Troperville
Help us survive. All donations are anonymous on the wiki and unacknowledged, as we don't wish to create a hierarchy among Tropers.
Editing
Tools
Toys
|
|
|
No One Could Survive That
|
Mook 1: There's no way he could have survived that fall. Seto Kaiba: Actually, I seem to be okay. Mook 2: Nope, he's definitely dead. Seto Kaiba: You guys are idiots. Mook 1: At least we're not dead, like you.
Almost universally uttered after a character (usually a hero but sometimes a villain) takes a wild leap into the unknown as a way to escape pursuit and otherwise-inevitable capture — jumping off a high cliff or across a wide chasm, for instance. The pursuers then give up the chase, confident that their quarry has effectively committed suicide, and never go look for the body to make sure.
Of course, the moment someone says this, they've guaranteed that the person in question not only has survived, but will be coming back to spoil someone's day.
A frequent variation is "Nothing human could have survived that," which usually heralds or underscores the discovery that the "victim" is either non- or super-human.
Also may be a result of The Worf Barrage or an attempt at Try And Follow.
(This also frequently occurs with explosions and collapsing structures. When it's the hero caught in the explosion, it tends to turn into a form of Disney Death.)
Along with Nothing Can Stop Us Now and What Could Possibly Go Wrong, this is one of the things a Genre Savvy character should never ever ever say.
See also Left For Dead, Soft Water, Not Quite Dead, Million To One Chance.
Examples
Anime
Hello? isn't Luffy fighting toe-to-toe with Lucci? If Lucci could survive a Buster Call strike, wouldn't it occur to you that ''maybe'' Luffy will ''also'' survive? Ugh! And to make things worse, not only did Luffy survive, but they blew up a Buster Call war ship, killing one-thousand of their own, and the Vice Admiral shot a Marine troop for having a conscience before the attack.
- Also, The Straw Hats with the Franky Family and Galley-La Company did eventually escape the Buster Call (Nico Robin actually escaped two Buster Calls in her life), with their mission a complete success and no casualties on their side. The Marines and Government agents on the other hand...
- As this troper recalls, the strongest Royal Soldier of Alabasta, sacrified himself to grab a bomb and fly it into the stratosphere. The bomb, had a kill radius of five miles, and exploded narrowing avoiding damage to the city, and leaving everyone from harm, except himself. His sacrifice was mourned. However, he managed to survive, and this is lampshaded by him seeing his own gravestone, and in Movie 8, which is a retelling of the stroyline, he meets up with the princess in the end, to receive a giant emotional hug.
- In Naruto both Itachi and Sasuke use jutsus that supposedly no-one can live through in their fight against each other - Amaterasu and Kirin respectively. However, even though Sasuke gleefully believes he finally killed Itachi with Kirin...Itachi uses another jutsu to protect himself.
- Tomoe from Mai-Otome takes a thousand-or-more-feet drop from the sky (head first!) after her armor was shattered during her final fight against Arika. Just as the castle guards discover her and prepare to pronounce her DOA, she springs back up from the gurney and yells at one of them, and then walks away as if she had simply fallen out of a tree.
- The same thing happens to Arika and Nina, who survive their final battle after having their Robes break down in outer space!
Comic Books
- Subverted twice in an issue of Tom Strong, in which the titular hero learns from his arch-nemesis that one of his other enemies actually died from breaking her neck in a fall into the Niagara Falls at the conclusion of their last battle; this foreshadows the revelation that the arch-nemesis himself is also actually dead, a body having previously been found and identified as him, and is present here through use of a shape-shifting stand-in.
- Lampshaded in an old issue of New Mutants after Sunspot hurled the ancient mutant Selene into a lava pit and caved it in behind her to the horror of his teammates. Admittedly he was not particularly Genre Savvy, but after seeing her get a sword plunged into her chest without slowing down, he was inclined to take her claim that she could not die by mortal means at face value.
- In Runaways the team saw a missile go off near Chase and counted him as dead. In a case of desperate genre savviness Molly guessed exactly how Chase survived and hadn't come back yet.
