An object that has been broken into many pieces is put back together; a paper document that underwent a Paper Destruction of Anger is painstakingly reassembled. A machine that exploded into tiny fragments is reassembled, piece by piece, into working order. A corpse that was subjected to Dismembering the Body might be put back together in this way. The Simile "like a jigsaw puzzle" is sometimes used. The Other Wiki has an article on Kintsugi
, the art of repairing broken pottery.
The repair may or may not be successful; indeed, further destruction may result from attempts to repair the object. This can Played for Laughs if the repair is improbably successful, such as if paper torn into very small scraps is put back together. This can be done as a way of resurrecting a destroyed item: when somebody breaks up an object, they usually assume it cannot be recovered. Somebody might carefully piece together some scraps of paper, in order to read what was on them.
For repairs done by magic, this only applies if a lot of effort is required to make the repair: for example, if all the pieces have to be found before they can be stuck together with magic. Simply saying "Reparo" note and the object is as good as new is not an example.
Supertrope to Reforged Blade. Compare Literally Shattered Lives, Dismantled MacGuffin, Sealed Evil in a Six Pack, Two Halves Make a Plot, We Can Rebuild Him. Can overlap with Broken Treasure and Resurrect the Wreck.
Examples:
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Anime & Manga
- Berserk does this in the Fantasia arc when Farnese and Schierke have to go into Casca's dreamscape in order to gather the pieces of her broken soul and psyche in order to restore her to her former sanity. They're beset along the way by monsters representing some of the nastier things that Casca had to go through.
- Delicious in Dungeon: While resurrection magic is a part of adventuring in the titular dungeon, there are limits. Ordinarily, the body needs to be mostly intact or, failing that, the revival specialist needs to provide enough fresh meat to replace the lost biomass. When Falin is eaten by the Red Dragon and digested enough for only bones to remain, the main characters spend quite a while assembling all the remains to make their desperate attempt at a revival. It succeeds, but also attracts the attention of the dungeon's ruler, the Mad Mage.
- Franken Fran: In "Take to Pieces", Fran helps the police investigate the case of dozens of dismembered arms and legs dumped around town — all with identical DNA. Fran notices that some of the body parts have mirrored surgical scars and starts matching them up, eventually assembling a huge ring of tumorous growths with no body at the center. She correctly assumes that the body all the tumors were lopped off of is still alive somewhere and in need of serious medical attention.
- JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
- Diamond is Unbreakable: Upon noticing the Nijimura Father struggling to piece several scraps of paper together, Josuke uses his Crazy Diamond to reconstruct all the pieces together, revealing it to be a family picture.
- Golden Wind: After Risotto discovered a piece of a burnt photograph next to Pericolo's corpse, he manages to reconstruct it using the ashes via computer analysis to show the location of the information disc hidden in a statue.
- Steel Ball Run: Funny Valentine's personal goal is to acquire all the dismantled Corpse Parts and put them back together so he can use the power it possesses for his own patriotism.
- Kurohime: A woman is Taken for Granite, then the resulting statue is shattered. Kurohime addresses this through the simple expedient of casting a healing spell on the broken statue to put it back together, before counterspelling the petrification.
- Yu-Gi-Oh!:
- The story kicks off when Yugi Muto reassembles the pieces of the Millennium Puzzle, releasing the spirit of the Pharaoh who sealed himself inside.
- Seto Kaiba wins Yugi's grandfather's Blue-Eyes White Dragon in a bet, and tears it in half so that it can't be a threat to him (since he already has the other three of that card that were printed and the rules of Duel Monsters limit him to three per deck. Yugi recovers the Blue-Eyes after defeating Kaiba, and a later episode shows he and his grandfather taped it back together.
Comic Books
- Impulse: In one issue, the Riddler tries to get the titular speedster to think about how to solve a death trap involving three buttons. To force him, he tears up a piece of paper showing the answer. Impulse just zips off, gathers the shreds, and tapes it up. It's enough to finally push poor Edward into a Villainous Breakdown.
- New X-Men: Emma Frost is completely shattered while in her diamond form when her daughter Esme of the Stepford Cuckoos shoots her. Beast attempts to collect all the shards before Jean Grey uses the Phoenix Force to put her back together and restore her to life.
Fan Works
- Past Sins: The Road Home: Talking about unicorn repair spells in the first chapter:
“A little nuance to almost any repair spell Twilight could use is the need for pieces. You need all the pieces.” Discord opened the box, taking one of the puzzle pieces out and chucking it over his shoulder. “And the longer you wait, the more likely those pieces are going to get lost.”
Films — Animation
- In The Little Mermaid (1989), King Triton destroys Ariel's collection of human objects in a fit of rage upon learning that Ariel's in love with the human Eric. In The Little Mermaid II: Return to the Sea, after Ariel is turned back into a mermaid, we see her in her old grotto at one point with her human collection fully restored, presumably rebuilt by Triton.
