Lore
(Existentially terrifying trope) The suit can't come off
Jester (Legend of Oz) - cursed by his sister to always be wearing a jester costume.
Super Scott (Hero Inside) - he is a literal comic book character brought to life, and as such cannot take his suit off because it is a part of him, no matter how much he hates it.
Agent Venom (Ultimate Spider-man: Web Warriors) - after bonding to Flash Thompson, the symbiote had formed a perfect bond with him and therefore will no longer come off, even when faced with methods that have been used to remove it before.
The fact they grew with his feet is an overlooked feature, I feel. Imagine if they were more solid. Either your feet get crushed or the shoes finally come off, but it's painful.
Maybe they're made of the same sort of stuff as a gelatinous cube, and it just eats his excess nails, skin, sweat, etc. and digests it to maintain its own shoey structure. Perfectly balanced parasitic footwear.
that actually is a good point…we never see his feet in the sequel so I’m headcanoning he created a dissolving agent off screen (unless he still has them and I’m forgetting something
What's infinitely more impressive is that they didn't come off when the outer layers of skin cells came off as they do. Nothing should be able to stick permanently to human skin.
Now that's a genuine mystery. How the Hell did he clip them through the material and get the clippings out? I know, cartoon logic, don't think too hard about it, but seriously?!
Everyone made fun of him for not being able to take them off. But he genuinely made a revolutionary piece of tech. Like imagine the applications with this. It’s literally a spray on material that is virtually indestructible.
Everything he makes is revolutionary tech. Genetically spliced rat-bird hybrids with stable lifespans and the ability to produce offspring? A universal translator that somehow decodes pure mental intent into spoken English? A machine that straight up changes water molecules into food? The man is a genius.
Unfortunately, he lives in a town that just can't see the bigger picture, which leads into him being made fun of, insecurity, and gets him more prone to mistakes
Also the minute his talent is finally recognized, it’s used for an evil corporation to take control of his now abandoned home island to use for nefarious purposes along with his former invention.
Not only indestructible but it also grew with his feet, and he did that at just 8 years old. His opening monologue was right, he really was a misundertstood genius
Soooo.... My dad was in the Navy in the early 60's and one of the guys he was in with grew up poor in the South. And for shoes, well have you seen how they do roads in Cool Hand Luke? They pour tar down and then toss sand on it. This guy and all his siblings would step in the tar and then the sand and then tar, sand... until a good coating was built up and that was their shoes. Apparently it stayed on until about the time another road crew was coming though the area. Every time l see the spray on shoes l think of this guy.
I get that there's supposed to be cartoon logic and everything, but how does he urinate/defecate/trim nails/etc? I'm assuming he still has bodily functions and needs like eating, right?
I recall a one-off where Rhino had a proceedure done which left him with some bandages on his head, and when asked what happened he lied and said he "fell off the John." Implying he does somehow use the facilities
Yeah, I think I had a reprint of that issue as a kid. Scorpion comes back for revenge on Jameson, thinking that he can't get the suit off, and the at the end Spider-Man just pulls Scorpion's mask off and reveals that the bond that kept him in the suit had already worn off some time ago.
Personal theory is that they're supposed to contrast Spidey, who can take his suit off at any time and separate between his normal life and his hero life. His villains can't take their suits off, and are basically forced into the villain life AS their normal life
At least with this version of Doctor Fate, once you put on the helmet, Nabu has control of your body. So the helmet (and thus the suit) only come off if he removes the helmet himself. Eventually he decides the world needs Doctor Fate, and decides to claim Zatara's body permanently.
Long story short, as revealed in comics, his suit was originally white, until he was possessed by a villain named Dark Specter, said villain was eventually defeated by other Rangers, but Phantom's soul and body were both too damaged and he has had to stay inside his suit since then, his suit was also permanently tainted black as a result of the possession
They just never show him without the suit, he does mention having "his own reasons" to not show his face in the show, but those were only revealed in the comics
At first, Alec Holland believed that his body was merely covered by the Green, like a suit, and hoped to reverse it so he could return to a normal life. But once he found his decaying body in the marsh, Alec realizes that he is the Green now and can never take it off.
