Handicapped Badass / Literature

Handicapped Badasses in literature.

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• In the Animorphs book "The Ultimate", Jake (The Leader, who's been toughening up the last 2-3 years to fight Yeerks) gets flipped by James (a paralyzed kid in a wheelchair). James follows up with: "You don't want to know what Kelly (another kid in a wheelchair) can do to you if she gets mad enough." Also, Tobias became a Mode Locked red-tailed hawk and was unable to morph for a large majority of the series. This did not stop him from being a one-man Air Force and master of Recon. He was also the main one to attack Visser Three in the majority of their battles.
• In The Antagonists the main character, Minnie, is in a wheelchair, suffers chronic pain, can't lift more than five pounds, and doesn't have any superpowers to offset her disability. That doesn't stop her from kicking ass by using her environment against her opponents, exploiting the fact that her opponents will be underestimating her, relying on brains over brawn, being stubborn as hell, being able to pretty much ignore pain since she's usually experienced worse, and so on.
• Assassin's Creed Gold has Omar Khaled, a 17th-century Moorish Assassin of the English Chapter. Despite being born the blind son of a butler, he became one do the best Assassins of his time, making full use of his other senses plus his Eagle Vision. After a disastrous mission, he resolves to only teach new Assassins without being one himself. He is assigned by a former Assassin to be Isaac Newton's assistant and helps him fight counterfeiters and to foil a plot to devastate the British economy. Unfortunately, Omar's latest student, a childhood friend of his, who also possesses Eagle Vision, ends up turning against the Brotherhood and Omar himself, forcing him to kill her.
• Epic novel Aztec included an Aztec warrior who kills four other men in gladiatorial combat, despite the fact that his feet were cut off. Mixtli is also handicapped, but he always wins through cunning rather than awesomeness.
• Bazil Broketail: The Purple-Green of Hook Mountain, the only wild dragon ever to serve in the Argonath legions, was captured and imprisoned by servants of Padmasa who clipped his wings, rendering him unable to fly after. Although the wings grew back thanks to Lessis' magic, they lack necessary strength, so the poor guy got stuck on the ground for the rest of his life. However, that does not make him any less dangerous in battle.
• In The Belgariad, King Cho-Hag of Algaria can barely walk, due to a childhood illness. That doesn't stop him from being able to outride, outfight and outthink anyone or anything that threatens him or his people. As one character notes, when your society is based around horses, not being able to walk stops being such a problem.
  • Beldin is a hunchback and suffers from dwarfism of an unspecified type. Neither condition prevents him from kicking the asses of people three feet taller than him without breaking a sweat (he treated Durnik like a basketball on their first meeting) and that's before he brings his immense magical ability and prodigious intellect to bear.
• BIONICLE's Vezon, although never actually fighting, manages to remain a main character, not dead, unbelievably unscathed after being captured by the worst torture master in the MU (with the building collapsing), and unmutated by Pit Mutagen. So what makes him better than Badass Normal? He doesn't have powers, and considering how almost every breathing thing in the MU has some power or other, that's pretty crippling. He also doesn't have much of a mind, so the mental handicap comes into play. This powerless nature doesn't apply to him anymore, since ever since he got fused to the Mask of Dimensional Gates, he became a living portal into other worlds and was reduced to a mere, yet very powerful and handy plot device.
• The Black Company:
  • Darling is deaf and mute, and for this reason, nobody believes she could be The Chosen One. They are hideously wrong since she grows up to be a natural leader and military genius, even without her Anti-Magic powers.
  • From the same series, The Limper takes this trope up to eleven. While initially handicapped as his name suggests, he just gets more and more damaged as the series continues, without ever really slowing down. At his first appearance, he walks with a pronounced limp and his face is described as "ruined." In the second book, Croaker injures him to the point that would have killed a normal man, including severing his right arm and planting a seed of evil on his body. The third book reveals that the Lady had to hurt him even more to pry said seed out of him; his injuries aren't detailed, but he is described as a "wreck of humanity" and is bolted to a magical construct that allows him to float a few feet off the ground as he would otherwise be immobile. At the end of this book, he is beheaded and his remaining body parts burned—only for his severed head to return in The Silver Spike and go on a campaign of terror the likes of which haven't before been seen in the series. At the climax of The Silver Spike, he is referred to as the most powerful single being still in the North and regarded as a threat to the entire city of Orr—despite having lost his army and approaching the city with nothing but his prosthetic body. Even so, he is a match for the no fewer than five other wizards and is only narrowly defeated.
