In Harms Way / Literature

Those who find that they're happier In Harm's Way in Literature.

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• As much as Alex Rider just wants to be normal, he definitely falls under this trope as well by the beginning of book four, when he goes off on his own—after an extremely traumatizing mission, being told that he would get his wish to be normal from then on, and receiving explicit instructions to the contrary—to investigate something that he knows for a fact will be dangerous. There's signs of it earlier, too. After all, most people would call the cops on drug dealers, not follow them back to their hideout and then pick their boat lab up with a crane and try to drop it in the parking lot of the police station, which is what gets Alex roped into book two's mission. And even earlier than that, he jumped out a sixteenth-story window to get into his uncle's locked office through the unlocked window via a flagpole at the beginning of book one. He really hates his "job"—but somehow he can't stop getting himself into high-risk, adrenaline-producing situations.
• Animorphs:
  • Rachel quickly becomes like this. At one point, she rejects a Deal with the Devil that would instantly end the alien invasion, both because the price was too high and because she realizes that she'd have nothing to do afterwards.
  • By the end of the saga, the whole team, except maybe Cassie, follows suit. In the aftermath of the war, Rachel is dead and Cassie is the only one with anything like a satisfying, functional life. There's a reason it ends on a Bolivian Army Ending for everyone but her.
• At the beginning of Bulldog Drummond, demobbed soldier Hugh "Bulldog" Drummond places an advertisement in the newspaper: "Demobilized officer, finding peace incredibly tedious, would welcome diversion. Legitimate, if possible; but crime, if of a comparatively humorous description, no objection. Excitement essential." He receives a reply from a young woman whose father is tangled up in a deadly criminal conspiracy, and never looks back.
• Conan the Barbarian. He gets a kingdom at the end and finds it deathly dull; it's when people try to violently overthrow him that he gets excited again.
• In the Deathstalker series, once the rebellion's finally over, half the characters start to practically vibrate out of sheer boredom, something that's really not good when they're the most dangerous people in the reformed Empire. The new regime catches this fact and starts sending them out to do the really dirty jobs.
• Terry Pratchett's Discworld:
  • In Interesting Times, Cohen and the rest of the Silver Horde love being In Harm's Way. It is also subverted near the end when Cohen hears a long list of Barbarian Heroes who had died—and one who has left it for being a Guardsman because it was a regular job and had a pension; it makes a deep impression on Cohen.
  • Played straight when the Silver Horde return in The Last Hero. After one of them dies choking on a cucumber, they decide to have one last adventure: returning fire to the gods...with interest.
  • In Men at Arms, Gaspode receives a place in a cozy little home at the end. At the very end, he escapes, returning to his life as a street dog.
  • Sam Vimes is often portrayed like this. He's the sort of cop to stop his own wedding to chase a criminal (because "it is the ancient instinct of policemen and terriers to chase anything that runs away".) Later books indicate he may be mellowing as his duty shifts to his family, but if he thinks that he'd let down his son by not doing his job, then...
    • Even while leading a parade in his full Ducal attire (which he hates) he cannot resist chasing a criminal. Twice. And, this being Discworld, the entire parade follows him.
  • Moist von Lipwig in Making Money. He actually takes to breaking into his own office building out of boredom until he gets a new dangerous job. (On the other hand, this is hinted as being due in part to Adora Belle Dearheart's absence.)
    Vetinari: Ahead of you is a life of respectable quiet contentment, of civic dignity and, of course, in the fullness of time a pension. Not to mention the proud gold-ish chain.
    Moist: And if I don't do what you say?
    Vetinari: Oh, you misunderstand me, Mr. Lipwig. That is what will happen to you if you decline my offer. If you accept it, you will survive on your wits against powerful and dangerous enemies, with every day presenting a new challenge. Someone may even try to kill you.
  • Beforehand, in Going Postal, he envisioned himself running off at the end, and it wasn't the same, the thrill was gone—and so he stays with Adora.
• Ulysses, as portrayed by Dante in The Divine Comedy, was so drawn to adventure that he abandoned his home and lead his crew to their deaths in search for lands lost to knowledge.