- Monsters, Inc.: At the end of the movie, Boo's door is put through an industrial shredder as part of the CDA's clean-up, and Sulley takes one of the splintered pieces as a memento. After a Time Skip, Mike reveals he was able to retrieve the other pieces and painstakingly put them back together, and the film ends with Sulley inserting the final piece, bringing the door back online, and going through it to reunite with Boo.
- Tinker Bell and the Lost Treasure: Zig-zagged, in that the movie is Tinker Bell's quest to repair the accidentally-destroyed Moonstone in time to build it into a scepter for a ceremony where light shines through the stone: if successful, the stone plus the light will restore their supply of fairy dust. Her attempts to repair the Moonstone via magical means fail, so she instead rolls with the Moonstone's destruction and creates a scepter that takes advantage of the fact that the Moonstone is in pieces by shining light through each piece individually. This generates more fairy dust than ever before, leaving her superiors wondering how she'd gotten the idea to break the Moonstone apart.
Films — Live-Action
- Amélie: Nino has an album of people's rejected passport photographs, which he has obtained by searching for the pieces under photo booths around Paris, and sticking them together. When Amélie tries to make Nino notice her, she disguises herself with a hat and mask, takes passport photos of herself, and leaves the pieces for him to find, with instructions of where and when to meet her. He does find them and is seen using tweezers to put the pieces together.
- Argo: Staff at the United States Embassy in Tehran attempt to destroy classified files before the building is stormed by Iranian revolutionaries, concealing the total number of embassy staff members in the country — first with an incinerator, then with a shredder. This allows six staffers to avoid capture when embassy personnel are taken hostage. The revolutionaries use child sweatshop workers to reassemble the mountains of shredded paper over the course of months and realize that they're missing a few Americans.
- In Back to the Future 1, Marty tries to leave the 1955 Doc Brown a letter warning him about his future assassination by Libyan terrorists. However, Doc believes that no one should know their future and tears up the letter without reading it. When Marty gets back to 1985, Doc reveals that he eventually taped the letter back together and was therefore ready for the Libyans.
Marty: What about all that talk about screwing up future events, the space-time continuum?
Doc: Well, I figured... what the hell. - The alien visitors in *batteries not included (1987) are really good at putting things back together up to and including a building that had burned down.
- Batman Returns: As The Penguin is convincing (read: blackmailing) Max Shreck into helping him rise to the surface, he mentions documents that prove Max owns "half the firetraps" in the city. Max scoffs that he would have had said documents destroyed, and Penguin pulls out formerly shredded papers.
"A lot of tape, and a little patience, make all the difference."
- A Better Tomorrow 2: Lung suffers a Heroic BSoD while looking at a snapshot of his deceased daughter, Peggy, leading to Ken grabbing Lung and slapping some sense into him besides ripping the photo to shreds. Lung briefly attempts putting the photo together, until Ken drags him outside because assassins after Ken and Lung had arrived, leading to an epic shootout.
- A Christmas Story: After his wife "accidentally" breaks the leg lamp, Ralphie's father is desperate to put it back together. However, the house is out of glue, so he's forced to painstakingly put it back together with tape. It reforms into the original shape, though not without chips and tears (humorously making the fishnets look intentionally torn up). But when he puts the lampshade back on, it all falls apart again. Defeated and shaken, he wordlessly carries the broken pieces outside to give them a burial.
- The Great Gatsby (2013): Daisy receives a very expensive pearl necklace from Tom Buchanan as an engagement gift. She gets drunk the day of her wedding and dramatically rips the necklace off, trying to cancel the ceremony (after receiving a letter from her former fling Jay Gatsby). Daisy's mother and her best friend Jordan quickly re-string the pearls and fix the necklace while Daisy sobers up in the bath; the wedding continues as planned with Daisy wearing Tom's necklace.
- The Ice Road: When Mike loses his temper with Gurty and angrily rips up the advertising flyer for the Kenworth semi they'd always hoped to save enough money to buy, Gurty furtively gathers the pieces and painstakingly tapes it back together. After Gurty is killed, Tantoo finds the flyer in his pocket and tearfully gives it back to Mike. Mike then uses the reward money for successfully completing the job to buy the Kenworth and name it in honor of Gurty.
- Kung Fu Hustle: When Sing meets Fong, a mute woman who he'd tried to protect when they were children, she offers him a large lollipop. Sing is reminded of his failure to be a hero and smashes it before running off in shame. Fong is later seen piecing the lollipop back together but it falls apart when she tries lifting it.
