This is when a character soils themselves because of external factors and it's played for a dramatic effect. Unlike a Potty Failure, which is when a character fails to hold in their pee and ends up wetting themself for comedic purposes, Dramatic Incontinence applies to serious cases only. It also has to be the direct result of external factors, such as an illness, a bladder control problem, the side effect of a medicine, physical trauma, or supernatural reasons, as opposed to someone just not making it to the bathroom in time. This can come from a Laxative Prank gone wrong with dramatic and humiliating results. The soiling can be urinary, fecal, or diarrheic.
The reasons for this type of accident vary. Either the character that suffers from this is a child who has problems controlling their bladder/bowels and it's a major source of drama for them (as they may also be a bed-wetter) or the character is a Scatterbrained Senior who has Alzheimer's or some form of dementia that makes them unable to recognize the need to use the restroom or even remember where it is. Suffering Cold-Blooded Torture and abuse can also reduce the victim into such a state. Incontinence can also be a symptom of many other (often fatal) illnesses, so the drama can be justified.
Truth in Television, as in Real Life (particularly the medical field) these occurrences are known as fecal and urinary incontinence
, and they're a problem that affects millions of people (albeit urinary incontinence is more common).
When this happens due to fright, regardless of whether it's comedic or dramatic, then it's Bring My Brown Pants, not this trope.
Contrast Ailment-Induced Cruelty, which can manifest as intentionally soiling oneself due to negative personality changes from illness or injury. See Ominous Hair Loss, Dangerous Drowsiness, Headache of Doom, Bad Black Barf, and I'm Cold... So Cold... for other symptoms of serious illnesses. See also No Dead Body Poops for when dead characters do not void their bowels at death.
Please do not add any video or real life examples.
Examples:
open/close all folders
Advertising
- Suzy Puppy: Suzy is noted to have diarrhea due to how sickly she is (she even dies at the end), and she is shown defecating on the floor. We even get a closeup of where it comes out.
Anime & Manga
- Barefoot Gen: In the second book, a soldier that was originally going to help Gen get to a hospital falls ill out of nowherenote , and he doesn't even notice that he's soiled himself until Gen points it out. The soldier comments that it's bloody, which he wonders if it's a result of dysentery. Gen helps the soldier get to one of the many makeshift hospitals around, only for it to be too late for the ill-fated soldier.
- EDENS ZERO: According to Crow, people complained about the smell of Holy's dung when he had her crucified in public; the utter humiliation this brought Holy only intensified her murderous hatred of Crow.
- Made in Abyss:
- Riko ends up getting stuck with a poison quill from an Orb Seeker that begins to swell up her arm and causes immense pain. After Reg bungles an attempt to amputate the arm, Nanachi quickly steps in and the two prep Riko for impromptu surgery to remove the poison and stabilize her condition. Nanachi uses some symbiotic fungus to help with the recovery, but they present a problem when the time comes to remove them. With nothing that can act as an anesthetic, the removal process is so painful that the conscious Riko loses control of her bladder, with a discretion shot of her urine spraying out over the edge of the table.
- The Ganja Corps runs into a survival issue of finding drinkable water once they reach the 6th layer. They find a source that they can drink after boiling it, but soon discover that the water is itself a lifeform causing a petrification sickness in most of the people. After waking up and finding Irumyuui in pain, she immediately notices diarrhea containing eggs formed from the Mockwater entering her digestive system. Everyone else who started showing symptoms also showed the same loss of bowels.
Comic Books
- Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth: When Batman first enters Arkham, he discovers a shivering Two-Face in a puddle of his own urine, tearfully apologizing for the mess. As it turns out, his psychiatrist Dr. Adams took away his trademark coin, which he uses to make decisions, and has been replacing it with other numeric objects to give him more options and break his duality obsession. Right now he's using a Tarot deck—but since he still has to consult every single card before he chooses to do something, he's lost the ability to make any choices, including going to the bathroom. What's worse is that Dr. Adams views this as necessary, coldly remarking that she has to tear Two-Face's mind apart to rebuild it.
