The Juggernaut / Literature

Juggernauts in literature.

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• In The Message, the fourth Animorphs book, Visser Three morphs a giant, untiring Sea Monster called a Mardrut to hunt the kids down with. They're only spared a messy death thanks to the fortuitous arrival of magic talking whales. Many of his other morphs count as well.
  • In The Reaction, Rachel acquires a crocodile morph, which she's apparently allergic too. This leads to her expelling the DNA from her body as an adult crocodile. It then fights half the team shrugging off everything they throw at it, including Rachel in her grizzly bear morph. Then Ax arrives and quickly cuts it in half.
• Arrivals from the Dark: This is how the Bino Faata are described by the protagonist in Invasion, after learning all the details about their massive starship and its capabilities, having previously thought that Earth's in-system Space Navy would be able to handle a single oversized ship. No such luck, the Faata starship might be unarmed, but it carries hundreds of cruiser-sized battle modules and thousands of corvette-sized ones. Each battle module is armed with an Anti Matter cannon and uses Artificial Gravity to move as nimbly as a Space Fighter. Meanwhile, the starship itself is protected by a Deflector Shield that effortlessly shrugs off a 140-gigaton Macross Missile Massacre. Subverted in later books, though, when humanity gets it hands on the remains of the above-mentioned starship (destroyed through sabotage), which allows them to reverse-engineer much of the tech and start building massive anti-matter-armed starships of their own.
• The giant squid from Beast. It's all but unkillable. This more or less holds true in Real Life as well. The only thing that can kill it is a Sperm Whale, which makes sense, as that is its natural predator.
• In The Black Company, The Limper qualifies as this after he gets his new body in The Silver Spike. He REALLY qualifies after he comes out of the fondu pot at the end..
• Citadel's Coach Achala Juggernaut isn't actually unstoppable. However, any object he sets in motion is. When he's taking a fight seriously, he wears a uniform that covers every inch of his skin so that, as long as he doesn't stop moving, he's nearly invulnerable. More than once, he's literally run through his opponents.
• Cthulhu Mythos:
  • H. P. Lovecraft's Great Old Ones are immortal and undying (that is not dead which can eternal lie, and so on). While it's possible to damage them, they regenerate any damage nearly instantaneously. In "The Call of Cthulhu", Cthulhu got rammed in the face with a boat and suffered no permanent harm. In the work of another mythos-writer he's suffered a direct hit from a 300 megaton nuclear warhead and wasn't even slowed down, and in the Call of Cthulhu RPG, rules state that if he is hit by a nuclear attack he gets vaporized, but reassembles 24 hours later and becomes radioactive! (Apparently, the only thing worse than an Eldritch Abomination is a radioactive one.)
    • Though it has to be said that Cthulhu and many (if not necessarily all) of Lovecraft's other horrors, for all that they may be Nigh Invulnerable, show little in the way of juggernaut-style behavior — at least in the original works, they usually don't seem very interested in going anywhere in particular. They might well be unstoppable once they decided to, but we don't see it happen often; Cthulhu doesn't even leave his island and fails to as much as seriously damage the yacht that apparently passes straight through him, for example.
  • Another example would be The Hounds of Tindalos. Immortal creatures, dwelling in the angles of time who relentlessly hunt down anyone who attracts their attention. They use corners and other angles to access our plane of existence, and the only thing that might slow them down would be to plaster over the corners to make them into curves (which they can't access). But you'd better get all the angles.
• The Luggage from Discworld books is quite implacable, and will follow its owner anywhere (even to the afterlife). In The Colour of Magic it gets bombarded with enough magic to cause reality itself to start breaking, yet survives unharmed (mostly due to being made from a completely magic-resistant material).
  • The Golems of the Discworld also qualify. They're not fast, but they're ridiculously strong, survive in just about any environment, and never need to rest. As the Patrician says, "Four miles an hour is 672 miles in a week. It all adds up."
• Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter can defeat anyone but Albus Dumbledore and Harry Potter (and only due to plot reasons for the latter). Even Dumbledore states that his most powerful spells would not be able to keep Voldemort out unless he was openly powering them. One of the first things we learn about Voldemort is that nobody survives long after he decides that he wants them dead.
  • Predecessor Villain Gellert Grindelwald was shown to be even more powerful than Voldemort was, by virtue of being acknowledged by Albus Dumbledore, who easily overwhelmed Voldemort even in his older days, as being very nearly on par with himself. During the 1940s it was widely believed that Albus Dumbledore was the only one who would even stand a chance at defeating him, and Fantastic Beasts shows exactly why: At least Voldemort can be opposed by a singularly powerful wizard or witch, even if he ends up winning, and 3 such high-level opponents end up fighting him roughly to a stalemate. Grindelwald meanwhile can deliver even more one-sided defeats than Voldemort does against opponents that would have given Voldemort some challenge at least, and be it 30 or 50 Aurors or even the protagonists themselves, who are all master-level wizards and witches, no army shown so far can even be of credible threat to the Elder-Wand wielding Dark Wizard. The protagonists of the prequel only survive fighting him due to external circumstances, Grindelwald being seconds away from killing them after only moments of engaging them before such things happen.
  • Giants apparently have this property in the Potter verse. Our best example in action is half-giant Rubeus Hagrid. You can fire as many spells at him as you want, but it wont do you any good once you've pissed him off. Six elite aurors found this out the hard way.
• The Shrike from the Hyperion Cantos most definitely qualifies. Biomechanical, incomprehensible, almost god-like in power, and an implacable force of destruction.
• Legacy of the Dragokin: Ktonia's fight scene is, in a nutshell, her walking down the street while the heroes throw themselves at her in pointless attempts to stop or harm her.
• In the Nightside series, there's The Walking Man, an agent of God that is sent to clean up sin in the Nightside — violently. Nothing can hurt him, nothing can even slow him down, until John shows him that what he's doing is wrong.
• In Space Glass, Bagok Grinch shrugs off most of the mercs attacks, only being truly affected by Ratroe's sniper rounds.
• The Stone Man by Luke Smitherd is about an 8-foot-tall stone man that appears in a busy city one day and then begins to walk off in a straight line, simply going through buildings, walking across the bottoms of waterways, and ignoring any attempts to interfere with it.
• The Sword of Shannara Trilogy: The Reaper from The Elfstones of Shannara. Swords break on its face, falling off a bridge only delays it, blasts from the eponymous Elfstones, which kill most Demons with ease, barely scorch its hide. It tracks Wil Ohmsford and Amberle from one end of the Westland to the other and never, ever, stops. Wil finally has to direct the Elfstones' fire into its face and down its hood from a few feet away in order to kill it.
• In Terry Brooks' Witches Brew, Ben and Willow are attacked by an unstoppable mechanical man created by Nightshade and Mistaya. Ben doesn't have time to summon the Paladin and is only saved by the Ardsheal, who is killed in the process. The chapter where it appears is named, appropriately, "Juggernaut".
  • The Ardsheal itself is this, which is why it's the only thing capable of standing up to the metal man. They're the River Master's ultimate Living Weapons, utterly unstoppable, utterly merciless and completely terrifying. Which is why Ben is in so much trouble when Nightshade reanimates the Ardsheal's corpse and sends it after him next.
    Willow: Nothing can stop an Ardsheal! Nothing!

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