Nigh Invulnerability/Literature

Examples of Nigh Invulnerability in Literature include:

The Odyssey: How can Odysseus possibly win a fight if it's just him and his son against 150 people who really, really want you dead? If Athena and Zeus are making them fight about as well as a four year old girl.
The Shrike from Hyperion Cantos, and Rhadamanth Nemes in the sequel series Endymion, would qualify as Trope Codifiers if the series was better known. The Shrike attacks the Swiss Guard, supposedly the greatest soldiers in charted space, and kills them all. Nemes is attacked by a ship that melts the rock around her, and instead of dying, sinks into the liquid stone. Even later, the Shrike punches Nemes about eight metres through solid rock.
In Stieg Larsson's The Girl Who Played With Fire, massive blond thug Roland Niedermann seems invulnerable to everything from full-force body blows to stab wounds and even gunfire. In fact, this is not the case: Due to congenital analgesia, he simply cannot feel the damage inflicted on him. This, when paired with his enormous build, makes him appear invincible. However, the same genetic flaws that give him his strength and numbness result in him being an utterly paranoid psychopath.
In Terry Pratchett's Only You Can Save Mankind, the eponymous "mankind" is a race of aliens who are under relentless assault from a hero who Just Won't Die - the hero being a small boy playing a computer game, that of course allows you replay from the last save point whenever you die.
An example from Discworld: Wolfgang von Uberwald in The Fifth Elephant, being a werewolf, survives any number of horrific experiences until Vimes uses a signal flare to destroy him with fire.
- Also in Discworld, vampires can be "killed" but they always come back one day. Some blood falls on their ashes or some such thing and then they are regenerated. This is one of the reasons Vimes hates them.
- Zombies - after all, how do you kill somebody who is already dead? Shoot him with a crossbow, and it'll make him just annoyed. Losing a limb, or even a head is nothing that a few stitches can't fix. (Though this condition doesn't [normally] give you any supernatural durability - when in Witches Abroad an alligator ate Granny Weatherwax's hat, she didn't let Baron Saturday try getting it back, because "Just because you're dead it doesn't mean you have to be in pieces.")
  - Though Mr. Tulip and Mr. Pin found an effective way to threaten one in The Truth.

Mr. Pin hadn't turned round. He kept the gonne pointed at the zombie. But he produced from a pocket a small cigarette lighter in the shape of a dragon, and then Mr. Slant ... Mr. Slant who crackled when he walked and smelled of dust ... Mr. Slant saw, wrapped around the evil little bolt that just projected from the tube, a wad of cloth. Without taking his eyes off the lawyer, Mr. Pin applied the flame. The cloth flared. And Mr. Slant was very dry indeed.

