Immune to Bullets/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Monsters and other villains tend not to be hurt by firearms.

  • Straight: Bullets fired at the monster are shrugged off.
  • Exaggerated: The monster shrugs off not only bullets, but also grenades, artillery shells, and tactical nuclear weapons.
  • Justified: The monster is incorporeal, so of course guns can't hurt it.
    • Alternatively, it has a million hit points.
    • Or: Its a huge monster with thick skin. The bullets barely penetrate, and, even if they did, the scale is just so massive that a normal-sized bullet can't do any real damage.
    • They're just that tough.
  • Inverted: Projectile guns harm the monster, while more futuristic weapons such as lasers and particle beams do not.
    • Assailing the monster in melee or bigger weapons does not work. Small arms, though? Just peachy.
  • Subverted: All the research the heroes can do suggests that guns are useless, but that turns out to be misinformation put out by the Omniscient Council of Vagueness to make the monsters seem more scary.
  • Double Subverted: Turns out the Omniscient Council of Vagueness Did Not Do the Research-- the monsters really are Immune to Bullets.
  • Parodied: Just because the monster can't be killed by gunfire, doesn't make the bullets hurt any less.
    • Alternately, the monster is exclusively immune to bullets.
  • Deconstructed: The uselessness of bullets leads to an increasing reliance on heavy weaponry by the monster hunters, which in turn breeds monsters who are even tougher, creating an escalating cycle of violence and lots of collateral damage.
  • Reconstructed: The monster is only one of several antagonists, the rest of whom are not bulletproof, making that monster a special threat.
    • Another option is that the monster gets stronger, but the heroes are adaptable and intelligent, leading to a Lensman Arms Race.
  • Zig Zagged: Whether or not bullets work changes with each Monster of the Week.
  • Averted: The monster can be harmed by gunfire.
  • Enforced: "The Moral Guardians won't let us use anything that looks like a real gun on a kids' show, so we'll make all our villains immune to gunfire as an excuse for giving our heroes lasers."
  • Lampshaded: The hero unloads his pistol into the monster to no effect, shrugs, and says, "Why do I even bother?"
  • Invoked: The Mad Scientist realizes that his enemies' first reaction will be to shoot the monster he's creating, so he makes it Immune to Bullets.
    • Alternately, gun companies make their guns less powerful so as to make the bullets penetrate shallower or not at all.
  • Defied: "This is the most powerful gun in the world. Nothing is immune to this baby."
    • Alternately, a scientist makes his monster possible to kill with bullets because a killing machine was not his intention (or because he's worried about his killing machine turning on him).
  • Discussed: "You know how the monsters in all those disaster movies are always immune to bullets? That's not entirely inaccurate..."
  • Conversed: "Geez, why do those guys in disaster movies always shoot at the giant monster? It never works!"

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