Armor Is Useless / Literature

• Subverted in the Genevieve sub-story for The Bloody Red Baron, Nezima (nicknamed Mouse) is a super-strong elder vampire who uses a katana. Normally in fiction, this would have her rip through enemy armor like paper. Not in this story, while she and a friend are investigating a cult, Mouse ends up having to fight an enemy vampire in full-plate armour. No matter where she hits, the katana kept deflecting off the armour and her foe gets her non-lethally impaled.
• A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court is a classic example of this trope being Played for Laughs. Hank puts on full armor during his Knight Errant quest for Sandy, and he finds it to be so insufferably stiff and hot that he never wants to do it again. For his duel with Sir Sagramore le Desirous, he forgoes armor himself and takes advantage of his speed in order to lasso him. The fact that he subsequently mows down multiple armored knights is justified since medieval armor was not designed to protect against Colt revolvers.
• Don Quixote is an early example of this trope, if not the Trope Codifier. When he decides to become a Knight Errant, Don Quixote digs his ancestors' armor out of storage and jerry-rigs it for his adventures. It does not even protect him from being beaten up by guys with sticks. There are also plenty of instances of swords cleaving right through helmets, although this may be a nod to the exaggerated Chivalric Romance that the book is a parody of.
• Dragaera: Justified, as metal armor is a great target for sorcery. This is a bit of an after-the-fact handwave by author Steven Brust, who loves the cloak-twirling romances of Dumas and modeled his world after them, complete with the general lack of armor. We do see that some leather armor is used during the war.
• Mostly averted in The Dresden Files. Harry habitually wears his magically armored duster, even when it's uncomfortable, and it's saved his life on numerous occaisons. Basically anyone remotely professional is going to be wearing bulletproof vests and some sort of tactical gear or armor whenever possible. Even the holy Knights of the Cross wear a special bit of armor made of chainmail over kevlar because, as Michael put is: "My faith protects me. My Kevlar helps." Even when armor doesn't fully protect someone (Michael is hit with several rounds from an assault rifle) it's noted that the damage without armor would still have been much worse. Michael does survive, crippled but alive. Some supernatural creatures do choose to go without armor (EG. Ghouls, Bigfoot, White Court Vampires) but this is presumably due to their reliance on supernatural durability and mobility instead. Particularly in the case of the former two, anything that hurts them in the first place probably isn't getting stopped by most armor.
• In one of the Dune prequel novels Duncan Idaho is given a suit of full plate while training at Ginaz and promptly gets his ass handed to him by the lightly armed and armored opponents who are almost literally running circles around him. The fight was a lesson to drive home the point that bigger armor is not always better armor and that mobility can be just as important as pure defense.
• David Eddings' The Elenium and The Tamuli:
  • Partial credit for the Thalesians: Thalesian knights go to war in chainmail, not in full plate, as Thalesia is full of deep rivers and streams, making plate armor more of a hazard than a help. A chainmail shirt is easily removable, whereas by the time you have a chance to get a full suit of riding armour off, you'll have drowned.
  • Funnily enough, a full suit of riding armor incorporates quite a bit of chain, is about as heavy as a full chainmail and is easier to remove underwater than chainmail. If we were looking at normal plate, it would be lighter than chain, and way easier to remove. Removing chain is about pulling it a bit over your head, and wriggling out of it, while gravity pulls it down, which is way harder to do underwater than to cut the straps of the plate parts that hinder swimming.
  • To Khalad's assertion that he could create a crossbow capable of firing a bolt several miles, Vanion shakes his head and foresees the obsolescence of the knight in full armour.
  • A literal case happens at the end of the Elenium when they encounter several undead Zemochian knights. The Zemochians have never understood that armor is supposed to protect you, and assume it's there for intimidation purposes only — so they wear Scary Impractical Armor that hinders their movement and has countless weak and blind spots, and with spikes that threaten to cut or impale the wearer if they make a wrong move.
  • Played with: Adus' armor, which might have saved him if it had ever been fitted to him. As it was, there were more than enough unarmored gaps for Talen's dagger to slide through. (Whether Adus had sufficient brainpower to put armor pieces on correctly is another question.)
  • Also played with in the final confrontation between Sparhawk and Martel. Martel's armour is very far from useless, but its style and ornamentation make it far heavier than the suit worn by Sparhawk and causes Martel to lose his wind quickly.
• Subverted in the Lord Dunsany story The Fortress Unvanquishable Save For Sacnoth, Leothric is armed with Sacnoth — a magical weapon that is the greatest sword in the world and he goes to hunt the evil wizard Gaznak. Unfortunately for Leothric, Gaznak wears black, magical armour Sacnoth is incapable of penetrating. The real subversion is Gaznak also carries the 2nd greatest sword in the world, but while Leothric's mundane armour can't stop the sword for ripping pieces out of it, it does keep Leothric from getting injured until it's completely on the floor.
