Only A Flesh Wound / Anime & Manga

Flesh wounds in anime and manga.

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• Averted in Osamu Tezuka's Adolf: protagonist Sohei Toge gets shot in the shoulder and, since his nerves were hurt, his arm is rendered pretty much useless until the end of the story. Tezuka graduated in Medicine before becoming a full-time manga artist.
• During Genesis' assault on Trident in the Air Gear manga, Benkei cuts off her own leg at the thigh. She later explains that she's not losing much blood because of her vegetarianism, and that she needed to lose some blood to lower her blood pressure anyways.
• Berserk: A lot of the time (especially in the Golden Age arc) a single arrow or stab wound will realistically kill a regular person in this Dark Fantasy. But:
  • Played straight with Guts the protagonist whose been struck with multiple arrows and crossbow bolts protecting Casca, stabbed multiple times, hacked off his own arm and lost his eye shortly after and in probably the most Nausea Fuel Guts has been impaled through both cheeks and out the other side of his head and only got pissed off. The Berserker Armor makes this trope more apparent as it blocks Gut's pain nerves meaning he can have his limbs broken and the armor will just knit his bones and skin back in place so he keep fighting. Averted when he takes the armor off as the collective injuries put Guts out of action for a month and he almost dies.
  • Casca despite being a Fragile Speedster once took multiple arrow wounds and kept right on going like her lover Guts, though she fell unconscious for weeks afterwards.
  • Played straight with the demonic Apostles and one member of The God Hand, Zodd The Immortal has had his forearm chopped off by Griffith and later the Skull Knight but just put his arm back on like he's made of LEGO. Slan of the God hand was shot by Guts's Arm Cannon and then impaled by the Dragonslayer... and only got a orgasm.
• Black Lagoon:
  • Averted several times, notably when creepy twin Hansel gets shot in the leg and then in the wrist by snipers, blowing his hand off. He dies within minutes (or even seconds) from the immense blood loss.
  • In spite of the series's attempts to keep to realism in regards to battle wounds, major characters tend to survive more grievous injuries. This may be justified, since those characters often note how lucky they were, or others remark that they must be superhuman (* cough* Roberta* cough* ). In one example, Rock once points out that although one of Revy's injuries wasn't fatal, it was deep enough where it wouldn't clot, so she would need medical attention as soon as possible.
  • Played slightly more realistically in regards to Roberta in the Roberta's Blood Trail OVA, where after being shot in her left shoulder during the final episode she can barely lift the arm, and the ending credits reveals it — as well as a right leg that was also shot — was later amputated. Normally you'd expect someone that badly injured to bleed out, however.
• Bleach:
  • There are barely any fights that don't involve a character getting cut through one or both shoulders (and eventually everywhere else). This is usually the first wound inflicted in the whole fight and the only explanation for this is that spirits don't suffer as much from wounds, being spirits and all.
  • See also: Kenpachi Zaraki.
  • Averted when Ichigo surviving Ulquiorra blowing a hole the size of his fist into his chest, lying there and breathing with a torn trachea for at least fifteen minutes or so before Orihime and Grimmjow arrive. However, as it turns out, Ichigo actually died in this instance, and only survives thanks to Orihime playing her "I Reject Your Reality And Substitute My Own" card and resurrecting him.
  • Ishida, despite fighting in his human body, seems to possess unbelievable hardiness as well, as he survives Szayel crushing his internal organs and still finds time to play comic relief for Mayuri (Renji observes how energetic he is despite his ah, condition). More recently, Ishida kept going against Ulquiorra, who had blown an even bigger hole in Ichigo's chest, in spite of having his hand blown off. It took Ichigo in psycho neo-Hollow mode to made Ishida fall over by stabbing him with his Zanpakuto. And Uryu still wouldn't shut up. Heroic Resolve, indeed.
  • Later in the series, a human — that is to say, not a ghost or reiatsu-powered superbeing — gets his arm cleaved off right at the elbow. He barely flinches. Although Inoue restores it moments later, those 'moments' would have been more than enough for a bleed-out if not instant death by systemic shock.
  • Lampshaded in nisinator1's "Bleach Ridiculously Abridged":
  "<injury> is not enough to kill a Bleach character!"
• In Change 123, there is a scene where one kunoichi threatens another by stabbing her in the chest with a scalpel. It's a surgically precise stab done so that the scalpel, while not doing any critical damage, goes so near the heart that it's on the very edge of stabbing it. Justified by the fact that the kunoichi who does the stabbing has a formal training in medicine.