- Honorary mention to Mr. Shine from Thud!!. Mr. Shine. Him diamond!
In the Incarnations of Immortality series, the Incarnations are nigh invulnerable unless they explicitly or implicitly allow it, such as when Death changes offices
The Wild Cards series had Demise, an undead and unhinged assassin whose wild card triggered during a near death experience. He ended up getting a healing factor that allowed him to return from the dead. When his head was chopped off by a similarly psychotic Ace, Dr. Tachyon analyzed the corpse and realized that his head was growing back. He ordered the body cremated, and while Demise hasn't shown up in any other books yet, well...
- Wild Cards also had Golden Boy, a classic comic-book Flying Brick (without the flying) who, when hit by anything up to a 50 millimeter artillery shell, would merely glow yellow instead of getting injured. According to Dr. Tachyon, Golden Boy projected a biological forcefield around his body whenever threatened by imminent danger, whether he was aware of this danger or not.
Parodied to hell and back in Nuklear Age by Brian Clevinger. The main character Nuke gets thrown into a sun and survives, beyond him there's Atomik lad who has a nifty forcefield that blocks everything, Angus the Iron Scotsman who's covered in iron and never takes damage (apart from one nasty incident where he is found in his suit backwards), there's a guy made of tungsten, and last but not least Superion who can't be destroyed ever thanks to how his powers work.
The eromakasi (eaters of light) in Carnivores of Light and Darkness, Into Thinking Kingdoms, and the Journey of the Catechist series in general (by Alan Dean Foster) can only be killed by eromakadi, because they are basically mist, and need to be sucked in. The most powerful mage in the world has two of them as bodyguards. That isn't the only nigh invincible creature around. The wall, a several mile long wall that can walk is also next to invincible, with the main characters just running under it.
Usually when people actually run into one of H.P Lovecraft's Great Old Ones, they end up going insane or getting brutally killed. In the few cases they manage to fight back, it turns out the beings are unkillable by mortal weapons. Sometimes they might be banished, like Nyarlatotep's avatar the Haunter in the Dark, who can't stand bright light, but even then they are likely to come back later. Others fall into the "Made of Air" category, and physical attacks go right through them. Some, like Cthulhu himself, can be harmed, but regenerate any damage within seconds.
- In Call of Cthulhu (tabletop game) a boat rams Cthulhu in the face, causing his head to blow apart, yet the only effect is to make him slightly annoyed as his head regenerates right after the boat has passed through it. (He did go back to sleep for another millennium afterwards, so it was a net win for Team Humanity.) In another story (not written by Lovecraft himself) humans try to stop the awakened Cthulhu by firing a ramjet missile carrying a 300 megaton nuclear payload right at him. It doesn't even slow him down.
- Even the "normal" aliens (i.e. not the godlike extradimensional ones that destroy worlds on whim) in Lovecraft's fiction are extremely resilient, or made from some exotic matter which makes normal weapon very ineffective against them.
  - Not all of them. Deep Ones and Ghouls aren't especially bulletproof, and a one of the Fungi from Yuggoth was killed by dogs. And Wilbur Whateley, who got ripped apart by an attack-dog.
The Ringwraiths of The Lord of the Rings are incredibly difficult, though not impossible, to permanently destroy, and are immortal thanks to the powers of the nine magic rings that sustain them.
- The only ways to permanently destroy the Ringwraiths are to destroy their rings (which Sauron keeps in his personal possession), or destroy the One Ring. In his letters, Tolkien says that Sauron could have restored the Witch King in time, if not for those meddling hobbits dropping his Ring into a volcano.
Lord Voldemort from Harry Potter went the phylactery route to allow his spirit to remain Earthbound even after his body is destroyed. Since he can't regenerate a new body on his own, however, this turns out to be less clever than he thought.
- According to Word of God, the fear inducing soul sucking Dementors are invincible. The Patronus Charm can drive them off, but they can't be destroyed by any means, magic or otherwise. Fortunately for the Harry Potter-verse, Word of God also stated that Dementors are not immortal and do eventually die.
  - Of course, with no soul to hang on to, they can stick around until their body crumbles (a century or so after their creation, give or take).
In R.A. Salvatore's The Cleric Quintet book 3 The Night Masks, the leader of the eponymous assassins' guild is Ghost - a scrawny, withered man who doesn't look at all imposing. He combines the Regeneration method (a Ring of Regeneration is hidden in his shoe, presumably around a toe) with the Multiple Bodies trick - he possesses an artifact, a Mirror that allows him to swap souls with someone, then kills his own fragile body with his victim's hand. When his body dies the victim's soul departs, Ghost then waits for the body to regenerate then uses the artifact to swap back, putting his soul back in his body and leaving the victim unharmed but soulless and therefore dead. The artifact in question is so powerful that it pulls Ghost's soul out of hell and back into his corpse after he is later finally killed, and has to be destroyed by the breath of an ancient red dragon... and the resulting explosion blinds the dragon in question. And if ALL THAT wasn't good enough, he has Vander, a huge giant-like humanoid called a Firbolg, as a slave with whom he will frequently forcefully swap bodies if the situation demands. Yeah.
In the Xanth series, Bink has the 'extreme luck' form of nigh invulnerability, because his talent protects him from magic attacks using coincidences and so on. The Magician Trent finally figured it out when he was trying to transform Bink and was always missing, to the point of transforming bacteria on Bink's skin instead of Bink.
This is one of the mutant abilities in Those Who Walk In Darkness by John Ridley, rendering one's skin impenetrable. The standard way of killing these mutants is to overload their pain receptors, but apparently contact poison works as well.
Jon Remillard, aka Jack the Bodiless, in Julian May's Galactic Milieu books is nigh invulnerable in his native form of a disembodied brain. His brother Marc actually remarks in the book Diamond Mask that nothing had been discovered to harm Jon in that form up to that point.
In Spider Robinson's Lady Slings the Booze several characters are protected by a bullet-proof forcefield over the entire surface of their skin, of course the flaw being that a gun fired into the mouth of one character causes the bullet to ricochet off the inside of the forcefield with results akin to a sack of chunky salsa.
Nicodemus in The Dresden Files, the leader of the Fallen Angel-possessed Denarians, wears the noose that Judas hanged himself with as a necktie, making him immune to everything from getting blasted by a wizard to getting ripped in half with a machine gun by a mob boss. But not from itself.
Vampires in Twilight are invulnerable and sparkle as if coated in diamond dust when exposed to sunlight. The only way to kill them permanently is to rip them into shreds and burn the pieces.
Glen Cook's Black Company novels are full of this. Really high grade sorcerers are near impossible to kill due to their use of magic to do most of the things on the list. One sorceress Soulcathcher survives being beheaded. The limper survives having a building collapsed on him, shot with ballista bolts, shot with magic arrows, beheaded, burned, etc. Many sorcerers presumed dead reappear throughout the series. The only real way to make sure they're dead is to burn every sticking piece of them.
- In some cases their soul and raw power (but not their personality) can still survive usually as some kind of artifact.
In Robert E. Howard's Conan the Barbarian story "Rogues in the House" Murilo argues they should leave, "Human weapons cannot harm a were-man."—and Conan's reaction is to merely tell him it's impossible and then setting out with him to escape the place.
Morgan Primus from the Star Trek: New Frontier series of books is both this and immortal. This takes its logical course when something was strong enough to destroy her body... her consciousness transferred to the ship she was on. She is currently the Andromeda-like avatar for the starship Excalibur.
- Which is as close as a book can get to Actor Allusion. She looks exactly like several characters who were played by Majel Barrett onscreen, though which ones were really her and which weren't is still unclear. The Federation computer voice is also played by Majel Barrett, so it's quite fitting.
In Jericho Moon, the Biblical Joshua is endowed with Nigh Invulnerability by Yahweh's favor, remaining untouched by any of several attacks that would've killed an unprotected man. Subverted when Yahweh's own storm winds catch up an arrow and send it unerringly towards Barra, so she grabs hold of Joshua and lets the missile pass through her own body and into his. In effect, God overcomes Joshua's God-granted invulnerability.
In Warrior Cats, Lionblaze's special power is that he can't be hurt in battle. He can turn this power off if he really wants to, but it's pretty difficult; he only does it once in the series, to prove to the cat who he wants as his mate that they can control their own destinies.

Back to Nigh Invulnerability