I'm Having Soul Pains

aka: I Am Having Soul Pains

"Owwww...my soul! No, seriously, this is actually making my soul hurt. I don't know how it's possible, but apparently, it is."

— The Necro Critic, Christmas Shoes review

When a character feels horrid pain in an... abstract way. It can be their soul, heart, spirit, hair, consciousness, or the nervous system itself, but it never leaves a physical mark and involves no gore despite it being unimaginably painful.

This trope is most frequently found in "kid-friendly" fantasy and science fiction works in an effort to heighten drama without the use of blood. Most likely, the hero is experiencing a psychological, supernatural, or magical attack that gives them ambiguous chest pains or a mind-splitting headache. You can bet that the hero will be doubled over in pain, unable to move.

Scenes with this trope can be pretty frightening anyway if used well, like with trippy spirit monsters chanting and hovering over the hero, or surreal montages of the hero's fears playing before their eyes. (See one of the possible causes, Mind Rape.)

Soul Pains usually can't kill a character by themselves. Sometimes Having Soul Pains could bring about the character's death, although it's never obvious exactly when the pain would get bad enough to actually kill him/her. Darker and Edgier works will use this trope to drive characters to suicide, just to make it all stop.

Sometimes used to bring the battle between good and evil to a personal level. In those cases, the true battle between cosmic forces is inside the characters, not out on a physical battlefield.

A character who has a Soul Jar will likely experience this if said jar is damaged or (especially) destroyed since in this case their soul is physically being damaged.

Possible symptoms include abstract clenching or burning sensations, splitting headache, or the feeling something on the inside will a splode. Causes include Mind Rape, an Agony Beam, a Soul-Cutting Blade, the presence of evil, Demonic Possession, Involuntary Shapeshifting, or using abilities that qualify as being Blessed with Suck. It may or may not be possible to heal a soul pain/injury/wound, depending on the work and case. In some settings, it may be overcome through Determinator-style Heroic Willpower. If you suffer from Soul Pains, ask your doctor if treatment through the Power of Friendship is right for you.

Achey Scars is when Soul Pains are connected to a physical scar.

