This trope occurs when a character willingly removes a body part, whether in fun or to solve a problem, under the logic of "Eh, I can get it back." One version of this happens when a character capable of Pulling Themselves Together decides to Exploit that ability for non-combat purposes; in other words, it's the Mundane Utility version of Detachment Combat. Another version happens when a character with a strong Healing Factor realizes their body parts are basically expendable.
This trope might involve pulling your head off and holding it up high to see over an obstacle, giving somebody your heart because you forgot about Valentine's Day, or pranking your friend by taking them literally when they ask for a hand. It can also be a bit more involved, such as pulling yourself apart so you can push yourself through a gap piece by piece. If you're capable of Appendage Assimilation, you may cut off your own limb to replace it with a better one you find… lying around. A particularly Squicky option for regenerating characters who don't have to worry about Shapeshifter Baggage is using their flesh as food.
Even in its most dramatic versions, this is very different from a Life-or-Limb Decision, because the point of that trope is that it's a serious and probably life-changing decision to make. The same thing happening to a character capable of this trope would probably be a Subversion thereof (and likely Played for Laughs if it was intended to be a Sadistic Choice). This trope also doesn't cover cases where a character unintentionally loses a body part and Exploits that in some way; that's a form of Good Thing You Can Heal if they can get it back. Cases where they can't regrow/retrieve it are a form of Major Injury Underreaction, as is self-dismemberment for the hell of it without expecting to get it back (i.e., the calculation is, "Eh, I don't need it"), even though that is technically both casual and self-dismemberment.
Characters that do this generally don't seem to feel any pain from doing it, especially the detach-reattach type. That type also tends to retain control of detached limbs, though not always. Organic characters doing this will probably be Made of Plasticine, at least when they're the ones trying to do it (others might have a tougher time). Intelligent zombies and other corporeal forms of The Undead are likely candidates for this trope, as are Living Toys and robots with Easily Detachable parts.
Sub-Trope of Healing Factor, Pulling Themselves Together, and Mundane Utility. Sister Trope of Detachment Combat (which is a combat style), Good Thing You Can Heal (which is accidental), and Self-Mutilation Demonstration (whose purpose is to demonstrate itself). Specific implementations may overlap with Appendage Assimilation, Eye Spy, Losing Your Head, and Who Needs Their Whole Body?.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Bleach:
- Ulquiorra can share his memories with nearby people by pulling out his eye and crushing it. His Healing Factor fixes it up within the day.
- Subverted in Ishida's fight with the arrancar Cirucci. Arrancar Super Modes usually involve dramatic transformations, so Ishida doesn't think much of it when Cirucci sheds her armored wings to boost her speed. She then tells him that it's a permanent amputation — she just really wants to take him down.
- Dragon Ball:
- The manga version of the 23rd Tenkaichi Budokai has Piccolo casually ripping his heavily injured arm off and then regrowing it back immediately. In both the anime and the manga, Piccolo rips his dry-sucked arm off like nothing and regrows it back immediately after Cell finishes info dumping on him.
- Majin Boo, in his fat and kid/pure forms, casually tears pieces of his body apart and uses those pieces as weapons. Due to his elastic body and insane regeneration, losing body parts means nothing to him. In his super/evil form, he detaches pieces of his "flesh" from his back without using any of his limbs and have the pieces crawl on the ground and sneak behind Piccolo and Gotenks to absorb them.
- At the start of Fire Punch, Agni and his sister Luna use his power to regenerate any part of his body to feed their village by cutting off his arm and letting others eat it again and again.
- In one scene in the anime adaptation of Haré+Guu, Guu is distracted while slicing an ingredient in cookery class and accidentally cuts several slices off her own arm. When she notices, she eats the slices and her arm regrows.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Bruno Buccarati's Stand Sticky Fingers allows him to form zippers on any surface, including human bodies; he uses this a few times to take himself apart so that he can avoid attacks, such as in the fight with the Pesci and Proscuitto, where he outmaneuvers Pesci's Stand, Beach Boy, by putting a zipper though his heart so that it temporarily stops beating, allowing him to avoid detection.
- In Kemono Jihen, Kabane possesses a powerful Healing Factor that lets him restore any part of his body so long as he has room to rebuild it. When Shiki traps him in the bath by mixing arachne silk into the water, Kabane rips his own arm off and puts it in the furnace heating the bath to warm the water enough to melt the silk.
- My Hero Academia: Setsuna Tokage's Quirk allows her to split herself into up to 50 separate pieces at a time; when she's not using it for Detachment Combat, she mostly uses it for general utility during exercises, such as detaching her eyes and ears to search for an objective. Since her pieces are controlled psychically and float, she can also split herself apart to fly.
