Strolling Through the Chaos

I don't think you noticed, but those stairs you were walking on just exploded...^note Next the stairs blow up completely, and he's still ascending them as if nothing happened.

"He was one of those guys that had that weird light around him. You just knew he wasn't going to get so much as a scratch here."

— Captain Willard describing Colonel Kilgore in Apocalypse Now

When the bullets, fists, or pies are flying, expect one character to be able to wander through it all without so much as a nick, a scratch, or a drop of cream.

Usually Played for Laughs, this trope will have one person able to maneuver about the chaos while completely avoiding damage. This could be either through skillful dodging or simple blind luck. Often the character will take advantage of the pandemonium. If a bar has erupted into battle royale, this guy will be leisurely enjoying the top-shelf booze while bodies slide along the bar and fly into the stacks of bottles behind him. Sometimes they may try to play peacemaker. Other times they are simply trying to find the nearest exit.

Sometimes the trope will be played seriously as our hero dodges his way through a vicious firefight to reach some important goal. If they are hit at all it will be just before the final task that accomplishes the mission.

Variants of the trope can find the person caught between two combatants and ducking just as their punches slam into one another's faces. Very often the last punch or pie thrown will be the one the character can't avoid.

May be combined with The Slow Walk when taken seriously.

See also Unflinching Walk, Dissonant Serenity, and While Rome Burns.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• Early in Trigun before The Reveal of Vash's bizarre biology, this is his defining quality. He can casually and instinctually avoid any amount of gunfire, even when it's directed specifically at him. Once he even danced down the street wearing headphones while a gang unloaded at him. When one commented how skilled he was at dodging another replied that "the idiot doesn't even know he's being shot at".

Asian Animation

• BoBoiBoy: In "Emotive Chemical Y", the heroes go to Adu Du's underground base to find the antidote to their emotionally manipulated states. Adu Du obstructs them by setting up a hazardous hall of traps. The newly confident Gopal is about to suggest a plan, but Yaya lackadaisically runs past several sawblades, swinging knives and spiked crushing walls, even pausing to let a pair of axes swing past her face before continuing. When she opens the door on the other side, the traps deactivate, which displeases Adu Du but Probe convinces him that he meant to allow them to see the other traps they made.

Comic Books

• In Uncanny X-Men #141, Kitty Pryde undergoes her first Danger Room session. She has to get past a gauntlet of deadly traps to reach a designated area and turn off the simulation. She simply closes her eyes and walks forward, phasing all the way. This scene is notable for being the very first recorded instance of Wolverine laughing.
• Plastic Man's buddy Woozy Winks started out as "The Man Who Nature Protects!"— natural disasters would spring up around him to protect him from enemies. (It was dropped after a few issues.)
• In a flashback within the Sequel Series to Crossed, Crossed: +100, Serial Killer Beauregard Salt's reaction to chaos of C-Day is to get a coffee and danish and idly comment on the news at the local cafe.
  Walking home I shot two little girls, but otherwise it was the screamers and runners attracting the attention. Personally, I think that manners and a dignified bearing still count for a lot. All in all, I was in a very good mood. When everybody's laughing, it's sort of infectious.
• The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck: In "King of the Klondike", Scrooge returns to Dawson after the Gold Rush has turned it into a massive boom town. There's one panel of Scrooge walking through town while all manner of Funny Background Event occurs.

Fan Works

• In the Naruto fan fic, Here and Now Yugito Nii, host of the Two-Tailed Cat, casually strolls through a battle between Cloud and Leaf ninja. Sasuke decides to take her out and finds out exactly why she was so calm. That changes when she starts fighting Naruto.
• In Thousand Shinji, when SEELE nukes the Geofront and sends the army in, everyone is going crazy and running around… but Shinji, who walks calmly while everything is going to Hell around him.

