Made of Iron

He's all right. Just get him some bandages.

"A foe with no known superpowers, who somehow survives being crushed by a car not once... not twice... but four f***ing times!"

— Honest Trailers for Iron Man 2, on Whiplash

Damage is frequently done to characters that should hurt or incapacitate them, but is easily shaken off. Nobody ever breaks a rib or other bones unless that specific broken bone becomes important later on.

This isn't Super-Toughness or Nigh-Invulnerability, where the character is supernaturally protected from harm. This is the ability to shrug off blows that would disintegrate a human body when you technically shouldn't be able to do so. Robots, Mutants, Mages, Ki using Martial Artists, etc. do not count. Having a story-enabled reason for not being a bloody smear immediately takes one out of the running for this trope.

Certain Required Secondary Powers may also induce this and it is particularly true for Super Hero characters to have "increased strength and endurance" in their portfolio, even if never outright explained or stated. How else can someone whose sole power is throwing flame take being thrown off a multi-story building as no big deal? The line gets fuzzy between Badass Normal and Charles Atlas Superpower where somehow a "normal" person has become invulnerable to the effects of injury by willing themselves uninjured. Modern special effects are somewhat to blame for this, as they frequently up the forces involved to look more dramatic. This sometimes approaches cartoon-esque extremes, such as a person getting smashed through concrete or brick walls and being able to get right back up again with only negligible injury.

By extension, blunt damage, concussions, and other side effects of "non-lethal" fights or a Tap on the Head never have unintended fatal consequences — death can only happen with intentionally-lethal weapons, like swords or guns. Even with normally-lethal weapons, the hero may intentionally inflict flesh wounds instead of shooting to kill.

This trope also enables our hero to take a bullet in some critical area (chest, shoulder, etc.) and continue to fight as though nothing had happened, even if they should be Overdrawn at the Blood Bank.

It makes you wonder why, for all the supposed beatings they have received themselves over the course of a show, the hero/heroine never suffers any long-term scarring or lasting physical injury. One especially tenacious example is the lack of punch drunkenness. Indeed, unrealistic lack of damage from head injuries leads to the widely prevalent Sub-Trope: Hard Head.

Punch-drunk boxers are the classic Real Life example of what happens to someone who takes repeated pummeling damage in many fights year after year. However, the American National Football League presents a better sampling. To survive more than a couple of seasons in the league is a guarantee of a lifetime of painful, lingering damage to battered joints, bones, and connective tissues. That life is also going to be about ten years shorter than that of the average adult American. The heart and body organs build up scar tissue likely to fail when the athlete is in his fifties and sixties. This condition is known as Dented Iron.

Between them, Made of Iron and Hollywood Healing cover the two main varieties of action hero — the Terminator-type that can walk unscathed through a bomb-blast, and the hero who does get hurt badly but somehow always comes back to triumph in the end.

The polar opposite of this is Made of Plasticine. A character who doesn't just shrug off extreme damage, but doesn't sustain any damage at all, is Nigh-Invulnerability. Characters who are Made of Iron, if they die at all, often die Rasputinian Deaths. If two Made of Iron characters go up against each other, it often leads to How Much More Can He Take? fights.

A character who is Made of Iron isn't necessarily literally made of iron. If he happens to sink in water and die as if he were, that's Super Drowning Skills.

If a person has this kind of durability as a superpower, it's Super-Toughness. When the character does sustain grisly, incapacitating injuries but keeps going anyway, it's Normally, I Would Be Dead Now. If the character's durability is justification for putting them through a lot of physical stress for the audience's amusement, you probably have an Iron Butt Monkey.

See also Charles Atlas Superpower, as being Made of Iron is one of its more common effects.

Not to Be Confused with Maid of Iron in any variation.

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Example subpages:

• Anime & Manga
• Comic Books
• Films — Live Action
• Literature
• Live-Action TV
• Tabletop Games
• Video Games
• Western Animation
• Real Life

Other examples:

Asian Animation

• Mechamato: Amato can survive getting blown away by nearby explosions or head-on ones with no more than a few scratches afterwards, even when not wearing MechaBot as his Powered Armor.

Comic Strips

• Because he personifies most bruiser tropes, it's no surprise that Popeye was Made of Iron back when he got his start on Thimble Theatre. In his first few story arcs, Popeye takes some brutal beatings and manages to come out on top. When in one fight he takes several handgun rounds in the gut, he manages to still win the fight before passing out. In the hospital, in addition to the bullets that put him there, knife blades, tips of pool cues and many, many other indications that you should see the other guy. The animated cartoons take this even further. Bullets bounce off him.