• Blood Work: Terry McCaleb is a former FBI agent who was forced into retirement after a heart failure. Even after a heart transplant, he needs over 30 pills a day but still can fight when needed. His movie counterpart is enough of a badass to be portrayed by Clint Eastwood in spite of the handicap.
• In the early twentieth century, Ernest Bramah wrote numerous short stories and one novel (The Bravo of London) featuring blind investigator Max Carrados.
• Lois McMaster Bujold has written at least two
  • In the Vorkosigan Saga, Miles Vorkosigan, whose brittle bones and stunted growth enhance his badassitude. His mother implies that if he had grown up normally and been treated like anyone else, he would have been an intelligent and valued military officer; due to his disabilities and his society's extreme phobia of mutations, he has to work harder to overcome their expectations and ends up overshooting them by miles. Like all Barrayaran military officers, Miles trained extensively in hand-to-hand. He notes once that three-quarters of the moves are barred to him in a real fight due to his brittle bones, but the one-quarter remaining is still more than sufficient for him to grab a large and healthy man by the throat and toss him around a bit during A Civil Campaign.
  • Dag from The Sharing Knife was a competent monster-hunter. Then he lost his left hand (among other things), got a prosthesis, went back to monster-hunting while not caring much if he survived, with successes leading to a close-to-legendary reputation, at least among monster-hunters. (Then he breaks his right arm, which leads to a spurt of his magic abilities that's unheard of for someone his age.)
• Gateman from Andrew Vachss's Burke books uses a wheelchair but is enough of a crack shot that other cons respect him.
• In Children of the Black Sun, Isidro only has one functioning arm but is still more competent than a lot of other characters with two. In many respects, his disability has more of a psychological impact on him (coming from a culture where not being "useless" is very important) than a physical one.
• The Chronicles of Ancient Darkness:
  • In the first book, Fin-Kedinn is injured by the demon bear, forcing him to walk with a staff for the rest of his life. That doesn't make him any less of the respected and resolute chieftain of the Raven Clan he was.
  • The Walker is an insane old outcast who has lost one of his eyes. Regardless of that, he's been able to live in the Forest all on his own for over a decade. He also retains enough power from his days as the former Otter Mage, using them to summon the Hidden People of the Mountain of Ghosts to destroy Eostra.
  • The seventh book introduces Shamik, a ten-year-old girl with a withered arm. She's surprisingly tough and determined, and she knows how to survive in the harsh envinroment of the Far North.
• Benedict from The Chronicles of Amber. He lacks one arm, and he is still the most skillful fighter of all the Amberites (except possibly Oberon) in both the hand-to-hand and strategic/tactical senses. Corwin, a badass in his own right, says that he fears him, and would not even dare try to confront him.
• Codex Alera:
  • The main character Tavi of straddles this trope and Badass Normal ( for the first few books). He is Badass Normal in terms of what he can do, but because he is an Un-Sorcerer (the only Aleran not to have any furycrafting), his interactions with his world is that of a Handicapped Badass.
  • Captain Miles, trusted guardsman to the first lord has had a permanent limp since a cart rolled over his leg about fifteen to sixteen years before the series started. He is still a powerful fighter, deadly with a blade, and when a horde of enemies was coming at his Lord, he stood first against them.
  • Maestro Killian, an old blind spy and weapons-master who uses wind magic to see around him, still trains new spies, is a powerful fighter and stood second behind Captain Miles in that same assault.
• Dark Days Of Hamburger Halpin: Ebony's not only a beautiful and smart girl, but she's a martial artist capable of taking down a man twice her size. Oh, and she's completely deaf.
• Stephen King's The Dark Tower:
  • Susannah Dean. Her legs were hit by a train as a child, but she still went on to join Roland's ka-tet and be awesome.
  • Roland is a lesser example, remaining a badass gunslinger after getting three fingers on his dominant hand chewed off, and later on having to deal with arthritis.
• Deeplight: Smuggler's daughter Selphin is "sea-kissed" (deaf) after a childhood diving accident. Downplayed, as sign language is widely spoken in the setting and sea-kissed are deeply respected.
• Discworld:
  • In Interesting Times and The Last Hero, Mad Hamish is 105, wheelchair-bound, and hard of hearing. But never forget that he's a very old HERO.
