Disability Immunity

Ain't got no distractions; can't hear no buzzers and bells
Don't see no lights a-flashin'; plays by sense of smell
Always gets a replay — never seen him fall
That deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball.

— The Who, "Pinball Wizard"

This is a subtrope of Disability Superpower where, rather than a character's disability giving them an actual power it instead renders them immune to some sort of attack, trap or ploy that would otherwise be effective.

Examples include:

• A lack of senses protecting someone from the effects of a Brown Note, Hypnotic Eyes, hallucinogenic illusion, etc. because they aren't capable of sensing it in the first place.
• Already being harmed in such a way so it makes no difference. (You're already dying, perhaps of a Convenient Terminal Illness resulting in Suicidal Overconfidence. The ultimate example is being Dead to Begin With: since You Can't Kill What's Already Dead you're Nigh-Invulnerable until someone figures out how to render you Deader than Dead.)
• Not having the frame of mind to be affected which would otherwise be a disadvantage (being Too Dumb to Fool, too nasty to be emotionally blackmailed, Too Kinky to Torture, too messed up to Emotion Bomb, etc.).
• Characters with a Cranial Plate Ability being immune to mind control, telepathy, and other Psychic Powers.

See also: Disability Superpower (for when this grants other abilities to compensate), Your Brain Won't Be Much of a Meal, Too Kinky to Torture, Too Dumb to Fool, Too Broken to Break, Insanity Immunity (which falls under the "frame of mind" variation), Organ Dodge (which can overlap with "already harmed in such a way"), Kryptonite Factor (for the opposite; someone being more vulnerable to something to balance out their power) and Fictional Disability.

Similar to No-Sell except this trope justifies the immunity. See also One Curse Limit when being affected by one thing grants immunity to being affected by anything else. Compare Curse That Cures when a sick or injured character is cured as a side effect of being Cursed. If the disability is being infected with a disease it's a Beneficial Disease. Handy Shortcoming is for those whose disability doesn't necessarily give them an immunity, but does become useful in situations.

The idea that Idiots Cannot Catch Colds is a subtrope.

Contrast Immunity Disability, the inverse of this trope where being immune to something gives you a drawback.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• In Basilisk, Koushiro is blinded when Oboro's power-nullifying gaze causes him to lose control of his own ninjutsu. His blindness is what lets him defeat Hyouma Muroga, as Hyouma's powers are dependent on eye contact and useless on someone who cannot see anything. And then is cruelly inverted when Saemon takes note and uses his voice against Koushiro, buying enough time to have Kagero get closer and kill Koushiro with a Kiss of Death.
• In Black Clover, Asta has no magic power whatsoever, which is shown to be extremely rare. This means Asta cannot use magic. This also means that the technique of sensing magic aura to track other people's movements and locations does not work on him. It's also what allows him to wield his Anti-Magic swords: they automatically drain the magic of anything that touches them, so only a person with no magic at all could wield them effectively. It also makes him a real pain in the ass for the devils to deal with.
• Bleach:
  • Aizen's Shikai only affects those who see it. Being blind, Tosen is immune to it. Aizen recruited him specifically because of this; having somebody around with considerable natural talent who's immune to his illusions wasn't something he was willing to risk.
  • Kenpachi was immune to Berenice Gabrielli's ability to fill people with self-doubt and make them question themselves because he was temporarily deaf from enduring a sonic attack from his previous opponent.
  • Rose's bankai only affects those who can hear its Magic Music. Mask de Masculine gouges out his eardrums to make himself immune.
• Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo has Don Patch do this in the fight against Poet; an attack that takes away his teammates' memories does nothing to him because he is, by his own admission, apparently too stupid to have memories.
• In Chainsaw Man, Denji reveals that he can No-Sell Mind Rape by abusing his Healing Factor and giving himself brain damage, temporarily becoming even more Too Dumb to Fool than he is normally.
• In Cross Ange, the norma, while having no physical disability to speak of, are unable to interact with Mana and shatter it on impact, which results in them getting discriminated against, isolated from everyone else and used as Cannon Fodder against DRAGONs. As it turns out, this also renders them immune to everything that affects mana users, such as debilitating DRAGON screams and mind control, and Embryo's ability to remotely control and influence them.
• Dragon Ball:
  • In Dragon Ball, Krillin once faced a horribly stinky opponent in the tournament. He was getting mauled until Goku reminded him that he had no nose. It does beg the question how could Krillin flick boogers at Master Roshi later that day at the same tournament?
  • Dragon Ball Z: Lord Slug: Piccolo orders Gohan to whistle during the final showdown, since Namekians like himself and Slug can't stand the noise due to their super-hearing. So he himself doesn't have to hear it, Piccolo rips his own ears off; once the crisis is resolved, he regenerates them.
  • In Dragon Ball Super, during the multiverse tournament, Krillin uses the Solar Flare on Majora - only to discover that he's blind, and tracks his enemies by sense of smell. In what almost seems like a nod to the above scene, Krillin wins by chucking his shoe at Majora's nose and "blinding" him with foot odour.
• Fairy Tail
  • Erza Scarlet lost an eye to torture as a child. We never get to see the damage thankfully, since it scares her closest friend who just proved that, in spite of this flashback being before he lost it, he was perfectly capable of murder. She gets a magical artificial eye in its place which lessens the effects of spells that require eye contact, such as Stone Eyes; the effect is stronger when she closes her real eye, to the point she's immune to things like illusions.
  • Ichiya apparently has so many weaknesses that Wall Eehto's Enemy Scan gets tripped up in the process... at least until Wall decides to just forgo relying on a weakness and pummel him directly while calling him "weak".
  • Ichiya himself has several times gone up against enemies that he's tried to take out with the effects of his perfumes (such as intense smells or even poisons), but they fail because his opponents don't have noses to detect them (such as a Rock Dragon or the aforementioned Wall).
• Fist of the North Star:
  • One enemy, Souther, is immune to Kenshrio's Pressure Point's based martial art, because he suffers from Dextrocadria. So in their rematch, Ken just solves the issue by switching which sides of his body he attacks.
  • In one of the video games adaptation, another is also immune to Kenshiro's attacks, because, being a Cyborg, he doesn't have any pressure points on his body left. So Kenshiro decides to directs his attacks toward his only organic part remaining, his brain.
• Alluded to a couple times in Fullmetal Alchemist; for example, when the Elric brothers break into the Fifth Laboratory, Ed remarks that his metal hand and Al's armor body allow them to climb over the barbed wire on the fence without injury, and when climbing through a duct, Ed thinks to himself with increasing horror that if he weren't so short, he wouldn't fit through the ducts.
• On one episode of Inuyasha, the main characters encounter an elderly "exorcist" with no actual spiritual powers. When they encounter the Monster of the Week, everyone is paralyzed by the monster's extremely high negative energy level — except for the old woman, who doesn't notice anything.
• In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Stone Ocean: Pucci has the power to remove abilities and turn them into CD-like discs. He temporarily removes his eyesight so that a rainbow won't turn him into a snail with subliminal messages.
• Jujutsu Kaisen: After Naoya returns as a cursed spirit, he evolves to the point that he can use Domain Expansion. However, Time Cell Moon Palace only targets people with even the slightest trace of cursed energy: because Maki has absolutely no cursed energy whatsoever (thanks to her Heavenly Restriction), she's able to move freely and suffer no damage, allowing her to sneak behind Naoya and stab him In the Back before exorcising him.
• In Monster Musume, Satyrs are known for having probably the strongest sex-drives of any monster girls. This makes them immune to the effects of the full moon, which normally drives most monster girls into a lust-driven frenzy — the satyrs are used to feeling that way all the time, so they have an easy time controlling themselves.
• In My Hero Academia it is eventually revealed that this is the case for Izuku and Toshinori. One For All puts strain on the body of a Quirk user who inherits it, and this eventually leads to them dying of Rapid Aging. However, since Toshinori and Izuku are both Quirkless, neither of them have this issue. This also helps out Toshinori during the Final Battle as he can battle All For One in Powered Armor without worrying about losing his Quirk as he has none while the monster usually fights long ranged to weaken them before taking those Quirks.
• One Piece.
  • Usopp is unaffected by Perona's negative hollow because he already has self-esteem issues. In fact, the hollows themselves get depressed by passing through him!
    "I'M ALREADY NEGATIVE!!!"
  • The fishman Sebastian from the 3D2Y special is immune to Hancock's charm due to being blind. Unfortunately for him, that just means that Hancock is forced to actually attack.
  • During the Time Skip, Captain Kid lost his left arm in a battle offscreen. This ends up proving crucially beneficial much later when he's used as a voodoo doll by Hawkins (which makes it so any damage Hawkins takes is transferred to someone nearby). Kid's crewmate Killer is able to bypass Hawkin's voodoo protection by attacking Hawkin's left arm, because Kid doesn't have a left arm to transfer the damage to.
• In Saint Seiya, Shiryu has to blind himself to fight Algol's Taken for Granite powers.^note  (He DID try closing his eyes and blindfolding himself, but the magic went through cloth and closed eyelids. This even enables him later on to avoid being fooled by Gemini's illusion of an empty suit of armor, preventing Seiya from striking the illusion (Hyoga was not so lucky, and Shun managed to save himself with his chains but couldn't help Hyoga), and actually sensing the temple exit where Seiya would only see a suit of armor and a wall behind it. Bonus points for the Big Bad pointing out that he should have known Shiryu would be immune, though it doesn't matter. Cue Evil Laugh.
  • Later on, the nigh-invincible God Warrior Siegfried was beset by the hypnotic flute of Siren Sorento. He gouged out his own eardrums... but it was revealed that Sorento's music pierced the victim's brain directly, and it was impossible for Siegfried to defend himself from it.
• In Umi Monogatari, Kanon's evil aura protects her from Sedna's darkness.
• YuYu Hakusho has an example where the arc's Big Bad likes to use a shrinking spell on people. But when he uses it on Yusuke, it shrinks him instead. Genkai explains that the spell enters the body through the ear canal and doesn't work if the opponent can't hear it clearly, making countering it as simple as covering one's ears. Yusuke has water and moss in his ears from being dunked in a pond earlier, so he qualifies.

Audio Plays

• Big Finish Doctor Who: In "The Shadow of the Scourge", this is specifically invoked. The Seventh Doctor, Ace, and Benny are fighting an alien species with a Compelling Voice that they use to force people to do whatever they tell them. Ace's solution? Get someone to destroy her eardrums! She knows the TARDIS medbay can patch her back up at the end of the adventure, but until then, she's running around completely deaf and with blood coming out of her ears.

Card Games

• In Yu-Gi-Oh! TCG, the equip spell Flint is an annoying equip spell that weakens the host monster and prevents it from attacking. However, the monster Flint Lock is designed to be immune completely to the negative effects of Flint, and even benefits from extra powers while equipped with Flint, such as being indestructible by battle. Cherry on top, it can even manipulate Flint to contaminate other monsters, or relieve a monster from it to use its protection. This double counts as Crippling the Competition and Disability Superpower.^note The two come from the videogame Xexex. The Flint is an alien life form that instinctively reaches out and saps enemies. The Flint Lock was built specifically to control and employ it.

