Invincible Hero/Quotes

"These fight scenes are so one-sided they're lame to watch. Not one person has laid a blow on Forrest in the whole movie. Not one."

—Film Brain in his On Deadly Ground review

"In movies they do this all the time to raise the tension. The hero needs weaknesses, otherwise we start to think of them as invincible and thus boring. You need to see Iron Man with his suit disabled, or Bruce Wayne attacked by the villain while out of his Batman costume."

—5 Plot Devices That Make Good Video Games Suck, Cracked.com

"Why should I care about this guy? He feels no pain and nothing can kill him, so therefore he's essentially a story device for action sequences."

—Roger Ebert on X-Men Origins: Wolverine

"There is no greater bore than perfection."

—General Zaroff, The Most Dangerous Game

"And some of them end up dying because I write military fiction and in military fiction, good people die as well as bad people. Military fiction in which only bad people -- the ones the readers want to die -- die and the heroes don't suffer agonizing personal losses isn't military fiction: it's military pornography."

—David Weber

"And at no point does Scott get so much as a scratch on him. Despite weighing about 110 pounds, Scott effortlessly defeats every ex he goes up against, and he can even take on 12 guys at once without breaking a sweat. And I ask you, is there anything more boring than a fight scene where you know the hero can't possibly get hurt?"

—Mr. Mendo in his review of Scott Pilgrim vs. the World

The temptation to invent some kind of magical McGuffin to get his hero out of a tight corner is something Eddings works hard to avoid.
"It's the Superman complex, isn't it? If you're more powerful than a locomotive and can leap tall buildings at a single bound, what do you have to worry about? Take the all-powerful sorcerer. There is nothing he has to fear. The guy is bulletproof. I spoke with Lester del Rey about this rather extensively. He said the only way you can get around it is to come up with believable limitations, and you must be very specific about what those limitations are right at the outset. My gimmick is that magic is tiring. Wizardry poops you out. So doing something with magic is as hard as doing it with your muscles, it's just that it happens almost instantaneously. I refined the gimmick so that when a character does something with magic it makes a 'noise' other sorcerers can hear. If you're trying to tiptoe through the tulips and sneak your way through the back alleys, using magic, you're going to sound off wizard burglar alarms all over town.

— from interview with David Eddings in Starlog Magazine #210, January 1995

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