Made Of Iron / Literature

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• Alan Alone: Alan doesn't sustain that much damage from some injuries, such as his leg getting bit by a dog and running through a glass wall while escaping a pursuing stranger. Once Bai points back to these events, even stating the glass to be thicker than Alan thought, the trope is subverted; the reason Alan doesn't get injured easily is because his body has technology that makes him more durable.
• In Animorphs, the kids can morph or demorph to heal all bodily injuries, but they still demonstrate incredible endurance until they get the chance to do this.
  • In the second last book, when Jake, woozy from blood loss, gets shot in the head by a human-Controller. Miraculously he survives long enough to demorph.
  • Bear-Rachel getting an arm cut off and using it as a weapon also qualifies as memorable.
• Bazil Broketail: Bazil takes some horrible punishment multiple times in the series but always manages to survive. For example, in the first book finale he ends up stabbed multiple times with spears, peppered with arrows like a pincushion and suffers severe burns on his entire body due to being caught in Doom's explosion. He gets better.
• Traitor Queen: Let's see. At the end, Lara has been badly wounded in the leg, lost a lot of blood, had the wound stitched, climbed a pier of a bridge, jumped from it into the sea, sailed a boat without any crew, climbed a steep cliff, ran until the stiches started to give up, fought and killed her father while receiving a wound across the chest, swam across shark-infested waters, got thrown at iron bars by a strong wave, and then almost drowned — and just a few days later is able to get up from bed and get to work.
• Conan the Barbarian:
  • In "A Witch Shall Be Born", the witch survives exposure as a baby.
    But the life in me was stronger than the life in common folk, for it partakes of the essence of the forces that seethe in the black gulfs beyond mortal ken.
  • In the same story, Conan himself not only survives being crucified, but after his cross is chopped down (with him still nailed to it) he helps pull the nails out and rides 10 miles before his injuries are treated.
• Cradle Series: When a sacred artist reaches Iron level, not only does their strength and toughness greatly increase, but so does their healing. While in the Sacred Valley they considered every Iron body the same as every other, outside they know how to create improved and specialized Iron bodies that will making it easier to reach higher levels (it's one of the reasons the Sacred Valley's progression is so slow). The Sandvipers use the Bloodforged Iron body, which grants improved healing, by taking a single prick of sandviper venom and drinking a thimble of sandviper blood. Eithan gives Lindon a Bloodforged Iron body by having four sandvipers bite him directly and then drink all their blood. Lindon's body is ridiculously overpowered, to the point that he has trouble keeping up with it considering his madra supply.
• The Dresden Files: Harry Dresden. Seriously. In Fool Moon alone, he gets chin-decked, shot in the shoulder, pistol-whipped, beaten with a tire-iron, slammed into various walls, savaged by a werewolf, knocked out by overuse of magic, stomped to a pulp, duct-taped to a pillar from which he rips himself free, tossed over a wall, dropped out of a moving car on the Interstate, and tossed down into a 20-foot pit, yet still manages to use powerful magic, climb hand-over-hand up a 20-foot rope, and otherwise kick the living shit out of the bad guy by the end. His friend Murphy also somehow manages to climb up a rope and rapid-fire a .38 mere hours after sustaining a compound fracture to her right arm.
  • And that's just in Book 2! Over the course of the whole series he accumulates damage that would kill a man many times over. He has a minor healing factor, but emphasis on "minor" — it's more about being able to live a long time than instafixing his body a la Wolverine — and yet, in the end he always somehow survives. Not only that, but he still kicks ass even as he's about to faint from exhaustion and sheer hurt — and though some of the worse injuries actually cross over into subsequent books, he never quits. And to top it all off, he has a rather blasé attitude about pain and never seems to be mentally traumatised by it.
  • Harry's dog Mouse takes after his master, to the point where he considers getting shot a minor inconvenience, and gets up and walks off getting hit by a speeding van like nothing happened.
• The Exile's Violin: Averted. Jacquie gets bruised, splinters, hurt by the loud noise of cannon fire, etc. However, After she is tortued via regular beatings for several days she is back on her feet at full capacity quickly.
• Lampshaded in Gilded Latten Bones, with Morley Dotes' stab wounds. The healer who treats him is astounded by the fact that none of the attacker's strikes had damaged vital organs or major arteries. Subverted in that Morley is laid up far longer than Garrett anticipated; played straight in that by all logic, he should've been one dead half-elf.
• The Locked Tomb: Gideon the Ninth: Gideon's unusual durability is remarked upon a few times. She survives extended soul-siphoning in the avulsion room, which Palamedes says ought to have given her permanent brain damage, if not outright killed her. Then there's the matter of the nerve gas that was released in her nursery when she was a baby, when just releasing the gas blinded Harrow's great-aunts. All of the other children died, Gideon breathed it for ten minutes unharmed.