Comic Books

• In Avengers/Invaders, New Avenger Echo is able to outmaneuver the villain D'Spayre because she's deaf and therefore unable to hear his attempts to influence her into despair.
• A Batman and Predator crossover had Mr. Freeze survive a Predator attack because his body temperature issues made it nearly impossible for it to see him.
• Bianca Steeplechase, the female version of the Joker in the Elseworlds comic Batman: Thrillkiller is hard of hearing, which leaves her unaffected by Batgirl’s sonic weapons.
• Birds of Prey: During Last Laugh, Copperhead and Hellgrammite were shown to be immune to Black Canary's 'canary cry' because they doesn't have ears.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season 10 exploits this in one issue. When Spike and Xander have been seduced by sirens, Xander, in a moment of clarity, takes two plastic drink swords and shoves them in Spike's ears, poking out his ear drums. The deaf Spike is thus immune to the sirens, and manages to kill them before his ear drums grow back.
• In Crossed, an insanity virus pandemic sweeps the entire world and destroys human civilization. The infected are turned into utter psychopaths and sadists, though symptoms vary: many are practically feral, but some retain enough intelligence to lay traps and use guns. A rare few individuals, however, retain most or all of their intelligence and emotional control: these "super-Crossed" are so rare they're considered a scary campfire tale by survivors, but where they do appear they rise up as leaders of organized hordes of the infected. It seems that these super-Crossed were people with atypical brains, either from genetic conditions or drug abuse: their brains were structurally/chemically different enough from baseline humans that the infection didn't match them as much. Examples include a criminal who abused ketamine, a young nun in Britain who had epilepsy, and mention of an "autistic kid" in Montreal. Worst of all was the serial killer Salt, who was already a psychopath before he was infected, so there was nothing to change. The super-Crossed are usually just as sadistic as regular Crossed, though one or two even retain human empathy.
• This happens a lot to Daredevil, since he's blind (despite his Disability Superpower).
  • An early The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) issue featured a guest appearance from Daredevil, who attended a circus where the ringmaster hypnotizes everyone in the audience except Matt. Unfortunately, Spider-Man gets hypnotized too and ends up fighting Daredevil.
  • One of his recurring enemies in The Silver Age of Comic Books was the Masked Marauder, who used "opti-blasts" that blinded people.
  • The 600th issue of Amazing Spider-Man begins with Spidey and Daredevil cleaning out a Bad Guy Bar. One of them has the power to render someone blind by touching them, and grabs Daredevil, much to Spidey's amusement.
  • A Marvel Two-in-One story has Daredevil win a one-page battle with minor villain Mirage, whose only ability is projecting convincing holograms.
  • Jester once tried to push Matt into a Heroic BSoD by having a dummy of Foggy hung by its neck from a banister with a suicide note. Since he couldn't see who it was supposed to be, Matt only detected that the body was a cheap fake and the letter was laced with cyanide to kill him with. He then wonders what Jester was trying to accomplish as Jester watches through a hidden camera.
    Jester: React, damn you! That's your best friend hanging from a noose! Anyone who's ever seen Matt Murdock in a fight knows the "blind lawyer" gag is a put-on! OPEN YOUR EYES!
  • His 2014 series features a flashback to a fight with Hawkeye, back before the hero community knew about his blindness. Hawkeye held a phosphorous arrow in front of him, and it took him a few seconds to recognize his "cue".
    Daredevil: AAAAAH! My eyes! The pain! The PAAAAIIIN--!
    Foggy: [narrating] Fun Daredevil fact: every single time Matt has to improv, he course-corrects by overacting.
  • On the flip side, Daredevil himself has occasionally had his Living Lie Detector abilities (which rely on his ability to hear stress-induced changes in heartbeat when someone lies) tripped up by a pacemaker.
  • Occasionally referenced in confrontations with the Purple Man; Daredevil is still affected by the villain's mind-control powers, but as his blindness means he's only picking up some of the signals that allow the Purple Man to control people, he's better equipped to resist the rest.
  • And speaking of the Purple Man: his power allows him to control people with his Compelling Voice, apart from people who are deaf for obvious reasons.
• Doctor Who Magazine: In "Sticks and Stones", being dyslexic made people immune to Monos' attack (which was transforming people into language).
• In the graphic novel Fall of Cthulhu, one of Nyarlathotep's minions is a shapeshifter who takes the form of its victim's loved one. One of the protagonists has lost his memory, and as such is not fooled when the shapeshifter changes into his wife (as he doesn't recognize her).
• Fantastic Four: It is occasionally noted that the Invisible Woman's powers, at least those not related to the application of main force, are trivially countered by those who could not see her or anything she does in the first place.
  • She first met Alicia Masters when the Pupper Master's stepdaughter alerted the man who had seized control of The Thing to the the fact that two strangers just came in their home.
  • When Daredevil came across the gimp-mask-&-fetish-gear-wearing woman who was mopping the floor with 3/4 of the FF he asked what the amorphous blob the heroes were fighting was, a critical clue that they were dealing with a Brainwashed and Crazy Invisible Girl.
• Ghost Rider's Penance Stare forces the victim to endure every mote of suffering they've inflicted on others throughout their entire lives by making them look into Ghost Rider's eyes. Naturally, it doesn't work on blind people.
• Green Lantern: The Red Lanterns have their circulatory functions controlled by their rings instead of their hearts, what makes them dependant on the rings to survive ^note Not counting some Depending on the Writer cases, it needs a Blue Lantern to heal this dependence (or in Supergirl's case, a very close proximity to a yellow sun to heal her solar-powered Kryptonian physiology). On the other hand, it also makes them immune to attacks aiming their hearts, as the Black Lantern Corps, whose modus operandi is ripping their victims' hearts from their bodies, learned the hard way.
• Done for laughs in one Groo the Wanderer story, where an evil wizard is attempting to read Groo's mind... and fails spectacularly, because Groo is so dumb there's nothing to read.
• Hawkeye: In a Bronze Age issue of his first miniseries, Hawkeye invoked this, using one of his sonic arrows to fry his own eardrums, rendering him immune to a bad guy's sonic mind control. Since then, Hawkeye has used hearing aids.
• Looking into the true face of Justice Society of America enemy Johnny Sorrow results in instant death. Dr. Mid-Nite, however, proves immune due to his blindness. Naturally, he's a big part of the team's eventual defeat of Sorrow.
• Locke & Key: Rufus Whedon's unspecified mental disability makes him immune to the mind-tampering effects of the Head Key.
• Memetic is about an image that becomes a viral sensation, and turns whoever looks at it into mindless and murderous "Screamers". The main characters are colorblind college student Aaron and legally blind war vet Marcus, who are immune to the meme's effect. Later on, the Screamers' screams become a chant that can lure/hypnotize those who haven't been turned: Aaron is also deaf, so that too doesn't affect him. In the end he decides to join the horde anyway.
• Nextwave. Forbush Man decides to torment the heroes with their worst nightmare. Apparently Boom-Boom simply didn't have enough of a mind to torment. Compared to Aaron Stack's whose mind was programmed in...
• Preacher: Starr sends a number of operatives who don't understand English to capture Jesse, as they're unable to understand his Compelling Voice and thus are immune to it.
• Rover Red Charlie, by the same creator as Crossed, is about an insanity-inducing virus that appears not to affect the neurologically impaired, like Hermann's "shit boy" slave or the passengers on the crashed short bus that the canine protagonists at one point come across.
• Star Wars: The High Republic (2021) features a roundabout example with Keeve Trennis's Jedi Master Sskeer. During the last arc of the Phase I run, Sskeer reveals that he's been diagnosed with Magrak syndrome, a Trandoshan-specific brain disease that causes him to regress to his species' more primal and savage instincts, explaining why he has had a number of episodes of being a ruthless berserker throughout the comic. He's been using the Force to slow the disease's progression, but it has also caused him to slowly lose his connection to the Force. This loss becomes a blessing in disguise when the Nihil start weaponizing the Nameless - Eldritch Abominations that can attack Jedi through the Force by passively triggering hallucinations before feeding on them. This ability exclusively affects Force-users, and because Sskeer has been losing his connection, he is unaffected. He uses this to his advantage to save Keeve and Avar Kriss from certain death, and then buys time holding off the Nameless on Starlight Beacon while the other two Jedi help evacuate the doomed station.
• In Suicide Squad, Rick Flag strongly suspects he has Brainwash Residue after extensive torturing and personality modification on the orders of General Wade Eiling, so he consults Bronze Tiger, himself a sufferer, and gets an idea. When, predictably, Eiling pops up and invokes a Trigger Phrase, Flag falls into compliance... until Eiling hands him a detonator and orders him to kill Amanda Waller. Cue Eiling's brain blowing into chunks and Flag revealing he was wearing ear plugs.
• Teen Titans:
  • Jericho can possess a person after making eye contact with them; his body turns insubstantial and enters the subject. Cyborg, whose body is half-cybernetic, was able to prevent this by closing his human eye and looking at Jericho through his cybernetic eye.
  • During Titans: Beast World, Cyborg is able to No-Sell an attempt by a Starro spore to control him partially because he's missing half the things it would normally use to possess someone.
• The Transformers: More than Meets the Eye: The mind-influencing nudge gun is a very powerful device capable of booth implanting ideas as well as removing memories from people. But it has one major flaw in that it relies on its victim having a fully working brain module. Riptide (who is implied to have some kind of learning disability) just got knocked out without it removing any memories and Tyrest (who may have suffered brain damage due to constantly drilling holes in himself) instantly recognised the idea implanted as foreign.
• In The Transformers: Sins of the Wreckers, Verity, being an ordinary human whose senses are much more limited than those of a Cybertronian, is much better at handling the Noisemaze once the characters get trapped there. To her, it's merely unpleasant rather than completely debilitating, and she's able to guide the rest of the heroes out of it.
• Wonder Woman Vol 2: During Greg Rucka's run Diana unhesitatingly blinds herself with snake venom to defeat a gorgon without falling prey to her petrifying gaze (she couldn't reliably just keep her eyes closed as Medusa had a Compelling Voice and kept ordering Diana to look at her). Athena then uses this blindness in a ploy to overthrow Zeus via their respective champions, by having Diana use Medusa's severed head to petrify Zeus' champion.
• X-Factor (2006): In Issue #233, Siryn uses her Compelling Voice to make the members of an anti-Mutant hate group drop their firearms and surrender peacefully. Unfortunately, one of them is deaf and his attack makes Siryn lose her concentration starting a fight betweex X-Factor and the hate group.
• In XXXenophile by Phil Foglio, supervillain the Eunuch is immune to Orgasm Lass's primary superpower: the ability to cause orgasms in others by touching them.

Fan Works

• A psychological variant of this featured in the Chronicles of Narnia fic Across the Worlds; when the dimension-spanning villain known as the Darkness captured the Pevensies and Caspian to stop them interfering in his plans, the Darkness left Susan alone because he assumed her current lack of belief in Narnia would prevent her being a threat. As a result, Aslan had time to recruit Susan and three new allies, and instruct them that they would need to travel across the worlds and oppose the Darkness, before his strength failed and he was captured too.
• Referenced in the Black As Night sequel Blind Spots; in this version of events, when facing the paralysis-inducing Flightmare, the writer changed how this dragon's ability worked by making it that people had to see the beast to be frozen by it, resulting in the blinded Hiccup being unaffected by its attack.
• "The Beginning of Uncertainty" begins in an AU aftermath of The Flash (2023) where Barry's actions create a new timeline. This series reveals that Kara (who exists in the new timeline while retaining memories of the reality where she ‘first’ met Barry) suffers from a Kryptonian variation of this; her genetic imprinting failed to take in utero, and she lacks the genetic markers for suitable reconditioning, so while Kara was raised as a member of the Thinkers’ Guild she actually has none of the programming that would make her a traditional member of Kryptonian society. The other heroes speculate that this lack of genetic conditioning is basically why Kara and Kal are the only two Kryptonians not in favour of Zod’s plan to destroy Earth and rebuild Krypton, as they are able to accept that the planet has gone and move on where the other Kryptonians are fixated on rebuilding what they lost (Aquaman describes it as the Supers being “the two Kryptonians out there that aren’t cuckoo for Krypton-puffs.”),
• In The Blue Hour, a Twilight Spite Fic, Bella is noted to have a metal plate in her head from a car accident. Presumably this would have explained why Edward cannot hear her thoughts.
• Both Syllables: Implied in the Spin-Off Policy of Truth, where Irkens' ability to pass in Paper Thin Disguises is explained by a mild kind of Compelling Voice. At one point Dib, who's immune, mentions that he's tone-deaf; Jumba wonders if this might be related, but we never get an answer.
• Cheating Death: Those That Lived: Teff Withers has been deaf since birth. This renders her immune to the siren mutts and their hypnotic song, which killed the Career pack, letting her win the Hunger Games.
• In Civilization V: Peace Walker, Alexander the Great has Hypnotic Eyes, which combined with his natural charisma allows him to try to hypnotize Snake's men into believing that Snake is the true enemy. Snake No Sells the effect because a) he's seen it before, and b) he only has one eye.
• In Daily Equestria Life with Monster Girl, Cerea is the only sapient being on the planet with no magic whatsoever. This means that she can handle platinum with relative safety (it still might explode in her hands, but it won't drain her if improperly prepped), and makes her the only being on the planet who can safely handle her Anti-Magic sword. It also means she's the only person in the world who can enter Tartarus in an attempt to evaluate Tirek without having her magic drained. There's nothing for him to steal.
• In the Harry Potter fic Disrespecting Authority, it's suggested that Sirius's years in Azkaban have left Sirius essentially immune to legilimency as his mind has been left an addled mess that makes it hard for others to see his memories properly.
• Getting Back on Your Hooves has the Ropen, a blind monster that as a result is immune to Fluttershy's Stare.
• In I Am What I Am, the reason Xander survived Willow's attacks at the end of Season 6 is revealed to be that he has so little magic^note The only magic present in his body is the amount that comes from having a soul that he's functionally Anti-Magic. On the upside, it turns out that it's actually easier to forge magical weapons the less magic the forger has. On the downside, while he can learn magic, it's so slow going that it took Xander decades to be able to hold a minor enhancement spell for a full minute.
• In Left Beyond, Aki Lattinen is coded as neurodivergent and actually turns out to have an unusual cerebral anatomy. While this does not make her immune to the Antichrist's mind-compulsion powers, she remembers that he has them, and helps build a partial countermeasure.
• Maria Campbell of the Astral Clocktower: Played for Laughs. Nicol is so ridiculously pretty that most people immediately faint upon first meeting him; there are servants dedicated to clearing away the unconscious people at any ball he attends. Furthermore, if people can make it past that hurdle, he's also The Stoic, so most people are put off by his lack of any obvious expression. Combined, these have made it very difficult for him to court anyone. At a diplomatic function, he ends up having a perfectly ordinary conversation with a blind woman, and his sister wonders why they never thought of that before.
• Nobody Dies has a quite disturbing example of this trope; Asuka ends up weaponising her Abusive Parents-induced mental illness at least twice.
• Old Man Henderson of Old Man Henderson infamy was already so crazy and had smoked so much marijuana that he dismissed the various Brown Note Eldritch Abominations as hallucinations or really ugly poodles, and his dyslexia means that he was unable to read the Necronomicon, rendering him immune to most of its effects.
• Opening The Box Deconstructs this; after experiencing just how debilitating Perona's Negative Ghosts were, Sanji is deeply concerned about the fact Usopp was able to No-Sell them due to his self-esteem issues.
  Still, the thought that Usopp was thoroughly familiar even with a toned-down version of what Sanji had felt when the ghosts attacked him – familiar enough to build up immunity to the real thing – was deeply unsettling. Sanji didn't like it one lousy bit.
• Hanna in The Secret Return of Alex Mack has no fear response at all, which can get her into dangerous situations. However, it also means that the Midwich Cuckoos are unable to Mind Rape her; replaying the memory of her mother being murdered just makes her thrilled to see her mother.
• Two Sides of a Coin: Kate McMillan is unharmed by a disruptor shot to her leg, on account of that leg being a prosthetic.
• The Vampire Spawn with the Green Hand and a Tadpole: Like all Grey Wardens, Stroud is slowly dying to Darkspawn Taint. The taint also protects him from vampire bites, because his blood is like poison to them.
• In Viridian: The Green Guide, Queen Bee's poison works by attacking a person's Quirk factor, which allows them to use their Quirk. When her bees attack Izuku Midoriya, who is Quirkless, he doesn't even notice it. When the Big Bad tries to steal Izuku's Quirk, it fails to work, giving Izuku the opening he needs to kill him.
• In What If?, this basically applies to Neo from the Machines’ perspective. As a glitch in the Matrix without access to his body, he can’t actually take any form of sustenance, and must make a conscious decision to come in contact with anything. On the other hand, his lack of an external link to the system means that the Machines can’t even try and hold him prisoner unless he lets them, and he eventually learns how to fight the Agents.
• In one X-COM: UFO Defense novelization, one soldier is described as having the psychic potential of a brick, which makes him the only one completely unable to use Psychic Powers in any way, shape or form in the entire organization. Which becomes extremely useful when it turns out that the Etherals, who rely on their psychic powers to replace most of their bodily functions, are absolutely unable to detect him, since he emits the same psychic aura as any furniture.
• Your Alicorn Is in Another Castle: From "The Kaizo Trap":
  In this case, Chief Kaizo had arrived in Canterlot three days prior to the meetings, mostly because it took three days for the embassy to properly consecrate itself for his stay and he had to personally oversee all of it, generally while leading the extremely loud cleansing chant which continued under both Sun and Moon before starting all over again at the moment anyone dropped a note. (Property values tended to be rather low in the vicinity of that embassy, and anypony who was hearing-impaired took happy financial advantage.)

