Discussion Main / NormallyIWouldBeDeadNow

Wouldn't a better name for this trope be 'Action Zombie' (Riddled with bleeding wounds, but won't stay on the ground after a No Holds Bar Beat Down )? Or, would that be a subtrope or something that I'm just missing between Determinator, You Can Barely Stand, and Just a Flesh Wound.

This is probably not an example: Otto is expected to survive major damage with no lasting harm since he is a Discworld vampire.

• In the Discworld novel The Truth, Otto gets a sword in the back and out through his chest. Of course it doesn't kill him since he's a vampire, but he's still upset about getting his shirt ruined.
  • Not to mention the small matter of his decapitation earlier in the book, which is basically an inconvenience and is played for laughs — though this is hardly surprising in a Discworld book.

This is probably not a good example since it's fighting on after the expectation would be unconciousness not death — and the fact the character dies muddies the waters. If returning this example to the main article please merge in the thread-mode material.

• An in-engine battle in Final Fantasy V has Galuf continuing to fight after being reduced to 0 HP through sheer determination and badassery.
  • Not just a cutscene, you control him during it.
  • But that does kill him; usually when a character goes to 0 HP they are knocked out; Galuf continuing to fight (and thus further taking damage from attacks, where a knocked-out character wouldn't be targeted) leads to his permanent death.
  • The fan Flash animation Final Fantasy A+ has a similar incident with Pensuke.

Terminators are not good examples — they are not human and are built to fight after catastrophic damage. It is very difficult to judge how much damage it would take to make their continued opperation suprising.

• The T-800 from Terminator 2 was shown to have shut down after being stabbed through its power core, only to reboot back to life after a few minutes despite the damage.
  • Justified in that it had a backup power supply for just such an occasion.
  • In the same film, the T-1000 was frozen, one of the few things that actually harm it, then shot to pieces, but it was barely fazed.
    • In the "extended director's cut",it's shown that all of this has damaged the T-1000; it starts glitching as it chases the heroes into the foundry.
    • It also tried to torture Sarah to call for Connor, implying it was incapable of simply copying her and doing so itself.
      • Although it does so seconds later. In the director's cut, John is only able to tell that the Sarah he sees first (hobbling, wounded, and crying out for her son to help her get to safety) is fake and the Sarah he sees second (hobbling, wounded, and aiming a shotgun at the back of the first one) is real is when the fake one glitches. This is, of course, the ONE time the T-1000 doesn't bother to terminate a person it's copying.
      • The reason for both occurrences is quite believable though. The T-1000 didn't kill Sarah because as he was about to, he was attacked by the T-800. As for John knowing which was which, in the theatrical release, it could be said John knew his real mother because she was telling him to get out of the way of the where she was shooting, whereas the T-1000 was begging John to come to it, when Sarah had spent the whole movie telling John how he was more important than her, and to stay safe, even if it meant her death.

While there are probably Bullet Hell examples, I'm unsure about the validity of Touhou's grazing mechanic under this. This trope applies when it's reasonable within the setting's premises that we're looking at lethal injuries. Between the intended nonlethality of the projectiles appearing in the games (as they're proxies for the real spells and weapons), most Touhou characters being between Nigh Invincible and the real thing, and the name and special effects of the mechanic, which imply dodging, blocking, or absorbing energy from the attacks...

In the vast realm of Touhou doujinshi, there are likely examples that do fall under this trope, but I don't think it comes up in the games themselves.

I took out the Snow Crash example because it contained some very bad misinterpretations of the story. The stuff Y.T.'s Vagina Dentata shot Raven up with was a sedative, not intended to be lethal. Further, there was absolutely no reason to believe that Raven died in the airport showdown, and every reason to think that he escaped, wounded. The virtual fight with Hiro shouldn't even count, for what should be (but apparently are not) obvious reasons.