Forced Bath

A fine bunch of water lilies you turned out to be! I'd like to see anybody make me wash, if I didn't wanna!

— Grumpy just before the other dwarves throw him in the bath, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

A Comedy Trope where somebody refuses to take a bath for a long time, usually because they hate baths, until everybody gets sick of how bad they smell, drags them to the bathroom (with them protesting the entire way), and hurls them into the tub for a good scrubbing down. Expect a lot of whining about cold water, overly hard scrubbing, or getting soap in one's eyes. For extra humiliation, the victim may be doused in perfume or lotion, scrubbed down in sensitive areas or forced into embarrassing clothes immediately afterward. They emerge squeaky clean and smelling like flowers, but almost always extremely grumpy as a result.

Common victims of the Forced Bath include small children, pets (especially cats), soldiers, and tomboys getting unwanted makeovers.

Sometimes, a character might realize that Baths Are Fun when they try it properly.

Related tropes:

• Bathe Her and Bring Her to Me: A more serious related trope where the villain orders a female captive to be bathed and prepared for him.
• Filthy Fun: What frequently precedes this trope.
• Hates Baths: The reason usually given why someone is refusing to take a bath...
• The Pig-Pen: ...and the reason why everyone gets sick of it and hurls them into the bathtub anyway.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Ancient Magus' Bride: Played with in the first chapter. When Elias buys Chise (who had sold herself into slavery and is implied to have been denied things like baths during that time) and takes her home to become his apprentice, he orders her to take a bath soon after they arrive. It's not the bath itself that Chise opposes, but Elias' insistence on being there in the bathroom with her and helping scrub down her naked body. He does so anyway, much to her embarrassment.
• Doraemon: Nobita's Great Battle of the Mermaid King: has this happening only in the manga (which bafflingly gives Shizuka the Adaptational Jerkass treatment); when Shizuka finds out Sophia, a mermaid-turned-human from Planet Aquadia who unintentionally crashed on earth, had never taken a bath in her entire life (due to being from a watery planet and spending most of her life underwater), Shizuka immediately drags Sophia to her bathroom and insists on giving Sophia a scrub while lecturing how "citizens of Aquadia need to be educated on the concept of baths".
• Eureka Seven: Gekko State seeks out the wisdom of Master Norb to help enlighten everyone on Renton and Eureka's special relationship, but his reputation precedes him. Holland orders the crew to draw a bath while he's transferring onboard the ship. After introductions are over, they drag him into the bath and wash him down good. In the following scene, he claims he had 50 years of dirt washed off him.
• A recurring Running Gag throughout Mahou Sensei Negima!: Negi hating baths sometimes seems like the only part of his personality that's actually ten years old. Naturally, a good portion of his class enjoy hauling him off to various bathhouses, hot springs, etc. whenever possible; a later chapter even shows Konoka throwing around "Wash Negi-kun" coupons.
• Photon: The Idiot Adventures: When Keyne Aqua awakens to find measly Photon in her bed, she tries to obliterate him with "aho energy," but Photon is too dodgy to die. Resigned to merely conversing with him, Keyne detects a foul odor and asks Photon when he last bathed. "Two months ago," he replies. Keyne leads him to her starship's natatorium, where she strips him naked and tosses him in. Photon has a Wouldn't Hit a Girl ethic, so he puts up only a token resistance while Keyne pours liquid soap on him, and starts washing him vigorously.

Comic Books

• In an Archie Comic from the Little Archie series, (little) Jughead's mother informs him that he is going to his Abhorrent Admirer's birthday party today. Jughead protests every step of the way, including while his mother bathes him, dresses him up, and drags him to Ethel's house. When they finally arrive, it turns out the party was for tomorrow.
• Commonplace in The Beano. Sometimes it'll be Dennis, Minnie, or Roger trying to avoid the bath, but the biggest case is Smudge, who had this as his entire gimmick. He loved getting covered in mud, so getting a forced bath was a regular occurrence for him. The same is true for an earlier character from its stablemate The Dandy, Dirty Dick.