Films — Animation

• In Barbie Fairytopia, Elina's lack of wings normally earns her ridicule or pity from other fairies. However, when the Big Bad Laverna spreads a mist throughout the land that weakens those with wings, Elina is unaffected, which enables her to stop Laverna and save the day.
• In Home on the Range, Grace is the only cow immune to Slim's hypnotic yodeling because she's tone deaf.
• In Hotel Transylvania, it's crossed over with No Eye in Magic: Dracula tries to use his Hypnotic Eyes on Jonathan to make him leave, but Jonathan's contacts somehow mess it up.
• The baby dragons in How to Train Your Dragon 2 are not susceptible to the Alpha dragon's brainwashing because their brains are not mature enough yet.
• Kung Fu Panda: Po is The Chosen One not just because he has a lot of potential, but because he is just too fat to be affected by Tai Lung's Pressure Point attacks.
• In Minions the Hypno Hat doesn't work on the blind keeper of the royal jewels.
• In My Little Pony: Equestria Girls – Rainbow Rocks, the Dazzlings' song does not affect people who are protected by magic or cannot hear it. The main heroes were protected by magic, and Vinyl Scratch never stops listening to her headphones.

Films — Live-Action

• In The Avengers (2012), Loki brainwashes people by tapping them on the chest with his staff. He tries this on Tony Stark to no effect, because Tony has an arc reactor in his chest keeping shrapnel from entering his heart.
  Loki: ... This usually works.
  Tony Stark: Well, performance issues. It's not uncommon. One out of five—
• Bird Box:
  • Deranged individuals do not kill themselves when exposed to the creatures. Instead, they see it as beautiful and are driven to show others what they've seen.
  • Blind people cannot be affected by the creatures at all.
• Bane in The Dark Knight Rises relies on a gaseous painkiller to numb the pain from his old injuries that would otherwise incapacitate him. And if his fights with Batman are anything to go by, the painkiller has the added effect of reducing pain in combat.
• In Dobermann, Nat the Gypsy is deaf. She uses this to her advantage during the raid in Joe's club. She manages to shove the cop who is trying to arrest her up against the speaker bank, and then cranks the volume of the club's sound system to maximum. The cop falls to the floor, deafened and nearly unconscious, while Nat is largely unaffected.
• In Eternals, Makkari's deafness also accounts for her Required Secondary Powers, as it makes her immune to the sonic booms caused by her Super-Speed.
• In Faster, Driver survives being shot in the head by Cop because he has a metal plate in his skull: a metal plate that is there because of the injuries he sustained the the first time Cop shot him in the head 10 years ago.
• One of the rules in The Human Race is that touching the grass anywhere on the race course will result in Your Head A-Splode. Eddie, a veteran who lost a leg in Afghanistan, is so skilled with his crutches that he is able to use them to safely traverse grass without his remaining leg touching the ground, something which is revealed when he is shoved onto a road-adjacent field by "Deaf Female."
• Exploited in Hush. The protagonist is a deaf woman in a remote house, under attack from a serial killer. At the climax, she uses her exceptionally loud fire alarm (which is designed to be so loud that she can feel the vibrations throughout the house), to disorient her attacker, while it doesn't impact her at all.
• In The Kunoichi: Ninja Girl, the eunuch Shimotsuki organ dodges Kanna's Groin Attack.
• In the Troma-distributed anthology Macabre Pair of Shorts, two vampires find themselves unable to feed on their prospective victim due to his blood disease. One vampire subsequently insists that the man be Killed to Uphold the Masquerade, but the other decides against it in favor of making him a vampire too (with the added benefit that the disease can't kill him now).
• Due to his inability to form new memories, the hero of Memento is the perfect assassin: he acts like a normal guy, doesn't feel guilt over the people he's killed, and can never confess any of his crimes because he genuinely doesn't remember committing them.
• In My Favorite Martian, Brace Channing is a borderline case. Uncle Martin uses a sort of mind meld on her while copying her form and while the copying works he's left seriously disorientated by her lack of brains.
  Martin: Boy, her head was dark and empty.
• The villain in Orgazmo is blasted with the orgazmo ray so many times in the "climax" of the film that he returns in the epilogue for a Sequel Hook, proclaiming himself to be a eunuch, and thus immune to Orgazmo's weapon (just like the villainous character they created in the movie-within-a-movie to bump off Orgazmo's character).
• Serenity (2005): Mal is immune to The Operative's Pressure Point Finishing Move because his back was injured in The War of Earthly Aggression, and the nerve cluster The Operative meant to hit is gone.
• Signs: Mel Gibson's son has asthma, and an asthma attack prevented him from breathing in the aliens' poisonous fumes.
• In Species II an alien organism sneaks aboard the first manned Mars space flight and attacks the three-man crew, rendering them unconscious for most of the trip back to Earth. Two of the astronauts are infected and turned into Half-Human Hybrids. The reason the third astronaut is spared because he carries genes for sickle-cell anemia, though he himself doesn't manifest it. As established in the first film, the alien can detect genetic defects just by touch and avoids procreating with humans who have those. As a side note, the astronaut in question is black, and most cases of sickle-cell anemia are encountered in people with sub-Saharan African ancestry. Ironically, as mentioned in the Real Life section below, sickle-cell anaemia is an example itself; an asymptomatic carrier for the gene like the aforementioned carrier is naturally immune to malaria.
• Star Wars: In Revenge of the Sith, Darth Vader's prosthetic arm enables him to climb to safety even after being burned by proximity to lava.
• The Big Bad of The World Is Not Enough is highly resistant to pain because of a bullet slowly moving through his brain. The fact he is dying also means he's willing to engage in The Last Dance in order to further the plans of Electra.
• In World War Z, the zombies instinctively seek out capable host bodies to make new zombies. A soldier with a crippled leg is indicated to have been a low priority target, and people with terminal illnesses are ignored completely.

Folklore

• In The Pied Piper of Hamelin, at most three children can get left behind when the Piper plays his alluring music, and are thus able to tell the adults what happened to the others. One is deaf and can't hear the music, one is blind and can't follow the Piper, and one is lame and can't keep up. Different versions use different variations.
• One piece of Japanese folklore holds that Idiots Cannot Catch Colds.
• The One-Armed Judo Competitor, a motivational story commonly told in martial arts schools, tells of a one-armed boy learning from an old master who only ever teaches him one move. He does very well at his first tournament, breezing through his first few matches, struggles in his next few, but ultimately managing to win and become champion even when apparently outmatched. When he asks how he managed to win with only one move, the master knowingly tells him that the move he mastered, which happens to be one of the most difficult throws in Judo, has only one known defense against it: grab your opponent by the left arm.
• One folktale about not succumbing to Toxic Friend Influence tells the story of a group of frogs who decide to climb to the top of a tall tower in the forest. Other animals gather to watch and state that there's no way the frogs can make it, they're too small and weak, it will never work, etc. One by one, the frogs lose steam — except one frog that does get all the way to the tower's peak. When that frog descends and the animals express shock, it's revealed that he is deaf and thus couldn't hear their negativity, which in turn gave him the strength to reach the top.

Jokes

• One joke involves a man in a hat making a Deal with the Devil in exchange for all his earthly desires to be granted. Years later, the devil returns to collect, only for the man to remove his hat, revealing a magnificent flame-red mane. The joke, of course, being that gingers have no souls.
• Do you know what dumb people have in their heads? Brain-eating maggot. What is it doing in there? Starving.