Fan Works
- Menstrual variants occur and are discussed in a series of The Owl House fanfics by Evilsnotbag:
- In Amity's Calamity, Amity Blight ends up having an embarrassing bloody accident in her pants when she gets her period at the end of class. Luckily, Lilith Clawthorne (who is a teacher at Hexside in this AU), comforts her and offers her new clothes and privacy for a shower.
- In Bless You, Amity's older siblings play a cruel prank on her by putting sneezing powder in her lunch, causing her to bleed through her pants. Lilith quickly takes care of things by helping her pupil and punishing Elma and Edric.
- In Amity's Calamity
- Pony POV Series: Kifuko (the present-day Queen Chrysalis), a lowly slave in the changeling hive, speaks out against Queen Cocoon. She is punished by being forced to fight Wolf Spider, a huge, hulking, and brain-damaged changeling, to the death using only a stick, a sack, and three potatoes. On the day of the fight, Wolf Spider's caretakers release him from his cage, and he staggers out and starts to wet and soil himself, whereupon Kifuko reveals that she poisoned him before the fight.
- Sisterhood: On rare occasions, Naomi's epileptic seizures cause her to lose bladder control. Her best friend points out that this is the one aspect of her illness that Naomi is genuinely uncomfortable and sensitive about.
- Why Am I Crying?: Cheerilee reveals to her student Scootaloo that she and the filly's father, Crimson, were classmates in high school and that she was a horrible bully to him. By her own admission, one of the worst things she did was drug him with something that made him have diarrhea in front of the entire school.
- With Pearl and Ruby Glowing: When Vicky and Ricky assaulted Luan Loud, the latter wet her pants in fear, which the teens uploaded online as a humiliation tactic. While her fellow students taunt her for it, Luan doesn't find it funny at all, and ends up offering herself to Ricky just so he'll take the video down (which, sadly, he doesn't, even putting Luan and Lucy through Rape by Proxy to boot).
Films — Live-Action
- Alzheimers: Mahmoud visits a man diagnosed with Alzheimer's named Omar at a psychiatric hospital/adult daycare center. When he leaves he sees that the guy has peed on himself and tears up because he thinks he's going to end up like Omar.
- The Judge: Hank's father Joseph has been taking medication for his cancer, which causes memory loss and diarrhea. At one point, Joseph violently soils himself, resulting in Hank having to help him in the shower.
- Midnight Cowboy: Near the end, as Joe and Rizzo are taking a bus to Florida, the gravely ill Rizzo wets his pants. It's initially Played for Laughs, as Joe jokes about it and they laugh together. But the hard truth is that it happens because Rizzo is dying.
- Mr. Nobody: A side effect of Nemo's prophetic visions is loss of bladder control.
- Relic: In the finale, Edna's ongoing descent into dementia comes to a head when she loses bladder control at the dinner table — and is so far gone that she neither notices nor cares. Kay quickly bundles her into the bath... where it rapidly becomes clear that dementia is only the beginning of Edna's problems: the "bruise" she was sporting earlier has now grown into a huge patch of necrotic tissue across her chest.
- Still Alice: Alice wets herself because her Alzheimer's made her forget where the bathroom in her house was.
- Suspiria (2018): When Olga is victimized by black magic that makes her dance uncontrollably and snap all of her bones one by one, she pisses herself out of pain.
- Take Shelter: Protagonist Curtis initially tries to shake off his apocalyptic dreams as simple nightmares, but after a particularly intense one causes him to wet the bed, he finally decides to go to a doctor.
- Testament: A small boy suffering from severe radiation sickness loses control of his bowels. The really horrifying thing is that you can see bloodstains on the towel his mother wraps him in — it's literally organ failure.
- 2:37: Steven suffers from urinary incontinence as he was born with two urethras but only the ability to control one of them. This makes him a target for the school bullies.
- The Exorcist: An early sign that something is badly wrong with Regan is when she wanders downstairs in a daze and urinates in front of her mother's houseguests. After exhausting any medical explanation, they slowly come to realize she's possessed by a demon.
- Zero Dark Thirty: A detainee at a CIA Black Site soils himself during the course of prolonged torture, which is mocked by the torturer.
Literature
- American Fuji: Gaby suffers from ulcerative colitis, requiring frequent trips to the bathroom. Towards the end of the book, she suffers a flare-up while out with Alex, and is not able to make it to the toilet before soiling herself, which is a sign that her condition is getting worse.