- The villainous cyborg Dekko in Scott McCloud's Zot!. The first time was a subversion: Dekko seemed to have shot himself dead while foolishly playing with a gun thought to be empty. But Zot never bought it at all, because he knew that the gun was empty, and that Dekko must've deliberately recharged it. He also notes that no body was found, and that Dekko's walking ocean fortress receded beneath the waves as if controlled remotely. As it turns out, the Dekko that shot himself was a remotely controlled robot. It happens again when Dekko is crushed by a collapsing wall and trapped as his fortress sinks, only to rise from the sea (without any legs) and rave about his immortality to seagulls before yelling at the reader.
- A recent X-men comic features someone tell Syrin this about Banshee (her father). Her response is basically that this is an X-men Comic without the glaring hole in the forth wall. So far, she is wrong.
- Herman Von Klempt from Hellboy is pretty good at this. In 1939 (shown at the beginning of Conqueror Worm) he was at ground zero of an explosion involving the Nazi space program and was the only survivor. However, he was reduced to a Head In A Jar. Later, Hellboy blew up Von Klempt's lab, with Von Klempt inside, yet Robert Zinco and Karl Ruprect Kroenen were able to find and revive him again. Then their laboratory exploded, and Von Klempt was again the only survivor. At the end of Conqueror Worm, Roger breaks Von Klempt's head jar, so he may be dead for real now.
- In an issue of Marvel comic's "New Warriors", the titular teen heroes have a moment like this after the villain is defeated. Spider-Man, who happens to be teaming up with them at the time, isn't so sure, and begins to tell the story of how Doctor Octopus survived a ground-zero nuclear bomb explosion...
Film
- In the film Grease II, Michael (as the masked "Cool Rider") disappears for almost the last fifth of the film after Johnny and his gang chase him into jumping his motorcycle off one edge of a wide chasm; it's unclear whether he survived or not until almost the very end of the film.
- Subverted: in the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the two heroes of the story jump off a cliff to escape pursuit. Sundance says that he can't swim, and Butch laughs, saying "The fall will prob'ly kill ya!" (See also Asymmetric Dilemma.)
- In The Godfather, the titular character miraculously survives being shot eight times. At the later assassination of Santino, the hit men take no chances.
- In The Fugitive, Dr. Richard Kimball (Harrison Ford) jumps off a spillway on a dam into the rushing water below. U.S. Marshall Gerard (Tommy Lee Jones) wants to make sure they see his dead body, despite claims by everyone else that he couldn't possibly survive the fall.
- Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith: When Captain Cody turns on Obi-Wan, he says the line out loud even as Obi-Wan is climbing up behind him.
- On the other hand, Mace Windu almost certainly didn't survive that. Probably.
- also in this film is an aversion, when Yoda falls to the floor of the Senate after losing his battle with Emperor Palpatine. When his body isn't found, Palpatine insists he'snot dead and to look again.
- Um, Anakin f***ing Skywalker? Anyone?
- Subverted in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II: The Secret of the Ooze: Super Shredder wrecks a pier, bringing the whole structure down on himself. The Turtles see his hand emerge from the wreckage, and Raphael exclaims, "Nobody coulda survived that!" The hand then falls, indicating that Shredder has, in fact, died.
- The Terminator series (particularly Terminator 2) seems to be mostly built around this trope.
- In the 2008 movie adaptation of Iron Man, Big Bad Stane seemingly falls to his death from over 85,000 feet. The next scene shows protagonist Stark barely making it back alive, seemingly setting it up like Stane DID die. However, he was perfectly fine, and only died when the arc reactor he was over blew up in a classic example of power glowing.
- In Serenity, River seals herself away inside a room full of Reavers to protect her fellow crew members. Since she's locked herself up with a hundred of the killer Ax Crazy space pirates, the rest of the shocked and wounded crew are left apparently believing she's dead. Then the doors open, and she's waist-deep in enemy dead.
- Indiana Jones.
