Abraham Setrakian allows The Master to infect him, knowing that vampires cannot vomit to expel poisons, and thus swallows blood thinner to poison The Master. The bastard cheats his way out.
• In Summer And Bird, Summer is eaten by a giant snake, and the Puppeteer Queen relies on birds being alive in her stomach in order to talk to them.
• Deathlands has a variation in "Ice and Fire". Ryan Cawdor is attacked by a mutant cockroach that latches onto his face. He's worried that if he just tears it off he'll lose a chuck of his face with it, so he opens his mouth to tempt it into feasting on his soft tongue, then when the cockroach tries to crawl inside, bites its head off and spits it out. The reactions of his True Companions range from admiration to nausea.
• The War Against the Chtorr: A character remote-pilots a panther-shaped robot into an attacking Chtorran worm's mouth, chews all the way through the creature's body and out the other end.

Live-Action TV

• The Avengers (1960s). In "Man-Eater of Surrey Green", Emma Peel is knocked unconscious and is about to be dragged away to be consumed by the Man-Eating Plant, so John Steed pours herbicide over her Spy Catsuit so it will be fatally poisoned in the process.
• Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers: In his last battle as the Green Ranger, Tommy tricks Turbanshell into swallowing him so that he can weaken Turbanshell from the inside with a heat blaster. He collapses from heatstroke briefly before getting back up to finish the job. It's an awesome scene — Turbanshell is walking along, saying "Hm, what should I destroy next..." and then suddenly cries out in pain as "Go Green Ranger Go" starts playing.
• In the Power Rangers Wild Force episode "Forever Red" the then-current Red Ranger flies into the mouth of Lord Zedd's zord in order to blow it up from the inside.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Doomsday Machine", this strategy is used to destroy the planet-eating Doomsday Machine, by self-destructing a ship just as the machine swallows it.
• The Ultra Series tends to do this every now and then, if the Monster of the Week turns out to be exceedingly huge.
  • In Return of Ultraman, Ultraman Jack defeat Planet Eater daikaiju Vacummon by flying into its mouth and slicing its guts apart from the inside.
  • The first half of the Temperor two-parter in Ultraman Taro. Alien Temperor is first defeated when Taro shrinks himself and leaps into Temperor's mouth, and then enlarging.
  • Ultraman Leo; when Ultraman Leo is unable to beat Hangler due to an arm injury, Leo's brother, Ultraman Astra came to assistance by shrinking himself, entering Hangler's mouth and re-enlarging, tearing Hangler apart.
  • Ultraman Gaia; the battle against Zorlim, a humongous serpentine daikaiju, ends with Ultraman Gaia flying into Zorlim's mouth and blasting it to bits starting at its throat.
  • Ultra Zero Fight have Zero facing two monsters, Bemstar and Gan-Q, at the same time, whose Belly Mouth and central eye, respectively, are interconnected. Zero then exploits the situation by purposely flying into Bemstar, and bursting out of Gan-Q's central eye, killing both monsters in one quick swoop.

Pinball

• Invoked in Data East's Star Trek pinball by shooting into the Doomsday Machine's maw.

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons & Dragons, this can actually be a good strategy for fighting very large monsters, as they're generally not armored nearly so well on the inside as the outside! But since the stomach of a creature that regularly swallows its food whole is not exactly a hospitable place, you'd better have a lot of HP. Usually swallowed people may use only short weapons, though. What isn't a good strategy is deliberately getting swallowed, cutting your way out, and letting the creature bleed to death, because "muscular action" instantly closes the hole behind you, pretty much specifically to prevent this.
  • In addition many creatures with Swallow Whole have multiple attacks, the end result being that its stomach is less damaging than being the focus of its attacks. The most notable example is the Tarrasque; you're safer in its stomach than within arm's reach of its claws.
  • In the History of Ashes arc in the Pathfinder campaign setting, the players are given the quest of provoking a giant fiery sandworm into eating them and then cutting their way out to win over a xenophobic tribe of Sclar Qua. It Makes Sense in Context.
  • The Purple Worm — a gargantuan purple earthwormlike creature — is the archetypical D&D monster for this trope, in that it's one of the few creatures — if not the only creature — who has both a "swallow whole" attack that doesn't incapacitate the victim and detailed rules for what happens to anyone inside the creature and how they can affect it in every edition of the game.

Theatre

• Invoked in the original film and the stage version of Little Shop of Horrors: after failing to destroy Audrey II from the outside, Seymour determines he has to go inside in order to kill the plant, and so he willingly goes into Audrey II's mouth. It doesn't work.