- One Piece:
- Buggy's Chop-Chop Fruit powers allow him to be completely immune to damage, as long as he's being chopped at. He can detach his limbs on command, which becomes useful in Impel Down, when he carries Luffy through Crimson Hell, the first level of the prison, which is covered in literal blades of grass that can cut through anything. Buggy just detaches his feet, hovers over the grass, and lets them stab him because he can't be hurt by the plant life here.
- Trafalgar Law's Op-Op Fruit allows him to form a 'ROOM' within which he can perform various procedures on those within; by and large, this takes the form of telekinesis and dismembering other people using his power (which is largely non-fatal until the ROOM is no longer active), but he has used it on himself once: during the time skip, Law cut out his own heart and gave it to Caesar Clown as collateral.
Comic Books
- One Deadpool comic has Deadpool keeping a teammate fed by cutting off his own flesh.
- Terror from Wolverine is a centuries-old mercenary with the ability to take body parts from corpses and attach them to his own body. In one miniseries, he has to infiltrate a criminal gang, so he tears off his own head and replaces it with the head of a mook he just killednote . The body he's using at the time, however, is much more muscular than the mook he killed, which requires some explaining.
Mook: Dude, how'd you get so big so fast?Terror: Steroids.
Comic Strips
- The single-panel comic strip Bizarro has a woman consult a physician, specifically an eye, ear, nose, and throat specialist. The woman is normal and whole, but the doctor is shown as one eye, one ear, a nose, and a trachea with larynx all placed on a padded chair across from his patient. The doctor assures the woman that he can treat her — "The rest of me being out on a golf course is irrelevant."
Fan Works
- Becoming a True Invader: The Fefians are a species of blob creatures whose Bizarre Alien Biology includes an inability to feel pain and an immensely effective Healing Factor. As such, they don't care at all about injuries, to the point of usually chopping off their own limbs for food.
Films — Animation
- Coco: Throughout the film, Hector (being a skeleton) reshapes/manipulates his body to do various things, including making his dancing at a talent show more entertaining.
- Corpse Bride: Because a good amount of the citizens in the Land of the Dead are, well, dead, they can remove body parts casually to do whatever they need to. Several times, Emily pops an eye in and out of her head without concern.
- Frozen: Olaf (being a living snowman) is able to remove/reattach body parts at will while still having control over them. In the sequel, he uses this trope to win at charades.
- Hotel Transylvania (2012): Frankenstein and his wife have a fear of flying, so they visit the hotel via freight. They disassemble themselves, put their pieces in separate suitcases, and mail themselves to the hotel, where they're brought in by delivery courier. Rebuilding themselves is equally easy for them.
- Igor: At one point, King Malbert has thrown Igor, Brian, and Scamper down the chute to the "recycling center," which is mostly a Conveyor Belt o' Doom. Since Scamper is pretty much death-proof, able to regenerate From a Single Cell, he simply gnaws his feet off to free himself, then rescues his companions.
Scamper: What? You think this is the first time I've had to gnaw my own feet off? Who says rabbit's feet are lucky.
- Moshi Monsters: The Movie: Zommer wins the limbo by taking off all his body parts and pushing them under the stick.
- In The Nightmare Before Christmas, Sally is a living rag doll who can pull apart her seams, with some control over any detached body parts. She uses this ability early in the movie to detach the arm Dr. Finkelstein is holding to get away from him. She later jumps out of a high window, breaking apart on impact but easily able to sew herself back together. Finally, during an attempt to rescue Santa, she detaches a leg to distract Oogie and her hands to get Santa's attention and untie his ropes. Early in the movie, it's also shown that Jack Skellington (who's a skeleton) can remove his own head, saying he does it to recite Shakespearean quotations.
- Toy Story:
- Toy Story 1: When Mr. Potato Head makes a pessimistic statement about Woody not being worried about the move due to being Andy's Favorite Toy since kindergarten, Slinky defends Woody. Mr. Potato Head quietly replies by removing his mouth and tapping his backside with it—calling him an ass-kisser.
- Toy Story 2: Mr. Potato Head's eye is used to see what's going on in Al's apartment when the toys are stuck in the air vent.
- Toy Story 3: Mrs. Potato Head's right eye is left behind in the now-teenage Andy's house, and she sees that he's upset that his mom threw his toys out. She gets her eye back at the end of the film.