Literature

• In The Andromeda Strain, the titular Strain kills an entire town save a baby and an old man. Turns out that the contagion was actually extremely sensitive to abnormal pH levels. The old man was a nutcase who drank drain cleaner, resulting in the pH of his blood being thrown off, and the baby had colic, and had cried himself into oxygen alkalosis. Previously subverted. If you have normal coagulation, Andromeda will cause your death by increasing it to the point that all of your blood will become solid in the blink of an eye. If you don't have normal coagulation? It migrates to the brain and destroys all of your blood vessels there.
• Animorphs:
  • Invoked — the Arn, a species adept at genetic modification, purposefully altered themselves so that they cannot be infested by a Yeerk without rupturing a blood vessel and dying. They assumed this would make the Yeerks leave them alone; instead the Yeerks made the Arn slaves and used them for target practice. By the main events of the series only one is left. They also can't infest a species called the Hawjabrans because their brains are spread in bits throughout their bodies instead of being centralized. So they just murder all eight thousand ones they capture.
  • A variant: Yeerks are perfectly able to infest disabled humans, but why bother when there are billions of better hosts available? (Taylor was apparently an exception, useful due to her mother's position rather than her own physical ability, and the Yeerks' first priority was to make her physically capable anyway.) When the Animorphs finally decide to expand their ranks they go after the handicapped, knowing that they can actually be trusted.
• Artemis Fowl: The LEP recruit Mulch Diggums to infiltrate Fowl Manor because being a criminal, he's long since lost his magic due to entering human dwellings without permission, while all of them are unable to do so without losing their magic (and severe bodily distress).
• The Ballad of Black Tom: Otis is saved from being driven insane by a Tome of Eldritch Lore because he's illiterate; you can't exactly Go Mad from the Revelation if the revelation looks like nothing but indecipherable scribbles to you.
• The Belgariad: Polgara the Sorceress is well-known for her Psychic Radar. Zakath counters this in The Malloreon by deploying sentries who are so profoundly stupid that she doesn't hear their thoughts at all.
• Bruce Coville's Book of...:
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Spine Tinglers: The Sight of the Basilisk is narrated by a basilisk, who was left to guard a treasure-filled tomb a long time ago. Some robbers force a blind boy into the tomb to steal stuff for them, and the basilisk strikes up a conversation with him when he realizes the boy is still alive despite "seeing" him. The story ends with the boy hiding the basilisk in his clothes when he leaves the tomb. Then the robbers attack him and demand to see whatever he found...
  • Bruce Coville's Book of Monsters II: Optical Illusion features a man in a crowded restaurant sharing a table with someone who turns out to be a mutant with powerful psychic abilities, and reveals that he and others like him are going to take over the world, then uses his Hypnotic Eyes to try to erase the protagonist's memory of the conversation. Once the bad guy leaves the protagonist notes that he has to warn somebody, and thankfully mankind has some hope — the smug villain wasn't even smart enough to realize that the protagonist is blind.
• Invoked in A Certain Magical Index: when Index is using a spell called "Sheol Fear" that induces paralyzing confusion in people of faith via a sort of song/wail, a group of nuns counter it by rupturing their eardrums with pens. Sheol Fear doesn't work on the deaf, since they cannot hear the song.
• In Chanters of Tremaris, Trout has hearing loss from his days in a machine shop, so he can't hear the high notes needed to perform the Power of Seeming and is immune to illusions.
• Billy Raven from the Children of the Red King series is immune from another character's Hypnotic Eyes because he has albinism, which impairs his eyesight prevents him from being able to focus on them.
• In The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant, Covenant attributes his ability to resist Mind Rape at the hands of Lord Foul in part to his being a leper: a lot of his nerve endings have died, making him numb against pain, and he's suffered so much scorn, abandonment, and isolation since contracting his disease that it's difficult for Lord Foul to make Covenant any more miserable than he already is. Much later on, his numb hands enable him to use a magic weapon that becomes hot enough to severely burn them.
• Could arguably apply to Eddie O'Hare, the protagonist of Colony, when he is brought back in a robotic body a few centuries after his 'death'. It is later observed that Eddie came through the reanimation process with his sanity intact because his low self-worth (regarding himself as the unluckiest man in the universe) meant that, where anyone else would have been driven insane by the sheer horror of it, Eddie expected so little from life that he actually benefited from his ‘transformation’.
• Conan the Barbarian: In "The Frost-Giant's Daughter", an incredibly beautiful and seductive woman named Atali mesmerizes men and lures them to her lair... where her monstrous brothers kill them for food. Conan falls under her spell, but manages to slay the brothers, forcing Atali to flee. Later, Conan tries to tell his comrades about this, but only an old warrior named Grom believes him. Grom explains that he encountered the ageless Atali as a youth, where she mesmerized and lured his unit to their deaths. He wasn't immune to it, but he survived because his injuries prevented him from following her.
• The villain of The Crow: The Lazarus Heart was struck by lightning as a child, giving him untreated brain damage that caused him to grow up to be a psychotic Conspiracy Theorist. The chemistry and electrical impulses of his brain are apparently so chaotic and cross-wired that he is almost completely immune to the telepathic powers of the new Crow.
• Dark Days Of Hamburger Halpin: Smiley learns that he, Will, and Will's ex-girlfriend Ebony (who Smiley gets a crush on) can break in to the school to watch the police's interrogation tapes (made while interrogating the students about Chambers' death). However, there's still faculty in the school on Saturdays, so they won't be able to use the volume. Fortunately, Will and Ebony (who's as deaf as he is) are experts at lip-reading, meaning they can tell what the interviewees are saying without sound.
• In the Darkwing Duck tie-in book "The Silly Canine Caper", Launchpad gets hit with a silliness-inducing ray while protecting Darkwing. He's completely unaffected. Darkwing initially assumes that this is because Launchpad's already too goofy for it to have any effect on him; it turns out it's actually because Launchpad turned on his headphones, which shorted out the signal.
• The protagonist of The Day of the Triffids retains his vision because he was temporarily blinded and could not see the beautiful meteor shower that (permanently) blinded humanity.
• Subverted in Deathbell by Guy N. Smith, which is about a cursed Tibetan bell whose ringing drives people insane and eventually kills them. "Deaf Donald" is introduced and set up to be potentially immune to the bell's effects, but when he hears, he goes insane and dies like the others, as a way of showing the evil bell's noise can even affect the deaf.
• Discworld mentions one prison guard as being "too stupid to fool". As in, he would shoot you with a crossbow without a second thought if you try something funny or try to fool him. He keeps keys to the cells safely locked in table drawer on the second floor (cells are in the cellar) and when he does need to use them to open cells, he always has at least two other guards with him. That guard? Fred Colon.
• In Dune, one of the two men who kidnapped a Bene Gesserit was deaf, making him immune to her Compelling Voice. But only one of them. Oops.
• In the Felix Gomez series of novels by Mario Acevedo, two people have been immune to vampiric hypnotism, most likely because it needs total eye contact, and these people both had a lazy eye.
• Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series: "Search by the Foundation": The Second Foundationers have near unstoppable Psychic Powers, but Dr Darell discovers that he can disable them by broadcasting a loud psychic static with a special electrical apparatus he calls the "mental static" device, while leaving normal people unaffected. He compares this to flashing a bright light in somebody's eyes; somebody without sight (i.e. normal people, without the psychic powers) are not even aware of the light, whereas people who can see will be hurt and incapacitated.
• Gentleman Bastard has a crime lord, the Grey King, intruding on the business of the master of Camorr's underworld, Capa Barsavi. No blade or bolt can harm the Grey King, thanks to his keeping a mage on contract and he can kill with a touch. After accepting the idea of the mage, Barsavi expects that the magic protection is a case of Exact Words and that the death touch might be a rumor the Grey King spreads so nobody tries just braining, drowning or strangling him. He tests this theory by finding a dying old man and offering a generous pension to his family if he'll only touch the Grey King, and if he lives he can live out a life of purest hedonism for his final months. Even so, the old man is held up as the bravest man in Camorr. Even the Grey King, after murdering Barsavi and taking the name Capa Raza, salutes his courage and agrees to honor Barsavi's deal to him. It's unclear in all that followed if the old man actually got his happy ever after.
• Harry Potter:
  • In Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, looking a basilisk in the eyes causes instant death, but Nearly Headless Nick stares down a basilisk and is merely Petrified (a condition which, fortunately, is curable) because... um... he's already dead. A few students and a cat also survive seeing the basilisk, and only end up temporarily Petrified, but that's not because of any negative condition like being dead; it's because they didn't look directly into the eyes. For example, several people (and the cat) saw its reflection, one student saw it through a camera lens, and another student saw it through Nearly Headless Nick's translucent form.
  • In Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Azkaban is guarded by joy-eating Dementors that normally drive prisoners insane. Sirius Black was wrongly imprisoned there for alleged mass murder and for the alleged betrayal of his best friends (and Harry's parents), James and Lily Potter. But he still manages to get past the Dementors and escape. This is partly because he switches back and forth between human form and dog form, meaning that in his dog form, his simple animal emotions are harder for Dementors to detect and consume. Also, Sirius is so unhappy already, over the deaths of Harry's parents and over his own wrongful imprisonment, that there isn't really much joy left for the Dementors to eat. This in turn is aided by the fact that he is consumed by thoughts of revenge, which fuel him enough to stave off despair, but aren't happy thoughts, so the Dementors can't take them away from him. And finally, Sirius is so emaciated from his twelve years in prison that (at least in dog form) he's skinny enough to slip right through the bars of his cell.
    • There's also a popular fan theory which states that people suffering from clinical depression would have a measure of natural resistance to a Dementor's aura simply because they're used to it.
• In one Horus Heresy novel, a Morlock Terminator is rendered totally deaf during a defensive action on the Sisypheum... which proves extremely convenient for him when they come up against the Kakophoni of the Emperor's Children. The resultant clash ends very badly for Marius Vairosean.
• In The Irregular at Magic High School, Elemental magicians are genetically engineered^note by their own ancestors, to stave off Witch Hunts servants compelled to obey whatever "master" they imprint on. This is recognized as an violation of their free will, and causes many negative emotions on the Element's part, but it's not without upsides: for one, it enables them to No-Sell brainwashing. There is no sort of intimidation or torture stronger than what is already in an Elemental's genes.
• In Is This A Zombie?, Kyoko made herself immune to Eu's reality bending words by gouging out her eardrums.
• The Magicians: In The Magician King, Quentin is attacked by a random swordsman who tries to slice him down the middle. Unknown to the swordsman, Quentin was badly mauled by the Beast in the previous book, requiring him to have several parts of his skeleton replaced with enchanted wooden prosthetics, including two thirds of his collarbone. Consequently, instead of delivering fatal injuries, the swordsman ends up getting his blade stuck in Quentin's prosthetic collarbone.
• Magnus Chase and the Gods of Asgard has Hearthstone, Magnus' elven friend who was born deaf. While his deafness isn't generally very useful, it does make him the only one of the heroes immune to the mental attacks caused by Ratatosk's shouts. His disability also saves everyone's lives during the confrontation with Fenris Wolf in The Sword of Summer, as he's equally unaffected by the monster's Compelling Voice and keeps everyone else from falling for Fenris' attempts to lure them into his striking range. It further saves the heroes from the Despair Event Horizon inducing Nokk lament.
  • Another example involving Hearthstone is that his deafness causes him and his circle of friends to all be fluent in ASL... which turns out to be very useful whenever the group wants to communicate without whatever Jotun they are dealing with hearing.
• The Nothing Equation: Captain McDowell, who takes the scientists to and from the bubble, keeps grumbling that it would be better to leave one of his roustabouts to man the bubble because they're too dumb to get spooked like the scientists.
• In the science fiction short story "The Ruum", a rogue alien robot pursues a man across the Canadian wilderness, intent on preserving him in an And I Must Scream state as a specimen For Science! When the robot finally catches him, though, it lets him go because he's been running so hard and starving for so long that he's no longer within the weight range of creatures the robot was programmed to preserve.
• The Rook features a variation of this in the character of Myfanwy Thomas, the protagonist who suffers total amnesia at the start of the novel. This complete loss of memory makes her immune to an attack by an entity that makes her experience the sensory input of herself and several others being attacked; where other people would have been overwhelmed by being made to recall everything they have ever experienced in their lives, Myfanwy's current persona has only been active for a few weeks, which makes it easier for her to focus on the events that she knows are hers and ignore the input from the others.
• In The Salvagers series, Boots has arcana dystocia, making her a rare Un-Sorcerer. While this inconvenienced her for most of her life, Mother's otherwise unbeatable time manipulation magic breaks down whenever it tries to ensnare her.
• In the Shadowlands Chronicles books by Andy Cooke, the character David proves to be immune to a villain's mind control due to being autistic.
• The Stand has Tom ("M-O-O-N spells [insert important item here]"), a good-natured but mentally handicapped man whose intellectual capacity is stated to be around the third grade level. Turns out that his mind is so befuddled or clouded that it frustrates any attempt by Big Bad Randall Flagg to locate him using his powers of telepathy: "All I see is... M-O-O-N spells moon."
• Star Trek: Enterprise Relaunch: At one point Trip Tucker (who is disguised as a Romulan for reasons too complicated to go into here) and a genuine Romulan are almost caught out by an ultrasonic booby trap that should have caused both of them extreme pain, but it operates in a frequency range that the human ear can't perceive at all. This nearly blows Trip's cover, but he plays it off by claiming he has hearing damage thanks to a taste for too-loud music in his youth, selling the story by adding that he'd never mentioned this before because it prevented him pursuing his dream career in the armed forces and he finds it painful to talk about. It almost works.
• Jim Gardner from The Tommyknockers is immune to the effects of the spacecraft of the titular aliens, as he has a metal plate in his head due to a ski accident. Two other characters experience this to a lesser extent, Ev Hillman (smaller plates in head from a war injury) and Anne Anderson (extremely extensive metal dental work).
• In Transpecial, Suza is autistic and understands body language intellectually rather than instinctively. As a result, she's one of the few people who can communicate with the ky'iin, whose movements cause instinctive fear and aggression in most humans. The government had a hard time finding someone who's autistic enough to be immune but also verbal enough to learn the ky'iin's language.
• The Twilight Saga: Bella thinks there's something wrong with her when Edward reveals that he can't read her mind, even though he can read everyone else's thoughts. Edward calls her out on the ridiculousness of that concern, under the circumstances. Spoony and the guys from RiffTrax all have a theory about this: Edward can read her mind, but there's just nothing there.
• In Arthur C. Clarke's story "The Ultimate Melody", a scientist analyzes music to create the ultimate Ear Worm... which renders the scientist permanently catatonic when he hears it. His assistant is unaffected because he's completely tone-deaf.
• In The Waterfire Saga by Jennifer Donnelly, one of the six talismans needed to seal away Abaddon is guarded by Okwa Naholo, monsters so terrifying that merely seeing one will kill you. Ava, the Blind Seer of the group, has no problems. Invoked, as the talisman's original owner (and Ava's distant ancestor) was a Blind Seer who knew his descendant would also be blind, and thus chose monsters that would deter others but let her through.
• In Watersong, Daniel was in a boating accident which damaged his hearing. As a result, he is immune to the sirens' song.
• The Oddity from Wild Cards is an amalgamation of three bodies and personalities in a constant state of flux, which normally means loads of pain and Body Horror. However, when a villain capable of switching minds comes along and tries to pull this trick on them not knowing what they are the pain catches him by surprise and the other two personalities are able to subdue him at least for a while.
• The Tin Woodsman from The Wonderful Wizard of Oz. His entire body was reconstructed out of tin after a series of axe injuries, so he's immune to fire and noxious poppy fumes. (The Scarecrow is also immune to the poppy fumes, but he's not disabled, he's...well...a scarecrow. And he's definitely not immune to fire, because straw burns easily.)
• World of the Five Gods: In The Curse of Chalion, Cazaril refuses substantial bribes from the king of Ibra because he has a stomach tumor he expects will kill him shortly.
• In World War Z, one survivor has no legs. A crawling zombie attacks him, and only gets his wheelchair, alerting him to its presence and giving him the time to dispatch it.
• X-Wing Series: At the climax of Wedge's Gamble, the Rogues need to get into a room that turns out to be filled with Deadly Gas. Fortunately, it turns out it's an inhalation-based agent, so their Gand member Ooryl Qrygg just walks right in: due to his Bizarre Alien Biology, he derives the oxygen he needs from his food and therefore doesn't breathe (which was alluded to in less detail in the previous book Rogue Squadron).

