You Can Barely Stand

""It's conceivable, you miserable, vomitous mass, that I'm only lying here because I lack the strength to stand. But, then again... perhaps I have the strength after all.""

- Westley, The Princess Bride

"Lt. Boomer: Colonel, Blue Squadron reporting for duty, sir. Col. Tigh: Lieutenant, obviously you can't even stand. Lt. Boomer: A Viper is flown from the seated position, sir.""

- Battlestar Galactica (1978), "Lost Planet of the Gods: Part 2"

As a rule, much of fiction ends with the villain being defeated by the hero. This should be dramatic, but if the true villain isn't that physically powerful, then this is going to be a rather short fight.

Sure, a writer could give their master manipulator a Humongous Mecha or have your amoral industrialist secretly be a martial arts master, but there's also something satisfying in bringing the invincible hero down a few pegs. Many pegs. To the point where they're already a few moments from death when they meet; this has the effect of showing that the character isn't fearless simply due to having superior power, but superior character-strength even when stripped of those abilities.

You Can Barely Stand is a scene where the villain meets the hero when he's in no fit state to fight. The threat of blood loss or collapse is as much a threat as the bad guy slapping him about and telling him he's failed and that he's not that invincible after all. The reason for the injuries can include a special weakness, having been poisoned, having been tortured, magical influence, or having just gotten the crap kicked out of him by either the Mooks or The Dragon.

Either way, the hero will eventually get a dramatic burst and fight on despite his weakened state, and will usually defeat their foe by the slightest of margins. Only once they've won will they be allowed the luxury of collapsing. For a truly Bittersweet Ending, they might never get up again.

On the flip-side, The Hero may be fighting a lackey who's just too stubborn to quit. In pity, the hero tells the lackey that they should surrender, or just leaves the fight themselves. This often happens in the leadup to a Heel Face Turn.

A common form of Drama-Preserving Handicap. A villainous version of Tempting Fate. If the hero is at their physical best when meeting the villain face-to-face, expect the hero to suffer a Game-Breaking Injury.

Compare: Heroic Resolve, Heroic Second Wind, The Man Behind the Curtain, Determinator. Often caused by Combat Breakdown.

Anime
"Inuyasha (to Sesshoumaru): 'You just stay back! This isn't the place for an injured person!'"
 * In Berserk, after the fight with Rosine, Guts is a complete mess. That also happens to be when he runs into the Holy Iron Chain Knights. He still puts up a hell of a fight, but gets captured at the end of it. In any other condition he would have killed them all.
 * In Fullmetal Alchemist, Roy Mustang takes down a after being stabbed in the stomach and cauterizing the wounds himself. It was awesome.
 * In the final battle, Greed tells everyone who's been injured to get off the "elevator", including Roy . He still chooses to fight.
 * In the 2003 anime version, Roy kills Pride after being sliced, impaled, and altogether getting the crap kicked out of him.
 * In Higurashi no Naku Koro ni, Rika has one of these during her Crowning Moment of Awesome when she.
 * This trope is so overused in Saint Seiya, the heroes are brought down to this level in pretty much every story arc after facing a few mooks. This trope needs to be renamed "You Can't Even Stand" to refer to the more serious instances.
 * In the Sanctuary arc, Hyoga was entombed by Camus using his Freezing Coffin technique and left for dead. Shiryu broke him free with the libra sword. This left him in a semi-comatose state (but he could Barely Stand). After lampshading this trope, Camus intended to finish him off with an Aurora Excusion. Hyoga while barely conscious.
 * Seiya is poisoned by by Royal Demon Roses on his way to the Pope's chamber, until all he could manage was crawl his way to the chamber. Once there, the Pope made him He won anyway.
 * In Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann, Simon
 * And before that, this trope is the start of.
 * Early on in One Piece, Zoro had to take on a clearly inferior swordsfishman after having been nearly cut in half diagonally across the chest in a previous fight.
 * Even earlier in the Manga, Zoro fights Buggy's first mate Cabaji, a swordsman, after being stabbed through the side by one of Buggy's knives. Cabaji makes it a point to go after the wound repeatedly...and after repelling him, Zoro cuts the wound WIDER, just to prove he can beat Cabaji even with that handicap.
 * Also Zoro—the post-Oz Kuma encounter, and the post-Kuma multi-Kuma fight.
 * Whereupon... wait, you said that part already.
 * Every single fight in Bleach, notably during the Soul Society Arc. Subverted twice in the Hueco Mundo arc when
 * Lampshaded when Ichigo gets a nasty cut as usual during said fight—except this time his torso is sliced almost in half. On the topic of standing, his opponent gleefully informs him, "It isn't a matter of willpower; it's a structural impossibility." Ouch.
 * Every Bleach reader already knows that everything in Bleach depends entirely on Rule of Cool. Usually this means Ichigo takes a ton of injuries and then pulls something super crazy awesome out of nowhere and defeats his opponent. Then again, that's just about every shonen ever.
 * Uryu, on the other hand, has a technique that overcomes "structural impossibility" by turning his own body into what amounts to a telekinetically-controlled puppet. This allows him to keep fighting even after his body is paralyzed by a poison that shuts down all voluntary muscle movement.
 * In Wolf's Rain, Toboe tries to bite Darcia's arm off despite being seriously wounded.
 * The  that concludes Cowboy Bebop.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh!: Jounouchi/Joey is worn out from his duel with Varon, but doesn't hesitate to duel his Psycho Ex-Girlfriend Mai as soon as it's over. He collapses at just the right time to give Mai a teary My God, What Have I Done? scene.
 * In Rurouni Kenshin, the final battle between Kenshin and Shishio is like this, and Kenshin actually does collapse during the fight before getting back up.
 * Also in the anime when he fights Shura.
 * Happens a lot to Allen Walker in D.Gray-man. Sometimes it works (For example, when he literally can't stand during the ) and sometimes it... doesn't (Like after the whole mess with Suman Dark, when ).
 * Gintama has its main character Gintoki have several moments like this when there's serious arc and he's so badly beaten he can barely stand. Yet somehow, he always gets up from the ground. Never mind the countless broken bones and him throwing up blood...
 * The cast of Inuyasha get this a lot. One example is when Inyasha is human and must fight the Peach Man. During that time, he is shrunk, eaten, thrown back up, bled, tossed around, and fell from a cliff. Not even Sesshoumaru is immune. He finally comes up against an enemy that knows how to fight a one-armed man