I could have sworn Alcatraz is killed somewhere in there and as he's dying with the suit saving him he realizes it's just remaking prophet inside his body. Like the suit was bonded to prophet first and decided that it would preserve him regardless of what happened to his meat. And by the end of the second game it's just prophet left inside an empty suit.
The suit DOES try to use Alcatraz as a main host/mind profile but when they are bonded, Alcatraz is near death, his body and mind are too mangled to perform a perfect synchronization.
The suit pretty much has Prophets mind profile loaded into it because they were bonded for so long and also the suit bonded with Prophet when he was physically healthy.
When the suit tries to synchronize with Alcatraz it realizes his mind data is too corrupted/damaged to use, so it dusts Prophet off and loads him in as the primary.
So in short:
Physical Alcatraz and Prophet are both dead as shit.
Digital Alcatraz is "alive", but so damaged and corrupted that there is no hope of savaging anything of him.
Digital Prophet is alive and the mind profile of the suit as of Crysis 3. Then by the end of Crysis 3 it accepts that it isn't really human. But it has essentially evolved, gained sentience, and allied itself with the humans against the Ceph (aliens).
Made even more so when Crysis 3, the suit did a whole body snatcher thing, and fully took over Alcatraz with Prophet’s mind and at the end, the suit and Prophet become one entity. I feel bad for Alcatraz. He never had a chance once the suit was put onto him
He never had a chance before the suit was put on him. He was fucked, and no field medic could have patched him up assuming one found him, which given the rest of his squad was KIA...
He was a dead man walking no matter what happened. This just gave him a chance to go out swinging.
Tali and the rest of the Quarians from Mass Effect have Immune systems so bad that even brief exposure to the outside world can be fatal. This becomes a problem for Tali in particular because she really wants to fuck Shepard (and Garrus.)
Even then she does seem to get a pretty nasty infection. For her purposes, fair enough, but for the point of the post, the Quarians really are in trouble if they don't have like, days of prep time before being exposed to something.
and in the second game Mordin makes sure you get all the needed info if you're romancing the aliens (Thane's species can cause some minor psychedelic trip on contact, how to avoid getting Tali sick, and noting the biochemistry differences between a human and Turian like Garrus can cause some minor discomfort)
And an amusing aside that apparently for Salarians, the way Shepard blinks is seen as very flirty - so if Shepard isn't locked in, Mordin turns them down and is low-key mortified to realize they weren't actually flirting.
I think that Mordin is fairly direct, if somewhat euphemistic, in saying that the chirality of amino acids can cause a Garrus-romancing FemShep to have gastrointestinal issues if she swallows.
All of that to touch briefly and she was sick for a week. But she rode that high for months, being able to touch Sheperd.
Quarians only mate with themselves because they can regulate their environmental suits to match the other as well as regulate the environment of their sealed living space to match their suits. They get sick initially but then can be with each other without the suits. They can't do that with other species because the other person will be constantly exposed to the environment.
You can only get a freak on with a Quarian if you are willing to live in an environmental suit or live in a sealed space long term without leaving.
Its so fucking funny and wholesome to see how Tali was so goddamn focused on cracking Shepard that she worked for so long to train up her immune system to be able to tolerate being out of her haz suit and go to bed with them for a moment.
Not that it prevented Terra from eventually throw him into a river of lava, killing the bastard and sending him to hell before Raven’s father turned him into his evil undead servant and gave him demonic powers
While he technically can take it off, the Noah outfit is the only clothes he can wear outside his house; any attempt to wear something else results in the clothes disappearing and him walking out naked.
He also can't cut his hair or get rid of his beard.
After destroying his previous Sword, Finn went shopping for a new one and ended up with a magic grass sword that could make perfect cuts with ease
He then discovers the Sword is cursed and that he cannot separate himself from it at all, having nightmares about the sword and waking up with it in his hand one night after trying to get rid of it
He and Jake then go confront the wizard about it and then discover there is no way to break the curse
Finn then makes peace with the fact, as the sword is pretty damn cool, and he gets the ability to change the shape of the sword into a grass bracelet
Yeah, Fern. They’re a combo of the grass swords curse latching onto a copy of Finn from a time loop episode. He had a rough arc surrounding the clone paradox of “who’s the ‘real’ Finn”.