Films — Live Action
- The Fireys in Labyrinth can casually remove limbs, eyes, and even their heads. They can also recombine the removed parts into new body configurations. They actually think it's weird that Sarah can't do this.
- The killing machines of Terminator can lose the living tissue over their metal endoskeletons with ne'er so much as a flinch, whether self-inflicted or not. Justified as, being machines who only have the tissue to blend in with humans, it's no issue. In Terminator 2: Judgment Day, the T-800 casually cuts into its arm and tears off the flesh, revealing the metal endoskeleton beneath to prove the reality of the situation to the scientist whose work will eventually lead to the creation of Skynet.
Literature
- Animorphs: When they run into the allegedly free Hork-Bajir Jara Hamee, the team wonders how they can be sure he's really free (Yeerks are Puppeteer Parasites that wrap themselves around their victim's brain and act exactly like them, and the only way the team knows is to starve the Yeerk out for three days). The Hork-Bajir calmly stabs his arm blades into his skull then pulls his head apart to show them his Yeerk-free brain. The team are shaken but accept that he's telling the truth, and there's no mention of Jara Hamee suffering brain damage afterwards.
- The Lando Calrissian Adventures: Vuffi Raa, Lando's droid companion, is a pentagon-shaped robot with five tentacles issuing from each of the pentagon's points. These tentacles can freely separate from the central body and be controlled remotely, slithering around like snakes, usually in order to help him control the ship he's on or to do maintenance from a distance.
- In Portuguese/Algarvian fairy tale "O Velho Querecas
" ("Old Man Querecas"), three sisters go to a haunted house to spend the night, and the youngest moves to the uppermost floor. Suddenly, she hears a voice shouting that "They are going to fall", to which the girl replies that they should fall. Suddenly, a leg falls from the ceiling. Then, the same voice shouts the same words, and arms fall from the ceiling, then a torso, and finally an old man named Querecas appears before the girl. It's implied that Querecas is the one who warned the girl about his body parts coming through the ceiling.
- Void Domain: Demons have a powerful Healing Factor, and their body parts graft perfectly to any human recipient, so the spider-demon Arachne thinks nothing of snipping off a few legs when her human friend Eva needs a transplant.
- We All Died At Breakaway Station: Earth is at war with the alien "Jillies." They call themselves "stomach brothers," because they developed a detachable stomach sac as a defense mechanism. The sac can be reattached if it's not too badly damaged, or another Jillie can loan his. The war was triggered when a Jillie emissary addressed parliament with his stomach sac filled with explosives, which nobody checked.
- In Tuscan fairy tale "The Woman of Paste", an old woman fashions a lifelike adult woman with excess dough and three fairies bring the image to life. A prince falls in love with the artificial woman and marries her, but since she does not laugh at her wedding, he banishes her and takes another wife. Later, she removes her head to place it on her lap to curl her own hair.
Live-Action TV
- Star Trek: The Next Generation: In "Disaster," Data uses his body to disrupt a dangerous and impassable electrical arc, and tells Riker to remove his head and take it with him to Engineering, where he and Riker collaborate to stop a warp core breach. His head is reattached to his body later.
Manhua
- In Fei Ren Zai, Nezha occasionally takes advantage of his immortal lotus body by using his own regrowing limbs as ingredients for lotus-root-based dishes.
Video Games
- Played With in The Missing: J.J. Macfield and the Island of Memories. While JJ cannot dismember herself at will, there's enough dangerously unsafe industrial equipment in the levels to do it for her. Much worse, it does hurt every time, and at one point, JJ offers a very graphic description of how it feels to have her arm ripped off. Nevertheless, JJ must repeatedly mutilate herself (and then regenerate, since she cannot reattach her limbs) to solve environment puzzles and to progress through the game, and eventually grows somewhat numb to the pain (just as the player grows desensitized to the gory effects).
- Never Dead has this as a central gameplay mechanic. Bryce is immortal and can have limbs or even his head blown off and just hobble over to pick them up with some moderate discomfort; however, certain enemies can eat his head and lead to a Game Over by melting it and sending him to Hell.
- Planescape: Torment: There are multiple points in the game where you can take advantage of The Nameless One's regenerative abilities and resurrective immortality by cutting off an eye, hand, finger, or your guts in order to get a magic item, learn a skill, or other reasons. For a game that's rated T, it gets rather graphic in the descriptions of having various body parts lopped off or otherwise mangled — Feels No Pain is very averted.
- Pokémon Scarlet and Violet introduces Veluza, a hake-based Pokémon whose Secret Art Fillet Away allows it to discard parts of its flesh to boost its speed and offensive prowess. It has a convenient Healing Factor that allows it to regenerate after doing so, and the discarded flesh can be eaten, which allows people to eat its meat without killing it.