 * The various Egrigori experiments in Project ARMS get this bad. Ryo has especially bad luck. His ARMS - the Jabberwock - will only come out if he is in serious danger. The result of this is that almost every enemy sent to kill the Jaberwock will try to make it come out by beating the stuffing out of Ryo. And since he hates the Jabberwock, he always puts in a great deal of effort to just let himself get pummeled and not release the ARMS.
 * Sword of the Stranger invokes this during its famed final fight sequence. Nanashi, after already being completely spent fighting the other soldiers and sustaining a few fairly series injuries, not only stands up to Luo-Lang, but refuses his offer of performance-enhancing drugs that would dull his pain and
 * Fate/stay night Unlimited Bladeworks. Lancer's Crowning Moment of Awesome is basically him taking out a major villain and a minor one, both non-heroic spirits, while suffering one such wound. That wound is being stabbed through the heart with his own magic spear. His response? "As if I would die from a wound like this." We must emphasize this wound is through the heart. With a spear that causes wounds that cannot be healed.
 * And appropriately enough in the scene happening parallel to that one, we have Shirou. During the course of his fight he's broken his fingers, gotten covered in cuts, has various other broken appendages, and is all but dead due to being outmatched. Quite literally the only thing keeping him swinging is a full on Determinator mode.
 * Shirou in HF too. He. Will. Save. Sakura.
 * Touma in To Aru Majutsu no Index was like this during his first fight against Accelerator. the funny part? it was, the one who he was helping, that put him in that state
 * Naruto has the battle between

Comics

 * Superman gets to do this a lot, including fighting weakened by a red sun and having just come out of a coma, or just having been stabbed with Kryptonite.
 * Done with somewhat different implications in the animated series finale "Legacy," where a depowered Superman lets out his anger on Lex Luthor, shattering the latter's jaw in one punch.
 * Reminding us all that even without superpowers, Clark Kent is still a big man who gets very intense workouts on a regular basis.
 * Really more of an inversion. He can cut loose because he doesn't have to worry about accidentally killing Lex. This happened in Smallville too.
 * Subverted in one instance in the comics (fighting a makeshift squad of villains). He's very ill, but still very strong. The conflict is that, as he says to the villains, he is so sick he has no idea if his punches will remove heads from necks.
 * Spider-Man fought The Black Widow in one issue. He had a case of pneumonia that would have put an ordinary man into the hospital, but it just slowed and weakened him down enough that the Black Widow thought he been toying with her when he broke free of her swing line at the end of the fight.
 * In Elf Quest, Cutter refuses to be healed during the first battle with the Northern Trolls because it would take him out of the fighting for too long, and his tribe needed every fighter they had.

