History Main / NotTheFallThatKillsYou

** Averted in ''Pegasus Prime'', with such labels as "Face Plant" and [[HaveANiceDeath "Have a Nice Fall"]].

* ''WesternAnimation/TheMitchellsVsTheMachines'': In the climax of the film, both [[spoiler:Katie and Monchi]] fall from the height of a skyscraper and are unharmed because they were caught by tractor beams.

* ''WesternAnimation/{{The Powerpuff Girls|1998}}'': In "Stuck Up, Up and Away", Princess plummets from a dizzying height after her flying power armor is destroyed, but Blossom grabs her right before she hits the ground.

** Also, he fairly often knocks or grabs people at super speed, making that hilarious effect where whatever they were holding at the time would suddenly be suspended in the air as they disappear between panels. Lampshaded in ''ComicBook/EmperorJoker,'' where he accidentally kills Lois this way. She gets better. [[KillEmAll Briefly]]. After the Joker's control over the universe (long story) is defeated, he grabs her this way again, but this time he apparently remembers not to accelerate so fast.

* John [=McClane=] falls down a shaft in ''Film/DieHard'' and grabs the edge of an air-vent. Instead of just broken fingers, he gets an {{acceptable break|sFromReality}} because he's in an action movie. It turns out the air-vent grab was due to a mistake by the stuntman. [[ThrowItIn Left in]] because it looks cool, nothing is said on whether the stunt-man got bashed up.

* Occasionally subverted with ''Franchise/SpiderMan'', with the most well-known case of said subversion being when he attempted to [[ComicBook/TheNightGwenStacyDied catch Gwen Stacy]] with his webbing after the Green Goblin tossed her off a bridge, but the sudden stop snapped her neck. Creator/MarvelComics briefly tried to [[RetCon reverse course]] on this, saying that it, indeed, ''was'' the fall that killed her; that the shock caused her to have a heart attack and die. They even went so far as to edit the prominent [[http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/e/e3/Spider-Man_Death-of-Gwen-Stacy.jpg "SNAP!"]] sound effect out of the panel where Spidey catches Gwen in reprints.

Subtropes of this include SoftWater and GiantRobotHandsSaveLives, among all the other tropes {{pothole}}d in that second paragraph. See also IFellForHours for incredibly long falls. See also InertialDampening, which can justify it in worlds where it exists. May overlap with RequiredSecondaryPowers. Contrast ReEntryScare, where the fall does kill you.

...It's hitting the ground.

* Various methods of doing this in ''VideoGame/WorldOfWarcraft'' are explored in [[http://www.awkwardzombie.com/index.php?page=0&comic=050409 this]] ''Webcomic/AwkwardZombie'' strip.

* ''Machinima/RedVsBlue'': In [[Machinima/RedVsBlueTheProjectFreelancerSaga Season 9]] Episode 15, after Carolina and York jump off a skyscraper, they are stopped mere feet from the pavement of a highway by [[spoiler:Maine in a Warthog driving by]]. The save acts as though they sustained no injuries whatsoever as a result.

* ''VideoGame/MirrorsEdge'' is LeParkour on the rooftops of a futuristic city. It completely averts this trope and you have to take a roll to dampen the impact of jumps from considerable heights. If you miss a jump between buildings, there's really not much more you can do than bracing yourself for the sickening sound of a body hitting the sidewalk.
** Played straight, however, in a cutscene where [[spoiler:Kate falls out of a helicopter]]: She somehow manages not only to grab and hold onto the ledge of a building ''with her arms alone'' (because she's ''handcuffed''), she isn't even remotely hurt by doing so (or, for that matter, by hitting a building from that distance in the first place).

* ''VideoGame/NoMoreHeroes2DesperateStruggle'' has a completely insane example in the ending. After finishing off the final boss, Travis plummets several hundred feet to the pavement, and Sylvia catches him... out of the air with one hand, while he's an ''inch'' from hitting the pavement, and slings him onto the back of her motorcycle.
** Given how the series plays with reality, it's perfectly within standards, but admittedly if one doesn't suspend their disbelief soon enough, most of the game is [[RuleOfCool questionably survivable but visually awesome]].
*** It is justified, in that Travis doesn't take any damage from attacks where the player has no input during. Yes, this is the actual reason for it.

