Basic Trope: Violence occurs, but no blood or major wounds are shown.
- Straight: Bob gets stabbed and falls down, but does not bleed or have visible wounds.
- Exaggerated: Bob is shot five times from point blank range with a grenade launcher, then stabbed profusely, fed through a large meat grinder, overkilled through cremation by flamethrower, fed to a sty full of starving swine and the resulting pig crap gets repeatedly poked with a spatula. His dead body appears to be completely intact, with no blood to be seen.
- Downplayed: Being stabbed leaves a small amount of blood on Bob's wound, looking more like a ketchup stain from a particularly sloppy lunch. Alice's knife is stained red, but a few swipes with a cloth make it clean.
- Justified:
- Bob is some sort of inhuman entity who has no blood, and so when he is shot, he does not bleed.
- Bob is shot with an Agony Beam that does not cause physical damage to the tissue, but disintegrates the tissue to atom levels.
- Bob was cut by a very hot weapon, so his wound was instantly cauterized.
- Bob is literally Made of Bologna somehow.
- Inverted:
- High-Pressure Blood sprays from even the slightest wound.
- Bob bleeds profusely and constantly without even being struck.
- Gorn: The deaths, injuries and wounds of any characters are enormously bloody and gory and caused in terrifying ways.
- Subverted:
- Bob gets stabbed and appears not to be bleeding, but he's wearing several layers of clothing and it just hadn't soaked through yet.
- Bob appears not to be bleeding, but he's suffering an internal tissue bleeding.
- Double Subverted: ...Except the dark splotch on his red jacket isn't blood, because the sword also stabbed through the canteen of tomato juice carried from the string around his neck.
- Parodied: Alice stabs Bob repeatedly, getting increasingly frustrated that he won't bleed or show signs of damage, even though he's long dead. Eventually, she just gives up.
- Zig Zagged: Alice stabs a mook who bleeds out, yet when Bob shoots her several times and leaves her to die she never bleeds. Bob ends up finishing Alice later and she bleeds then.
- Averted:
- People are wounded in perfectly normal amounts when they are injured.
- The blood is hidden in other ways, such as a Gory Discretion Shot.
- The work doesn't have any violence.
- Enforced:
- It's a family-friendly show, and they need to keep it that way, so blood can't be shown even if violence does pop up.
- The game is for a low configuration portable console, and it doesn't have the resources to display blood.
- Animating blood is difficult and takes time, so not showing blood at all is easier and quicker.
- The work just doesn't have the budget for the required special effects, and has no choice but to show characters getting wounded and killed without bleeding.
- Lampshaded:
- "AUGH! Even if I'm not bleeding, this invisible stab wound hurts like a bitch, so help me out, guys!"
- Charlie looks at the camera and says, "I'm more amazed by the lack of blood than the fact that Alice stabbed Bob."
- Invoked: An Ax-Crazy character makes sure to be very clean when he attacks people, to save him the trouble of too much cleaning up the evidence.
- Exploited: Bob successfully hides his injuries since they're not visibly bleeding.
- Defied: An Ax-Crazy character won't stop until the crime scene is covered in blood, and can't stand to make just a small, clean wound.
- Discussed: "Oh my god, you've been stabbed!" "Why am I not bleeding? Why do we never bleed here?"
- Conversed: Before his first big battle, the hero's mentor reminds him that even though fiction might not show blood when people get shot and stabbed, reality is different.
- Implied: Dave dies offscreen and is explicitly stated to have been killed, but when his body is found later, there's no blood on it.
- Deconstructed:
- Because his violent deeds don't cause any unsightly blood or large wounds, the villain becomes desensitized to killing and starts mass-murdering people.
- Bob's team doesn't notice his injury due to the lack of bleeding and fails to give him medical care, leading to his death.
- Reconstructed:
- A program is put in place to make sure everyone knows the horrors of violent actions despite the fact that nobody ever bleeds or shows major external injury.
- The team healer learns to recognize people's injuries more carefully or starts using medical imaging technology, ensuring this won't happen again.
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