- The first Hellboy film has the Nazi clockwork assassin dropped into a pit of spikes, but he is still twitching even after having been impaled. So Hellboy drops a... cog? on him, burying him. If he's still alive, we don't know.
Literature
- Subverted in the Star Wars novel Sacrifice. Lumiya starts falling off a ledge during her duel with Luke Skywalker; he grabs her hand, says "I'd never let you fall", and decapitates her.
- Done straight earlier in the same novel, with Mara Jade (in a Mama Bear/quasi Unstoppable Rage moment) stabbing Lumiya in the heart (alright, that wasn't specified, but it sounds cooler), only to get tripped and throttled by a sentient Sith ship and see Lumiya making her escape in it (both ladies end up severely injured, by the way). I still don't know how - and evidently Mara shares my line of thought.
- Boba Fett has also escaped the Sarlaac pit in at least one short story.
- Well, that's not really a spoiler, it falls under You Should Know This Already in all later material (including the Legacy of the Force books). If you count the Marvel comics (which were made before a more-or-less rigid canon system was set up for Star Wars), Boba Fett escapes the Sarlacc twice, only the first time he falls into the same Sarlacc at the end, but second time's the charm.
- In the novel Dune, Paul Atreides and his mother are able to escape their hated enemies by piloting an aircraft into a sandstorm which has winds of 400 mph. The main villain is told that they "are certainly dead"; naturally, with their superhuman reflexes, they are able not only to flee, but also to build an army on a practically uninhabitable desert planet which is described as being able to conquer the galaxy.
- To be fair to the Baron Harkonnen, he immediately smacks his minion in the mouth for doing something so stupid as to assume his enemies are dead without actually seeing their bodies, and then sends his forces back out to find the bodies. Naturally, they don't. But he did at least try!
- Paul also appeared dead at the end of the second book after he walked blind and alone into the desert. His men refused to search for him because of their old tradition.
- In Matthew Reilly's books, Anyone Can Die. Gena "Mother" Newman of the Shane Schofield series appears to die once per book, but always manages to survive. After the third time, she declares herself "f***ing indestructable".
- In the Harry Potter series, this trope could also apply to Lord Voldemort, as the Avada Kedavra spell he had tried to kill Harry with hit him instead. We learn in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire that no one (aside from Harry himself) had ever survived being hit with Avada Kedavra. His followers certainly seemed to think No One Could Survive That, as many (though not all) of them didn't bother to search for him, instead opting to lead lives of lesser evil. Subverted slightly as Voldemort actually was, for all intents and purposes, dead. He managed to cling to life as some sort of spirit, and would eventually return to his body in The Goblet of Fire.
Live Action TV
- The villain Murdoc from MacGyver had at least five of these, including a fall down a mine shaft, a nosedive off a mountain cliff, being electrocuted then falling into a deep pool of water, being blown up by dynamite and having an entire skyscraper dropped on him. Invariably, he would shout "MACGYVER!" when he met his apparent doom, and someone would afterwards remark that he could not possibly have survived (quite reasonable in all cases). But he would nevertheless return, without explanation beyond the fact that they Never Found The Body.
- The Doctor Who story "Remembrance of the Daleks" makes use of the "nothing human" variant for exposition. After their attack leaves a Dalek buried in rubble, a soldier remarks that "nothing even remotely human could have survived that"; the Doctor just has time to point out that a Dalek is not even remotely human before the creature emerges unharmed and the battle resumes.
- The Borg Queen, of Star Trek fame, loves this trope. First Contact actually retconned her right off the bat into having been on a early Cube when it was destroyed, but surviving (she tells Picard that "You think in such three-dimensional terms"). It looks like she's had it when Picard breaks her spine at the end of the movie, but she went on to have a healthy career in Star Trek Voyager, which found her in three more deep-space explosions, one of which she herself initiated. (The jury's still out on whether or not she survived the Grand Finale, where she seemed to actually die on-camera before everything exploded.)