Live-Action TV

• Gary of Alphas is immune to Nina's "push" power because he's autistic. Similarly, a character with lie-detector powers is unable to read him because of his lack of affect.
• In the Angel episode "I've Got You Under My Skin", a boy is possessed by a demon. When the main characters exorcise the boy, the demon reveals that he had no control over the boy's body — the boy was a sociopath (and possibly literally soulless), so there was nothing to corrupt, trapping the demon powerlessly inside him.
• Are You Afraid of the Dark?:
  • An episode has kids being abducted by aliens who use sonic weapons. A deaf girl is immune to the weapons and helps the kids escape.
  • "The Tale of the Ghastly Grinner" features the titular character, a Villainous Harlequin and Monster Clown who can turn people into drooling, mindless, giggling idiots by staring them in the eyes. When he captures the protagonist's nerdy friend Hooper, he tries the same trick—only to discover his power is completely ineffective. In a Meaningful Echo, Hooper reveals that she "doesn't have much of a sense of humor" and thus can't fall victim to an attack based on that. Another possibility, given evidence throughout the episode, is that Hooper has an some kind of mental disorder (she seems to be autistic) and has a brain wired differently than everyone else the Grinner seizes.
• In Battlestar Galactica (2003), the Galactica avoids Cylon computer infiltration and destruction because it's not connected to any wireless networks, using such obsolete technology as corded phones. Commander Adama, who was in the last war with the Cylons where they did the same thing, is Properly Paranoid of this and refused to upgrade them.
• In an episode of The Bionic Woman, extraterrestrial aliens use mind control on the residents of a small town. One young girl is immune, and Jaime is partially immune. The mind control is based on hearing, and the girl is deaf and one of Jaime's ears is artificial.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer: In the episode "Band Candy", chocolate bars sold all around Sunnydale cause anyone who eats them to revert to their teenage personalities. None of the young heroes are affected, despite Xander eating a large amount of his own chocolate, because they are already teenagers.
• One the abducted women in the Criminal Minds episode "The Uncanny Valley" was diabetic, which somehow allowed her to metabolize the paralytic drugs she was given at a faster than usual rate. The show did state that there was a significant chance of the drugs being absorbed into her system faster, killing her in less than a day, however.
• A man in CSI is only mildly injured after being stabbed in the chest with a fork because the position of his heart is off due to situs inversus — the organs in his body are mirror-swapped.
• In the Dark Angel episode "Fuhgeddaboudit", Max and Co. meet a transgenic with the ability to control a person's actions. It turns out that a man with narcolepsy is immune due to his brain "being wired differently".
• Doctor Who:
  • In "Frontier in Space", the Ogrons are stated to have the best defense against mind probes: stupidity. "There's no mind to probe!"
  • An Expanded Universe story has an elderly professor at the prep school "Harry Saxon" attended in his youth, who becomes increasingly disturbed by his colleagues' extremely vivid memories of the boy... who he simply can't remember. When the man himself returns for a photo op at the school, he hears a faint buzzing and turns down his hearing aid. Unfortunately, later on, Saxon catches on, and it turns out that while the professor can somewhat resist the Archangel Network's background brainwashing due to his deafness, a direct blast from the Master's laser screwdriver is a completely different beast.
  • "Flatline": The psychic paper that's fooled everyone except geniuses is defeated by a community service supervisor who lacks the imagination to picture anything on the paper.
  • In a more mundane example, The Star Beast sees wheelchair-bound Shirley Bingham avoid being hypnotised with the other UNIT members because they had to climb a staircase to get to the area they were hypnotised.
• Farscape:
  • In the episode "Crackers Don't Matter", John Crichton is resistant to something that is affecting the crew (implied to be some sort of light frequency) because humans have eyesight which is far too poor to see whatever it is that caused it.
    Chiana: You've got the worst eyes out of all of us. That's why your optic nerves aren't being affected.
    Crichton: I got GREAT eyes! They're better than 20/20 and they're BLUE!
    Chiana: Okay, so can you read the symbols on the basin over there?
    Crichton: (looks) There's nothing there.
    Rygel: (reading) Warning...
    D'Argo: ....don't flush corrosives...
    Aeryn: (with a hand over one eye) ...down the waste tunnel.
  • Crichton has also been resistant to brainwashing because given the number of people who've messed around with the contents of his skull, trying to control his mind is rather like trying to drink milk with a butter knife.
• In the Fringe episode "The Box", the titular box, upon being dug up, emits an ultrasound that kills everyone nearby except for a deaf man.
• Ros from Game of Thrones attempts to seduce Lord Varys but fails because he's a eunuch (he claims to have been asexual even before then, but it definitely seals the deal, or lack thereof). On the physical side of things, Theon Greyjoy is able to No-Sell several repeated knees to the groin because he, too, is a eunuch (so Organ Dodge meets Balls of Steel).
• Haven:
  • Nathan is immune to Jordan's Agony Beam ability because he feels no pain. In fact, in several episodes Nathan's lack of sense of touch/pain allows him to function in situations (extreme cold, extreme pressure, etc.) that others can't. In these cases, it's pointed out that he will still be damaged by whatever the hazard is, but since he can't feel it he can last longer than anyone else.
  • In the episodes "Morbidity" and "Mortality", Dwight is immune to the Trouble that is activating people's Troubles without their usual emotional triggers because Dwight's Trouble is always active.
• Legend of the Seeker, like the books it was based on, has the "pristinely ungifted" who can neither use nor be affected by anything magical. This is put to use by forcing a pristinely ungifted person to go past magical protections surrounding a magic box that the villains want and retrieving it.
• A more mundane example crops up in an episode of London's Burning in which Blue Watch are called to a fire in the basement of a public library, which happens to contain the Braille section. The two firefighters who go down to search for anyone trapped find a blind woman, who ends up being a great help in getting back out again; between the smoke and the power going out neither of the firefighters can see more than a couple of feet anyway, but the woman they're ostensibly rescuing has considerably more practice navigating by feel.
• MacGyver (1985): In "Jenny's Chance", a deaf racehorse is key to a race-fixing scam involving a high-frequency tone generator due to his immunity to it, as a result of his deafness.
• An episode of Mighty Morphin' Power Rangers involved Kimberly's hearing-impaired friend being immune to the Magic Music used by the Monster of the Week, and as a result, being able to warn Kimberly and thus ruin said monster's plans to ambush the Rangers.
• Misfits: In one episode, we meet a man who can telekinetically control dairy products. Though the power is seen as lame, he uses it to great effect by suffocating people with the dairy they consumed prior. Luckily, one of our heroes is lactose-intolerant, so he has no dairy in his system to begin with. However, the villain just resorts to stabbing immediately after learning this fact.
• The Outer Limits (1995):
  • One episode titled "From Within" stars a disabled guy who is immune to the parasitic mind control worms that take over everybody else in town. When one tries to get him, it shrivels up and dies of starvation. It appears to come out a different ear than it went in. He has a form of Fetal Alcohol Syndrome/Fetal Alcohol Affect Disorder that results in him having reduced neurotransmitters that affect emotions — the same neurotransmitters that the parasites happen to feed on. FAS can result in a smaller brain as well.
  • Another episode titled "Stream of Consciousness" posits a future in which all brains are networked and have access to the world database, except for the protagonist, whose body rejected the procedure. This makes him pretty much useless except as A.) a janitor, and B.) the Only Sane Man when the network becomes malevolent.
  • In "Nest", the polar mites are unable to survive in Robby Archer's body as he suffers from polycythemia, which leads to an overabundance of red blood cells.
• In an episode of Sledge Hammer!, the bad guys try to turn Hammer into a Manchurian Agent by using subliminal messages in a television to alter his subconscious. It doesn't work - Hammer doesn't have a subconscious.
• Stargate:
  • In "The Broca Divide", Daniel and Dr. Fraser's allergies make them immune to the week's malady because of the antihistamines they take, conveniently preventing the only two named characters with the skills and knowledge to synthesize a cure from being afflicted by the evolutionary regression that turns everyone else into cavemen.
  • An episode of Stargate Atlantis has Sheppard as the only character unaffected by a mind-altering perfume because he has a cold and can't smell it.
  • The SGC's stargate dialing system in Stargate SG-1. They did not find the original Egypt Stargate's Dial Home Device,^note "DHD" for short; a more streamlined usable operating interface than the integrated manual dial in the Gate itself, as well as a power source for the gate so the US Air Force kludged together their own system that works on the gate's integrated manual dial. The SGC's gate-dialing system has a very incomplete set of error code report interpretations, and is far slower to dial out than the "touch-tone" dialing that DHDs provide, and requires a rigged-up system to power the gate from the local electrical grid. However, this kludged system made the SGC's gate the only operable gate left in the galaxy after the Goa'uld System Lord Ba'al infected a vast number of DHDs in the galaxy with a virus that corrupted their dial-out protocols and made them gate to random incorrect addresses. It spread through a "correlative update protocol" that helps the Stargate network compensate for stellar drift, and since the SGC's gate has no such DHD...
• In the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "Is There in Truth No Beauty?", there is a race of aliens said to be so ugly that anyone who sees them goes insane. The Girl of the Week is able to look at them through special glasses, but it's later revealed that the glasses are to hide what she's really doing and she's actually blind and pretending to be able to see (with the aid of a sophisticated sensor mesh draped over her clothes).
• This little exchange from The Suite Life on Deck episode "Lost at Sea", when the characters are debating whether or not to eat wild fish and risk mercury poisoning.
  Woody: Wait, what are the symptoms of mercury poisoning?
  Bailey: It causes bad skin, profuse sweating, weird behavior and muscle weakness.
  Woody: I won't even notice!
• Supernatural:
  • Everyone in the vicinity of Famine is eventually driven to extremes of overindulgence, except Dean, who is so broken that there's no hunger, literal or metaphorical, left in him.
  • Sam is immune to a god who forces people to speak the truth because he has no soul at that point.
• A frame of mind example occurs in Teen Wolf: One of season 3's big bads causes four of the werewolves to hallucinate their worst fears in an attempt to push them over the Despair Event Horizon. This works on Scott, Boyd, and Ethan who each attempt suicide. Not so with Isaac, who has spent years of his life being horribly abused by his father. Upon hallucinating that it's happening again, he simply endures it as he always has.
• Todd from Todd and the Book of Pure Evil proved to be immune to one antagonist's mind control powers because of his attention deficit hyperactivity disorder. This is (sort of) Truth in Television; severe mental disorders that prevent concentration can actually prevent a person from being hypnotized, but normal ADHD isn't generally sufficient for this.
• The X-Files:
  • In "Wetwired", Mulder proves immune to some subliminal brainwashing because of his red/green colorblindness.
  • In "Drive", all the living creatures in a given area die horrifically when their inner ears pressurize and explode out of their skulls. Amazingly, a single old woman is found sitting in her home, unaffected as death surrounds her for miles. It turns out that the cause of the hemorrhages is a high-frequency sound, and the woman was born without eardrums, meaning that there was nothing for the pressure to build up against.

Music

• It's discovered in The Who's "Pinball Wizard" that the main character, Tommy, is fantastic at pinball, something his rivals completely fail to understand given that he can't even see or hear what's going on. Supposedly, anyway, given that he actually can see and hear but simply has mental blocks that stop him from actually reacting to stimuli most of the time. He might very well be playing the same way as everyone else, evading his complex thanks to the fun he's having.
  Ain't got no distractions; can't hear no buzzers and bells
  Don't see no lights a-flashin'; plays by sense of smell
  Always gets a replay - never seen him fall
  That deaf, dumb, and blind kid sure plays a mean pinball

Mythology and Religion

• According to The Talmud, Daniel and his companions got cleared of sexual immorality charges by virtue of being eunuchs.

Podcasts

• Malevolent starts with Arthur Lester, loosing his eyesight and having to rely on a mysterious entity to tell him what he sees. However, said lack of eyesight ends up being an advantage, as it makes him immune to the insanity inducing sights of the various eldritch abominations he comes across.

Roleplay

• In the PBEM RPG Star Trek: Shadow Operations, humans do not have nearly the hearing range of Carnora (a group of related races specific to that RPG). Which means Reepchip's defensive shriek—which can incapacitate other Carnora—simply makes a human's ears feel a little uncomfortable.

Tabletop Games

• This is why the Quiet Knights exist in Blue Rose: they recruit knights with disabilities so that there are, for example, deaf warriors on hand if a siren starts causing trouble, or blind knights to fight medusae.
• Champions powers defined/bought as "No Normal Defense" can become this. An example power from several editions of the rulebook is a sonic NND attack that bypasses armor, but won't affect a deaf character.
• Leonardo de Montreal of Chuubo's Marvelous Wish-Granting Engine ripped his heart from his chest and used it to power a machine that runs the sun. (It's complicated.) While his heartlessness has inconvenient effects both physical (he loses some power in the light and has a world of blood and fear trapped in there) and emotional (he loses lots of power if he ever admits to having friends), it also means that the one time Billy Sovereign impaled him it did basically nothing to him.
• Dungeons & Dragons:
  • In module A2 Secret of the Slaver's Stockade, the fort's commander is blind and therefore immune to the petrifying gaze of the medusa he uses to guard his treasure.
  • This is pretty common in the D&D universe: blind characters are immune to gaze attacks, deaf characters are immune to sonic attacks, unliving creatures and creatures without a discernible anatomy are immune to critical hits, etc. Medusas often use morlocks — a species who live their entire lives underground and are blind — as mooks for this reason.
  • There's even a spell that lets you use one sense instead of another for the same effect. The example given was that the caster was "hearing" light to see and immune to the gorgon on the page. It's specifically meant to utilize this trope against monsters.
  • D&D also contains the infamous explosive runes, which detonate when read — unless you're a barbarian, who has illiteracy as a class "feature".
  • in 3.5 "Mindless" creatures are immune to mind-influencing effects.
  • Averted in the fourth edition, where blind creatures can be hit by gaze attacks, formless puddings can be stabbed in the foot, mindless automatons can be affected with fear spells, and so forth.
• In the New World of Darkness:
  • Not quite a disability, but there's one Abyssal entity in Mage: The Awakening that manipulates human behaviour by meddling with social cues — but autistic people are less susceptible to this, because the entity manipulates neurotypical social cues, which autistic people are not wired for.
  • Vampires in Vampire: The Requiem have Damaged Souls and a feral Enemy Within that cause them no end of trouble. However, their undead minds are resistant to dream manipulation, they're immune to the shadow-stealing power of Fetches, and the soul-rending Thorns of Arcadia in Changeling: The Lost (which leave humans Empty Shells) only scratch them up a bit.
  • Averted in one case in Vampire: The gamebook specifies that a vampire's use of the Majesty discipline — which requires eye contact — does not fail automatically if the target is blind, though it will raise the difficulty for the vampire's attempt.
• This is the main premise of Out of a Violent Planet by Greg Stolze of Unknown Armies fame. Fauna from Earth are the only known sentient species without Psychic Powers, whereas anything more complex than a housecat on any other planet has at least some psychic capability. This means that, without having evolved More Teeth than the Osmond Family or psychic powers, humanity is the only species that ever developed weapons technology and non-psychic technology. It also means that humans are immune to the psychic powers of other species — The intro blurb describes Earth being bombarded with enough psychic power to leave the sentients of any other planet drooling husks or straight-up dead, and only those with even the slightest psychic potential felt anything more than a passing breeze. This also gives humanity the unique niche as the ultimate mercenaries, referred to as "souls" (short for soldier), since human military units armed with modern firearms can go toe-to-toe with nasty psychic alien monsters and come out on top.
• In Pathfinder, characters with peg legs take massive penalties to their ability to walk and jump, however they're immune to caltrops (partly if they have one leg replaced, completely if they have both legs replaced).
• Warhammer 40,000:
  • In this universe, the Tau (named for their position on the settings Greek psychic scale, about two steps down from "psychically inert") are about the only race that have no powers of mind — at all. Now, it sucks because you need powers of mind to feel the Warp, and without the Warp, you're not going to be going through the galaxy all that quickly. BUT, given that the Warp is also the home of the forces of Chaos, not having to worry about Chaos being drawn to them through nonexistent Psykers is seen by the Tau as a Good Thing.
  • Some humans are considered Blanks, meaning they have a negative effect on the Warp around them. On the downside, Blanks are social pariahs because their aura of non-Warp creeps out other humans (at best), and their lack of impact on the Warp means they're The Soulless. On the plus side, having a negative effect on the Warp means they can No-Sell even the most devastating of magical attacks, and particularly powerful Blanks can completely shut down psykers within a given radius (such specimens are sought out by the Imperium to use as jailers for powerful and/or unstable psykers)
• The tabletop RPG version of Le Donjon de Naheulbeuk features a skill called "Empty Head", which makes the character immune to spells that affect the mind – for they simply do not possess enough of a mind to get a hold of.