** Quick reflexes, the right hero, and a bit of luck may save you even then: if charged, a rocket boost or grappling hook may be able to pull you out in time.

* Hilariously averted in ''VideoGame/ResidentEvil4'' during the Pueblo attack, due to Leon's habit of jumping down ladders rather than climbing them. If you climb up into the 50 foot high watchtower, Leon will still jump down, fall at a steady speed for a good three seconds, and land without so much as a grunt. It's worth pointing out that Leon isn't nearly so invulnerable to falling during any of the game's obnoxious PressXToNotDie cutscenes, though these at least tend to have the excuse of him falling into a pit [[BottomlessPit from which there is no escape]] (or just a lot of spikes at the bottom).
** Ashley is a similar case, always jumping after Leon with him catching her at the last moment. Amusingly enough, when using the second alternative costume (a suit of armor heavy enough that enemies can't even pick her up to kidnap her as usual), Leon clutches his side in pain after breaking her fall each time.

* ''VideoGame/SaintsRowTheThird'' has semi-realistic fall damage. Jumping off a ledge that is 10 feet above the ground will do some serious damage to your character. Using a parachute to avoid the fall also isn't a sure-fire way to take no damage, depending on how well you control it. However, the trope is played straight to increasing degrees as you start buying upgrades that reduce damage from falling. The final of these upgrades makes it where you are completely immune to any fall damage. You can jump off a skyscraper and face plant into the sidewalk without a single scratch on you.
** Cutscenes, however, ignore this due to RuleOfCool. In one part of the game the Boss survives falling from a cargo plane simply because they were ''inside a tank''.
** Its predecessor, ''VideoGame/SaintsRow2'' also had realistic fall/physics damage -- until you completed the BASE jumping minigame, after which you could leap off a skyscraper with no ill effect.

* In ''Manga/FullmetalAlchemist'', Ed slips off a snowy ledge and plummets fifty feet, landing through the roof of a wooden shed full of soggy dynamite. His only reaction is "Rrrgh... [[MadeOfIron falling like that's]] [[BrattyHalfPint gonna stunt]] [[PintSizedPowerhouse my growth]] [[BerserkButton even more]]!!"

* Played rather strangely in ''VideoGame/TheElderScrollsVSkyrim''. Normally averted, as fall damage is definitely in play and can even be weaponized by judicious use of a certain shout. The odd part comes when an enemy falls just a short distance but then slides down a slope for a while before coming to a stop. The damage appears to be calculated as if it were falling the whole time.
** Also, if you fall while riding a horse, the horse takes the entire impact. So you can fall off a mountain and walk away unscathed from the crumpled corpse of your former mount.
** In a bizarre interaction with SoftWater, very long falls, even those that involve you bouncing off the side of a mountain or skidding along the mountainside on your face on the way down will be survivable [[http://youtu.be/Im5IpE2rleo?t=44s so long as you land in sufficiently deep water at the bottom.]]

*** ComicBook/UltimateMarvel [[Characters/Avengers60sMembers Quicksilver]] did something similar, killing a lesser speedster by grabbing hold of her and accelerating so fast that her body was completely shredded.

** ''Film/StarTrek2009'': When Chekov manages to beam Kirk and Sulu back onto the Enterprise while they were falling towards the planet's surface, he manages to catch them ''just'' before they hit the ground, but when they rematerialize and fall onto the transporter pad, the impact is a little hard but no one is injured. This is, however, completely in keeping with how a transporter would have to work, since they would materialize at a stationary point with no preexisting momentum, but the deceleration effect wouldn't apply to the act of being beamed out because it's not quite the same as a force acting on them to slow them down. (The hard impact onto the transporter pad is because they were beamed in ''above'' the transporter pad rather than ''on'' it, so they have a fall of a few feet complete with the momentum that comes with that -- enough to make it a little painful, but not enough to do serious harm.)
*** The transporter already has to handle the velocity difference between an orbiting starship and a planetary surface -- falling speed would barely be a rounding error in comparison.
* Both averted and played straight at the start of ''Film/StarWarsAttackOfTheClones''. When Obi-Wan falls several stories, Anakin catches up in a speeder and descends with him, matching his speed and slowing down gradually once he's on board. Not long after, Anakin flings himself out of the speeder, falls several stories himself and catches the canopy of another speeder going ''very'' fast. And yet he doesn't lose his arm. Not yet, anyway...
* Averted in ''Film/SupermanTheMovie'' when Lois falls off a high building after a helicopter accident: after catching her, Characters/{{Superman|TheCharacter}} visibly decelerates over several dozen feet of downward motion before proceeding upward ([[Series/TheBigBangTheory Sheldon]] was still pissed off by it enough to create a page quote out of it, though).
** Also averted in ''Film/SupermanReturns'' where Supes catches a falling plane and has to decelerate gradually while the plane falls to pieces due to the conflict of forces (even having a wing torn off because he grabs it). Then again, the wing spar—which supports the plane in flight—is much stronger than the thin aluminum covering the nose cone, yet Superman successfully slows the plane by pressing up against the nose. So the scene is not entirely realistic, but at least it acknowledges the need to decelerate a massive object gradually.