- This is likely explainable by assuming the Borg Queen does "die," or rather, get destroyed each time. She seems to be assembled at the start of each of her appearances so each one may be a newly constructed queen, likely with a download of the previous one's memories. Hence, thinking in such three-dimensional terms.
- Given that the Borg Queen is the personification of an enormous Hive Mind, it stands to reason that she cannot be "killed" so long as the Collective still exists. The destruction of her physical body would, then, hardly even count as a minor setback.
Tabletop Games
- The Tyranids of Warhammer 40,000 are so resilient that they can survive (individually, in rare instances) exterminatus. In other words, not even converting everything on a planet to ash can kill them, as they can just burrow into the bedrock.
Video Games
- In Knights Of The Old Republic, Calo Nord is Left For Dead. Buried under rubble. In a collapsing building. On a doomed planet undergoing heavy bombardment. With no chance to escape had he even not been buried, as the player has just stolen his Cool Ship. Later in the game, he emerges on the Big Bad's flagship with barely a scratch; it is never explained how he survived, although they do hang a lampshade on this.
- In Metal Gear Solid, main character Solid Snake shoots down Big Bad Liquid's Hind helicopter, in a boss battle on the top of a tower. The chopper plummets, Liquid screams, and Snake leans over the edge of the railing, stares into the flaming mass, and utters a Bond One Liner. Snake gets slightly suspicious later on when finding a parachute caught in a tree ("No way, he'd be sliced up faster than an onion in an infomercial..."), and, sure enough...
- He actually dies for real at the end of the game. First his Humongous Mecha explodes, then he's kicked off the top of it, then the room caves in on top of him, then he's in a car crash, before an assassination virus gives him a heart attack. At each turn, characters treat it as a a certain, irrevocable death (it helps that these things are meant to be fatal to the player as well). Remarkably death hasn't kept him from taking major roles in MGS 2 and MGS 4.
- Not really, just someone pretending to be him.
- Final Fantasy VII killed off Rufus Shinra while having him trapped in a building which was then blown up - this was played entirely as a Killed Off For Real scenario. But, to resurrect him for The Movie, he turned out to be a victim of this trope instead. It was salvaged by a subtle and very good Lampshade Hanging - Rufus starts to explain to Cloud how he survived, and Cloud cuts him off before he can, leaving it forever a mystery.
- In No One Lives Forever, this is subverted: one of the main characters is introduced as having last been seen during an escape that, were he not such a super agent, surely would have killed him. Well, turns out that it did, and the man who claims to be him is in fact an impostor working with the bad guys.
- How about the earlier "Since no body was ever found, we assumed he survived" for Lampshade Hanging?
- In the game Overlord It's revealed towards the end of the game that the main character is a former hero who was left for dead by his companions because "No one could have survived that fall." He, of course, did, and it's how he got drafted into the previous Overlord's Xanatos Gambit.
- Suikoden II Luca Blight is killed as follows: Riddled with arrows (killing his horse), fought three times, riddled with arrows, riddled with arrows again, and then fought in a duel. Only then does he die.
- Zero from the Mega Man series, he can die, turn evil, be put into stasis, and STILL be a playable character in the next game.
- Yes, this happens to the hero in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, during the Whirlybird mission. Carl plays door gunner for a Triad mission, but his chopper is shot down. One bad guy asks about survivors, and a nearer gunman says that no, No One Could Survive That. Properly played, CJ would then sneak up on the gunman and slit his throat.
- This also happens in Super Robot Wars Original Generation saga. Lamia Loveless was forcefully pulled out from a Bartoll pod using Alt Eisen Riese's Revolving Bunker, all while naked, already damaged, and bound with the cables inside, anyone can say Thats Gotta Hurt at that point. To make things worse, she got shot down while laying down in Alt Eisen Riese's arm without recovering from the previous damage, not by a mere gun, but with a dangerous Humongous Mecha, all while NAKED AND DEFENSELESS. People think that she wouldn't survive at all... except that she survived just by a very small margin, because the game's Dragon made it in time to reprogram her and turn her against her allies. And the scene of her ultimate rescue was just as brutal, Axel uses his strongest attack only to plug her out of the machine that kept here, yet she still survives for the ultimate repair. If you call Code Kirin weaker than Revolving Bunker, well that's just ridiculous... But then again, she was in a bigger mecha so a way stronger attack may be necessary to plug her out.
