The Horror of the Healing Factor

Now I don't follow comics that extensively. I read various bits and pieces that are recommended to me or that I find interesting. So that's why I'm asking if this has ever been addressed.

The Healing Factor is top grade nightmare fuel for me. It is a horrible thing to be immolated down to my skeleton - all my flesh and nerves burned away. But at least I'd be dead and it all be over with.

I do not want to even try to imagine how horrifically agonizing it would be for all of that to grow back.

What the hell would it fell like to get your eye put out then have it piece itself back together? It makes me sick just thinking about it...

No wonder Sabertooth is completely insane and Wolverine is always on the edge.

So yeah...has any comics ever gone into real detail about why a healing factor is the worst thing imaginable?

Teen Titans: Impulse has his kneecap blown off by Deathstroke, but due to his super speed (and super healing that goes with it), he has to go for immediate surgery so that the joint doesn't heal improperly. Also, the doctors are forced to operate on him without anesthesia because it wouldn't work anyway.

Ultimate X-Men: It's implied several times that a healing factor can't do jack about brain death (something mostly forgotten these days). So, if you are drowned or your brain is irreparably damaged in some way, even replacing the brain cells that were destroyed can't fix what it does to your brain. So, you don't die from drowning but live the rest of your life as a vegetable.

Naruto (and a few other sources): Healing is (like it is in real life) basically a byproduct of aging. Thus, the more you heal, the more your body artificially ages and you eventually cut your lifespan drastically short.

edited 15th Jul '11 1:25:17 PM by KingZeal

I remembered reading something like this a few times as an explanation of Deadpool's insanity. His brain's in a state of flux. It's constantly rotting away due to cancer, however, it's also constantly healing due to his Healing Factor. I've always found it a good explanation.

Weird in a Can (updated M-F)

Wolverine story Get Mystique, Logan narrates how much healing himself hurts, before he has to blow himself up. (Makes Sense In A Context)

Yeah I'd much rather go through the rest of my life with one eye than have it grow back.

Please, of all the X-men/Marvel character blessed with suck and you choose the salamanders?

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

Erik Larsen's Savage Dragon also, apparently, has a healing factor. There was one story where a villian beat the snot out of him (Dragon, not Larson) broke a good many of his bones, and then stuffed him down a chimney. By the time he was pulled out, you guessed it, his bones had healed and he looked like six bent-nail puzzles fused together. They had to bring in another super-strong character, Mighty Man, to re-break his bones so they could be set properly. Not a fun time, I'm sure.

I don't have any other recommendations, since The Savage Dragon was what I was going to mention.

What I will say is I really don't think a healing factor is the worst thing imaginable. I think it would be worse to have immortality without healing or eternal youth. Honestly, this guy seems much worse off than Wolverine.

There was a character from Greek mythology like that... some goddess or other was in love with this guy, so she asked Zeus to make him immortal, and he did but, in a move that was either very absent minded of very dicky, he didn't give him eternal youth, so the guy aged normally and was eventually all shrivelled and whatnot. The goddess continued to take care of him, though; according to some versions of the story, Zeus eventually took pity on him and turned him into either the cricket or the grasshopper (can't remember which) which, again, seems kind of dicky when he probably could have just made him young again, if he'd wanted...

Yeah really, what was Savage Dragon's alternative? Death, and he may have been in enough pain to ask for death but once his healing factor got it right he wouldn't be in pain anymore, he may remember it, but it'd be gone, he'd get over it.

Irukandji often asked to be killed. But they get through it, they recover, its like it never happen. They remember it hurting, and so they'll avoid the Irukandji from now on, but they won't go through the rest of their lives like it has been eternally ruined.

Modified Ura-nage, Torture Rack

for me it's the horror of having skin as delicate as a newborn, every nerve ending intact. Imagine that, feeling everything like it's the first time it has happened to you. Every punch is an agony.

While we're on the subject, Prometheus.

Worse yet regarding Wolverine, the adamantium in his skeleton. He shouldn't be able to survive it, and the fact that he lives with constant heavy metal poisoning (confirmed in the same Get Mystique story as previously mentioned) means a chronic ache that follows him everywhere.

We Are The Wyrecats Needs Tropes!

Lobo doesn't mind it a bit, but then again, he's, you know, Lobo.

Well, it's less painful and more Squicky, but wouldn't someone who is constantly growing new skin be leaving piles of skin cells everywhere?