Fan Works

• In the Jackie Chan Adventures and Teen Titans crossover fic A Shadow of the Titans, Jade lampshades how tough the Titans and other inhabitants of the TT world are. Subverted with Kitten, who foolishly insults Jade in the Tournament of Villainesses, hitting a Berserk Button and causing her to get blasted by the Dragon Talisman, nearly killing her and giving Jade an My God, What Have I Done? moment (she lampshades the inconsistency).
• Actually Played for Horror in At The Food Court. Ash got an MRI scan after his psychotic break (caused by a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown delivered by Team Rocket), and the test showed that he suffered ubiquitous hematomas and inflammation of the brain, and large parts of his brain were straight-up dead from blunt-force trauma. The doctors had no idea how he was even still alive, since the injuries would normally have been enough to kill him several times over. It is not clear whether the healing spring from the fourth film let him survive or whether this is a Cerebus Retcon of Ash being able to survive Pikachu's and Charizard's attacks in canon (since the earlier fanfiction this story is a reaction to regularly played such attacks for drama and Wangst). Either way, the damage is so great that his original personality and maturity cannot be recovered.
• Child of the Storm has a number of examples, but Harry is probably the best. With human (growing to slightly above Super-Soldier) physical abilities, and without outside intervention, he survives being: stabbed, stabbed and struck by lightning (twice), repeatedly beaten to a pulp by a number of physical vastly superior fighters (in one case, having his arm broken and suffering Metronomic Man Mashing with that arm as a lever), and close proximity to a lot of explosions. Combine this with how ludicrously stubborn he is ^note  after being stabbed and struck by lightning the second time, having been pummelled into a mess by his opponent, he gets up and essentially glues himself back together for another round barely half an hour later and you have a textbook example of this trope.
• Clash of the Elements: Alex Whiter has a ridiculous record of getting hit with attacks that would kill any normal human, which is a bit crazy considering that in spite of his flight he only has an above-average level of strength. Of course, when one takes into considering his Determinator status...
• The two best examples of this trope in You Got HaruhiRolled! are Haruhi surviving a blimp crashing on her, and Kyouko surviving get thrown under a trolley, much to Sasaki's annoyance.
• In ToyHammer, you would think Mike would kill two dozen of the miniature soldiers a day just walking though his house, and that any of the scouts trying to hide in his handbag would get liquefied in a matter of seconds. You'd be wrong.
• Sleeping with the Girls: Pretty much everyone other than the protagonist, due to him coming from a Like Reality, Unless Noted world much closer to the "realistic" end of the Sliding Scale of Realistic vs. Fantastic than the ones he ends up in and and not having his body adapted in the transitions.
• In the fanfic Tails of the Old Republic, a crossover/ Fusion Fic between Sonic the Hedgehog and the videogame Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Tails the fox averts his usual One-Hit-Point Wonder status even without Power Rings, and takes damage like anyone else. However, he can take a crapload of damage nonetheless, surviving even getting torn to shreds by a rakghoul swarm and even getting eaten by a rancor monster!
• The fanmade DEATH BATTLE! Mario vs Link has Link taking a pounding for most of the fight thanks to Mario's various power-ups, but still has enough strength to kill Mario and win the fight win Mario runs out of power-ups.
• The Twilight Child: The main character is capable of taking several beatings, despite by all indication being a regular Unicorn. She gets knocked off a building, and lands incredibly hard. It barely phases her. She gets kicked through a door and into a wall. She just gets right back up again to fight the guards who kicked her. She gets a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown that outright breaks several bones. She heals what she can and ignores the rest. Then she gets hit by a blast of magic capable of knocking out Princess Celestia. It doesn't completely kill her, but it does render her Only Mostly Dead. The fact that her mother is Twilight Sparkle might have some hand in this.
• Bad Future Crusaders has Captain Rumble, who not only shrugs off pretty much everything thrown at him, but at one point is shown up and about just a couple of hours after being run over by a speeding vehicle with nothing to show for it but some bruises and a very bad mood.
• In Robb Returns, Jon Arryn manages to survive a brutal stabbing by Lysa.
• In The Devil Does Care!, Lisa discovers that the young Trevor was walking around with a particularly large shard of glass imbedded in his foot, having gone for days, if not weeks with it there.
• Project SNT: In the SNT comic series, there are many moments where a main cast member should've been injured or killed, but is perfectly fine for some reason. Then Eggman is apparently exploded by Sonic and friends, and is later seen kidnapping Knuckles so he can turn him into Flaming Knuckles.
• Fantasy of Utter Ridiculousness: Youkai in Gensokyo tend to be this by default as long as they're not facing someone like Reimu. Specific examples include:
  • Rumia was accidentally kicked away by Megas. She got up and flew away a few minutes later, albeit a bit woozy from the experience.
  • Yukari was in Megas's flight path when it made its first accidental entry into Gensokyo, meaning that she got herself slammed by who-knows-how-much-tonnage clear into the Scarlet Devil Mansion's library. A short nap later, and she's fine and dandy.
  • The most blatant examples are the scaled-up Suika and Yuuka, Megas's actual opponents. Suika was subjected to a powerful uppercut-spin kick combo, a colossally-sized warhead, and a chunk of her own Wrecking Machine firebomb; Yuuka was assailed by one of her own bullets accelerated to mach speed, the Nitrous, Megas's Eight-Ball explosive strike, a point-blank barrage of gatling-fired energy bolts, and the Double Deuce.^note A double shoulder-chop capable of slicing arms off of opposing mecha. Both times it takes outside interference from Gensokyo's resident incident-resolver(s) to make them stop fighting, and they're still mobile and fight-ready afterwards.
• Wilhuff Tarkin, Hero of the Rebellion has two examples:
  • Adult Hutts are extremely hard to kill with portable blasters due their thick hides, the mucus said hides secrete, the underskin mantle that acts as a skeleton, and their heavy layers of blubber and muscle. It takes either specialized blasters or ludicrously powerful ones (such as the DLT-19D, capable of outright disintegrating a human) to cause fatal damage.
  • Force Users can make themselves even tougher: A'sharad Hett is shot with a DLT-19D and it takes three full-power shots (it's implied he had died at the second and the third just disintegrated him once he couldn't reinforce himself anymore), and Darth Vader survives being struck by lightning (though it incapacitates him). Both are actually canonical: during Order 66 many Jedi take a ludicrous amount of blasters shots to die, and Vader did survive being struck by lightning.
• Suicidal Overconfidence: According to Word of God, this trope meant that it took a bit of effort and time for the Kingpin to actually beat Bitsy to death. Not only was he pummeling her repeatedly just for the sake of it, but Bitsy (even as old as she was) was tough enough to require that much force before she eventually succumbed to her injuries. As the author themself puts it, "For all [of Bitsy's] faults she's a stubborn old witch."