Video Games

• In the final fight of Batman: Arkham City, Batman leaps into Clayface's mouth to retrieve the cure for the sickness he and the Joker have been suffering from. He gets it, and slices his way out of Clayface with Talia's scimitar.
• One of the quicktime sequences in Dante's Inferno involves having Cerberus' middle head devour Dante in order to destroy the creature.
• A certain maggot demon in Devil May Cry 2 is a bore to kill since it spends so much time burrowing under the ground. Get eaten, however, and Dante will burst out and destroy the creature, even if you do take damage in the process.
  • Eat Me can be invoked by the player against Nightmare in DMC 1. It's dangerous inside that thing, but you can get a health item by destroying the enemies inside.
• God knows that it wasn't on purpose, but Delta Squad makes the most out of what they get when they're devoured by the giant riftworm.
• Invoked in a Zora tale in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, where Prince Sidon killed a giant Octorok that way.
• To defeat the Final Boss in Lollipop Chainsaw, Juliet has to trick him into swallowing her and Nick, then destroy his heart.
• The Queen Metroid from Metroid II: Return of Samus. The most common way to beat her is to be eaten by her, plant bombs in her gut... and get spit up so you can repeat the process multiple times.
  • Getting eaten in morph ball form and bombing your way out is necessary to get past certain creatures in the Metroid Prime series, such as the Stone Toad and Amorbis.
  • Another Queen Metroid shows up in Metroid: Other M. You eventually kill it with a Power Bomb from the inside.
• In Muramasa: The Demon Blade, Momohime convinces the Big Oni to swallow her whole, which lets her start fighting it from inside its stomach. That doesn't necessarily discourage it from swallowing her again.
• To defeat Galdon in Star Fox Adventures you have to let him eat you then, uh, beat the hell out of his heart with a stick.
• In Tales of Legendia, some of the largest monsters in the game are too big for Senel to throw, so instead of throwing them, he'll invoke the trope by jumping into their mouths and pummeling them from the inside.
• The second half of the C'thun boss fight in World of Warcraft involves being swallowed by one of the boss's tentacle mouths, attacking its weakpoint inside the stomach, then getting out before taking too much damage from digestive juices.
  • Not the only time WoW has invoked the Eat Me. The final quest in a Mist of Pandaria zone has the player use a large rhino-like animal to launch them a great distance into the mouth of a mountain sized bug (repeatedly) where you literally punch it to death from the inside.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater had Red Mage (unintentionally) do this at least twice.
  Red Mage: It has exposed its weak underbelly to me in the form of its digestive tract!
• In The Adventures of Dr. McNinja, in a Bad Future conquered by superintelligent dinosaurs, Dan and Mitzi McNinja battle the Horrorsaurus. It swallows Mitzi whole, and then Dan dives in after her. While being digested in its stomach, Mitzi asks Dan why he followed her, revealing that she's decked out with explosives and got swallowed in order to kill it from within. Dan whips out his own vest of explosives, and replies, "You didn't pack enough."
• In El Goonish Shive, Ellen Dunkel jumped into monster's maw and discharged a force blast. Let's just say everyone present had to bathe before debriefing.
• In Delve Bree "surrenders" to a giant white snake and allows it to swallow her, then of course cuts her way out. Later Paraxyss the naga is fighting the Jakaali king for the right to eat the main characters, eventually the Jakaali realizes that she's too tough to beat normally and tells her to eat him. But afterwards she mentions that she had her digestive system permanently stoneskinned.
• In The Order of the Stick, V uses this to kill a dragon: piss it off sufficiently to get eaten alive, then shapeshift into something very large.
• In Tower of God, there is a test that require people to evade a White Steel Eel in very dense Shinsu to get to a ball. So Bam lets himself get eaten by the hungry beast and stabs it's tongue, so that it won't attack him anymore.

Web Original

• Outside Xtra covered seven examples from video-games in their video "7 Bosses You Killed From the Inside Out, Ew"
• One of the many Things Mr. Welch Is No Longer Allowed to Do in an RPG:
  2093. Can't trick the dragon into swallowing a shrunken dire porcupine and then ending the spell while he swallows.
• In one episode of Unforgotten Realms, the group ends up having to fight an ogre. The ogre is too strong for them to hurt with anything besides poison, and it's doing more damage than they can handle. So Sir Schmoopy casts an enlarging spell on Petey the rat and tells him to swallow the rest of them in order to wait for the poison to finish the ogre.