- The Love Bug: In the 1997 TV film, Herbie is attacked and destroyed by his evil counterpart, Horace the Hate Bug. Herbie's original owner Jim Douglas and the car's creator Dr. Stumpfel arrive on the scene soon after and reveal that if Herbie is rebuilt with all his original parts, he can be revived. It takes a lot of work, but they succeed.
- Mary Poppins: George Banks considers his children's preferred list of qualifications for their new nanny to be ridiculous, believing they need a harsh disciplinarian rather than a kindly, loving governess, and tears their script up once they've gone to bed and throws it in the fireplace. The fragments are then sucked up the chimney, and Mary Poppins turns up to interview for the nanny position with the reconstructed advertisement in hand (there's even a shot with the document backlit so the tear marks are visible).
- Millennium (1989): After his encounter with the time-traveling Louise, Bill Smith orders the accident investigators to reassemble the two wrecked aircraft in order to try to find evidence of the time-travelers' involvement. Of course, he can't tell them what he's looking for because they'd think he'd gone crazy, which leads to the investigation being quickly closed once pilot error is proven as the proximal cause.
- Happens across the Star Wars sequel trilogy. In The Force Awakens, Kylo Ren wears a face-concealing black helmet in order to emulate his idol, Darth Vader. In The Last Jedi, his mentor Snoke mocks him for wearing this helmet. In a fit of rage, Kylo smashes the helmet to pieces, symbolically rejecting Darth Vader's example and foreshadowing his betrayal of Snoke. Finally, in The Rise of Skywalker, the true mastermind of The First Order recruits Kylo Ren for their final offensive. As a sign of getting Kylo back on program, he has the old black helmet repaired (filling the cracks between the pieces with some kind of red crystal) and returned to Kylo.
Literature
- Adrian Mole: In Growing Pains, Adrian's father rips up a letter from Adrian's mother's lover Lucas, without reading it. Adrian later retrieves the pieces and sticks them together, revealing it to be a solicitor's letter demanding access to Adrian's sister Rosie.
- The Berenstain Bears Big Chapter Books: In The Berenstain Bears in the Freaky Funhouse, part of the plot involves a search for a fraudulent contract used to cheat the local hospital out of the money it was owed from the circus that was fundraising for them. In the end, Sister Bear remembers having found some torn bits of paper in the wastebasket from Captain Billy's office and realizes it's the remains of the contract, which the cubs soon piece back together to prove the fraud and allow the hospital to get its money.
- Coffin Princess Chaika centers around Chaika's quest to retrieve the pieces of her father's corpse, which was dismembered and distributed among his killers, so he can have a proper burial. The problem is that said father was Arthur Gaz, the immortal evil sorcerer who had ruled the Gaz Empire for 500 years, and the heroes who finally managed to kill him are very intent on ensuring he stays dead even if reviving him isn't Chaika's stated intention. They have every right to be, as Chaika turns out to be an Unwitting Pawn of Gaz, who is successfully revived once his pieces are gathered together.
- Discworld:
- In the novel I Shall Wear Midnight, young Witch Tiffany Aching travels to Ankh-Morpork with her guarding retinue of NacMacFeegle. On the way, a delicate glass globe being carried by the mail coach smashes. The Feegle demonstrate they have a hitherto unknown skill called "anti-vandalism", and gather in the shards so they can reassemble the globe. Tiffany then uses this as a lever to get free travel on the coach to the City.
- Ella Enchanted: In Chapter Four, repairing a bowl smashed to pieces is called "big magic" and the resident fairy won't do it, but telekinetically putting the bits into the trash is safe "little magic".
- In The Emperor's Snuff-Box by John Dickson Carr, the snuff-box of the title is smashed during the murder. The police painstakingly reconstruct it.
- Funnybones: When the dog skeleton trips and ends up as a pile of bones, the big skeleton and the little skeleton have great difficulty putting him back together. At first, he ends up the wrong way round, and says "Foow!". They eventually put him right.
- In The Law and the Lady, a vital letter was torn to shreds and thrown on the dust-heap. Months later, the investigators have to sift the dust-heap for the fragments and reconstruct the letter.
- Life, the Universe and Everything: The Krikkit robots apparently managed to do this with the Wooden Pillar of Nature and Spirituality, one of the pieces of the Wikket Gate needed to unlock their planet — despite the fact that it had materialised in Australia, been mistaken for an ordinary cricket stump, and burned, to produce The Ashes.
- Reign of the Seven Spellblades: In Oliver Horn's Troubled Backstory Flashback in volume 10, he murders both of his Gruesome Grandparents in retaliation for years of abuse: him by decapitation, her by a sword through the heart. His father, who had been separately plotting a palace coup against The Patriarch and Evil Matriarch, then discovers the crime scene, and repairs the bodies before carefully re-injuring them in like manner so that the traces point to his own athame instead of his son's, and finishes the cover-up by taking his own life.
