Super Strength / Literature

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• Eponymous character in Aatomik has super-strength as his main power.
• The Alteriens in Alterien all have a degree of superhuman strength on par with most enhanced human soldiers.
• In And Then I Turned Into a Mermaid, this is Margot's merpower — the unique ability all merfolk have — which she discovered when she picked up a speedboat with her thumb.
• Animorphs: The Hork-Bajirs are a species of friendly, peace-loving, reptiloid aliens. And they have blades all over, and are physically strong. They are among the strongest known species, which is why the Yeerks enslaved them, and use them as soldiers.
• In Astral Dawn, the Keepers and Defilers both endow the bodies they possess with above normal strength. This is a natural side-effect due to their intense energy.
• The hIEs in Beatless are super-strong.
• In Campione!, Godou Kusanagi can temporarily boost his strength to superhuman levels, said to rival Hercules himself, with the power of The Ox. The catch is that he's only allowed to activate it in a situation that would actually require super-strength. For example, if he were fighting a bear or someone else with super-strength, or if he needed to move a boulder or a train, he could use it. If he were fighting an ordinary person or needed to move furniture around, he has to rely on his normal strength.
• A Certain Magical Index:
  • Saints, born with bodies similar to the Son of God, can perform Herculean feats of human power, and superhuman strength is one of them. One notable example is Acqua of the Back, who along with his Saint-strength is a member of God's Right Seat and such can call upon even greater power with Divine Mother's Mercy, allowing him to overpower several Magicians and even fellow Saints like Kaori Kanzaki in combat. He also regularly carries a massive mace around during combat and can carry Ascalon without trouble.
  • Several non-Saints use magic items which increase their strength tenfold, such as Leivinia's Strength Ring and Thor's strength enhancing belt. Knight Leader is also similarly enhanced, using several magic spells and modifying his weapon Hrunting, allowing to go toe-to-toe with a weakened Aqcua (who is still powerful enough to blow away a platoon of knights with a single blow.)
  • Sogiita Gunha's undefined power grants him superstrength among other powers, strong enough to punch through concrete and steel like it was paper. He can also use his strength to create huge gusts of wind of varying degrees of power.
  • Hokaze Junko, thanks to her power Rampage Dress, is strong enough to match Sogiita in combat.
  • Magic Gods, apart from their overwhelming magical power, are stronger than the average man (it's implied they outmatch Saints in overall power). Ollerus, an imperfect Magic God, defeated Gunha without much trouble. Othinus in particular, casually crushed Touma's Imagine Breaker and the Invisible Thing that overpowered Fiamma of the Right who at that point possesesed power beyond that of God's under the same breath with just her strength alone.
  • More due to Charles Atlas Superpower but Kamijou Touma is regularly seen sending people flying across the air with one punch (he once punched one such foe so hard they cratered a nearby pillar upon impact) and had once knocked away a massive cross about to crush him with his left, unpowered hand.
• Earthcrafters in Codex Alera can give themselves super-strength by using their furies. Particularly powerful ones tend to wade into battle wielding huge BFSs and warhammers to get the most out of this ability.
• Cradle Series: Anyone with an Iron body has superhuman strength and durability — and since most people get an Iron body before their teenage years, this means everyone is like this. However, Iron bodies have various specializations; Lindon's Bloodforged Iron body has a ridiculously overpowered Healing Factor, and Eithan's Raindrop Iron body gives him Super-Reflexes. It's Yerin's Steelforged Iron body that is supposed to be the absolute best in terms of raw strength.
• Daughter of the Sun: The priestess of Iius who attacks Orsina is far stronger than she looks, as an old woman. Her blows even break some of Orsina's mail, they're so hard. It's presumably a gift Iius gave her.
• Several characters in Devil's Cape have this, including Behemoth, Argonaut and Scion, and Bedlam.
  • Magic practitioners can also use Kinetomancy, which results in this and limited Super-Speed.
  • Harry Dresden himself gains this after becoming the Winter Knight, at one point he mentions bench-pressing 400 kilos.