  "Oh I bet the wheelchair terrifies them, especially the blades..."
  • Lord Vetinari suffered a crippling injury in Men at Arms. The first gun ever built on the Disc was used in an attempted assassination. The shot was aimed at his head but went through his thigh when he moved at the last second. His reaction was to let Vimes carry him, not back to the palace but to Vimes's wedding, say things like "It's Only a Flesh Wound" and "I seem to be losing a lot of blood" while wizards look at him, and make sure everyone in Ankh-Morpork knows damn well he's still alive. He walks with a cane throughout the rest of the series but you still wouldn't want to try attacking him - because he's still a master assassin who killed own predecessor as Patrician by walking up and talking to him. Even with limited mobility his reflexes are lightning-fast and that cane can easily be used as a blunt weapon.
  • Arnold Sideways, a member of the Canting Crew beggars, who has no legs and travels on a small cart. He's said to have an advantage in bar fights because of the level of his teeth relative to his opponents' anatomy, and he can kick — with a boot held on the end of a pole.
  • Mr. Teatime in Hogfather only has one eye. The other one is a Glass Eye. He's one of the most dangerous men on the planet, simply for sheer Lack of Empathy - the instant he thinks you're no longer useful to him, he will kill you. It's implied the glass eye is actually enchanted - which means he has Discworld magic (which could easily pass for Chaos magic in any other setting) embedded in his skull.
• In Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, Mildmay the Fox has near crippling self-esteem issues and one of his legs is crippled at the end of the first book, leaving him in near constant pain when he walks and unable to get around without a cane. He still manages to be the biggest badass in the book and accomplishes a few feats that most able-bodied people would probably have died attempting.
• The Door in the Wall by Marguerite de Angeli: Robin, the son of a knight who longs to become a great warrior like his father. The story taking place in the Middle Ages, the black plague is running rampant. Robin survives what is thought to be the plague, but may have been polio, thanks to the care of a monk, but is left a lifelong cripple with misshapen legs. This does not in the least stop him from helping to save his people from invaders; in fact, it aids him, because he's able to slip past enemy lines without arousing suspicion thanks to his crutches, and then he's able to get reinforcements and defeat the invasion, being knighted for his noble spirit. He's also portrayed as quite the snarker.
• In The Dresden Files, Harry himself after he got his hand roasted by a Mook with a flamethrower. Also, Michael after a confrontation with Nicodemus goes south. He ends up having to give up his post as a Knight of the Cross because of it. Even after this, when he can barely walk unaided and it causes him great pain to try, he beats up a physically fit man ten or fifteen years his junior for hurting his daughter.
• The First Law:
  • Captain Sand dan Glokta was badass once. He was a handsome, dashing war hero, a decorated warrior who distinguished himself in battle...And was captured by the Gurkish, and spent the next two years somewhat less pleasant than he was accustomed to. This left him crippled, disfigured, incontinent, and in constant pain. At this point, most people would have been happy to live out their days in comfort, resting and being brought meals in bed. Glokta decided to screw that, promptly became an Inquisitor, and spends the series making readers cheer as he unwinds conspiracies, conquers stairs, and reveals that he hasn't entirely lost the ability to fence.
  • Caul Shivers really comes into his own as a badass after losing his eye to Cold-Blooded Torture.
• Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe has Buddy 'Stump' Threadgoode Jr, who had his left arm cut off in a train accident at the age of six. After one event having him be annoyed about his handicap and Idgie showing him that a handicap does not mean someone is worthless, he grows up to be quite amazing. Among his achievements are being a great quarterback for his high school football team, and even being a great shot, despite lacking an arm.
• In Doris Egan's The Gate of Ivory, Eln Cormallon was born without sorcerous abilities in a family whose business is sorcery, then was left unable to walk as a youngster. He compensated by studying sorcery more deeply and learning more about the theory of it than any of its practitioners have done, to the point of being supremely dangerous when involved in a sorcerer's duel. He also suffers from Grave's disease, an autoimmune disorder, and is paralyzed beneath the waist.
• Sniper Nessa Borough of Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts series is one of the best snipers in the Tanith regiment, despite being completely deaf. A couple of other characters also retain their badassery after being handicapped, such as "Shoggy" Domor, who is blinded, and Sergeant Varl, who lost an arm - through it got replaced with a bionic augmetic limb that can punch people's heads off.