Not to be confused with deaths that are only bloodless due to censorship.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Another less-than-kid-friendly variant occurs with the Brand of Sacrifice in Berserk, which inflicts this upon those who bear it in the presence of demons. The more powerful demons can inflict even worse pain on someone with the Brand, with the Godhand being the worst of them all, and intense enough pain inflicted this way can even kill them. Guts could only get within about Dragon Slayer distance from Femto before being almost completely overwhelmed by the pain, and the fact that Casca was even closer than that when she got raped by Femto (and was thus in utterly excruciating agony) was probably a big contributing factor to her loss of sanity following the Eclipse.
  • Much later, Slan of the Godhand slashed Guts across the chest, cutting into his soul as well as his flesh. While the wound on his body eventually healed, the wound in his soul will never go away. The cursed Berserker armor Guts wears is the only thing that is keeping the damage to his soul in check.
• Ichigo in Bleach, after defeating the Menos Grande, sets off his Heroic RRoD, after Urahara cuts his soul chain during Training from Hell, and again during the soul chain's encroachment. He says something along the lines of, "What's going on? I - I can't breathe!"
  • Also during Shirosaki's takeover. Ripping half his face off can't have been a bed of roses.
• This happens to both Light and Misa in Death Note, when the titular Death Note returns their memories at the conclusion of Light's Memory Gambit, but Light gets bonus points for an absolutely bloodcurdling scream. Though, his pain seems to be a combination of this and realizing who exactly he is.
  Light: Ryuzaki, let me see it!
• Delicious in Dungeon: Downplayed with mana sickness, a temporary condition that spellcasters suffer when they overdraw their Mana reserves, like when Laios uses magic for the first time. Symptoms include extreme exhaustion, nosebleeds, hallucinations, and the sense of something crawling under their skin.
• This happens a few times in Digimon Tamers. When facing the tiger Deva, Takato passes out from feeling Guilmon's pain. Later, when facing the D-Reaper, each of the trio slides back in pain after their Digimon get hit by attacks. Calumon has this when his Sentient Phlebotinum powers result in him powering up Guilmon's Superpowered Evil Side.
• In D.N.Angel, Satoshi falls to his knees and clutches at his chest when Krad is trying to take over his body.
• Once in Dragon Ball Bulma felt a pang in her heart when Vegeta blew himself up in an effort to kill Majin Buu.
• Rath from Dragon Knights is in constant pain due to needing to wear a light dragon amulet in order to stay in the castle and being a demon.
• FLCL has Mamimi who reacts to pain when she says that she's going to "overflow".
• In Fullmetal Alchemist, Alphonse gets this when his soul starts tearing away from his Animated Armor to rejoin its body which is waiting at the Gate of Truth.
  • A more horrifying version of this trope occurs for people whose souls are trapped inside philosopher's stones. They are compressed into what seems to be a tiny pocket dimension and subjected to excruciating agony that will only end when their particular soul is used up as energy. Yes, that's right, each philosopher's stone is a self-contained hell. More disturbingly, they're fairly common; at one point we see a room filled with tanks of the objects.
• Happens to all the Priestesses in Fushigi Yuugi, as the Beast Gods they summon devour them from the inside out.
• Early in Harukanaru Toki no Naka de - Hachiyou Shou, Akane briefly falls ill, presumably due to her newly-acquired Dragon-God powers that she is still trying to reject. Even though she is in pain and has a fever, it is confirmed that the symptoms don't have any physical cause — it's more of a consequence of her spirit being in disorder. She also has a similar reaction when she meets Ran, her Evil Counterpart, for the first time.
  • In the manga, Yasuaki "reflects" Akane's negative emotions (mainly because he lacks his own ones); at one point this is said to manifest as chest pains that don't have any potential cause. And tears. This eventually leads to some interesting Character Development on his part.
  • Yasuaki's angst-induced chest pains in Hachiyou Shou episode 23 might also count.^note If he wasn't already The Woobie before that, well...
• Whenever Inuyasha is forced to transform into his full demon form, it looks extremely painful; it is implied some of the pain results from his demon blood eating through his human soul.