- The Sharing Knife: In this fantasy series by Lois McMaster Bujold, Dag (a "Lakewalker", a member of a Mage Species) is able to use his "groundsense" to put a shattered glass bowl back together good as new, but it leaves him utterly drained: Nauseated, weak, stumbling, and with his skin cold as ice. (Later in the series, he learns to work more efficiently.)
- Toradora! has a scene where the big glass star on top of a Christmas tree is knocked off by a stray ball and shattered into many, many pieces. The fragments (including the very small ones) are gathered and the star is put back together again, albeit with many cracks visible.
- Usborne Puzzle Adventures: In several books, there is a puzzle where the hero comes across torn-up scraps of paper, or a shattered picture, which has to be reassembled; and the pieces are on the page, in various orientations. The book suggests to the reader to trace or photocopy the page and fit the pieces together. Many readers will not bother to do this, and simply look up the answer in the back.
- Naturalist Opal Whiteley kept a diary from age five — initially on butcher paper and grocery bags with crayon — describing her life and "explores" of the fields and woods around her home near Cottage Grove, Oregon. Years later, seeking to publish her nature studies textbook The Fairyland Around Us, she spoke with Atlantic Monthly publisher Ellery Sedgwick, who didn't want it but asked for her childhood diary. Opal's younger sister Pearl, perhaps jealous, routinely got into Opal's things and tore them up, but Opal had kept the bits of paper in a box in storage; Sedgwick sent for them and put Opal up in his mother-in-law's house while she sorted through and reconstructed it. It was serialized in the Atlantic and later published as The Story of Opal. Controversial and compelling, it has been reprinted several times and is on the Internet Archive.
- World of the Five Gods: In the stories of the World of the Five Gods by Lois McMaster Bujold sorcerers gain their powers from demonic possessionnote and demons, while not necessarily evil, are inherently chaotic. "Uphill magic" (decreasing disorder) is thus very difficult (and can only be done by "shedding" at least an equal amount of disorder elsewhere to make up for the orderliness the sorcerer brings about). It is possible to do "uphill magic" though, and in the backstory of The Hallowed Hunt a very talented sorcerer spent a month's work and "great difficulty" reassembling a letter that had been burned to ashes.
Live-Action TV
- Better Call Saul: Sandpiper Crossing bans Jimmy from their assisted-living facilities and starts shredding documents when they realize he is reviewing their clients' records after catching onto their overcharging. He hastily files an injunction to get them to stop and swipes the shredded documents from the unlocked dumpster. He and his brother Chuck start reassembling them to build their case.
- Bones: The show focuses on the efforts of a team of forensic anthropologists as they help the FBI identify bodies that are too damaged to identify without scientific assistance. Most of the bodies in the show are, at the very least, dis-articulated (i.e. in pieces) and the cast regularly has to identify bodies that have been decapitated, partially digested by wildlife, have been made into foodstuffs or incorporated into artworks (either on accident or on purpose) or have otherwise been mutilated in order to obfuscate their identity and cause of death.
- Brooklyn Nine-Nine: In "Safe House", Terry and Amy try to sort through a whole room full of shredded documents trying to find evidence that will let them locate Seamus Murphy so that Kevin and Jake can come out of hiding. After only piecing together two words in two hours, Scully, a surprise jigsaw puzzle savant, manages to put together half a page in a matter of seconds. This comes in handy when Rosa gets a lead on a potential address in Rhinebeck and Scully is able to put it together from the pile.
- The Brittas Empire: In "Stop Thief!", Carole discovers that a £5 note that had mysteriously disappeared was in fact eaten by her baby son Ben, and subsequently pooped out in fragments. She tells Brittas of her intent to sellotape the pieces back together, although she notes that it might take a few days to get all the pieces in the first place. Brittas, understanding the uselessness of such an act, simply tells her that he'll take the money out of her wages.
- CSI: NY likes puzzles where objects have to be put back together.
- "American Dreamers": Someone put together enough of a human skeleton to use it as a prank. M.E. Sheldon Hawkes says whoever did it must not've passed anatomy class because they got a radius and an ulna backwards, plus mixed up some of the finger and toe bones. He rearranges them and once the rest of the skeleton is found, lays all of the bones out in their proper places.
- "Grand Master": Mac finds a shredded document in a victim's office and painstakingly tapes the strips of paper back together to discover that it's a contract that holds the key to the killer's motivation.
- "Outside Man": Danny glues together the pieces of a broken glass door from the front of a restaurant that was broken into after closing time, and where all the employees were shot, in hopes of finding the doer's fingerprints.
- A Season 4 arc has Adam putting a series of actual jigsaw puzzles together. A perp leaves the first one in a plain cardboard box on top of Stella's vehicle, prompting a call to the bomb squad. Turns out, it's a 3-D puzzle of a NYC building. A second puzzle and a clue are found at that location, and the cycle continues until the case is solved.
