Only a Flesh Wound/Playing With

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


Basic Trope: A show underestimates the severity of wounds that would be serious in Real Life.

  • Straight: The hero is shot in the arm, but it's treated as nothing more than an inconvenience.
  • Exaggerated: The hero is shot in the face several times at point-blank range with a shotgun. What is left of his mouth insists that he's okay.
  • Justified: The hero can regenerate damaged nerves and heal wounds at a superhuman rate.
    • The Hero really is that tough, and thus the bullet did much less damage than appearances would suggest.
    • The hero was shot in the buttocks or forearm, where this can realistically happen.
  • Inverted: Instant Death Bullet
  • Subverted: The hero appears to be able to fight normally after being shot, until he realizes that he can't move his arm.
  • Double Subverted: But that's nothing that can't be fixed with some bandages.
  • Parodied: A man casually shows up to work with a bullet hole in his knee, and nobody makes a big deal out of it.
  • Deconstructed: Gun control becomes obsolete, leading to a significant increase in firearm-related crimes.
  • Reconstructed: Medical science and law enforcement minimize the number of victims and effectively punish offenders
  • Zig Zagged: The hero appears to be able to fight normally after being shot, until he realizes that he can't move his arm. So he bandages it up, but that only does so much to help. He gets better by the next episode, however.
  • Averted: The hero is realistically wounded after being shot.
  • Enforced: "We can't kill this character off just yet, so we need to have him survive this wound."
  • Lampshaded: "How are you still standing? That bullet went right through you!"
  • Invoked: The guns are actually non-lethal pellets or beanbags, simply meant to disorient.
    • Alternatively: The character is wearing body armor or is totally Made of Iron.
  • Defied: The gun is powerful enough that it blows the hero's arm off.
  • Discussed: "I've been shot plenty of times before. No big deal, really."
  • Conversed: "Even if he wasn't hit in a vital area, wouldn't he still be losing a lot of blood?"

Let's head on back to Only a Flesh Wound and don't worry- it's only a gallon of napalm and a few anti-tank rounds, and maybe a couple of land mines worth of shrapnel and only enough bullets to kill every soldier on Earth twenty times over...

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