• In Mary Gentle's The Golden Witchbreed, Ruric amari is a one-armed warrior in a society where warriors fight with two swords, one in either hand. She is the T'An Commander of the army of the Southland.
• The Great Brain: In Papa Married a Mormon, Uncle Will is confined to a wheelchair after being shot in the spine by the Laredo Kid. In Mama's Boarding House, when Buzz Beeler beats his manservant half to death, Will has himself tied to a light pole so he can stand up and draw his gun, winning the duel easily.
• In Grent's Fall, Edwin One-Hand's left hand may be useless, but it doesn't interfere with his talent at sword-and-shield combat.
• In Charles Bukowski's Ham On Rye, little Henry Chinaski meets a kid called Red, who has a prosthetic arm. When some bullies come and start hitting them, Red beats them senseless with his fake arm.
• Harry Potter's Mad-Eye Moody. Over the course of his career as an Auror, he loses an eye and a leg (and a chunk of his nose) but gains a reputation as the most fearsome member of the agency. He uses a wooden leg and a magically-enhanced prosthetic eye that can see in all directions and through solid objects. You'd think that magical technology capable of coming out with something like that eye could do better than a peg leg.
• Her Crown of Fire: Rose's leg is severely mangled during a fight around halfway through the book. She will likely walk with a cane for the rest of her life, and loses much of her athletic abilities. Afterwards, she mostly just burns her enemies with her magic.
• Two examples in The Heritage of Shannara. Wren's Mentor is a Rover named Garth. He's a badass Mighty Glacier who taught Wren everything she needs to know about how to survive in an incredibly hostile world. He's one of the few humans in series capable of fighting The Shadowen without the use of magic. He's also deaf. Then there's Walker Boh, who's probably the poster boy for this trope: a Determinator of a Druid who overpowers Shadowen and monsters alike, takes on the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and finally kills the series' Big Bad, all while having only one arm.
• In the final showdown of Matthew Stover's Heroes Die, Caine/Hari Michaelson suffers injuries that render him semi-crippled for the rest of his life. This only serves to increase his awesomeness in the sequels, as he now has to pull off all his impossible stunts and insane schemes without the use of his legs. And he does.
• Mira, one of the telepaths in Hive Mind (2016), has Down syndrome. She's still an excellent telepath, apparently very nice, and a vital member of her arcology's security forces.
• Hollow Places has Austin. Despite missing an arm, being blind in one eye, and having a body covered in scars, he manages to save several lives and take down a serial killer. He had a bit of help by way of a partner and an anomaly which allows him to go wherever he wants, but what he accomplishes is still impressive given his handicaps.
• It seems that Captain/Admiral Honor Harrington only gets worse with every major injury and amputation she suffers.
  • With all respect to Honor's injuries, the technology of the time enables her to actually improve her capabilities: the electronic replacement for her biological eye has telescopic vision and the electronic replacement for her biological arm allows her to hide all sorts of weapons in it. A better example would be Nimitz, whose spinal injury prevents him from communicating with the other 'cats, but he is still awesome.
• The eponymous character of Edgar Allan Poe's "Hop-Frog", as well as his female ally Trippetta. Both are dwarfs, and Hop-Frog's legs are deformed so he can't walk normally (which led to his nickname). They were taken from their homelands and are forced to "serve" (read: be constantly mocked and humiliated) in a royal court. Eventually, Hop-Frog and Trippetta decide they've had enough.
  
  They organize a royal masquerade in which the king and his ministers frighten the guests while disguised as chained orangutans, wearing costumes made of tar and flax. Hop-Frog catches the "orangutans" by hooking their chains to another chain dangling from the ceiling. Then he holds a torch to their faces to "examine" them and sets their costumes on fire, burning them to death in front of the guests. After killing the king, Hop-Frog and Trippetta disappear and presumably escape to their homelands.
• Pedro Tercero Garcia from Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits, who loses three of his fingers to an IRATE Esteban Trueba who has just found out that he impregnated his daughter Blanca, but after a very understandable Heroic BSoD manages to re-learn how to play the guitar. He's so successful that he becomes a famous guitar player and composer... after the loss of his fingers!
• The Hunger Games has Peeta Mellark who spends two-thirds of the trilogy with a prosthetic left leg. He's notably less badass in the second book but still he manages to fight pretty well in the arena and kills Brutus in an Off Screen Moment Of Awesome. In the third book he's somewhere in-between his badass levels of the first and second book.
