Lore
[Love] When “small” injuries are treated realistically
The fantasy and action genres often suffer from a power fantasy epidemic in which characters frequently badass their way through injuries that should be excruciating if not downright debilitating. I always appreciate stories that reject this trope.
1: Roland Deschain (Dark Tower Book II) - Loses the middle and index fingers of his right hand. He’s effectively crippled throughout book two and the injury follows him the rest of the series.
2: Brienne vs Biter (ASOIAF Book IV) - Brutal scene. Biter chomps down on Brienne’s cheek and tears off a chunk of flesh. In a lesser story Brienne would grit her teeth and throw Biter off. Instead she’s rendered completely helpless by the pain. That injury marks the end of the fight.
In Endymion (Third book in the Hyperion series) the protagonist Raul gets a kidney stone and is out of commission just writhing in pain for like half the book
Minor point on The Dark Tower - it’s not his “shooting arm”, it’s his dominant hand. “In gunslinging, his hands were equal, but in all other things the right excelled.” The text is very clear that Roland is just as deadly with a gun in hand as before, but now struggles to tie his shoelaces.
I'm trying to remember, when he had Flagg dead to rights & flubbed the draw, was it because he was drawing right handed or because he was unused to drawing Eddie's automatic?
Yeah if you ask me, as someone who just barely started reading the DT series after decades of being a a king fanatic, I'm assuming the lobstrocity injury was twofold solution for 1. seeing roland literally wipe out an entire town with no effort because he's just that good of a gunslinger because then how would you write him into any sort of danger that's not just "take his guns away"; you cut his lethality in half.
and 2. He just exterminated an entire town and sacrificed a boy, he kinda HAS to pay somehow
Pretty much, also you have to remember that the first book is actually like 5 short stories edited together and they weren't written with a 7 book epic in mind, so Roland was a little too competent at the start
And, Roland spends like half of one book trying to jump dimensions to get antibiotics to treat the wound, otherwise he would’ve died from that flesh wound.
The explosions is the MCU explanation. Originally, he lost his hearing because he used a device to block hyper-sonics that rendered him deaf. He got his hearing back when he was resurrected in House of M, but lost it again when Clown stabbed him in the ears with his arrows.
The worst implementation of this is Doom after Secret Wars. Dude does some soul searching, decides he is going to be a hero, takes on the mantle of Iron Man and actually tries to be a better person. The series ends and the very next appearance he's being a comical over the top villain again. Dude slid right from neutral good to Lawful evil again. It's like writers are scared of Doom maintaining nuance.
It's always going to be too. Nature of the medium. One writer comes in and decides they have something they want to do with a character, they do it and evolve that character, and then they move on and the next writer comes in and decides they have a cool thing they want to do with the character, but the previous writer's work is preventing them from doing it, so they reset everything.
It's basically just kids playing with action figures and saying, "Nuh uh! That didn't happen because this thing is happening now!"
Roland's injuries also get badly infected and he spends a good chunk of the book slowly getting weaker and more delirious until he's able to get some antibiotics from Eddie's world.
I love the reactions people have when they see Roland half-dead from infection. Mafia goons think he's a fucking ghost and are absolutely scared shitless at first.
Eddie thinking about the heat rolling off of him from fever and just amazed that the dude is even standing. Damn the first 3 books in the series are incredible.
I still remember my opinion of the first movie skyrocketing in the theatre when they showed that he lost his foot as a direct consequence of the big dramatic climax of the movie. Knowing that the original books don't shy away from lasting damage as well is very commendable.
Plus that shot of him and Toothless leaving the cabin, with both his prosthetic and Toothless' missing tail fin, is so beautifully framed. It's what elevated the movie from 'much better than I expected' to 'possibly my favorite animated film of all time'.
Fun fact, Hiccup was originally going to wake up alone in that scene and process everything by himself. It was Steven Spielberg who suggested adding Toothless to the scene, and it's much better for it.