• City Hunter:
  • Double Subverted and justified in one epic early scene: to avoid having his .357 Magnum round go through a random perp and kill a passerby, Ryo slowed down the bullet by shooting through his left hand. He acted like it was nothing until he was alone, at which point he started crying in pain; later at home, it's revealed it's literally a flesh wound because Ryo, being just that good with a gun, managed to shoot without hitting the hand's bone.
  • Justified with Umibozu, as his sheer size and muscle tone means that small .38 Special bullets can only leave shallow scratches on him. A more powerful round (like the .357 Magnum), however, is treated as potentially fatal even for him.
  • Usually subverted: when you get shot in the hand, you're lucky if you recover the use of said hand. In fact, the one guy who was shot in the hand in one arc still can't use it anymore when he shows up again, and in another occasion Ryo justifies the many instances of shooting a gun out of a foe's hand without harming him by the fact he shoots the gun (and the victim is still clutching the hand in pain every time).
• Code Geass:
  • Happens to Mao, who is shot multiple times and comes back perfectly fine (albeit bandaged up a little bit) the very next episode; it's Hand Waved by mentioning advanced Britannian medicine and pointing out that the policemen were not ordered to shoot to kill. YMMV on whether or not this is bad writing, but it's later shown that Geass is a Literal Genie and has ties to the collective subconscious of humanity, possibly being more influenced by its intent than the individual user's. It is also established that Geass can be defied by an unusually strong will, so another explanation is that each policeman's subconscious engaged in Loophole Abuse.
  • Used a second time with Cornelia, who was shot multiple times in the leg.
  • Averted with Nunnally, though. She was crippled for life due to nerve damage to her legs from submachinegun fire. Or so it was set up to seem.
• Cowboy Bebop's Spike usually only averts this if he's shot in the arms while using two guns at once. Any other time, he's more likely to play it straight.
• Subverted in Darker than Black Season II, when Dr. Pavlichenko, Suou's father is hit in the leg by a spear-like weapon. Although Suou manages to tightly bind the wound, it doesn't completely stop the bleeding, and he eventually dies from blood loss.
  • However, all bets are off when it comes to the resident badass, Hei. He once limped about halfway across town after being shot through the leg (unsurprisingly, Amber was involved), and in the interquel OVAs isn't even slowed down when he gets a foot-long shard of wood through his shoulder. He just pulls it out and walks off. Oh, and he managed to do a Ceiling Cling with a knife embedded in his arm.
• Deadman Wonderland contains a particularly ridiculous example. When Genkaku wants you incapacitated rather than killed, he will impale you through the chest with a katana. And it will damned well work. Incidentally, he claimed to have missed his victim's heart and lungs with the blow, presumably because basic biology was scared enough of him to raise no objection.
• Played with in Death Note. Matt gets shot several times by Takada's bodyguards. Even if one had missed something vital (and it appears several might have), there were lots more to make up for it. One even went clean through him!
  • Played straight with Light, who gets shot several times by Matsuda, and yet (despite being badly injured) manages to walk quite some distance before being killed by Ryuk.
• During Goku's fight with Piccolo in Dragon Ball, he was shot by a ki blast that punched clean through his shoulder. He got back up, much to Piccolo's shock, saying that he missed his vital organs. He was also shot in his other limbs, and suffering from heavy blood loss. One senzu bean later and Goku is perfectly healed. He takes a similar beating from Vegeta, and until he gets another senzu, he's stuck in the hospital.
  • Frieza has it as an ability: he is able to survive and function in the most horrible conditions. He got his tail chopped off twice, got vivisected and lost his left arm, then was caught in the explosion of the planet he was on, resulting in the loss of half his head. When he was found floating among the debris, he was (semi-)conscious. And as if that weren't enough he survives for at least a few seconds after being vivisected again, vertically this time. In Ressurection 'F', when he is wished back to life, his body is in diced-up pieces, yet he is not only alive, but seemingly concious.
  • His brother Cooler was just as hard to kill, if not more so. At the end of the movie Dragon Ball Z: Cooler's Revenge, he was actually blown into the sun. There was still enough left of him for his consciousness to usurp control of a machine called the Big Gete Star and create a new body, returning in the sequel, but this actually made him more vulnerable; at the conclusion, he perished for good when Goku and Vegeta destroyed his body and the Big Gete Star.