Western Animation

• In a variation Scanlan suggests to Vax that they try a Kill It Through Its Stomach plan on Umbrasyl the Black Dragon in The Legend of Vox Machina Vax points out the dragon's acid breath would prevent entry this way... only for Scanlan to admit he wasn't planning on going through the front. One anal entry later and they find themselves inside the bowels.
• In the Looney Tunes cartoon "The Unexpected Pest", Sylvester forces a mouse to be chased in front of his owners to keep from being kicked out, and if he doesn't it's "down the hatch". Eventually, the mouse catches on and realizes that if something were to happen to him, Sylvester was out on the street. So he jumps into Sylvester's mouth and dares him to eat him. "Down the hatch? I dare ya! I double dare ya!" A cowed Sylvester refuses.
• Walt Disney Presents episode "Mars and Beyond". One segment about the plant men in Edgar Rice Burroughs' John Carter of Mars stories has a bird drop an egg on the plant man's head. The plant man swallows it, then a baby bird with a saw-beak cuts its way out.

Examples of being Assimilated:

Anime and Manga

• Demon Slayer: Kimetsu no Yaiba: During the Infinity Fortress arc, Shinobu takes advantage of Doma's proclivity for absorbing women to deliver the near-fatal dose of wisteria poison that had been concentrated in her own body for months.
• Claymore: Clare, mortally wounded by Priscilla and the Destroyer, allows the latter to absorb her before taking over it and using it to defeat her nemesis.
• Dragon Ball Z:
  • In the Majin Buu arc, the leader of the Kaioshin let Buu eat him. Absorbing his personality changed the Omnicidal Maniac Evil Kid Buu into the far more affable Fat Buu.
  • Vegetto lets Super Buu absorb him so he can rescue the other people who were absorbed; this turns into an entire "Fantastic Voyage" Plot. Since unlike the previous victims, Vegetto was prepared to be swallowed (as well as being really freaking powerful), he was able to cover himself with a ki barrier that allowed him to move freely inside Buu's body instead of being trapped like the other absorbees.
• Hohenheim's plan for destroying Father in Fullmetal Alchemist. Hohenheim has spent the past three hundred years getting to know each of the 536,329 individual souls within his philosopher's stone body. When Father, the one responsible for turning them into a philosopher's stone, attempts to absorb Hohenheim's stone into himself, the souls seize their chance for vengeance and tear his body apart from the inside. It didn't work. Fortunately, Hohenheim had a backup plan...
• Schrodinger from Hellsing is a villain example. Eating his soul (temporarily) destroys Alucard due to Schrodinger's nature as a paradoxical being who is "everywhere and nowhere" turning him into a living Logic Bomb.
• In Inuyasha, Naraku feigns being beaten at his own game and lets himself be absorbed by Moryomaru when Moryomaru tries to prove that he has surpassed him. Naraku promptly regenerates inside Moryomaru, removes his core, and then assimilates him. Probably shouldn't have assimilated the guy who came up with the idea to assimilate people in the first place, Moryomaru.

Comic Books

• In the Bloodstone mini-series from Marvel Comics, Elsa Bloodstone's blood is fatal to vampires.
• In an X-Men annual, Mojo allowed Rogue to absorb his powers and memories, knowing that she wouldn't be able to handle what she got, or to drain enough to inconvenience him before it was too much for her.

Films — Live-Action

• The Matrix Revolutions: The Oracle allows Smith to assimilate her so he'll gain her power of precognition and be set up for the final confrontation with Neo. When Oracle!Smith says "Everything that has a beginning has an end" (which the Oracle had said to Neo earlier), Neo realizes he needs to let Smith assimilate him. Neo then allows Smith to assimilate him so that Smith will die with him when the machines use the Prime Program Neo has been carrying to reboot the Matrix.