Comic Strips

• Calvin and Hobbes: Calvin is frequently subject to this, being a young boy who loves to get dirty and hates baths. In one Spaceman Spiff fantasy, he's captured by aliens whose leader orders them to "take him to the interrogation room and WASH HIS HAIR!", with the last panel revealing that said "alien" is actually his mom.
  Calvin: AAUGH! You got soap in my eyes on purpose! Sinister fiend!
  Mom: If you'd stop thrashing around, maybe it wouldn't happen!
• Hägar the Horrible is compelled by his wife Helga to take a bath in a wooden tub once a year. Given that Helga is a Brawn Hilda, Hagar really can't weasel out of this yearly cleansing. Hagar's colleague Dirty Dirk has never been married and never taken a bath, to the point that his dirt and grime are almost armor plating on him.

Fan Works

• A darker example appears in Asylum of Doom. When Gaz is mentally transported back in time and becomes a patient of the Burke Lunatic Asylum, she finds out that part of their "treatment" involves being drenched in ice-cold water and roughly scrubbed down by the nurses, with uncooperative patients chained to the wall and sprayed down with hoses like animals.
  Gaz: (teeth chattering) C-couldn't you have u-used s-some warm w-water?
  Asylum Nurse: Hot water's a privilege for sane people. Besides, the cold helps the brain heal from whatever's wrong with it.
• Dungeon Keeper Ami: Ami requires her dungeon staff to be clean. The bile demons treat being forced to bathe like a horrible punishment.
• In The Loud House fanfic In the Pink, Lana rolls in some mud, so her siblings put her in a cage, dump her in the bathtub, and bathe her. However, Leni accidentally puts pink hair dye in Lana's hair instead of shampoo.
• Pony POV Series: During the Dark World arc, the newly un-brainwashed heroes decide to take a bath. Rarity is absolutely filthy after a thousand years of rolling around in dirt and dust with rocks she thought were precious gems, and is reluctant to take a bath until Spike drops her into the bathtub. Twilight and Applejack proceed to scrub her down and brush out the rat's nests in her mane with a lot of complaining, with Twilight thinking to herself that it might have been easier to just set Rarity on fire and let her immortality regenerate a new, clean body for her.
• The Second Try: In The 2nd Try: Short Stories and Aki-chan's Adventures, Shinji does this to his daughter twice and she is not happy.
• Where the Sun Don't Shine: Princess Luna hasn't had a bath for a thousand years and refuses to take one until her big sister Princess Celestia threatens to erupt into a solar storm, destroy all life on the planet, and force them to sit and wait until civilization rebuilds itself and reinvents the bathtub (and apparently she has done this at least once). When Luna agrees, Celestia drags her down to the Royal Department for Treatment of Toxic Wastes and has her scrubbed down for hours with steel wool, buzzsaws, and industrial-grade detergents. The resulting bath reveals that her cutie mark isn't actually the moon, but Uranus.
• In this My Hero Academia comic, when Aizawa gets shrunk to a tiny size by a villain's attack, Present Mic dunks him in a cup full of water and scrubs him with a toothbrush, which he's not happy about.
  Present Mic: Hey! You needed that bath, okay? Last time the neighbors called the cops because they thought something died in here.
  Aizawa: Let me guess...you also washed my outfit?
  Present Mic: Heh, no...I did a chemical purification and then washed it in holy water because that smell was hellish.
• In this comic where some of the My Hero Academia cast are Bakugou's pets, he tries to give cat-Todoroki a bath, who does not want it and uses his Quirk to freeze the water solid. Bakugou yells, "Are you serious???"
• In this piece of Star Wars fanart drawn in a Calvin and Hobbes-esque style, Leia and Han are trying to force their young son Kylo to take a bath, which he very much does not want to do.
  Kylo: AGHH! LEGGO! LEGGO! No no no no no no! PUT ME DOWN! The First Order will not stand for this!
  Han: Your first order is to take a bath!