Theatre

• Pokémon Live!: Ash Ketchum is all set to battle a deaf trainer, and Ash sends out his Pikachu, while his opponent sends out his Jigglypuff. Jigglypuff wins the battle by singing Pikachu, Ash, Misty, and Brock to sleep... which being deaf, the other trainer can't hear, so the Jigglypuff's trainer is perfectly matched as one of the few people who can't be put to sleep by his own Pokémon's attack.

Video Games

• Nine Hours, Nine Persons, Nine Doors has the "bracelets" integral to the Nonary Game the players are trapped in, which trigger the bombs placed in their systems in most circumstances like breaking the rules and can only be removed if their assigned player escapes the Gigantic used in the game or if their heartbeat reaches zero. This was actually the trump card of "Snake" since his bracelet was unknowingly placed on his artificial left arm which has no pulse to speak of and thus disconnected his bracelet, meaning that he wasn't under threat of his bomb exploding but decided to play along the rules until the time was right. In the "Safe" ending, he uses this loophole to freely follow his teammates through doors without needing to register his bracelet since he could just compress his fake hand to take his bracelet off. Subverted when it turns out that Zero never put a bomb into him in the first place since Snake wasn't one of Zero's targets.
• Bug Fables: The Everlasting Sapling: Mind Control magic gets into bugs' heads through their antennae. If one or both of their antennae are damaged, such as the case with any non-hostile Wasps that were neither protected by other means nor out of range of the spell — Zasp (bent crooked), the imprisoned scout (broken off), and Voi (crumpled flat) — then it doesn't work.
• Bugsnax: The player character has allergies that prevent them from eating the titular Phonýmon which comes in handy when it's revealed that eating them eventually transforms the would-be predator into more Bugsnax.
• Supposedly, the reason J.C. Denton and his brother were chosen for experimental nano-augmentation procedures in Deus Ex is due to the both of them having a crippled immune system, which means their bodies would not be able to "fight" the nanomachines (a problem that killed or hurt the other subjects, who suffered from severe allergic reactions).
• In Dragon Quest VIII, The Hero was cursed as a child, a curse so strong it overrides any other curses. This results in the hero escaping the Forced Transformation curse on Trodain, and makes them immune to the Curse status in battle.
• Undead enemies in Dwarf Fortress were at one point almost totally immune to piercing damage because their internal organs are defunct, meaning that the normal Critical Hit and bleeding mechanics didn't apply to them. They also don't need to draw breath so they can't be dispatched by drowning traps.
• EV Nova: The Vell-os, a telepathic offshoot of humans, were made Slave Mooks first by the Colonial Council and now by the Federation centuries ago by means of a Restraining Bolt implanted into their nanite-producing organ. In theory, a powerful-enough psychic could bypass the organ long enough for the chip to be disabled, but doing so would be lethal to a Vell-os: they can't free themselves and the chip prevents them from having another Vell-os do it for them. However, in the Vell-os storyline, the Player Character's slavemasters in the Bureau of Internal Investigation never realize that the PC isn't actually a Vell-os, but rather the first of an entirely new subspecies of human telepaths that doesn't have the nanite organ, and therefore never realized they might need a different method to control the PC until it was far too late.
• In Fallout: New Vegas the Courier is shot in the head and left for dead in the opening sequence. In the "Old World Blues" DLC, the Courier is kidnapped and lobotomized by mad scientists, but the bullet wound causes something to go wrong, and the Courier loses virtually nothing by having their brain scooped out and replaced with a Tesla coil, instead gaining some resistances. Though what happens to the Courier is actually how the process is intended to work, it just failed to do so on everyone else it's been tried on.
• Final Fantasy:
  • Final Fantasy V features a Siren boss who charms her victims into submission by conjuring illusions of their loved ones. It works on everyone except the team's elder member who, having suffered from amnesia, doesn't recognize his "granddaughter."
  • In Final Fantasy X, being Zombified makes you immune to Death. This means that refraining from curing your Zombification is actually one of the best ways of beating Yunalesca, who uses Death on every party member at the end of each round (as long as you remember she also casts high-level healing spells on zombiefied characters).
    • As a consequence of Revive Kills Zombie, The Undead in Final Fantasy games tend to be not only IMMUNE to instant death attacks, but actually HEALED by them. Using Zombie status this way is just making this factor work in your favor.
  • In various games, Silence and loss of MP can cripple casters since Silence prevents casting spells and damage to their MP can render casters unable to use their stronger spells if they don't have the MP for it. Characters that rely on brute strength don't have to worry about Silence or keeping their MP high since they don't/can't rely on magic to begin with.
• In Five Nights at Freddy's: Security Breach, you can remove one animatronic's eyes after Roxanne realizes too late that she Didn't Think This Through when she jumped in front of a go-kart going full speed, as it rams into her and disables her temporarily, allowing Gregory to take Roxanne's eyes for Glamrock Freddy. Unlike other animatronics who are left crippled after their boss fights, this actually makes the blind animatronic that much more of a threat. In particular, the animatronic gets better hearing, so stealth becomes a lot harder. Also, the blind animatronic stops being affected by the Faz-Cam or Fazerblaster, because they rely on blinding the target with light, and that doesn't affect something that can't see.
• In Guild Wars 2 the sightless Dredge are immune to blind effects.
• Sergeant Johnson from Halo. After "liberating" a crate of plasma grenades to help save his men, he got radiation poisoning which resulted in Boren's Syndrome. According to Halo: First Strike, this disease degraded his DNA so much that the Flood wasn't able to synch with his nervous system, giving immunity to infection. Subverted, as that was just his cover story; he's actually a Spartan-I. Boren's Syndrome, a real disease in The 'Verse, kills a person before it could ever be weaponized this way.
• The Heroes of Might and Magic series gives us the troglodyte, a blind creature of the deep. Their inability to see renders them immune to the spell blind, known to stop stronger creatures in their tracks. By removing the right creature from the fight for several turns, a single well placed casting of blind has been known to steer the course of entire battles. The thing is, troglodytes are some of the weakest units in the game—even if they were susceptible to blind, chances are no one would have actually wanted to cast it on them anyway, either due to bigger threats taking priority, or the trogs not even being worth the mana cost it would take to disable them. Whether their incompetence lies from their blindness or simply being primitive hunchbacks with spears in a world full of bigger, more vicious fish is unknown.
• This is the primary story premise of Howl. The werewolf curse transmits via the howl of other werewolves, and the main character is immune due to her deafness.
• A very amusing and twisted example from Katawa Shoujo: after having anal sex for the first time, Emi comments that being in a wheelchair means she won't have to tell anybody why she's walking funny.
• League of Legends initially declared that Lee Sin, the Blind Monk, would be immune to blind effects. This didn't carry through to release, mostly because out of about a hundred champions, only two of them have abilities that cause blind.
• Metal Gear:
  • Fortune survives being shot by Revolver Ocelot in Metal Gear Solid 2 because, thanks to her Dextrocardia, he misses her heart.
  • Naked Snake in Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater has a bout of this not long after gaining the disability. After Ocelot grazes Snake's eye with a bullet in a scuffle, he's forced to wear an eyepatch and spends time adjusting to the limited vision, eventually learning how to ignore his missing eye. When the two meet up in their last encounter, Ocelot tries to poke Snake in the eye... the exact same eye that he shot out and has an eyepatch over it for good measure. All Snake does is smirk.
  • In MGS4, Johnny has no nanomachines to enhance his abilities (He has trypanophobia and always dodges medical checkups that would've given him them). So, when there was an attack on the Patriot A.I. system that affected everyone with nanomachines, Johnny was fine.
• In Monster Hunter, monsters without eyes are (obviously) unaffected by Flash Bombs. This includes Khezu, Gore Magala and Meraginasu.
• Mortal Kombat:
  • In the third game, Cyrax and Sektor are unaffected by Shao Kahn's invasion where he steals the souls of Earthrealm's inhabitants; as cyborgs, they have no souls to take.
  • During the events of Deception, Kenshi saves Sub-Zero from an ambush when they're attacked with a flash bomb generated by Hotaru's powers; being blind, he's unaffected. He also says it saves him from Johnny Cage films.
• In NetHack, when you are (temporarily) blinded, you are immune to gaze attacks (such as from a floating eye) and flashes of light (from a yellow or black light). This is incredibly useful when combined with the telepathy ability, which can be acquired by among other things, eating the corpse of one of the aforementioned floating eyes, which allows you to see most enemies while blinded.
• Oddrietta: The titular deaf heroine, Henrietta, is immune to the wind that is turning everyone else into horrible monsters, allowing her to investigate the phenomenon.
• In the Forgotten Sanctum of Pillars of Eternity II: Deadfire, there's the Collections, which slowly drains away the memories of all its prisoners. With one exception: Bekarna, a brilliant astronomer and Absent-Minded Professor. It's never stated for certain, but after being rescued, she theorizes that her already-existing issues with memory preserved her against the similar effects of the Collections.
• In the Pokémon games, there's an aversion: Abra can still be afflicted with sleep despite being said to spend most of its day sleeping and its psychic powers allowing it to function while asleep. In fact, it's one of the best ways to catch one so it doesn't teleport away. Aside from that, the game has several abilities that are disabilities of some kind, but works in favor of the Pokémon for blocking certain statuses.
  • The ability Insomnia, fittingly, protects the user against sleep.
  • The Klutz ability, which renders a Pokémon's held item useless, is often mixed with an item that has a harmful effect that can then be tossed at or swapped to the opponent.
  • The ability Comatose effectively makes a Pokémon suffer from permanent Sleep, protecting it from other status conditions. Fortunately, Comatose also lets the Pokémon attack while asleep, so outside of effects that target sleeping Pokémon (which are pretty rare), it might as well just be immune to status conditions.
  • Due to game mechanics, Pokémon that are afflicted by Poison, Burns, Sleep, Paralysis, or Freezing become immune to all of the others for as long as they're affected. Some players use the Toxic Orb or Flame Orb item to invoke this by poisoning or burning their own Pokémon intentionally (statuses that don't hinder the afflict's attempts to attack, unlike the other three), though there typically has to be some other benefit (usually from Abilities like Quick Feet or Guts) for them to resort to it.
• In Portal 2, after Wheatley turns evil, GLaDOS tells him a paradox in an effort to kill him with a Logic Bomb. Unfortunately, it doesn't work, due to him being Too Dumb to Fool.
• In Psychonauts, Lili is kidnapped by the villains shortly after coming down with a cold. Ironically, this means she's too stuffed up for Loboto's powder to make her sneeze her brain out.
  • Inverted in the game's final level, the Meat Circus: Raz's naturally high levels of protection from psychic influence actually hinder him, as his father—who's also a psychic—has been trying to enter his son's mind to protect him, only to fail to do so until it's nearly too late.
• In Rogue Legacy, your character can sometimes receive Peripheral Artery Disease, which disables pulsing of your feet. There are also retracted spike traps that shoot out their spikes when they detect foot pulse. Naturally, PAD makes your character effectively immune to these traps.
• Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice has the item "Contact Medicine", which is actually a weak poison. The benefit is that, while you're affected by the weak poison, you're completely immune to all other kinds poisons. Additionally, since you're taking damage, you can spam Mist Raven at will.
• In Shadow of the Comet the main character has a heart condition which makes him prone to passing out in moments of extreme stress. How is this helpful? Well, the game happens to take place in a Lovecraftian setting, and this effectively limits how much exposure he can have to visions of otherworldly horrors before he quickly passes out.
• In Tactics Ogre; Hobyrim is immune to stone gaze attacks because he's blind; and thus can't see the Medusa or Basilisk.
• In Tales of Zestiria in the cutscene before the Medusa boss fight, Dezel proves immune to Medusa's gaze because he's blind, this carries into gameplay as well.
• Some works featuring undead make them invulnerable, what with being already dead. The Animate Dead spell in Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne works like this. (In the original Warcraft III, the units were vulnerable, but lasted longer.)

Web Animation

• In X-Ray & Vav, the titular heroes/zeroes can't be mind controlled because they are so empty-headed they don't have a mind to control.
  Rusty: You need to have a mind to control it! These two morons have the emptiest skulls I know.