Film — Animation

• Brave: Everyone who fights Mor'du and doesn't die, especially Fergus. Even with a broken peg leg, he still tries to take him on, and survives being hurled against a huge rock at full speed without any noticeable injuries. Mor'du himself is peppered with scars and broken arrows from old encounters.
• Captain Underpants
  • The titular character gets hit by a car and gets right back up. And that's before he gets superpowers.
  • Then there's Professor Poopypants. He gets hit by TWO cars and an ice cream truck and suffers no ill effects.
• Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget: To top getting blown up by her pie machine and getting crushed by a giant door in the first movie, Mrs. Tweedy manages to survive getting deep fried by her nugget maker.
• Gru from Despicable Me. He was able to survive the rockets and missiles from Vector's base, with the exception that he's completely covered with ash.
• The Fox and the Hound: Tod, a 13lb fox, takes multiple hits from a 500lb bear, and takes a plummet off a waterfall with said bear. He lived. The bear didn't. Though thanks to the Square-Cube Law smaller animals can survive larger falls without being seriously injured.
  • Chief takes a hit from a train and plummets to his apparent death from a bridge hundreds of feet above ground. He survives with only a broken leg.
• Jack-Jack in Incredibles 2 seems to be much more durable than the average baby, flying through the ceiling fast enough to make holes in the ceiling and wrestling with a wild raccoon with no visible scratches or injury.
• Migration: Chump, a comparatively diminutive pigeon missing a foot, gets run over by two buses and a motorized scooter in less than ten seconds, all Played for Laughs. She's completely ok afterwards.
• Jack Skellington of The Nightmare Before Christmas manages to get shot down by anti-aircraft flak guns without being blown to pieces. This could be justified, however, by the coffin sleigh taking most of the blow. However, this does not explain how at least a mile-high fall onto a stone angel didn't break any of his bones (the impact from the fall did seem to be strong enough to knock off his jawbone, however). This all still could be justified by the fact that Jack's undead, so he would not feel pain, if it weren't for an earlier scene where Sally accidentally pokes Jack's finger with a needle, and he yelps in pain. It's a little confusing. Most likely, Jack's status as the King of Halloween just makes him immortal.
• Nigel from Rio.
  • First he accidentally flies into a transformer (which causes the whole city to plunge into a blackout) with only some burnt feathers and the sparks shocking him as he flies off.
  • After the climax, although he survived the turbines of the smuggler's plane, he lost most of his feathers and was made fun by the marmosets.
• Zartog is shown to be this in Space Chimps 2: Zartog Strikes Back. He gets hit by a car and is perfectly fine aside from being paralyzed for a moment.
• In Turning Red, Mei falls flat on her face as a human onto concrete from about a metre up a couple times but appears to be completely uninjured and her glasses don't have so much as a scratch on them. The first time, it's even Lampshaded by Mei's father asking if she's hurt.
• Wreck-It Ralph: Ralph can be thrown several stories from the roof of an apartment building, slam face first into a concrete floor, and he'll still be ready to tear some more stuff up in the next level.