- "Enough": Danny brings Adam six boxes of evidence packets, all containing glass fragments from a shooting in a bar. Adam eventually puts enough pieces of a low-ball glass together to lift fingerprints leading back to a suspect
- "The Box": Sid and Sheldon have to reconstruct the fractured skeleton of a young woman which was found in the trunk of a car being compacted at a junkyard.
- "Cavallino Rampante": A family of car thieves inadvertently steal the Ferrari of an international terrorist and sell it to a chop shop. The owner kills one of them and forces the others to track down all the parts and reassemble his car, telling them they'll meet the same fate if they fail.
- "Late Admissions": A coffee mug broken into several pieces is found in a school library next to a teenager whose head was bashed in. Sheldon glues the mug back together and dusts it for prints which eventually lead to the student's killer.
- Farscape: the season 4 finale infamously killed off both Aeryn and John, rendering them into thousands of little pieces. The TV movie manages to reconstruct them both very early on (poor Rygel did the bulk of the work swimming down into the ocean to retrieve all of the pieces in question).
- Played with in an episode of Happy Days where Fonzie (temporarily) loses his sight. Richie brings Fonzie his beloved motorbike, completely disassembled, in an effort to snap Fonzie out of his funk. Richie's reasoning being that Fonzie always bragged he could put his bike together with his eyes closed, and this was his chance to show that was true.
- It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia: In "Chardee MacDennis 2: Electric Boogaloo" it's revealed that the "Puzzles" challenge in the titular game that Mac and Charlie hate consists of the team who draws the card having to glue a smashed beer bottle back together and do it well enough that beer can be put back into the bottle and consumed from it.
- In the Mayday episode "Lockerbie Disaster", which is about a plane bomb, the investigators carefully put together the exterior of the plane, along with the luggage boxes which were damaged the worst, to work out exactly which suitcase the bomb was in. They are ultimately successful, and discover the bomb was sent on by Libyan terrorists.
- On NCIS, Medical Examiner Dr. Donald "Ducky" Mallard and his assistant Jimmy Palmer have had to deal with meat puzzles several times:
- A side arc that starts in the Season 1 finale and ends in the Season 2 episode "The Meat Puzzle" has Ducky and Palmer reassembling pieces of a body found in a barrel outside Bethesda Naval Hospital. At least, at first they think it's one body. It eventually turns out to be three.
- In a season 4 episode, the team finds a cache of body parts in a mausoleum, and Ducky and Palmer have to first determine how many bodies they're dealing with, then reassemble them.
- Subverted in another season 4 episode: the team finds a hotel room that was apparently the location of a mass murder, with pieces of flesh strewn everywhere. When Ducky and Palmer start trying to reassemble those pieces, they find they can't. The pieces aren't pieces of one body; rather, they're ordinary medical waste, bits of tissue removed during ordinary surgical procedures and stolen before they could be properly disposed of.
- The Pretender: One episode has Jarod in the FBI, looking for a traitor on Lyle's payroll. He steals the shredder's bin and part of his Hard-Work Montage shows him reconstituting the shredded documents.
- Secrets of the Dead: The episode "Returning to Babylon" is bookended by a visit to a museum in Mosul, Iraq where conservators are painstakingly trying to reassemble Assyrian and Babylonian artifacts that were destroyed in the three-year occupation by Daesh, who considered their continued existence antithetical to Islam.
- Taskmaster (NZ): One task is to smash a vase as dramatically as possible — with a second task inside the vase instructing the contestant to put the shards back together.
- Ted Lasso: In Season 3, Ted rips his own "Believe" sign into pieces (after Nate previously ripped it in half) to prove to the team that they need to find the belief that they can win inside of themselves, not from a paper sign. But unbeknownst to him, the players took and saved the individual pieces of the sign. In their final game against West Ham, the players reveal this to Ted and put the poster back together in front of him, showing they have truly internalized Ted's belief. In the Where Are They Now epilogue, the sign has been fully repaired with gold glue, referencing the art of Kitsugi — coming back stronger from an injury or loss — referenced in an earlier episode.
Music
- Bowling for Soup: Discussed in "When We Die". The idea of repairing broken glass is used as a metaphor for the damaged relationship described in the song:
Now I know that it's early, and it's too hard to thinkAnd the broken, empty bottles are reminders in the sinkBut I thought that I should tell you, if it's not too late to sayI can put back all the pieces, they just might not fit the same
Mythology & Religion
- In Egyptian Mythology, the god Osiris is murdered by his brother Set, who then proceeds to dismember him. Osiris' sister-wife Isis then undertakes a quest to gather his body parts together and reassemble them to revive him.