If you receive a major injury, like being immolated or being disemboweled, odds are the sensation will be too much for your brain to process and you'll go into shock, so you're not really feeling the pain. And if the injury heals in a matter of seconds, then all the pain will be gone by the time you come out of shock.

Deadpool was another case of "got to rebreak the bones to make sure they heal straight" in one issue. Of course, there's always that side effect that, because of his healing factor, Wolverine does a horrible job of dodging which means he's actually pretty lousy at the whole fighting thing.

Mai-Chan's Daily Life also deconstructed it a bit in that it means that odds are you're completely infertile since your body will automatically "heal" you of the non-native tissue. And, as noted before, it likely means that you never desensitize to pain.

this was touched on in a brief conversation between Logan and Rogue in the first X-Men movie.

• "When they [the claws] come out... does it hurt?"
• "... Every time."

All things are lawful for me, but all things are not expedient: all things are lawful for me, but all things edify not.

Hope nobody minds if I start this thread back up. This a bit about a traumatic healing factor that can be used on other people.

A while back a had the idea for a world with two kinds of healer. The first are revered miracle workers they fix almost anything and do so without pain. The second kind however are the stories focus. The scar aspects. They heal by allowing the bodies own healing to be accelerated to unnatural and some say unsafe levels. They can heal, breaks, cuts, burns and most everything else except birth defeats, cancer and missing limbs. The process is far from pleasant, with side effects in including the body 'purging' dead cells and toxins which ever way it can, significant pain, black tears, body parts repositioning as appropriate, huge draining of energy reserves, mental trauma and light scaring.

Owners of this power are effected with it to a higher degree, regrowing parts of them selves that are less that optimum, the main character coughs up several teeth and his eyes regrown. Several scaring aspects attempted suicide, only to find the screaming mass that was their bodies rebuild itself.

Why not just lead normal lives and ignore their powers for the most part? For healers they just glow if the don't heal for a while. Scar aspects veins turn black, starting from the back and moving down the body, until their even their eyes and nails are black. Thus they must hide away or heal people illegally. As you can imagine people who are willing to go though this healing ordeal are either desperate or criminal. The idea of underground healing appeals to me from a story perspective, the fact that these people must do something illegal to be a part of normal society.

And yes, they often eat a lot. Many just consider themselves lucky their hair and nails grow at a normal rate. But they also live in fear of getting stuck somewhere, unable to die.

My latest Trope page: Shapeshifting Failure

One aspect of healing that is rarely touched on is how fast the character should be able to bulk up on muscle. Excercise involves the tearing if muscles, and you get stronger as those muscles heal. If you had a healing factor, your muscles should grow insanely fast and insanely big.

One thing that bugs me about speedsters that have healing as a side effect. If their metabolism is so fast that you heal like that, they should age just as fast.

Also, bullets shouldn't be pushed out, especially in settings that try some token realism and require proper bone setting. The flesh should heal around the bullets, and require surgery to remove, which could be problematic/horrific for someone with a healing factor. This would be especially bad for healers who are continuously riddled with bullets.

That's why I specifically included a 'resetting' feature within my idea of rapid healing. To avoid the problem with embedded foreign objects and bones healing in the wrong place. I agree with your comment about about speedsters rapid ageing, looks like we can file that under secondary and tertiary powers.

edited 19th Jun '14 3:35:36 AM by MCE

My latest Trope page: Shapeshifting Failure

I could be wrong but I think the X-Men movies at least hinted that if the blow was severe enough, the subject would remain unconscious until the body was healed. For instance there's a scene in X2: X-Men United where Logan is shot in the head and appears dead to everyone on the scene, but doesn't wake up and open his eyes until we see the bullet hole in his head heal up.

I think the video game adaptation of The Darkness had a similar idea. The character's mind and soul are kept in limbo while the Darkness regenerates the damage done by a self-inflicted gunshot wound.

What if you could metabolize the bullets?

If you could metabolise anything anywhere in your body there wouldn't be any point in having organs. You'd be a decentralised psychic hive-minded shape-shifting colonial mass on a par with John Carpenter's The Thing - better than that, even, since the Thing can't process metal.

Mind, that would make a pretty fascinating superhero, but they wouldn't be a superhuman.

edited 5th Jul '14 3:10:03 PM by Noaqiyeum

The Revolution Will Not Be Tropeable

They would be Alex Mercer.

edited 5th Jul '14 7:27:25 PM by Canid117

"War without fire is like sausages without mustard." - Jean Juvénal des Ursins