• The Inheritance Cycle has Glaedr the dragon, who keeps on kicking ass after losing a leg. There's also the High Priest(ess?) of Helgrind, though he or she isn't so much badass as creepy and powerful.
• Inkmistress: Asra loses use of her left hand after she's stabbed in the wrist, severing tendons. It doesn't stop her from growing into a good fighter with her magic.
• Journey to Chaos: Retina Corison is totally and completely blind in both eyes but he can still be a high ranking member in the fighter portion of the guild. His Aura Vision helps.
• The I, Richard Plantagenet Series of novels were written after the discovery of protagonist Richard III's remains and accurately portray him as having severe adolescent onset scoliosis. In the books, he resists the suggest he become a priest because of his crooked spine and is warned he will have to work harder than all the other boys to compensate. He does, becoming a Warrior Prince.
• The Kadingir series has Sura, a war veteran with severe PTSD, a missing leg and a blood feud against a very specific kind of invertebrates. None of that takes away from the fact that he kicks major ass throughout the events of The Fourth Power, is the only explorer who has come out alive from the Nuzua jungle and is thought to have died in increasingly bizarre ways by every character he comes across.
• Bobby Clark in Dana Stabenow's Kate Shugak series of detective novels. Epitomises this trope by having no legs yet still being a very Scary Black Man when occasionally necessary.
• Cap'n Bill, best known from the Land of Oz books is an old sailor who had to retire from the sea after he lost his leg. Neither his advanced age nor his wooden leg stop him from going along on all sorts of magical adventures — even though the books, particularly the non-Oz book Sky Island, do show that the wooden leg gives him trouble from time to time (he can't run very fast and is liable to lose his balance if he tries), they also show that he's still got it when it counts and is someone you're glad to have on your side in a crisis.
• In the historical trilogy A Legacy of Light, Tutankhamun has a clubfoot and uses a cane, but learns that being a powerful politician has nothing to do with one's physical strength or agility.
• Deconstructed in Legacy of the Dragokin. Rufus is a big, strong and brave man but with a bum leg there's little he can do to stop Mordak and Zarracka from destroying Final Shield. Then again, the legs of his Mini-Mecha work fine and he later joins the climatic fight.
• In The Legend of the Condor Heroes we get Ke Zhen'e and Mei Chaofeng after being blinded, both of whom are highly skilled in martial arts with or without disability.
• The Nazgûl in The Lord of the Rings have such poor vision during daylight they are nearly blind (under the noon sun they are truly blind) and have to rely on their horses for guidance, and have a magic-induced fear of naturally running water. This doesn't stop them from being the most feared warriors in Middle-Earth and having far better nightvision than mortals.
• In Magical Girl Raising Project, Ripple losing her left eye and left arm barely hinders her swordsmanship, martial arts, or throwing skills.
• And again in Poe's "The Man Who Was Used Up", a lighter story than most of his about Captain A. B. C. Smith. The narrator knows Smith was wounded in several different battles, but he's not sure how; at the end he discovers that all that's left of the Captain is parts of his head, and the rest is prosthesis. Some consider this story the first depiction of a cyborg.
• Maya Lopez/Echo in Marvel's Spider-Man: Hostile Takeover is completely deaf, but this does nothing to impede her. She can understand what people are saying if she can see their lips moving and as Echo, she is able to match toe-to-toe against Spider-Man despite having no powers herself.
• Colonel Lomax in the Matthew Hawkwood novels. Pinned under a dead horse and caught in a grass fire, the left side of Lomax's body was badly burned; crippling his left arm and destroying his left eye. Still badass enough that he is the first person Hawkwood approaches when he needs allies to storm a Bad Guy Bar.
• Maximum Ride has Iggy, a guy who's completely lost his sight. Does he let it slow him down? Nope! In fact, despite not being able to see, his hobby is building bombs. Which he then hides on his person and throws at people he doesn't like. That's what he does for fun. The flock is constantly being attacked by various robots and mutants designed to kill them. Iggy has no trouble holding his own in the many battles and does just as well as the rest of the flock. He is not amused when Max won't let him go on a mission because he's blind. He proceeds to build an intricate system of traps and bombs to defend the house and blows the entire area up when it's attacked. Then goes and joins the mission.
• Moby-Dick: Captain Ahab, who lost a leg to the titular whale and now moves heaven and earth to get revenge.