• Numerous races in Discworld are super-strong. Most notable are the golems and trolls, thanks to being mainly made of rock and clay; one Troll in particular, Detritus in The Fifth Elephant, easily wields the "Piecemaker", a massive modified siege crossbow that fires six-foot-long arrows that can destroy buildings. Humans of the Discworld are also ludicrous strong compared to normal standards; Carrot who was raised in a dwarf mine and "built like a god", being able to stop a fleeing crook by holding his arm out with the same effect as running into a steel girder. Carrot can also knock out trolls with his punches and put a sword through a stone pillar and the villain standing in front of it. Vimes is no slouch either, able lift the Librarian (a 100kg orangutang) off the ground.
• The titular Dracula has incredible strength, with Professor Helsing confirming that the Count has the strength of at least twenty men. At the start of the novel, Jonathan describes Dracula's "grip of steel", and later on, the Count actually kills Renfield by throwing him to the ground so hard that his bones shatter. Being the Trope Codifier for vampires, Drac likely set the standard for vampires' super-strength in fiction.
• Dragonvarld: Ven is far stronger than a human, able to rip his chains out of their bolts then bend his cage's bars while seeking to escape with only his bare hands.
• Most nonhuman creatures in The Dresden Files, especially when compared with puny humans.
• Durarara!!: Though Shizuo Heiwajima was born with the strength, he initially lacked the Required Secondary Powers of Super-Toughness and repeatedly broke his bones throwing stuff at people. Shizuo's body toughened up, though, so by the time most of the series take place, he routinely chucks vending machines around and swings lampposts without suffering any ill effects.
• Fearless plays with this: Gaia is technically super-strong, but only in comparison to other humans (in a hypothetical battle against, say, Superman, she would get curb-stomped). This is because she doesn't feel fear and therefore isn't held back from unleashing everything she's got when she fights, like most people are.
• In Gate, the demigoddess Rory Mercury is pretty much the only character who can lift her halberd, which is so heavy that an ordinary person would get crushed under its weight. She can also hit the ground hard enough to shatter it, throw a gun at a man hard enough to send him flying, and knock a dragon back by hitting it.
• Nikita in The Girl from the Miracles District, when she goes berserk, has enough strength to tear men apart with her bare hands.
• Harry Potter:
  • Rubeus Hagrid might be a Gentle Giant but he still twists Uncle Vernon's gun like it was rubber, tames several massive superbeasts by hand, knocks out several Aurors by punching them and apparently wrestled trolls in the Forbidden Forest as a boy. Hagrid's strength is also a hassle for his friends, too, as Hagrid's pats on the back and hugs can be incredibly painful.
  • Giants naturally have strength in abundance. Hagrid's brother Gwarp and the other giants wreck Hogwarts in the Final Battle.
  • Fenrir Greyback has this due to being a Werewolf and acting like a Werewolf even when not transformed. In his first appearance, Greyback overpowers Harry and Bill effortlessly. Greyback can also walk off getting hit with a triple stunning spell from Harry.
  • Wormtail's a.k.a. Peter Pettigrew's silver hand can reduce a twig to powder. Harry almost gets choked out before he reminds Wormtail of the life debt the former owes him.
  • Wizards appear to have some relative super-strength compared to Muggles — Dumbledore despite being in his 100s, can lift a fourteen-year-old Harry off the ground easily, and a book later, he swims the breaststroke in a storm. Quidditch players, namely Beaters, invoke this strongly, given that they have to knock back Bludgers (which are made of iron and weigh approximately 149 pounds) with clubs.
  • There's also a strengthening Solution from the fifth book that Umbridge admonishes Snape for teaching, due to her (and the Ministry's) fears of a rebellion. Sadly, nobody takes the solution in the books, but in LEGO Harry Potter, it's used to solve puzzles when Hagrid isn't around.
• The demigods in The Heroes of Olympus qualify for this. They are different in strength, depending on who their divine parent is. The children of the "big three" (Poseidon and Zeus and Hades) and the children of Ares are usually much stronger than the other demigods. In general, demigods who have the same divine parent, about the same strength as their siblings, but sometimes there are exceptions. However, every demigod is still stronger than an ordinary human.
• The Primarchs in Horus Heresy are superhumanly strong even if one takes under consideration that they're three metres tall. Roboute can easily punch a man's head off with his bare hands, and Vulkan once sends an entire tank flying through the air with a swing of a hammer.
• Into The Broken Lands: The mage-crafted Human Weapon Nonee is strong enough to make Ludicrous Gibs of a human-sized monster with a thrown rock. In her free time, she built a stone wall around her new hometown single-handedly.
