Not the Fall That Kills You: Difference between revisions

{{trope}}

{{quote|''"[[Lois Lane]] is falling, accelerating at an initial rate of thirty-two feet per second per second. [[Superman]] swoops down to save her by reaching out two arms of steel. Miss Lane, who is now traveling at approximately one hundred twenty miles an hour, hits them, and is immediately sliced into three equal pieces.''"|'''Sheldon''', ''[[The Big Bang Theory]]''}}

 

It's '''not the fall that kills you'''... it's the sudden stop at the end.

 

Subtropes of this include [[Soft Water]] and [[Giant Robot Hands Save Lives]], among all the other tropes [[pothole]]d in that second paragraph. See also [[I Fell for Hours]] for incredibly long falls. See also [[Inertial Dampening]], which can justify it in worlds where it exists.

 

* Kinda subverted in ''[[Kaleido Star]]'': while in the trapeze, Leon drops May off, lets her fall a bit and then catches her by the hand, but the pull dislocates her shoulder. Later he does the same thing to Sora, but this time she's not injured because she was expecting it, and used her own strength to help Leon lift her.

* Mokuba tries to rappel his way down a tower using [[Bedsheet Ladder|rope tied together from old bedsheets]] in ''[[Yu-Gi-Oh!]]''. The rope isn't nearly long enough and comes loose, and he falls a ''long distance'' down... into some bushes, which saves him.

* In [[Fullmetal Alchemist (manga)|Fullmetal Alchemist]], Ed slips off a snowy ledge and plummets fifty feet, landing through the roof of a wooden shed full of soggy dynamite. His only reaction is "Rrrgh… [[Made of Iron|falling like that's]] [[Bratty Half-Pint|gonna stunt]] [[Pint-Sized Powerhouse|my growth]] [[Berserk Button|even more]]!!" {{spoiler|Subsequently averted ''hard'', when he gets blasted down a very deep mine shaft and gets impaled on a support beam, coming extremely close to dying.}}

* Kagura in ''[[Oku-sama wa Mahou Shoujo|Okusama wa Mahou Shoujo]]'' manages to catch Ureshiko when she falls from the sky. He hurts his leg a little when he lands (no one catches ''him''), but that's taken care of by [[Magical Girl|Ureshiko's magic]].

 

== Comic Books ==

* In a ''[[Cloak and Dagger (comics)|Cloak and Dagger]]'' story where Dagger is thrown out of a plane, Cloak saves her by enclosing her in the dark dimension of his cloak...but she still has all the momentum of the fall. So he repeatedly releases her over water for a second at a time, gradually slowing her down and leaving her extremely bruised but alive.

 

* In ''[[The Incredibles]]'', when a man jumps from the top of a building to kill himself, Mr. Incredible, who is in the top of a much lower building, jumps across the street, grabs the man in mid-air and lands in a lower floor of the building from which the man had jumped. The man ends up with serious injuries. And ends up suing Mr. Incredible.

** Averted at the end, when Helen/Elastigirl is thrown into the air to catch the baby—she visibly extends her arms upwards, then contracts her body upwards towards the baby before turning into a parachute.

* During the final battle in ''[[How to Train Your Dragon (animation)|How to Train Your Dragon]]'', Astrid gets thrown from her dragon and goes tumbling through the air. Hiccup and Toothless fly in and catch her right before she splats. Hiccup asks Toothless if he caught her, Toothless makes sure he did and Astrid smiles rather happily considering that that catch probably should have broken her legs or spine. And in the same battle, {{spoiler|Hiccup and Toothless (without flight control) should be splats on the ground at the end, and the only injury ends up being a leg needing to be replaced}}, so that should probably be chalked up to [[Nigh Invulnerability|barbarian hardiness and cartoon physics.]]

* Lampshaded in the CG film ''Doogle'', when one of the characters remarks after falling a great distance: "I'm fine: I broke the fall with my face."

* ''[[Star Trek V: The Final Frontier|Star Trek V the Final Frontier]]'': Kirk falls off a cliff. Spock (wearing rocket boots) races after him and grabs him by one ankle right before impact, arresting his fall inches above the ground with no ill effects whatsoever. Obviously the boots have [[Applied Phlebotinum|Intertial Dampeners]]

* The "arrested fall" version also occurs in ''[[Quantum of Solace]]''.