Fanfiction

 * In the Firefly fanfic Forward story "Business," River and Jayne are in this state when they fight the  at the climax. This is because they had been   previously, and had only just escaped that. In this case, Jayne actually proves to be the better fighter, if only because, being larger, stronger, and tougher,   River is only able to fight because Jayne injects her with a syringe of synthetic adrenaline.

Film
"Roark Jr.: Look at you, you can't even lift that cannon you carry! Hatigan: ...Sure I can."
 * In the film version of The Fellowship of the Ring Boromir gets up and keeps fighting after taking an arrow in the chest - twice!
 * In the book, Boromir is "pierced by many" arrows, but kills more than 20 orcs—after driving off hundreds; Ugluk, the Uruk-hai leader, even boasts of this slaying as a great feat, saying "We are the fighting Uruk-hai -- we killed the Great Warrior" (albeit with arrows from a distance, while Boromir was defending two hobbits). Likewise, the story implies that orcs could never have defeated Boromir in combat otherwise.
 * The film version makes up for its reduced number of arrows by making the arrows really big.
 * In the book, Frodo also defies all of the Nine Nazgul at the River, despite being severely weakened, stabbed, and almost completely under the Witch-king's power. (Unfortunately cut from the film-version).
 * In the Daredevil film, Daredevil goes to the climactic fight with Kingpin while still seriously injured from his fight with Kingpin's Dragon, Bullseye. Kingpin proceeds to own him in seconds, and even gloats about wishing he could fight Daredevil "in his prime".
 * Both Inigo and Westley do this in the climax of The Princess Bride (see page quote).
 * In Gladiator, Commodus stabs Maximus in the lung just before their climactic battle in the colosseum. Maximus, a seasoned general mind you, proves to be able to defeat the reasonably skilled but nonetheless inferior Commodus,
 * District 9 does this rather well.
 * Sin City gives us a gem, when Detective Hartigan, an aging cop with a heart condition, staggers over to confront the Big Bad of his arc.

Literature

 * This is the case with the titular character at the end of Eisenhorn. His solution is to strap himself to a metal frame to let him stand.
 * In the fourth book of The Sword of Truth, Richard defeats his evil brother, despite being barely able to stand due to a disease, and the brother wielding the titular sword. A couple minutes later, that brother tries to kill Richard, despite having his spine ripped out.
 * In Robert A. Heinlein's short story The Long Watch, the hero Lieutenant John Dahlquist barricades himself in an Interplanetary Patrol nuclear weapons bay on the Moon, while dying from the radiation dose he's getting from impromptu hammer-sabotage of a bunch of nuclear warheads sought by Colonel Towers, the leader of an attempted coup. It's sort of a You Can Barely Stand-off.
 * Vimes in Thud fights off a small army of dwarfs while badly beaten from a fall, cold and wet, and highly disorientated. However this is (probably) because of . Where he really shows his Heroic Resolve is that, once he's run out of armed opponents, he stops.
 * Harry Dresden. In nearly every book. In Fool Moon he basically uses up his magic—and that's before he even has a chance to confront the pack of werewolves he came to fight.
 * Played with in Turn Coat: While it's really obvious that he can barely stand (numerous bandages, about to fall over from lack of sleep, and what have you) and he's hopelessly outnumbered, none of the want to attack him because they've all heard about the crazy crap he's pulled when he's running on nothing but sheer bloodymindedness.
 * Subverted in Changes,
 * The RPG rulebook lampshades it. Harry asks why all the pictures of him show him beat to crap. Billy says it's because they're pictures of him on the case, and when he's on a case he's usually beat to crap. A little later on, Harry singles out one picture from a case file where he's not all beat up—only for Billy to point out it's from early in the case, and there's already a visible bruise on Harry's face.
 * Old literary example: In Ivanhoe, the title character Wilfred of Ivanhoe meets Sir Brian de Bois-Guilbert as challenger in a trial by combat despite barely being able to maintain his seat in the saddle due to severe wounds from a tournament earlier.
 * In Harry Potter and the Half-blood Prince,
 * Although in Deathly Hallows,
 * Ron fits this trope literally in Prisoner of Azkaban. His leg is broken and he still gets up to protect Harry from an escaped convict (curse the movie for removing it).
 * Northern Lights: Lyra sets up a fight-to-the-death between Iorek Byrnison and the usurper of the throne of the Armored Bears, Iofur, in a last ditch effort to help Iorek, only to realize later that Iorek, after a battle with cliff-ghasts and days of journeying through the tundra with no food and rest, will not be in the best condition to fight. The alethiometer eventually gets tired of telling her she has nothing to worry about.
 * In Tad Williams' Otherland, Orlando Gardiner spends much of the story in this state, because he is suffering from a terminal disease in real life. Ironically, he should be the strongest of all the characters, since his online persona is a strapping barbarian warrior.
 * In the Star Wars novel Shatterpoint, Mace Windhu has operated with little sleep for several days, gone through at least three separate battles that day, and been stabbed in the stomach with a lightsaber, and finds himself wobbling on his feet as he faces a man twice his size and much more powerful in the Force, who already beat him senseless once.
 * In the Dale Brown novel Flight of the Old Dog, the titular Airstrike Impossible starts with the titular Cool Plane already damaged from a takeoff under enemy fire, with its operators not at 100% due to needs must, and gets into steadily worse straits along the way, including damaged/malfunctioning engines, compromised fuel tanks and failing sensors.
 * Honor Harrington does this in Flag in Exile where after the best part of three days of awake activity, being shot out of the sky, having a bomb go off next to her, and being in a life-or death duel, she still has to fight her ship. Good thing she sits in her command chair.
 * In the Dragonlance series, Raistlin Majere is a rare case of the villain suffering from this. Suffering from the most severe Incurable Cough of Death in all of fiction because of his Test, Raistlin is almost constantly on the verge of keeling over or being blown away by a stiff breeze. Even Crysania, when she opposed him at first, sees him as a pitiable figure. And when Caramon confronts him in the Abyss, Raistlin had been burnt, stabbed, frozen, sheared and skewered to within an inch of his life, and yet Caramon still holds back. Not only because of lingering brotherly concern, but because even then Raistlin is still dangerous. 98% of his magic had been expended, but that last 2% was still enough to be worried about, not to mention his dagger of last resort that he had no compunctions to using.

