Destructo-Nookie

"Sometimes Women are Just Plain Better than Men," and sometimes beds get destroyed

Sex is always better when you're breaking something.

—Lockpick Pornography by Joey Comeau

The relationship dynamic between Bob and Alice has always been stormy. Maybe they're in love but have been fighting lately over this or that. Maybe they're doing The Masochism Tango. Maybe they're enemies with chemistry and magnetism they're trying to resist. Maybe they're attracted to each other but seem capable only of Slap Slap Kiss.

One night—because it always happens at night—Bob and Alice get into a fight. But this is not just any fight; it's a knock-down, drag-out brawl where anything goes—literally. The location they've chosen for their battlefield breaks up around them as they display their rage physically. They may even actively be trying to kill each other.

Then at one point during the fight, their attraction—admitted or not—turns their rage into sexual passion. Amidst the broken timbers, falling plaster, rattling floors and shattered furniture, they can't get into each other's arms (and/or pants) quickly enough. They can barely keep their hands off each other long enough to clear a spot against a wall or on the floor to do the deed.

It makes an interesting precursor to the obligatory love scene and frequently leads to an Aw, Look -- They Really Do Love Each Other. More often than not, it's Head-Tiltingly Kinky.

Supernatural circumstances can and do contribute to the sex leading to destruction even if there's no actual rage or fighting involved.

Like Slap Slap Kiss, it's a safe bet to say that this rarely happens in real life; when it does, though, it's usually in dysfunctional relationships or cases of Domestic Abuse. In terms of Unfortunate Implications, Destructo-Nookie can be just one rung below Victim Falls For Rapist on the Squick ladder. (Fortunately, the couple engaging in Destructo-Nookie are both consenting to the act with each other. Or, they are both dominating/twisted enough that they attempt to rape each other simultaneously).

No real life examples, please; this is All The Tropes, not Tropes After Dark.

Examples of Destructo-Nookie include:

Anime and Manga

  • In Vassalord, Charley seems to think attacking Rayflo with assorted heavy weaponry counts as foreplay. Rayflo seems to agree. Fortunately, they're both vampires, so no harm done.

Comic Books

  • Explicit in the background of a pair of minor characters in the Powers comic: a married superhero/ex-supervillain pair got together through these kinds of moments. Of course, readers only learn of this because Powers tends to bring its background characters to the fore to mix A Day in the Limelight with Monster of the Week, meaning that having their backstory filled in involved the ex-supervillain husband (among others) being brutally murdered by the demon that gave the superhero wife her powers, and then her own suicide to keep the demon inside her from using her to kill further.
  • In the short-lived Penthouse ComiX line, every encounter between Captain Adventure and Hericane caused varying levels of property damage (up to and including a Caieratornado-like trail of destruction if Hericane is worked up enough).
  • In the Cross Gen comic Negation, Evinlea of the First switches sides from the protagonist's True Companions and seduces Emperor Charon of the Negation Empire. As they're both cosmic-powered immortals and Charon's been without sex so long that he's literally forgotten what it was like (and is thus a tad over-enthusiastic when Evinlea finally... reminds him), their moment of... mutual fulfillment... involves a destructive energy release that literally vaporizes half the planet they're having sex on. Pity that it was an inhabited planet, but they were the villains.
  • The captioned pic above features She Hulk and X-Men villain-turned-member-turned-villain-again-but-was-faking-it-the-whole-time, Cain Marko, The Juggernaut (bitch). She-Hulk, herself, vehemently denied doing the deed with Juggernaut. Turns out it was a (very pleased-with-herself) double from an alternate Earth that nailed him.
    • Her cousin The Hulk has had Destructo-Nookie in Planet Hulk; there's a reason he has a kid running around.
      • Caiera the Oldstrong. It would be yet another alternate reality transplant if that's the mother, however. In 616's sad, sad excuse for canon, Caiera died along with virtually everyone else on Sakaar when the parade float made of the ship that brought the Hulk there was activated, detonating with such force as to effectively kill the planet. Given the way the Illuminati were acting, it's anyone's guess as to whether that was actually an accident or a deliberate means to kill Banner after he was stranded on the world they had meant to dump him on.
      • The explosion was intentional all right. But it wasn't the Illuminati, it was actually teh servants of the King Hulk and Caiera had recently deposed. Also, she posthumously gave birth to twins.
  • The Hoffmanites of Buck Godot: Zap Gun for Hire have all their relationships like this. Courtship begins with high explosives and presumably progresses from there.
  • In an issue of Daredevil set during the Inferno storyline, Kingpin gets into a fight with Typhoid Mary—whom he hired to kill Daredevil—that ends in sex. After the deed is done, the office is half-pulverized, half burned-down (from Mary's mutant powers), and they both have this smug look while getting dressed, thinking the other is completely wrapped around their finger.
    • Also an example in Frank Miller's "The Man Without Fear" miniseries. Foggy arrives at the dorm room he shares with Matt and yells that the chain is on. A shirtless Matt cracks the door open and says to give him a minute. Quite a while later, a smiling Elektra comes out of the room. Foggy enters and finds the room utterly destroyed and Matt wearing only his underwear and a smile. "She really is a nice girl, Foggy..."
  • In The Dark Knight Strikes Again, Superman and Wonder Woman have sex, resulting in earthquakes, tidal waves and more forms of destruction on a massive scale.
  • The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck story "The Prisoner of White Agony Creek" heavily implies Scrooge and Goldie's Slap Slap Kiss relationship culminates in this.
  • The angel and devil that sired Genesis in Preacher (Comic Book):