- In Shantae (2002), Rottytops unlocks the gate to Cackle Mound by casually pulling off her leg, using the exposed bone to pick the lock, and putting her leg back on afterwards.
- In Ultimate Custom Night, Foxy can take himself apart to get into your room piece by piece.
Webcomics
- In The Death of Kindness, Yoichi discovered before the start of the story that he has the inexplicable ability to regenerate from nearly any wound and can even restore entire organs if needed. So he supports himself and his younger siblings by selling his organs to a shady dealer repeatedly, hoping to one day make it out of the slum he was born into and give his family a better life.
- Erma: Being the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl main character of a Horror Comedy webcomic, Erma is a big fan of this.
- In "Heart to Heart", Connor gives Erma a Valentine's Day card. Erma doesn't have one to reciprocate… until she realizes she does—in her chest.
- In "Dance Off", Erma pulls off her head to perform some breakdancing tricks that'd be impossible for just about anybody else.
- Called upon to give a science presentation on the muscular system, Erma begins by tearing her skin off.
- In "Heart to Heart"
- Unsounded: When an enemy locks Duane in magic-suppressing handcuffs, he — an undead man who's replaced all of his limbs at least once already — simply pops his hands off at the wrist and shakes the cuffs off.
- Zom in Zom Com tends to do this, from Zom messing with her werewolf friend or providing her vampire friend a portable sunshade.
Web Original
- SCP Foundation features this as fairly common body horror. For instance:
- SCP-4716 features a variant with the Neo-Sarkics, flesh cultists able to remove their stomachs and replace it with a new one from an alternate source if they get indigestion.
- SCP-5980 is a man with two anomalous properties: firstly, he has a fast-acting Healing Factor and is biologically immortal. Secondly, and inexplicably, he tastes delicious to anyone who eats his flesh or bodily fluids. So, with that in mind, he opens up a fast food joint in New Jersey.
- SCP-4716
Western Animation
- Animated Tales of the World: In episode "The Green Man of Knowledge", the Green Man's daughter, Malveen, helps Jack to fulfill her father's second task by jumping into a well and turning into a ladder of bones. She warns Jack to take care not to miss a step, lest he break a bone of her body. Jack retrieves a ring from the bottom of the well and Malveen restores herself from the ladder of bones, albeit with a broken little finger.
- Futurama: In "I Second That Emotion", Bender dismantles himself so that he can flush himself down the toilet one piece at a time to retrieve Nibbler. Fry walks in and sees this just as the last arm jumps in and pulls the flusher. He's next seen in the sewer with his arms and legs mixed up and his head badly screwed on, complaining that he shouldn't have thrown out his assembly manual.
- The Owl House: A side effect of Eda's curse is that she can remove various body parts (still having control over them) at will with no pain (although she admits in the pilot that she hates getting her head knocked off). This is usually Played for Laughs, but it ends up being the main reason why she's one of the few not to be severely affected during the Day of Unity. When the sigil that had been forced on her started to drain her magic, Raine detached the arm the sigil was placed on. While she permanently lost the arm, it saved her life.
- SpongeBob SquarePants: Played for Laughs in "Graveyard Shift". When Squidward tells SpongeBob the story of the Hash-Slinging Slasher and gets to the part where the titular slasher accidentally cuts off his hand, SpongeBob goes, "You mean like this?" while pulling off one of his arms and regenerating it. He does it again in numerous ways, before Squidward gets annoyed and clarifies that the Hash-Slinging Slasher wasn't a sponge. Later, as Squidward describes how the slasher will arrive at the Krusty Krab, a scared SpongeBob is shown eating his dismembered arms out of a popcorn bucket.
- The Star Trek: The Animated Series episode "Bem" has one Ari bn Bem act as liaison from planet Pandro aboard the Enterprise. He joins the away team on Delta Theta 3, where he furtively displays his ability to separate his body into pieces. This ability comes in very handy for moving through a thorny thicket that the others on the away team can't wriggle through without getting scratched bloody. Bem's pieces can also reattach themselves to form his whole body.
Real Life
- The ability of some lizards (skinks and geckos in particular) and salamanders to shed their tails to distract predators is sometimes presented as this, but it's actually an Aversion. Although the tail can be regrown, regrowing a whole tail is slow and costly, and only salamanders can actually regenerate an exact copy of the tail they lost. It's more of a downplayed version of Life-or-Limb Decision.