• In the Kingdom Hearts manga, Riku is shown gasping for breath, growing pale, and having difficulty walking after using the power of darkness so much. At such times, he says he "feels like his heart is about to explode." (It's not referring to his physical heart.)
• Hayate of Lyrical Nanoha when she was bound to the Book of Darkness.
• In Mermaid Melody Pichi Pichi Pitch, this happens to several characters: Kaito during his imprisonment, Sara when she gets hit by Gaito's attack, and... Michel. Just... Michel.
• Happens to Quatre in Mobile Suit Gundam Wing due to a form of empath power called "The Space Heart."
  • Indeed, it's quite common for Newtypes in the other Gundam series (which may indicate that Quatre is a Newtype, but it's never confirmed in-series).
• Possible variant: The Gentle Fist technique used by the Hyuga clan in Naruto can leave its targets crippled, chakra-wise, without leaving a mark on them.
  • Genjutsu in general can be this. Notably Itachi's Tsukuyomi, which he once used against Kakashi to create painful hallucinations of the latter being stabbed over and over again for 72 hours. Suffice to say, Kakashi passes out and slips into a coma shortly afterwards, despite having no visible injuries. In the English dub, Kisame comments about how surprised he is that Itachi's genjutsu didn't break Kakashi's spirit. Whether he means this in a literal or metaphorical way is unclear.
• The eponymous Negi of Negima! Magister Negi Magi starts experiencing these once the "encroachment" of his Magia Erebia starts kicking in. It's later clarified as being "similar to acute magical poisoning", and even later revealed to be merely a symptom of turning into a demon.
• Neon Genesis Evangelion has this at low-level synch. Or, to be exact, the pilots feel everything felt by their Evas but at higher synch levels, it hurts progressively more until they even get physically injured by it; some residual phantom pain might be present for a while. For example, Unit 01 getting its arm broken in the first battle was rather painful for Shinji; Unit 02 getting speared in the head at 300% synch and then being torn apart and partially eaten by the Mass-Produced Evas had Asuka screaming at the top of her lungs. It then got worse for her when she attempted to go Berserk with her Eva-02 to kill her attackers, as they viciously speared Unit 02 with their glaives. Asuka's right arm is seen splitting in two to the elbow with the first strike...fortunately, we don't see what happens with the rest.
  • In the second Rebuild movie, Mari forces Unit-02 into a berserk state with the 'Beast mode'. Control rods literally burst from the Eva's back, and it's heavily implied that Mari herself feels the pain. The only reason she really keeps going is that she is a bit of a masochist and claims that it is 'so much fun'.
  • A literal version is how the EV As destroy the Angels. The Angels are invulnerable to all damage typically, and if they aren't, they'll eventually regenerate the damage they take. An Angel's soul also resides in an organ referred to in series as a "Core". NERV's solution? Attack Its Weak Point.
• Ash, Brock, and Dawn in Pokémon the Series: Diamond and Pearl get spikes of pain when the Lake Trio are kidnapped, because they had been linked to them previously.
• In Princess Tutu, Mytho has fits of this whenever a heartshard is returned to him, and later gets it worse when the raven's blood is spreading in his heart.
• In Puella Magi Madoka Magica, Kyubey causes these in Sayaka by pressing on her Soul Gem, demonstrating to her what "real" pain is while commenting on how fortunate she is that her physical body can no longer feel it.
• In Saint Beast, the last episode of the prequel series has Judas and Luca in critical condition due not to physical wounds but being polluted by the miasma of the evil spirits.
• Soul Eater has this. Black☆Star experiences this when he attempts to use the Nakatsukasa Purpose before getting some sense beaten into him. It's stated that it's killing him, to which he typically pays no attention.
  • Of course, in Soul Eater souls are actual, tangible objects, and at one point we even get to see an X-ray of Black☆Star's damaged soul.
• In the Steins;Gate sequel movie, Okarin's time travel blitzing leads to some unexpected side effects - all his memories of different timelines overload his Ripple-Effect-Proof Memory, giving him episodes where he can't control which timeline he's in as well as splitting headaches that get worse over time.
• The dragons from Yona of the Dawn after meeting Yona, their "master". Upon first contact with her, they feel a nebulous, searing internal pain that compels them to obey her.

