Normally I Would Be Dead Now/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: Sheer willpower enables a character to continue fighting after being dealt injuries that, by all means, should be fatal.

  • Straight: Alice is impaled through the heart by Emperor Evulz' humongous lance, but since this fight determines the fate of the world, she simply remove the lance, throw it aside, and continue fighting until Evulz is defeated. She dies soon after the fight is over.
  • Exaggerated: Alice is impaled through the heart, took hail of bullets from anti-aircraft guns, and then survives having multiple nukes detonated right above her. She survives through sheer willpower and continue to fight until Evulz is defeated. And then she survives, dying a happy woman at the old age of 107.
  • Justified: Alice is really that badass.
  • Inverted: Alice lose all the will to continue fighting after being pricked with a common sewing needle.
  • Subverted: Alice continues to fight after taking bullets... and then when she turns to the viewer, it's revealed that she is a robot.
    • Alice actually was dead, but carried herself through on sheer willpower.
  • Double Subverted: But even a robot can't survive multiple hits from armor-piercing shells... it turns out that Alice has gained a soul and it's really her determination that carried her through the battle. She stopped moving after saying goodbye to her friends.
  • Parodied: Alice wears a t-shirt that reads "IMPALE ME HARD, BABY".
  • Deconstructed: Being stabbed, crushed, shot, and blown up hurts. Alice is alive but in too much pain to do anything, even if her body was intact enough to act.
  • Reconstructed: Alice has a healing factor and has learned to shut out the pain - with no risk of death except in the most severe of circumstances, pain means nothing.
  • Zig Zagged: Alice is stabbed through the heart, gets a HeroicSecondWind gets stabbed in the leg after that attack fails, and when it looks like she's a gonner she gets a heroic third, fourth and fifth wind, defeating Evulz, but dying afterwards.
  • Averted: All injuries that should be lethal are lethal.
  • Enforced: ???
  • Lampshaded: "Someday, I shall fall in battle with terrible wounds my body can't sustain, but it won't be this battle, and it won't be THIS wound!"
  • Invoked: Alice simply charge forward even though she knows that Evulz' lance will go through her heart; this is her only chance to kill Evulz in one hit. She believes that her willpower will allow her to defy the injury for that decisive moment.
  • Exploited: ???
  • Defied: Evulz seals Alice in a can instead of fighting her.
  • Discussed: After Alice survives, Emporer Evulz says "She wasn't supposed to survive!"
  • Conversed: ???

Normally I Would Be Dead Now, but i can still point you the link back to the main page of this trope.

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