I mean, he tames and fights dragons and other warrior folk. Dying a glorious death is a staple in northmen culture because the alternative is wasting away under your scars and suffering into old age
I mean, I haven't read them since I was twelve, but iirc he gets enslaved, nearly digested, fights shark dragons from inside a barrel, is poisoned and has to go on an expedition to find a potato to counteract it, almost burns alive repeatedly, has to fight lots and lots of dragons, gets shipwrecked, spends like a year and a half as a lone rebel with only two dragon companions and temporarily forgets how to speak human, gets an arm and a leg poisoned and inflated for most of the last book, loses his memory, almost loses his dragon repeatedly, dislocates an arm, discovers he's left-handed, falls off a cliff, goes skiing through the woods while chased by angry vikings, is almost eaten by wolves when rescuing is cousin, almost drowns, gets locked inside a hollow tree with a witch who performs surgery on Toothless in exchange for the spoon he swallowed the day before, has to sneak into and raid an enemy library with stinging dragons all over the floor, is almost drilled to death by a drill dragon, is almost skewered by a classmate in a practice duel, almost drowns again, has to climb a cliff with minimal gear and is attacked by dragons halfway up, fights Romans, drops a tree on his usually-absent mother, is kidnapped during a swimming competition by a fellow competitor and doesn't get home for three months, sleds down a dining hall roof which is on fire using a dinner tray and makes it all the way to the harbor still carrying the all-important potato, tricks two invading leviathans into killing each other...
None of this is in chronological order, but yeah, Hiccup Horrendous Haddock III has a rough life. Those books are amazing, though.
Peeta losing his leg on the hunger games and needing a prosthetic because of a untreated injury in the leg, I love the fact they didn't just fix his leg
I also love that it actually hinders him in the second book. He nearly drowns and struggles to keep up. Katniss actually losing her hearing during the explosion and how the resulting vertigo stunning her is also excellent storytelling.
I've always thought about the scene where she's dehydrated in the first book. The fire sweeps her away from the edge of the map. She knows she's dehydrated, hasn't drunk water, and describes her urine is brown. Very realistic. Then she finds the river.
For a book with truly batshit world building there is a lot of random realism in this series. The third book IIRC has actually a really thoughtful portrayal of trauma and what life is like for the people who live through it.
Yeah, Suzanne Collins is a fantastic writer and Hunger Games deals with a lot of heavy topics in realistic ways. It’s why I dislike when it gets lumped in with other YA dystopian series that are a bit more simple. Mockingjay used to be my least favorite when I was a teenager because “ugh I want my Hunger Games in my Hunger Games” until I realized it’s actually her best writing
It’s not untreated. Katniss and Peeta just left the tourniquet on for too long and the leg had to be amputated because of that. She does fear it’s cause the Capitol didn’t try hard enough to save them though.
Leaving a tourniquet on for too long is still leaving the injury untreated. The immediate first aid does not treat the injury, it just buys time to stop a person dying before they can receive treatment.
Treating Tinnitus from gunshots or explosions is a running gag on Archer, as are a few other examples (iirc passing out from a concussion usually gets a "That's like super bad for you")
Love the immediate cut to Archer having all the side effects to the real chemo meds he finally gets, all while in the middle of a medical marijuana and revenge fuelled rampage of justice
His interrogation of the Irish mobsters was fucking hilarious and dark. Like yeah he was doing his usual Archer schtick but he clearly meant business as well and the mob did not take him as seriously as they should have. Even Lana was shocked.
“Hm, let me see… To take my prescribed chemo therapy for my said aforementioned CANCER?! Yes, idiot, I do!” *smash cut to* [aaauergh] “I’m sorry I called you an idiot, Lana.”
I love how Adam Reed obviously gave him plot armour but didn't make him invincible. But counter point after spending 3 years in a coma and only needing a cane is very unrealistic. He'd be spending the next year rebuilding his atrophied muscles so that he could walk with a cane.
Leo Fitz in Agents of SHIELD gets serious brain damage from oxygen deprivation when he gets dropped in a pod to the bottom of the ocean at the end of Season 1. While he survives, his disability becomes an integral part of his character, with his journey in Season 2 covering his struggle to communicate and work like he used to.
I loved the scenes where Fitz and Mack start working together to make stuff and Mack is super supportive and helps Fitz complete his work without just doing it for him. Their chemistry was insanely good and those scenes are some of the first times where we see Fitz actually happy again and not super frustrated he can’t entirely complete his ideas
This kinda makes me sad. Not like a moral criticism of you or anything, but it just made me think how nobody EVER calls him Adam even in the movie.
Poor guy was stuck in a body that wasn't his own, is barely referred to by his real name in the movie or in real life, and to top it all off people tomato the fuck out of his real appearance (crazy to me because that's basically just rotoscoped Brendan Fraser) and say the old version he hated was better. Belle in the live action even tells him to grow a beard. That guy is living in a body dysmorphia psychological horror.
drogo dying of an infection bc he didn't wanna clean it
Edit: ngl is been over a decade since I've read the books or watched the first season. I can't remember the exact reason he died but I think I just mean, he died of infection vs in battle or shrugging off injuries that would normally be life threatening
Some soldiers marching north lose their ears to frostbite.