Comic Books

• In New X-Men: Academy X, Pixie had a piece of her soul ripped out during a trip to Limbo. The void left behind is filled with dark magic that acts up specifically around demons and beings with darkness in them.
• In Blackest Night, every living thing in existence suffers Soul Pains when Nekron attacks the Life Entity. Unlike most cases, this would have been fatal if it had gone any further.
• Hellfire — which is exactly what it sounds like — is used by some Marvel Universe characters such as Ghost Rider; it causes damage to the soul rather than the body. If used long enough, it can actually render a target literally soulless.

Fan Works

• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfiction Black Queen, Red King, John has his soul crushed to the point where it implodes. He's screaming the whole time, but as his current body^note  an emerald has no way to perceive pain, this is the only kind of pain he can feel.
• In With Strings Attached, when George has his shapeshifting ring taken from his finger, he screams and pleads for it back. Later, when he calms down somewhat, he explains that it was like having his soul's arm ripped off.
  • The same thing happens again in The Keys Stand Alone: The Soft World during the ambush at Hermit's Rock.
• Child of the Storm: When Gravemoss casts what is essentially Familicide in order to kill and zombify an entire species of dragons, every magic user and psychic on the planet feels it. The results vary, depending on the power range and relative distance to Gravemoss himself, but most suffer nightmares, feelings of dread, or are knocked unconscious. Some notable examples from the more powerful — Harry Dresden, standing practically at ground zero in Paris, has a seizure; Loki, the literal God of Magic, relatively nearby in London, is left violently ill; and Professor Xavier, plugged into Cerebro at the time, is rendered catatonic.
  • Voldemort's spirit suffers this when Betsy severs his Psychic Link to Harry, having what is described as a full-body migraine.
  • In Ghosts of the Past, Harry's psychic duel with Rachael Grey/Maddie Pryor in the Red Room's Nevernever base is so intense that the shockwaves from it echo all the way back to Earth, affecting everyone on the planet. While most are mostly hit with feelings of unease or headaches, the more psychically and magically inclined are hit with pain, the level of it varying depending on the scale of their power.
• Rei suffers this constantly in Advice and Trust due to only having a piece of Lilith's soul. It's part of the reason why she started off as a Death Seeker. Although she eventually finds something that can counteract the pain... hugs!
• In Tales of a Reset Mind, Mania tortures Nico this way, for hours
• In Queen of Shadows, when the Gani are sealed in a mask, all the other Shadowkhan are overcome with a feeling of unease, but it's especially hard on Jade. As the Queen, she can physically feel the agony of the entire tribe being ripped away.
• In the Phineas and Ferb fanfic Two Halves Make A Whole, Phineas and Isabella get their souls intermixed, as do Perry and Vanessa, making it hurt to be more than 5 feet away.
• In the Empath: The Luckiest Smurf story "The Other Smurfette", Polaris Psyche feels physical torment when his friend and psychic lifemate Empath has been raped by Hogatha posing as the female Smurf Wonderette, experiencing the entire rape all in his head until he wakes up with his clothes wet and stained.
• In Prometheus in Chains, Temrash kicks Merlyse ten feet away from Jake while he's in control of them in order to torture them. Just like in His Dark Materials canon, humans and daemons feel immense psychic pain when they're separated from each other.
• In Toward A Bright Future, this is a major drawback of Y/N's Quirk; if she manages to change the future and butterfly away injuries she foresees someone taking in her important visions, all the pain from those injuries are instead inflicted onto her at the time of their occurrence (though no actual damage). The combined pain from broken limbs, injured spines, and even the pain of having one's Quirk removed has laid her out multiple times.
• In What Tomorrow Brings, Temrash punishes Tom by setting off his pain receptors.
• Zero Context: Taking Out the Trash: At some point in her past, the part-time dragon Bahija experienced a Curb-Stomp Battle at the hands of Callista. Her recollection of the battle is so strong that while watching one of Callista's fights across town years later, her entire body becomes engulfed by all the pain she experienced down to the tiniest detail. Bahija shortly thereafter recovers when she realizes that Callista's opponent made the same mistake of infuriating her that she did, though.
• At least two examples in The Awakening of a Magus:
  • The presence of death, especially one caused by him, is very unpleasant for Harry, to put it mildly.
  • Apparently, Percy has some emotional problems because he was born as one of a pair of twins with a very strong bond, and when the other twin died, no proper Healer was around to notice the resulting trauma, much less treat it.

