Tele-Frag - TV Tropes

Rory: Where's Nephew?
Amy: He was standing right where you materialized.
The Doctor: Ah. Well... He must have been redistributed.
Rory: Meaning what?
The Doctor: You're breathing him.

— Doctor Who, "The Doctor's Wife"

Powers like teleportation can be very dangerous if you don't look where you're going. If you teleport into someone else, or someone else teleports into you... splat.

The term comes from early First-Person Shooter Video Games, where it is possible to teleport or respawn in the same space as another player. But the hitboxes lining up could cause a lot of trouble, so usually what happens is the person who was there first dies, and the person teleporting in is perfectly fine. It's called the "last one standing" rule. Whoever is the last one to arrive, survives.

This is also known as interpenetration, especially when there is no exploding involved.

In the cases where this is harmful to the teleporter, the dangers of teleporting into a space currently occupied by air and dust are usually ignored. This can be handwaved by stating that the teleporter is capable of displacing gases, liquids, and minuscule solids therein, or by the fact that compared to about every other substance humans normally deal with, air is very thin stuff.

The usual aversion is Swap Teleportation. Then, if you appear inside a mountain, a statue appears at the starting position, but you're still Buried Alive unless you can teleport again immediately (bearing in mind that being entombed this way tends to impair one's ability to speak, move, or indeed think clearly). In this case, any living being who is teleported into will be horribly eviscerated, while the one doing the teleporting may be merely psychologically traumatized.

The opposite of a Portal Cut (a perfect guillotine made by disconnection of the gate's surfaces while someone or something is passing through, or otherwise using partial teleportation to cut something apart). If the teleporter isn't fine tuned, expect a Teleporter Accident to result.

See also Portal Slam (when there's something in the way when you try to enter a teleportal). Can be used to defy Inertia Is a Cruel Mistress by destroying the offending obstacle, or as Weaponized Teleportation. The supertrope is teleporting things to anyplace that's inherently extremely dangerous even if it's not actually inside a solid object, such as into deep space, over lava, or 100 feet straight up. A No-Flow Portal may be deliberately designed to have this sort of effect on the unwary. A Dimensional Cutter may cause a version of this when used offensively.

Not to be confused with Telefang.

Examples:

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Advertising

Occurs suddenly and horrifically in the "It's a Snap" ad for the Australian Central Institute of Technology, when Aaron, a guy with teleporting powers that can be activated by snapping his fingers, teleports into a clothing rack which goes through his chest, and when he tries to "snap" to the hospital, he doesn't quite make it, teleporting right into a staircase, with the railing through his jaw, and the steps severing his arm and lower torso.

Anime & Manga

Bleach: When Hachigen Ushoda's arm is affected by Barragan's corrosive powers, he uses one of his barriers to cut it off, then teleport it into Barragan. Since Barragan isn't immune to his power on the inside, he disintegrates himself (never mind the damage from have a arm shoved into his chest).
Call of the Night: Although vampires are able to phase through solid matter, becoming tangible at the wrong time can and will result in severed body parts, as Nazuna demonstrates by deliberately severing her own arm while phasing through a wall. Susuki weaponizes this by letting Yamori's arm phase through her before becoming solid, severing his arm and leaving her with a much less inconvenient hole in her chest that she can easily heal with a few drops of blood.
A Certain Scientific Railgun: Kuroko explicitly states her teleporting one object into another displaces the material occupying the old space, regardless of what either object was. At one point, she tears down a building by teleporting sheets of glass into its support pillars. She also threatens to teleport her needles into people. She only tries this once, however, and it misses (the target was an illusion that she fell for).
In Delicious in Dungeon, Captain Mithrun of the Dungeon Investigation Squad/Canaries specializes in using this trope as his main offensive magic. Whether that means enchanting his cape and then throwing it through an opponent to instantly decapitate them on activation, or accidentally exploding someone who happens to be standing in the spot he's chosen as a landing zone, it's one of the few unblockable attacks in the series and very efficent for taking out the dangers of the titular dungeon.
In My Hero Academia, not doing this is one of the few Required Secondary Powers that Mirio has- while he falls through the floor whenever he uses his Intangibility quirk, matter can't overlap so he just gets propelled outside of whatever he was in once he shuts it off.
Negima! Magister Negi Magi: The cast has just traveled a ten-day leap backwards in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, unfortunately without enough time to give any idea as to where they would appear. They nearly fell several thousand feet, but afterward one character remarked about their luck of not appearing inside a rock.
The Dimension Sword technique in Rosario + Vampire is a combination of Tele frag and Vibroweapon. By shifting dimensions, a user can pass through objects unchallenged — and by shifting back, they will promptly destroy whatever they are currently within — from a block of wood to a suit of armour to human flesh. The most efficient form is doing this 'shift away, shift back' action one hundred times per second.^note

Comic Books

This happens to the eponymous duo in Cable & Deadpool, Cable accidentally teleporting into Deadpool and fusing the two of them together.
Caliban: Several of the Caliban's support staff die instantly upon encountering the alien vessel, as both ships are occupying the same area when they drop out of hyperspace. One is cut in half and expires shortly thereafter; at least two more are only identifiable by the pieces of them that didn't end up merged with an alien bulkhead.
Disney Ducks Comic Universe:
- Don Rosa points out that it can also happen with time travel: what if, in the age you're travelling to, there's a tree right where you stand? It's what sets in motion the plot of The Once and Future Duck. The Ducks resolve to use a Time Machine invented by Gyro in the middle of Stonehenge since they can be certain that no other structures will have been there for several thousand years.
- In the 2014 relaunch of Paperinik New Adventures, the Raider, after showing the ability to use his chronosail for Teleportation, moves a gigantic planet-moving engine inside a slightly smaller Evronian space station, blowing up both.
The first issue of The Elf With No Name mentions a few rules about teleporting. Among them: "If you teleport into someone, at least one of you will die."
In Exiles, team teleporter Blink has done this, both intentionally and while under someone else's control. While fighting Hyperion, Blink fakes a redirect portal to distract him, then uses her power to fill him with sand. Due to one of his abilities, it didn't last very long. Fortunately, in the end Hyperion is sent back to his own reality. The reality where he had caused the deaths of everyone else on the planet, leaving him the only person left on Earth.
JSA Classified: The unfortunate S.H.A.D.E. scientist who tried to steal an H-Dial by moving forward in time to a point when he thought the lab would be empty loses a leg when Johnny Mimic taps into the echo of his plan and mindset, and moves a chair to sit right where his leg is about to rematerialize.
Miracleman: One of the first moves in the climactic fight against Kid Miracleman is to teleport him into a wall. It doesn't work at all; he breaks out instantly. It does, however, work when the Warpsmith tries it the other way around — teleporting a chunk of asphalt and rebar into Kid Miracleman's head, and an I-beam through his chest. Even this isn't immediately fatal.
An accidental version happens in the first volume of Powers. As mobster Johnny Royalle is starting to walk away from detectives questioning him, with the intention of teleporting elsewhere, Detective Deena Pilgrim grabs his arm. Cue an alarmed look on Royalle's face as his portal opens... with the arm that Pilgrim is holding onto pulled outside the portal thanks to her grip. That arm is promptly cut off as the portal closes. Eventually, years and volumes later, it would be confirmed that Royalle in fact died as a result of this.
The Rocketeer. In Pulp Friction while experimenting with the new technology of television, Benedict Trask discovers he's invented a teleportation device and decides to use it to assassinate President Roosevelt (who's about to make the first TV broadcast from the White House for the 1939 New York World's Fair). When his partners in crime (who've joined Trask in the first teleconference) express skepticism, he demonstrates by firing a tommy gun into the teleporter, causing his cohorts to all duck for cover.
Savage Dragon: The time-travelling villain Darklord was originally dispatched this way. After beating several heroes near to death, he leapt through a teleporter in order to get to Earth. What he did not count on was that the teleporter had previously been given a virus and was in the process of shutting down. Half of him arrived on Earth but the other didn't. Keep in mind, since Darklord was a time-traveler, this didn't really stop him from showing up again.
Teen Titans: In the Terror Titans miniseries, Dreadbolt induces this in his father, Bolt, by interfacing with his suit and forcing him to teleport halfway into a brick wall, killing him.
Top 10:
- Travelers are killed when two vehicles fuse together like this. It's treated like a traffic accident (albeit a gruesome one).
- Wolfspider lost his legs in such an accident. He takes a personal interest when some jerk causes such a crash. Very personal.
The Transformers (Marvel): This◊ is the result of Megatron and Ratchet getting caught in the interdimensional void when an explosion sent them into an open portal between Cybertron and the Earth-bound Ark.
Watchmen plays with this: Veidt's "alien" telefrags on its arrival in New York, likely killing a few people this way, but the great majority of its victims are killed by the enormous psionic shockwave that is unleashed upon its death.
X-Men:
- In Age of Apocalypse, Marvel Comics' most famous teleporter, Nightcrawler, is shown once teleporting away from an enemy — taking several of the foe's fingers with him. He does it again later, with Dead Man Wade's head.
- The regular continuity's Nightcrawler has threatened this on several occasions, scaring opponents into submission by telling them he'll teleport their arms off. In practice all he really ever does is grab someone and 'port them a few times until they pass out, as teleporting is depicted as extremely uncomfortable for those not used to it.
- Rogue, using Nightcrawler's power, teleports Nimrod's arm off the first time the X-Men encounter him. (Nimrod, being a robot, gets around the heroes-don't-kill thing.) Nightcrawler tries to do the same thing later on, and Nimrod demonstrates why using the same tactic against him twice is a bad idea.
- Nightcrawler gives his fear of telefragging as reasoning not to teleport into a place that he hasn't seen, and in some versions that isn't within sight of his location.
- Nightcrawler willingly telefrags himself by teleporting in the way of Bastion's blow against Hope and gets an arm stuck in his chest for his efforts. He teleports Hope away, taking Bastion's arm with him, and clings to life just long enough to make sure that Hope is safe with Cyclops before dying.
- In Uncanny X-Force, an Alternate Self of Nightcrawler eliminates the Blob this way, by teleporting into a shark tank, grabbing hold of a great white, and telefragging it and himself into the Blob's stomach. It's not shown what happens to the Blob's insides, but it's pretty well implied.
- In Spider-Man/Black Cat: The Evil That Men Do, Nightcrawler remarks on the effects of killing someone by teleporting into their body. He avoids the act based on the squick factor, and because he doesn't kill people, although he does admit to an academic curiosity about what it would look like if someone suffered such a fate. The villain of the piece, Francis Klum, performs this on his brother to prevent him from raping Black Cat.
- In X-Factor (1991), Multiple Man once does a variant of this against Mellencamp of the Acolytes of Magneto — Madrox rams his fist down Mellencamp's throat, and then uses his Self-Duplication power to manifest a dupe in the otherwise Nigh Invulnerable mutant's throat. It works, though Mellencamp has a Healing Factor and eventually recovers (it takes some time, though).
- In one post-Decimation storyline, Iceman is teleported into the middle of a wall. Luckily, having ice in place of flesh makes this non-lethal.