Especially valid that Fern is, as far as the audience is concerned, the Finn we have been following up to this point until he was paradoxed into the sword
Goosebumps! Carly Beth realizes she can’t take off the mask as it starts to take over her personality, she even undressed partly and it’s fused to her skin.
This was my intro to the new generations of The Doctor. Genuinely creeped me out. Not something that usually happens with TV shows or movies, but I can still hear that child asking that question.
Eccleston Who is still my favorite of the new ones, because they hadn't gotten drunk on success yet, and had the unenviable task of modernizing a kind of hokey franchise.
This was done to the mutants on Genosha from the X-Men comics in the 80s. Back then, it was a mutant apartheid state, and all mutants were genetically modified to have a suit grafted onto them to prevent them from reproducing and permanently marking them as property before putting them into slave labor.
There's a scene in I think Shadows of the Empire, set in between ESB and ROTJ, where Vader fully removes the suit in his meditation chamber (seen briefly in Empire Strikes Back) and works on his force healing. Being a sith this means channeling his hate: his hatred for Obi-Wan for failing to train him, his hatred for the Emperor for withholding information, his hatred for Luke for rejecting him, his hatred for himself for being too weak to change any of it.
With the power of his hate he heals himself, restoring scarred lungs and charred esophagus. He can breathe again like a normal man. To prove his power he opens the chamber, standing bare in the room as the oxygenated and bacta-infused air from the chamber leaves him. Yet he can still breathe, with no suit and no bacta.
For a brief moment Vader feels joy at his accomplishment, and the poison of true happiness breaks the focus of his hatred. His lungs once again shrivel, he collapses into a coughing fit, and he slams the meditation sphere shut to flood the space with healing mists once again. And Vader stews in his self-loathing as his weakness led him to another failure, resolving to find a way to maintain his hatred even in victory.
Pheonix Man from One Punch Man. When he was still human, he played a character on a children's tv show. After he became a monster, the costume he hated wearing became a part of his body, making it impossible to take off.
Buzz lightyear (toy story) thought he was wearing a space suit but when his arm detached he can clearly see there is no suit and no person inside. Just plastic.
It didn't help the editing was obvious and end up being a trigger for my most hated trailer "Trope"
they had a daytime scene with the owl commenting he believes he has a pinecone in his -
then they cut to the doll AT NIGHT gasping in shock, making it clear they lazily pasted two separate scenes to make a 'oooh he was gonna say something naughty' gag.
yeah that movie is better known as a massive fucking investment scam, as the actual movie is an extremely mealy retread of every 'Dorothy goes back to Oz' plot.
I can't remember it exactly but I feel like there were a LOT of investment scam type movies back in the early-to-mid 2010s. Just low budget animated movies that had no business being in theaters and would've served better as straight to DVD releases. There was this movie called Space Chimps that also felt that way looking back at it.
There's that one run of iron man where his suit's interpretation of keeping him safe melts his skin when he tries to take it off, eventually fusing with him and driving him mad, making suits for others to keep them "safe" as well.
Kent McCoy from the movie Clown puts on an old clown costume he found in his basement to entertain during his kid’s birthday party but turns out the costume is cursed and fused to him since it’s made out of the skin and hair of a demon that eats children.
Spawn’s armour can shapeshift, but one of the ways Malborgia fucked Simons over is that the armour can never make him look like he did when he was alive.
Leading to an infamous panel where Simons, looking like a white blond super bro, screams “No, I’m a black man!”
I mean, he did try take shape as a human again due to the fact that he had stupid OP powers from the get-go, which included transmutation....
....Only for Al to realize that everytime he tried to morph back into a human he got turned into a white blonde dude with blue eyes while he lived for all of his life pre-Spawnification as a black guy.
The Daemon-Plate armour of Chaos Warriors, those soldiers of Chaos that give their souls entirely over to the gods in return for strength and power, is said to be permanently fused to their bodies. They no longer need to eat, drink or sleep, as slaughter nourishes them now.