Angel: It was a tornado. A hurricane. A tsunami crashing down upon a tower of rock. Our juices fell like rain on the inferno.
Jesse: Hey!
Angel: We were not meant to even meet, let alone achieve such union. We were not created --
Jesse: Hey! How much more of this horseshit have I gotta listen to?

  • Scandal Savage and Knockout of the Secret Six both genuinely love each other, but due to one being a Dark Action Girl and the other being a former Female Fury they managed to trash several successive hotel rooms when they went out together, as seen here.

Fan Works

  • Shows up in a lot of post-series fic featuring any of the three Official Couples of Avatar: The Last Airbender, usually alongside Power Perversion Potential for the youngest couple or Brains and Bondage for the two older couples.
  • Luminosity features a relatively mild example, with the damage being limited to a hotel bed. This ends up being plot-relevant: One of the hotel staff connects Edward to some local vampire myths, and in the course of being reassured that Bella is uninjured tips them off about a possible means by which the two of them can have children together.
  • In the last part of the How I Met Your Mother fanfic "Instant Pleasure", Marshall, Lily, Ted, Robin, and Barney's extremely vigorous five-way causes the bed to collapse under them.

Film

  • Mr. and Mrs. Smith - John and Jane Smith are trying to kill each other for plot-related reasons. But despite the fact that they're trying to kill each other and hate each other for the mutual betrayal, they still love each other. They're using guns, and when the bullets run out, they go hand-to-hand. They throw each other bodily all over their marital home, floor to ceiling, room to room (not necessarily using doors for it), and finally give into their desires. They make love on the single clean spot left on the floor, unconcerned that the house is completely destroyed, and that they have other problems.
    • Which made for quite the awkward moment when a police officer knocked on the door...
  • The only good part of the Duff feature Raise Your Voice is when the Goth Pianist stormed into Kiwi's room to scream at him that he's the loudest fucker in the whole damn school, in which Kiwi responded by pushing her into the wall, then she pushed him back, kissing him as they knocked over lamps, send all the drum sets flying, and otherwise causing a huge mess and quite a bit of noise. And it was friggin' hot
  • In an interesting twist of this trope, in the John Wayne romantic film The Quiet Man, he and his new bride argue so vigorously that they break the bed (It Makes Sense in Context) but end up not consummating the marriage on the wedding night. This trope is subtly invoked, though (this was the days of the Hays Code, after all).
    • When the matchmaker O'Flynn visits the next morning, he finds the ruined bed: "Impetuous! Homeric!" he declares with shock.
  • Parodied in Shoot Em Up, in which Clive Owen and Monica Belucci have sex during a gunfight.
  • Subverted in The War of the Roses. Part of the climactic fight ends up with Kathleen Turner straddling Michael Douglas, begging him to show her his... "little captain". He does, but it doesn't end well for him.
  • Scaramouche (1952) - It starts as Slap Slap Kiss with frying pans. It ends with a make up nookie that tears apart Lenore's carriage from the inside out (with frying pans still in hand).
  • Done for pure slapstick in The Tall Guy. Jeff Goldblum and Emma Thompson demolish a flat the first time they have sex. Not that there's any fight involved, they just lose control a bit.
  • The sex scenes in My Super Ex-Girlfriend - one of them just breaks the legs of the bed. One sends it through the wall into the next door apartment. One ends up with a large shark thrown at it, but that's something of another story...