• In Andre Norton's Dread Companion, Kilda would have loved being a scout and explorer, if only she were male.
• Fritz Leiber's Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser's endless adventures are also the fruit of a love of it. In one story, they set out in search on the grounds that they are bound to find it.
• In John C. Wright's Fugitives of Chaos, when Victor professes his desire for a home, wife, and children, Amelia says that most men want adventure; he retorts that she's describing not most men but herself.
• Oscar in Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein, a book with this as a major theme. Possibly also Lazarus Long in other books by the same author.
• In Edgar Rice Burroughs's Gods of Mars, when John Carter meets a fellow prisoner, the young man tells how he happened to fall into this.
  I must have inherited from my father a wild lust for adventure.
• On Gor, larl hunting is a popular sport for Warriors. A larl is like a giant-sized version of an Earth lion, with a meaner attitude, and the normal procedure for hunting it is that every man should carry one spear and a shield, except the junior-most hunter, who also gets a sword. After each man throws his spear, he hits the dirt under his shield, but if the larl's not dead after tail-end Charlie throws his, he must stand and fight with his sword to let the others get away. And they engage in this sport because "the larl is beautiful and dangerous, and because we are Goreans".
  • Typical of Gorean society in general, really. Thanks to Gorean medicine, they have extremely long lifespans, but they don't see the sense in sitting at home doing nothing when they could be out finding interesting ways to die.
• Grettir of the Old Icelandic Grettir's Saga takes on powerful enemies (like bears, trolls, or undeads) or puts himself in dangerous situations (like visiting a wrestling contest in disguise even though he is a wanted outlaw) so as to prove his mettle, not because he must. In his own words:
  "I don't care for a monotonous life."
• Rachel Morgan, the protagonist of The Hollows novels, is often described as an adrenaline junkie seeking dangerous situations in order to feel alive. This tendency was greatly reduced when she nearly gets all of her friends and several other people killed as a result.
• In Death: This is one of the reasons that Eve Dallas doesn't get promoted to Captain (or get pregnant) at any point in the series thus far, and more than likely will not until the end. She likes her place on the streets.
• The fourth episode of The Incomplete Enchanter, The Wall of Serpents, begins with Shea and Belphebe, who narrowly survived the events of the previous story, finding themselves ill at ease living the comfortable suburban life in 20th-century America, so there's nothing for it but to take themselves off to the Kalevala and get in trouble.
• In J. R. R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings, Bilbo's love of adventure returned after much time in settled life.
• In Jack Campbell's The Lost Fleet novel Invincible, Admiral Lagemann jests that the Marines are glad to on a ship that's an attack magnet.
• In Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere, after getting his life back, only better, Richard seems strangely discontent, finding that he now wants nothing. So he goes back to the dangerous, deadly world of London Below.
• In the Newsflesh world, we have a variety of Intrepid Reporter known as "Irwins", who intentionally go out and find zombies and other hazards to play with, in part to entertain their audience, in part to keep themselves entertained. They tend to be adrenaline junkies, and one non-Irwin character mentions that Irwins and professional security people tend to have similar mindsets regarding putting themselves in danger.
• In L. Jagi Lamplighter's Prospero Lost, Miranda thinks that Ferdinard had jilted her for a life of adventure.
• In Rudyard Kipling's The Second Jungle Book, most times, going to drink can be dangerous, and
  In good seasons, when water was plentiful, those who came down to drink at the Waingunga—or anywhere else, for that matter—did so at the risk of their lives, and that risk made no small part of the fascination of the night's doings. To move down so cunningly that never a leaf stirred; to wade knee-deep in the roaring shallows that drown all noise from behind; to drink, looking backward over one shoulder, every muscle ready for the first desperate bound of keen terror; to roll on the sandy margin, and return, wet-muzzled and well plumped out, to the admiring herd, was a thing that all tall-antlered young bucks took a delight in, precisely because they knew that at any moment Bagheera or Shere Khan might leap upon them and bear them down.