Comic Strips

Dan Dare: In a Virgin Comics issue, a team of commandos is poised to rescue Dare from the Mekon's battleship via jumping by dead reckoning directly into the landing bay. It's a risky move no matter how confident they are in the maths. When they arrive, they have the top halves of some very surprised enemy troopers sticking out of the deck into their ship. Their intrepid pilot was less lucky; the nose of the ship, and part of his head, were embedded into a parked shuttle.
In a Sunday strip of Dilbert, a future version of Wally, conducting some highly unethical time travel, accidentally telefrags a past co-worker when attempting to get a fresh cup of coffee from the past.

Fan Fiction

The Bridge (MLP): Brought up but dismissed with Gigan's teleportation ability, which works through swapping Gigan's current position with an equal volumed hunk of liquid or gas matter where he's "jumping" to; but it can't work with all but extremely small bits of solid matter like dust.
In Cavitation (a Blake's 7 fic), Avon and Vila are accidentally swap-ported into a vaultful of banknotes, resulting in a bad case of claustrophobia and the fastest heist in history.
In Child of the Storm, this is explicitly weaponised as an off-shoot of the New Bifrost project (Earth's variation on the Bifrost, which uses similar ideas to build a functioning Vortex Manipulator, teleportation gates, and a 'Nexus Engine', an internal teleporter that can move something as large as a super-sized helicarrier — or the size of Camp Bastion, if Sinister's technology is based on the same principles), and the results are called 'Nexus Bombs'. They function by targeting an area or a sufficiently large foe and teleporting them without a set destination, essentially scattering them across about 2000 kilometres and multiple dimensions, and they're shown to be hideously effective.
A Game of Cat and Cat: In the first chapter, an issue with demon summoning without a summoning circle, is that they can be summoned into walls, which is implied to be bad/useless.
Here Comes the New Boss: Shadow Stalker runs out of bolts and throws her whole crossbow instead, in shadow state — which would be extraordinarily lethal if it hit and returned to its solid state inside the target. Tactical remarks that with that level of lethal force, she would have fit in with the Teeth.
The arms of the bow, the string and the stock; they were all stuck, seamlessly fused with the debris.
Defied in The Maretian: the Sparkle Drive is equipped with a collision avoidance system. A system with slightly too much freedom in deciding how to avoid the obstacle... sends them into a fourth dimension.
The Meaning of One: Harry and Ginny quickly learn to be careful about teleporting into spaces out of their line of sight, after an early attempt blends Ginny's knee with Harry's blanket. Fortunately, she's able to leave the blanket behind when teleporting away, and suffers no lasting effects.
Poké Wars:
- Sabrina states she will not teleport from city to city due to the risk of this trope happening.
- Likewise, Lugia does not allow Mew to teleport himself and Latias to Alto Mare due to the imperfection of her memories, which could lead to this trope.
In The Stars Will Aid Their Escape, Twilight, Shining Armor, and the remaining Royal Guards deliberately invoke this in order to eliminate the Dark Young.
Averted in the Triptych Continuum. A teleporter can displace gasses, liquids, and extremely small or fragile solids (i.e. dust, blades of grass, and the like) at her arrival point, anything more substantial results in the teleporter being displaced in a quasi-random direction (never down) until they have enough clear space to materialize. Unfortunately, the further the teleporter has to go to find a space, the faster they'll be moving when they do reappear.
In We Are Legion, a Young Justice (2010) Self-Insert Fic, Legion manages to defeat Amazo after it uses Martian Manhunter's phasing ability by filling the space it occupies with bugs. Once it switches to Superman's powers and becomes tangible again, Amazo explodes.

Films — Animation

This is discussed in My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rollercoaster of Friendship. The film's antagonist, Vignette Valencia, has a magical phone that can teleport people to a certain room. After the girls escape the room, they realize Vignette is going to target a large crowd next and they must stop her. If they all get sent to the room at the same time, it will become "Squish City".

Films — Live-Action

In Back to the Future Part III, Doc explains the reason they're out in the middle of the desert is because the DeLorean will have plenty of run-off space in a wide-open area. Sending Marty back to a place that is populated or geographically unknown would be very dangerous idea; there's a risk he could easily crash into someone or something that once existed there. Doc doesn't clarify if this also extends to materializing inside something that once existed as well, but the implication is that it would be just as much of a danger. In an example of Continuity Nod, Doc warns Marty that he might crash on a tree that was there 70 years ago... unaware that the first thing Marty did when he first traveled back in time was crashing on a tree that was there 30 years ago.
In Dungeons & Dragons: Wrath of the Dragon God, teleportation requires being able to accurately visualize the target location, lest this trope occur. The heroes thus search out a scrying mirror that shows images of places the user has never been. The inventor, however, as a cruel joke didn't make it perfect, so the images have a chance of being slightly off. The mortal he gave it to ended up in a wall. The mage on the team gets it somewhat better: her team is fine, but her arm is in a wall, which they then must lop off to teleport again.
Fantastic Four (2015): The way the Fantastic Four gain their powers is implied to be this, as rocks and fire from Planet Zero get into the pods of Ben Grimm and Johnny Storm, respectively, as they're being teleported back to earth, whilst Sue Storm (who didn't go on the mission) accidentally gets caught in the blast radius as the teleporter comes back.
At the end of The Fly (1986), this seems to be the result of teleporting someone with an inanimate object: Brundle is fused with pieces of the telepod itself, and the pieces semi-randomly fill up his body.
Galaxy Quest plays with this. The Thermans have built a teleporter, in the erroneous expectation that the "crew" will know how to use it...
The Philadelphia Experiment: Sailors are fused into the deck of the ship during the titular experiment.
At the end of The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let's Do the Time Warp Again, when Riff Raff and Magenta beam off to the planet Transsexual in the Galaxy of Transylvania, they demolish one of the castle's towers on the way out.
Stargate: A Deleted Scene, restored in the Extended Cut Blu-ray, shows two Horus Guards apparently trying to come through the gate while it's buried, which leaves them flash-fossilised in solid rock.
In the Terminator canon, time travel destroys everything in its path, leaving a spherical hole around the point where the time traveler arrives. In the original script for the first film, however, Reese was sent back with another soldier, who was killed on arrival when he materialized halfway through some of the scenery.
Thunderbolts* (2025): Discussed and Averted. Ghost's power to turn intangible cannot last more than a minute. So, when she's down in a bunker deep below a mountain, she's not going to try to escape by phasing through the walls for fear of ending up re-materializing inside solid rock.
X-Men (Film Series):
- In X2: X-Men United, Nightcrawler cites this as the reason he refuses to teleport anywhere he can't see — "otherwise I could wind up inside a wall".
- In X-Men Origins: Wolverine, John Wraith has a similar teleportation ability. When he fights Victor Creed, Creed uses his knowledge of Wraith's fighting style to lead him, causing Wraith to reappear in just the right position for Creed to get a solid grab on Wraith's spinal column, which he then rips out when Wraith tried to 'port again.
- Azazel uses the "100 feet up" variant quite a bit in X-Men: First Class.