Live Action TV
"Sunday: What about breaking your arm, (grabs at Buffy's left arm) how'd that feel. Buffy: Let me answer that with a head butt. (she does and sends Sunday staggering) And for the record, the arm is hurt, (punches Sunday, sending her flying) not broken."
 * When Angel loses his soul for the umpteenth time, his sidekick calls in fallen Slayer Faith to hunt him down. This might have been a short fight, since Angel has a long record of getting soundly beaten every time he fights a Slayer (Faith herself managed to bounce him off the ceiling while attempting Suicide by Cop) so before the big fight she gets beaten to a bloody pulp by The Juggernaut. Oh, and . She still nearly beats him, because Slayers are just that Badass.
 * On Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Buffy gets a rather cool line in the season four opener:


 * When Shaw has taken over the Buy More and has chained Sarah to a thick bar at the base of the Nerd Herd desk, Sarah tells Shaw that Chuck won't show up to save her because he can barely stand. Yet, lo, and behold, Chuck shows up while injured, gets a reboot, and takes the Paragon Path when he won't kill Shaw. Of course that doesn't stop Sarah from whacking him across the skull with the object of her restraint.
 * Booth on Bones, in "Two Bodies In The Lab", after he's injured by the fridge bomb. He leaves the hospital against medical advice and makes Hodgins take him to where he realizes Brennan is being held. He can barely stay on his feet, but manages to stop the corrupt FBI agent and save Brennan. After which, he has to go back to the hospital.

Professional Wrestling

 * Very common in Professional Wrestling: the Heel weakens the Face before the big title match by getting his friends to beat him up, or forcing the face to have another match just before the title match, usually a handicap match, hardcore match or another grueling type. (This is referred to as the "Spirit of '76" spot, when the bandaged and battered face comes staggering out for the match anyway.)
 * More commonly used now since the advent of the Money In The Bank match, which gives the winner the right to challenge the champion at any time, even right after a grueling title match where the title holder has been beaten brutally. Use of it this way often starts a Face Heel Turn for the wrestler who wins the title this way.

Tabletop Games

 * One does wonder about people like Commissar Yarrick in Warhammer 40,000, who have special abilities that allow them to stand up with one Wound left after being killed.