• The Lord of the Rings: Hobbits. They are adapted to volcanic regions, and so the fumes in the Sammath Naur did not kill Frodo, Sam, or Gollum. Lampshaded by the House of Healing's Master when he's told that, while Faramir and Eowyn had to stay in bed for a while, Merry was going to be able to walk out of the bed the next morning. Take note that all three were ill due to exposure to the Ring-Wraiths' corruption, and Faramir was of probably the purest Numenorean bloodline bar Aragorn himself, with the inherent resilience. Their sheer reliance dates back to the first book The Hobbit, where Bilbo not only walks off falling onto stone of having it land on his head; but survives Smaug’s fire at close range and though burnt and in pain he’s still no worse for wear rather than being a scorched mark on the floor.
• Downplayed in Harald. The badass protagonist is on the run from The King's Wolves, and has been playing Guile Hero to avoid fighting them. They catch him while he's fleeing on horseback, he kills several of them, gets hit by a couple Annoying Arrows and shrugs them off — and then one of them whacks him in the head, he passes out, gets rescued by Those Two Action Girls and spends months recovering from all of his injuries.
• Harry Potter: Quidditch is a sport that involves heavy iron balls knocking people off broomsticks 50 feet in the air and it's specifically mentioned that the worst injuries players have suffered (at Hogwarts) are broken bones. When Harry asks him if anyone's ever died playing Quidditch, Wood responds, "Never at Hogwarts", which seems to imply that fatalities have occurred elsewhere. It is worth noting that magical healing seems to be far superior to mundane methods. They can mend bones instantly and regrow them overnight, so it seems like anything less than dying on the pitch could be treated without much problem.
• The Wilds in A Harvest of War can walk off injuries that would almost certainly be fatal in normal humans, such as an arrow to the chest, falling from several yards onto said chest or getting shot in the face with an arquebus.
• Duff, the Idiot Hero from the comedic parody How to Survive a Zombie Apocalypse manages to survive no less than three zombie hordes, getting trapped inside a building on fire and jumping off a three-story building on the apocalypse's first day. All of this with only a giant pencil as a weapon.
• The eponymous character of The Incredible Worlds Of Wally Mc Doogle, a self-proclaimed and nationally designated Walking Disaster Area, probably would have died more times over than Harry and Marv would have if not for this trope. Among other things, he has plowed through several walls on an out-of-control rocket-powered skateboard, trampled by animals, fallen from thousands of feet in the sky twice (once without a parachute), been close by when an oven exploded, and always survives. (Albeit injured in comical ways.) This was more apparent when the books became Denser and Wackier following Book 11.
• Woodrow Lowe from Man of the Century by James Thayer. In the course of the book, Woodrow is whipped raw by dervishes, bloodied by a sadistic lover, knocked off a boat by an incoming boom, kicked by a horse, trampled by a bull, stabbed within an inch of his life more than once, shot multiple times, some very close to the head, has the snot beaten out of him by at least five famous 19th-century prizefighters, and is imprisoned for 368 days in a Chinese torture pit. He is a Dakotan cavalryman, a Rough Rider, an opium trader, the (deposed) ruler of China, an Amazonian sex slave, and the assassin of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. And he lives to tell about it all. At the ripe old age of 108.
• The Spirit Thief:
  • Alric can survive wounds that leave doctors shocked that he's still alive. While he is immortal, he doesn't have a Healing Factor, so he claims thise is just the result of centuries of experience.
  • Josef's Heroic Willpower allows him to keep going long after everyone else would collapse, though he often ends up passing out immediately after the threat is over.
  • Tesset survives a building falling on top of him with nothing more than some scrapes.
• It's a more minor example than most of these, but the four Aurek Seven stormtroopers in Survivor's Quest should count. Two of them fight for and protect two unarmored officers against a large number of Vagaari armed with blasters and charrics. Their armor is good, the blasters are fifty years old and have a weak charge, and charrics aren't designed to pierce this armor, but there are a lot of Vagaari. By the time the other two show up it is mentioned that their chestplates aren't white anymore, they're having trouble standing and walking, the nonhuman stormtrooper is forgetting to translate his responses to commands into Basic, and the other isn't responding at all, and yet they're still shooting, still taking the blaster bolt. That's how Zahn writes stormtroopers. They take a lot of damage, shoot well, and never give up.
• In the Sword of Truth, the hero Richard rips out his evil half-brother's spine, but he's still good for one last fight. It's played completely straight, and made even more ridiculous when it's revealed the character had no superhuman or magical abilities (though he did have some kind of funky acupuncture/acupressure technique that he somehow used on himself in order to keep going).
• Brutes in Worm have this as part of their super power package, in a wide variety of ways (and to a variety of extents). Skitter, though, lives this trope. She does have powers, but it's just the ability to control insects and not something that actually makes her any more durable. She's still been able to push through concussions, getting shot, having limbs broken, and worse at various times. Her powers do help with some things like using the bugs for sensory input when she was blinded (which was so effective she forgot to mention it and most people around her didn't even know)

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