• Gor is a case where wearing armor is explicitly more dangerous than not, the same aliens who enforce Medieval Stasis on Gor also incinerate armored combatants with heat beams from space. Their given rationale is reintroducing Darwinian selection pressures, only the quickest and the strongest live to reproduce, rather than those wealthy enough to afford armor. Only helmets are permitted. Yet archery and crossbows are fine, and indeed more effective where only shields can stop them.
• In The Heirs of Alexandria, it is subverted. The Knights of the Holy Trinity acknowledge that the heavy Gothic full-plate they prefer is obsolete for conventional battles, given the preponderance of firearms. However, in this setting iron protects against magic, and many of the Knights' opponents have either demonic or sorcerous backup, making wrapping yourself in sixty pounds of the stuff before a fight a somewhat situational, but ultimately quite sensible, thing to do.
• Subverted in The Heroes: "Cracknut" Whirrun was told the day he would die by a witch, so he has gradually stopped wearing armor over his legendary career as a swordsman. When Bremer dan Gorst fights him, Bremer is amazed by how effectively Whirrun fights without armor. However, in the middle of their fight, Whirrun is randomly stabbed in the back by someone else. Dying, Whirrun laments that if he'd known the witch was lying, he would have worn more armor.
  • Played straight in The Age of Madness. Gunnar Broad survived multiple trips up the siege ladder in Styria, a role that most men don't survive on their first time. In The Wisdom of Crowds, we see Broad's preferred equipment loadout; a warhammer with a pick on the reverse of the head, a knife, and a simple breastplate. His internal monologue notes that armor past the breastplate makes the ladderman too slow and cumbersome, making it more trouble than its worth. His weapon choice is worth noting, as a military pick is purpose-built to kill armored foes.
• Kris Longknife: Played with. Personal body armor is extremely effective, requiring specialized rounds to reliably penetrate, and saves the lives of cast members and Red Shirts alike multiple times (the title character is something of an assassin magnet). Warship armor is more variable. At the start of the series most ships use ice extruded over the hull to fend off laser attacks, which generally requires concentrated fire on a single point to punch through. However, in the first encounter with the still-unnamed Planet Looters and their Beam Spam, it's Kris's smaller, faster Q-ships that survive rather than the big battleships, because they're able to evade. Later in the series, the all-Smart Metal "battlecruisers" that Kris commands have some armor, but their primary defense is rapid-fire jinking and dodging, which proves effective against prewar battleships as well.
• Justified in Sergey Lukyanenko's A Lord from Planet Earth with the planar swords being the main weapon of combat. The blade can cut through anything without slowing down with Like Cannot Cut Like completely averted (swordfighting techniques are focused on avoiding getting your own blade cut while timing your strikes to cut the opponent's blade). Combatants can wear special armor, but even that can't prevent a blade that sharp from cutting. The main goal of the armor is to harden at the point of the cut in order to allow the wound to heal (which takes about 3 seconds given how fine it is). A wound to the heart, though, can never heal, as the heart beating will expand the tiny cut into a gaping hole. An additional effect of the armor hardening is to try to hold the sides of the blade, keeping the opponent from moving it. The protagonist accidentally figures out how to defeat the latter function, killing the Big Bad of the first novel in the process in a gruesome fashion. In the third novel, the protagonist dons an advanced nano-armor that can take any hit and will protect the wearer and self-repair (being composed of nanites). However, the nano-armor still can't stop a planar blade, although it, presumably, can function like the normal dueling armor. When the protagonist faces off against his Fang counterpart wearing their equivalent of the armor, the two armors destroy each other nanite-by-nanite.
• The Gonne in Men at Arms makes this the case, going through Detritus' breastplate from significant range. Through the rest of the series, armour is more likely to work than not against anything that isn't a breech-loading rifle matching real world-technology from long after guns made armour useless.
• In Mistborn, metal armor is extremely useful... for conventional soldiers fighting other soldiers. Against an Allomancer like a Steelpusher or Lurcher, who can telekinetically push or pull on metals, metal armor is entirely a liability. The Allomancer can use their powers to knock their enemy off-balance (though Pushing or Pulling exerts an equal and opposite force on the Allomancer, meaning that Pushing hard enough to throw a human will be just as likely to Push the Allomancer away if they don't have an anchor). Allomancers often specifically ensure they carry no metal if possible, as it can be an enormous liability in a fight against other Allomancers. Most soldiers (save those who are specifically intended to fight Allomancers) still wear armor since allomancers are fairly rare, although it is often limted amounts so that it can be removed quickly when needed.