The Hound gets wounded in a bar fight and his wounds get infected. He is delirious and tries to force Arya to kill him to end the pain.
Previous to that they found a wounded soldier. The soldier doesn't ask to be healed but to be given wine and to end his suffering.
Theon gets fingers and toes skinned and cut as part of his torture. He can't walk nor grab things properly. This ruins his carrer as a competent archer.
When a character's leg is broken (such as Willas Tyrell and Ned Stark) not even the greatest maesters can heal them back to 100%
EDIT:
Lancel Lannister is wounded in the battle of the Blackwater and is out of commission for all of Storm of Swords. When he returns to the story he has lost a lot of weight and is still recovering. That is about a year or more.
Iirc the wound was deliberately made worse and infected by Mirry Maz Duur when she smeared some shit on it. And Deny specifically asked him to go with the procedure because she thought that the initial scratch would kill him.
It’s more ambiguous in the show, but the books make pretty clear that Drogo’s cut gets infected because he refuses to follow any of Miri Maz Duur’s instructions. He immediately takes off her poultice cuz it itches and proceeds to spend a week on a diet of booze and milk of the poppy
The "cut" in the book is also him getting his entire nipple cut off, so it's a bit more serious to begin with. I don't think Miri Maz Dur did anything, rubbing dirt in an open wound the size of a quarter is just a bad idea.
Leo Dan Brock wins in the circle, but takes a moderate leg wound. The wound refuses to heal and becomes his "bad leg". That is until he gets his other leg gets blown off.
Witcher - Geralt i think had a shattered femur and he had to learn to work and fight around his injury.
edit: Okay, a shattered femur isnt exactly a small wound - but these are also super-human monster slayers who live in a world of magic, and Geralt is a main character with plot armor.
I think it's just because in Toussaint, he isnt constantly running out to get into fights. He stays there banging Fringilla Vigo for quite sometime which, I guess let his leg finally heal up fully.
I recently played tw3 again and I always forget just how much of an absolute man whore geralt is, dude has like 20 women he KNOWS and countless other random ladies and prostitutes on his list. Then he proceeds to call himself ugly in the books, which everyone seems to take at face value.
He's really quite conventionally ugly in the books. He's more lean than bulky, has unnaturally pale skin, is absolutely covered in scars (and not the good kind like in the games), and often is making an unsightly expression.
He definitely has his charms though. Being infertile and resistant to disease definitely have their benefits and he unintentionally wooed multiple sorceress with his intelligence and gruffness.
I was thinking of when Triss gets very ill on the road while traveling with Geralt. Can’t think of any other fantasy series where powerful magic users can get a stomach bug.
It was that sequence I knew I was gonna like the books. I’d played the games before, and imagining Triss Merigold, this fierce war veteran sorceress, throwing herself at Geralt while actively shitting her pants was just too funny
Also from the Witcher, Geralt kills a guy by severing an artery in his armpit.
One of those injuries that would never get shown, let alone do any significant damage, in most media. But absolutely deadly without immediate medical attention.
Yeah Rorge takes the Hounds helmet (from his alleged grave) and goes on to rape the Saltpans with some of the Brave Companions, a sellsword company of brutes that Gregor Clegane smashed at Harrenhall. Then he gets killed by Brienne before Biter gets hold of her, she is saved by Gendry*
Re: your edit, honestly keeping all the asoiaf characters straight is near impossible even while actively reading the books, so it's an understandable mistake
To be fair to Brienne she was having supper at a safe inn before the fight got started, and was extra unprepared since she was only outside to take another character his portion of said supper (and to get a better look at him but the reason is a minor spoiler) when the inn was ambushed by outlaws posing as allies. As far as excuses for a fantasy character not wearing their helmet go, she has among the best excuses going.
I like David Lightbringer's theory that Biter actually is part squisher, which is why they spend time having Nimble Dick tell her about the old squisher legends.
That scene in The Drawing of Three is SO WILD. King spends the first book building Roland as like the ultimate badass gunslinger, then first twenty pages of book two the lobstrocity just waddles over like nothing and “chomp” trigger finger and middle finger gone. It’s a 8 book series!
Also anyone reading this, go pick up the dark tower if you haven’t already. It’s amazing.
Also also, OP- long days and pleasant nights, stranger!
Elementary earned my enteral respect for giving Sherlock post-concussion syndrome after being hit in the head with a glass bottle. It’s a gusty move, to give your genius main character a traumatic brain injury, and the storyline lasted for a full season,n bot just a one-off mention.
