Damsel Fight-and-Flight Response

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

A girl got cornered by the villain, he is about to kill her, and there is no escape. Suddenly she catches him off-guard and smacks him in the head with a heavy object. He will collapse to the ground and she will run to the door. Somehow, despite the fact that realistically he should have at least a minor concussion, he would recover quickly enough to catch her just before she would reach the door.

Of course it would never occur to her to continue hitting him while he is down to make sure he would not recover.

Similar to Once Is Not Enough except that the villain is only unstoppable to women. To men he might be just a Mook.

Examples of Damsel Fight-and-Flight Response include:


Comic Books

  • Mary Jane does this to the Chameleon in a Spider Man comic, but subverted in that she does keep hitting him.
    • Calie Liddell, in Return to Wonderland #3, does much the same thing to the Mad Hatter, though her beating goes much farther. She even lampshades it.

Film

  • Runaway Jury: Marlee hit the guy twice and, when he still catches her before she manages to escape, she stabbed his leg with a piece of wood.
  • Best subversion ever: the kidnapping scene from Rush Hour in which the girl manages to frustrate and bruise much of the abduction team before they finally subdue her and stuff her into a van.
  • Another severe subversion occurs in the ending of Death Proof. The girls go back to finish the job.
  • A Gender Flip happens in the movie Misery.
  • In the movie The Watcher, the only person who bothered to fight back against David Allen Griffin (the Serial Killer and Keanu Reeves' character) was the homeless girl, who smacked him hard in the head with her boombox and runs. Unfortunately, just as according to this trope, it hardly fazes him much, and he's after her, managing to chase her down and kill her.
  • Subverted in the remake of House of Wax. The heroine gets a hold of a baseball bat and smacks one of the killers down. It's set up to look like she'll run off like pretty much every other horror movie. But after a pause she continues to hit him until he dies. And then some.

Live Action Television

  • Happened to Lex's girlfriend in season 2 of Smallville.
  • There's a Criminal Minds episode where a Damsel in Distress, in the last third or quarter, decides to fight back against a pair of Siblings in Crime when she gets ahold of a knife. She manages to stab one repeatedly, then after a little baiting, waits for the other one in a tree, pouncing on him when he gets close, stabbing him twice in the back... then getting off of him and running away, with his bow and already pissed off, no less. Lucky for her the FBI arrived Just in Time.

Manga and Anime

  • An especially egregious instance is the first time Miaka gets cornered alone in Fushigi Yuugi. When it dawns on her that she's in another world, away from any legal consequences for hooliganism, she proceeds to singlehandedly mop the floor with an entire street gang and nearly run away… Until one of them reaches up from the ground to grab her ankle, paralyzing her. From that point on, she's Tamahome's Damsel in Distress par excellence.

Web Original

Western Animation

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