Basic Trope: A show underestimates the severity of wounds that would be serious in Real Life.
- Straight: Bob is shot in the arm, but it's treated as nothing more than an inconvenience.
- Exaggerated:
- Bob is shot in the shoulder with a high caliber bullet. The arm is dangling limply by a thread, but after a few bandages is completely healed.
- Bob has his head blown clean off. He reattaches it with no problem whatsoever.
- Downplayed:
- Bob collapses in pain after getting shot in the shoulder, but it is not treated as life threatening.
- Bob is shot in the shoulder, and his friends quickly work to stop the bleeding. Once the wound is patched up, Bob is able to get up without much help, needing only a bottle of water for the blood loss.
- Justified:
- Bob can regenerate damaged nerves and heal wounds at a superhuman rate. He can heal from torso wounds, the process is just a lot more difficult and painful.
- Bob really is that tough, and thus the bullet did much less damage than appearances would suggest.
- Bob was shot in the buttocks or forearm, where this can realistically happen.
- Bob is a Humanoid Abomination; the injury does affect his/her body, but that sort of injury could never kill him, or have any sort of meaningful effect.
- Bob has an adrenaline rush going, allowing him to shrug off serious injuries.
- Bob gave himself a shot of Morphine so he could continue fighting.
- It's the future, and advanced medical tech heals Bob's bullet wound in a matter of moments.
- Inverted: Instant Death Bullet
- Subverted:
- Bob appears to be able to fight normally after being shot, until he realizes that he can't move his arm.
- Bob is shot in the arm, there's a beat...and then blood starts gushing out of his body, as the mook he was fighting severed an artery.
- Double Subverted: But that's nothing that can't be fixed with some bandages.
- Parodied:
- A man casually shows up to work with a bullet hole in his knee, and nobody makes a big deal out of it.
- Bob is shot in the face several times at point-blank range with a shotgun. What is left of his mouth insists that he's okay.
- Zig Zagged: Bob appears to be able to fight normally after being shot, until he realizes that he can't move his arm. So he bandages it up, but that only does so much to help. He gets better by the next episode, until the wound gets infected, but that's what medicine is for.
- Averted: Bob is realistically wounded after being shot.
- Enforced: "We can't kill this character off just yet, so we need to have him survive this wound."
- Lampshaded: "How are you still standing? That bullet went right through you!"
- Invoked:
- The guns are actually non-lethal pellets or beanbags, simply meant to disorient.
- The character is wearing body armor.
- Exploited: ???
- Defied: The shooter uses a high caliber gun to make sure it is much more than a flesh wound.
- Discussed: "I've been shot plenty of times before. No big deal, really."
- Conversed: "Even if he wasn't hit in a vital area, wouldn't he still be losing a lot of blood?"
- Deconstructed:
- Gun control becomes obsolete, leading to a significant increase in firearm-related crimes.
- It may only be a flesh wound but it becomes infected, which does lead to death.
- Reconstructed:
- Medical science and law enforcement minimize the number of victims and effectively punish offenders.
- Modern medicine helps with the infection caused by the flesh wound, and the recovery may take a while but the character eventually gets better.
- Intended Audience Reaction: Bob shrugging off such a seemingly deadly wound is indeed as unnatural in this universe as it would be to the audience, foreshadowing his true nature.
Let's head on back to Only a Flesh Wound and don't worry- it's only a gallon of napalm and a few anti-tank rounds, and maybe a couple of land mines worth of shrapnel and only enough bullets to kill every soldier on Earth twenty times over...