• John Carter of Mars: John Carter has this in comparison to the Martians due to the weaker gravity of Mars, along with an ability to leap incredible distances. Carter supposedly wound up being an inspiration for Superman's creators, as Earth's weaker gravity became one of the justifications for Superman's own great strength and invulnerability.
• Jean Valjean from Les Misérables is a classic literary example of this, as despite being a seemly normal man, he's capable of tremendous feats of strength that easily hit the superhuman mark. During his time in the prison hulks, when paying out a cable or winding up capstan, Valjean was "worth four men". One time when a caryatid came loose, Valjean was able to support the statue with his shoulders, giving the workmen time to arrive and fix it, earning Valjean the monicker of "Jean le Cric". Later in the book, when Valjean is disguised as a mayor, Inspector Javert becomes suspicious of him when he sees "Monsieur Madeleine" single-handedly lift a massive cart off a crushed man, since Javert only knows one man — a convict — who's that strong. Even when he's well into his 60s, Valjean can still break iron chains, knock a man out with a single punch and carry a wounded man for miles. Apparently, Valjean had this immense strength back when he was just a tree pruner as a young man.
• The German SF series Maddrax has several examples.
  • The taratzes, a race of humanoid giant rats, are also much stronger than humans. In the unarmed duel an average human is far inferior to a taratze.
  • There is also the daa'mures, a race of humanoid lizards. They too are much stronger than humans.
  • And then there are the cyborgs and androids who repeatedly show that they are much stronger than humans. One of them, Miki Takeo, is even a One-Man Army.
  • However, it is inverted with the hydrides. Humans are much stronger and more resilient than hydrites. However, the common descendants, called mendrites, are stronger than hydrites. Mendrites are very strong for a hydrite, but only averagely strong for a human.
• In The Magician's Nephew, Jadis is transported to London and discovers her magic doesn't work. After being mocked by people who think she is crazy for calling herself a witch, she demonstrates she is still strong enough to rip an iron rod off a lamppost and use it as a club, and throw people around like ragdolls.
• The Mermaid Chronicles: In Quest for Atlantis, Wade is almost killed, but is revived with the Power of the Sea, which gives him super-strength. He discovers his ability when he uses it to lug half the submersible back to the surface after it implodes.
• Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children: Bronwyn Bruntley, and her brother Victor have the shared peculiarity of super-strength.
• Pewterarm Mistings in Mistborn: The Original Trilogy have this power, as do the titular Mistborn.
• This is also common in The Mortal Instruments. The shadowhunters are nephilim, and their purpose is to hunt down evil downworlders and demons. Each of them has superhuman physical abilities.
  • Jace Herondale and Jonathan Morgenstern are two nephilim even stronger than the other shadowhunters because they were experimenting with angel blood and demon blood.
  • Fairies are also considered strong. The true extent of their physical strength is never shown, but they are considered stronger than ordinary humans.
  • The vampires are very strong, too. They are on the same level as the nephilim, if not higher. In addition, they become Stronger with Age. Simon Lewis was the strongest fighter in the group after being transformed into a vampire, and the smartest at the same time.
  • Particularly strong are the werewolves. They are said to be as strong as demons, and are usually really tough opponents in combat.
  • The demons also show that they are superhumanly strong. The true magnitude of the power varies from demon to demon, depending on the type of demon. The demon princes, however, are considered particularly strong. However, every demon is stronger than a human.
  • However, it is inverted by the warlocks and witches. They are half-demons, but they are not much stronger than ordinary humans, but they often have magical powers.
  • In the prequel trilogy The Infernal Devices one also sees robots called automatons, which are very strong. They were built to kill the shadowhunters, but they were eventually destroyed.
• Mr. Men:
  • Mr Strong has this as his defining trait. One example of his strength involves him lifting a barn house over with his arms as if it was a flower, even after filling it up with water.
  • One of Mr Impossible's feats involves kicking a football so high up that it is covered with snow by the time it comes back down to earth.