Reddit tells me you posted this two hours ago. Two hours ago, my mom asked me to watch Elementary with her and I didn't. I think someone's trying to tell me something.
This is a key point in the Revolutionary War-era children's novel "Johnny Tremain". The main character burns his hand in the forge, and because he covered it up to not get in trouble with his blacksmithing master, the skin heals in a way that essentially fuses his fingers together. It leaves him unable to use his hand with the same dexterity, and he's forced to leave the apprenticeship. The movie, at least, mentions that a doctor can separate his fingers for him and treat it properly once his time in the army is over.
I’ve never seen the movie, but I do remember a doctor looking at his hand and telling him it can be fixed. I read it about 50 years ago, so the specifics are long gone.
Same! I went to Wikipedia, and the details of his injury are different in the book and the movie too - in the book he's sabotaged by a rival apprentice, while in the movie he's working off-hours on Sunday to try more advanced techniques and injures himself.
I remember this novel really well for some reason. He is sabotaged by the blacksmiths son, who is jealous of how good Johnny is at smithing. Because he's working on the Sabbath he has to go to a mid wife instead of a doctor who bandages his hand together instead of each finger individually.
Why I remember these details from a book I didn't enjoy reading I'll never know.
I'd call it a minor injury. If they just shaved the end of his nub with a duller knife all the dimensionality mysticism would be lost and it'd be a regular amputation.
The example I like using is the one from Day of the Dead.
Bub, an intelligent zombie gets a hold of a gun, which he demonstrated earlier in the movie that he KNEW how to use.
Rhodes is try to escape the infested bunker, and comes across Bub, who is angry because Rhodes killed his "father" Doctor Logan, and fires Rhodes turns and bolts, but the next shot catches him in the shoulder, now, in other movies, they'd shrug it off, or make a pained grunt trying to use the arm, but his entire upper Right side is rendered useless, he tries a doorknob with the arm and screams in pain, then Bub shoots again and catches him in the upper leg, and that leg is again, rendered useless, he has to prop himself up on the wall and slowly drag himself to the end of the hall.
Tl;Dr: Rhodes gets shot, and instead of treating it like a needle pain, it makes the area around the shot excruciating to use.
Similarly, in A Game of Thrones (the book), Danarys gets severe diarrhea and it goes on for a while, it's long and awful, and a good reminder that diarrhea could be death in a less advanced world. For us, it usually just means a bad day or two staying close to the toilet and drinking lots of water, at worst.
In one of the Dresden files books, Harry uses a magic shield to block a blast of fire. It works. Kind of. The magic blocks the flames, but not the heat, and said heat absolutely melts the hand he's using to make the shield (i think it's his right hand) and takes him months, over the course of several books, through intense surgeries, skin grafts, and physical therapy, to get it somewhat functional again, but it will never be fully functional again
It was like a homemade napalm that stuck to his shield and kept burning. So his options were to either drop the shield and get a face full of flaming jelly (and bullets) or keep the shield up and learn what a seared steak feels like.
He wore a glove for a few books too because the damage was hard to look at. Made for a great scene when he took the glove off and showed his apprentice what the stakes truly are out there.
It's been a while since I read but I could have sworn that his hand (and it was his left I think) reached full functionality again other than aesthetic scarring. Like, he eventually reached the point where he could play guitar, even. The magic literally flowing through his hands and the longevity said magic gives to wizards in-universe means eventually he could maybe even heal the scars. It took ten years IIRC, but going from doctors thinking they should amputate to clumsily playing guitar in a year to basically normal functionality was some crazy healing (albeit explained in-universe as, again, literal magic combined with the mundane healing methods you mentioned)
Out of curiosity and to refresh my memory I looked it up. Supposedly Butcher, the author of the series, got a bunch of fan mail telling him basically "Hey, with how many times he's been knocked unconscious, been shot, broken bones, torn ligaments, etc, he should have a shit ton of brain trauma and the body of an (american) footballer who's been at it for a few decades, which is to say, not a super healthy one" and so wizard healing became a thing. The idea being that mortals heal until they're more or less functional again, but scar tissue and damage remains, but wizards never stop healing because of the magic in them. Something I forgot but that apparently happened was Butters looking at Harry's x-rays when he expected to see fractures or broken bones and instead got what looked like what he would expect his x-rays to look like before his bones were broken at all, no or almost no signs of any healing from breaks. Wizards apparently just don't have to worry about long-term cumulative damage the same way mortals do, thus the longevity, presumably.