Dreadnoughts are a fusion of a walking tank, and a life-support unit. When a Space Marine or Custodian is too badly wounded to survive otherwise, they may be interred into a dreadnought. This is an irreversible fusion, once the sarcophagus is sealed shut, as the ruined remains of their body struggle in vain against the various life support systems keeping them alive, while on the outside, the mighty dreadnought follows their commands with surprising speed and dexterity. Ruined stumps move in tandem with the mechanical limbs on the outside, lungs filled with synthetic amniotic fluid cough and splutter while the dreadnought's speakers bellow commands for allies, and abuse for foes.
There's a lot of mentions of just how horrific it is to exist inside a Dreadnought, and, despite it being seen as a great honour among most marines, it's certainly not enviable, and a few chapters (The Grey Knights and the White Scars, to name two) actually dislike their use and would prefer to die than be interred, but understand that what they want is secondary to what the chapter needs and the Emperor expects.
Thousand Sons - granted I know very little about their lore but i think due to some magical fuckery of Ahriman the usual legionaires got their souls fused into their armours while their bodies were turned into colorful dust. If I recall correctly they can be "killed" if the suit is breached but they can endlessly revived if repaired.
Even if they wanted to, turns out being dust is really bad for your ability to act on your own accord. Those dweebs are just barely sentient cobwebs stuck inside their armor.
(I play TSons, love me Rubrics love me Scarabs simple as)
In Star Wars, there was a guy in the old republic who made a black suit of armor imbued with force alchemy (also following the whispers of the spirit of marks ragnos iirc) and once he put it on he couldn’t take it off (because of dark side magick) but it made him force sensitive and a great fighter.
People who read between the lines will see that this sounds an awfully like Darth Vader in terms of appearance. This is because in fact Sheev used this as inspiration for torturing Vader passively.
Jaime Reyes, the third Blue Beetle, has an alien superweapon fused to his spine. It's so powerful that when he and Batman went to Oa for help on a case, nearly the whole Green Lantern Corps showed up in force to remove it from him, and when they accidentally tripped the Scarab’s security measures it took him over and fought them to a standstill.
More existentially horrifying, the Scarab was designed to be in control all the time. The only reason it isn’t is because it was damaged on its way to Earth and the two previous Blue Beetles tampered with it.
He got caught in a magical storm and a bunch of weapons and armor fused around him into one solid suit, and he's been stuck in it for years. He's also one of the Disfavored, who are constantly protected and healed by their leader's magic, and that same magic is part of what keeps him fused into the armor so they can't just cut him out. At one point he starts wondering if there's still a normal human body inside it. Completing his personal quest can involve getting him unstuck though so it's not as bleak as some examples.
Cursed Armor - The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy
Can only come off if the wearer wins a challenge of some kind. Unfortunately for Billy he sucks at challenges, and he really has to use the restroom. He gets it removed only because Mandy refuses to participate in a dance challenge, and Billy's stupid enough to interpret that as a win.
Warhammer 40k. Extended exposure to chaos will cause things like power armor to fuse to to the wearer's body and eventually even becomes their new skin. The example shown is Typhus the Traveler. Whom at this point is less a man and more a Suit filled with bee's
The whole Death Guard and plague marine lore is horrifying because they're all in this mental haze where they view their disease ridden bodies as full of "gifts" from Grandfather Nurgle (the God of decay and disease). But i remember reading a story where their connection to chaos was temporarily cut off and not only did their bodies immediately start falling apart, but their minds cleared as well and they started realizing what a horrific position they had put themselves in. I can't remember which book it was but I certainly remember that part.
Justified version: In Inglorious Basterds, Lt. Aldo Raine makes sure that Col. Hans Landa will never be able to completely remove his "uniform" after the war.
A more comedic example happens in the first Iron Man, considering that it’s a simple design oversight rather than a supernatural bond, and it is possible to take it off, it’s just extremely difficult and inconvenient. For all of the genius he put into designing the Iron Man suit, Tony somehow had never considered making it easy to get out of the suit. As a result, he spends so long trying to take the suit off that Pepper catches him in the act and figures out his secret.
Thankfully, he seems to have learned from this in Iron Man 2.