Manhwa

• Averted, and almost subverted in Veritas. Through 14 issues, the main character has already suffered at least 5 broken arms, three broken legs and a concussion or two. Oddly, he seems to have done all of that on purpose.

Music

• The Proclaimers in the video for "There's a Touch", who walk away only moderately harmed from falling a lethal height off a building, getting hit by a car, and having a helicopter land right on top of them. One of them has his trouser leg set on fire at the end of it, but he continues walking away ignoring it.
• The members of GWAR have survived alot of things that would kill humans.
• The Chumbawamba song "El Fusilado" tells the story of a man who survives his execution by firing squad, despite being shot ten times in the chest and then an eleventh to the head.

Mythology and Religion

• Irish Mythology: Two members of The Fianna, the warrior band led by Fionn Mac Cumhaill, fit this trope. Fionn's grandson Oscar, and Fionn's rival-turned-ally Goll Mac Morna.
  • Oscar was known for leaping into battle with an almost frenzied vigor and would always get up and keep fighting no matter how many wounds he received in battle, making him both this and The Determinator. A few times this got him into some trouble because, in a few particularly intense battles, he would still walk away barely able to stand and in serious need of the Fianna's healers.
  • Goll Mac Morna used his his incredible constitution, along with his considerable strength, to win many of his engagements and was described as sustaining blows "like a great oak tree." A good example is in his duel against Cumhaill Mac Trenmor, Fionn's father. During their fateful duel, Cumhaill stabbed Goll in the eye with his sword. However, not only did Goll keep fighting, but he eventually overcame and killed Cumhaill.

Pro Wrestling

• Professional Wrestling can wander into this when things go wrong and sometimes even when they go right, generally missed completely by the tendency for people to think "knowing how to fall" equates to "falls don't hurt." See Hell in the Cell, where Mick Foley suffered a concussion, broken ribs, a broken tooth that went up his nose, and a dislocated shoulder after falling from a twenty-foot height twice, and still finished the match.
• Another great example is Kurt Angle. For the uninitiated, he was in the summer Olympics with a broken neck. No, he didn't get it during the wrestling tournament, he had it before the tryouts. Not only did he convince them to let him compete, he won the gold medal. While he's at times injury prone, his neck at least is made of titanium. This is an understandably large point of pride both for his character and in real life.
  "I won an Olympic Gold Medal with a broken freakin' neck."
• Japanese female wrestlers can take piledrivers, powerbombs, and DDT's from the top rope onto steel chairs and tables, several times in the same match.
• Big Van Vader, in his infamous match against Stan Hanson spent a good 20 minutes of it with his right eye bulging out of socket.
• The Undertaker. At Elimination Chamber 2010, Taker was making his way to the ring in his usual grand fashion (Smoke, fireballs, really slow walk, etc.). Undertaker did his usual pause at the top of the ramp and was engulfed in flames by an errant fireball. Playing it off as being fired up, he ran to the ring, and proceeded to wrestle an entire Elimination Chamber match. He then lost his World Heavyweight Championship to Chris Jericho, but nobody's perfect.
• Kayfabe example: "Stone Cold" Steve Austin uses a forklift to drop a car with Triple H inside from a great height to end Survivor Series 2000. Triple H returns the next week with a bandage.
• Wouldn't you believe it but Zack Ryder has become one. In the month of January 2012, he's been assaulted by Kane in ways that other wrestlers his size would be dead by now. He's been dropped from ten feet in the air, had three powerbombs on his cracked ribs, got chokeslammed through the stage before finally having to be put away with a Tombstone Piledriver by Kane at the Royal Rumble before he has to be put out for a while.
• Chris Jericho has only suffered two serious injuries to his body in his entire life. One was a broken arm caused by his own stupidity (practicing dives without a mat). The second was a herniated disk, which he suffered training during Dancing with the Stars. Keep in mind he's been in more Elimination Chambers than anyone else, been in more than a few brutal TLC matches, worked for several promotions that specialized in Garbage Wrestling, and works a hard-hitting, high-risk style in which several peers have destroyed their own bodies.
• DEAR GOD, Terry Funk. The amount of stuff he's went through, it's amazing.
• Cody Rhodes is one of those WWE wrestlers who doesn't get injured very often. Case in point, during the November 14, 2012 episode of WWE Main Event, Rhodes suffered a strained shoulder. Miraculously, Rhodes returned on the December 10, 2012 episode of WWE RAW (sporting a mustache, nonetheless).
  • At Hell in a Cell 2022 Rhodes took on Seth Rollins in the main event despite having a completely torn pec.