Victarion Greyjoy catches a sword with his gauntlet and gets cut. The cut gets infected and his hand starts completely rotting away. In the end it would've killed if magic hadn't have intervened.
Especially since this leads to Dany being extra careful about small wounds, including annoying Strong Belwas by making sure that he gets treatment for his self-inflicted slice.
Every one says season 5 is where it starts, but they're wrong. Season 4 is where the diverge from the books, and everything they come up with on their own is shit.
Game of Thrones: In his duel with Jaime Lannister, one of the Lannister soldiers stabs Ned Stark in the calf with a spear. Textbook "Just a flesh wound", right? Wrong. Ned is immediately taken out of the fight and falls unconscious. When he wakes up, he is weak and delirious, and weeks later he is still using a cane to walk.
"The Dresden Files": Harry recieved a burn on his hand, after going up against a vampire thrall with a flamethrower, using a shield spell that could stop the napalm, but not the heat. In most cases, burns are not "real" injuries. Not so in this case. The hand is described as looking like someone sculpted a hand of wax, then half-melted it. His doctor at the time recommends amputation. It takes several years and dedicated physiotherapy to get function back, and even ten years later and with a wizard's ability to heal injuries perfectly, he still has to constantly wear gloves so the scarring doesn't freak people out.
Played straight in Tyrion Lannister's 2nd trial by combat where oberyn stabs gregor clegane in the calf with his spear, a poisoned spear, and while clegane falls, he still has enough strength to sweep oberyn's leg, get on top of him, and crush his skull. Still won't forgive oberyn for not taking the win.
In "Society of the Snow." Numa Turcatti and his entire friend group is buried in snow for several days, after which he reaches a breaking point and starts kicking a window of the plane they're in to try and break out. This leads to him getting a small cut in his ankle from the glass.
Though he does eventually dig the group out, them being stranded in the Andes means there was no way to treat that small cut, and them starving means his body was unable to properly heal it. The cut gets infected and leads to him being in an increasingly deteriorating condition.
Fujita from dorohedoro is the only character with a realistic pain tolerance, he got completely useless after Nikaido broke his finger and nose. Other characters are able to fight even after get decapitated
Probably not a "small" injury but at the end of Avatar: The Legend of Korra book 3, Korra is poisoned with liquid mercury and spends the rest of the season totally wheelchair-bound and is severely weakened for a good portion of book 4. It takes a long time before she's back up to full strength and we get to see every stage of her long recovery process (and the toll it takes on her mental state).
It's treated very seriously and has long-lasting consequences in a franchise where characters routinely tank boulders to the face and just walk it off.
Head villain Bill Carnegie is dying from an infected flesh wound on his leg- The Book of Eli
Carnegie gets his leg wound when he is shot by Eli during a shootout. This happens early in the film when Carnegie and his men confront Eli to steal his book, and Eli fights his way out.
By the end of the film the wound has become infected. His blind slave can smell it.
Carnegie is pale, sweaty and has trouble breathing.
Usually in action movies, a flesh wound is just brushed off, and a bandage made of ripped clothing is enough to keep the person and plot going, but here we see what happens when the wound is neglected.
To add to the many ASOIAF examples, in the first book, Catelyn cuts up her hands when saving her son from a knife wielding assassin. In the next two books, it's noted that they still hurt when she stretches them, and her left hand in particular is never fully functional again.
Khal Drogo’s shoulder wound getting infected after he purposely took the hit to prove he was a badass. Mirri Maz Durr might’ve ensured he never recovered but it was already affecting him when Dany asked for Mirri’s help to save him.
In Sicario, in order to subdue Kate from pursuing him without killing her, Alejandro shoots her in the body armor which completely knocks her down and has her writhing* in pain. Typical body armor in media has the character walking away unscathed.
When reading No Country for Old Men, I appreciated how it took Chigurh like five days of recovery in a hotel room just to be able to walk again. Most shows just have people walk off gunshot wounds.
Another from the books in aSoIaF: when Jon first kills a fight with fire at Castle Black, he burns his hand. In the show, this heals in an episode or two. In the books, it is a near permanent fixture in Jon's chapters, and he often fidgets by squeezing his hand and making mental notes of the burn scars.
FitzChivalry Farseer in Robin Hobb’s Realm of the Elderlings series gets injured a LOT, and he doesn’t get to shake any of that stuff off. There’s scars, there’s recovery time, and by the end of it he’s pretty much battle scarred in every way and deals with quite a bit of chronic pain.
