Characters Dealing With Pain and Cumulative Injuries

How do your characters deal with pain and/or collective injuries? Are they Made of Iron, The Stoic, or are they just wimps? (Or hypochondriacs?) Do they not let injuries get in their way, refuse treatment, and tell The Medic to shove off; or do they make sure that the injuries are rested properly, bandages changed, and slow their pace?

My main character, though she's pretty much Made of Iron/The Stoic at the start of the story, after acquiring some truly bad injuries and scars (things like loss of an eye to a thing trying to eat her, loss of her other eye later to an arrow that missed its target and struck her instead, Domestic Abuse, No Holds Barred Beatdowns, loss of her dominant arm, Marital Rape License, and Scars Are Forever on her back, abdomen, and the aforementioned wounds) her inhuman Healing Factor loses its potency (except for the injuries she inficts when she's Driven to Suicide, where she fails because her Healing Factor does work in some, lowered capacity) and she's all but incapacitated. She basically, by the end, has to rely on others to even take her to battles she can throw herself into in hopes that it will finally just kill her Healing Factor completely. She's still stubborn enough at the end, though, that she will all but refuse to admit she's in pain or injured, unless she's in the company of her Lipstick Lesbian Love Interest, who, incidentally (finally having resigned herself to the fact that her lover really doesn't want to continue living, even if it's with her), is the one who acts as her caretaker.

How do yours deal with what they get put through? How does it leave them?

edited 9th Mar '11 8:14:25 AM by punkreader

My main character just sucks it up as best he can. He is however realistically affected by pain in the sense that one chapter he was hospitalized over the events of a previous one. (Chiefly having a sword slash cut all the way through his armor. He can suck it up and still move while in the hospital but things are mentioned as still hurting while there.)

So in essence he's Made of Iron, but that doesn't mean he's invulnerable to pain and actual injury. Each injury can be recovered from in time however. At times though, it will leave scars.

My main character has a demon in her that allows her to cause things to rot and decay. Unfortunately, her own powers are slowly eating away at her and going into Magical Girl mode increases the pain quite a bit. But she's got an iron will is determined to die on her own terms. She's also got loving family and friends who will always do their best to help her, even if it means putting themselves at risk when her powers go out of control.

Well, in one story I have a character racking up cumulative injuries combined with malnutrition, because she's got a self-destructive streak but believes suicide is morally wrong. Her dismissive reaction to injury or ill health is supposed to show how messed-up she is.

Apart from that, I can't think of anyone who gets multiple separate injuries during the same story. However, I have several getting specific injuries. A wind mage figures out how to use his powers to fly just in time to escape the police, and then breaks his arm because he has no idea how to land, and for a large chunk of the ensuing story he's dealing with a broken arm while on the run. Another character gets a head injury and a broken jaw in a car crash, and the main plot is him coming to terms with having a serious disability caused by his head injury.

Oh, wait, I do have another guy who gets multiple separate injuries - a demon who gets stabbed by a saxophone that falls off of a truck, and then while trying to feed on some guy's Life Energy to heal, he gets shot by a police officer. The latter wound causes a plot-important magical disability. He thought his Healing Factor would protect him, but unfortunately he got hit with his Kryptonite Factor both times.

My character can regenerate, and is ridiculously hard to hurt due to her physical make-up. So cumulative injuries are tough unless you pump her full of her one weakness, or hit her in the right spot hard enough.

My Author Avatar for the Whateley Universe is a De Terminator...who is actually very emotionally fragile. Shi'll get hurt, and even react and cringe realistically as a result of the pain, but shi'll push forward...BECAUSE SHI HAS TO...right up until the point of pure exhaustion, when the entire trauma finally registers and shi breaks down.
The De Terminator status comes from hir sheer overwhelming desire to be a solid, dependable ally and the fact that shi actually hates hirself enough to not give a damn about hir own life/well-being in battle situations.

Most of mine tend to complain/cry a whole lot, but then get up and do what needs doing anyway. A Single Tear is not tolerated; instead it's more like Inelegant Blubbering.

edited 12th Mar '11 1:24:16 AM by LoniJay

They try to put up with it the best they can, but if their wing(s) get(s) torn off, usually it's fatal. It's hard dealing with creatures that don't fight in real life that much. They're a bunch of GlassCannons using the art of warfare.

edited 12th Mar '11 4:07:29 AM by Collen

Depends upon the character and the circumstances. For example, the Lancer, while certainly rather badass, actually has a rather low pain tolerance, and so becomes extremely grouchy and vocal if faced with a lasting injury; on the other hand, one of the most physically fragile characters is a closet Combat Sadomasochist whose response to even severe injury is usually... a little, creepy smile.

My main character cannot express anything outside of his assigned personality aspects (he is a specifically tailored artificial human), so if he is hurt, emotionally or physically, he can only express it in ways that his boundaries will let him.

Being of (albeit artificially created) human-like flesh, his body still reacts to injury the same way as everyone else. Technically speaking, he can be fixed to a good as new state (depending on the injury), but that's rendered irrelevant since his creator is missing from his life.