Literature

Almost Night: Jaspike kills several people by phasing his hand through their head and rematerializing.
Older Than Television: In Charles Cloukey's story "Anachronism", published in Amazing Stories, Mr. Wentworth is killed by an iron ball being teleported into his brain.
The Axis of Time story Weapons of Choice sees a time-travelling naval flotilla from 2021 shoot back in time to 1942. It telefrags the US Carrier Strike Force en-route to do battle with the Japanese at Midway. One ship from the future "intersects" with a ship in the past. The book even mentions two fused crewmembers going into a frenzy caused by pain and shock (as well as their mismatched blood types poisoning one another) and kill one another. They end up scuttling both ships. Another ship gets Portal Cut (it was too close to the edge of the Transition), and its reactor promptly blows up.
Frank Pollard from The Bad Place has a problem: when he teleports, small pieces of nearby objects end up being permanently embedded in his body. As the porting is somewhat uncontrollable and resulting in more and more outside mass being incorporated, the book ends with him forcibly teleporting his villainous brother again and again until their bodies have merged and enough outside mass has been worked in to make the final configuration unable to survive.
The Belgariad:
- Relg the Ulgo once used his power of phasing through rock to kill an attacker by phasing both of them into a boulder, then phasing just himself back out, leaving two hands gruesomely protruding from the boulder.
- He also used a more conventional tele frag to create handholds in a rock wall, allowing the rest of the party to easily scale it, by phasing his hand in and out, instantly powdering the rock in fist-shaped holes.
- Belgarath repeats this trick on The Dragon, Belzedar, burying him in rock far underground. He's not dead, though.
Book of Swords: Farslayer, the Sword of Vengeance, kills its targets this way. Once Farslayer is swung with a target in mind, it becomes a ghostly blade that relentlessly seeks out its target no matter where they are hiding and only becomes solid again after it has embedded itself in the target's heart. The catch is that the sword remains stuck in its victim, so anyone seeking vengeance for the victim (hence the title "Sword of Vengeance") who has a good idea of who is responsible (and the Sword can understand vaguely worded instructions on the order of "kill whoever did this", even if the holder doesn't have the slightest idea who that person might be) can throw Farslayer right back. Two feuding families were wiped out this way as they kept launching Farslayer at each other.
A Certain Magical Index:
- Awaki is a Level 4 Teleporter like Kuroko, and was on her way to becoming Level 5, but she had an incident where she miscalculated her teleportation and ended up getting her leg telefragged into a wall, panicked, and ended up tearing a large amount of skin and muscle off. Her leg has since been healed, but the trauma was so terrible that she is paranoid about teleporting herself and takes an extra 3 seconds to recalculate, and anything that reminds her of the incident terrifies her. The stress when she actually does manage to teleport makes her unable to do it consecutively more than 3 or 4 times and makes her vomit. Ironically, she's forced to relive the experience during the Battle Royale Arc when she teleports while her powers are affected by AIM Jammers and gets her feet telefragged into the ground. This time, however, as a sign of Character Development, she forces herself through the pain and shock and keeps attacking her foe to bring them down despite tearing her skin and muscle again to break free.
- Telefragging is one method fans have thought up to get around Accelerator's "I'm invincible" powers, but the author accounted for this as well: teleporting involves 11th dimensional movement, so there is still a vector of movement with teleportation, meaning Accelerator would just reverse the teleportation like he does everything else.
Ciaphas Cain:
- Played for Laughs in For the Emperor when Amberley Vail dives for a gun and is shot at mid-dive, causing her displacer field to activate. This teleports her safely out of the way of the bolter shot, but Cain hears a crash and "some unladylike cursing" from her. Amberley's accompanying footnote briefly explains that a displacer field conserves momentum (in other words, speedy thing goes in, speedy thing comes out) and concludes that "it was a stupid place to put a table, anyway".
- In The Traitor's Hand, the Valhallan 597th hits a Chaos installation only to have a group of World Eaters Chaos Space Marines teleport into the facility ahead of them. They had just teleported from ships orbiting on one side of the planet to literally the complete opposite side, and Cain wonders to himself how many World Eaters are now entombed thousands of kilometers underground.
The Culture:
- The Displacers manifest as a "caisson" field that appears around the target and shrinks to a point to remove it, and at its destination expands from a point to the full size of the displaced object, then vanishes. Careful Minds expand or contract the field carefully so as to push the air in the target area out of the way or allow it to diffuse in... rapid displacements are effectively explosions. Displacement into sealed areas is done carefully to prevent the container from bursting (or the pressure from crushing the displacee).
- It's revealed in Matter that an attempt to displace something through a four-dimensional barrier like the interior of an Iln Shellworld leads to the object's mass converting to energy on contact, similar to an antimatter explosion.
Deadworld Isekai: How you do kill a giant gorilla who's tough enough to shrug off every weapon you have and chase you non-stop for days? Answer: complete a dungeon, take a shovel as your reward, and have it materialise inside the gorilla's chest.
In the Russian Death Zone Shared Universe, each of the Five Zones has a perpetual twister at the center, representing the point of a dimensional link between the Zones and the mysterious Node. In a certain area close to the twister, people can use a special device to shift between the Zones. While that area is pretty empty, there's always a small chance for a person to end up inside an object during the shift. Then again, this is hardly the worst thing that can happen in the Zones.
Discworld:
- When someone teleports, whatever was at their destination is sent back (see swap-porting above). In Interesting Times, Rincewind points out this isn't much better:
  Rincewind: So I'd still be in the middle of a mountain but in a me-shaped hole? Oh good, instant fossil.
- Rincewind doesn't use this however, as the method used to move him (in Interesting Times) does use the intervening space. The explanation does however pertain in the case of Ridcully transporting himself and Granny Weatherwax in Lords and Ladies. In fact, this actually becomes a plot device later on.
- The issue is side-stepped by relating the mass of objects, rather than the space occupied — this becomes a Deus ex Machina solution in the case of Rincewind, Lord Hong and the Barking Dog.
Doctor Who Expanded Universe:
- The Doctor Who New Adventures novel Transit has a teleport network spanning the Solar System, where trains are sent through the gates. There are occasional references to the Bad Accident, which is eventually explained as what happened when two trains tried to materialise in almost the same place at the same time. They ended up merged together. And so did everyone on board.
- Also referenced in the Doctor Who Missing Adventures novel The Dark Path, as a semi-standard military tactic used to cripple starships (e.g., by teleporting someone or something into the location where a ship's pilot is sitting) without actually damaging the ship itself — and yes, the technique was actually referred to as "telefragging".
Doom (1995): A truly horrific version crops up in the novelization of the first game when the Japanese female Marine and her CO are fused at the head upon using a teleporter. Their immediate solution? Blow their brains out.
In the first Dragonriders of Pern book, Dragonflight, F'lar describes how a party exploring some of the abandoned corridors of Benden Weyr came across a Weyrling pair (a young dragon and his equally young rider) encased in rock after a bad jump between. They had no idea who the rider and dragon were, or how long they'd been there. (We do find out who it is in Dragon's Blood). In Moreta: Dragonlady of Pern, Moreta reams out a weyrling after he tries to show off and cuts a jump too close for comfort.
Moreta: Don't be clever, T'ragel! Be safe! You could have come out in the rock, not on it!
The Elenium: In The Shining Ones, Bhelliom mentions how unusual it is for two objects to share the same space. When asked about it, Bhelliom says "I beg of thee, ask him not to continue this line of inquiry. The answers will greatly disturb him." However, it's unclear from the context whether this trope or its hard aversion is the implication. Aside from the questioner being a soldier used to searching for more efficient ways to kill, this dialogue parallels previous conversations in the series touching on the subject of how basic concepts such as "matter", "distance" and "time" don't really exist in a form the human cast would recognize and how upsetting overturning these concepts can be. All the transport magic in the series originates from beings with more direct perceptions of reality; it's possible Bhelliom meant it would be less disturbing to think about telefragging than the implications of why it's perfectly reasonable for multiple solid objects to share the same space without telefragging.
In the Federation of the Hub story "Sleep No More", Telzey Amberdon is being pursued by a teleporting monster that homes in on its target's mind. She mentally projects an image of herself being inside a nearby mountain, and when the monster teleports to that location and merges with solid rock there's an explosion.
In the first Feline Wizards novel, The Book of Night with Moon, Arhu is arguing about the dangers inherent in the place they're going. His older partners warn against cave-ins, at which points he mentions teleporting out or simply phasing through the rock. Irritated at him being right, they pull out an unlikely and convoluted scenario involving the Gates warping the reality of the rocks he's working on, getting him stuck inside and destroyed because the rocks are "older". His elders have been working with the Gates for years; they know that this kind of thing can happen; in fact, they've probably seen it. In this case, however, it was just a scare tactic — such things are possible, but they wanted him to shut up and listen since the arrogant attitude would cause dangers in itself.
Deconstructed thoroughly in Fine Structure when Anne Poole disappears during a teleporter experiment. They find her inside a mountain alive and functionally invulnerable, after being encased in a coal seam for a year and a half, alone.
Future Times Three has a variant not exactly due to teleportation. At some point, the protagonist switches off the Just One Second Out of Sync setting of the time machine, which allows him to become ghost-like, while he goes through a cloud of smoke. The smoke merges into his blood and he barely survives from severe carbon dioxide poisoning.
In Gone, a cat teleports into a book, and the results are not pretty.
This is a concern for Travelers in The Grimnoir Chronicles; it's mentioned that while Travelers aren't all that rare, Travelers who survive to adulthood are very rare. Faye gets lucky — she only ends up with a bug stuck in her foot when she teleports without checking if the space she's jumping to is empty. Most mistakes of that nature are fatal.
Mentioned as a concern in Halo: Ghosts of Onyx: two human ships had tried to engage their FTL slipspace drives without sufficient power and were turned into atomized pieces.
In the Harry Potter universe, the Floo Network (basically magical teleport conduits) and use of Portkeys (charmed objects designed to transport the user to a designated spot) are monitored and regulated to avoid such collisions. Apparating is also restricted to adult wizards and witches for this reason, as there's a good chance that parts of the wizard or witch could fail to appear in the right places (a phenomenon known as "splinching"). This happens to Ron in Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, and it's not pretty. Fortunately, wizarding medical science can treat pretty much everything other than death, curse injuries and (for some reason) eye maladies, so while messy, injuries resulting from failed apparation can generally be rectified with a minimum of fuss, assuming of course that you're not currently on the run from the Big Bad.
In the Horus Heresy novel Know No Fear, an Ultramarines assault force teleports from their fleet flagship over to an orbital yard that's been seized by the traitorous Word Bearers. Of the fifty Space Marines in the assault force, four are killed by teleportation mishaps; one Ultramarine fails to reform at all and is turned into bloody sludge, two are fused into a bulkhead, and the fourth is fused into the deck from the waist down, which is so painful that the stoic and unflappable Space Marine is left screaming in agony and has to be put out of his misery. It should be noted that this is considered a success by Warhammer 40,000's standards.
Johnny Maxwell Trilogy: Referenced in Johnny and the Bomb when Kirsty points out that trying to occupy the exact same space as another object is likely to cause the atomic nuclei to fuse, with interesting and deadly consequences.
In Kindred (1979), one of Dana's uncontrolled Time Travel trips costs her an arm when she arrives in the present too close to a solid wall.
One of the Magic: The Gathering books had a character with an item that let her teleport anywhere by intoning where she wanted to go three times (Wizard of Oz style). She uses it in a way probably not intended by the person who gave it to her when she says the name of one of the villains three times. Ludicrous Gibs result.
In the novel Mindbridge by Joe Haldeman, interstellar travel works by teleporting everything in a set area to another planet. After a certain amount of time, everything within a limited radius of a special beacon is teleported back. Once, they tried to give two beacons to different members of the exploration crew, and the results were... the Fantastic Nuke level of not pretty.
May have happened in Piers Anthony's Mode series. Darius can teleport himself and others safely to any location he's familiar with. (He names a general area, visualizes it, and the magic presumably does the rest.) When the group is attacked by two soldiers, he teleports them to their castle, which can just be seen on the horizon. When another character asks if he's ever been there, he replies, "No. So their arrival may be unpleasant."
In the humorous Russian SF short story "Monument" by Yevgeniy and Lubov, the First-Person Peripheral Narrator Lukins "proves" that teleportation is impossible because of telefragging. Then his friend acquires the power of swap-porting, which cuts the shape of his body and clothes out of any material, and covers the township with monuments to himself.
Mentioned in Isaac Asimov's Nemesis as a possible danger of hyperspace travel; it's noted that a ship materializing inside another object would be instantly destroyed in a nuclear explosion. Fortunately, it turns out that this is impossible, as superluminal travel produces a gravitational repulsion effect which would be powerful enough to push the ship and object away from one another before they had a chance to merge.
The protagonists of The Number of the Beast worry about what would happen should they accidentally end up inside solid rock, mainly because their best guess is that it would create an explosion the size of a small star. Thankfully they're careful (or lucky) enough that it never happens. It is also brought up in passing in the related book The Door into Summer.
The Polity: In the very first scene of the first novel, Gridlinked, a Portal Network malfunctions, causing planetary scale desolation.
This little ditty from The Restaurant at the End of the Universe:
I teleported home one night, with Ron and Sid and Meg,
Ron stole Meggy's heart away, and I got Sidney's leg.
Shadow of the Conqueror: When Daylen is experimenting with his newly acquired Lightbinding powers, at one point he accidentally makes himself intangible and starts sinking into the ground. In a panic, he immediately makes himself tangible again. Since his feet are now occupying the same space as the ground, they end up exploding into a bloody mess with enough force to launch Daylen spinning into the air. Luckily, this is also when he discovers his ability to regrow missing limbs.
Star Carrier: While extremely rare, there is a chance for a ship exiting meta-space to hit another ship, resulting in both of them exploding spectacularly, regardless of their size. Usually, when a fleet jumps together, the ships' AIs coordinate the jump using protocols meant to prevent this sort of thing. Unfortunately, when combined fleets of multiple countries jump together, their protocols may not match up. In one novel, this results in a Russian ship slamming into a USNA ship that has just arrived.
In the Starfire (1979) novels, ships normally proceed through jump points one at a time because there's a risk that ships going through simultaneously could intersect when they emerge, which results in their immediate destruction. As a result, jump points can usually be defended because defenders should theoretically always have more firepower that only has to focus on one ship at a time. The attacker can send many ships through at once, but it inevitably results in at least some of them interpenetrating and being destroyed. The Bugs do this as a standard tactic since they don't particularly care about losses as long as they win; Alliance fleets use it regularly with robot missile pods, but not with manned starships except on rare occasions when the tactical advantages outweigh the certain loss of life.
The Stars My Destination:
- Telefragging is used as an incarceration device. Every human has learned how to naturally self-teleport (called Jaunting), which makes it rather difficult to detain prisoners. The method that governments use is to put the prisoners into jails which prevent them from having any knowledge of their present location (by being deep underground and in the dark, for instance). Knowing where you are and where you're going are prerequisites for safely Jaunting. By preventing prisoners from knowing where they are, they can't Jaunt to where they'd like to be without a very large chance of ending up somewhere else entirely... like inside a mountain. Occasionally, a prisoner goes insane from the isolation and attempts a "Blue Jaunt" (as in "into the wild blue..."), which is just a fancy way to commit suicide.
- This also happens in one of the jaunting hubs during a major evacuation. The effects are not dwelt upon.
Star Trek Novel 'Verse:
- In the Rihannsu novel My Enemy, My Ally, Spock and the Captain are playing a four-dimensional chess game which uses a small transporter to "time out" pieces to reappear in the future of the game. When Kirk is about to concede, McCoy asks to play it out, and arranges things so that several of his lesser pieces reappear in the same location as Spock's most important ones. A disapproving (and losing) Spock dubs this strategy Kamikaze Chess.
- In the Star Trek: Voyager novel Pathways, Harry Kim manages to tele frag his own foot because he stepped off the transporter pad just as it was dematerializing him. He rematerialized with his foot inside a rock wall. The transporter they were using had been hacked together out of spare parts, with none of the normal safety features of a regulation one.
- Used intentionally by Mackenzie Calhoun in a novel using a portable transporter that can send anything a short distance away using voice commands. Mac needs to destroy a generator, but he is in the process of being pummelled by an enemy near the generator. He slips the transporter (which is the size of a coin) into the enemy's pocket and tells it to transport 5 meters to the right, which happens to be the generator. Unlike normal transporters, the portable version doesn't check first to make sure there's space available, resulting in the bad guy fusing with the generator, killing the former and destroying the latter.
- Avoided in the third book in the Star Trek: Millennium trilogy, Inferno. Due to being in a different pocket of time than DS9 (don't ask — it's complicated and a tad confusing), a transporter lock can't be achieved, so O'Brien manually sets the coordinates to a room he knows will be empty and to a couple feet off the floor to avoid transporting into anything/anyone or even the floor. The landing is a little rough.
- In the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Into the Nebula, the titular nebula causes sensor interference that renders this a risk if the transporters are used. At first, it's thought that the margin of error of 100 meters wouldn't be that much of a problem when beaming down to a planet so long as they choose a suitably empty area... until Chief O'Brien clarifies that this is 100 meters in all directions, including up and down.
In The Tomorrow War, jumping ships absorb anything in the targeted space, so it's wise to choose a destination witho no atmosphere, excessive dust, or too strong a solar wind. They have lots of redundant systems to survive this constant contamination. Exclusion: ships able to hang in transition state (submarine-like) exit into the normal space more slowly and somehow displace thin dust or gas. Also, volume carried by single jump drive is limited, so big ships have several, and when one of the drives or their synchronization fails, the ship is Portal Cut by the jump.
In the short story "Via Vortex", published in the Sideways in Crime alternate history anthology, the victorious Nazis use Pseudo-Science to teleport around the world. When you are teleported somewhere, you need an equal amount of human flesh to recreate yourself. Convicted criminals supply said mass. The teleport booth has a built-in shower to clean out either the original disassembled 'you', or any leftover mass from the victim you reappear within.
In Void Domain, "Blinking" runs the risk of fusing a mage with anything in the destination point, leaving Eva unable to use it while temporarily blind. It's a sign of Genoa's phenomenal skill as a Magic Knight that she's able to Teleport Spam around a debris-filled battlefield.
The Warlock's kids from the Warlock of Gramarye series like to play by 'porting rocks inside of trees. Boom! Try it yourself — it's great fun, if you can surround yourself with impenetrable forcefields to avoid splinters, and be sure to telepathically scan the area first so no innocent bystanders get hurt. 'Kay?
In Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe, it is stated that a starship's teleporting drive should only be used to travel into outer space. If you try to emerge in a place which already contains air, it's not pretty.
In the World of Tiers series, swap-porting and Portal Cut are introduced right from the start and stay important throughout the series.
Phir Sē from Worm has a teleporter working for him that can do this. This is a big deal because the Wormverse has the Manton Effect as an explanation for why most teleporters can't do this or most telekinetics can't just crush your heart, so even Taylor (who earlier in the story only narrowly survived a fight against a teleporter who was limited by the Manton Effect) is seriously scared by this.
In one of the Zachary Nixon Johnson novels, the villain is ultimately defeated by causing her to teleport into a wall.
In The Zombie Knight, Ibai Blackburn's favorite combat trick is to teleport enemies into walls, resulting in instant sculptures. However, the tactic failed when he tried it on Asad Najir, since even Marshrock's soul-empowered walls are no match for Asad's passive defense.