Video Games
- Dead Space 3: After Issac Clarke and the survivors of the expedition to Tau Volantis, the home planet of the necromorphs reach the old research station for a way to stop the markers, they discover that someone named Rosetta may have written down a way to put an end to the Markers and the necromorphs. They instead find out that Rosetta was the code name for an indigenous alien being that was being studied by the long-deceased members of the old research station, and to get the information they need, Isaac and company have to gather "Rosetta's" preserved remains and examine them for any useful datanote .
- The Dig: One particularly infamous puzzle requires the player to reconstruct the skeleton of a dead alien turtle. There is a fossilised one a couple of screens away that can give some clues, but it's not easy to find.
- Dragon Age: Origins: Alistair is said to have thrown his dead mother's crystal pendant at the wall in a fit of childish fury when he was a boy. Predictably, it shattered into a million peices. When you do the Aemon Manor quest, you can find the pendant, which his foster father Arl Aemon spent the intervening years repairing. It's a unique Amulet character-locked to Alistair.
- The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim:
- One of the long-standing quests of the Companions is their retrieval of the pieces of Wuuthrad, the battleaxe wielded by their founder Ysgramor. As part of their initiation, the Dragonborn is sent alongside Farkas to retrieve a piece from Dustman's Cairn. Later on, the Companions suffer a setback when all of the pieces they had gathered were stolen by the Silver Hand, but this allows the Dragonborn to retrieve said pieces, with only one piece left. Said piece was one that the former Harbinger, Kodlak Whitemane, had kept close to him in his bedroom. With all of the pieces gathered, Eorlund Grey-Mane then gets to reforged Wuuthrad in all of its glory.
- The Collection Sidequest "No Stone Unturned" tasks the Player Character with tracking down 24 gemstones that were looted from the crown of Hlaalu Barenziah, the former queen mother of Morrowind, and reuniting them with the crown itself. The crown is then displayed in the Thieves' Guild headquarters.
- Hugo: The Evil Mirror: The game starts with Scylla trapping Hugo in a mirror and shattering it to scatter the pieces across the land, leaving his children to venture out to rescue him. At the end, Hugo uses the same mirror to trap Scylla, breaking it into hundreds of small pieces, ending with her minion having difficulty putting her back together.
- Kirby & The Amazing Mirror: The Dimension Mirror becomes shattered by Dark Meta Knight at the start of the game, with the four Kirbys heading out to obtain all the pieces to defeat Dark Mind.
- Layton's Mystery Journey: Katrielle and the Millionaires' Conspiracy: One puzzle called "Paper Caper" involves putting several ripped pieces of paper back together to form a picture of a drawn squid.
- The Legend of Heroes: Trails through Daybreak II: The first half of the story involves Van and the others searching for the fragments of the eighth Genesis and putting it back together.
- The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker: One of the main objectives near the end of the game is collecting the pieces of the Triforce of Courage to restore it after it had been broken apart following the Hero of Time being sent back home.
- Mario Party DS: The end of Story Mode has Mario and the group piecing the Sky Crystals back together, causing them to form into a DS and unlock the Triangle Twisters game.
- Monkey Island 2: LeChuck's Revenge: Even after Guybrush collects the four pieces of the map to Big Whoop, he can't decipher them, and has to track down a cartographer to have the map reassembled. LeChuck then kidnaps the cartographer before Guybrush can collect the results.
- In the 2023 video game version of Murder on the Orient Express, the clue that allows Poirot to realize Ratchett's murder is related to the Daisy Armstrong kidnapping is a torn photo of the girl's favorite stuffed toy with the phrase "for Daisy" written on the back.
- Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent: The first puzzle of the game starts with Tethers finding his crossword puzzle ripped into pieces. After putting it back together, he discovers a written message, "Scoggins", where he gets sent to for his assignment.
- Overwatch: In the short story "Stone by Stone", Symmetra gets dispatched on behalf of the Vishkar Corporation to Suravasa, a religious city in India, after one of the company's developments accidentally caused the destruction of a sacred statue of one of their holy figures. After spending some time among the religious commune, learning about their faith, and understanding the history of person the statue represents, Symmetra reassembles it kintsugi-style using her Hard Light abilities, which is beautiful enough to please the community and her bosses.
- One of the first puzzles in the video game Ripper involves piecing together the shattered bits of a mug to see what was written on it. In his let's play of the game, Spoony complains about the buggy mechanics of the puzzle and points out that in real life you wouldn't have to assemble the entire mug, just the parts that have writing on it.
- Sonic the Hedgehog:
- Sonic Adventure: After Chaos escapes from the Master Emerald, shattering it in the process, Knuckles' story consists of him tracking down the pieces and gradually putting them back together again.