Films — Animated

• The Thief and the Cobbler: In the climax, the thief enters a huge warmachine. The machine is on fire and collapsing, and all the millions of weapons inside it are being constantly fired, creating a true Bullet Hell. Miraculously, he doesn't notice any of the chaos surrounding him, managing to steal the items he was after and escapes completely unharmed.
• During the big Ballroom Blitz between the clans in Brave, Queen Elinor manages to break things up just by strolling into the chaos and dragging the instigators (her husband Fergus and the Lords Macintosh, Macguffin, and Dingwall) out of it by their ears. The other fighters simply stop and turn to face her as she passes. Near the end, Merida breaks up another fight between the clans by strolling into the middle of the fight, much like her mother.
• Mulan: To show that Cri-Kee is a lucky cricket, Mulan's grandmother crosses a street wearing a blindfold. Even Cri-Kee is scared by the ensuing chaos but she's unharmed and describes it as proof of Cri-Kee's luck.

Films — Live-Action

• The Great Race had The Great Leslie strolling through a massive pie fight in a royal kitchen. It was his attempt to dodge one pie too many that led to his diving face-first into the one pie that got him.
• Star Wars:
  • A New Hope had R2D2 and C3PO amble across a corridor during a pitched firefight between Rebel and Imperial forces.
  • And again in Attack of the Clones, this time with C3PO "beside himself".
  • A serious example appears in Rogue One when Chirrut places his faith in the Force and calmly walks through the middle of a barrage of blaster fire to reach a control panel. Despite several troopers targeting him, he is not even grazed.
• A serious example of this would be in Akira Kurosawa's Ran, where a king survives the siege of his own castle without making any effort to avoid his death.
• Pirates of the Caribbean:
  • Jack does this in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest. After the fight starts, the man starts wandering aimlessly through the pub, randomly trying on people's hats to replace the one he lost at the beginning of the movie. He narrowly avoids getting injured in some spectacularly funny ways (such as ducking to get a dropped hat off the floor and avoiding a flying bottle that smashes on the wall above him).
  • Lord Cutler Beckett's death scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End was very much the serious version. He's walking down the stairs, which are blowing up behind him with chunks of wood flying around, and finally dies engulfed in the fireball which annihilates his ship. All while so deep in a quiet internal breakdown he doesn't even blink as fragments of his own ship fly past his face.
• Gandalf in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, grimly closing in on the possessed Théoden while his party beat the shit out of the guards.
• The Longest Day features a group of nuns calmly walking through the intense battlefield to join up with the Allied troops to help wounded soldiers.
• Hedley Lamarr, the Big Bad of Blazing Saddles, walks in on a pie fight in the commissary. He ducks into the bathroom and emerges after a moment, disguised by having his face completely covered by a cream pie. Since he's clearly already been hit and isn't throwing anything himself, everyone ignores him to focus on other targets.
• Bill the Butcher pulls this in an opening battle of Gangs of New York; he swiftly dispatches any opponent unfortunate enough to get between him and Priest Vallon though.
• Apocalypse Now: Col. Kilgore strolls around in the midst of a battle as his fellow soldiers duck and cringe at the bullets and explosions. The narrator says that he's the kind of guy who won't get so much as scratched during the war.
• In Support Your Local Sheriff a brawl breaks out as James Garner's character is trying to get some lunch. He says "Hold it!". Everyone freezes. He steps out of range, carefully taking his plate of overpriced food with him, then tells them to "Go ahead on!" He calmly eats as they brawl, discouraging the one man who tries to attack him with a warning glance, and helpfully handing another combatant a two-by-four. Later in the film, he pulls the same trick during a gunfight.