Live-Action TV

Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.:
- In "S.O.S., Part 2", Gordon abuses his teleportation powers while fighting Coulson's team and winds up impaling himself on a pipe that Fitz was wielding.
- In "Orientation, Part One", the team gets teleported to the Lighthouse space station. When they arrive, May ends up with a piece of rebar through her leg.
Babylon 5:
- Jump points destroy everything around them. This is used by Minbari as weapon in the movie In the Beginning and attempted by Scary Dogmatic Aliens in the episode "A View from the Gallery".
- Opening a jump point inside an active jump gate is called the "Bonehead Maneuver". It got that name because it's pretty much a Suicide Attack, since a larger ship wouldn't have the speed to get out of the blast radius in time, and a smaller ship wouldn't have the power output to open its own jump point in the first place. Not even warships built by the First Ones can survive it. White Star corvettes used by the Rangers have both the requisite escape speed and self-jump capability, however.
Battlestar Galactica (2003):
- During a rescue mission, one of the Raptors in a squad miscalculates its jump and arrives inside a mountain.
- In "Someone to Watch Over Me", when Boomer jumps while fleeing Galactica, she tears out a section of the hull because she's too close.
- In the finale, "Daybreak", an entire squadron of Raptors jumps out from Galactica's sealed-off flightpod. It happens ridiculously quickly, but Freeze-Frame Bonus watching reveals the maneuver absolutely ruins the flightpod with the damage it causes.
Used in the Blake's 7 episode "Cygnus Alpha" when Vargas, while explaining his thirst for power in his usual manner, accidentally steps onto the teleporter. The crew of the Liberator tries to send him back to his planet... but unfortunately for him, it's out of range.
Doctor Who:
- The TARDIS herself seems to have safeguards in place that prevent this. It's been shown that when she does decide to materialize around someone or something, they get deposited safely inside the console room.
- "Nightmare of Eden" begins with a hyperspace traffic accident that results in two spaceships interpenetrating.
- "The Time Monster" and "Logopolis" demonstrate that when two TARDISes try to materialize in the same space, they somehow both materialize simultaneously in both the outside world and the other's console room, leading to Mind Screwy but harmless effects. However, "The Time Monster" also explains that it is possible to override the safety features and cause a "Time Ram", which is a straight example of this and will destroy them both.
- In "Remembrance of the Daleks", the Doctor sabotages a Dalek teleporter so it telefrags itself, with the Dalek's insides and outsides trying to occupy the same space.
- In "The Doctor's Wife", Nephew is "redistributed" when he happens to be standing right where the Doctor's makeshift TARDIS materializes.
- In "The Husbands of River Song", River tries to take off in the TARDIS, having just stolen a tyrant's detachable head. Unfortunately, the safeguards detect his body outside the ship and the engines shut down automatically.
Earth: Final Conflict:
- An episode has a man build a teleportation device, which he uses to teleport bombs directly to the target to perform assassinations. When his hideout is discovered, he promptly teleports himself to a warehouse he owns, only to be half-embedded in some shelves, which had been moved when the feds raided the place earlier. Realizing he is pretty much dead, he chooses to destroy his creation to prevent it from falling into the Taelon hands. He does this by teleporting to the same exact location. According to Augur, this will create an anti-matter explosion.
- Another example in the final season, when an Atavus female uses a modified ID portal to go back to the distant past, when the Atavus ruled the Earth, and humans were still cavemen. Renee goes after her and then jumps back. The Atavus female enters the portal, but Renee has already turned it to face a wall. The Atavus ends up embedded in it.
In the Eureka episode "Crossing Over", objects from 1947 are pulled into the present by an unstable wormhole — redwood trees through the rotunda, a fighter plane through the wall of Cafe Diem, a nuclear warhead through the infirmary, and (worst of all) an unfired 50 caliber bullet in the chest of Joe Lupo (luckily missing her heart and lungs by a centimeter).
In the episode "Eye of Death" from Friday the 13th: The Series, the villain had been using a magical slide projector to travel back to the American Civil War to steal artifacts, and the heroes shuts it off just as he was partway through the portal to return to the present, leaving him to die embedded in the wall.
In an episode of Fringe, a building from an Alternate Universe ends up in the universe the majority of the show is set in, resulting in a man being fused with parts of the building as well as his own duplicate.
Impulse (2018): Henry unintentionally kills Bill Boone this way in "New Beginning" when he's threatening her and she teleports away to safety, ripping his arm off as he's standing close by, from which he bleeds out.
This is the fate of an admiral in Other Space, resulting in new rules against leadership being the first to explore new worlds.
Sliders: The timer has safeguards to ensure that our heroes always slide into open air over solid ground. When malfunctioning, it's been known to send them into a broom closet or in the middle of the ocean — or, in a memorable incident, half of them high in the air, landing on a window washer's rig, and the other half safely on the ground. Another example has the portal open halfway in a building, with two of the heroes ending up inside and two outside.
Stargate-verse:
- In Stargate SG-1, the aptly named "Iris" is a Dilating Door that covers the wormhole of the SGC's Stargate. Anyone trying to enter unannounced ends up obliterated against it, because the iris is so close to the wormhole that not even a molecule can reintegrate without hitting it. An episode of the seventh season shows the latest Goa'uld Big Bad Anubis having duplicated the SGC's iris at one of his bases with a force field across the Stargate impenetrable except to his Kull Super Soldiers. In Stargate Atlantis, the city of Atlantis has a similar force field that can be raised across its own Stargate.
- The short-range transporters used by the Goa'uld have safeguards against this — anything within the descending rings gets exchanged with whatever is within the rings on the other end.
Star Trek:
- Star Trek: The Next Generation:
  - "The Schizoid Man" has the Enterprise jump to warp while executing a transport, as they were in a big hurry for another emergency and needed to offload the away team as quickly as possible. The transport doesn't kill anyone, but it has the effect of causing the away team to be briefly shifted a few meters from their destination. Deanna remarks that she thought she was inside a wall for a few moments, which Worf explains is exactly what happened.
  - In "In Theory", a nebula destabilizes the matter within the ship, causing it to warp or become briefly intangible. Some poor crew member ends up falling partway through a floor before it becomes solid again. Not actually teleportation, but the end result is remarkably similar.
  - In "The Pegasus", the title USS Pegasus has a Tele-Frag-like encounter with an asteroid, thanks to a cloaking device that makes the ship intangible. It broke while the ship was drifting through an asteroid field, and the ship ends up embedded halfway inside solid rock.
- Deliberately invoked in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode "The Darkness and the Light". The villain of the episode plants a "remat detonator" on one of his victims just before Dax and Worf beam her up. The device scrambles her pattern mid-transport, leaving a smoking ruin of flesh and bone when what's left of her rematerializes on the pad. Dax even admits the transporter should have detected the device before energizing, but somehow didn't.
- The Star Trek: Voyager episode "State of Flux" has a malfunctioning food replicator (which works by a variation of the transporter technology) fuse an alien halfway into the floor.
- In episodes of Star Trek: Enterprise, a Red Shirt (uh, Red Stripe?) who gets beamed up during a windstorm in a forest appears with leaves and sticks stuck in him, while another who gets beamed out in a sandstorm gets a dermis full of sand. They live, though. These kinds of thing happen when the transporter's still in beta. All things considered, by far not the worst thing to happen to anybody because of the Transporters. Though it is understandable why nobody wants to actually use that thing on the show.
The X-Files: The two-part "Freaky Friday" Flip episode "Dreamland I & II" has a case of accidental telefragging. During a test run with an experimental and top-secret aircraft by the more secretive parts of the military, something went wrong that had space-time warping in the area. The results? One of the pilots is fused to a boulder and still breathing, a lizard is found with its head inside a rock and somehow still alive, a clerk in a nearby gas station is found sunk on the ground up to his waist, a couple that were getting intimate is found fused together by their friend, and Mulder finds a pair of dimes intersecting each other at a right angle. Mulder also trades his consciousness with an Area 51 worker, hence the "Freaky Friday" Flip.