Films — Animated

• Mulan: As part of her preparation for meeting the matchmaker, Mulan is quickly stripped and hurled into a tub of water by the beauticians. When she complains that the water is freezing cold, her mother gently chides her, "It would have been warm if you were here on time."
• Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs: Snow White tells the dwarfs to wash up or they won't get anything to eat. Grumpy is the only one who refuses to wash, so the other six dwarves promptly drag him to the tub and roughly scrub him down, while tying ribbons into his beard and draping a flower crown around his head to embarrass him.
• Valiant: Sergeant Monty directs the newly recruited carrier pigeons to shower under watering cans, and Bugsy, the most perpetually filthy of them, tries to sneak away before being dragged back. He somehow manages to make himself dirty again on the spot right after being cleaned.

Films — Live-Action

• Apocalypse Now: When soldiers come to Willard to take him to the mission briefing, he can't get himself together and just lies down on a bed. They get him up, take him to the shower cubicle, and turn on the water. He does not like it.
• The War Wagon: Lomax tells Billy that any man who shares his horse has to be sober and clean, and then throws him into the river fully clothed. Lomax tosses him a bar of soap and Billy starts washing himself... over his clothes.

Jokes

Q. How was streaking invented?

A. Somebody tried to give a (insert name of rival sports team member) a bath.

Literature

• Italo Calvino's variant of Catherine and Her Fate has the girl suffering from ill fortune reversing it by literally making her fortune prettier - by finding her and giving her a makeover by force. That includes bathing her for starters.
• In George Macdonald Fraser's McAuslan, Private McAuslan, dubbed the filthiest soldier in the world, is repeatedly given the forced-bath treatment by his barrack-room mates. As they are stationed in North Africa at the time, this could be held to be understandable. Even after the unit's return to Scotland, the Army lawyer who has to defend McAuslan at his court-martial quietly asks for his client to be forcibly washed, so that he'll look better in court. He advises McAuslan's commanding officer
  I got some of the lads to go at him with soap and scrubbing brushes. It shifted a power of dirt, that did.
• Henry Huggins: In Ribsy, when Ribsy the dog ends up separated from the Huggins family, he finds himself with another family who has four excitable daughters. The girls set about bathing poor Ribsy, who glumly accedes to this since they outnumber him. It becomes more than Ribsy can bear when the youngest one pours the entire bottle of scented bubble bath into the bathwater. Ribsy makes a desperate escape from their clutches and spends the night at a gas station, where the petrol fumes partially negate the haywire lavender aroma.
• Mr. Men: In Mr. Messy's debut, two men named Mr. Tidy and Mr. Neat visit Mr. Messy. They clean up his house (much to his chagrin), drag him up to the bathroom, and throw him in the tub. It's noted that Mr. Messy isn't used to bathing and the illustration shows him frowning. By the time it's over, he looks completely different and he quips that he'll need a new name now.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians: In The Battle of the Labyrinth, Percy has to clean all the poop out of Geryon's stables, which are home to a herd of meat-eating horses. A water naiad teaches him to use petrified seashells to summon saltwater, which he uses to wash out the stables. When he's done, everything is sparkling clean, including the horses, who have been cleaned so thoroughly that their coats are shining and even the meat scraps between their teeth have been washed out.
  Meat-eating horses: We won’t eat you! Please, lord! No more salty baths!
  Percy: On one condition. You only eat the food your handlers give you from now on. Not people. Or I’ll be back with more seashells!
• Princesses of the Pizza Parlor: Using water magic to attack a monster inadvertently cleans them off.
• In Shogun, Blackthorne's Japanese hosts must beat him up in order for him to submit to a bath.
• A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • In A Clash of Kings, after Alebelly hears a prophecy from Jojen that he's going to drown, he won't take a bath or go near the well until six of the guards throw him into a tub of hot water and scrub him clean. The prophecy turns out not to refer to literal drowning, but to Alebelly's murder by the seafaring Ironborn when they storm Winterfell.
  • In A Storm of Swords, when the Brotherhood Without Banners stays at Acorn Hall, Lady Smallwood has her maidservants take Arya upstairs and wash her down, the girl resentfully noting to herself that "they even dumped in some stinky-sweet stuff that smelled like flowers." When Gendry sees her freshly washed and wearing a dress, he laughs so hard that wine spews out his nose.
• Winnie the Pooh: In "In Which Kanga and Baby Roo Come to the Forest and Piglet Has a Bath", Kanga bathes Piglet against his will as part of her pretending to think he's her son Roo. He hates this because he's a Messy Pig (in this story anyway), and because she keeps putting the soapy cloth in his mouth.