• In Tim Burton's Batman (1989) there's a scene where the Joker's thugs tommy-gun rival mobsters on the steps of the courthouse. Naturally everyone hits the deck except Bruce Wayne, who's so busy staring at the Joker he doesn't even notice when a bullet clips his shoulder.
• Aurora does this in the New York shootout in Babylon A.D. But that's hardly surprising as she turns out to be impervious even to miniature guided missiles.
• During Prudence's "I Want To Hold Your Hand" in Across the Universe (2007), she walks straight through a football field in the middle of practice without getting tackled. A keen eye will be able to see the football players are actually dancing.
• "Now or Never", the first sequence of High School Musical 3: Senior Year sees Troy walking straight through the middle of a basketball court, singing, without being tackled; he even catches a pass and travels with it before passing it on, still singing.
• In one scene of Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, a group of British officers in the middle of the Zulu war go about their morning routine completely oblivious to the fully pitched battle going on around them.
• Blackhawk Down: Lt. Col. McKnight had a habit of walking around in the open during intense urban firefights, while bullets and shrapnel land all around him, at one point standing in the open talking to a Ranger who is taking cover to avoid being shot (actually, he was announcing the arrival of his convoy of reinforcements for the besieged Rangers by asking him "Need a lift?") Interestingly enough, the one time McKnight gets injured is while riding shotgun in a Humvee barreling down the city streets and a lucky shot grazes him.
• In Little Big Man, the blind Cheyenne chief Old Lodge Skins believes himself to be magically Immune to Bullets and crosses a battlefield where his people are getting cut down all around him by the U.S. Cavalry. His attitude makes the scene almost comical, despite the terrible death and destruction occurring close by.
• In Mean Girls after the female population of the school has descended into madness over the Burn Book, Regina stands at the top of the stairs and admires her handiwork as people run past and debris flies through the shot.
• In Walker, William Walker does this in all of the battle sequences. He simply walks straight down the street and shoots at people without making any attempt to duck or dodge the return fire. This was apparently based on real accounts of Walker's Nicaragua campaign, in which he was never injured.
• Given a stationary variant in The Amazing Spider-Man, when Stan Lee makes his Creator Cameo. Stan remains standing at the desk, listening to music on his headphones while the library is destroyed around him. He, of course, remains oblivious because Headphones Equal Isolation.
  • Spidey doesn't even need to try to avoid the police's bullets. Of course, the one stray shot after the chief calls "Cease Fire" cripples his leg.
• Looper. This is how Old Joe catches sight of his future wife, a beautiful Asian woman calmly walking through a Bar Brawl in a hotel lobby; Joe stops fighting to stare at her and make an (unheard) pass. She responds by Flipping the Bird.
• In It's a Gift, Mr. Muckle the blind man casually strolls across a busy city street, blissfully unaware as car after car misses him by the narrowest of margins.
• An interesting variant crops up in The Dambusters; Wing Commander Guy Gibson strolls past an almighty Bar Brawl that's taking place just off-screen, his Stiff Upper Lip undisturbed by the occasional chair being hurled through a window into his path or a man being tackled to the ground by two others and forcibly relieved of his trousers. This is not strictly accurate, incidentally; by his own admission in his memoirs, Gibson was just as much the Work Hard, Play Hard type as the rest of the squadron.