Sports

• Cal Ripken, Jr. holds baseball's record for most consecutive games played (2,632 from 1982 to 1998), and consecutive innings (8,264 from 1982 to 1987). He famously surpassed Lou Gehrig's long-standing record of consecutive games in 1995.
• Basketball player A.C. Green played in 1,192 consecutive NBA games from 1986 to 2001.
• Olympic skier Hermann Maier's spectacular crash at the 1998 Winter Olympics in Nagano, Japan. High winds caused an unintentional ski jump. He flew through the air, hit the ground headfirst at 70 miles per hour, bounced, tumbled, and smashed through two wire-and-slat fences before coming to a stop. And then he picked himself up and walked back up the hill, rubbing his shoulder (he also had a minor leg injury). A few days later, he won gold medals in two events. A news article about the event began with the words, "The Tough Man contest is over. Forever. The winner is Hermann Maier." And he almost lost his leg after a traffic accident but continues to win — his nickname "Herminator" is well deserved.
• Hockey player Gordie Howe was said to get a goal, an assist, and a fight in every game. He continued playing in the NHL into his fifties, even through its notoriously violent era, long enough to play with his grown sons. After his retirement, he even suited up for a charity game in the minors, whereupon a local radio DJ offered a large cash prize to any player on the opposing team who fought Howe, by then in his seventies. No-one was stupid enough to take up the offer.
• In a similar vein, Toronto Maple Leaf Bobby Baun scored the game winning goal of game six of the 1963-1964 Stanley Cup finals after sustaining a broken ankle earlier in the game.
• This classical fencing article discusses how unreliable a sword-inflicted wound could be in ending a duel.
• Jake Brown, 2007 X Games skateboard contender, lost control of his board and fell 45 feet to the deck below (clip is here). After a dazed few minutes, he got up and was able to walk out under his own power.
• George Chuvalo, a former heavyweight boxer, was known to have one of the toughest chins in history. He faced some of the most devastating punchers in history and was never knocked down as a professional in 93 fights (his two technical knockout losses came when the referee stopped the fights). In fact in his fight against George Foreman (a man whose punch normally sends mere mortals to the moon), Chuvalo complained to the referee after the fight was stopped.
• Though both have become more vulnerable as they've aged, Mark Hunt and Antonio Rodrigo Nogueira were each known for this. Hunt was known for shrugging off life-threatening strikes as mere annoyances, while Nogueira was known for taking immense amounts of punishment, but still somehow managing to not only survive, but to win.
• Bert Trautmann, football (soccer) goalkeeper active in the 1950s. During the 1956 FA Cup Final, he was injured in a collision with an opponent. With 17 minutes to go, and no substitutes allowed, he shook off the injury and continued. He saved several goals, preserving his team's lead and helping to win the match. The injury? Merely a broken neck.
• Jack Youngblood played the entire 1979 playoffs and Super Bowl, AND the meaningless Pro Bowl game with a broken fibula. Because of this, he was called "the John Wayne of football".
  • He missed all of one game his entire pro career, in the last season of his career due to a ruptured disk in his back. He was back on the field the next week.
• Steve Yzerman played on essentially on one leg due to having a blown out right knee during the 2002 Stanley Cup playoffs.
  • He didn't just show up in his uniform and serve as a backup, either. He was The Captain of the eventual champion Detroit Red Wings that year, and was the second-leading scorer of the entire tournament with 23 points in 23 games.
• Donovan McNabb played on a broken ankle for most of a 2002 regular season game. He went to the locker room to have his ankle taped, but returned for the Eagles' second drive. His injury was reported to be a sprained ankle, but X-rays after the game revealed that Mc Nabb had broken his fibula in three places. During the game, however, he was 20-of-25 passing, with 255 yards and four touchdowns.
• In week 2 of the 2011 season, Dallas Cowboys Quarterback Tony Romo took a hit from San Francisco 49ers Cornerback Carlos Rogers, and went down with a broken rib and a punctured lung. He then somehow returned to the game and proceeded to play the fourth quarter and overtime with said injury, winning the game for the Cowboys, and then proceeded to play out the rest of the season with the rib still cracked.
• Fedor Emilianenko vs. Kevin Randleman. Fedor got hit with possibly the most perfect suplex in history, impacting the mat with all of his own weight plus all of Randleman's weight directly onto his spinal column. Fedor showed no reaction to it at all, and less than a minute later he'd managed to grab Randleman's arm in a hold and made Randleman tap out.
• Former NFL quarterback Brett Favre set an NFL record by starting 297 consecutive games (321 including playoffs). He also was sacked an NFL record 525 times during his career and played through numerous injuries, including sprained ankles, sprained knees, concussions, a separated shoulder, and a broken thumb on his throwing hand. Despite all of this, his various backups virtually never saw the field until they moved on to other teams; Favre failed to finish merely 8 games due to injury during the streak.
• Nolan Ryan played a record 27 seasons, throwing faster than anyone else in MLB history. His Nolan Ryan Express fastball was once clocked at 108 MPH, which helped his record 5,714 strikeouts over four decades and seven US presidents. During his final start, he tore the ulnar lateral ligament in his throwing arm. Despite this, his final pitch, at age 46 with a torn ligament, was thrown at 98 MPH. He was the last person who played Major League baseball in the 1960s to retire.
• Former quarterback Chris Simms, son of New York Giants legend Phil Simms, once had his spleen ruptured during a game after several hard hits. In spite of this, he only missed a handful of plays, most of which were not because he was in pain, but because he had to rehydrate himself the massive internal bleeding and playing in the Florida sun were causing him.
• Johnny Hoogerland in the 2011 Tour de France. A rider next to him (Juan Antonio Flecha) got sideswiped by a car; Flecha in turn was bumped into Hoogerland. Both riders went down, and Hoogerland had the misfortune of falling into a barbed wire fence. Both riders got back up and eventually finished not only the stage, but the entire race. Hoogerland and Flecha won the combativity award for that stage, and deservedly so.
• Joe Thomas, the starting left tackle from the Cleveland Browns, played 10,363 consecutive snaps in his career, from 2007 until 2017, when he suffered a career ending injury. Because of his durability, Thomas was named to ten straight Pro Bowls and the NFL's 2010s All-Decade Team, and a first-ballot Hall of Famer, despite the fact that his team never reached the playoffs.

