Basic Trope: Sheer willpower enables a character to continue fighting after being dealt injuries that, by all means, should be fatal.
- Straight: Alice is impaled through the heart by Emperor Evulz' humongous lance, but since this fight determines the fate of the world, she simply removes the lance, throws it aside, and continues fighting until Evulz is defeated. She dies soon after the fight is over.
- Exaggerated: Alice is impaled through the heart, took a hail of bullets from anti-aircraft guns, and then survives having multiple nukes detonated right above her. She survives through sheer willpower and continues to fight until Evulz is defeated, in the nude no less... And then she survives, dying a happy woman at the old age of 108.
- Downplayed: Alice is shot in the chest by Emperor Evulz, collapses, returns fire, and then dies.
- Justified:
- Alice's body is pumped on adrenaline (and other bodily neurotransmitters) because of the extreme tension and stress of the fight. Therefore, those chemical reactions give her the extra boost she needs to endure her wounds and end the battle before her body collapses.
- The wound is fatal, just not immediately so. Things like blood loss or organ malfunction need time to catch up.
- Alice's soul is so dang attached to her body that even when something clearly lethal hits her cleanly, the soul struggles and puts the body on auto-pilot to finish Evulz off before finally separating.
- Inverted: Alice loses all the will to continue fighting after being pricked with a common sewing needle.
- Subverted:
- Alice continues to fight after taking bullets... and then when she turns to the viewer, it's revealed that she is a robot.
- Alice was Dead All Along, but carried herself through on sheer willpower.
- Double Subverted: But even a robot can't survive multiple hits from armor-piercing shells. It turns out that Alice has gained a soul and it's really her determination that carried her through the battle.
- Parodied: Alice receives a paper cut while refilling the copy machine before collapsing and then giving a long heroic speech. She gets up and refills it before passing out and being carried to her chair.
- Zig-Zagged: Alice is stabbed through the heart, gets a Heroic Second Wind, gets stabbed in the leg after that attack fails, and when it looks like she's a goner, she gets a heroic third, fourth and fifth wind, defeating Evulz, but dying afterwards.
- Averted:
- All injuries that should be lethal are lethal.
- Alice is not injured, at least not lethally so.
- Enforced: The producers want to avoid giving some idiot audience member any ideas and get sued when that guy tries to do it in real life and gets killed.
- Lampshaded: "Someday, I shall fall in battle with terrible wounds my body can't sustain, but it won't be this battle, and it won't be THIS wound!"
- Invoked: Alice simply charges forward even though she knows that Evulz' lance will go through her heart; this is her only chance to kill Evulz in one hit. She believes that her willpower will allow her to defy the injury for that decisive moment.
- Exploited: Alice is chosen to become the government's Super-Soldier because of her extreme willpower.
- Defied: Evulz seals Alice in a can instead of fighting her.
- Discussed: After Alice survives, Emperor Evulz says, "She wasn't supposed to survive!"
- Conversed: ???
- Deconstructed: Being stabbed, crushed, shot, and blown up hurts. Alice is alive but in too much pain to do anything, even if her body was intact enough to act.
- Reconstructed:
- Or rather, most people would be in too much pain. However, Alice happens to have congenital insensitivity to pain, meaning she feels nothing no matter what wounds she receives in combat.
- Alice has a Healing Factor and has learned to shut out the pain — with no risk of death except in the most severe of circumstances, pain means nothing.
- Played for Laughs: This situation ends up being such a common occurrence in Alice's fights that now she wears a T-shirt that reads "IMPALE ME HARD, BABY!" as a nod to her recurringly gruesome injuries via Black Comedy.
Normally, I Would Be Dead Now, but I can still point you the link back to the main page of this trope.