Roleplay

Jacob from Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues can rewind objects and then have them replay their actions. Any object that he rewinds is immediately teleported back in its path to the place where the rewind starts. If something else has come to occupy that space in the meantime, then the results can be messy. Jacob first found this out when he accidentally rewound a screwdriver into Barbra, killing her (fortunately, she's immortal).

Tabletop Games

Arduin: In Book 2: Resources, if the caster of a Tandoora's Teleportation Spell rolls a miss and ends up in a solid object (like a ceiling or a floor) they suffer immediate and permanent death.
In BattleTech, the odds of telefragging when a JumpShip jumps are astronomically slim due to the vastness of space, to the point that it's only been recorded in one incident in over a thousand years of JumpShips being used, during a massive invasion. However, the annihilation of whatever interplanetary medium matter was in the destination point when a ship jumps in-system emits an electromagnetic pulse which is easily detectable.
Champions: In both the 5th and 6th editions, you can't teleport into something solid. A teleporter's "natural safety system" will automatically shift him to the nearest clear area big enough for him. However, this is a severe shock to that teleporter's system, and you don't get any defenses against that damage, so better hope the GM rolls low. That said, a common special effect used by characters with the Teleport power and a related Killing Attack is "I teleport over to him with my fist appearing in his guts". A power built in this way would only damage the teleporting character if it was specifically built that way for some reason.
In Continuum, the rules specifically state that "spanning" (instantaneous travel through space and/or time) carries no risk of materializing the spanner in a wall or solid object. Air and liquids part to make space for the spanner. When trying to span into a solid object, you will be placed near the object instead. Of course, that does not mean that spanning there is safe, just that you will not occupy the same space as another object. You're still pretty much screwed if you span into the bottom of the ocean or into a furnace. The reason for this protection from materializing inside another object becomes clear when you learn about the mechanics of spanning: Basically, your body is broken down at one end and rebuilt at the other by nano machines. Much of the details of this process is handled by the nano machines rather than the user, including the exact location. As such, the programming automatically avoids solid objects.
Dinosaurs Attack!: Dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures are being randomly transported from prehistoric times into the present day. One unfortunate man has the horrifying misfortune of being on the spot where a tyrannosaur materializes, resulting in him being fused to its abdomen. It doesn't kill him, but his best friend thankfully performs a Mercy Kill.
Dungeons & Dragons:
- Teleportation spells tend to feature a failsafe that, in the event of a spellcaster accidentally attempting to teleport himself into a wall or some other invalid location, will shunt the spellcaster to the nearest valid (read: empty) square. However, if said square is too far away from the initial target location, the spellcaster starts taking damage with every square he is shunted through. Some of the more safe variants shunts you into the Astral Plane if you can't be shunted to a nearby square. That may or may not be a bad thing, depending.
- In the 1st and 2nd editions, there was no failsafe: if you teleported into a solid object, you died. That's one of two reasons why wizards who weren't feebleminded too frequently tend to scry on poorly-known locations before jumping there, when possible. From AD&D 2 on, there's also a variant of teleport that's two spell levels higher and which simply fails rather than depositing the caster off-target (even if that arrival point would also be safe).
- The Blood Magus prestige class in 3rd edition has this as an ability. You can teleport by simply entering one living being, and coming out of another one you know, wherever they are. It's normally harmless for everybody involved, but if you wish, you can make what the game charmingly calls a "catastrophic exit", literally exploding your way out of the destination point.
- 2nd edition has an immunity to metal spell that makes a creature intangible to metal, thus weapons go harmlessly right through it. That's normally an excellent defense, but if metal intersects the body when the spell expires or is dispelled, the subject is instantly killed. Thus, although it's a dangerous proposition, the spell could be used on an enemy before luring it into crossing something metallic, like cell bars, and then timely dispel it.
- Spectral lurkers are a 3rd edition monster that hunts by taking advantage of this. The beasts are naturally incorporeal, but they can also "incorporealize" anything in the clutches of their tentacles (which can affect both solid and ethereal objects). The lurkers thus snatch a victim, drag them into a solid object, and let them go, so that the re-solidified victim is shunted back into an open space, taking unavoidable, non-specific damage all the while. Rinse and repeat until the target is dead.
In GURPS, the default version of teleportation doesn't do this. Even a Critical Failure lands you in an open location. You can take a limitation to buy the power more cheaply at the risk of telefrags.
In Hc Svnt Dracones, this is a risk with Cuil 3 Dislocation implants, you have a chance of materializing inside the planet instead of on it, which is instant death.
HeroQuest: The "Castle of Mystery" has magic portals, and whenever a player moves through a door, they roll two dice, to determine where they are teleported. If another character is on that space, they lose a body point, and are teleported elsewhere.
Mage: The Awakening: A master-level spell in the Space arcanum violently teleports two or more targets into each other. It's not permanent or necessarily lethal, but deals Aggravated damage to everything affected.
Paranoia, on the other hand, does not have this kind of pleasant upgrade to the Teleportation power. One bad roll and you can wind up as mincemeat.
In the Starfire (1979) series, ships travelling via wormhole reappear in a random position. Normally a fleet will pass through one by one to avoid accidents, but if the race involved doesn't care about losses the ships can pass through simultaneously. They risk reappearing in the same space and blowing up. The novelizations also use this one, especially The Shiva Option.
Warhammer 40,000:
- The Orks use a heavy weapon called a Shokk Attack gun that fires a small orkoid called a snotling through the Warp to emerge inside its target. Consider also that the Warp is, at best, insanity-inducing, so this gun basically teleports a gibbering, homicidally mad imp into either your vehicle's cockpit... or a unit's abdominal cavity. The sheer amount of mishaps a Big Mek can have with it is both hilarious and terrifying to both sides of the fight.
- In earlier editions, Orks also had a support gun that could teleport enemies randomly. This had predictable results if they were teleported down.
- Most forms of personal teleportation present an inverted risk: teleporting into an enemy makes YOU roll on the "Deep Strike Mishap Table" — this has a chance of making your personal teleporter explode — but does nothing to your foe (the same mechanic is used for paratroopers getting shot down and tunneling units suffering a cave-in).
- Also, daemon summoning usually results in the major daemon appearing "in" the caster or sacrificial victim.