Films — Animation

• In Turning Red, the pain that Mei experiences while going through the red moon ritual is very severe because her red panda spirit has bonded very strongly to her soul. In contrast, when her relatives separate from their red panda spirits for the second time they experience no pain at all since their spirits were very weakly bonded to their souls at that point.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Princess Bride, Westley is tortured to (only mostly) death with a machine that drains years of life out of his body.
• Star Wars:
  • I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.
  • Happens again in Revenge of the Sith during Order 66. Yoda clutches his chest with a pained expression on his face as he feels the deaths of countless Jedi across the galaxy.
  • The Expanded Universe makes it clear that Force lightning is this as well. (Carbonite is And I Must Scream, by the way.)
    • Of course, since in the EU Leia is (depending on the timeline) actually aware of her Force-sensitivity and thus is connected enough to it to feel the crushing pain that a 'disturbance in the Force' can cause, she doesn't get off easy for long.
  • In The Force Awakens, when Kylo murders Han, the movie cuts to Leia looking like she's just been hit very hard by something and needing to sit down.
• In X-Men: First Class, when Erik kills Shaw by slowly pushing a coin through his head Charles is in Shaw's head, keeping him from moving or using his powers. He shares all the physical pain of the entry wound as well as FEELING a mind die.

Literature

• In The Hollows, certain Inderlanders can cause this type of damage to one’s aura. Undead vampires and Banshies literally feed on them, though the more civilized ones only take a few nibbles from each creature they feed off for a net harm of zero. Also, familiars experience excruciating agony if too much ley line energy is pulled through them at once.
• In Dragon Bones, Oreg suffers terrible pain whenever he disobeys an order (even if he really tried to obey, but couldn't do it for some reason), and if he gets separated both from his owner and castle Hurog. His father turned him into the Genius Loci of castle Hurog, or something like that, and permanently bound him to obey the owner of a certain ring, that goes from father to son in the Hurog family line. Oh, and he's immortal. Ward, his current "owner", treats him more like a brother than a slave but doesn't know exactly how the magic works, so that this still happens ... once.
• Various entities in Madeleine L'Engle's work are so terrible that simply being in their presence can be quite frightening and very painful to the mind and/or soul.
  • A Wrinkle in Time: IT is a control freak and veritable mind rape machine.
  • A Wind in the Door: The Ecthroi are beings of nothingness that want to extinguish everything and everyone from existence.
• The Wheel of Time introduces "soultraps" late in the series. Once they're set with your blood, just having someone touch them is a queasy thing (although it's possible this is either a full-blown empathic effect and could be used for pleasurable purposes, or just a psychological reaction to danger). If they get ''broken''...
• Inheritance Cycle: Eragon throughout most of Eldest suffers pain due to a shade's dying blow against him. It's not the wound that does it, but rather a type of curse.
• His Dark Materials: "Soul-clenching" perfectly describes Lyra's feeling upon having her daemon seized. It gets worse in the third book when the two of them are separated by Lyra's choice. Even people without visible daemons can feel that.
• The Harry Potter universe
  • The Cruciatus Curse, which lets a witch/wizard use hatred to cause extreme pain in a victim without causing physical wounds.
  • The literal soul pain (as the soul is a real and specifically defined part of a person in the Potterverse) brought on by Horcruxes. Odd in that the destruction of the soul is not what kills, but the putting it back together again. As paraphrased, the pain of remorse is enough to kill a man.
    • Harry and Dumbledore discuss if Voldemort would feel anything when one of his Horcruxes is destroyed. Dumbledore speculates that it may be possible, but that Voldemort's soul is so fractured by that point in the series that he likely wouldn't.
  • The dementors. More of the Mind Rape, worst-experiences-montage variety and generally not lethal, but given time and a free rein, they can drive a victim insane, rob them of their will to live, and, in extreme cases, literally eat their soul.
  • Whenever Harry and Voldemort come into physical contact, they both experience indescribable pain. Once, Voldemort attempts to use this to his advantage by taking possession of Harry and hoping he commits suicide from the pain.
• The Lord of the Rings: Frodo had a Burning Scar that was inflicted upon him by a Morgul blade during his second encounter with the Nazgûl, but also suffered from the evil presence of Sauron himself, especially after he entered Mordor. The book described him to be waving his hand feebly as if trying to ward off a blow. He often collapsed and eventually had to have Sam carry him up to Mount Doom. It might be a case of Giving In To Spirit Pain or Evil Induced Adrenaline when Frodo's actually at Mount Doom and all his energy returns ten-fold in a frenzied attempt to save the ring. It also could be that the One Ring was sapping him as it did to Gollum, and was trying harder and harder to sap his strength away to keep itself away from Mount Doom. Then, being there, it decided "Hey, this STR-sapping thing just isn't working, let's try full-on Dominate Creature effect..." After the adventure was over, he continued to feel the effects of the wound once a year, on the anniversary of the day he received it, even after the Ring was destroyed. The Ring itself apparently left its mark too, since he left Middle-Earth for Valinor in hope of healing his Soul Pain.
• The Lost Fleet: One of the side effects of spending a long time in survival sleep is constantly feeling cold for hours afterwards, and the story opens with Captain Geary experiencing these symptoms and the adverse psychological effects of learning about the world he's woken up to. It's probably psychosomatic, but for weeks afterwards, he's described as feeling an echo of that lingering chill every time stress and anxiety start to wear him down.
• The Jedi Academy Trilogy has a character use a superweapon to annihilate an inhabited world. (ooh, this sounds familiar ...) There's a note in the text about this making a "disturbance in the Force" which Jedi and semiJedi feel, and then things got back to the character with the superweapon feeling bad because he just killed his brother. I, Jedi has a very long and horrifying passage about what this felt like to the protagonist, as he experienced a little of the fear and pain and grief of twenty million people all dying at once. It makes the protagonist run outside and vomit, and later think that 'disturbance in the Force' is too mild a term.
• Aubry Fitzwillliam in the Laws of Magic series is in a constant struggle to keep his soul attached to his body. It is his fault that the link got severed, though.
• In Of Fear and Faith, August feels like his soul is being choked whenever Fear is around.
• Kindling Ashes: A human body was not meant to host two souls, thus, humans suffer side effects of hosting a dragon soul inside them: Incurable Cough of Death is the first one and Spontaneous Combustion is the final one.
• In MARZENA We have (half) Wild Child Renée Fritzhaber who suffers from deep and horrible psychological trauma from a life spent alone in a padded cell and being experimented on by first American military, and then German military. Micro-brain surgeries and a swiss-cheese brain were an attempt at containing her Dissociative Identity Disorder and creating a more stable personality, but also causing memory loss resulting in several Tomato in the Mirror moments. "I DON'T DO ANYTHING! I NEVER DO ANYTHING! NEVAR!"
• Dragons in Elcenia experience "esu" if they go long enough without flying under their own power. This starts off as mere lethargy, but eventually develops into pain, and gradually gets worse with no apparent limit the longer the dragon goes without flight. Shrens are hatched with a disability that prevents them from flying in their natural forms, forcing them to endure steadily worsening esu for the first twenty-odd years of their life, until they develop Voluntary Shapeshifting and can fly that way.
• In the Sword of Truth series, wizards with untrained magical gift get intense headaches, ultimately lethal in a few months to years. With very powerful ones, it takes under a month for them to start fainting from pain. For the protagonist, less than two days.
• In White Trash Warlock, a character experiences literal soul pains after performing a magic ritual to wound their soul and create an artifact powerful enough to destroy an Eldritch Abomination that's terrorizing Denver. The wound causes them frequent pain and corrupts their magic enough that any supernatural creature they run into knows immediately that done some kind of dark magic and assume the worst.