Video Games

 * Link gets a moment like this near the end of The Legend of Zelda the Wind Waker. After Link  Then, at the end of his, Link  But after a fight like that, who wouldn't be tired?
 * Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare ends with your character taking multiple air-to-surface missiles to the face, leaving you in a half-unconscious state as the Big Bad walks over and starts gunning down your squadmates one by one. Your dying captain tosses you his sidearm, and the game's final action is a blurry slow-motion sequence where you shoot down the Big Bad and his two bodyguards before they can react and kill you.
 * Modern Warfare 2's climax has you falling off a few hundred foot high waterfall after shooting down the Big Bad's helicopter. You recover, limping and badly injured, just in time for a hand-to-hand CQC fight with the Big Bad who is in much better condition following the crash.
 * The final mission in Project Snowblind disables all the cool nanotech powers your character spent the game building up... but you're still left with standard FPS character Made of Iron durability, and there aren't many enemies in the last level anyway.
 * Metal Gear Solid 4:
 * Amusingly used in Disgaea. A villain springs one of Larharl's weaknesses, forcing you to go into a fight with his stats halved. That weakness?
 * Inverted in Golden Sun. 4 teenagers face the powerful villain Saturos in Mercury Lighthouse. Normally they would be no match for him, but the Mercury (Water) energy drastically weakens Saturos's Mars (Fire) Psynergy and gives Mia, who is a Mercury Adept, Psy Point regeneration. Still a somewhat challenging boss fight.
 * Later in the game, at Venus Lighthouse, you fight Saturos and his partner Menardi to prevent them from lighting the lighthouse. Due to your massive increase in strength since the previous fight at Mercury, you defeat them with (relative) ease. After the fight, Mia actually says outright, "You can barely stand," in response to a comment from the injured Saturos. Cue Mia eating her words, dragon style. This trope, but with the roles reversed.
 * The sequel Lost Age also has two incidents of this trope After the fight with replacement baddies Agatio and Karst atop the Jupiter Lighthouse. Regardless of how the fight goes, they're forced to make a hasty retreat because the fight with Felix and Co. took to much out of them, and the heroes from the last game are on their way up. Once the villains leave, Issac and co. arrive a tense standoff ensues between the two teams (long story). Ivan defuses the situation by suggesting they return to the local village to resolve things, as both teams are too tired to fight.
 * By the time the last fight in video game Def Jam: Fight for New York comes around, your character has done the Charles Atlas Superpower power-ups for so long he has become a virtually Made of Iron fighting machine, so fighting the cowardly Manipulative Bastard Bad Boss who has never shown any sign of having any fighting ability seems like it should be pretty anti-climactic... except that he stabs you in the back with a cane sword before the bout begins, significantly lowering your health.
 * And Crow isn't exactly a lightweight in the ring, either. (figuratively speaking; It is still Snoop Dog.)
 * This happens in the fight with Incarose in Tales of Hearts, when other characters tell Shing to step down because of his recent state of being stabbed through the stomach. The weird thing is, you can't even put him in your party that fight. The lines are only known about because of the Sound Museum, although hacking him in does trigger the lines and even the victory animation.

Webcomics

 * Gilgamesh Wulfenbach in Girl Genius, here. Near passing out at the start of the fight.
 * In A Miracle of Science, Vorstellen Policeman Benjamin Prester ends up invoking this from Dr. Haas to treat the latter's Science-Related Memetic Disorder.

Western Animation

 * Beast Wars. Specifically Dinobot's Crowning Moment of Awesome where Megatron speaks these lines verbatim when Dinobot, after a long battle with several other Predacons is reduced to a large stick against an upgraded Megatron. Of course, Dinobot "improvises" and Takes A Level In Badass.
 * In the very-first episode of Thundercats, the Mutants invade the Thundarian flagship, seeking to steal the Sword of Omens, and particularly the Eye Of Thundara set in its hilt. When they find it, it lies in the hands of a young Lion-O, and when he tries to threaten them, they laughingly reply that "You can barely hold that sword, much less lift it." Which is, of course, the sword's cue to start glowing. Moments later, Lion-O is swinging the full-sized sword around despite his young age, and the Mutants are running scared.

Real Life

 * Real life sports example: Curt Schilling in the 2004 World Series.
 * There's a lot of examples from sports beyond that. Kirk Gibson was a lot closer to being crippled when he hit the game winning homerun off Dennis Eckersley in the '88 World Series. Steve Yzerman helped the Red Wings win the early series in the 2002 NHL playoffs despite having virtually no knee cartilage left. And Willis Reed famously started Game 7 of the 1970 NBA Finals despite a torn muscle in his thigh, which is often credited with helping rally the Knicks to victory.
 * Gerry Byrne was an English soccer player famous for remaining in goal during the 1966 FA Cup Final despite having a broken collar bone. Another British soccer player, Bert Trautmann, is said to have played an entire match with a broken neck. Hard bastards, these football players.
 * Real life music example: Yoshiki in the March 28, 2008 X Japan reunion concert. He tries to play the full set of the show that he played 11 years before, despite years away from drumming and serious injuries to his neck and back from his career as a drummer. He collapsed on his drums halfway through the last song Art of Life. He would have major neck surgery the next year in a successful bid to save his ability to play drums (and a somewhat less successful one to spare his health), and recovered to do another two tours - which were also examples of this trope, though he had no on-stage collapses, due to ongoing health issues. Nevertheless, he's planning yet another tour...