Video Games

Achron features a time-specific version of this called "chronofragging". When a unit travels through time, if the location at the arrival time is occupied, the unit will chronofrag whatever unit it runs into, dealing significant damage to both units. This can most easily happen if you set a unit near a chronoporter. If the unit is standing idly for a while and gets sent back in time, it will still be standing in that spot in the past (since it hasn't moved) and will frag itself. Traditional Telefragging, however, is prevented. They just teleport slightly to the side.
In the old Ben 10 Adobe Flash game Battle Ready, having the Omnitrix time out while phasing through walls as Ghostfreak would be an instant Game Over.^note
Mentioned in BioShock 1 in some Mooks' random dialogue when examining a corpse: "The subject... appears to have been ripped apart from the inside... probably a failed teleport."
Castlevania:
- In Castlevania (1986), Dracula has a nasty habit of teleporting on top of Simon, regularly enough it may even be deliberate. It doesn't kill the player instantly, but does take a quarter of his life meter off, and is just one part of what makes the first phase of the boss fight such a challenge. Fortunately, the player gets a bit of warning as Dracula is initially intangible when he ports in, but the player has to be fast to move out of the way before the Count materializes fully.
- A boss in Castlevania: Order of Ecclesia uses a glyph to pass through walls to avoid the explosions of the bombs he fills the room with and carries an infinite amount of Super Potions, making it impossible to kill him the normal way. Absorb the glyph while he's inside the wall and he dies instantly.
In City of Heroes, you can only teleport (or teleport other people) to places you can see, but this is mainly due to game mechanics. Additionally, the game mechanics actively prevent this from happening; if someone is standing at another character's teleport destination, one of the two characters will be pushed aside.
Command & Conquer: Red Alert Series:
- The Allies's Chronosphere was based on the legend/myth of the Philadelphia Experiment from the second World War, which was an experiment to attempt to create cloaking technology that twisted space and time enough to make the ship "teleport" back and forth between the docks of two different countries, which caused some of the crew to burn up, fuse with the ship's hull, or plain disappear. According to the original lore, the remaining survivors went insane after the experience.
- The original game lets the Allied chronosphere perform this on when used on an APC, always disintegrating the passengers. You can only chronoshift into an empty space, though, avoiding the most common kind of tele-frag. It's also possible for overuse of the Chronosphere to create a "Chrono Vortex", a swirling distortion of space and time which destroys things that are too close to the distortion.
- Red Alert 2 enables it as a viable tactic. One can even transport enemy units, meaning you can force a friendly-fire tele frag. By Red Alert 3, you can destroy a construction vehicle using a Chronosphere and a dog.
- Red Alert 2 also features accidental teleportation: if you chronoshift units onto uneven ground, units that end up on higher elevation may end up inside the ground and explode.
- For a more interesting variant, you can also chronoshift enemy land units into water and watch them die. Sadly, the expansion makes this less useful, as more amphibious units get introduced in Red Alert 3. Fortunately, this tactic also works with impassable pieces of terrain, so even an amphibious unit can be telefraged if you have cliff or even a building handy.
- There's also teleporting sea units onto land. Nothing quite like bombing an opponent's war factory...with a pair of aircraft carriers.
Counter-Strike: It's a lot worse when you don't get telefragged by bad spawns. Spending the first five minutes of a round trying to get separated from the person who spawned inside your head is not a good way to relax.
Crusader:
- Though you can't teleport into anyone else, telepad mishaps can kill — once, even to advance the plot!
- In the second game, one gets a weapon to sabotage telepads, killing anyone incoming on them. You can tele frag yourself that way if the pad was supposed to be your escape route later on. Time to start the level over again...
In Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Billie's Blink-equivalent Power is Displace, which places a silhouette that can be teleported to. If anyone is standing inside the silhouette when you teleport, they will explode into pieces but you will take some damage. There's a bone charm which causes Displace to not cost Mana if you teleport next to a person, but causes you to get telefragged instead.
In Dofus, this is an explicit power of the Xelor class. It even calls the ability "Tele frag". (It's not an instant kill, however, but a debuff that makes other Xelor spells more powerful when used on a telefragged target.)
Telefragging got its name from the Doom series: if someone teleports in and you're standing at that exact spot, you'll get reduced to Ludicrous Gibs, and the teleporting player will be awarded a frag.
- Doom (1993): The initial release of the game did not have telefragging. If you tried to use a teleporter and an object or enemy was standing on the destination point, the teleporter would simply not work. This counted as a Game-Breaking Bug, as many levels could no longer be completed if an enemy got "stuck" over the destination point and made the teleporter unusable. This was fixed in a later release by making the incoming entity frag whatever is standing on the exit point, and this evolved into a gameplay mechanism.
- Doom II: The Final Boss shoots cubes that cause monsters to teleport in when they hit the ground. If you are standing at one of the spots where a cube hits, you will die instantly even if you have God Mode on (this is because God Mode only protects against attacks that do less than 1,000 damage, and telefragging does 10,000). Interestingly, monsters aren't allowed to telefrag outside of the final level. This can clearly be seen on many maps, where a huge horde of monsters teleports in — one monster at a time, shortly after the previous one is killed.
- TNT: Evilution uses this combined with another bug in the final map, where the player has to navigate a series of platforms; and if they take the wrong path, they will be teleported into a second copy of themselves, promptly telefragging themselves.
In Dragon Age: Inquisition, the Fade Cloak spell, which allows the user to briefly phase through foes and their attacks unharmed, can be upgraded with "Decloaking Blast", which deals massive damage and knockback when the user rematerializes within an enemy.
In DUSK, it is quite possible to do this, although the player will rarely be able to get much of a chance to. There is an achievement tied to telefragging the Guardian boss at the end of Episode Two, which will also instantly kill it.
In The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion's "Shivering Isles" expansion, the Daedric prince Sheogorath (the ruler of the dimension the game takes place in) executes those who break his laws by teleporting the condemned to a point well above the execution grounds, and letting them fall the rest of the way there. Either that or he teleports the condemned into space and then throws the Shivering Isles at them. It's Sheogorath, both are possible.
Eternal Darkness: In the Trapper Dimension, the player character uses teleporters to move throughout the area. If a Mook happens to be standing where the exit is, they'll be reduced to little chunks. There's usually a Horror standing on at least one of the exits.
E.Y.E: Divine Cybermancy features the psychic ability "The Dragon". When it is used while targeting an organic enemy, it'll instantly teleport the player inside the enemy, and cause the enemy to explode in a shower of blood.
In Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, a late-game boss can use teleportation magic to warp one of your units into another unit’s space, killing the latter and heavily damaging the former.
Gauntlet has teleport squares; beaming in from (not on) one of these could Tele Frag just about anything, even Death.
In Halo: Combat Evolved's multiplayer, if you try to go through a one-way teleporter, and somebody else is in the receiving end, you'll be blocked out for quite some time. The guy blocking will have his screen go white and his controller vibrate, and then finally he'll die and the teleporter will be sent through, receiving a tele frag for his efforts. However, since this takes time to do, the guy trying to teleport may end up screwed if he's relying on the teleporter to escape from death, and the guy blocking will be completely unharmed. This was dropped in the Mac/PC port, where corking the exit is a major part of strategy. Unfortunately, there is still one very embarrassing type of tele frag: If unattended vehicles are set to respawn and you're standing at the wrong spawn point, it will literally pounce on top of you for an instant kill.
Heretic and Hexen, being Doom (1993) engine-based games, naturally have telefragging, though they may or may not have the restriction mentioned above of non-boss monsters not being allowed to telefrag. There are probably few Hexen players who haven't been telefragged by Korax at least once. And careful when playing co-op! If two people enter a teleporter in quick succession or even simultaneously, a double tele frag is the usual result.
Homeworld:
- In multiplayer, opening a hyperspace portal on top of another ship would result in both ships being destroyed. With super bad luck, this could result in a destroyer opening a portal on top of a fighter and being destroyed, or with super good luck a frigate opening a portal on top of a carrier or even an enemy mothership instantly destroying it.
- Homeworld: Deserts of Kharak reveals that the hyperspace core in the Khar Toba has caused interference with the local hyperlanes. As a result, numerous starships crashed into the planet over the centuries.
Iji:
- Komato Assassins carry a device that allows them to teleport around at will. They mentally map out the area prior to the fight, and are trained to stop pursuit if the prey leaves that area to avoid teleporting into a wall. As part of the backstory, Assassin Asha got too wrapped up in the pursuit of an enemy, ignored his training, and lost his arm in precisely this fashion.
- Also, Sector 8 has a Trapmine — an item you can set on a teleport pad that goes off when anyone teleports through it, instagibbing the sucker that uses it (except in version 1.6) and rendering the teleporter unusable. Do NOT use it when Dan tells you to: save it for a later teleporter in the same sector, where it is much more needed.
In Ittle Dew, you can use the Portal Wand to warp enemies onto spikes for an instant kill. Petal Slugs can only be killed this way.
In Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast, characters enter and respawn in a versus match through a beam of energy. Getting hit by one of these beams results in getting "crushed into another dimension by x". A more amusing example is setting the number of bots to 10 and starting up a match in the Imperial Labs: Raven map. Because of how incredibly small the map is compared to other areas, spawn points are cluttered up, if not, overlap with one another. No matter what you do, you will ALWAYS start up the game automatically telefragging an enemy or an ally, or several people at once.
The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past and Oracle of Ages avoid this with travel between their two worlds/time periods. If you try to transport yourself into a solid object, you'll flash for a bit and then be kicked back to your original position, able to adjust your position and try again.
In Marathon, if one stands on a teleporter exit point when another goes through the teleporter, the player on the exit point will be launched at high speeds in a random direction. If the teleporter is in a narrow hallway and it sends the launched player into the wall next to the exit point, expect Ludicrous Gibs, because they'll probably both have rocket launchers out.
In Mighty Flip Champs!, teleporting into a wall will kill you.
In Mighty Switch Force! (Spiritual Successor to Mighty Flip Champs, above), you can (and are occasionally required to) tele frag enemies by switching while an enemy is standing in front of a background block. You can quite easily do the same thing to yourself if you aren't paying attention or your timing is off, and in fact this becomes one of the biggest hazards in some later stages.
In Minecraft, this appears mostly as a result of glitches:
- Using an enderpearl to teleport may cause you to become stuck inside a block and possibly suffocate and die.
- An animal that goes through a netherportal may become stuck in the blocks of the portal when re-emerging on the other side, resulting in it suffocating and dying if you can't get it out in time. Making a larger portal reduces the risk of this happening.
Path of Exile: The Bodyswap skill is a gory version of this, where you target an enemy or a corpse, explode your current body, then recreate a new body at where you targeted the skill, creating the same explosion.