Webcomics

• 8-Bit Theater:
  • The entire cast has exhibited this despite not having any apparent magical protection.
  • One member managed to survive having Australia dropped on them. That one member? The SQUISHY FREAKING WIZARD.
  • Fighter himself has survived several stabs to the back of the head courtesy of Black Mage and it isn't likely he's ever felt a thing. Hell, he even had one used as a lightning rod to channel a Lightning Spell directly into his brain. That particular spell actually INCREASED his intelligence instead of dealing any damage whatsoever!
• Ennui GO!: In Vol. 4, during her fight with Captain Orca, Darcy gets stabbed in the stomach with a harpoon and left for dead. However, thanks partially to The Power of Love, Darcy manages to get back up, covering up her wound and is itching to fight Orca again. Of course once the fight is over, Darcy asks Izzy and Tanya to take her to the hospital and make sure she doesn't pass out.
• Combagals in Furry Fight Chronicles are naturally tough because of their training.
  • Fenny defeated Roora in spite of suffering a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown with a Groin Attack at the end, even able to make a comeback while Roora was entertaining the crowd.
  • Muko has Stone Wall levels of resistance even before starting her Combagal training. It took prolonged beatings from Kalita and Nyarai to defeat her in spite of being superior opponents.
• Agents of the Realm must have it as one of their Required Secondary Powers, as Norah survives being thrown a few dozen metres and hitting the ground without as much as a scratch while untransformed.
• Borgo the Ogre is revealed to be Made of Iron here.
• Girl Genius:
  • Considering what he HAS survived, Othar Trygvassen (GENTLEMAN ADVENTURER!) is only boasting a little in the former page quote.
  • The Jaegers as a group tend to be rather durable. One goes so far as to mistake Von Pinn's attempts to puncture his kidney for flirtation.
  • And coming completely out of left field is quiet, unassuming, Mauve Shirt Airman Third Class Axel Higgs. He gets slammed into a stone wall hard enough to leave a man-shaped dent, brushes it off, then cuts the insane clank that did the slamming with a wrench in a single swipe. Eventually we learn he's a Jagergeneral; for some reason unknown even to him, his external physical appearence has never changed over all the centuries of his existence.
  • Minor character Mr. Obsidian is evidently physically invulnerable; both a wrench and a knife shatter when deployed against his skin.
• Guilded Age: Frigg, all the way. Not only is she the party's designated "meatshield", but after being captured by the Sisters of the Bloodshot Eye and beaten and tortured so badly her face looks like bloody hamburger, she's still talking trash and making jokes.
• Jones from Gunnerkrigg Court. Trick one: a sword bounces from her face. Trick two: place a palm on a wall. Close the fist, excavating what concrete happened to fit under the fingers. Who she is wasn't revealed yet, only that she's not a robot and probably not a "normal" magic-user either. We already saw one god and one valkyrie at the Court, though... And remember, androids aren't robots, and golems don't count as robots either.
  • Adding to her list of achievements? When she finally reveals her backstory to Annie, she says she's taken direct hits from high-explosive bombs during the London Blitz, been stabbed by medieval knights accusing her of witchcraft, was set on fire during Nero's fire in Rome, taken down Paleolithic bison by hand, walked naked on an Ice Age glacier, and first appeared on Earth while being submerged in lava when Earth was still a molten, inhospitable chunk of rock billions of years before life even existed. None of this has drawn anything from her than mild indifference. Even getting launched into orbit by a mad god and surviving reentry doesn't so much as scratch her!
• Homestuck:
  • Gamzee received several hundred bullets in the chest, and doesn't even stop smiling. Apparently, clowns in Homestuck are death-proof.
  • On a similar note, Terezi can survive, in order, taking a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown from the aforementioned, having a sword plunged into her chest, being blasted into a mountain, the collision of two planets, and a high-speed jetpack crash. She staggers out of it all bleeding heavily and badly worse for wear, but alive and strong enough to walk, speak, and headbutt somebody in the face hard enough to draw blood. She died after that, but she didn't go until she was good and ready and she still outlived Gamzee!
• Steve from Life and Death in his fight with himself.
• Memoria: The children realize their injuries should have been worse.
• Among other things, Vane Black of Next Town Over has been shot through the hand and hanged, and the strongest reaction she has is frustration that John Henry Hunter is getting away because of such holdups.