- The Baby-Sitters Club: Part of Stacey McGill's backstory in her learning she's diabetic is that she was at a sleepover and wet the bed in her sleep. Since she was twelve at the time, her friends shamed her for it, and she lost several before moving to Stoneybrook.
- The Fault in Our Stars: Gus wets the bed towards the end of the book, which is disturbing proof of what he already learned at the hospital: that his cancer is returning after being in remission.
- Middlegame: Roger has a major seizure and wets himself when his twin sister, whose life force is tied to his, is near death from a suicide attempt. He's in the middle of class but is too panicked about keeping her alive to care much about the embarrassment.
- Night: At one point, a boy named Zalman (who is sickly due to the poor conditions at a concentration camp) complains of stomach cramps and starts to undo his pants to do his business before dying right then and there.
- Shtum: Georg urinates on Ben while he carries him to the bathroom because his cancer and radiation therapy have left him too weak to walk to the bathroom himself.
- The Power of One: Peekay suffers from chronic bedwetting as a result of the constant abuse that he suffers at boarding school. After a medicine man cures him, the subsequent boost of confidence helps him excel at his studies.
- A Song of Ice and Fire: In A Dance with Dragons, after catching a surprise ride on Drogon's back and being dropped in a grassy plain in the middle of nowhere, Daenerys struggles to survive, alone and with little food around. She eats some hard green berries she thinks are safe, and an hour later, starts having awful stomach cramps and vomiting. She becomes so sick that she's forced to stay by the stream, drinking water and emptying her bowels in the grass.
- The Wheel of Time: After Egwene shatters the mind of a Forsaken in a duel in the World of Dreams, her allies track down the Forsaken's cover identity in the waking world. What gives her away is that she's been reduced to an incontinent Empty Shell.
Live-Action TV
- American Vandal: Season 2 centers around the mystery of the "Turd Burglar", a prankster who poisoned a Catholic school's lemonade with laxative. While beginning from a place of Toilet Humor, later episodes detail how horrible it is to poison people, and how scared the students and faculty were when it happened. The student who carried out the prank even took steps to keep an elderly priest from drinking the lemonade, as it could be legitimately deadly for him.
- The Brokenwood Mysteries: In "The Power of Steam", Chloe unexpectedly wets herself in the middle of a music festival, just before the Body of the Week is found. The investigation reveals that the murderer drugged her drink with a diuretic in hopes of killing her in the toilet.
- Chernobyl: Mentioned in "Open Wide O Earth". Here, Vasily Ignatenko and the other first responders to the fire at Reactor 4 begin to rapidly succumb to Acute Radiation Syndrome. According to Lyudmila, Vasily is soiling himself five times a night by the end, one of the many reasons why she has disobeyed the nurses' instructions and remained with her husband is to comfort him through his dying agonizes.
- Euphoria: In "The Trials and Tribulations of Trying to Pee While Depressed", Rue suffers urinary difficulties as a result of severe depression, culminating in her peeing herself while trying to get to the bathroom.
- Game of Thrones: Discussed by Robert Baratheon in a scene original to the television shows. He's talking about war stories and how his first kill was a random soldier who tried to challenge him and met his end under Robert's hammer, and in the moment before his death, he defecated in his fear. Unlike Robert's usual demeanor, he's distant when discussing this particular tidbit. Even though he lets out a tiny chuckle as he talks about it, it's the most humorless laugh he lets out in the entire show.
Robert: They never tell you how they all shit themselves. They don't put that part in the songs.
- The George Lopez Show: In "The Kidney Stays in the Picture", Max has been wetting the bed a lot. Max is taken to the doctor and it's revealed he has a blockage in one of his kidneys that if left untreated would have required a transplant. George is particularly shaken by this, as his father had died of a kidney disease.
- The Pacific: In episode four, Leckie wets himself while being stationed in New Britain. Thinking he has been infected with a tropical disease, he goes to see the corpsman, who diagnoses him with nocturnal enuresis, telling him the symptoms are from the stress of being in the front lines, and sends him to a field mental health facility for some relaxation.