* In the 2009 B-movie ''Infestation'', a giant wasp grabs a guy and flies away. A policeman patiently waits until the pair are above a roof before shooting the wasp. Unfortunately, the victim lands on the roof headfirst and dies anyway.

* Averted in ''[[The Avengers (film)|The Avengers]]'' when {{spoiler|The Hulk}} rescues a falling Iron Man by sliding down a building to slow his fall, then sliding several hundred yards down the street before finally coming to a stop.

 

== Literature ==

** In the same arc Marvin falls from the same altitude and has his fall arrested by only the rocky ground below. {{spoiler|He survives, but did decelerate for a whole mile through the rock}}. And he wasn't very happy about it.

* In a strange subversion, in any given [[Philip K. Dick]] novel/short story you ''know'' that something is wrong with the fabric of reality when the rules of physics start acting up. Kudos to the characters if they realise it at the time. ... And you know you're in a horrible sub-sect of reality when the rules of physics are played straight at every single turn (VALIS, anyone?)

** Rincewind himself abides by a variation of the trope. He claims he is not afraid of heights but of ''grounds'': rightly recognizing that the ground is the actual instrument of death in a fatal fall. Also, his own life experience (and the fact that he's a just-barely-Wizard) show him multiple times that he can survive falls...provided someone or something intervenes on his behalf.

* ''Rapunzel: The One With All The Hair'' Prince Benjamin falls from Rapunzel's tower and has his fall "broken" when he lands on his horse, unharmed.

* In the last of the ''[[Lensman]]'' books, Kim Kinnison's daughter Constance is described as having formed a close friendship with Worsel, the flying dragon Lensman, to the point where she ''rides him like a horse'' (and has done so since she was big enough to climb on). One of her sisters describes how he "pretty nearly split her in two with an eleven-gee pull-up", for which she kicked him. Smith, who cranked so much up to eleven for so long, was known for getting little things like this right.

* At least some works of [[Robert Heinlein]] avert this.

** In ''[[Double Star]]'', a pilot tells about his strong, but dumb and stubborn passenger, who managed to walk under 5''g''... and who never walked again afterwards.

* Both the Dragon Boat and Simon Heap easily survive their falls in ''[[Septimus Heap]]''.

* Averted in ''Dragon Keeper: Garden Of The Purple Dragon''. Ping jumps off a burning balcony, hits a tree on the way down, then lands in a pool. However, hitting the tree and water are both seperately described as being ''very painful'', and Ping breaks a rib or two in the process.

 

* Averted in ''[[Heroes (TV series)|Heroes]]'' when Nathan saves {{spoiler|Tracy}} as soon as she jumps off the bridge before she has time to build up velocity and what not.

* Completely and [[Applied Phlebotinum|technologically]] averted in ''[[Crusade]]'', when Lochley's Starfury is heading into the hangar bay at ~1/2 of the ''Excalibur'''s cruising speed. Gravity traps slow the fighter so it doesn't splat on the back of the bay.

'''Sheldon''': In what space, sir, in what space? She's two feet above the ground. Frankly, if he really loved her, he'd let her hit the pavement. It'd be a more merciful death. }}

* In ''[[1000 Ways to Die]]'', a woman is sucked out of a plane mid-flight. Due to wind velocity violently scouring the body, the abnormally cold air, and lack of oxygen, she dies before hitting the water below. This is one of the show's rare cases of [[Truth in Television]], since this is exactly what would happen if someone were sucked out of the plane at high altitude, and in fact actually happened to a stewardess aboard Aloha Airlines Flight 243 in June 2001. Flight 243 was an old Boeing 737, built in the 60's, that had endured tens of thousands of pressurization cycles and operated in the warm salt air over the Pacific Ocean. The fuselage skin started to crack just behind the cockpit bulkhead due to corrosion and metal fatigue. Finally, while cruising at 24,000 feet, nearly a third of the roof peeled off, sucking a stewardess out of the plane. What saved the plane and the passengers (who were buckled into their seats) is that, unlike the 1981 crash of a Boeing 737 owned by Far Eastern Air Transport, the floor stayed intact. (In the 1981 crash, both the ceiling AND the floor ripped off, dooming the plane and the passengers.)