  • Piccolo has regeneration so one mangled arm is no big deal, at one point he is turned into stone and then is unintentionally smashed to pieces by kid Trunks but a minute later Piccolo appears fine explaining he can heal from almost anything so long as his head remains intact.
  • It gets really nasty when the next major villain combines Piccolo's regeneration with Freiza's survivability, and the Saiyan ability to get stronger from being near death: Cell survives getting half of his torso and his full upper body blown up, and his own self-destruction as well.
  • Vegeta was able to walk after Krillin put a hole through him in Namek, and in Dragon Ball GT he even stayed conscious after Omega Syn Shenron turned him into a pin cushion.
• In Elfen Lied, Nana loses all of her limbs while fighting Lucy, but she doesn't bleed to death even though it takes a while for her to get medical attention.
  • A lot of other characters get gruesomely wounded as well with much of the same result.
  • Oddly, there's also kind of a subversion. Someone shoots a scientist in the shoulder so he can force her to do what he says on the basis that he won't save her life if she doesn't.

• In Fullmetal Alchemist there is a scene of Mustang's crew going out of their way to avoid shooting soldiers in vital areas, but still shooting them just the same. You'd think being soldiers they'd know better.
  • When Ling and Lan Fan are being pursued by Wrath, Lan Fan manages to save Ling by cutting off her own arm. She survives by using her shirt to make a tourniquet, and it is mentioned several times that she nearly died.
  • Subverted during the fight between Ed and Kimblee. Kimblee blows up the building they're fighting in, and Ed gets blasted thirty feet down the shaft.
    Ed (slowly pushing himself off the ground): I must have fallen down the mine shaft. Dammit... I can't let Kimblee get away...! (coughs blood, looks back, eyes widen as he sees he's been impaled by a girder) Y-you're kidding... No!... (collapses)
  • Ed's arm and leg are both severed from his body, but he still manages to live long enough for the machine replacements to be attached.
    • The above statement is not quite true. During a flashback, Ed is shown in a wheelchair, stumps bound, before he receives the surgery. It IS worth noting though that, with two limbs completely severed, he still has time to bond his brother's soul to a suit of armor, his brother adjusting to being bound in said armor, the reasonable expectation of panic from such a young child in such a situation, and the fairly long run to the Rockbell house. Trope thoroughly in effect.
• In Fullmetal Alchemist (2003), Scar gets both of his arms severed through alchemy. Globs of blood splash down for a few seconds, then the bleeding miraculously stops.
• Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex plays it realistically with gunshot wounds, at least on non-cyborged individuals. In one episode, a soldier is shot in his upper-thigh by a sniper and bleeds to death on the ground while his squadmates are pinned down.
  • Quite nicely, there is also an episode that plays with the concept in 2nd Gig. Togusa, while off duty, stumbles upon a violent domestic dispute. The attacker is a cyborg who turned off his pain receptors, and, despite Togusa just wanting the guy to calm/stand down, requires multiple shots of small-arms fire to immobilize. In the farce of a preliminary examination that follows, he is forced to justify the number of times he shot by the resilience of cyborgs and the lawyer from the other side tries to turn that argument against him as prejudice towards cyborgs.
  • Cyborgs on the other hand often play this straight, such as Hideo Kuze in 2nd Gig, who in an early episode get shot into Swiss cheese, with visible bullet holes even on his face, but thanks to his subdermal armour isn't even slowed down. All in all, the only way to actually hurt "full" cyborgs is to damage their still organic brain, which is encased in a heavily armored shell that can resist being crushed by the weight of a 4 meter tall walking tank.
• Great Teacher Onizuka: Our lead shrugs off being hit by a truck, jumps off a building onto a car (twice), receiving only a broken arm that he doesn't even notice until it's pointed out the next day (and does push-ups on it), and even then continues to play computer games like a god (while keeping track of his winning streak on his still-untreated and horrifically swollen arm). He's also survived a number of gunshot wounds that should have been fatal.
• In Guilty Crown, Shuu at one point gets the arm severed clean off at the elbow, and instead of bleeding out or dying instantly merely sits and stares at it in shock, without so much as bleeding.
• Gunslinger Girl
  • The eponymous cyborg assassins are for all practical purposes Made of Iron. During gunfights they tend to keep their arms up high to protect their eyes (the only weak spot). Several of them shrug off multiple shots in the arms, Rico a shot in the neck, and Triela stands up after taking a bullet in the gut. The mooks they fight go down pretty realistically. Triela ends up dying due to bleeding out from a gunshot wound.