I don't think it was an oversight or something he hadn't considered, it was just that those early suits were prototypes and he hadn't figured out how to make them more accessible yet. Keep in mind that the "final" suit at the end of the first Iron Man is still only Mark 3, and only the second model that he designed and built in his workshop.
It's actually one of the things I always liked about the three Iron Man movies, is that we see how Tony's tech progresses as he improves the designs. Going from a cumbersome armor that needs a whole elaborate docking station with robot arms to assemble and lock him in, and then by IM3 he can just step in and out of the suit like getting in a car. They took it too far with the nanotech suits, though.
This trope brought back a childhood memory of an apparently obscure book I once read. The title probably needs no further explanation as to how it fits the trope.
I’m surprised no one mentioned this mf from Clown (2014)
Premise: a loving father puts on a mysterious clown costume for his son’s bday party only for it to not come off, and he slowly transforms into a flesh eating demon clown.
I think the original Scorpion from Spider-Man was a dude hired by J Jonah Jameson to fight Spidey and given a high tech suit but it won't come off for some reason. So he's stuck like that and hates JJ as much as he hates Spidey
Hans from Pumpkin Scissors was part of an experimental flamethrower unit during the war. If he removes the suit his body will liquefy. He is also constantly cold except for when burning things.
Teen Titans - When Mumbo turns the Titans into animals (and in Beast Boy’s case, a lamp), Cyborg is stuck wearing a tutu that keeps reappearing no matter how many times he rips it off.
She put on a suit of indestructible, cursed armor and two swords that she cannot remove to save her village from bandits. She begs the main group to strip her, since they are famous for undressing elves.
Godot in Phoenix Wright 3(Trials and Tribulations). The white hair and Geordi La Forge mask is not for show. He's... I wanna say 35 years old? Body horribly wrecked from a neurotoxin, he needs the mask to see and consumes about 17 cups of coffee on a busy trial day to keep himself going. He basically runs on coffee and spite.
The mask is actually a really important plot point. Because the visors project red light, he can both be seen in the dark, and cannot see red on a white background(for instance, bloodstains). The only time it comes off is when it's forcibly knocked off by a knife assailant. He has to put it back on even though he's suffered a gnarly slash wound underneath, because he can't see without them and hasn't had time to go to a doctor. It's not stated, but it's implied that it's structurally important to the shape of his face, and probably shouldn't be off for long periods of time. So yeah, pretty married to the mask.
That badass suit? That’s his skin. Unlike modern Kamen Riders that don armor, Takeshi was turned into a mutant cyborg against his will and now transforms into a grasshopper themed superhero whenever the wind blows.
(gif taken from the 2023 film Shin Kamen Rider)
Mimosa (Hi Fi Rush) - During her boss fight, one of her voice lines has her yell out that the dress is a part of her. Granted she's probably referring to the fact the lower part of her dress is part of her wing implants, but the game never really elaborates on this, and to be fair her surgically locking herself to the same over-the-top outfit is strikingly in-character for her. Also another excuse for me to post this pic again because it's funny.
https://giphy.com/gifs/QMMuvJz3wJk1JtkrR8
Red lanterns - dc. In many continuities, the ring becomes their heart so they literally can’t take it off without killing themselves
After Gandhi unzips the mascot from their rival highschool GESH (Genetically Engineered Super Humans), it's organs fall out and he realizes it's not a suit.
"Oh my god, that's not a kid in a costume, that's a living thing!" screams
"Oh my god, it was genetically engineered with a zipper" screams
An alternate dimension version of Captain Britain. He was a normal dude who discovered an uniform that had the colors of Granbretan.
He put it on and gained superpowers. He then began to put them to use to do good. He began to get annoyed he was getting too tired to take advantage of it. Eventually, he wanted to take the outfit off...
But the outfit refused, even taking control over the guy's body and covering his mouth to prevent him from calling for help. Even the guy's death did not stop the suit from its desire to perform heroics.
When the body decomposed too much, the suit then flew back to where the guy had found it, digested the body, and now waits for the next wearer.
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u/LorryToTheFace 10d ago
Flint Lockwoods spray-on-shoes from Cloudy With A Chance Of Meatballs. He applies them as a child and is still wearing them as an adult.