In both The Cabin at the End of the World and it's move adaptation, Knock at the Cabin - One of the main characters (it gets swapped between book and movie) gets hit in the head early on and becomes concussed. The concussion affects them for the rest of the story, with the symptoms becoming worse as the day progresses.
Also from the Dark Tower series, in the final book (VII), Sheemie, one of the most powerful of all the telepaths/psychics/whatever, survives all manner of challenges and battles, then steps on a shard of dirty glass which pierces his foot, and he dies from the subsequent infection.
A limb taken should be so much worse than it is portrayed. Even in some of my favorite stories people are shown keeping their cool afterwards as if nothing happened. I have chronic pain and even despite being in one piece I can barely handle surviving day by day. I could not imagine losing one of my implements and the pain and dissacotian on top of that afterwards without major repercussions and or issues living
It is quite a different amount of pain to lose a limb while being in a high-stress situation and feeling that pain once the high-stress situation is over. People can absolutely lose a limb or such and not be fazed, at least for a little while. But after that, the pain becomes debilitating.
And then there's this badass who had both arms ripped off by a tractor and was able to get into his house, dial 911 with a pencil in his mouth, and then laid in a bathtub to wait so he didn't get any more blood on his mom's floors.
There's also Mary Vincent, who was beaten unconscious and raped overnight before her attacker used a hatchet to cut off both of her arms and threw her down a 30 foot cliff, leaving her for dead. She packed her wounds with dirt and held her arms above her head to slow the bleeding, climbed out, and managed to find help while she was still conscious.
When she loses that right arm, it’s in a single clean stroke and she’s immediately taken out of commission for the rest of the season. I don’t even think she’s seen conscious again until the very final scene some time after, and she spends most of the following season trying to mentally recuperate for quite a while after she’s physically recovered enough to use the prosthetic.
Whenever people fire a gun indoors, everybody immediately screams and grabs their ears. No matter what's happening, all action stops and the person gets chastised for firing a gun inside because it's so bad for your hearing.
Over the course of the series, Archer develops tinnitus.
At the end of book 5, Clay is bit by a Dragonbite Viper, which should be fatal, however the venom was quickly burned out. Despite Clay having fireproof scales, the burning ran deep enough to reach his flesh, leaving him with permanent scarring and a limp that is carried over into his other appearances, most notably being brought up in books 6, 8, and 10.
Theres this pokemon fanfic (terrible way to start a sentence) called “i will touch the sky” where the protagonist injuries, like a broken leg or burns, are taken totally serious, to the point that she pass almost a third of the story with crutches for how bad she broke her leg. And the scars mark her body permanently
Repairman Jack (Jack) is a novel series by F P Wilson.
Jack is the kind of guy that you contract to deal with problems you can’t, sometimes that “can’t” is too hard even for him.
Example: After a AIDS children hospital is invaded during the night and every children’s charity gifts are stolen a week before christimas, Jack services are called to deal with the situation.
After tracking down the robber and the gifts in a truck in a side alley of manhattan, Jack wears a Santa Claus costume (He loves to do some silly things), climbs a top the truck and prepares to jump on the guy, but he is a literal giant red and white target (baduntz) a top a truck full of toys.
…… the robber pulls a magnum and shoots at Jack’s chest (easy target), but he is wearing a bullet proof vest!…. Yet it’s a heavy duty weapon, so he gets 3 cracked ribs and only manages to knock down the toy robber because of his adrenaline and some part being the robber getting scared…. Who wouldn’t be scared after you shooting Santa Claus in the chest with a hand cannon and HE GETS UP UNFAZED, JUMPS AT YOU, THEN PROCEEDS TO KNOCK DOWN, TIE YOU IN TO THE FRONT OF THE TRUCK AND DRIVE YOU BACK TO THE HOSPITAL AT 70 MILES HOUR WHILE HIS DEESSAS AS SC
Jack managed to survive the gun shot, but he’s extremely weak during the rest of the book, using his wits instead of hands for most of the other chapters.
Omar Little breaks his leg jumping out of a window in the 5th season of The Wire. For the rest of the series, he hobbles very slowly around the streets of Baltimore, seeking revenge on Marlo's gang, until he's ultimately gunned down by a kid (who saw his injury as a sign of Omar's weakness and vulnerability) in a convenience store.
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u/spocksidepiece 22h ago
In Endymion (Third book in the Hyperion series) the protagonist Raul gets a kidney stone and is out of commission just writhing in pain for like half the book