• Averted in Sarilho. The soldiers very much get broken during the conflict, and their extensive recovery times are explicitly stated.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • O-Chul has survived: being hit, whilst paralysed, by an explosion right next to him that destroyed a castle; fighting a shark whilst tied up and impaled by spikes in a tank of acid; (offscreen) having a staring contest with a basilisk; and being Disintegrated, electrocuted, and hit with a Meteor Swarm. The villains have taken to placing him in psychotically dangerous situations simply to bet on his survival. This is a man who has Chuck Norris jerky for breakfast. Word of God states that O-Chul's Constitution score is in the mid-twenties. In comparison, the average Constitution (health) score is ten. 18 is the normal 1st level human maximum. Normal play rules give a +1 increase to one stat every 4 levels, and 'maximum' level tends to be 20. So even assuming he's level 20 (which he isn't) his CON would still only be 23. All this sacrificing all the others abilities. This means he probably has the Hit Points of an average character twice his level. Also, paladins are traditionally loaded down with class features and abilities that make them rather hard to kill — but O-Chul has mostly fighter levels. Hinjo even remarks that he is the "toughest" Sapphire guardsman.
    O-Chul: [This is] Xykon's spell list. Or most of it, anyway.
    Roy: Are you kidding?!? How did you get this??
    O-Chul: One saving throw at a time.
  • Most characters in OotS seem to have this to some degree. Characters regularly shrug off impalements, stabbings, and tramplings as only minor inconveniences. This could be attributed to the Dungeons & Dragons rules that run the universe.
• In Plume, Tegan, the only main character we can be absolutely certain is not supernatural in the slightest, somehow survives being thrown ten metres in the air and landing on solid ground with nary a broken bone or bruise.
• The title character of Princess Pi. Watch as she survives an explosion, then two throws to the ground, then a gasoline fire.
• RPG World often plays with this trope.
• Schlock Mercenary: Captain Landon gets filled with sixty-one bullets, and complains that the surgery bot wants to sedate him.
  Mako: Landon's huge, and I'm sure he's good in a scrap, but he would have been surrounded by armed officers. I suspect he's lying on the floor, bleeding from fifty different holes.
  Sorlie: Maybe, but he did answer his phone.
• In Shortpacked!, Ronnie gets shot by a robber, then takes out the criminal using nothing but Patriotic Fervor.
• Sluggy Freelance: Oasis might also count. She's been through many No One Could Survive That! moments, including two explosions and a sniper bullet to the head. How she does this is not yet explained, and may or may not be a superpower she was given by Dr. Steve. Her "sister" Kusari has also survived being stabbed through the chest and even decapitated, again by means unexplained. It's eventually revealed they're both a collection of clones, with Oasis being linked to a Kill Sat AI Hereti Corp has been trying to take full control of for decades.
• In Spying with Lana, Lana has been beaten bloody and shot several times during her spying assignments. She always bounces back to save her ass.
• Stand Still, Stay Silent: In the 48 hours contained within Chapters 9 and 10, Sigrun gets a nasty troll bite on her arm, goes book salvaging on the next day, followed by an evening on which she temporarily gets her energy drained by a ghost, has a fight with a water troll, gets dunked in icy water during the process, and finally has to walk back to the tank with wet clothes in freezing tempearatures with the bite wound re-opened due to having odered the non-combatants to drive away from the action earlier. On the next morning, she's having breakfast with everyone else, chipper as ever. Chapter 14 (two in-universe weeks later) revealed that some of the wounds from the troll bite got infected, but her body still overall took all these injuries in stride.
• Superwholock The Comic: Castiel. Dean discusses this with Rose.
• Sweet Home (2017): All of the monsters are, but the security guard is so muscle dense that he actually singlehandedly tops the weight recommendation on the elevator and every weapon used on him breaks without harming him.
• In Tiny Ray Gun, Nepta survives being thrown from the cockpit of a ship that crash landed at light speed without so much as a scratch.
• VG Cats parodied this with (amusingly enough, considering the Trope Picture) Zoro from One Piece. Zoro blows off some physical damage taken by earlier attacks... only for Chopper to tell him that he's taken such internal damage from the attacks that most of his colon has to be removed.
• Some of the fights in Weak Hero can get extremely brutal (akin to Like a Dragon), with characters being pummelled so intensely that a visit to the hospital would be required at the very least. However, for the most part, they'll show up the next day looking right as rain aside from a smattering of band-aids.