Live-Action TV

• The eponymous character of Angel experiences something like this when he's about to lose his soul or has just had it returned. It's at least partly an emotional effect due to extreme guilt; whether real physical pain is involved is difficult to tell. On one occasion, the show fakes viewers out after he has sex with his sire Darla.
  • A variation of this, in the seventh season of Buffy, the character Spike has a variation of Heroic BSoD that comes from being re-ensouled at the end of the sixth season. He tries clawing it out with his fingernails, to no avail.
    Spike: They put the spark in me, and all it does, is burn.
• Examples abound in Doctor Who.
  • Take the opening sequences of "The Five Doctors": the Doctor's fifth incarnation experiences this trope at length, complete with ambiguous chest pains. He puts this down to "a twinge of cosmic angst", chunks of his past "detaching themselves like melting icebergs", "being diminished — whittled away piece by piece", and "being sucked into a time vortex". Staggering around, repeatedly fainting, and eighties special effects ensue.
  • Similarly, "The Name of the Doctor", the Doctor also suffers this when The Great Intelligence starts interfering with his timeline, turning every one of his victories into a defeat, and "feeling all of his past selves dying all at once".
  • Actually, all the post-regeneration periods (so far in the new series) probably count as well.
  • "Planet of the Ood" pulls this with the Doctor hearing the Ood singing in his head (the pain there was more from the fact that the Ood song of captivity is just that frakking depressing — he lets Donna hear it for a few moments and she almost begs him to take it away again. It's pretty depressing in Real Life too, actually).
• Frasier: Typically, Frasier's ex-wife Lilith Sternin is harmless aside from her acid tongue. But Frasier's psychic friend Daphne Moon gets skull-splitting headaches whenever Lilith is nearby. And by "nearby", we mean in the city.
• Occurs every so often on Power Rangers when someone's powers are on the fritz. Sometimes the source is running out (Tommy as Green in Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers), sometimes its deharmonizing with their body (Jason as Gold in Power Rangers Zeo), sometimes it's the powers being taken away...
  • Plus one non-power-related incident in Power Rangers Lightspeed Rescue, when Ryan was cursed with a snake tattoo. Every time he morphed the tattoo would come closer to killing him, making each morphing painful.
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Immunity Syndrome", Spock experiences this when the USS Intrepid, an all-Vulcan starship, is destroyed with all hands, feeling their deaths from light-years away.
• Played with in Suits when Louis tries to get Donna to fill in for his vacationing secretary. She turns his wording into objectifying her and her work, invoking this with "That just makes my soul hurt." Of course, she is kidding and just feels like messing with Louis and making sure he won't ask again or try to convince her.
• In Supernatural, Sam coughs up blood, suffers horrible pain and dizziness, and develops life-threatening fevers, after he starts transforming to complete the trials which will close the gates to Hell.

Myths & Religion

• In The Bible, Peter the apostle in his second epistle speaks of Lot having his soul tormented by seeing and hearing the lawless deeds of the people in Sodom.

Roleplay

• Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues:
  • If Ciro doesn't mentally prepare himself then forces that act on his forcefield can have a negative effect on his mind. For example, he suffered mental heatstroke when he quickly tried to cover a naked flame with a forcefield.
  • Luna experiences severe pain when her electrical power starts to go into overload, only stopped when she unleashes it all in a single blast.

Tabletop Games

• Unknown Armies has several examples of these, either in the form of magical attacks that leave few or no marks, or spiritual attacks that leave the target an eventual vegetable. Perhaps the most straightforward example would be the pornomancy spell Psychotrauma, which causes incredible and searing pain with no physical cause. It doesn't do as much damage unless the target is having sex with the pornomancer at the time, but because it has no physical cause it also can't be healed by normal means.
• Demon: The Fallen has this with Thralls: By entering into a Pact with a mortal, a Demon is able to strip Faith (the mana of the game line) from the soul of the mortal, giving her horrific nightmares and hallucinations as well as excruciating pains with no source. It stops being this trope when the Demon sucks more Faith than the mortal can spare, leading to stigmata or vomiting blood, etc.
• Shadowrun has this as a spell, Agony, which adds damage to a character's track that is removed as soon as the spell is no longer sustained. In addition, blood and toxic magic are believed to cause this in the user.
• Betrayal at House on the Hill has a ring that allows you to attack an enemy using your Sanity stat rather than Strength and cause Mental damage rather than Physical if successful.
• The Psychic damage type in Dungeons & Dragons 4th Edition is basically this.
• Chronicles of Darkness: If a character's soul is separated from their body and subsequently damaged, such as if a powerful Spirit begins to eat it, they need to succeed on a Stamina dice roll or fall unconscious from pain.