- Reborn Rich: Jin Yang-Cheol, the founder of Soonyang Group, has a life-threatening illness that causes delirium and dementia, though he keeps this information hidden from the public. When he has to attend an important meeting, his youngest grandson, Do-Joon, is against him going, lest his delirium comes during the meeting and he loses his position as a CEO. Yang-Cheol attends the meeting anyway and gets in the elevator with Do-Joon. Do-Joon then notices that his grandfather is unconsciously soiling himself, so he kicks the iron barrel when the cleaner lady in the elevator tries to look, so his grandfather won't be humiliated. This scene is tragic; however, it shows how much Do-Joon out of all Yang-Cheol's family loves him genuinely.
- Succession: Logan has moments of incontinence following his health emergency. This is stressful for everyone at Waystar-Royco because they're trying to claim Logan is fine to shore up support for him, but also because it's not always clear how much control he has over it. At one point, Logan pisses on the floor of Kendall's office and it's unclear if he was trying to humiliate Kendall or legitimately couldn't control himself.
- Squid Game: In "A Fair World," Player 001 — already suffering from a brain tumour — becomes feverishly ill between games. Following the violent collapse of the secret organ-harvesting ring, the guards search the players' barracks for the AWOL guard, and in the process, they roughly yank 001's blankets off to reveal that he's lost control of his bladder during the night. Thankfully, Gi-hun ties his jacket around 001's middle early in the next episode so the old man can recover a little of his dignity.
Theatre
- Angels in America: Prior Walter's ongoing struggle with AIDS comes to a head when he finds himself feverish, almost unable to move, and struggling for breath. As his boyfriend Louis hurries to call an ambulance, Prior can be heard deliriously muttering that he needs to go to the bathroom — and almost immediately soils himself. When Louis takes a closer look, he realizes to his horror that most of the resulting puddle is blood.
Video Games
- In Final Fantasy XIV, the Green Rot is a disease of the digestive system with symptoms akin to real life cholera. Victims of the disease scream from the agonizing pain in their abdomens while repeatedly soiling their smallclothes. In the quest, "All in the Family", Hihira is an alchemist who desperately tries to develop a treatment for the illness after being traumatized by memories of her mother suffering from and succumbing to the disease. She's horrified when she recieves word that her father, the wealthy merchant Hihibaru, may have contracted it as well. That fear turns to outrage when it turns out that he faked the report just to see her again after she buried herself in her work. Hihira nearly cuts him out of her life for his actions, leading Hihibaru to reflect and apologize to his daughter after realizing just how insensitive he was.
- Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater: It's heavily implied Snake lost control of his bladder while being brutally tortured by Volgin. The camera zooms in on the protagonist's crotch while the villain sadistically taunts him.
Volgin: Yes, yes! Let yourself go! That is what I want to see!
- Lost Judgment: The plot of the game can be traced back to the attempted suicide of Mitsuru Kusumoto 13 years earlier. He was routinely bullied by his classmates and no one thought it was a problem. After a particularly savage beating, he lost control of his bladder and wet himself in front of his bullies. He jumped off the school's roof that same day. He survived but has been comatose ever since.
Web Animation
- GoAnimate: In this video, Caillou is being tortured by Boris in rather brutal ways. At one point when they're on a plane, Boris refuses to let Caillou leave from his seat to use the bathroom, and after a few hours, Caillou's bladder ruptures, resulting in him pissing himself (though this doesn't kill him, somehow).
Web Original
- SCP Foundation: Halfway through the documentation on SCP-7955 (a shapeshifter suffering from dementia), the unfortunate character is reduced to hiding under his bed when his paranoia gets the better of him during the night. When the staff drag him out next morning, they find that 7955 has soiled himself several times, having been too afraid and too ill to leave his hiding place even use the provided toilet. Worse still, his physical coordination has decayed so badly that he needs to be helped into the shower cubicle.
Western Animation
- The Simpsons: In "Kidney Trouble", Homer refusing to stop the car to let his father go to the bathroom results in Grampa's kidneys exploding out of incontinence and leaving him at death's doors.
- South Park: In "Bass to Mouth", Cartman gives Jenny a cupcake laced with laxatives, causing her to soil herself in the middle of the class. Her humiliation is such that she tries to commit suicide by jumping out of the class window.