Web Original

• Broken Saints: Oran. Sure, the power of his faith protects him, or at least numbs him to pain, but he still takes way too much punishment to survive, time after time.
• Darwin's Soldiers has a surprising amount of Made of Iron characters.
  • Alfred shrugged off at least two point blank gut shots from a pistol and continued engaging Marcus in a fist fight.
  • Marcus is an ordinary human Dragonstorm agent. He was capable of taking on two beings with Super-Strength, even after he had been punched several times by them.
• The eponymous Jeff the Killer in the original Creepypasta survives being stabbed, kicked in the face, punched, thrown through glass, having a glass bottle broken over his head, set on fire, cutting off his own eyelids, and giving himself a Glasgow Smile yet takes the bullies who inflicted this upon him (or mostly anyone else really) quite easily.
• Randall Octagonapus of The Lazer Collection 3 survives falling from the roof of a tall building and with no reaction other than "Ugh... I'm fine... but this is personal."
• Marik Plays Bloodlines. While Marik was in the wrong crowd's house, one interrupts his Badass Boast. All the other wrong crowd members got down within 2-3 hits, this particular one got hit 16 times total by a Bat-wielding-Vampire!
• The Nostalgia Chick can get her head exploded and only need happy pills to cure the minor headache she got.
• Red vs. Blue:
  • Grif. He is repeatedly shot and killed by Sarge and others, to the point of almost being a Running Gag, but always appears alive and fine later on. He's even survived a shot from a tank with no ill effects.
  • The Meta/Agent Maine. Before he got any super-powered armor enhancements, he survived getting shot in the throat nine times, then getting tossed off a speeding truck, bouncing off a vehicle going the other direction at extremely high speeds, and then falling hundreds of feet. The only lasting consequence of this was he lost his ability to speak (not that he spoke much to begin with). In the final battle with him he gets stabbed in the chest by Tucker's energy sword and barely reacts, as well as taking multiple close-range shotgun blasts without any apparent injury. When he finally is Killed Off for Real, fans didn't actually believe it until some characters recovered his armor and confirmed that, yes, he is really dead, and even then it's revealed that getting thrown off of a giant cliff wasn't what did him in; it was drowning.
• Corbin from Splinter Cell: Extinction gets surrounded by a SWAT team, sedated, takes a Magic Antidote, his Mission Control provides him a distraction via Hollywood Hacking that leads to a Darkened Building Shootout, Corbin gets shot in the chest while totally murdering everyone in the room, then beats the crap out of four more armed commandos and escapes.
• Jacob Starr of Survival of the Fittest is (in)famous for this trope, to the point of handlers referring to its use as "The Jacob Treatment". The character in question, over the course of his tenure on the island, was hit by arrows, burned, shot, cut and stabbed, all without seeming to flinch or even lose any mobility.
  • V3's Rick Holeman also took an absurd amount of injuries before dying. These included getting shot in the chest while still being able to run right over to his attacker, knock her over and starting to beat her down. All the while being stabbed with a knife — then he survived long enough to deliver some last words before finally kicking the bucket.
• Whateley Universe: Generally averted despite the presence of superpowers. While Exemplars - those whose power buffs all normal human traits and abilities to peak human or even super-human levels - shade from 'slightly tougher than an ordinary human' to 'bulletproof against most small arms' depending on power level, they are far from invincible, and even the Nigh-Invulnerable characters can and frequently do get injured. Lancer is a Flying Brick, and in his Fall 2006 combat final, he got a dislocated shoulder that sent him to the hospital. He still won, though. Phase seems to be in dire need of her roommate's healing salves on a regular basis.
• In Worm, Skitter. Her sheer toughness is demonstrated on several occasions, but the most vivid demonstration comes in 19.2 when she walks up to a hero who uses his power to sort-of cure her, a power which as a side effect transfers her injuries to him. She was prepared to fight without healing, but Tattletale convinces her to go through with it anyway. Afterwards, the hero needs the help of two people just to stand.
• Dimension 20: In Mentopolis, this is Hunch Curio's shtick, if his highest stat being Sturdy didn't give it away. This really comes into play in the final battle, where, after perhaps the worst roll imaginable where he was hit with a roll of 59 and defended with a measly 1, he gets knocked clean out of the station and lands in the rail yard- and still gets up, ready for more. In a system where, rules as written at least (and admittedly 'rules as written' isn't a big deal here), a roll difference of ten should be enough to kill or injure for life.

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