- And it was actually PRECEDED, when she self destructs to save the team from the Shadow Mirror, and she got Lemon to haul her in the last minute and repair her and let her off...
- Axel Almer also adheres this trope fully, probably in a far more impossible odds than Lamia. Let's see... he got blasted into pieces, almost all limbs said to be broken, had his death speech and all, and his place of death was merged into an alien body (and supposedly his body too)... Banpresto's answer? Have a quirky mercenary squadron haul his machine remnants in the last minutes, JUST BEFORE THE MERGING, and have ANOTHER DEAD character (Alfimi) possess his soul briefly so he can wake up in the future time. And bear in mind that he has no body modifications before, he's just a human that happens to be too tough for his own good. Maybe his popularity ever since he played the villain part ultimately causes this...
- Speaking of which, even Kyosuke Nanbu fell to this trope several times. Before the game timeline, he suffered a plane crash that could've killed him... yet he came out with just some scratches and bruises. Next, when he was trying a test run of a Transforming Mecha, it malfunctioned, exploded with him inside, and the mech sank to the water... yet he came out with just a few broken ribs. In Original Generation 2, Axel Almer proceeds to use his strongest attack to rip Kyosuke's mech to shreds, which Kyosuke not only survives, but promptly gets a massive update to his mech so it doesn't happen again. And where does that credit to? His luck. What a lucky bastard.
- Oh, and Excellen Browning also got it a bit worse. She was supposedly dead at the plane crash with Kyosuke, but the Einst hauled her in the last minute so they can partially put their parts on her, and that ensured her survival.
- Final Fantasy IV has multiple examples, which all appear to be Plotline Death until the characters show up alive later on. They may be injured, but no explanation is given as to how they survived at all. Only one playable character is actually Killed Off For Real. The most egregious example is Cid, who leaps from a speading airship hundreds of feet (at least) above the ground. He then sets off a bomb powerful enough to collapse a mountain. Which it does. On top of him. Oh, and the bomb is in his hand at the time. Yang isn't much better; it's implied that he stops a city-destroying super-cannon by stuffing himself in the barrel and causing it to misfire.
- Tekken 3, Bryan Fury's ending. Nuff said
 .
- And in Tekken 4, Kazuya Mishima got into this. So he was thrown into a volcano, and probably was immolated there... But he still manages to get Back From The Dead, because some scientists hauled off his ashes just in time and resurrected him.
- And in Tekken 5, Heihachi Mishima takes this to a new level. Surrounded with robots, pinned down with no chance to escape, and all the robot self destructed, destroying him and the temple where he's located. An observer confirms "Heihachi Mishima is dead"... Is it? Bzzt! Wrong! He Never Found The Body. So it turns out that Heihachi managed to survive the near-impossible odds, being no ordinary man.
- Counter-Strike: I'm sure anyone who's played the game for a decent amount of time gets quite annoyed when they fired at the head of an opponent from long range with the AK47 only to see the guy at the other end not fall/fly backwards, assuming they've missed. Eventually they'll find out that they actually did hit... for 99 damage. Thankfully this is very long-range only, rare to begin with, and easily rectified by just hitting one more shot or just getting a grenade close enough.
- Albert Wesker got impaled by Tyrant, Left For Dead, and has the building he was in self-destruct, and comes out of it Nigh Invulnerable, as shown in his next appearance when he takes a pile of I-beams and then a small explosion to the face and yet is still mocking Chris as the place self-destructs around him. Also tends to happen with most of the Big Bad monsters... until the rocket launcher shows up.
- Not to mention how Krauser actually seemed to have made it off Sadler's island before it exploded in RE 4, in spite of having been seemingly killed in single combat twice (once by Ada, once by Leon), judging by his "mission complete" screen in the Mercenaries minigame.