- Sonic Adventure 2: The Master Emerald shatters again — this time, Knuckles shatters it himself to keep it out of Eggman's hands — and has to be reassembled again. Unlike the first game, where Knuckles gradually puts the pieces together as he collects them, here he waits until he has every last piece before assembling them all in one go.
- Undertale: Before the fight with Asgore starts, he attacks the Mercy button on your battle menu, shattering it and preventing you from sparing him. Once the fight ends and you have the option to either kill or spare him, the Mercy button reappears, visibly fragmented where he broke it.
- the white chamber: A game-spanning puzzle involves collecting various body parts (head, eyes, both arms, torso, and right leg). These are to be combined on a bed in the Medical bay into a whole cadaver. Sarah has no idea why she collected them, how she's carrying a whole other person, or why she was compelled to put them together. Once completed, the corpse reanimates and unlocks the Quarantine bay. The body is implied to be made out of the parts of her victims, as they're found in or near the rooms where she did the murders.
- World of Warcraft:
- One quest in the Fleshwerks storyline in Icecrown tasks the player with recovering the remains of an Argent Crusade member taken by Scourge forces in the area and stitching them back together.
- You do something similar in post-Cata Blasted Lands with the remains of deceased demon hunter Loramus Thalipedes, after which you protect his body as he's resurrected at the Altar of Storms.
Visual Novels
- Ace Attorney:
- Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney: During the bonus case, "Rise From The Ashes", one of the many pieces of evidence in the SL-9 case is a broken vase that the player has to reassemble from the broken fragments.
- This happens three times to the Kurain Village's Sacred Urn. In "Reunion, and Turnabout" in the second game, Pearl Fey breaks the urn and doesn't quite put it back together properly; in "The Stolen Turnabout" in the third game, Adrian Andrews breaks the urn and does reassemble it correctly (albeit with noticeable paint splodges), and at the end of "Bridge to the Turnabout" in the same game, Phoenix finds a photograph in Misty Fey's talisman showing a young Mia reassembling the vase after she and Maya had broken it.
Webcomics
- Cursed Princess Club: Princess Aurelia snags her beaded necklace while trying to shirk away from President Calpernia's accusations that Aurelia's actions deliberately put Princess Gwen in danger; as a result the necklace snaps and beads go flying everywhere. Gwen (who is a sweetheart) repairs Aurelia's necklace by hand and returns it to her as a gesture of goodwill.
- Kill Six Billion Demons: As a devil, Cio is a spirit of chaos with a mask to anchor her sense of self. It was destroyed when her previous incarnation was executed, but her then-husband painstakingly put it back together to bring her Back from the Dead.
Cio: It took my husband months to reassemble my mask. He had me summoned back, or something like me.
- In Mob Psycho 100, Emi's friends tear up the novel she was writing. Although she pretends not to care, Mob stands up for her and starts picking the pieces back up, one by one. Emi helps him, and when a gust of wind starts blowing everything away, he uses his psychic powers to piece the story back together.
- The Whiteboard: Doc is frequently called upon to repair ridiculously damaged paintball markers, in one case a client even brings in the pile of dust that resulted from his attempt to polish it in a rock tumbler.
Web Videos
- Critical Role: Campaign Two: The fight to rescue Caduceus's family from the gorgon that petrified them causes the statue of his aunt Corrin to be shattered. Jester carefully reassembles the statue before undoing the petrification, restoring her to life with a bit of chronic stiffness to show for it.
Western Animation
- American Dad!:
- In "The Devil Wears a Lapel Pin", Hayley complains to Jeff about her father never appreciating her, saying that Stan once responded to a crayon drawing of them by tearing it up and giving her an essay critiquing the quality. At the end, after Jeff gives him a harsh talking-to for his behavior, Stan gives her the drawing taped back together and admits that it's good for what it is.
- The 300th episode is the culmination of the Golden Turd subplot, in which said object is returned to its place of origin (Roger's anus). Such action causes an explosion that sweeps through the globe and brings about world peace, while simultaneously shattering Roger's body into 300 pieces. Growing bored from the lack of conflicts, the Smiths decide to reassemble Roger in the hopes of restoring things to how they used to be. Guided by Roger's mouth, the family tracks down each body part and sews them together using a stuffed teddy bear as a base. Once Roger has been reconstructed, he poops the Golden Turd once more, unleashing all vices back into the world.
- DuckTales (2017): Season 2's "What Ever Happened to Della Duck?!" reveals that when Della was first trying to rebuild the Spear of Selene, she got so angry at the manual (in part because of Gyro Gearloose's snide remark about her included in it) that she tore it apart. Later, she swallows her pride and puts it back together before getting to work on the repairs.
- Harry and His Bucket Full of Dinosaurs: In "Uh-Oh", Harry accidentally shatters his mother's cup, so he, Charley, and the dinosaurs take it to Dino World and try to fix it. They take it to a guy named Mr. Bodine, who glues all the pieces back together, but unfortunately it can no longer hold liquid.