* In ''Film/Underworld2003'' the Vampires like to make entrances by jumping off buildings without so much as bending their knees.
* In ''Film/WhoFramedRogerRabbit'', Eddie Valiant falls off a high skyscraper while in Toon Town, and is only saved when [[AbhorrentAdmirer Lena Hyena]] catches him at the last second. Possibly justified by ToonPhysics being involved.
* Subverted and played straight in the same scene in the 1999 movie ''Film/WingCommander'', when the hangar bay was depressurizing due to damage from an attack. Blair plays it straight when he grabs an item on the deck to stop his being sucked out into space, without any obvious discomfort or injuries. For the subversion, Maniac's rush towards the vacuum is stopped by a cable tied around his waist and held at the other end by other pilots. The sudden stop when the cable that was tied around his midsection catches makes him visibly wince in pain, and afterwards, he's shown with bandages wrapped around his waist, where the cable bit into him.
* In ''Film/XMenApocalypse'', Psylocke manages to survive falling hundreds of feet in the air from the abandoned jet by thrusting her psionic blade into a building to decelerate.

In fiction, however, one must specifically hit the ground to get killed in a fall. [[LiteralCliffhanger Grabbed a ledge?]] [[CatchAFallingStar Got caught out of midair?]] ([[GiantRobotHandsSaveLives By a giant robot?]]) [[SoftWater Hit water instead of ground?]] [[GoombaSpringboard Landed on an enemy?]] [[CarCushion On a car?]] [[TrashLanding Fall in a dumpster?]] On a tree? Congratulations, you're completely uninjured, no matter how far you fell beforehand! [[VariableTerminalVelocity Someone taking a plunge from a great height]] is probably the most frequent offender.

* Deliberately averted in the ''Literature/KnownSpace'' books by ''Creator/LarryNiven''. The writer points out that teleportation platforms contain special technology to compensate for a velocity difference between the source and the destination and cannot function of this velocity difference is too large.

* {{Subverted|Trope}} in ''ComicBook/NikolaiDante'': When [[spoiler:Dmitri/Arkady]] throws [[spoiler:Galya]] out a high window, Viktor dives to save her in his eagle form. He succeeds, but the force of the impact still kills her.

* In the 2007 ''DCU Infinite Holiday Special'' # 1, Characters/{{Supergirl|TheCharacter}} wants a guy to have [[MyLifeFlashedBeforeMyEyes his life flash before his eyes]], so she saves him from a 29,000 feet fall. It's a [[ChristmasEpisode Christmas story]] with a happy ending, so he should be fine.
* Characters/{{Superman|TheCharacter}} regularly [[CatchAFallingStar snatches Lois Lane out of the sky]]. He'll sometimes justify it by thinking something to the effect of "I've got to time this right: match my velocity to hers and then gradually slow us," but that doesn't work when they were only seconds from hitting the ground.

** Not surprisingly, most {{superhero}}es with {{Flight}} will do the same at one time or another. Realistically, they would have the additional concern of taking injury ''themselves'' from colliding with a falling object, which at least [[FlyingBrick the invulnerable]] Superman has no concerns about.
** In Superman's case, this was one of the main justifications for the ComicBook/PostCrisis "unconscious telekinesis" theory. Later made explicit in the case of [[Characters/SupermanConnerKent Superboy]], who learned to control it consciously. One ''ComicBook/ActionComics'' issue has a very ill Superman convey to villains they better stand down as he, Superman, no longer has the ability to ''pull'' his punches and their heads might just go explodey.
* ComicBook/TheTick attempts to do this in one of his earliest appearances by grabbing onto a flagpole after jumping out a window. [[SubvertedTrope The flagpole snaps and starts vibrating all the way down.]] Good thing he has NighInvulnerability.

