Bowl-full-of-names
The stresses of acceleration bit means that, fall far enough, and it is the -falling- that kills you, well before you even reach ground ...
(Actually, who needs love when one has music?...)
Isn't "falling through trees" a bad example, since it (potentially) means you're hitting & breaking through multiple branches consecutively, thus incrementally slowing your descent?
You'd still have to be really lucky to survive that way, but it seems like a bad example to use when trying to show why this trope doesn't work. (See also the "grabbing flagpoles and washing lines and canopies when falling from a tall building" urban variant).
Edited by johnnye Hide / Show Replies
I realize this is an old topic, but you are absolutely correct, and this article ought to be corrected accordingly. I'm a physicist, and the extent of damage caused by the fall is related to the rate of deceleration.
Trees are good at breaking falls because, number one, branches have some elasticity (like a spring or a trampoline) and so each branch slows your descent more gradually than concrete or dirt would, and number two, as you've pointed out, the branches will cause you to decelerate in incremental steps rather than all at once, since the branches will break before fully bringing you to a stop, and as a result, you will hit multiple branches on your way down.
See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicholas_Alkemade
for an example of someone who actually did fall out of an aircraft and survive because of snow and trees breaking his fall.
The fact that someone actually did survive such a fall makes it pretty obvious that the idea is not as ridiculous as this trope entry claims.
This principle, incidentally, the same reason that parkour athletes tumble when they make high (one storyish) jumps. By letting their legs buckle, they spread the deceleration from landing over a longer period of time, allowing them to be unscathed despite falls that would injure a normal person. It is also the same reason why falling onto a trampoline or a bed does not hurt like falling onto concrete does (its elasticity increases your deceleration time).
Sorcerer in training
I don't have the source to hand at the moment. But a few years ago I was reading a book about forensic autopsies, and the subject in question had jumped off a building, apparent suicide. He had landed on his feet, but they weren't sure if the distance to fall had been enough to kill as opposed to severely injure him. (Even in the city on a sidewalk.)
Turns out that somehow, the way he hit and when he hit as his heart beat forced a massive amount of blood into his heart. (That was the theory.) His heart literally exploded; the one telling the story said it looked like his heart had shredded into fine spaghetti. Very unusual. And another way for the stop at the end to be lethal.
Coming back to where you started is not the same as never leaving. -Terry Pratchett Hide / Show Replies
... Eww. Hope that's an urban legend.
Don't make me destroy you. @ Castle Series
Shouldn't we add the Leap of Faith thing into the assassin's creed examples? It seems like pretty much the same thing to me. Jump off 10-story building, land in hay bale, magically survive.
New troper, but what would the best way to discuss climbing ropes as a possible real life example?
I would like to point out that modern dynamic ropes are elasticated and so potentially avert(?) this trope as opposed to the old school climbers who first tied inelastic hemp ropes around there waists which would of course have helped very little.
[[color:purple:♏]]
Cut the following paragraph. We don't need a physics lesson embedded in the trope description:
It's not even the "the speed of the stop" that kills you: it's the fact that one part of your body decelerates rapidly and the rest of it starts to decelerate… a little bit later. Squish.
Moving an example to the examples page: the gist appears to be that if a character can change their vector by wrapping a cable around a fixed object when following a trajectory in zero-G he must have been moving fast enough to get hurt if he hit something. That's too complex and indirect to make a good example.
- Subverted in Enders Game and by Proxy Enders Shadow. Bean becomes Ender's 'Special Tactics' team leader and Bean procures a bunch of steel rope. He uses it in the Zero-G environment of the battle room to make pin-point turns, and considering that "The enemy gate is down" most times he'd be swinging up and around a crate and shows that unpadded and without proper training it really fucking hurts.
You know we should really only list examples in video games when it happens within the story. If it happens within the gameplay then shouldn't it be associated with Acceptable Breaks from Reality?
Edited by KSonik
I'm rather confused with Playing-With of this trope. If someone falls from great height, without slowing the fall down at all, but survives, does it count as this trope? I added Halo Infinite example, where Chief can fall from the top of mountains and survive without problem, but now I'm not sure if it fits this trope. Also wanted to add several examples from DOOM, but now I'm not sure about that too.
Edited by XanderClarke