 

== Tabletop Games ==

** Pretty much any high level character can survive. You suffer 1d6 damage per 10 feet up to 20d6 damage, or generally between 60 and 80 points. You also have to roll versus death from massive damage but pretty much anyone capable of surviving the damage will make the save. Of course, by the time you're high level, you probably have other means of surviving a fall anyway.

* ''[[7th Sea]]'', as part of its [[Rule of Cool]] swashbuckling theme, allows you to fall from any height with no damage as long as you land on something "soft", including hay bales, awnings, [[Soft Water|water]] and people.

 

== Video Games ==

** In the ''[[Halo 3]]'' beta if you turned up the movement speed as high as it could go, players could die by simply running into each other fast enough.

** ''[[Halo: Reach]]'' has your character thrown off a doomed Covenant Corvette, and you survive, despite the (relatively) old armor you have access to. How do they explain this? If you look closely enough at the thing on your back, you can see the words "REENTRY PACK" stamped on the side of it. It's [[Informed Ability|(apparently)]] able to lock the Spartan's armor like what Master Chief did in Halo 2/3 and/or augment the energy shield to better withstand the re-entry.

** In most gameplay situations, you automatically die in midair after falling about 30 feet.

* Averted with the summoning stones introduced in ''[[World of Warcraft|Burning Crusade]]'', where if someone is falling off a cliff and is summoned to the dungeon, they hit the ground with all the force they should Of course, this would require rather careful timing. When Wrath of the Lich King introduced a dungeon finder that allowed you to teleport to dungeons at will, they made the caveat that teleportation was not possible while falling.

* [[EverQuest]] keeps similar physics to World of Warcraft: falling any significant depth will damage or kill you, with the damage being proportionate to the fall. A fall into [[Soft Water|any body of water]] (no matter now long the fall or how deep the water) will result in no damage.

* [[Final Fantasy Tactics]] has characters take fall damage if they fall a greater distance than their jump rating (4 for most classes), at a rate of 10% of Max HP per height level. A fall of 10 or more over the character's jump rating is always fatal. Given the scale of the game, this isn't actually all that high (roughly ten yards).

 

== [[Web Comics]] ==

* After dropping ''[[Buck Godot]]'' from a great height and allowing him some time to panic, the elusive Teleporter proceeds to gradually [https://web.archive.org/web/20150409232406/http://www.airshipentertainment.com/buckcomic.php?date=20070403 break his fall] by repeatedly punching him in the stomach. Ouch.

* ''[[Bug Martini|Bug]]'' explored this. [https://web.archive.org/web/20130516090259/http://www.bugcomic.com/comics/plunging-prepubescents/ Sort of].

* Various methods of doing this in ''[[World of Warcraft]]'' are explored in [http://www.awkwardzombie.com/index.php?page=0&comic=050409 this] ''[[Awkward Zombie]]'' strip.

 

== Web Original ==

* [[Played for Laughs]]/[[Rule of Funny]] recently in ''[[Survival of the Fittest]]'', with {{spoiler|Richard Han}}'s death. He falls off a mountain, and screams as he falls... only for him to enter another thread as he falls, apparently screaming the entire time and only stopping when he hits the ground and dies. [[Crowning Moment of Funny|It's actually pretty funny as hell]].

* Subverted or deconstructed every time in the [[Whateley Universe]], where the powers aren't as big and the physics seems to matter more. In "Ayla and the Birthday Brawl", Elite League are running through a holographic simulation. When the [[Squishy Wizard]] Spellbinder gets blasted into the air by a magical trap and [[Flying Brick]] Bombshell flies forward to catch her, the impact knocks Spellbinder out and injures her.

 

== Western Animation ==

{{quote|Remember, its not the ''fall'', [[Disney Villain Death|its the sudden ''stop!'']].}}

* Happens quite sometime in [[Star Wars: The Clone Wars]], most egregiously in the Season2 episode Landing at Point Rain. After Anakin and Ahsoka jumped down from the top of a ten-stories high droid fortress, they used the Force to slow themselves down about a meter from the groud, then they catch Rex -whom Anakin threw several meters high into the air before he himself jumped- about fives inches above ground.

 

== Real Life ==

 

{{reflist}}

[[Category:Television Is Trying to Kill Us]]

[[Category:Artistic License Physics]]

[[Category:Video Game Physics]]

[[Category:Index to The Rescue]]

[[Category:Falling, Dropping, and Plummeting]]