  • Kipling loved this trope. Many of his better-known poems, like "Song of the Dead," consist of little else.
• The title character of Sinbad the Sailor is a wealthy merchant. He gets bored sitting home and doing business, so he decides to take to the ocean. Inevitably, he ends up in wild adventures (but still wealthy at the end of each one). After seven of these, he figures out he should stay home.
• King Robert Baratheon in the A Song of Ice and Fire series yearns for his glory days in the war to claim his throne. Even trying to join the melee in one of his kingdom's tourneys.
• Star Wars Expanded Universe: Wedge Antilles feels some of this, Depending on the Writer. His first written appearance in The Thrawn Trilogy had him thinking that helping his friend Luke always led to excitement, and supplemental material shows that while he's had plenty of opportunities for career advancement, he hates the thought of a desk job and just prefers flying.
  • The X-Wing Series fleshes this out a little. Wedge thinks he can do more good as a pilot than as a higher-ranked officer. He's persuaded that it's the other way around and ends up promoted to general. For a time, he's kept from flying combat, and he hates this, but manages to persuade himself that flying combat is only a hobby. Still, it tends to happen to him. Thirty years later, in Legacy of the Force, he's discharged for being too moral—and, for a carefully-hidden instant, panics. Then he realizes that someone's going to try and assassinate him, and this thought calms him down. People have been trying to kill him for so long that the thought centers him.
• In Lewis Carroll's Sylvie and Bruno, trying to explain hunting to Sylvie, the narrator starts with the observation that some places men must hunt fierce beasts, and some of them come to like it.
  "Well, and so the men—the hunters—get to enjoy it, you know: the running, and the fighting, and the shouting, and the danger."
• In Those That Wake, Mal isn't happy unless he's fighting something, and sees not fighting as a failure.
• In Poul Anderson's Time Patrol stories, all the members of the Patrol have this to a greater or lesser extent. Manse and other Unattached Agents in particular.
• Andre Norton's book The Time Traders had the U.S. time-travel operation recruit a lot of these sort of people — "the expendable man who lives on action" — who had been "pressured by the peaceful environment into becoming a criminal or a misfit." They were sent back into some very un-peaceful history.
• In Michael Flynn's Up Jim River, the reason the Brute offers for going.
  • In On the Razor's Edge, several characters think or comment on the excitement of living "on the razor's edge".
• Another trope that recurs in Warhammer 40,000 tie-ins:
  • Sandy Mitchell's hero, Ciaphas Cain, is a coward with a great reputation for heroism. He enjoys the advantages of this reputation so much that he has to fake it, including a love of being In Harm's Way. This inevitably results in him emerging looking like a big damn hero, which only results in him getting thrown into even worse situations.
  • In Dan Abnett's novel Malleus, the rogue trader Maxilla works for Eisenhorn not for the money but for the challenge.
  • By the same author, in Brothers of the Snake, Priad's squad is disappointed when they are sent to pay respects at a coronation, and Priad must sternly remind them that it is their duty.
  • In Lee Lightner's Space Wolf novel Sons of Fenris, Berek thinks that his duties are hard: he can not go down in the fight, which will be glorious.
  • In Graham McNeill's Horus Heresy novel Fulgrim, one of Fulgrim's own men, though thinking his plan vainglorious, admits to a thrill at being back in the fight.
  • In Dan Abnett's Gaunt's Ghosts novel Blood Pact, after Daur was drawn into one of Rawne's schemes, Elodie points out that he was obviously after the danger.
• In Worm, Eidolon privately admits that he's been seeking out fights to try to restore his waning powers. In the climax, Scion tells him that he'd unknowingly used his powers to create the Endbringers because "you needed worthy opponents", thus causing the deaths of untold numbers of civilians and parahumans. When he hears this, Eidolon stops fighting and allows himself to be killed by Scion.
• E.R. Eddison's The Worm Ouroboros contains perhaps the most egregious example. It ends with the triumph of the heroes and the defeat of their noble foes, after a long and ruinous war. The heroes are bored. So the gods bring back their foes that they might fight them.

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