The Reaper weapon from The Persistence lets you weaponize your teleportation by appearing right where an enemy is and reducing them to paste.
In PlanetSide 2, vehicles are constructed instantly on the vehicle pads when a player requests one at a vehicle terminal. Any player or object standing on the pad when the vehicle is built will instantly die, with no exceptions. Pity the poor tank pilot who accidentally backs up onto a pad when another player on his empire builds a Flash ATV. The first game was more forgiving, giving the dope on the vehicle pad two or three seconds of warning.
Some Quadrax games allow you to teleport between portals. Guess what happens when you teleport into one with stone block in it. The same effect can be achieved if you teleport a block to a place where a character is.
Quake:
- Shub-Niggurath, the final boss of the original game, is only killable by this method. There's a weird looking spiked sphere that flies around the boss room and deposits the player wherever it happens to be when you go into the teleporter, and at one point, the pod goes into Shub's body. If you go into the teleporter at that point, the result is a VERY messy demise for the Hell-Mother.
- In Quake Champions, the character Ranger (who was the player character of the original Quake) possesses an ability called Dire Orb that is capable of telefragging other players if activated at the right moment. His character description explains that he acquired this Orb from Shub-Niggurath's steaming remains.
- In multiplayer Quake, for those lucky enough to have played over LAN and not dial-up, nested telefrags were quite common. Player A respawns and telefrags Player B, who respawns and telefrags Player A who telefrags Player B who telefrags Player A ad infinitum. Naturally, this problem decreases rapidly with the size of a map and quantity of respawn points on it. Sometimes, the match might even start with a few players getting telefragged. Quake II multiplayer introduced a server option called "Spawn Furthest" which would always try to use the respawn point furthest from all other players to prevent this from happening... at least, as long as an unoccupied point is available.
- Like in Doom, enemies can only be telefragged by players, not vice/versa. Unlike in Doom, any monsters that attempt to teleport into a space occupied by a player will die as if the player teleported into them. Players can sometimes weaponize this by standing on the exact spot a monster is supposed to teleport into to preempt an ambush.
- In another instance of "reverse telefrag", attempting a telefrag on a player with the Pentagram of Protection causes the inbound player to explode instead. The explanation is that the inbound player "feels Satan's power". However, should both players have a Pentagram active at the same time, they'll both explode on the inbound player's arrival.
The Rise of the Golden Idol: In the first case of The Age of Restraint, a short-range teleporter used for harvesting plants is misused to lethal effect: An orchard worker illegally modifies his harvester to improve its range; during a test run, he teleports an entire tree and the person standing behind it, who ends up fused with the plant as a mangled corpse. In the final case, two thieves try to use a stolen teleporter to evade the authorities after a heist, unaware that it's the same modified device from the first incident, and frag each other in the process.
In Roblox, the CFrame system actively tries to keep players (and other objects) from sticking into each other, even if they have disabled collision. (Sidestepped by scripting and simultaniously anchoring the bricks, preventing flying stuff from going everywhere. For non-CanCollideable objects, the physics object "BodyPosition" also works.) Sometimes it also leads to players stacked up on a SpawnLocation. Telefragging must be deliberately scripted into a place (and even then it's hard.) The trope is also played straight with Regeneration Buttons: If a player stand where an object is created when the button is pushed, they are trapped inside until either they reset themselves (many in-game items have been created to do this in the most humorous way possible) or a benevolent player triggers the regen again, which normally has a delay timer. Sometimes, a place creator may actually put the regen button right below where the seat of a vehicle appears, causing the player to instantly get control of the vehicle. Kid-friendly Ludicrous Gibs result if a player dies in any way (being a Lego-like game, they literally fall apart, no blood involved, though a player's head may roll away to who-knows-where, taking the camera with it since the camera only watches the head, not the player as a whole), and if they were the driver of a vehicle, it also falls apart.
The final stage of R-Type III: The Third Lightning involves traversing an alien dimension that constantly phases in and out of reality. You must maneuver your ship into a circular dimensional "warp" that drifts through solid walls as they appear. The warp itself can disappear and reappear elsewhere, and if you were inside the walls when the warp fades out, it's instantly fatal.
Scarlet Nexus: Discussed, but not shown. Luka, in a conversation about his Psychic Teleportation, gets asked what would happen if he teleported into a tree. According to him, it would cause a nuclear explosion.
Discussed in Shadow Warrior (2013) with regards to Hoji's chi portals. After the second one nearly drops Wang off a cliff, he starts chewing Hoji out. Hoji responds that he's still rusty with the portals; if he tried to make them closer to the ground Wang might materialize several feet underground. Wang withdraws his complaint.
Roger gets this in the beginning of Space Quest VI: Roger Wilco in the Spinal Frontier when a teleporter malfunction re-materialized him with his legs below the ground, which he can simply pulls himself out.
You can pull this off in Spelunky if you're incredibly careful about it. The main use is to kill shopkeepers without it being counted against you.
Splatoon has the Super Jump technique, which lets you jump straight to the location of an ally, a Squid Beakon, or your spawn point; basically a teleport. Problem is, in the case of the former two, enemies can see your landing spot if they're nearby and ambush you accordingly. Splatoon 2 has a counter in the form of the Splashdown special, which can not only be executed by itself to slam down on an opponent from above, but can also be performed in conjunction with a Super Jump to punish Super Jump campers.
In Star Control and Star Control 2, the special power of the Arilou spaceship is random teleport through the battlefield (a Colombus-effect bubble of space around planet). There is a small, non-cumulative chance every time you teleport to end up inside the planet, or an asteroid, or your opponent's ship. This doesn't end well for you.
In Star Fox Adventures, it is rare but possible for the bat enemies in certain locations to respawn inside a cave wall. This causes them to be eternally stuck in the spawning animation, and never be replaced.
In Star Trek: Elite Force multiplayer, if two or more players (or bots) try to enter a teleporter simultaneously, both will be killed in the ensuing "transporter accident".
Team Fortress 2:
- Used in cases where, if an enemy is standing on top of a Teleporter and a player uses it, they are awarded a kill (if both players are on the same team, nothing happens) - even if the enemy is Übercharged. A common strategy for Spies is to sap a Teleporter entrance and stand on top of it so that when the Engineer breaks the sapper, the Spy teleports through, kills the Engineer in doing so, and can sap his buildings with impunity.
- An Engineer can also tele frag by using the Eureka Effect to teleport to his Teleporter exit while an enemy is standing on it.
- The Helltower map gives the players access to an assortment of spells, one of which is Teleport. Targeting the ground under an enemy's feet with this spell will teleport you into them and kill them instantly. It even has its own kill icon.
- With proper timing, it's even possible for Engineers to telefrag offensively with their own Teleporters.
Tetanus — a Game Mod for Doom II, above — features a special case in the sixth map, where a relatively open area is being guarded by a powerful creature (by default a Baron of Hell, but it's replaced with a Cyberdemon in Ultra-Violence difficulty); however, there's a secret cache which, upon being unveiled, shows a teleport tile that takes Doomguy right where the troublesome monster is, telefragging it instantly. The bad news is that, when you make the next step, an Arch-vile will appear from the other end to try to avenge the death of the fallen enemy.
Titanfall 2: Exiting Phase Shift inside another enemy Pilot will kill them, though this is not easy to pull off (since you can't see enemies while shifting). There's even a Pilot execution where the executing player phases into their target deliberately, exploding them from the inside. The Ronin-class Titan can also use Phase Shift. However, if it tries to phase in on a point where an enemy Titan is standing, the Ronin is instantly destroyed instead.
Tribes:
- The teleport pads (which either came with the base game or one of the most popular mods ironically played more than the real game itself) killed you if you stood on them when someone was coming through. It also would kill you if you were too heavy.
- In Tribes 2, vehicle pads will instantly kill any player standing in the way of the vehicle it's about to start building. Usually it accidentally telefrags an ally, but some players bait enemies into flying at them over the vehicle pad, then immediately build a flying vehicle as the enemy passes over, instantly gibbing the enemy player.
A staple of the Unreal Tournament series, through use of both teleporter gates or the Translocator Beacon. Also, a damaged Translocator beacon would always telefrag the user and credit the kill to whoever damaged the beacon, making it a good idea to leave the beacon in an out-of-the-way area when not using it as a rapid approach device. Damaged beacons cannot be automatically recalled, either; they must be manually recovered. If you have Improbable Aiming Skills, you could shoot the translocator beacon of anyone trying to rapidly approach with it while it's still flying through the air. The personal teleporter refuses to activate when the beacon is under the foot of an ally, but a teleporter gate allows a player to kill allies, even when friendly fire is turned off, and like in the Quake examples, if there are more players in a match than there are spawn points, it's perfectly possible for one or more of them to telefrag someone else as the match starts, even teammates.
In Warp, tele-fragging is your #1 offensive option but is 100% completely optional after tutorial section, just know it will count against you if you do it too much leading to the Downer Ending or Meh ending.
The Wheel of Time:
- One of the Ter'Angreal available in multiplayer is "Swap Places", which experienced players can use to set up a Tele-Frag on their opponents. For example, sic Swap Places on your opponent, don a Fire Shield and jump into the lava. Or use it to drop the player into the ring of Explosive Wards you set up beforehand; if they're running, momentum should do the rest. Or fire it at the guy who trapped you in ice with Freeze.
- There's also Shift, which shifts you ahead about 5 feet and breaks the lock of any tracking weapons on you. It's good for escapes, but it's possible to tele frag yourself into, say, an incoming fireball.
The Malor spell in Wizardry involves teleportation via punching in grid references for the desired area. The catch? Punch it in wrong and you could appear inside a rock or some other undesirable place, killing the entire party.
Discussed in World of Warcraft in the "Schools of Arcane Magic" books:
Make absolutely certain you know your destination before attempting to teleport... attempts to cast a teleportation "on the fly" often result in one very dead mage inside a wall, chair, or another mage. And I don't mean in a fun way.
In the X series of games, ships travel between different sectors of space through jumpgates. Jumpgates are two way, meaning that ships both enter and leave sectors from the same portal. Meaning, you can use your jumpdrive to jump to a distant sector for a mission... right as a 5 kilometer long vessel is entering the jumpgate's event horizon (where you are). The Terran sectors in X3: Terran Conflict were notorious for this, as they have very active military patrols which fly between the smaller Terran gates very often. The issue became so annoying in X3TC that the developers changed how smaller ships enter the gate in an update — they now fly towards it from slightly above or below, and enter the gate at its very edge, rather than the direct center, which capital ships use, in order to avoid any chance of being rammed to death by an inbound or outbound capital ship.
Xenoblade Chronicles 3: One of these having occurred on a large scale (by which we mean planetary scale) is vital to the backstory of the setting.