Webcomics

• In Captain SNES: The Game Masta, The Sovereign Of Sorrow's "Touch" causes those affected to lose their hope, happiness, and sanity. Kefka is immune because he's a deranged, murderous nihilist, so he didn't have any hope or sanity to lose, and no happiness beyond mad laughter at his own cruelty; he's too horrible a person to be driven to despair. To be more accurate but also more spoilery: The Sovereign's Touch teaches victims the Awful Truth that their life is meaningless, they're nothing more than characters in a game suffering and dying for the amusement of humans. Kefka already considered life meaningless and had no greater ambition than destroying things for fun, so, aside from the video game angle being a surprise, he's just been proven absolutely right.
• Comic Book SNAFU: Jeanette's Death Wail breaks Hawkeye's hearing aids, but doesn't disable him like the other heroes.
• Darken has a temporary example: a Body Surfer is unable to possess a character who's too drunk to think straight, because their mind is too muddled to get a grip on.
• Chapter 52 of Drowtales has two master empaths, Faen and Bae'rali, engaging in a psychic Mind Rape duel. Bae attempts to break Faen's mind with a sense of weakness and helplessness... but Faen, who has endured severe anxiety issues and psychological abuse for much of her life, No-Sells it with ease. She then returns fire with a blast of terror strong enough to make Bae weep actual Tears of Fear.
• In Freefall, Florence foils a sound-based remote control that would render her unconscious by filling her ear canals with water.
• Grrl Power: Sydney's ADHD makes her functionally immune to truth serum — it gets her talking all right, but then she just KEEPS ON talking about anything and everything that pops into her head, making it nigh-impossible to get the actual desired information out of her.
• Last Res0rt:
  • "Light Children" in general tend to be resistant to a Celeste's Tones, but they share that immunity with species that naturally have keen hearing.
  • Jason turns out to be entirely Tone-deaf (too dumb to recognize the commands) in dog form.
  • Daisy reveals that her therapy to manage her fear of eye contact (being autistic), helps with Geisha's petrifying gaze.
• The Order of the Stick:
  • In the second major arc, Belkar is hung after the Order are captured by bandits, which he survives since he's a 30-pound halfling, and his weight doesn't even pull the rope taut enough to strangle him, let alone break his neck (although hanging upside down for a while does eventually make him a little delirious).
    Belkar: You know, that's the problem with humans, always thinking other races are the same as they are, so they assume the same methods of execution are valid.
  • There's also the, ahem, "squid thingy" that refuses to eat Elan's brain because his low Int score makes it seem as nutritious as diet Coke. Roy isn't as fortunate, though...
  • Invoked in comic #860. Roy sets it up so Durkon's Holy Word spell (which, among other effects, deafens any non-good-aligned characters in range unless their HD is greater than the spell's caster level) also affects Belkar, so that Nale can't use Suggestion to make him attack them, as he did in an earlier strip.
    Roy: It's not a bug, it's a feature.
• Rob from Tails Gets Trolled has no ears and therefore can't hear the trolls' insults, which is why he was recruited into the Troll Slaiyers.
• In That Deaf Guy, Desmond and his friends enter a haunted house, but aren't scared of its spooky noises because they're Deaf.
• Unintentionally Pretentious often runs on this.
  • Only bald Luthor and blind Mia can pull off these costumes
  • In one Halloween Episode, she's also immune to the effects of the Necronomicon.
  • In another Halloween Episode, she remains human after being bitten by a werewolf because she can't see the moon.
• Unsounded: Matty is fully blind, rendering him immune to the deadly Weeping Plauge.
• In When She Was Bad, Anthony, who's been deaf since birth, is immune to Gail's mind-reading. She can't hear his thoughts because he doesn't associate words with sounds.
• Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic, in a Lord of the Rings plot. Turns out the rings tempt and take over their wearers by working around inhibitions. One of these is given to Charlotte. Yeah, good luck with that.
  Cyclops: Any creature with half a brain will totally submit to its power!

Web Original

• A romantic variation with a Gorgeous Gorgon and a blind man.
• A Hero's War: Cato's life force is odd, making him poor at sensing magic and completely unable to manipulate it. All the medical experts he meets are baffled. However, it does mean that life-force-disrupting attacks generally don't affect him.
• Looming Gaia:
  • Deaf children are immune to the undines' mind-controlling song.
  • Crystal fiends, abusers of pyre dust, suffer symptoms such as hallucinations, mood swings, sores on skin, tooth decay, and even spontaneous combustion. However, they are immune to vampires, as any vampire trying to drink from them will instantly burst to flames and die.
  • Goblins are magically forced to obey any command given by someone who uses their full name, but only if they hear the command. Some goblins stab themselves in the ears in order to escape slavery. The commanding can also be done by an experienced telepath, though.
• In Phaeton, Siren's blindness protects her from gorgons.
• SCP Foundation:
  • The Foundation notes that people with diabetes are somehow immune to SCP-081, a virus that causes Spontaneous Human Combustion.
  • A number of SCPs are harmless to the blind or the deaf. (In fact, including "blind guards" as a part of the containment procedure is considered an annoying cliché.) An early example would be SCP-689, a statuette that kills people after they stop looking at it and teleports atop their corpses, preferring those who died in crowds. The blind can't look at it in the first place, and all non-blind guards have to wear a visored, vision-blocking helmet during their shifts.
  • SCP-2774-A is an image of a sloth costume that appears non-live media. 40% of those who see it will eventually begin to lose the ability to use cognitive functions or make higher level decisions (except for a lucidity period of 150 seconds every 24 hours). However, 2774-A only can affect those who can see red or green hues, and those with red- or green- colorblindness will thankfully be immune.
• Jericho from Whateley Universe is immune to the effects of seeing the Voodoo wolves despite a lack of psychic protection because he's blind. Note this is a partial immunity because he can still be clawed by them.
• One Texts from Superheroes gag revolves around this when Daredevil gets in a fight with Spider-Man villain Mysterio, whose schtick is using lots of visual illusions and projections to confuse his enemies. Daredevil is confused as to why the guy spent the entire fight standing in a corner and playing random sound effects; Spider-Man promply offers to switch villains.

Web Videos

• Déborah Levinsky from Flander's Company is very much The Ditz... to the point it's her actual superpower, as she's immune to Psychic Powers (trying to read her mind invokes the image of an empty grotto). In this 'verse this means even very powerful telepaths (who can usually makes Your Head A-Splode) are powerless against her. She's even used as a human shield against such an antagonist in season 3.

Western Animation

• In The Adventures of Jimmy Neutron, Boy Genius, Sheen is so bad at singing that he's the only kid in Retroville who doesn't end up angering the Twonkies, aliens who hate good music but fall asleep to bad music.
• Adventures of Sonic the Hedgehog: In the episode "Attack on Pinball Fortress", Dr. Robotnik creates a Stupidity Ray to use on Mobius, to make them too stupid to do anything against him. When Scratch gets hit by the ray, it has no effect, because he's already a complete moron.
• In The Adventures of Super Mario Bros. 3 episode "Do the Koopa", Bowser has a cold which impairs his hearing. When one of his Koopalings tries to use the Doom Dancer Music Box's Magic Music on him, he can't hear it and is thus not affected.
• Adventures of the Gummi Bears:
  • Duke Igthorn's ogres are as dumb as bricks, but this can actually be a benefit for them sometimes. In one episode, Igthorn's plan involves using magical bagpipes that hypnotize people, which only work on intelligent creatures. (That leaves his men out, so they don't have to do anything while he uses them, the only precaution he has to take being stuffing cotton in his own ears.) In another episode, it's implied that a slumber sprite's spell might put Gruffi to sleep forever, but it only works on the ogres for about a minute, because as the sprite says, "they're so dumb!"
  • In the aforementioned episode with the mind-control bagpipes, Grammi herself is immune to their effects due to a loud clang from a metal pot leaving her temporarily deaf.
  • Toadwart a very undersized for an ogre, which usually leave him to be abused and insulted both by Duke Igthorn and his fellow ogres. One episode had the Duke searching for a set of armor said to make its wearer invincible, only to discover the suit was useless to him because it was made for someone the size of a Gummi Bear... or Toadwart. Naturally Igthorn was quite eager to use Toadie as his new weapon, but he couldn't stop belittling his minion, which led to consequences.
• Archer: After having guns, grenades and bombs go off next to him for years, Sterling Archer's hearing is so bad that he can put people out of commission by firing guns in enclosed spaces and not be affected himself.
  Archer: To me, it sounds like bubble wrap.
• Codename: Kids Next Door: In Operation: L.I.C.E., the titular giant lice target the other members of the KND to eat their hair, but since Numbuh 1 is bald, they have no interest in him.
• Courage the Cowardly Dog:
  • In the episode "Tower of Dr. Zalost", the eponymous villain fires cannon balls that are engineered by science to magically make the people of Nowhere depressed (and green tinted) when hit, but their power doesn't affect Eustace as he's already cranky and bitter.
  • Another episode had a small bitter man use a machine that lets out a "Curtain of Cruelty" to blanket the entire area of Nowhere and turn all inhabitants cruel so he can be elected mayor. While Courage and Muriel both remain who they are thanks to Muriel's homemade fabric softener, Eustace, already a cruel man to begin with, is completely unfazed by the curtain (in fact he's so cruel that when Courage tampered with the machine using the same fabric softener, managing to create a "Curtain of Kindness" that returns the people of Nowhere to normal (redeeming the bitter man in the process), this curtain DID NOT affect Eustace either).
• In the first episode of Dragons: Race to the Edge, "Dragon Eye of the Beholder, Part 1", upon exploring The Reaper (a booby-trapped shipwreck), the first trap Hiccup triggers is a Bear Trap that closes on his leg. Thankfully, it's his prosthetic pegleg that got caught.
  • In the third episode"Imperfect Harmony", the Thunderdrums' being hard of hearing makes them immune to the Death Song's siren-like call.
• In the Earthworm Jim episode "Lounge Day's Journey Into Night", Jim, despite being without his Powered Armor, is resistant to evil lounge singers because, as an earthworm, he has no ears.
• Family Guy:
  • An entire subset of jokes involve Joe getting his legs smashed, mangled, or otherwise horribly injured, only for him to laugh it off (or at the very worst, become mildly annoyed), because they're already useless.
  • Also, in "Blind Ambition", when Peter becomes temporarily blind, he walks into the Drunken Clam bar during a fire and rescues the trapped bartender. When asked, his reply is priceless.
    Peter: That freaking place was on fire?!
• Futurama:
  • Philip J. Fry lacks the Delta Brain Wave that all other sapient beings have, due to an incident involving Time Travel and doing "certain actions" that make him his own grandfather; his own sapience is only possible due to the rest of his brain waves cobbling themselves together like "a prom dress made of carpet fragments". The end result is that Fry is significantly dumber than most other creatures, but also completely immune to all types of psychic attacks; such as the Brain Spawn's ability to rob people of their intelligence, or the evil influence of the Brain Slugs' and Hypnotoad's Mind Control powers.
  • The toxic sewer waste that can turn normal people into mutants has no effect on anyone who's already a mutant, even if they're relatively normal like Leela.
• In Gargoyles, Demona goes on TV and casts a spell to make "all who see this, all who hear this" turn to stone during the night. One of the few people unaffected was Jeffrey Robbins, a Blind Black Guy, who could hear the spell but obviously not see it. The gargoyles themselves quickly mute Jeffrey's TV when they hear what she's saying.
• In Gravity Falls, Old Man McGucket is immune to the Society of the Blind Eye's memory ray because of Insanity Immunity. Played with, because we soon learn that overuse of the memory ray is what messed him up in the first place.
  "You can't break what's already broken!"
• The Grim Adventures of Billy & Mandy:
  • One episode had a brain eating alien come to Endsville. The first person he runs into: Billy, who's got no brain for him to eat.
  • In another episode Mandy attempts to invoke this when attacked by zombies by sending Billy to fend them off, only to realize they aren't after brains, but rather Billy's stinky brownies that Grim hid in his skull (literally).
  • In "Billy and Mandy's Big Boogie Adventure", the main characters quest after a MacGuffin called Horror's Hand, which can manifest whatever a person fears the most. Billy, Irwin, and even Mandy all fall victim to its power, but Grim is able to easily claim it. Why? Because his biggest fear is being forced to live with Billy and Mandy, and he's already doing that because of the bet he lost in the pilot!
    Grim: I live me worst nightmare every day living with YOU two jerks!
• While "disability" might be a touch strong, it never-the-less pops up in King of the Hill when Cotton learns the Military School that Bobby is attending has dialed back the brutality to the point of coddling the students instead, and so takes it over and goes full Drill Sergeant Nasty to turn it back the way it was when he went through. Bobby takes all the abuse he throws at them with a doofy smile, cracks wise at both the physical and psychological abuse, and outlasts Cotton's record in solitary confinement by napping. In the end Hank explains that while Bobby's soft physique and complete wimpiness mean he'll never be able to be tough, it also means he's so soft and such a complete pushover that abuse like that simply has no significant effect on him: you can't break what was never built up to begin with.
  Cotton: I guess he was just born a pile of mush.
  Hank: Well, I guess you could say that, but maybe mush isn't so bad. You can keep stomping on it, but it's all give. It just stays mush. You can't build it up, but you can't break it down either. In a funny way, mush has the edge.
  [Beat]
  Cotton: [starts laughing] Can you imagine that pile of mush in the P.O.W. camps? He would have driven them Tojo's crazy! Three days with Bobby and they would've quit the war!
• Love, Death & Robots: In "Jibaro", the titular knight is immune to the Golden Woman's song due to his deafness, which causes the Golden Woman to develop an interest in him. After he knocks her out and strips her of her gold scales, he suddenly begins to hear, which makes him as susceptible to the Golden Woman's song as anyone else.
• One episode of the Mega Man (Ruby-Spears) animated series featured a deaf little girl who was immune to Dr. Wily's sonic form of mind control.
• In The Owl House, Hunter is a witch who lacks the innate magic other witches have, meaning he's unable to cast spells by himself and has to rely on his artificial magic staff or Palisman for casting. This does, however, appear to grant him some degree of immunity to the Draining Spell in "King's Tide", since there's not really anything there for it to drain. Hunter is still fully conscious and functional even when all the adults around him have been rendered completely catatonic, and while he's in obvious pain and too weak to stand on his own by the time the Collector ends the spell, he never passes out like the others did and recovers almost instantly.
• Mort from The Penguins of Madagascar is too stupid to comprehend pain. This led to an odd sort of inverted "Flowers for Algernon" Syndrome episode, which involved the penguins lowering their intelligence down to Mort's level so they wouldn't feel the stings when they took on a hive of wasps.
• The Powerpuff Girls once fought a brain-sucking villain dubbed "The Robbing Leech" because he sucks on people's heads like a leech to steal their memories of riches, and then uses those memories to steal them for himself. The girls defeated the leech by tricking him into attacking the Mayor, who didn't have enough brains to really be affected.
• Rocky and Bullwinkle:
  • Bullwinkle is immune to Boris and Natasha's Goof Gas Attack.
    "Goof Gas affects the brain and — no brain, no effect!"
  • Similarly in the movie, he is impervious to their mind-numbing television programs.
• Scooby-Doo! Mystery Incorporated:
  • In "Where Walks Aphrodite", Angel Dynamite is immune to Aphrodite's pheromone attack because she suffers from anosmia (i.e. she has no sense of smell).
  • In a later episode, Shaggy and Scooby are immune to music that forces people to dance to exhaustion because Shaggy's tone deaf and to dogs, music is little more than noise.
• She-Ra and the Princesses of Power: Beast Island is permeated with a Magitek signal that artificially induces crippling depression. Entrapta, however, proves extremely resistant to it, because she's autistic with a hyperfixiation on First One technology, so she's too focused on constantly examining and tinkering with the surrounding tech to think about anything else. Notably, it's when Adora and Bow show up and force her to deal with her unresolved emotional baggage that she begins to succumb. And while she appreciates Bow's friendship speech, it's Adora bringing her attention back to First Ones tech that snaps her out of the trance.
• The Simpsons:
  • In "Treehouse of Horror III" a bunch of zombies leave Homer completely unharmed. They were looking for brains to eat, and after a brief inspection, they decided that Homer just wouldn't do.
  • In "Who Shot Mr. Burns? Part Two", Smithers initially believed that he shot Mr. Burns in his drunken rage, but it soon turns out that he actually shot Jasper in his wooden leg.
  • Ultimately subverted in "The Joy of Sect"—Homer proved immune to a cult's standard brainwashing technique because his attention span was so short that he didn't pay attention to it long enough for it to work. After struggling with this for a while, they then manage to brainwash Homer by singing the theme to the old '60s Batman (1966) TV show with the word "Leader" in place of the word "Batman".
• An episode of Skunk Fu! had the ninja monkeys attacking the valley while invisible. The only one who could see them was the token dumbass Ox. Panda explains that the invisibility works by using the opponent's thoughts as a distraction, and Ox has no thoughts.
• The Smurfs (1981) special "Smurfily Ever After" has Laconia the mute wood elf getting married to her beloved Woody, which is crashed by Gargamel and his evil Magic Music machine. Fortunately, Laconia's deafness makes her immune to Gargamel's magic music, which zaps the rest of the heroes.
• Gobbles the turkey from South Park is sent to a slaughterhouse where turkeys are killed by a blade that whirs across the room at the level of their necks, decapitating them. But since Gobbles is deformed and his head and neck drag along the ground, the blade goes right above him and doesn't hurt him at all.
• Star Wars: The Bad Batch: The main plot is kicked off when the titular elite clone squad fail to follow Order 66, which the Empire quickly determines is because the unique genetic aberrations that make them so effective also impair the mind-controlling biochips that Order 66 is supposed to activate (Echo, the only "reg" clone in squad, had his damaged as a result of the Techno Union messing with his brain while in their captivity). Unfortunately, this only applies to most of the squad; Crosshair's mutation is slight enough that his biochip is intact and merely working at reduced effectiveness, allowing the Empire to make adjustments to the signal and turn Crosshair against the others. After too many concussions, Wrecker starts to feel the effects of the chip through increasingly frequent headaches. When the squad meets up with Captain Rex, he makes it clear that this is a sign the rest of the squad is still at risk, and they need to get their chips removed before they become a threat to Omega. By the end of "Battle Scars" (and after Wrecker falls under the full influence of the chip), the whole squad gets their chips removed (minus Omega, who never had a chip to begin with).
• Steven Universe: Lapis' history of abuse, and the mental turmoil associated with it, has made her capable of shrugging off Blue Diamond's sadness Emotion Bomb.
  Lapis: [Wiping a Single Tear] I've felt worse.
• In the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1987) episode "Corporate Raiders from Dimension X", Shredder's plan involves taking over the Octopus Inc. corporation with a brainwashing device. However, because the CEO is hard of hearing and his hearing aid is broken, the device doesn't work on him, so they tie him up and lock him in a closet. When the heroes find him and Donatello fixes the aid, he's able to help them defeat the villains.
• ThunderCats (1985): A partial example with the blind Lynx-O. Since he cannot see, he can resist Alluro's hypnosis. However, it is pointed out that he can still hear Alluro's voice, so he can get hypnotized eventually.
• In the short, "Drooley Davey" from the Tiny Toon Adventures episode, "The Wide World of Elmyra", when Elmyra babysits Davey, she warms his bottle to eight million degrees. She is not immediately affected by the hot bottle, because as Buster and Babs explain to the viewers, it takes longer for pain sensations to reach Elmyra's brain than those of more intelligent life forms. The pain does eventually reach her brain when she follows Davey into his bedroom.
• In Ultimate Spider-Man (2012), even Iron Fist and Dr. Strange can't fight their worst fear, but Spidey's worst fear is reliving the day Uncle Ben died. Since he lives with this fear constantly, it doesn't even slow him down, and he actually gets to have a little chat with Uncle Ben.
• In one episode of The Venture Brothers, the Monarch tries to kill Dr. Venture by going inside his mind and unleashing waves of sanity-breaking mental trauma upon him. But, as Dr. Venture explains, he's already so miserable that nothing the Monarch does can even faze him. "What can I do to this guy that life hasn't already?"
• An example happens in the "Blind Alley" episode of X-Men: Evolution: Scott's ruby visor is stolen by Mystique, and he can't open his eyes without destroying whatever's in front of him, effectively blinding him. But he manages to even the odds by blowing up the lights.