Literature

• War causes people around her to burst into violence, which she moves through calmly in Good Omens. Justified in that she's War.
• Lord Rust in the Discworld novels. An Upper-Class Twit to end all Upper-Class Twits who thinks he's a military man because of his breeding, he's been described as confusing "idiot stubbornness with bravery." In Snuff, it's mentioned that for all the horrific losses his regiments would suffer in battle, Rust himself would often emerge without a scratch, "the arrows turning aside in midair to avoid striking him."

Live-Action TV

• Princess Agents: Yuwen Yue walks through a fight without getting so much as a scratch.
• The classic Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" has Cyrano Jones enjoying some quality time with the liquor synthesizer while Humans and Klingons are happily beating each other with the furniture. Then holding a drink well above his head so it doesn't get spilled, he waltzes through the brawlers until he gets to the door, whereupon it's snatched out of his hand by the bartender who's just entered having fetched a squad of Red Shirts. Only slightly abashed, Cyrano removes another full glass from his pocket and drinks that instead.
• Doctor Who: The Doctor does this in "Battlefield" and "The Christmas Invasion". In fact, in the former, the Doctor takes this a step further by casually walking in between two people having a swordfight, cheerfully raising his hat to them as he does so.
• In the Farscape two part episode "Into The Lions Den", Scorpius wanders through the corridors of his exploding Command Carrier in a state of shock, drifting unharmed past hordes of evacuees, exploding energy conduits, and bursting watertanks. For dramatic effect, apocalyptic choirs are singing in the background, cementing this moment as Scorpius' great Villainous Breakdown.
• A vehicle variant occurs in Top Gear, during the review of the Ford Fiesta. The test was to take part in an amphibious assault alongside the Royal Marines, which culminates in a wonderfully, brilliantly awesome shot of the cheerfully green Fiesta winding its way up a beach filled with gunfire and explosions.
• Blaine from Glee does this on the football field during his number of "Hopelessly Devoted to You", as a homage to Across the Universe above.
• Commander Black's first scene in Ultraman Leo has him calmly walking around Tokyo, oblivious to the mayhem and destruction his Saucer Monster caused.
• Lucifer (2016): In "God Johnson", Lucifer gets the inmates of a mental hospital to start a riot so he and God Johnson can break out of there. The scene is combined with Lyrical Dissonance as they stride through the chaos to "In A Blackout" by Hamilton Leithauser, dodging hurled objects and clearly enjoying themselves.
• Xena: Warrior Princess: In a "Groundhog Day" Loop episode, Xena spends the second-to-last loop carefully measuring and calculating what she has to do to break the cycle, while all around her a massive brawl consumes the town she's trying to save.

Music

• Fiona Apple did a cover of "Across the Universe" by The Beatles. In the music video, she is flowing through the riot without getting hit by their baseball bats, or cut by the broken glass. In fact; she doesn't even notice or acknowledge them.

Mythology

• Various mediums portray Ares, the God of War, to do this is the midst of heated battles. Cause ya'know, he's the god of war.
  • Justice League Unlimited
  • Hercules: The Legendary Journeys often portrayed him as a raving fanboy getting front-row seat action.
  • Subverted in The Iliad, in which Ares is impaled by a spear thrown by a soldier under the guidance of his sister and subsequently is forced to withdraw from the battlefield.
  • Used in the game God of War: Ares is depicted as being enormous, yet still eludes the arrows of the enemy.

Tabletop Games

• In Scion, this is the first power of the Chaos purview: as long as the Scion in question doesn't interact with the violence/wackiness/chaos that's going on in a scene where he/she activates this power, he/she can't be harmed by it.

Video Games

• Metal Gear Solid 2: Sons of Liberty gave us Fortune who, through some Applied Phlebotinum caused bullets to bend around her and grenade to defuse near her body. That coupled with her huge railgun made her practically impossible to defeat.
• Super Smash Bros.: Peach strolls across the deck of the Halberd as Fox and Falco strafe it with laser blasts, starting a chain of explosions directly behind her. She doesn't seem to notice, and in fact, merrily twirls her parasol as she does.
• Happens in Red Dead Redemption at the end of the Mexican revolution, John Marston walks calmly through the embattled Escalera past the dying civilians and soldiers.
• A dramatic variant from Mass Effect 3: Mordin Solus walks briskly through an exploding building on Tuchanka on his way to cure the genophage, shielding his eyes from shrapnel, but never breaking stride. Depending on your exact choices, this can either be Subverted by making Mordin struggle a great deal to reach the end and succumb to his bullet wound before making it, or he'll actually sing quietly to himself as he makes the trip.
• Enforced in Shadow Complex with the Fusion Helmet - it renders the user completely Immune to Bullets, grenades, missiles, railgun rounds and artillery fire, so long as said user does not move faster than any pace that can be described as "brisk".

Webcomics

• Occurs in this Aki Alliance strip when Aki starts up a fight and simply walks around.

Web Videos

• In the video "British Officers Don't Duck!" Lindybeige discusses the ethos of the British command during World War II against ducking or flinching from gunfire and explosions. This resulted in numerous stories of officers strolling through the battlefield as if it was an afternoon picnic. This led to an impression on both sides that British officers were somehow indestructible, though it's more the case that when they did get hit, people were less likely to talk about it.