• In The Mortal Instruments, the shadowhunters code explains exactly why the nephilim do not wear armor. They rely on maintaining a fighting style that requires agility, agility, and speed. An armor would only slow them down unnecessarily. In addition, most demons can easily shred metal. And for those who spit fire or acid, or use magical attacks, a shadowhunter in an armor would be a gorging.
  • Many fairies warriors wear armor. These, however, seem to be just for decoration, because shadowhunters and other fairies can effortlessly penetrate them with their weapons. Of course, both shadowhunters and fairies are superhuman strong, so it may work against other foes.
• The Once and Future King sometimes plays it straight, such as when Lancelot kills Agravain, but usually inverts this. When fighting unarmoured peasants on the battlefield, being an armoured knight is like using an invincibility hack. White includes one passage where a knight was none the worse for wear from being unhorsed and mobbed by spearmen. Indeed, after his comrades rescued him, it was actually found that he fought better because now he had lost his temper.
• Percy Jackson and the Olympians and The Heroes of Olympus let the heroes almost always fight without armor, with the only real exceptions being during the war games (since they use actual weapons and it's meant just as much to be a training exercise) and during the Battle of Manhattan (which would be plain stupid given they're fighting a defensive battle against armies of monsters and rogue demigods). In a book, Percy is said to be fighting in an arena, even hinting that armor would give him more protection, but that he would slow down and tire more quickly.
• Perfect Dark: The first novel (yes, novel) notes the uselessness of armor in the games. The evil company is so huge that its offensive division is constantly outclassing the defensive division. Nobody is telling the right hand to stop inventing guns that can chew through the bulletproof vest the left hand issues the company soldiers.
• Played with in A Practical Guide to Evil. Armor is generally good and saves people's lives many times. It is also useless against a variety of magic weapons in the setting and touch and go at best against Named. In at least one case, a minor character, the Exiled Prince is hilariously killed through misuse of his armor. It was enchanted to deflect arrows and quarrels, which was great, but he didn't wear the helmet so as to inspire his men. Thus a bolt that would have harmlessly dinged off the thickest portion of his breastplate was instead magically deflected up into his unprotected head.
• Few Redwall characters wear armour, except Martin and the Badger Lords. In an aversion, though, Martin's armor actually saves his life from being torn to pieces by Tsarmina's claws, though it still gets horribly mangled and doesn't spare him from bleeding badly. Tsarmina's Mooks were an exception, but the armour was described as "cumbersome" and hindered more than it helped (particularly when the heroes flooded the castle). Possibly justified in that mammals fur does offer some basic protection that humans lack and some species (like ironically, badgers) have remarkably thick skin that offers additional advantages. Plus the general shape of most small rodent and mustelid skeletal structures would make it really difficult to make armour to fit them without severely restricting movement, as most already have considerably worse range of motions in their arms regardless. Also the Redwall forest is not particularly industrialized. Swords are pretty rare in the books, with most combatants using spears, clubs and knives as melee weapons, so it's not a huge surprise there isn't a great deal of iron or steel armor. And of course there are numerous problems with various small mammals making leather armor...
• Lampshaded for one particular scenario in K.C Alexander's SINless, protagonist Riko is in corporate raid on a lab that's surrounded by Necrotech. She and her team are outfitted with heavy armour, but she notes that the armour was only effective at stopping bullets from a rival mercenary team and that the Necrotech would tear through it like it didn't exist. Her employer for the mission is Mantis, an industrial corporation that has gone into armor development as a branch. Riko tells them that they better work on much better generation of armour for her if she's on the field, as what she was currently wearing was shit.
• A Song of Ice and Fire usually averts this trope, as knights rely on heavy armor, and when someone eschews it others often note the decision as a considerable risk. It is still played with occasionally:
  • Bronn eschews heavy armor during his duel with Vardis Egan. He dodges his more heavily armored opponent until the knight is exhausted, then moves in for the kill. Justified in that this is a one-on-one duel where he doesn't have to watch his back, and has lots of room to maneuver.
  • Prince Oberyn Martell employs basically the same strategy as above when facing "The Mountain", Ser Gregor Clegane, in a Trial by Combat. He opts uses his superior speed to his advantage, since getting hit by the absurdly large and strong Mountain at all could be crippling if not fatal, armor or not. Whilst he inflicts mortal wounds on the Mountain, the Prince lets his guard down and is killed nonetheless.
  • Water dancers of Braavos do not wear armor and rely on light piercing swords. Syrio Forel manages to kill four lightly armored guardsmen with a wooden practice sword, although he is also supposed to be one of the best swordsmen on the planet. He has less success against an opponent in plate armor, though of course he also would have been much better off with a real sword.