  • The act performed by the possessed Dana Barrett and Louis Tully in Ghostbusters could be considered an extreme example of this trope, as it was supposed to bring about the END OF THE WORLD. Sex doesn't get much more destructive than that.
    • And did completely trash Dana's apartment beyond the dreams of rock bands, to the point of blowing the outside wall out completely and revealing the walled-over stairway to the rooftop. (There's a reason this all started in Dana's pad..)
  • One film adaptation of The Three Musketeers has D'artagnan screwing Milady's maid on a previously-established-to-be-very-sturdy iron-framed bed. After he leaves, she leans against the bed and it collapses into several pieces.
  • Simon Sez
  • A subversion of this happens early on in The Losers, where Clay and Aiesha retire to Clay's room under the pretext of a traditional bar hook-up. Upon being called out on her hidden motive, a fight ensues that juggles foreplay and firestarting.
  • Barnabus and Angelique trash her whole office by making love everywhere (including the walls and ceiling) in Dark Shadows.

Literature

  • Similar to the above example, Bones in the Night Huntress books is occasionally prone to this. One of his encounters resulted in a shattered lamp, a broken table, a bloodstained carpet, an overturned couch, and various other damaged items, prompting Cat to describe the room as looking like a brawl had take place there.
  • The Dresden Files:
    • In a twisted inversion, sex takes place to prevent destruction in Death Masks.
    • Bob the Skull cheers Harry on from an unfortunately mistaken notion of Destructo-Nookie in "Something Borrowed," the short story written for My Big Fat Supernatural Wedding.
    • The end of White Night. Harry uses the energy from the emotions from kissing resident succubus Lara Wraith to strengthen his shield against a massive explosion, and they get shot out of a cave like a cannonball. And continue through most of a wing of her mansion.
  • Subverted in Catch-22 with Yossarian and Nately's whore. First she's trying to kill him, then for a bit it really looks like it's going to be this trope... aaand then she goes for the knife. Admit it, you were fooled.
  • Robert A. Heinlein's Beyond This Horizon contains a bit resembling this trope: the protagonist beats up his love interest; she returns the favour. True Romance.
  • Tanya Huff's Summon the Keeper books involve this. The first time Claire and Dean have sex, they make an angel—and, by extension, a demon.
  • Vampires in Twilight all have destructo sex; the resident hulk says he and his ice queen wife have broken multiple houses.
    • Not to mention that when the main couple went out on their honeymoon, they managed to break their vacation bedroom multiple times.
  • In Lucy A. Snyder's Spellbent, Jessie and Cooper have sex to magically summon a thunderstorm. Later in the series, after she's acquired a magical hellfire arm, they try to make love and almost burn down a house.

Live-Action TV

  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer - Buffy and Spike get into a brawl in an abandoned house. At some point in the fight, they go from trading blows to kissing, and they end up having sex up against a wall before the floor gives out beneath them.
    • And even that doesn't stop them - they just keep going and going...
      • The line about the Destructo-Nookie from the following episode (as the Nookie was part of a Cliff Hanger) was named one of the best post-coital lines ever:

Buffy: "When did the building fall down?"

    • Another episode opens with a slow pan across a trashed room, accompanied by the sounds of passion and breaking objects, ending with Spike and Buffy lying post-coitus under the carpet.

Buffy: We missed the bed again.
Spike: Lucky for the bed.