- Invincible (2021): In "Neil Armstrong, Eat Your Heart Out", Cecil decides to banish Damian Darkblood back to Hell when the latter refuses to stop investigating the Grayson house. Damian is initially confident that the only way to banish him was destroyed long ago. Cecil then reveals the fragments of the spell were recovered and the missing parts were reconstructed by A.I.
Cecil: The Demonius Ex-Mortum? I had a few of my guys reconstruct it. They used artificial intelligence to figure out the missing words. Technology, am I right?
- Jackie Chan Adventures: In the season 2 episode "The Warrior Incarnate" (which is actually set during season 1), after the statue of Lo Pei is shattered, Jade suggests this trope — simply putting the pieces back together, which she even compares to a jigsaw puzzle. After her first attempt at manually putting it together falls flat though, she instead resorts to stealing all the pieces and taking them to Section 13, where she uses the Horse Talisman's magic to "heal" the statue, restoring it to its original state.
- Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated: Much of the Myth Arc has the Scooby Gang searching for the pieces of the Planispheric Disc. When they do manage to put it all back together, the group then has to figure out what the disc is used for.
- SpongeBob SquarePants:
- In "Artist Unknown", Squidward tries to teach SpongeBob how to make art "by the book", but SpongeBob keeps using his own unorthodox techniques. After Squidward tears up his origami art of the pair of them playing leapfrog, SpongeBob reassembles the ripped-up pieces into a mosaic of them playing leapfrog instead. Later, after realising he's killed both SpongeBob's creativity and his talent, Squidward tries to reignite it by ripping up a copy of the rulebook and prodding SpongeBob to create a mosaic from the pieces, but instead he just pieces the rulebook back together again.
- In "Life of Crime", SpongeBob and Patrick learn about "borrowing" from Mr. Krabs and try it out by taking a balloon, planning to return it when they're done. Unfortunately, the balloon pops, and the two desperately try to reassemble the pieces around a ball of "air" collected by Patrick. The pieces hang in midair for a moment in the rough shape of the balloon before falling back to the ground.
- In "I Had An Accident", SpongeBob suffers a massive fall that shatters his butt into numerous tiny pieces. When he awakens from surgery, the doctor informs him that it took twenty hours to piece his rear back together and that they ran out of staples and had to use a glue stick.
- The Transformers: In "City of Steel", Optimus is disassembled by the Decepticons, forcing the Autobots to search the city for his parts to rebuild him, which isn't made easy as Megatron had Prime's torso converted into a robotic crocodile and his arm and rifle made into a turret.
Real Life
- The East German Secret Police, the Stasi, are known for having kept very detailed paper records of their activities over the four-decade-long dictatorship, but did their best to destroy these records when the government collapsed in 1990 and was reunified with West Germany. After the takeover, the Stasi Records Agency, which has since been absorbed into the German Federal Archives, was placed under new management and tasked with reconstructing its own destroyed documents to fill out missing pieces of the historical record (among other reasons, to learn what happened to people who were disappeared by the regime). This is made easier in some cases by the fact the Stasi Records Agency managed to wear out all of their office shredders partway through, forcing them to start tearing documents up by hand.
- Aircraft accident investigators frequently reassemble the wreckage of crashed aircraft to help find the root cause of the incident.
- After several hull losses involving the De Havilland Comet jetliner in the early 1950s, the remains of one of the planes was retrieved. It helped investigators narrow down what caused the crashes, which was eventually found out to be metal fatigue in the fuselage.
- The loss of TWA Flight 800 in 1996 generated much speculation and many conspiracy theories, given how the flight broke up in mid-air due to an explosion and how some eyewitnesses reported seeing what they thought was a missile intercepting the flight. Consequently, the American National Transportation Safety Board was very meticulous with their investigation, to the point they salvaged much of the plane from the ocean floor and then reconstructed a significant portion of the fuselage to see exactly where and how the plane came apart. This avenue of investigation ultimately helped determine that an electrical fault had ignited fuel vapors. The NTSB then kept the reconstructed plane as a training tool for many years after, until it was finally scrapped in 2021.
- Similarly, after Pan Am Flight 103 was destroyed by a terrorist bomb over Lockerbie, Scotland, a large portion of the Boeing 747 was reconstructed to help figure out how it destroyed, and by extension, by who.
- After several hull losses involving the De Havilland Comet
- The Japanese craft tradition of kintsugi involves repairing the cracks in broken pottery with lacquer containing precious metals like gold and silver. It is heavily inspired and justified by the philosophical concepts of wabi-sabi and Mono no Aware, where impermanence and flaws are considered natural additions to an object's history that should be celebrated and even emphasized.