• Nowhere Stars: Irida Deveraux, the Silver King, one of the most powerful and badass Keepers in the setting, is in fact paralyzed from the waste down, even in her transformed state. It doesn't stop her much, as her main source of power is being The Minion Master, commanding a host of spectral soldiers she controls with her shogi board, while she rides in on a magical palanquin.
• The Obsidian Chronicles: Many dragonhearts are at least partly disabled by the injuries dragons inflicted on them which caused the ingestion of dragon venom that changed them. This does not make them any less dangerous in most cases.
• A character in the Tom Clancy's Op Center series is wheelchair-bound, but that doesn't stop him from protecting a woman from neo-Nazis in Germany during Chaos Days. The physically disabled are one of the many groups Nazi ideology is prejudiced against, so when he embarrasses them by taking out their hit squad it causes the group to completely lose faith in their leader and break up.
• In Pegasus in Flight, Peter Reidiger overcomes spinal damage and moves around by telekinesis.
• Conner Penske from The Peripheral. Even though during Haptic Wars he lost his "leg, the foot of the other one, the arm on the opposite side, and the thumb and two fingers of the remaining hand", he remains a Badass. He rides a trike that he can arm with a rifle but he shows his true badassery when he controls a titular peripheral.
• In the original novel of The Princess Bride, Inigo Montoya trains under “McPherson, the only Scot who ever understood swords,” a master fencer who is missing both legs at the knee. He teaches Inigo how to deal with adversity in a fight, such as having to fight blind or at a different elevation.
• Gen from Megan Whalen Turner's The Queen's Thief fits this after he loses his right hand. Even with that severe handicap, he's still more than a match for the Attolian Guard in one-on-one sparring matches He complains about it all the time, but given this is Gen we're talking about, it's anyone's guess how much is genuine Wangst.
• Viking warlord Ivar the Boneless of Ragnar Lodbrok and His Sons has no bones in his legs and is thus unable to walk, but nevertheless is carried onto the battlefield on a shield, commands the army and fights with bow and arrow.
  • Inspired by the real Ivar the Boneless, though there is a debate about what his nickname meant.
• In Redwall, one of the longest lasting characters was Lady Cregga Rose Eyes. She was a Badger Lord who became blind during a battle and was sidelined to being the babysitter of the Dibbuns. However, threaten the Dibbuns or her Abbey, and she'll still beat some ass. With the help of a young otter, she even fired a longbow from one of the top levels of the abbey and nailed a vermin dressed in the leader's armor who was extremely far away.
• Yang Guo in The Return of the Condor Heroes. His right arm got chopped off, but he still managed to master wielding a BFS with his remaining left arm and develop very powerful Ki Attacks.
• Ripper (2014): Despite losing his leg during a mission, Ryan still practices at the gun range, continues with Attila's training and trains daily for triathlons. His Belgian Malinois dog Attila, who survived a mine explosion that left him missing an ear, also qualifies. When Indiana's abductor is identified, Ryan and Atilla break into the location where she is being kept. Not even being mortally wounded stops him from saving her.
• The Saga of Grettir the Strong has Grettir's great-grandfather Onund Treefoot, a Norwegian Viking who lost one of his legs in a battle with King Harald Finehair. He replaced it with a peg leg and continued a successful career as a warrior and seafarer.
• Uly, the co-protagonist of Scary Stories For Young Foxes, was born with a lame forepaw. He's abused by his sisters and nearly murdered by his mother under the orders of his depraved father, Mr. Scratch. Despite his (justified) fears he'll never survive on his own, Uly escapes his murderous father and improves with help from his new friend Mia. Later losing the leg entirely to an alligator doesn't stop Uly from orchestrating a trap to take out Mr. Scratch with a swarm of enraged bats. Or knocking him into the ice cold river when that plan fails.
• In The Secrets of the Immortal Nicholas Flamel, The Grim Reaper has a Hook Hand which represents the sickle that Death traditionally carries.
• She Who Became The Sun: The protagonist, Zhu Chongba - even after losing a hand, she personally leads armies, infiltrates hostile camps and re-learns swordfighting with her left hand.
• Kaz Brekker from Six of Crows limps and uses a Classy Cane due to an improperly healed broken leg. He's also the second in command of one of the most dangerous gangs in the city, and he earned that spot. He’s also a master of Cane Fu, with it being specially made to be weighted to break bones.