  • Averted in the training sequence of the anime's first episode. Henrietta is told to just aim for the center of mass, because at close range, hitting the target anywhere will stop them dead.
  • In Gunslinger Girl - Il Teatrino, Guise is caught in a car bomb explosion and is quick to tell Henrietta that his wound is only a scratch. But then again, he'd noticed her finger tightening on the trigger of her handgun, so it was probably a good idea to do so.
  • Also in Il Teatrino, Triela does a Tuck and Cover to protect her handler Hilshire from a Booby Trap. Due to her conditioning she's more concerned that he might have been injured, brushing off her own injury as a scratch, then getting flustered because she's lying on top of him.
  • Hilshire decides he doesn't have the moral right to expose his cyborg Triela to danger and tries to carry out a hit without her. He's wounded in the process and tries to brush it off as 'just a scratch'. Triela is furious because she's been conditioned to protect her handler at all costs, and views this as a betrayal of their trust.
• Gray from Gunsmith Cats. Apparently getting shot half a dozen times in the arm isn't that big of a deal for him. He just flexes them out, and bandages it up.
  • The same applies to Bean Bandit.
• Averted in GUN×SWORD — Michael takes a bullet to the arm, and despite pulling his sleeve tighter to stop the blood flow, collapses from blood loss, possibly dying in Fasalina's arms.
• Averted in the Haruhi Suzumiya Light Novels and The Movie, when Kyon gets stabbed in his abdomen with a knife and only barely escapes dying from blood loss.
  • Played straight with Yuki Nagato, who gets impaled by six sharp poles. Her reaction? "I am fine."
• A variant of the 'Intentionally Shooting To Wound' theme occurred in Hellsing, when Knight Templar Alexander Anderson introduced himself by putting about a score of blessed bayonets through Seras Victoria's neck and torso while missing her heart to incapacitate her (and leave her in agony) while he entertained himself with Alucard. Heroic Willpower is invoked when she surprises Anderson by dragging herself away with her master's head.
  • Seras and Alucard are both vampires, Alucard in particular has no trouble healing himself after being chopped into dozens of pieces, decapitated etc. Even if Anderson was just aiming to incapacitate, he has no particular reason to care if she does get permanently destroyed, since his mission is to obliterate her eventually anyway.
  • Anderson in the Final Battle keeps fighting while missing most of his left arm. Anderson’s apprentice Heinkel survived a bullet fired by The Captain through her cheek mangling the side of her face and she was still able to talk.
• Averted in Infinite Ryvius. A character is shot in the shoulder and only survives because he's given emergency surgery right away. Even then, he has to undergo months of physical therapy, and is never again able to raise his arm above his head.
• JoJo's Bizarre Adventure:
  • Jonathan, Joseph, and Jotaro do this trope best. Jonathan tanks a Speedwagon’s spinning blade to the hand and gets a metal spike through the shoulder and mans through it. Joseph has his hand lopped off and uses his severed limb to beat Kars. Jotaro is stabbed mutiple times in Part 3 and wounded after an explosion in Diamond is Unbreakable but still beats the shit out of Yoshikage Kira who made the mistake of thinking a few holes would put Jotaro down.
  • Early in Golden Wind, Guido Mista gets shot three times in the head and survives. Justified in this case because his Stand (which has the power to control bullets) made it literally a flesh wound by catching the bullets at the last second, so that only the skin was pierced and his skull and brain were untouched.
  • Stone Ocean: Due to the nature of her ability, F.F. is able to survive a bullet to the brain, but she loses her physical body.
• Averted in Kinnikuman; Terryman takes a bullet to the leg, and it costs him the leg.
• In Kodocha, Hayama doesn't try to resist Komori's attempt to kill him by stabbing Hayama with a knife. Komori only stabs Hayama in the arm, prompting Hayama to remove the knife and give it back to him, telling him to do it properly. He then walks around for over two hours with a severed artery before passing out from blood loss. He still almost dies on the operating table and loses a good deal of mobility in said arm until the Distant Finale.
• Zack, Tifa and Cloud in Last Order: Final Fantasy VII as all three of them get badly sliced/stabbed by Sephiroth and unlike a certain flower girl they live to tell the tale. Bonus points for Cloud since he literally pulls himself along Sephy's murasame and briefly remains conscious with the katana sitting in his torso.