Literature

• In Dark Of The Moon, the second book of The Chronicles Of The Kencyrath by PC Hodgell, Torisen does this to a Darkling Changer during a blood-binding ritual. It was completely accidental on both sides: Tori didn't know that the person he thought he was performing the ritual with wasn't exactly who he looked like (if he had been the ritual would have merely created an almost-unbreakable emotional bond between the two), and the Changer didn't know that Tori was a Shanir blood-binder and that ingesting any of his blood would be fatal.
• In the Discworld novel Carpe Jugulum, Granny Weatherwax offers her blood to a vampire who is trying to turn her into another vampire. Not only does she not become a vampire, but he is surprised to find himself craving hot sweet tea—and he manifests Granny's belief in vampire weaknesses and a complete inability to admit he has a problem. As Granny puts it, "I haven't been vampired. You've been Weatherwaxed."
• In Forgotten Realms / Planescape cycle Lost Gods the illithid god agreed to let protagonists go only for a ransom of "unique information", draining it right from the victim's mind. The bard paid, naturally, with a not-yet-performed song. By the time illithids across the whole Multiverse began to rhythmically twitch, Ilsensine decided it would be better off without this sort of "unique information".
• In Hammerjack's sequel, Prodigal, Avalon joins the SEF Hive and asks them to assimilate her. She secretly injected herself with Ascension-grade Flash, which is incompatible with the Mons virus used to link the Hive together; trying to assimilate her creates a fatal resonance which kills every member of the Hive.
• In The Saga of the Noble Dead, the Fay-born canine Chap's Spirit is so strong that any vampire which he allows to drink his blood will immediately perish. He twice uses this method to destroy vampires in Child of a Dead God and The Dog in the Dark.
• In the eleventh Slayers light novel (not yet translated to English, unfortunately), Aria lets the Bell-Doolgofa chimera kill her so that it will absorb her pacifism, causing it to stop fighting.
• In the Barbara Hambly novel Those Who Hunt the Night (a.ka. Immortal Blood), a character injects himself with a lethal dose of silver nitrate before allowing his blood to be drained by a vampire; silver being lethal to vampires in this setting.

Live-Action TV

• Done another way in Angel. Angel is confronted by a necromancer who specializes in giving ghosts and demons a new physical body. In order to do this, the necromancer allows the ghost to pass through him first. In order to help Angel, a newly resurrected and incorporeal Spike plays Fake Defector and convinces the necromancer to put him into Angel's body. Once in the necromancer's body, Spike possesses him and stops him using his powers, letting Angel kill him easily. (The more direct approach against someone who controls corpses had not gone well for a vampire.) Though Spike keeps attacking until Angel chops his head off.
  Angel: That was you hitting me?
  Spike: The last bit, yeah. Hainsley's been dead since he hit the table. Oh, come on. Had to get a few licks in, didn't I?
• Inverted somewhat in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The Scoobies are fighting against a demon that can possess corpses, so Angel lets the demon enter his body and Angelus destroys the intruder in a matter of seconds.
• Doctor Who: In "Smith and Jones", the Doctor lets an alien absorb his genetic code (by drinking his blood through a straw!) so that it will show up as non-human on the Judoon scanners (it was drinking human blood to fool them).
• In one episode of Dollhouse, Echo plugs herself into the neural network of a group of super-soldiers so that she can overload and control it with her many personalities.
• Return of Ultraman: Ultraman Jack returns to this trope later when battling Reality Warper kaiju Priz-ma; by allowing himself to be assimilated into Priz-Ma, Jack finds a quick opening that allows him to blast Priz-Ma apart from the inside.
• Star Trek: Voyager introduces several instances (including Future Janeway in the finale) involving people letting themselves be assimilated in order to transmit anti-Borg viruses into the Collective.

Tabletop Games

• Magic: The Gathering has the Plague Sliver. The slivers all manifest each other's abilities; Plague Slivers are simply slivers suffering from some horrific disease that the rest of the slivers will start to manifest. In game this is crippling for sliver decks, as an opponent playing this card will basically cause your own creatures to deal damage to you.

Toys

• In an Alternate Universe BIONICLE story, Matoro allows Makuta to absorb him, using it as an opportunity to overpower his consciousness and crush his will, thus destroying both of them.

Webcomics

• In Sluggy Freelance, the Anthropomorphic Personification of the year 2003 goads the Groundhog's Shadow into killing him and claiming his power by right of caste. This grants the Groundhog's Shadow all of 2003's considerable power, but also means that it will die when the year ends — which is in twenty seconds...
  • Incidentally, this would also kill the switchblade-wielding mini-lop that the Shadow was bound to.

Western Animation

• In The Grim Adventures of the KND, Mandy intentionally allows herself to be assimilated by the Delightful Reaper knowing she can take it over from the inside.
• An episode of Jonny Quest: The Real Adventures, "DNA Doomsday", has Jonny letting the Monster of the Week absorb him while he's in Quest World in order to short-circuit it.
• Inverted in The Savage Dragon, where Dragon convinces The Fiend to possess him. Once he does so, The hate-feeding Fiend tries to turn Dragon's great strength upon whatever Dragon hates the most, only find out that IT is the thing Dragon hates most.

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