  • Moonlighting - Dave and Maddie have a brawl that leads to throwing things and the destruction of Maddie's living room before they end up with an afterglow romantic shot in bed several minutes later.
  • In Burn Notice, Fiona challenges Michael to a fight when Michael refuses to talk about their relationship. Halfway through the fight turns into a fight/grope-fest and a few minutes later it just turns into flat-out sex.
    • Which was, if you're into that sort of thing, a Crowning Moment of Sexy.
  • In the Star Trek universe, this is pretty much a Klingon's idea of a hot date (the violence being less "trigger" and more "foreplay").
    • A broken collarbone during the wedding night is considered a sign of good luck for the newlyweds.
    • The Deep Space Nine episode "Looking for par'mach in all the wrong places" had three characters coming into sickbay for sex-related injuries (Quark didn't inflict sufficient damage upon the Klingon chick for her to need repairs). Worf and Dax literally start out with a bat'leth duel, which is implied to be Klingon tradition.
    • Curiously, the same appears to be true of Vulcans. You'd think it was a match made in Sto-Vo-Kor, but the pairing's uncommon at best.
  • Star Trek Enterprise. Hinted at in "Babel One" when Captain Archer notices that Commander Shran is having a relationship with his Number Two Talas.

Shran: Andorian women are far more aggressive than Earth females. She made...an overture. I had a choice -- charge her with assaulting a superior...or mate with her.

  • An early episode of Roseanne has Dan and Roseanne's fight over a tacky souvenir clock degenerate into furniture-throwing. After they heft the couch out onto the front lawn, they lock eyes and go straight for the bedroom. The scene cuts to a steamy afterglow shot.
  • Happened a few times in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys and Xena: Warrior Princess.
  • There was a line in the TV series Wiseguy where the villain played by Tim Curry says to his wife "You call it fighting, I call it foreplay!".
  • Battlestar Galactica. Happens between Colonel Tigh and his wife Ellen in one episode, but it's made perfectly clear their relationship is seriously dysfunctional (actually the writers specifically included the scene to show there was in fact some attraction between the two).
  • Subverted on Desperate Housewives. Edie and Carlos have been having trouble with their sex life, and an argument appears to be leading towards this trope. She throws him against the fridge to make out and a pepper grinder falls on his head. He throws her onto the table and it collapses from their combined weight. Cut to them at the doctor's office, getting stitches for their injuries.
  • Weirdly enough, a dance routine on the sixth season of So You Think You Can Dance was intended to portray this. Also, it was freaking amazing.
    • You mean Ellenore and Legacy's contemporary piece, right? That was awesome.
  • On One Life to Live, Max and Blair, in the depths of their mutual gambling addictions, and he wrongly believing that his wife Luna is cheating on him with his best friend (thanks to Blair's lies and scheming), proceed to wreck a hotel room during a sex scene that involved him slamming her against the wall several times, knocking over tables and chairs, and at one point, clearly taking her from behind (a shocking daytime first), before finally falling onto the one table they haven't knocked over.
  • Castle episode 6 of the First season contains the good example of this trope. Castle and his ex-wife having quite a brawl, with her legs knocking glasses and pictures of the table, them breaking bed, her ripping off the curtain and eventually both falling off said bed so hard that pictures fall off the wall and break. And it seems that it was most casual too.
  • In Smallville Lana Lang temporarily gains super powers identical to Clark's. This means they can finally have sex without him destroying her. Earthquakes ensue.
  • In the final season of The West Wing rumours arise that Democratic candidate Matt Santos and his wife destroyed an antique bed in a hotel room that they were staying in.
    • ("Hurricane Santos")

Santos (to reporters): So, I'm going to address this once, just this once, and that'll be the end of it, okay: No way was that bed steel-reinforced.

  • All My Children's adulterous Alec and Arlene destroyed his apartment (which she'd already trashed) having sex on the night he married her DAUGHTER.
  • In Frasier the titular character does it in Bora Bora, alone, on a bed, to feign great sex, with no superpowers.
  • Heavily implied once on The Big Bang Theory, back when Leonard and Penny first started dating. Sheldon demanded to know why they were at his and Leonard's apartment when they had agreed that when they wanted to spend the night together, they would do so at Penny's. Leonard looked very smug and replied that they couldn't, because her bed broke.