• The Neanderthal Parallax: Neanderthals are, compared with homo sapiens incredibly strong, capable of easily killing or severely injuring people far more easily simply with their bare hands. It's stated in the past most assassinations in their society were simply done by walking up to a target and caving their skull in with the attacker's clenched fists. When the Neanderthal ambassador to Earth is attacked as well, she easily smashes her attacker's skull into a pulp, shocking her police bodyguards. It's affected their culture as they've taken extreme measures against this spreading, castrating not only any person convicted of violent crimes, but also immediate family members to prevent aggressive genes from being propagated and using Companion implants which constantly record the wearer for easily solving cases mostly (the recordings are only accessed when a formal accusation has been made however), with far less tolerance for violence generally (they lament that in their last war, about seven hundred people died, with it being over a thousand years back, which is treated as high-they're shocked by how violent homo sapiens are).
• Pippi Longstocking is an example from children's literature, the World's Strongest Girl, able to lift a horse and more. Actually there are a number of super-strong children in folklore.
• In Please Don't Tell My Parents I'm a Supervillain, Ray gets this as one of his powers, after drinking Penny's Super Serum. The sequel has Remy's eldest brother, who insists that everyone calls him Chief Fawkes (or else he'll punch them), who has even greater strength, flight (including through space), and the ability to breathe in vacuum.
• The Turkish Gentle Giant Fezzik in The Princess Bride has this. When it comes to strength nothing worries Fezzik, though reading and writing makes him break out into a cold sweat. The real trick behind Fezzik's strength is the ridiculous stamina in his arms — tell Fezzik to cut down a forest and the axe will break, and his legs will give way before his arms get tired. With his arm strength alone, Fezzik can climb the Cliffs of Despair, and in the epilogue, he swims out of a massive whirlpool, with his companions clinging to his back in both cases.
• Reborn as a Vending Machine, I Now Wander the Dungeon: Lammis has the Blessing of Might, which lets her carry Boxxo with ease.
• In Renegades, a lot of prodigies have Super-Strength as their secondary power, either explicitly (like Captain Chromium) or implicitly (like Sentinel, who uses a suit of armour).
• Rumor's Block has Allspades, who has high muscle density.
• In Shadow of the Conqueror, this is one of the powers granted by Lifebinding. Daylen determines early on that he can use it to enhance his strength to about sixteen times his normal level. Lyrah achieves much greater levels of super-strength as a result of her specialization, and sunforged armor doubles the user's strength as a secondary effect. This is also an explicit Required Secondary Power of increasing one's mass, the point where Lifebinders can make themselves weigh several tons without slowing down.
• An interesting version shows up in John Ridley's Soledad O Roark books. People with super-strength tend to look scrawny and lack muscle tone because they are unable to strain their muscles enough to gain visible musculature.
• The Sorcerer of the Wildeeps:
  • Captain, despite looking rather unimpressive, is the strongest man in the band. At one point he takes up a half-full barrel and hurls it upwards to a balcony just to show Suresh his displeasure.
  • Demane, though not as strong as Captain, is still a demigod. When he means to kick a jug of alcohol from Barkeem's hands in anger, he makes it explode instead.
• One of the more common gifts to be granted by the titular Bond Creatures of Spirit Animals.
• The superhumans in Star Trek: The Eugenics Wars all have enhanced strength, among many other improvements. One of the toddlers almost breaks Robertas fingers by accident.
• This is a trait of gravekeepers in Sunday Without God. Scar can flip grown men one-handedly and without breaking a sweat, and Ai, being half-gravekeeper, has a surprising amount of strength for a little girl.
• One of the most common powers or side effects of powers in Super Powereds. A number of students at the Lander University Hero Certification Program have superhuman strength and endurance to varying degrees. For example, Roy is a typical strongman: tough, able to give and take a Megaton Punch. Chad is the top student in his class in terms of combat ability. Using his power of body control, he has been able to improve his muscles, bones, and brain to superhuman levels and even attain a small Healing Factor. Stella can turn her body into steel, which boosts her strength and endurance. Violet becomes superstrong when increasing her density. Later on, Vince learns to absorb and put out kinetic energy, allowing him to take any punch (it feels no worse than light tap) and then give it right back, which also allows him to survive falls. Sasha can deal increased damage thanks to her Super-Speed. Outside the school, Roy's father Titan is widely believed to be the physically strongest man alive. In fact, he almost never uses his full strength in a fight for fear of collateral damage. He finally gets to show off his full strength in the Corpies spin-off. In Super Powereds: Year 3, Roy is demonstrated by a boosted strongman that there is Always Someone Better... who then gets the same lesson from Titan.