• Averted many times in Legend of the Galactic Heroes: characters who get wounded in a limb either lose said limb or die, sometimes even after having received futuristic medical treatment. This is played in a very cruel way with one of the main characters, especially since the WHOLE episode of his death was made in a way that lead many viewers to believe he would still get out of this alive and keep playing a large role in the next season.
  • They play with it even further near the end of the show, blending it with the Determinator and I Can Still Fight! to good effect. Another main character is impaled through the chest with a massive sliver of glass, yet calmly pulls it out and tells his subordinate to stop shouting. Minutes later, it turns out the spike actually severed an artery between a lung and his heart, and though the doctors can stop the bleeding he will die without surgery and will probably die regardless. He ignores his doctors and keeps going in order to manage a withdrawal from a disastrous battle with such steely composure it seems he won't die, and then waits almost a whole day for his friend to return with such steely composure it seems he'll be fine, until he dies less than an hour before his friend arrives.
• Sleepy is frequent shot repeatedly in Mad Bull 34, but he shrugs off each injury like it's minor. This includes getting shot in the shoulder, shot in the arm, shot in the leg, and shot in the chest. During one shootout he's shot six times in the ass, but he just stands up and starts throwing grenades he'd tied to his pubic hair!!
• In the finale of Mobile Suit Gundam, Amuro is stabbed clean through the arm with a rapier. It doesn't seem to affect his piloting skills at all when he resurfaces in seven years later Mobile Suit Zeta Gundam (although he is slightly superhuman & medical technology is presumably more advanced in the Universal Century).
  • Amuro also became rich during those seven years by patenting Haro's design, so it's not as if he was settling for minimum coverage, either. Char, though, survived just fine after getting stabbed in the face.
  • In Mobile Suit Gundam Wing, Heero Yuy gets shot, blown up, drowned, etc, and does not die. Ever.
    • Also, Quatre gets stabbed clean through by Dorothy, and still makes a speech and continues to act as a leader in the Final Battle.
  • Averted in Mobile Suit Gundam 00, when Setsuna gets shot in the shoulder it severely debilitates him despite his best efforts to tough it out. It eventually leads him to lose consciousness two times before he gets the proper medical attention.
• Monster:
  • Averted repeatedly in Monster. One character is shot in the shoulder and survives — but his arm is rendered useless for the rest of his life. Other characters bleed to death from thigh wounds, stomach wounds, and shoulder wounds. For those that did survive, it was because a medical professional (usually Tenma) stopped the bleeding.
  • On the other hand, Johan gets shot in the head and survives (though only after intense surgery; the bullet was low-calibre and got lodged in his brain). He later has the same thing happen to him again and survives. It's pointed out that Tenma, the doctor who safely removed the bullet, is the best neurosurgeon in Germany, if not the world, and that he's the only one capable of such a feat.
• Naruto frequently does this when applied to the likes of stab wounds, the most blatant being Neji surviving being impaled just because he prevented it from injuring any vital organs and Kiba surviving stabbing himself in the chest (though the main character at least has the excuse of a Healing Factor). Subverted in that they spent weeks in the hospital afterwards. In Neji's case this came after a three hour surgery.
  • Deidara and Hidan aren’t bothered by the loss of major limbs and other body parts. Hidan at least has the immortality excuse, though he makes it clear getting your head chopped off hurts like a bitch.
  • By the time of Boruto, Naruto isn’t troubled by a sword sitting in his gut.
  • In the Blood Prison movie, Ryuzetsu and Naruto end up impaled through the abdomen by a claw that's almost as wide as their torsos. Naruto continues fighting, though he is fatally injured, and Ryuzetsu can still walk even though both of them just lost a large part of their spines.
• Hit and miss in Negima! Magister Negi Magi. The really nasty wounds received are generally portrayed as such, but they're not very incapacitating once heroic resolve enters the equation. It's occasionally outright averted, however, such as when Fate spears Negi through the shoulder with a rock lance, and he instantly collapses into a bleeding pile. Then hits Fate with it and passes out again. The next 'three minutes' are a race against time to get Konoka's artifact out so he doesn't bleed to death while a semiconscious Negi holds himself together with what magic he can.
  • Played straight later on when Tsukuyomi cuts Fate's arm off. He's completely unfazed, although his subordinates freak out when they see him. Justified in that he is a doll. Also, he pats the head of one of his servants — with his cut-off arm hold in his other hand. Lampshaded in that his servants wonder if he is attempting physical humour.