* In ''VideoGame/SuperSmashBrosBrawl'''s Subspace Emissary storyline, [[VideoGame/EarthBound Lucas]] and the Franchise/{{Pokemon}} Trainer are falling from a height of several hundred feet (well above the summit of an impressive mountain). [[VideoGame/{{Kirby}} Meta Knight]] spots them and catches them nearly at ground level, flying them away from the mountain at a horizontal trajectory. Even more mind-boggling in that Meta Knight is smaller than either of those characters. But then, many other characters fall from immense heights and don't need saving to come out unscathed.

* Averted in ''ComicBook/{{Batgirl}}: Year One'', when Barbara Gordon's jumpline, made of normal rope, is cut by Batman before she can hurt herself with the sudden deceleration. She is later given some of the special 'batrope' to use with the explanation that it is elastic and extends/contracts in order to prevent the shock of an instant stop.
** TruthInTelevision -- climbing ropes are elastic for exactly this reason since falls will usually involve at least a few metres of drop before the rope catches you. Unfortunately, this does mean that if you fall near the start of a long climb, the rope may well stretch enough that you still hit the floor, albeit rather more gently than if the rope weren't there. In fact, ropes for many different purposes will generally either be dynamic (i.e. somewhat elastic) or static (ie. not elastic), and it's important to know which you should be using.

* Characters/{{Supergirl|TheCharacter}} wants a guy to have [[MyLifeFlashedBeforeMyEyes his life flash before his eyes]], [[https://why-i-love-comics.tumblr.com/post/638412152927027200/embed so she saves him from a 29,000 feet fall]]. It's a [[ChristmasEpisode Christmas story]] with a happy ending, so he should be fine.

[[folder:Fanfiction]]

* Acknowledged in the ''Bloodties'' crossover between the ComicBook/XMen and ComicBook/TheAvengers. At one point, [[Characters/IronManHeroes WarMachine plummets from the sky after his armor is shut down, and [[Characters/MarvelComicsStorm Storm]] swoops in to save him. She manages to catch him, but the act causes her immense pain, and she notes that it nearly tore her arm out of its socket.

Amusingly, even works that take the stress of deceleration into account will paradoxically ignore the stress of ''acceleration''. Trauma from rapid velocity change works both ways. [[PunchedAcrossTheRoom Getting thrown halfway across a city square]] is pretty much equivalent to standing still and getting hit by a train. Even if Franchise/{{Superman}} catches you at the other end, you still end up ripped apart like tissue paper by steel-hard fingers pushing at you like jackhammers. If writers considered the way vehicles work, they could avoid this. Don't want your hero bisecting flying civilians? Try having them travel at the same speed and gradually decelerate the target to a more reasonable velocity. Air braking is your friend.

* ''Anime/{{Pokemon}}'':

* Acknowledged in the ''Bloodties'' crossover between the ComicBook/XMen and ComicBook/TheAvengers. At one point, ComicBook/WarMachine plummets from the sky after his armor is shut down, and ComicBook/{{Storm}} swoops in to save him. She manages to catch him, but the act causes her immense pain, and she notes that it nearly tore her arm out of its socket.
* In a ''ComicBook/CaptainAmerica'' issue, Cap is flung off a building. He doesn't catch a flagpole, he slams shield first into the cold, hard cement. His [[AppliedPhlebotinum Vibranium-steel alloy]] shield absorbs ninety-five percent of the impact but it's the five percent that bothers him. The same shield can disperse enough force that a punch from the ComicBook/IncredibleHulk (who bench-presses MOUNTAINS) stops, instead of nailing you into the ground like a tent peg, and is explicitly the hardest thing in the Franchise/MarvelUniverse.