  • In the Battle of the Blackwater, armor is not quite "useless" so much as "Awesome, but Impractical." When Stannis fleet is trapped in the bay and set aflame, most of the high lords and knights, who go into the battle heavily armored, go down with their ships and are drowned. Ser Davos Seaworth, being somewhat smarter about naval combat, eschews heavy armor and is able to swim to relative safety.
  • The above example is inverted by Victarion Greyjoy, who derides the armorless soldiers he faces at the Shield Islands as cowards who fear drowning (he has no such fear for religious reasons). Heavily-armored himself, he cuts through them easily.
  • Also inverted by Barristan Selmy, who easily outmatches a Dothraki with a slashing arakh in single combat when his opponent's Hurricane Of Blows keeps glancing off his breastplate. Comparing this to Bronn's duel with Ser Vardis, the moral is that heavy armour won't win or lose a fight by itself. The Dothraki was unfamiliar with heavy armor and was unable to come up with an appropriate tactic to combat it, while Bronn was much more familiar and knew how to exploit the weaknesses of his opponents armor.
• Played straight in The Sorcerer's Daughter: Rothbart and Siegfried are armored very lightly when they go to rescue Odette from Castle Tudl. That’s because their antagonist is a magician rather than a warrior, so Rothbart realizes heavy armor wouldn’t help them and would only slow them down instead.
• Subverted and played with in The Stormlight Archive, where knights wear Shardplate, magitek Powered Armor capable of shrugging off anything short of a Shardblade or sustained attacks by almost entire armies. Two knights equipped with full Plate and Blades are able to survive against an army that outnumbered their own greatly for the better part of a day, albeit with horrific casualties among their more conventionally armored allies. Bringing down someone who is wearing Shardplate is considered such an achievement that it is a widely-honored tradition that the one who killed the Shardbearer gets his weapon and armor as a reward which motivates troops to fight Shardbearers in hopes killing one. Doing so through their Plate requires overwhelming them and beating them until a part of the armor wears down and breaks, or to strike through the helmet's narrow eye slit. That being said, everyone in the army still wears conventional armor as even the most well-equipped armies have only a handful of Shards, meaning the vast majority of combat is still happening between conventionally equipped soldiers, so mundane weaponry is the main threat.
• Played with in the 1950's science fiction novel Tunnel In The Sky. One of the characters wears body armor all the time for awhile after being introduced, prompting another character to wonder why trade marginal protection for a much greater loss of speed and agility? Turns out the character is wearing the body armor because it helps hide that she's a woman.
• Averted in Vanas Heritage. At one occasion Halvor swings his axe at a Shor warrior and the mail he is wearing stops it from penetrating. Halvor must bring him down with repeated axe-strikes and stab him into the armpit to kill him. When Avaron is later hit in the head, he is “only” knocked unconscious due to him wearing a Helmet.
• Dan Abnett's Warhammer 40,000 novel Brothers of the Snake discusses and averts this. When Space Marines fight a foe that they can see only with the naked eye, they open their visors with explicit commentary about how it makes them more vulnerable in one sense. Indeed, several of them die because of it. A number of other Warhammer 40,000 novels fall back on playing it straight, especially the Horus Heresy series (where hundreds of power armoured supermen get cut down by necessity, usually by guns that wouldn't actually penetrate the armour in the game itself) but notable exceptions are skirmishes in the Abnett Eisenhorn and Ravenor series, where even basic armour is a major obstacle to the Main Characters, and Ciaphas Cain^note HERO OF THE IMPERIUM who has his life saved on several occasions by his battered set of misappropriated carapace armour.
  • Also discussed in Prospero Burns, also by Dan Abnett, where Leman Russ has taught his legion to appropriate the enemy guns when possible, having noted that often the cyclic nature of armor and weapon penetration will fall in favor of the weapons.
• In The Wheel of Time, many characters forgo armor either because they fight with magic, or because they're trained swordsmen, not soldiers, and the armor would only slow them down. Besides them, this trope is largely averted for mundane weapons. Though obviously magic fireballs and lightning aren't terribly impeded by steel.
• Averted in Worm. Taylor's spidersilk costume is able to stop lower calibur bullets and knives, which saves her life many times over, and she makes similar costumes for teammates on a few occaions. Plus being spidersilk means that it's light and easy to move in. Many other Capes who don't have such a convenient option instead totally forgo armor. Of course many powers make using armor uncessecary or impractical, and armor is pretty useless against most superpowers anyways, so if you aren't worried about more conventional attack armor is probably pointless.
• The Zombie Survival Guide: Modern Body armor is simply dead weight - it doesn't protect against bites on the arms or legs. Chain mail is considered noisy and thus attracts zombies. Cumbersome plate is considered suicidal. The best defense is simply being able to move as fast as possible. The sole exception is a shark suit, which can protect against bites stronger than a zombie, and is therefore useful when fighting underwater zombies.

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