• Happens pretty often in One Piece.
  • Kohza is pretty underrated example, but technically he predates Whitebeard in terms being a bullet sponge being shot many, many times. However unlike Whitebeard Kohza is still alive by the end of the arc.
  • People seem to shrug off missing limbs all the time in One Piece: losing an arm like Shanks, Jozu, Zephyr, Nekomamushi, Perospero and Kidd or losing a leg like Zeff, Kyros and Inuarashi is more of a mild inconvenience than anything else in One Piece.
  • Zoro is one of the biggest examples of this trope — in the Arlong arc, Word of God is that he lost 5 liters of blood. The human body can hold up to six liters of blood at the very most. Let's assume Zoro has six liters at the very most. Zoro is stated to have lost nearly 90% of blood in the arc due to the wound Mihawk gave him. That's more than twice the amount of loss to be considered fatal (even Arc Villain Arlong is shocked that Zoro is still alive.). Yet, a few stitches later, he's up and partying with the gang...
    • In Wano Arc during Zoro's fight with Kamazo he takes a scythe to the shoulder and is clearly winded, but in true Made of Iron fashion Zoro mans through the pain getting his usual Slasher Smile and uses the scythe in combination with his other katanas to wreck Kamazo. Zoro then faints from blood loss... and needs urgent medical attention from Hiyori.
  • Luffy, thanks to eat a devil fruit, has the properties of rubber turned up to a supernaturally high degree. In addition to being able to stretch his body parts to hundreds of times their normal length, he is also immune to both electrity and blunt force. Granted, this only applies to bullets and usually punches; blades are more than capable of piercing and slicing through his rubber body, which is why Zoro's the guy who usually takes swordsmen on, but even then Luffy's taken some pretty impressive blows, including being impaled through the chest, and walked it off after some time. In Whole Cake Island he gets impaled in the middle of fight by Katakuri and unlike the time with Crocodile he stayed conscious and eventually won the fight since Luffy's stamina is nigh-unbeatable.
  • Sanji deserves as much recognition for this trope as Zoro or Luffy do, especially since Sanji unlike Zoro is completely unarmed and unlike Luffy, Sanji doesn't have a Devil Fruit to protect his body from grievous injury. Yet at one point, Sanji takes a couple of Mr. 2 Bon Clay's kicks, which put big holes in whatever they strike and doesn't need any medical attention afterwards despite casually mentioning broken bones. It doesn't end there: Sanji has a been shot in the arm, had his feet shredded (Movie 2) and even shot clean through the chest with a laser beam by a Pacifista and just walked it off. In the Thriller Bark arc, Sanji was stabbed in the back by Absalom with a knife long enough to go through his chest and still stayed conscious to defeat Absalom with ease (something Zoro in a similar situation couldn't do, when stabbed by Buggy). Chef of Iron indeed.
  • Despite being the weakest Straw Hat, Usopp has taken abuse that would (at very least) incapacitate the trio above. In his introduction arc Usopp was shot in the arm, in Enies Lobby Usopp got punctured by all ten (unlike Sanji he only got five) of Wolf Man Jabra's claws and recovered quickly, and in Sabaody Archipelago Usopp is shot through the shoulder with a laser beam and remains conscious. Most notable, in Alabasta, Usopp was hit in the face with a 4-ton bat, but instead of dying instantly, he was able to stand and continue fighting.
  • Nami has two of these moments: first she gets impaled through the leg and then the foot by Miss Doublefinger... and walks just fine afterwards. Later and even more impressively Nami tanks a powered up Shigan from Kalifa and keeps fighting, worth mentioning the Shigan one-shot Paulie one of the strongest Foremen in Galley-La.
  • Franky was still moving after getting hit by a sea train and after becoming Cyborg he got all the skin on his face burned off and it was more traumatic for the people around him.
  • Whitebeard, after he's been treated to 267 sword wounds, 562 bullets, 46 cannonballs and having half his face melted off, is still able to kick ass until his dying breath.
  • Charlotte Oven is a tank plain and simple he recovers from getting pierced through the chest by Vinsmoke Ichiji's exploding laser-like ability and appears shortly later with only a little bandage at his side and still strong enough to fight the Sun Pirates. And this was after getting kicked through a building by Sanji, then shot with a cannon ball and run over by Capone Bege. Word of God handwaves this by saying that Oven is physically the most durable of all his numerous siblings.