• From Snow Crash, Ng, a quadruple amputee who, instead of settling for a wheelchair, builds a gigantic van that can shoot missiles and deploy robots that can break the speed of sound. He also builds a BFG.
• Several cases in A Song of Ice and Fire:
  • Qhorin Half-Hand, a ranger of the Night's Watch, lost a large chunk of his right hand fighting Wildlings and is still one of the best fighters in the Night's Watch, said to be even better fighting left-handed than he was before.
  • Bran Stark gets pushed out of a tower window, shattering his legs and spine; while he will never walk again, his long convalescence gave him a lot of time to hone his ability to mind jack animals while dreaming.
  • Averted painfully with Jaime Lannister: he loses his sword hand, which more or less breaks him. He's suicidal for some time afterward, though he does pick up a bundle of Guile Hero and/or Battle of Wits tendencies later on (ambiguity, yay). He becomes obsessed with recovering his skill — apparently not realising that fighting left-handed is a new skill he needs to learn from scratch — and terrified of someone finding out that he can't fight anymore.
  • Tyrion Lannister, who doesn't let being born a dwarf stop him from personally leading charges in ill-fitting, last-minute armor and chopping down men twice his size. In one case, he forces his reluctant men to attack because they would look like total wimps if they were outmanned by someone they usually enjoy mocking. See also Battle of Wits. And Guile Hero. Lannisters; underestimating them rarely goes well...
  • Also from the Night's Watch is the blacksmith, Donal Noye, who only has one arm. This doesn't stop him from putting up a Last Stand against the king of the giants, and takes the giant with him. It's played low-key, but there is some seriously stiff competition among the Free Folk over who is going to get to compose his and Mag the Mighty's death ballad — his opponents consider the feat just that awesome and tragic on both sides.
  • From the prequel series is Brynden Rivers, the sinister "Lord Bloodraven", who lost an eye fighting his half-brother Aegor Rivers. Didn't stop him becoming perhaps the best spymaster Westeros ever knew, becoming Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and being a greenseer who is still alive 48 years after he apparently died.
• Talos in Spartan. He was born cripple, but thanks to his grandpa's training, he is able to kick your ass. Generally, he is a Nice Guy.
• In Spellbent, Jessie Shimmer loses an arm and an eye in the first chapters. She kicks a great deal of ass over the rest of the novel.
• Lorna The Storm of M. She was shot twice in the first book (once in the leg, once in the shoulder) and the wounds hadn't properly healed by the time she escaped the prison-hospital she'd been trapped in for months. As a result, she has a permanent limp that leaves her reliant on a walking-stick, but that just means she has something to whack people with when they get in her way, and she's still capable of punching people out with her good arm.
• Suspicion by Friedrich Dürrenmatt: The Dwarf is not quite 80 centimeters (31.496 inches) tall and seems to suffer from some sort of mental retardation. He is also a strong and deadly assassin. Inspector Bärlach who is dying from terminal cancer also has traces of it.
• Rosemary Sutcliff (who wrote more than fifty books while sitting in a wheelchair) produced, among others, Drem One-Arm, a Bronze Age warrior in Warrior Scarlet; lamed Roman infantryman Marcus in The Eagle of the Ninth; Aracos, a Roman cavalry hero with a dodgy ticker in A Circlet of Oak Leaves; Viking admiral (and Historical Domain Character) Onund Treefoot in Sword Song; clubfooted horsebreaker Vadir Cedricson in Dawn Wind; clubfooted cavalryman and surgeon Gwalchmai in Sword at Sunset; and Midir, a blind assassin, in The Mark of the Horse Lord.
• In Sword of Truth there is a blind sorceress named Adie. When twenty soldiers came to arrest her, they never had time to flinch. Somewhat subverted, though, when she runs into the Pristinely Ungifted; since she uses her magic to make up for her lack of sight, she can't even detect them unless they make some noise.
• Mary in Take a Good Look by Jacqueline Wilson, a partially sighted child who ends up outwitting armed robbers when she is caught in a hold-up while out shopping.
• Burrich in the Tawny Man Trilogy and the Farseer Trilogy before that was always a badass. He just happens to be losing his sight and he is almost completely blind. And that's on top of the time he got tusked in the knee by a boar (before killing it) before the first book, then taking an arrow wound on top of the scar later.
  • Then there's Kinnit, a blood-thirsty pirate who took down half a dozen assassins by himself. He later lost a leg and stopped carrying a sword, but still managed to make a leap on one leg that many men couldn't make with two. Oh, and he became king.