Live-Action TV

• El Chavo del ocho: There's a brief Story Arc where people want to give Chavo a shower with water buckets due to his bad hygiene. On several occasions, he dodges the splashes (and makes other characters get splashed instead), but ultimately gets showered when someone is dropping the remaining water on a barrel, unaware that Chavo is hiding there.
• M*A*S*H: In "The Smell of Music", when Major Winchester chooses to play his horn in the swamp, Hawkeye and BJ protest by going on a bathing strike. Eventually, the entirety of the 4077 gets fed up with their antics, and forcibly wash Hawkeye and BJ, while simultaneously flattening Winchester's horn.
• Orange Is the New Black: Soso refuses to shower for so long that others complain; Pennsatucky tells her she smells like a turtle tank. When the guards intervene, she lies down outside the showers, claiming she's "demonstrating passive resistance." The unimpressed guards respond that they are "demonstrating aggressive aggression!" and just force her into the showers, making her cry.
• The Witcher (2019): Yennefer and Jaskier both bathe a reluctant Geralt in season 1, leading to some Ship Tease.
• Yeralash has a sketch where two adults sneak into a sleeping boy's room, pull a pistol from under his pillow, grab him, and drag him to a dark room. A minute later, the lights go on, the two parents with dirt-stained faces hold their kid, wrapped in a towel, and say "Finally managed to bathe him."

Music

• "No Me Quiero Bañar" (Spanish for "I Don't Want To Bathe") by Tatiana is Exactly What It Says on the Tin.

Poetry

• The classic Russian kids' poem "Wash 'Em Clean" has the titular animated washstand attempting to give a bath to a very dirty boy. The boy manages to run away but is forced to return after meeting a crocodile who threatens to eat him if he doesn't get cleaned up.

Video Games

• In Bathe the Bear, a Licensed Game for Bear Behaving Badly, the player has to bathe an anthropomorphic bear named Nev by catapulting sponges at him.

Web Comics

• Freefall: Florence Ambrose laments about the drawbacks of being a genetic hybrid Bowman's wolf. In her youth, she had a completely canine appearance, and her adoptive family bathed her like a dog. "From his perspective, he was giving me a bath. From my perspective, he was erasing all my notes."
• Handplates: In Make sure to cover the outlets, little Sans and Papyrus get into the printer and make a mess when playing with the ink cartridges, and Gaster has to give them a bath.
  Papyrus: Nooo, no no, no tashing, no tashiiiing.
  Gaster: (as he's scrubbing Papyrus) You brought this on yourself, shush.

Web Original

• Don't Hug Me I'm Scared: In "Time", the sentient clock Tony inflicts this on the cast (despite them already being clean). It's one of the early signs that he doesn't respect their agency.