Western Animation

• The Simpsons:
  • When Hank Skorpio's lair is attacked by the Army in "You Only Move Twice", Homer seems completely oblivious and simply walks away through the raging battle. He's more concerned about quitting his day job than the grenade that landed at his feet.
  • In "The Twisted World of Marge Simpson", Springfield's Sicilian mobsters are being fought by the Yakuza gangsters brought over from Japan. While everyone else is fighting, however, one tiny Yakuza member in a white suit is standing perfectly still as the fight rages around him. When Marge pulls Homer away from the fight, he complains, "But Marge, that little guy hasn't done anything yet. Look at him. He's going to do something soon, and you know it's going to be good!" Sure enough, as soon as Homer can no longer see the fight, the Yakuza springs into action. We see him later through a window doing backflips.
• In the Bugs Bunny short "Racketeer Rabbit", Bugs — whose rabbit hole is located underneath a house occupied by a pair of mobsters — sleepily climbs up into the living room and walks to the kitchen and back for a glass of water, ignoring a shootout that the crooks are engaging in with a rival gang.
  Bugs: [ducking his head beneath a hail of machine-gun fire] Low bridge!
• Uncle from Jackie Chan Adventures does this a lot, as most of the time he just doesn't care about Jackie's problems.
• A food fight variation from The Critic: "Give me your french fries! *GULP!* Give me your pot pies!"
• DC Animated Universe:
  • In the Batman: The Animated Series episode "The Clock King", the eponymous villain can easily walk into the Clockworks Area of the Clock Tower without showing vertigo, while Batman slips and fails. He even can do it when the Clock Tower collapses.
  • Darkseid is usually shown in this manner. After, for instance, he knocks someone through a wall, he will come casually strolling through the hole that was made, usually with his hands clasped behind his back. This is also his signature fighting style in Injustice 2.
• The opening sequence of Milo Murphy's Law has the titular character doing this, seemingly oblivious to the mayhem his bad luck is causing.
• Rick and Morty: Commonly done by Rick, not through blind luck, but through the safety provided by his force fields and other gadgets. One example is in "The Old Man And The Seat", where he walks through an active battlefield looking for information about a sandwich delivery.

Real Life

• Wyatt Earp. Despite being a real-life iconic badass, a U.S. Marshal, and perhaps the Ur-Example of the Wild West lawman, he was never in his life grazed by a single bullet. There's even a story that says a thug fired on him with a 10-gauge shotgun, and every single piece of shot missed, passing harmlessly through his duster.
• General Douglas MacArthur had a habit of not seeking cover during major battles. An anecdote said that during World War I he told a young George Patton (who flinched when an artillery shell landed nearby) that "You never hear the one that gets you."
• While advising on A Bridge Too Far, Lt. Colonel Frost objected to a scene where the actor playing him (Anthony Hopkins) runs across a street under fire. He always walked. It was decided to leave the scene as it was, for fear the audience wouldn't like it.
• While it is commonly overshadowed in the public consciousness by the carnage of Omaha Beach a few miles east, the first wave of American troops to land on Utah Beach was almost a bloodbath. The destroyer USS Corry, leading the landing craft in, struck a mine and sank, so they landed in the wrong place thanks to strong currents. The Germans immediately directed artillery on the leading elements of the 4th Infantry Division. As the troops took whatever cover they could find, the 4th ID's Executive Officer, Brigadier General Theodore Roosevelt Jr. (son of the famous President), recognized that the artillery was intensifying, the Germans were shifting machine guns to sweep the beach, and his men would soon be pinned down. Standing up amid the shrapnel and bullets, Roosevelt strode (actually limped with a cane) across the beach, waving for his men to follow him. Led by Roosevelt, the 4th Division quickly overran the beach defenses before the Germans could react, saving hundreds of lives. Roosevelt was awarded the Medal of Honor but died of a heart attack before he could receive it.

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