  • In the beginning of his backstory, Oden completely sliced in half, lengthwise, a gigantic boar monster known as a Mountain God, allowing all the people that it had eaten to be retrieved unharmed from its stomach. It's shown in a later scene stitched back together, tamed, and no worse for wear. Word of God states that Oden's sword cut was simply that clean.
• Psycho-Pass has Shinya Kogami suffer from this.
• Rurouni Kenshin is fairly realistic with limb injuries even though the cast is normally Made of Iron: In the Rajuuta arc, the first victim of his sword technique becomes almost permanently crippled (though he apparently recovers enough use of his arm in the Distant Finale to become an assistant dojo-master for Kaoru), and Kenshin himself doesn't react to being hit because he's doped up with painkillers; in the Kyoto arc, Saitou is injured in the legs and this reduces his efficacy, especially when Shishio attack him a second time in that area, and Kaoru breaks the knee of one member of the Quirky Miniboss Squad; by the time of the Enishi arc, Badass Normal Sano has to contend with the fact that using his ultimate technique shatters every bone in his hand since it still hadn't healed from trying it on Shishio right after his fight with Anji.
• In Shy, the heroine Spirits is pierced by an ice shard during a battle and subsequently trapped in ice. Once she gets freed, she manages to activate her powers again and and saves one of the other heroes who was captured by another enemy. Subverted later when Spirits tries to reassure her younger comerades and calls her injury a "small wind hole": The nurse who treated her makes it clear that the wound, the subsequent blood loss and the sudden temperature drop were very serious.
• Used in fights in Soul Eater on characters lacking the advantage of the black blood. Black Star in every encounter with Mifune, Stein with Medusa (at one point I'm pretty sure she drills a hole in him or at least stabs him badly). Avoided somewhat when Mosquito cuts Kid's arm off. He's noticeably shocked (about the lack of symmetry), bleeding a lot, and unable to stop Mosquito injuring him further until Brew kicks in. When it does, marginally reasonable responses no longer apply — Rule of Cool and CMOA do.
• That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime:
  • Rimuru takes "fatal" blows with alarming frequency, but he has three things going for him: He's a slime, so he doesn't have any valuable organs to actually damage, he has the Pain Nullification skill to ensure he's not incapacitated by any pain, and he has Self-Regeneration to quickly restore his destroyed parts. And that's how he starts off. Eventually, he gains abilities that grant him resistance and outright nullification to attacks that directly attack his soul and would make a lesser person Deader than Dead.
  • Rigurdo gets half of his face blown off by a servant of the Demon Lord Carrion and just calls it a simple scratch. One healing potion a moment later and his damaged face is all new, though the healing potions in question are capable of restoring entire lost limbs.
• In Those Who Hunt Elves, an inconclusive fight scene between Junpei and an elf ends with Junpei's arm bleeding. The English dub has him blow it off as "just a flesh wound".
• Anaak Jahad from Tower of God is stabbed in the shoulder by her mother's killer right above the heart. Three days later, she is a fit as a fiddle and has no problem moving.
• Wounding to stop or incapacitate (temporarily) is Vash's main offensive tactic in Trigun. He may be justified in that he's incredibly old and an experienced crackshot, so he knows exactly where to hit... but once he hit a Mook in a non-vital area that still resulted in severe bleeding, and Vash was terrified at the extent of the damage. The most annoying example was in the final duel with Knives in the animated series, where Vash shot his opponent Knives through both shoulders (closer to the chest than to the outsides,) and through both legs. He survived and didn't even bleed much, just needing a few bandages to cover his wounds. It is made explicit in the Manga that Knives and Vash can heal themselves through their plant abilities. At one point Knives mocks Vash for carrying scars from encounters with humans instead of healing himself.
• Underworld Academy Overload!!: Shion doesn't notice her face is gushing blood after she crashlands. When specifically asked by Towa about it, she tells it's no big deal. Mel has to drag her to the nurse's office.
• Averted in Vagabond. Kanemaki Jisai receives a slash to the arm and remarks after the fight that he'll never be able to swing a sword properly again. Also, during the fight with Inshun, Musashi gets cut across the face and eventually passes out from the blood loss after a few minutes.
  • Played straight: Musashi gets sliced up pretty good in his 70-man brawl, and yet is on the road to a full recovery.

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