* Same goes for ''Franchise/TheFlash'', who would certainly be giving high G-load injuries to the people he picks up and rushes off with at super-speed, as his acceleration is depicted as nearly instantaneous. Indeed, the [[MetaOrigin Speed Force]] was invented largely to "[[HandWave explain]]" these kinds of mechanics.
** In one issue of the ''Franchise/JusticeLeagueOfAmerica'', he saves the population of a North Korean town from a nuclear meltdown in about 12 seconds. The speeds he would have needed to achieve this should have turned everyone he touched, carried, or simply ''ran past'' into chunky red jello.

*** ComicBook/UltimateMarvel ComicBook/{{Quicksilver}} did something similar, killing a lesser speedster by grabbing hold of her and accelerating so fast that her body was completely shredded.

* ComicBook/{{Supergirl}} saves a guy from a 29,000 feet fall [[http://scans-daily.dreamwidth.org/1372875.html?#cutid1 here]]. It has a happy ending, so he should be fine.
* ''Franchise/{{Superman}}'' regularly [[CatchAFallingStar snatches Lois Lane out of the sky]]. He'll sometimes justify it by thinking something to the effect of "I've got to time this right: match my velocity to hers and then gradually slow us," but that doesn't work when they were only seconds from hitting the ground.

** In Superman's case, this was one of the main justifications for the ComicBook/PostCrisis "unconscious telekinesis" theory. Later made explicit in the case of ComicBook/{{Superboy|1994}}, who learned to control it consciously. One ''ComicBook/ActionComics'' issue has a very ill Superman convey to villains they better stand down as he, Superman, no longer has the ability to ''pull'' his punches and their heads might just go explodey.

* ''Franchise/WonderWoman:''

* Averted in the ''WesternAnimation/TeenTitans'' fic ''[[http://www.fanfiction.net/s/3934212/1/The-Mark The Mark]]''. Jinx uses her powers to make a trapeze cord Dick Grayson is using snap in midair. He, while ''upside-down'' no less, grabs the snapped rope, uses it to swing back toward the rigging, sails through the air to grab said rigging, and slides down it to the ground. The recoil of grabbing the rope dislocates his shoulder, and sliding down the rigging leaves a cloud of dust from the chalk on his hands. Of course, given that he's Robin and has been an acrobat since birth, it'd be more unusual if he couldn't do it.

*** Later on, Tony gets blasted out of the sky by a tank, and slams hard into the ground, making a large crater. He then crawls out, damaged but alive. This contrasts heavily with [[ComicBook/WarMachine Rhodey]]'s fate in ''Film/CaptainAmericaCivilWar'', where the War Machine suit's reactor is blasted off at cruising altitude, and the now-inert armor is basically a metal coffin as it plummets to the ground -- explicitly stating that Tony's various suits ''need'' the gigantic amounts of power from their Arc reactors to actively cushion the squishy human inside from kinetic blows just as much as they do to fire repulsor beams or fly.

* ''Animation/TheReturnOfHanuman'' has a boy surviving after crushing through walls and a guy falling off the road while driving his truck. Seems like Maruti the [[GodInHumanForm reincarnation of Hanuman]] isn't the only one who's {{Nigh Invulnerab|ility}}le.

* Averted in the 1978 ''Film/{{Superman}}'' movie when Lois falls off a high building after a helicopter accident: after catching her, Franchise/{{Superman}} visibly decelerates over several dozen feet of downward motion before proceeding upward ([[Series/TheBigBangTheory Sheldon]] was still pissed off by it enough to create a page quote out of it, though).

* Deliberately averted in the ''Literature/KnownSpace'' books by ''Creator/LarryNiven''. The writer points out that eleportation platforms contain special technology to compensate for a velocity difference between the source and the destination and cannot function of this velocity difference is too large.

* In ''Series/{{Smallville}}'', Clark catches people a lot this way. Well, he ''is'' Franchise/{{Superman}}. Done painfully straight when he catches a conveniently unconscious Chloe who has been thrown off a dam. [[ArtisticLicensePhysics Which he did by jumping off said dam a few seconds ''after'' she is dropped, and catch her after he reaches the ground]]. The latter half can be justified since, on ''Smallville'', Clark can't ''consciously'' fly but does so unconsciously.

* Played straight initially in ''VideoGame/DeusExHumanRevolution'' then {{Hand Wave}}d with the optional addition of an augmentation that allows [[PlayerCharacter Jensen]] to fall from any height and survive. The game always shows Jensen activating something that shoots lightning downwards that, apparently, creates a cushion for a soft landing. Interestingly, this neither consumes nor requires energy.