Real Life

• People with cardiac arrhythmia (irregular heartbeat) are immune to polygraphs (lie-detector tests) that measure stress-induced changes in heart rate, since they're having them all the time anyway. Then again, polygraphs are notoriously inaccurate even for people with normal physiology, and their use has fallen out of favor for this reason.
• The Thalassemia trait that appears in some people because of a genetic mutation may provide some protection against malaria.
• This is also true of another genetic disorder, sickle-cell disease (a.k.a. sickle-cell anemia). Though the heterozygous "carrier" version is even better as you have no symptoms and immunity to malaria, just a chance your kids will have sickle-cells. As a result of this natural selection, areas with a high incidence rate of malaria also have a high distribution of the sickle-cell gene.◊ Similarly, heterozygous carriers of the cystic fibrosis gene are much less likely to die from cholera or tuberculosis.
• It's not a disability, but being bald pretty much assures your head will be lice-free.
• Many disabilities can exempt people from conscription, although this depends on the intensity of the war and the disability.
• Some fighter pilots were aided by the fact that they lost their legs. While their counterparts with legs could lose consciousness when the blood in their body ended up in their legs due to intense G-forces, these legless fighter pilots could pull off more intense maneuvers without succumbing to those same effects. The most famous example, Douglas Bader, took this one step further; his leg got caught somehow or other when he tried to bail out of his aircraft, and where a fully able-bodied pilot would have been killed, Bader merely had to ask his German captors to retrieve it from the wreckage.
• People with weaker immune systems are less likely to suffer from allergies, since they're the result of an overactive immune response to something harmless. They're also less vulnerable to certain diseases, since in some cases the most lethal element is not the disease itself but the immune response to it. This is why people killed in the 1918 influenza pandemic were mostly otherwise healthy young adults. The very young and old were relatively unaffected, due to their less robust immune systems, which reduced the damage that could be done.
• Some of the diseases listed in SciShow's video How 6 Rare Diseases Are Changing Everyday Medicine
  • Niemann-Pick (Type 1C) causes cholesterol to build up inside cells, causing patients to suffer dementia as early as childhood, but it also has the effect of making patients completely immune to Ebola. This discovery is helping scientists to invent new drugs for treating Ebola.
  • Laron syndrome causes dwarfism and often obesity, but strangely they have normal blood pressure despite the obesity and almost never get diabetes or cancer. This may help scientists figure out new ways to prevent those diseases.
  • Plasminogen Activator Inhibitor Type 1 Deficiency causes poor blood clotting but people who have it actually live about 10 years longer on average and are less likely to get diabetes. Researchers are testing a therapy that imitates this disease.
• In one Story Corps piece, a man tells the story of his father's wooden leg and different potentially-dangerous scenarios where he avoided pain because of his leg.
• According to Cracked's article on "4 Modern Countries With Surprisingly Backward Technology," the US military keeps using obsolete technology partly to make infiltration harder:
  Then there's what I like to call the "Galactica" factor. In Battlestar Galactica, the decrepit Galactica is the only starship able to escape computer infiltration and destruction by the enemy Cylon race, purely because it's an old, crappy ship that relies on obsolete technology. Similarly, if anyone wants to bring down America's store of nuclear missiles from the inside, they'll have to somehow figure out computer technology that no normal person has used in decades. This means that America's potential missile-silo enemies are now limited to really, really old people and extreme hipsters.
• Speaking of military technology, during World War II, the all-female "Night Witches" of the Soviet Air Forces dropped bombs from wooden crop dusters — which were advantageous precisely because they weren't military planes. They flew so slowly that the Nazis' planes couldn't engage them while remaining aloft, and they were light enough to sneak up on Those Wacky Nazis at night without running their engines. The crop dusters' light weight often also let the Night Witches land gently even when they got shot down.
• Although strictly speaking not a disease, people with Gilbert-Meulengract syndrome might well have a slightly more sensitive liver and might be prone to jaundice (hyperbilirubinemia) when their energy is slightly displaced (not enough food/water/sleep) or they've been drinking and some might experience kidney or liver pains after a night of drinking, and some medications might result in severe diarrhoea, there are indicators that they are more resistant to cardiovascular diseases. It is specifically linked to the raised levels of bilirubin, so occasionally pulling an all-nighter, skipping a few meals, or getting drunk is good for your heart!
• There are a few autoimmune diseases that attack the osteoclasts preventing osteoporosis and bone loss. However this imbalance in osteoclasts and osteoblasts can create a few problems: loss of skeletal flex (bend don't break,) the fusing of joints, calcification of organs, hypocalcemia, paralysis if the backbone grows into the spinal cord, and bone cancer. Salmonella can aggravate this, because of its similarity to osteoclasts. (Immune systems can be dumb.)
• Castrated men tend to live longer. This is attributed to the lack of testosterone, which has been shown to weaken the immune system and increase risk of heart disease. Castration also prevents the onset of acne and male pattern baldness.
• Contrary to popular belief, Rasputin the Mad Monk didn't "survive poisoning" — even if the poison survived the baking process, his stomach problems may have prevented him from eating those poisoned cakes at all. Of course, that wasn't much help after he was shot in the head.
• Autistic people are not only to various degrees immune to Politeness Judo due to not being wired for neurotypical social tact and awareness, but are also more likely to see through the tricks of illusionists since the subtle body language tricks and diversions that illusionists employ are far less effective against people who process those sorts of things differently (or pay little to no attention to them in the first place). For a similar reason, many magicians hate performing for very young children, since they've not yet learned these subtler social cues (and may also lack the politeness that would prevent them from shouting out what the magician is doing).
  • Cognitive and perceptual differences in autistic people also make them more resistant to optical illusions and various cognitive biases.
• During the Blitz, blind men were often recruited to guide people to shelters. They couldn’t be disoriented by blackout conditions, star shells couldn’t dazzle them, and they were very good at avoiding concealed fires started by incendiary bombs.
• Owls' poor sense of smell makes them a Smelly Skunk's worst enemy.
• Birds cannot taste spiciness, allowing them to eat peppers other animals cannot. This is actually a result of evolutionary selection by the plants because their seeds can pass through an avian digestive system unharmed and get deposited far from the original plant, whereas a mammalian digestive system destroys the seeds.
• Some armies have actively recruited colorblind people as snipers since, in their eyes, many varieties of camouflage don't blend in.
• Corgis were originally bred as herding dogs because their dwarfed legs kept them too close to the ground for cattle to kick. Dachshunds, which have the same sort of dwarfism that corgis do (hence the back problems common in both breeds), were bred to hunt badgers and rabbits because they're small enough to fit in burrows.
• Ridvan Celik rescued survivors trapped in the rubble after the Izmir earthquake, since his dwarfism let him reach places that other rescue workers couldn't access.

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