- This also happens to be HUNK's entire gimmick, too.
- Army Of Two winds up using this for pretty much the central premise of the money-making objectives of the last level. Philip Clyde is on the wrong end of a grenade explosion that rips a cargo plane in two, and free-falls to the flooded Miami streets. Guess who the last boss pre-expansions is?
- The first half of Final Fantasy VI concludes with the entire party packed into an airship and fleeing from a newly divine Omnicidal Maniac. It doesn't go well, and the airship gets sliced in half and falls to Earth from a height of thousands of feet. It initially looks like a subversion, as the viewpoint shifts to a character who spent a year in a coma after the crash, and when she finally wakes up assumes that she was the only survivor. It takes about half an hour to discover otherwise.
- Mr. Phoenix Wright himself. Not only is he lucky in winning trials, but he's also damn lucky in surviving. In the final case of Trials and Tribulations, Phoenix attempts to cross a burning bridge, which breaks apart, causing to fall 40 feet below into a river. Now the river is very well known for sweeping bodies away without anyone surviving. If that didn't kill him, the freezing cold water (since it was winter at the time) would have, right? WRONG! Phoenix gets away with only a few bruises and a nasty cold. Also, during Apollo Justice, Phoenix gets hit by a car that causes him to go flying 30 feet into the air and smacks his head into a telephone pole. Crazily enough, his head is fine and he only suffers a sprained ankle!
- In the early missions of Syphon Filter 2, Logan makes a leap of faith to dodge a helicopter-launched missile not once, but twice, first diving headfirst off a cliff of unknown height, then later off a 100-foot or so high bridge onto a moving train. There's no way these leaps could be survived in real life, at least not without crippling injuries. In fact jumping onto a speeding train from a stationary object would cause one to slide backwards and sustain severe lacerations or broken bones, maybe fall between the cars and be shredded under the wheels. Apparently the designers disregarded Newton's third law. Don't think the snow in the first case would do much to cushion the impact, either(see Soft Water).
- And during the Agency Biolab Escape mission, he jumps a hundred feet or so down a large ventilation shaft and grabs onto a ledge a few feet above a gigantic fan, Die Hard style. If this were realistic, his fingers/wrists would snap on impact and he'd be shredded by the fan "like an onion in an infomercial". See Not The Fall That Kills You
Web Comics
- This Megatokyo two-page spread. Especially with the "disturbance in the force" next page.
- Played with in Captain SNES where an explosion is set up for the sole purpose of killing a character named Bob. The person who made the explosion, who was Genre Savvy and realized the heroes would just be blown away, mentions that only a Chocobo would have the reflexes to survive said explosion. Guess what Bob happens to be at the moment.
- Satirized in This Sluggy Freelance comic upon the seeming death of Oasis. "A dynamic character with the ability to survive certain death and a questionable death scene leaving no corpse? Face it, we'll never see HER again."
- This strip from Real Life Comics details the various hazards to surviving the coming explosion of Evil Genius Tony's space station. The payoff is three strips later with Tony crashing into Greg's front yard, brushing off the inevitable "How the hell did you survive?" with a simple "Don't ask stupid questions."
Western Animation
Truth In Television
- The story of Rasputin. According to sources, he was poisoned, stabbed repeatedly, shot, and thrown into a lake before he finally kicked the bucket. The ultimate cause of death was drowning, though not for lack of trying everything else.
- And castrated. Don't forget castrated.
- I've heard someone say that he was also bound by iron chains, and when his body was discovered, he had been able to get free from the chains but hadn't made it to the surface of the lake before drowning.
- Some Historians claim that he actually sat up during his cremation.
- Most cases of Cosmic Lottery Winner.
- Rebel commander (and general badass) Hadji Murat flung himself over the edge of a narrow mountain pass to escape capture by the Russians. The Russians figured him for dead, but in reality the snow had broken his fall, and he lived to fight against the Russian Empire's absorption of the Caucasus.
|
|