Visual Novels

In Steins;Gate, this is implied to be the horrific fate of some of the test subjects of SERN's Time Travel experiments. (Due to the Earth moving, time travel is pseudo-teleportation if no coordinates are set.) Each subject was "gellified", resulting in their bodies literally becoming a green gel and the victims winding up inside of walls and other places not fit for human survival. To add insult to injury the name of the report detailing these test subjects' deaths is called the Jellyman's Report. The worst part? In the visual novel, it's revealed in the report that these are only 14 of the test subjects whom were found. The rest are presumably dead underground, or in other difficult and impossible-to-reach places. The fact that each dead test subject's profile contains the phrase "Error. Human is dead, mismatch." doesn't help either... Hearing/seeing Okabe skim through the report, repeating this phrase over and over again, also makes it begin to sound like a Madness Mantra.

Web Animation

Bino the Elephant by FilmCow has Bino teleport out of Hell... right into where the Professor's wife was standing. It leaves a big mess.
DSBT InsaniT: Killer uses this tactic with Dimension Claw, like emerging out of peoples backs.
Murder Drones: At the end of the final battle, Cyn attempts to teleport past Uzi on a narrow beam to attack her, but Uzi sees Cyn begin to disappear and goes for a blind grab in the area behind her. This results in the reappearing Cyn impaling herself on Uzi's outstretched arm, putting her heart directly into Uzi's grip.
In The Seal of Nehahra, a four-hour long Machinima fully rendered in Quake I which expands on its plot, an Ogre named Zin accidentally telefrags a Death Knight standing on a teleporter pad. It is this incident which inspires Sergeant Lawrence Maxwell to orchestrate the teleporter and spiked sphere in Shub-Niggurath's Lair (see the Video Games folder).

Webcomics

Exploited in Crowley by the titular Anti-Anti-Christ to kill a demon — the spell has mass displacement so only the demon is hurt when Crowley teleports inside him and rips his way out.
Girl Genius: As this page helpfully demonstrates, ramming a teleporting engine directly inside the brain of a giant clank tends to have explosive results.
Goblins:
- Big Ears has an axe which is enchanted so it will pass harmlessly through paladins rather than harming them. When the party fight Kore, Thaco has him throw the axe at Kore with a rope attached to it. The axe pulls the rope through Kore, but Thaco cuts the rope before it passes through completely, removing the enchantment and leaving part of the rope trapped painfully in Kore's body.
- A true Tele-Frag is narrowly avoided when Onyx tries to teleport Minmax to the psionic engine room. Ruby thankfully stops her in time to explain that "position 0" is the one she's occupying right now.
In The Handbook of Heroes, Warlock seems to have some trouble with the intricacies of summoning monsters.
Cleric: Inside of ye there are two wolves.
Warlock: Bro... Conjuration magic is hard.
One Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal strip has a super villain trying to break into Fort Knox, (the gold repository of the United States) only to be met by a young girl who's guarding the place. He asks what sort of power she has that they're trusting her to guard the fort alone, and she replies that she can make puppies appear anywhere. The villain laughs in derision... until three different puppies leap out from inside his body, leading to his gory death. Currently the page image for Lethal Harmless Powers.
Swords: In "Duck of the Draw", the Dreary Knight thinks that the "Sword of Summoning Ducks" isn't very practical on the battlefield... until the Duck Knight makes a duck appears inside his throat.
A villain in Use Sword on Monster conjured a nice big slab of stone inside a contracted wizard's teleportation circle. When the wizard teleported home, well ....

Websites

Wormholes in the Orion's Arm universe would be rather dangerous to use without the safety precautions they have in place. Each wormhole's event horizon is coated by a layer of exotic matter; if anything comes in contact with this layer during transportation, everything inside is annihilated. Also, nothing larger than the wormhole itself can come within 427 AU of the wormhole (standard safety distance), or it will collapse and explode.
SCP Foundation:
- SCP-084 ("Static Tower"), an area centered on a radio tower, can cause objects to randomly "jump" their positions, causing "overlaps", which have been described as having a "markedly detrimental effect on living tissue".
- SCP-595 ("Teleporting Destroyer") was an experimental U.S. ship, in attempt to create either a teleporting ship or ship that can bend light around itself. Problem, many of the crew could be teleported into the walls and fused with the bulkheads, still alive.
- When someone jumps on SCP-761 ("Slightly Less Dangerous Trampoline"), they are subjected to Teleportation Misfire and end up in a random location within 15 meters. If there is already a solid object where they arrive, they suffer a Teleporter Accident and become merged with the object. Depending on how much of their body is merged with the object, they can be injured or killed.
- SCP-1609 ("The Remains of a Chair") was originally one of the most harmless anomalous objects you could imagine; a teleporting chair that would appear if you were tired and needed to sit. Then the Global Occult Coalition tried to destroy it by running it through a woodchipper, which didn't actually "kill" it. It's now a paranoid pile of woodchips whose individual bits can still teleport, including inside people's bodies if it feels threatened.

Web Videos

Discussed in Critical Role. The Mighty Nein, being pursued by Trent Ikithon, decided to put three of their number into the Happy Fun Ball to cheat the creature limit of the Plane Shift spell. Two problems: time passes far slower inside the Happy Fun Ball than outside of it, and the people on the outside have no idea when the people on the inside are going to pop back out, meaning they could do so mid-Plane Shift back to the Material Plane. Marisha describes what that would look like as "like throwing a slurpee out a car window."
Freeman's Mind:
- One of the cleverer moments from the series is when Freeman speculates that this is why things at Black Mesa keep falling apart: the aliens are creating big them-sized holes in everything by teleporting indiscriminately and getting stuck in the walls. He even fears that Lambda Core's reactor is facing imminent meltdown and possibly China Syndrome because an alien has teleported inside it after the announcement system mentions that there's a "biological contaminant" inside the reactor.
- Gordon later starts fearing that this could happen to him if one of the aliens teleported inside him. This almost happens Episode 55, causing Gordon to have a major freakout.
- After seeing human bodies, supplies and ammunition littered all over Xen, Gordon starts suspecting that Black Mesa has been doing research awfully similar to the Steins;Gate example mentioned above by dumping loads of people to random coordinates around Xen, with most of them ending up floating in space, in the middle of enemy territory or dropping down from high altitude.
Discussed at one point in My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series.
Applejack: Aren't y'all worried about teleporting inside somepony?
TomSka: Done this a few times in "Time Trouble". It also comes up in "Bible Time" and "Meanwhile 2".
Happens in an episode of Voltz (Yogscast) with Sips and Sjin, who were inside their base when it ended up being restored to the way it was — that is, pure mountain — by a World-Healing Wave, courtesy of "rejuvenation missiles" fired by Ridgedog and Duncan Jones. As a result, they suffocated to death.

Western Animation

In the Adventure Time episode "A Glitch Is a Glitch", the Ice King gets his comeuppance for his unsuccessful attempt at having a glitch monster destroy the entire world (except for himself and Princess Bubblegum) when a house that had been destroyed re-materializes right where he's standing and traps him in its walls.
In Invader Zim, Zim invents a time portal to send an assassin robot back to Dib's childhood to kill him. Because of its "incompatibility" with the portal, he has to send plush-toy pigs instead. After successfully using them to kill Dib through various childhood accidents, Dib (resurrected by his father) catches on to what's happening and attacks Zim's lair with Humongous Mecha. Zim hurriedly scrawls a message to his past self on the last pig, which successfully ends Dib's assault... because he accidentally lodged the pig inside his brain.
My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic:
- In "Lesson Zero", Twilight Sparkle deliberately teleports into a beach ball, causing the ball to expand and pop (with seemingly no harm to herself).
- In "Baby Cakes", Pinkie Pie pulls off an Offscreen Teleportation inside a small cake she made to celebrate the twins becoming one month old, making it — in essence — explode.
- In "Do Princesses Dream of Magic Sheep?", some of Luna's apparitions into a dream are through existing items — like a dress, a cake or an apple flower — which get destroyed in the process.
Rick and Morty:
- Combined with a Portal Cut in "Mortynight Run" when Rick opens a dimensional rift in the place that an alien is standing, which consequentially splits the alien in half.
- In "The Rickshank Redemption", Rick telefrags an entire space station... within another space station.
SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob visits Sandy and sees that she made a teleporter. Because he's running late for work, he asks her to send him to the front of the Krusty Krab... just as Squidward is opening the door. SpongeBob appears with part of Squidward's arm stuck in his mouth and it only gets worse when the machine malfunctions. SpongeBob and Squidward are both brought back to Sandy... completely fused together, Sandy tries hard to separate them but fails. Squidward has to perform, so he tries to hide the SpongeBob parts under a cape, but they are revealed. However, the audience seems to be impressed by this "freak" and they applaud. Sandy charges in with a "separator" she just invented, and not hearing Squidward's screams to leave them (he loves the applause), separates them. As most people get bored by the "normal" Squidward and SpongeBob and leave, Squidward freaks out and starts hitting random buttons on the separator to try to fuse back together. It explodes, making Squidward, SpongeBob, Sandy, Patrick, Mr. Krabs, Pearl, Larry, and Mrs. Puff all fuse together into a disgusting blob.
In Transformers: Prime, Smokescreen uses a phase-shifting device to embed Knock Out in one of the walls of the Nemesis. Megatron, incensed by the latter's failure, just leaves him there until he has need of the doctor's expertise.
Nightcrawler pulls the "teleport your arm off" schtick with Spiral in Wolverine and the X-Men (2009). Although in this continuity, she visibly has four robotic arms, and after he yanks the fourth one off he drops them at her feet, smirks, and states she should surrender because he's "run out of fake ones" to take. (Spiral, in every continuity but this one, has six natural arms, some of which are part mechanical due to injuries received over the course of a long career as The Dragon.)
In Xiaolin Showdown, Omi uses this tactic to defeat the demon Mala Mala Jong: The Golden Tiger Claws can open a gate that transports you to any specific place you want to go. Omi uses them to travel inside Mala Mala Jong, grab the Heart of Jong (which is what gives the demon life), and exit again.
The telefragging is present in X-Men: Evolution — but not for the party you'd think. Scarlet Witch messes up Nightcrawler's powers and causes him to teleport into a sign. The sign is pushed apart by Nightcrawler appearing in the middle of it. What would happen if it had been a person is left to the imagination.
Young Justice (2010):
- Amazo can use powers copied from superheroes, but only one at a time. After it used Martian Manhunter's power to phase through an attack, Superboy stuck his fist inside its head as it switched to Superman's power to counterattack. It didn't end well for Amazo.
- In "Before the Dawn", M'gann (who also has phasing powers) suffers this when she attempts to phase through a door and a villain shifts the density of the door to match hers. Doesn't slice and dice, but it does knock her out until someone drags her out of the wall.

Tele-Frag
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