Western Animation

• Garfield and Friends: In the segment "Clean Sweep," tired of giving Odie a bath every time he gets dirty, Jon buys a Laundro-Mutt robot to give Odie a bath. Every time the sensor collar detects Odie getting dirty, the robot grabs Odie and gives him a bath. Seeing this, Gafield gets Odie dirty a few times, thinking that seeing Odie being miserable is hilarious. Odie gets fed up with Garfield making fun of him, so while Garfield takes another nap, Odie slips on the sensor collar on Garfield and wakes him up by serving him a messy meal. When Garfield gets dirty eating, the Laundro-Mutt grabs Garfield and gives him a bath, all the while Odie points and laughs at him. In the end, they make peace, put the sensor collar on Jon, and when they get him dirty, the Laundro-Mutt grabs Jon and gives him a bath.
• In the Hey Arnold! episode "World Records," Arnold and Gerald attempt to break the world record for longest time without taking a bath, but the other tenants living in Arnold's apartment eventually can't stand the smell anymore and bombard Arnold and Gerald with soap and water as soon as they come inside the building.
• Johnny Test: In "Bathtime for Johnny", the entire family tries to force Johnny to take a bath, only for all of their attempts to fail. They finally get him to take one by building an indoor pool that Johnny wanted to give Dukey as a birthday present.
• Lilo & Stitch: The Series: In "Phantasmo", Stitch runs away from Lilo to avoid getting a bath due to his fear of water. Lilo has to drag him into the bathroom and he clings to the toilet seat, tearing it off. This causes the water to overflow, thus activating Phantasmo's pod.
• In the 1934 Max Fleischer short The Little Dutch Mill, the filthy, miserly owner of the titular mill, who is proud of living like a tramp despite owning a sackful of gold, kidnaps two kids who saw him counting his money and plans to burn their tongues out to stop them telling anyone what they had seen. However, the people of the town, alerted by the kids' pet duck, angrily storm the mill and give him not only a forced bath but a forced shave and haircut as well and a change of clothing, as well as scrubbing the mill from top to bottom. At the end, the miser looks around his changed surroundings and realizes to his surprise that it makes him happy, something his gold never did, and gives it all away to the townsfolk.
• Little Princess: Subverted in "I Don't Want a Bath". The Maid is about to lower the Princess (who doesn't want to take a bath due to the water getting into her eyes and nose) into the bathtub and wash her, but she tricks her by saying she wants to do it herself and then only pretending to bathe herself.
• Martha Speaks: In "Itchy Martha", Helen writes a story and adds Martha and Jake as characters. Their adversary is a robot who tries to bathe them by force by spraying soapy water at them.
• The New Adventures of Winnie the Pooh: At the start of "Stripes", Tigger is happily stomping in mud puddles until the gang ambushes him and throws him into a wash basin. He's less than pleased about this, and he's spitting out water and protesting the whole time. This then washes off his stripes, thus setting the episode's plot in motion.
• PAW Patrol: A Running Gag for the famously hydrophobic Rocky. Whenever Katie is giving the other dogs baths, he'll go well out of his way to avoid it, only for Cali to rat him out. He's then shown not enjoying his scrub-down in the least.
• The Powerpuff Girls (1998): In "Down 'n' Dirty," Buttercup refuses to take a bath and starts smelling increasingly worse until she gets kicked out of home and then run out of Townsville. However, rather than everyone else forcing her into a bathtub, she forces herself; the last straw is when not even monsters want to fight her because she smells so bad. When she yells in frustration, "All right! I'll do it! I'll take that stupid bath!" her sisters immediately haul her home at light speed and scrub her clean, which she's not happy about.
  Blossom: You know, Buttercup, you may be clean, but your attitude still stinks.
• Exaggerated and ultimately defied in the Spongebob Squarepants episode "Gary Takes a Bath". Gary, being an analog of a cat, won't take a bath, and SpongeBob goes through increasingly outlandish and desperate measures to try to get him to do so. In the end, after the last of these measures backfires, SpongeBob winds up being the one who takes a bath, and Gary ends the episode without ever taking one.

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