Music

  • The song "Lover's Day" by TV On the Radio
  • "Stingwray" by Static-X
  • "Oceanographer's Choice" by The Mountain Goats details (an inevitably brief) reconciliation and subsequent destructive sex of the recurring Alpha Couple

And then we fell down, and we locked arms. We knocked the dresser over as we rolled across the floor

Music Video

Video Games

  • Parodied in /flirt emotes in World of Warcraft, particularly the Draenei, Night Elf, Troll and Orc ones. Sadly, some of the Draenei Noodle Incident emotes were not present in the released version.
    • Unfortunately, most of the female Draenei flirts were removed.

"When enraged and in heat, a female troll can mate up to 80 times in one night. Be ya prepared?"

  • Knights of the Old Republic: Heavily implied among the Echani. Depending upon the circumstances, a series of duels between two members of the opposite sex can be construed as a courtship of sorts; and individual duels can be interpreted as flirting or possibly foreplay.
    • The Handmaiden (half-Echani, raised as one) fights several unarmed duels with the player character along the course of her romance subplot. During the duels both participants are wearing their underclothes (from the dialogue, they're supposed to be naked, but the game engine doesn't allow that). A hand-to-hand duel between the two turning into sex isn't a stretch of the imagination. (Admit it, that was what you were thinking too) Kreia even points this out at one point, asking the Exile why he thinks she's been so eager to get naked and sweaty with him.
  • It's implied in Gears of War that the Locust breed this way, considering that the Berserkers (their females) are extremely strong, have to be chained down while having the deed done, and have skin that's so hard it's bulletproof.
  • Travis Touchdown finally got with Sylvia at almost the end of the second No More Heroes game. The "No More Heroes" sign outside falls to read "More Ero" and during, you can very clearly hear gunshots.
  • In Darkwatch, you vampire bite the girl during sex, then she comes back and uses her new powers to destroy the organization.

Web Comics

  • Jägers in the Girl Genius universe seem to think this is just how it's done, since they consider being physically wounded by Von Pinn as not so much "Emphatic, murderous NO!" as "A bit of teasing". After all, she could kill or incapacitate them with very little effort.

von Pinn: Move or die!
André: Woo-hoo! Already mit de sveet tok!

    • Of course, while Jägerkin believe in Love At First Punch, her charges think she's "warning them off". But now that her background is revealed, she may have used an opportunity simply to keep them in good fighting form... and vent her perpetual nasty mood.
  • Walky and Joyce's first night together. Lampshaded by the motel clerks who recognize their SEMME uniforms:

Clerk 1: They got "the stripe," man.
Clerk 2: So what? You mean like "Man of Steel, Woman of Kleenex?"
Clerk 1: More like "Man of Steel, Woman of Steel, Bed of Kleenex."

    • And inside the room:

Walky *tangled in a heap with Joyce, surveying the remains of the room--utterly wrecked save for the chair* Whew...whew...uh...Joyce, we kinda...should we...
Joyce The chair! THE CHAIR!

Sabine: You can do anything you want with me... You can't honestly tell me this didn't cross your mind while we were fighting, can you? I promise: this time, when I manhandle you, it will feel a LOT better.
Roy: Anything I want, you say?
Sabine: Anything.
(Next panel: Sabine crashing through a window and falling several stories)
Roy: Hey, you were right. That DID feel better than before. Nice piercings, though."

    • Especially awesome given that her supernatural combat enhancements had just worn off, so she was trying to continue to distract Roy by stripping. Also, she's a shapeshifter.

Western Animation

  • The Venture Bros, Brock Samson and Molotov Cocktease's entire relationship. Hell, Brock has a rule against killing women and children... but such things as cutting out Molotov's eye or getting handcuffed to a bed in a burning building are nothing more than foreplay to them.

Molotov: You took my eye!
Brock: After you took... my heart.

    • Not to mention the motel room they trashed while Brock was trying to get his rocks off.
  • Mortal enemies Aeon Flux and Trevor Goodchild have been known to make out on the battlefield.
  • Futurama, between Lrrr and Ndnd in the episode Spainsh Fry.

Lrrr: You will want to retreat to a safe 500 meter radius!

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