* Most ''Videogame/{{Metroid}}'' games lack fall acceleration and thus lack fall damage, even from literal canyons, unless Samus falls to the ground with something heavy on top of her. ''Videogame/MetroidIIReturnOfSamus'' has the opposite, where flying too high without the spacecraft will cause Samus to take damage and fall back down(every game similarly stops you but most do not punish the player with damage for it). The games in the ''Videogame/MetroidPrimeTrilogy'' do have fall acceleration and if you somehow manage to get Samus into a situation where she reaches terminal velocity she will freeze up and the player will be unable to take any action until she hits the ground, at which point she will be temporarily stunned. Samus still takes no fall damage from this, but ''Videogame/MetroidPrime2Echoes'' added BottomlessPits, which do cause minor damage to Samus before she respawns next to them. ''Videogame/MetroidPrimeHunters'' is the only game where regular falls can hurt Samus if she is high enough and free fall,will kill you if Samus misses a jump in a low gravity, no atmosphere enviornment and drifts out into space. ''Videogame/MetroidOtherM'' goes back to having no adverse affects for falls, provided Samus simply falls. If she is ''thrown'' towards the ground she can then she can be injured.

* Taken UpToEleven in ''VideoGame/TrialsOfMana'', where being launched into air by a spring-like mushroom, flying up about 2 kilometers and falling back down leaves you unharmed, with this also being the case with Von Boyage's cannon travel system, which sends the heroes to a different part of the world.

** In ''WesternAnimation/BatmanTheAnimatedSeries'', as Two-Face prepares to push a terrified Hugo Strange out of a flying plane for cheating him and his fellow villains; ComicBook/TheJoker sadistically wisecracks:

* ''WesternAnimation/MiraculousLadybug'': The heroes often catch endangered citizens that are falling from great heights, such as the top of the Tour Montparnasse, or the Eiffel Tower. Ladybug even repeatedly makes a quick web-like stucture with her magic yo-yo to catch multiple falling people at the same time, while this yo-yo's string is unbreakable and strong enough to cut through the legs of the Eiffel Tower. None of those ciitizensed up sliced though.

* ''WesternAnimation/ThePowerpuffGirls'': In "Stuck Up, Up and Away", Princess plummets from a dizzying height after her flying power armor is destroyed, but Blossom grabs her right before she hits the ground.

* In ''VideoGame/{{Aion}}'', even though you can fall from ridiculous heights, hitting the ground kills you instantly (from more than something like 10m or so). You can spread your wings just above the ground to save yourself though, but that's not necessarily that unrealistic (apart from the spreading your wings part :) ) -- you only accelerate for a while, after that the air resistance counteracts the pull of gravity and after you spread the wings, you don't just stop immediately -- you glide a bit, giving you much more time to dissipate the speed than simply splatting into the ground. Also, the world Aion is set in appears to have very strange gravitational properties (mainly to the Aether, which apparently acts as a kind of antigravitational AppliedPhlebotinum and also thanks to the fact, that the planet is eaten from inside, thus having much smaller gravity... everyone moves like on Earth more or less though... Aether did it?)

* Most ''Videogame/{{Metroid}}'' games lack fall acceleration and thus lack fall damage, even from literal canyons, unless Samus falls to the ground with something heavy on top of her. ''Videogame/MetroidIIReturnOfSamus'' has the opposite, where flying too high without the spacecraft will cause Samus to take damage and fall back down(every game similarly stops you but most do not punish the player with damage for it). The ''Videogame/MetroidPrime'' games do have fall acceleration and if you somehow manage to get Samus into a situation where she reaches terminal velocity she will freeze up and the player will be unable to take any action until she hits the ground, at which point she will be temporarily stunned. Samus still takes no fall damage from this, but ''Videogame/MetroidPrime2Echoes'' added BottomlessPits, which do cause minor damage to Samus before she respawns next to them. ''Videogame/MetroidPrimeHunters'' is the only game where regular falls can hurt Samus if she is high enough and free fall,will kill you if Samus misses a jump in a low gravity, no atmosphere enviornment and drifts out into space. ''Videogame/MetroidOtherM'' goes back to having no adverse affects for falls, provided Samus simply falls. If she is ''thrown'' towards the ground she can then she can be injured.