• In Tales of an Mazing Girl, Sarah can toss tanks around and also knows at least the rudiments of kung fu.
• Puddy is easily the strongest character in Tales of MU, though how much is unclear. In her first appearance, she pins Mack to the wall with ease; later on, Mack (a half-demon) is shown to be strong enough to wrestle a half-ogre and dent concrete with her fists.
• Tarzan, from the same author as John Carter, has some feats hit this mark. Growing up in the jungle Tarzan is able to wrestle and overpower 160 kg silverback gorillas and kill leopards, crocodiles and pythons. At one point after returning civilization as the gentleman Lord Greystroke he sees four burly sailors struggling to lift his shipping trunk (which likely weighs 700 lbs.), he then strolls over and casually lifts it himself to the shock of the sailors.
• Tolkien's Legendarium:
  • The Valar, Ainur and Maiar have ridiculous super-strength compared to the other races. For example, at one point in Melkor a.k.a. Morgoth's fight with Fingolfin, the former put his foot the on the elf's throat: "Morgoth set his foot upon his neck, and the weight of it was like a fallen hill". In the same fight, Melkor makes craters in the ground by slamming his hammer down trying to hit Fingolfin. Then there's Tulkas, who isn't even the most powerful of the Valar but is so strong that he easily overpowers Morgoth when he fights him and actually forces the dark lord to flee.
  • Gandalf, despite his frail build, still has super-strength, being one of the Maiar — best seen when he destroys a Balrog's conjured fire sword with his Cool Sword Glamdring.
  • The Ents are likely the strongest race after the aforementioned divine ones, given that they can crush steel and rock with just their fists and can flatten almost everything in their stride (and they have a very fast stride). Isengard was reduced to a dismal ruin after the Ents went on a Unstoppable Rage.
  • Dwarves appear to have this, as they make light of heavy burdens and can travel for miles wearing full amour with no problem. Gimli is the foremost example, as seen in The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers when he lifts two wargs and an orc off himself while trapped as well as snapping the neck of the orc who tried to kill him.
  • Men in Middle-Earth have super-strength compared to real-life standards. For example, in The Lord of the Rings, Boromir plows through a good mile of snow with a Hobbit on his back using nothing but his arms and legs.
  • Elves may have this too, though it's not as apparent as previous examples. The most blatant showcasing is in The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies when the willowy Galadriel does the Bridal Carry to Gandalf.
  • Can't forget Hobbits. Sure, they're much lesser compared to the rest, but they still have a surprising amount of hidden strength. Bilbo, Frodo, Sam, Merry and Pippin have all brought down foes much larger than themselves, but the winner is Bandobras Took, who knocked an orc's head clean off with his club, sending it flying into a rabbit hole and inventing golf in Middle-Earth.
• Trapped on Draconica: All dragokin have this, though it varies between them. Daniar may have the greatest but she's too honorable to use half of it on humans. Rana, however, is often stated as the strongest of the Dragonkin.
• The Traveler's Gate: If a Valinhall Traveler defeats the skeleton Benson and all his animated knights, they gain "Benson's steel", an incredible and long-lasting boost to strength. This is often the first power a Valinhall Traveler receives, and seemingly the one that they all share. You need steel to even wield Valinhall's famous swords in combat.
• In Vampire Academy, Strigoi have super-strength which increases with age and the consumption of Moroi and dhampir blood. Isaiah, an ancient Moroi, was observed giving a light push which packed the force of a small car.
• Percival from The Vazula Chronicles has the strength of five men as his magical gift. His athletic abilities have made him popular with the public, and he becomes even more so after he saves a peasant child from being crushed by a boulder. He is very upset when the king bans him from competing in the annual tournament on the grounds that he has an unfair advantage.
• In the Wild Cards franchise, some degree of superhuman strength is relatively common among aces (Carnifex, the Harlem Hammer, Sharon Cream...) and even some jokers have it, like Troll, the Oddity or Drummer Boy. Golden Boy however takes the cake as tge strongest infectee ever.
• Imre in Zomboy. He demonstrated this best by lifting and carrying a school bus into the school parking lot.

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