Video Games

• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy VII: Advent Children: Cloud's Geostigma seemed to be I'm Having Soul Pains as a tic. He would suddenly cringe, run short of breath and flinch as if an invisible force were causing him pain.
    • Final Fantasy VII Remake: has Cloud suffering this. In Hojo's lab, just after meeting Red XIII, getting too close to Jenova triggers something in Cloud, causing him to stumble forward slowly towards the elevator before collapsing. During this time, Cloud is Hearing Voices of Sephiroth, telling him that "they have come again."
      Cloud: Je... No... Oh... Ah... Mo... ther... [collapses]
  • Final Fantasy XIII: Pictured above is Lightning, experiencing some intense pain caused by her Eidolon's first summoning. Other Eidolon hosts appear to feel some discomfort with their initial summonings as well, with Hope outright losing consciousness. Later summonings do not seem to cause any discomfort at all, however.
  • Final Fantasy XIV: In the Shadowbringers expansion, the Warrior of Light absorbs all of the primordial light of the defeated Lightwardens in order to bring the night back to an otherwise endless day in Norvrandt. They're fine after the first couple victories, but they soon begin to suffer from pangs due to the stress this is causing their soul, to the point that it's on the verge of shattering by the last one.
• The Shadow Priests in World of Warcraft run on causing this trope. Virtually all of their attack spells — Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Shadow Word: Pain, Shadow Word: Death, Vampiric Touch, even the Holy spell Chastise — operate by attacking the soul directly.
  • Also the Warlock's Curse of Agony. There's an implication that the "shadow" school of magic is elemental pain.
  • After his death, Uther Lightbringer was taken to Bastion where he could not abandon his memories of life because he could still feel the pain of Arthas killing him. To his tutor's horror, he was literally feeling the pain still as Frostmourne had left a wound on Uther's soul due to it being forged in the Maw.
• Missing a guess while trying to break psyche-locks in Ace Attorney causes your health bar to go down. When it's empty you're forced to stop, lest your 'soul shatter'. The same 'health bar' is used in court trials (and for logic in Investigations), and the protagonist lawyer reacts as if they've been physically struck when they are penalized. So apparently getting penalties from the judge directly attacks your very soul.
• In Hisui's route in Tsukihime SHIKI notices that Shiki is watching him while he dreams and it totally freaks him out. Since he has a pretty high Healing Factor and they're connected, he starts stabbing himself so that Shiki will feel it too. It leaves no physical damage, only pain. Although he bled a lot the first time, he still had no wounds.
• The fire at Fuyuki burned far more than just Emiya Shirou's body. His emotions, sense of self, and the simple ability to function as a normal human being were completely erased, to be filled with the ideals of someone else.
• In the Chzo Mythos universe, a soul can feel pain if someone or something it relies utterly upon or loves deeply is killed and/or destroyed, but since this permanently cripples the soul, it can only be done once. The pain-worshiping cult, the Order of Blessed Agonies, have their potential new members causing this pain to themselves as final test before they are fully accepted into the cult.
• A few times in Jade Empire- the vengeful spirit of a drowned orphan enjoys hitting them with ghost-mojo to cause pain, and the reaction of the Water Dragon to Master Li sucking her power out is similar.
• In a similar vein to the Manga entry above, Kingdom Hearts: Final Mix includes a scene after Riku loses his body/heart over to Ansem where Riku is walking along a dim pathway and almost collapses, clutching at his chest and repeating that he won't disappear, at least not until he's seen Sora and Kairi again.
  • Earlier in the game, Sora went through this when Ansem!Riku pointed the evil Keyblade at his heart, falling to his knees because Kairi's heart was responding within him. He got better through a combo of Determination and The Power of Friendship.
  • And once again to Sora during the final fight of KH2, where the Big Bad catches him with Agony Beams.
  • This happens to Ven in Kingdom Hearts: Birth by Sleep twice. The first being meeting Master Xehanort in the Keyblade Graveyard. He falls to his knees and clutches his head in pain when he starts to recall what he is before screaming in pain and lying facefirst on the ground. The second being coming across Vanitas on the Islands, where we're given a nice flashback of Vanitas' creation.
• All of the Entropy spells in Dragon Age, and most of the offensive Spirit ones. Spirit Bolt is actually pretty much punching someone in the soul long distance.

Webcomics

• In early parts of Sluggy Freelance, Gwynn toys with a voodoo doll of Riff. This gives Riff various uncomfortable symptoms, including "it feels like someone is stuffing M&Ms in my ear!" and Riff mysteriously jumping into a desk drawer and going all the way to "I think I'm coming down with a fever... I'm hot all over and my head feels ready to explode!" (The doll was in the microwave.)
• Something to this effect is used in Hanna Is Not a Boy's Name. Although it's hard to determine the nature of Hanna's condition, he gets very weak and appears to be in pain when a ghost passes through him.
• In Homestuck, Dirk's powers as Prince of Heart let him inflict these — say, as a side effect of tearing someone's soul out of their body.
• In Megatokyo Meimi drops a tray of dishes when Miho is killed.
  Meimi: Just something... very sad, dear.
• In Pungirls, (Jackson Ferrell's first comic, years before Sketch Comedy) Karen's catchphrase, at least in the early strips, was "The puns! They hurt my soul!"
• In Sonichu, after Chris-Chan curses Jerkhief with permanent bad luck, Jerkhief comments that his soul hurts.
• In Champions of Far'aus, when Daryl accidentally comes into contact with one of the spheres inside Leilusa’s avatar, his body more or less starts warping like a glitched-out character model in a video game, while he screams in agony. After Leilusa dispels it, Daryl is physically no worse for wear than he was before. Leilusa describes it as “Unimaginable pain and suffering”.