• In John French's Thousand Sons novels, Kadin loses all four of his limbs during a disastrous mission and has them replaced with low-quality, poorly-fitting prosthetics. Since Kadin is a Space Marine, this does not stop him from kicking ass with a bolter or chainsword, and he can hold his own against healthy Space Marines without difficulty.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Silmarillion: Maedhros was a strong elf warrior who was captured by Morgoth and hung by his right hand halfway up a cliff. He was only rescued by having his right hand cut off — and when he'd recovered from his imprisonment, he went on to be a more badass warrior with his left hand than he was with his right, despite being right-handed.
  • Beren and Lúthien: Beren, one of the greatest warriors of the First Age, got his right hand bitten off by a giant wolf...after he'd accomplished most, but not all, of the deeds for which he became famous.
• Sir Apropos of Nothing has been lame of the leg since he was born and requires a staff to hobble about. And this has not at all stopped him from kicking a great deal of ass. Especially impressive considering that he doesn't want to kick ass.
• Treasure Island:
  • Long John Silver may have lost one of his legs, but he killed an honest crewman who refused to join the pirates by hurling his crutch at him, thus breaking his spine, and then hopping one-legged to him and slitting his throat.
  • Pew is fully blind, yet most of the survivors of Flint's crew fear him only slightly less than Billy Bones or Silver.
• Alex Treyton of The Treyton Injections is paralyzed from the waist down. He still manages to punch his much larger, much stronger captor in the chest, hard. Several times.
• Mareth loses his leg in Gregor and the Prophecy of Bane.
• In Vigilauntie Justice, Peggy and Baz use canes and mobility scooters to get around. They doesn't stop them from investigating crimes and committing murders.
• Another Warhammer 40,000 book, Redemption Corps, seems to love this trope: Major Zane Mortensen suffered burns to every part of his body crippling his nervous system so he can't feel anything who leads a squad of implied sues. Inquisitor Herrenvolk is a weak old man who has to be carried everywhere... and can impose psychic control on anyone within the star system. The Lord Commissar is so crippled that he has to live in an oxygen tent... and shouts down a captain on his own starship to hold them in a deadly, guided meteor shower. Cadet-Commissar Krieg has his most badass moments shortly after having his right arm surgically re-attached, making it useless.
• In Warrior Cats, Brightheart and One-Eye (originally named White-eye) each lost an eye at a young age. This does not stop them from learning how to fight just as well as others despite having a blind side and becoming warriors.
• From John C. Wright's War of the Dreaming there is Peter "One-Man Army" Waylock, who is wheelchair-bound.
• Who Needs Enemies: The hero of "Gift of a Useless Man" is paralyzed from the neck down except for one of his arms, but by being a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond, he is able to give a tribe of telepathic alien insects valuable insights in farming, building, government, education, and more. When a hostile rival tribe attacks his friends, due to being so much bigger than the insects, he is even able to squash most of the enemy army with one blow of his good arm.
• World War Z has an example when a wheelchair user shows up at a recruitment office for the local volunteer anti-zombie militia guarding a suburban neighbourhood in the Safe Zone. It takes a certain amount of arm-twisting on his part, but the recruiters do eventually concede that anyone who can slog their way to said Safe Zone through a Zombie Apocalypse probably meets the definition of 'able-bodied' whether their legs work or not.
• Juan Cabrillo from The Oregon Files is missing one of his legs from the knee down, and has a prosthetic replacement. Despite this, he walks with barely a limp, and, in most cases can keep up with even the fittest of his crew. In Skeleton Coast, he reflected on this; he absolutely hated the looks he got from the hospital on that first day, being wheeled out with one of his pants legs pinned up. From that point on, he pretty much threw himself into physical therapy, essentially re-learning how to walk and move with a prosthetic, and utilizing every resource available to ensure that his prosthetic would never be a hindrance on missions, to the point of even commissioning a "combat leg" outfitted with a small arsenal of goodies such as C-4 explosives, a spare pistol, and even a high-caliber pistol/shotgun installed into the heel; to Cabrillo, he may have a handicap, but he is not handicapped. To his credit, there is only one incident, also in Skeleton Coast, where his lack of a leg gets in his way, and it is thanks to that "combat leg" and his own quick thinking and survival skills, that he is able to salvage the situation and even turn it to his team's advantage.

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