Web Videos

• During the Midnight Screenings of Endless Love, Brad was so broken by how awful of an adaptation it was that when asked by Jillian if it "made [his] brain melty", he responded by saying "it made my soul melty".
• The Necro Critic's catchphrase when a particularly awful movie offends his sensibilities most definitely qualifies.
  The Necro Critic: Owwwww, my SOUL!
• The Spoony Experiment: When roused to anger, Spoony often threatens to inflict this upon others.
  Spoony: I WILL PUNCH YOU IN THE SOUL!
• Two Best Friends Play: Pat compares Matt to "Mind Cancer" in the Portal 2 video.
  Pat: Not a brain tumor. You're hurting my ideas.

Western Animation

• Zuko in Avatar: The Last Airbender falls under this trope. Up until the episode Lake Laogai, he was sure that his destiny was to capture the Avatar. His uncle, however, confronted him and convinced him his destiny was his to decide. Soon after, Zuko fell dreadfully sick and lost consciousness. After waking up the first time, his uncle told him that he was suffering from a spiritual illness, that he was so conflicted within that he was physically ill.
  • It showed up earlier than that. During the first season finale, when Zhao threatens the Moon Spirit, Yue, who was originally stillborn but given life by the Moon Spirit, says that she feels faint. Aang, being the bridge between the human and spirit worlds, says he feels it too.
• Megatron's preferred method of controlling the Ax-Crazy Rampage in Beast Wars was to jam pure energon into half of his spark. As Rampage is all but immortal, he can survive it, but it inflicts him with indescribable pain until he agrees to follow orders.
• Several times in She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, mostly caused by Shadow Weaver.
  • The magic restraints that Shadow Weaver places on Glimmer cause her great pain if she attempts to teleport out of them.
  • And then when Glimmer eventually pushes past it and teleports out anyway, her powers later start to intermittently "glitch". She tells Bow it doesn't hurt much, but her wincing, and Bow himself, say otherwise.
    Glimmer: [hugging Bow] Nrgh, I'm glitching again aren't I?
    Bow: It hurts so much...!
  • And then again when Shadow Weaver uses Glimmer as a source of magic. It was with consent this time, but that doesn't stop Shadow Weaver's draining Glimmer from being painful.
  • Finally, a non-Shadow Weaver example when The Heart of Etheria is activated. And this time it's not just Glimmer affected but all the princesses, though as the conduit for the massive amounts of magic Adora's Soul Pains seem the most intense.
• Spoofed in Ugly Americans when Mark Lilly gets checked up for some persistent abdominal pain and learns that his soul is engorged from all his virtuous behavior.

Real Life

• Pain with no physical source can be a symptom of Clinical Depression or a host of other psychosomatic disorders.
  • Precordial Catch Syndrome can cause harmless but really excruciating chest pains via nerve crimps at more or less random times. It's fun.
  • Takotsubo cardiomyopathy is also known as broken heart syndrome. It happens mainly in older women and has a tendency to occur during extreme emotional stress, such as the death of a loved one. The heart basically loses strength suddenly, as if it can't go on.
  • Can also be caused by zillions of things that are physically real, but hard to diagnose, for example, autoimmune diseases.
  • It's theorized that the abstract chest/abdominal pain many people feel in conjunction with sudden or intense negative emotions is the result of your brain desperately trying to find a physical reason you're not feeling well, because physical pain is easier to rationalize than emotional pain.
• Oh my god, psychotic episodes. So... many... times... over...
  • It's no surprise then that the Malay term for such episodes is literally soul pain (sakit jiwa)
• Panic attacks. It's a little like having a nonlocalized heart attack.
• Under stress, the muscles in your chest expand and contract, creating the feeling of a pain over your heart/soul area. Commonly known as Heartache.
• Pain with no known cause is just pain with no known cause. Heart attacks must have seemed like this many years ago.
• People with high levels of empathy can experience sudden pains and even difficulty breathing when watching/interacting with people who are going through trauma, mental breakdowns/anxiety/panic attacks, or getting injured. They themselves may not be feeling the pain first hand but it sure can seem like it...

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