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Audrey: So you can't feel anything?
Nathan: That's right.
Audrey: What about ice? Can you feel ice?
Nathan: Oddly enough, yes, I can feel ice.
Audrey: You can feel ice?
Nathan: No, but I can feel a headache coming on.
Haven

In normal living things, pain functions as a warning system for the body that tells it to try and get away from whatever is causing the sensation. However, sometimes someone can't feel pain for whatever reason, usually due to nerve damage or other factors. Fiction likes to explore this idea and will often explore the consequences in a very philosophical way.

For humor purposes, a man may sometimes gain a temporary version when Distracted by the Sexy.

As in Real Life, a person like this is very likely to accidentally injure themselves and not realize it for some time. In fiction these people also tend to develop a skewed perception of reality and may take to killing people for fun.note  Other times they're simply shown as tragic individuals who are literally out of touch with the rest of us.

It may become a Disability Superpower if the advantages are played up far more than the disadvantages. This is also a common feature for Super Soldiers, especially disposable ones. In such cases, the massive crippling drawbacks of not feeling pain tend to be downplayed, or, if addressed, aren't seen as a problem since they won't be alive long enough for them to have any effect.

It's also a common trait of androids and other robotic characters. As artificial constructs with computer "brains", there's no need for any warning system about damage they've received to actually be unpleasant, just like how real-life non-sapient computers don't feel pain from error reports. If an artificial lifeform can feel pain in the same way we understand it, that's a sure sign of Ridiculously Human Robots.

Contrast Frozen Face, also stemming from nerve damage.

See also Made of Iron and Nigh-Invulnerability for when a person resists damage, but may still feel something. This trope may result in a Major Injury Underreaction, though the latter is usually a temporary state of affairs. When a character with this trope is thought to be immune to emotional pain as well, they may eventually break down and ask Did You Think I Can't Feel?. When a character feels pain just fine but simply ignores it to keep going when a normal person would be debilitated, that's an example of Heroic Willpower and not this trope.

Can be a sub-trope to Master of Your Domain wherein the character is technically capable of feeling pain but can turn it off by an act of conscious will.


Examples:

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    Anime & Manga 
  • One of Dr. Stylish's mooks in Akame ga Kill! is a Cyborg whose enhancements include a lack of any sense of pain. While he was sufficiently mechanical to be immune to the One-Hit Kill function of Akame's sword (which only works on biological life), she eventually causes enough damage that he can no longer fight back. Before he dies, the mook lampshades that feeling pain is actually a useful thing.
  • In Area 88, Greg is impervious to pain. In the manga and OVA, he sterilizes a shrapnel wound by pouring alcohol directly on it. In a manga issue that did not make it stateside, he sterilizes a wound by pouring gunpowder from a bullet into it, then igniting the gunpowder with a lit cigarette.
  • Astro Boy: Being a robot, Astro is supposed to be immune to pain, though this was sometimes portrayed inconsistently over the manga's long run, possibly justified by his AI developing to be more humanlike. Indeed, for example, in Volume 7 when Hamegg has Astro in the circus, he beats him with an electrical whip. It very clearly hurts Astro, as he cries out in pain and begs him to stop before collapsing.
  • If the Titans in Attack on Titan feel any pain while being slashed and shot, they sure don't show it. This doesn't apply to all of them equally; when a human runs experiments on the captured Titans nicknamed "Sonny" and "Bean" that involve torturing them, Sonny just tries to eat her, but Bean recoils in agony.
  • Berserk: This is one advantage offered by the Berserker Armor. While wearing it, the wearer feels no pain from wounds he receives, allowing him to fight without distractions and unleash the full potential of the human body. Unfortunately, pain exists for a reason: wearing the armor can easily result in broken bones and torn muscles from the overexertion, but the wearer doesn't notice until they try to take the armor off. During battle, the armor compensates for the damage by shoving a bunch of iron spikes through the broken bones to set them. It's unclear whether the armor accelerates healing or if it's the elf magic Guts is treated with afterward that allows him to keep his body in one piece.
  • The titular character of Black★Rock Shooter does not feel any pain. Mato experiences them instead.
  • Shira from Blade of the Immortal lost his sense of pain due to brain damage suffered when Magatsu sent him falling off of a cliff. Luckily, the ridged sword that Manji owned tore Shira up so badly that the psycho's limited regeneration was slowed down by the damage he sustained over the course of their final fight. It still took a Big Damn Heroes moment from Magatsu to take him down, though.
  • In Cynthia the Mission, the Ripper of 2010, aka Yumiko, has this problem. Unfortunately, when she saw a show that talked about how normal humans have natural limits thanks to pain, she realizes she can do whatever she wants and normal humans can't stop her. She's proven wrong the second time she attempts to escape the insane asylum she's in, and the big sister of the girl whose eye she stabbed out kills her with a neck-shattering kick.
  • In The Daughter of Twenty Faces, the 2 genetically enhanced children are emotionless, super strong, super speed and feel no pain in order for them to last longer in fighting. The downside is that sooner or later their muscles wear out while fighting. This is what happens as one of the children's arm dislocates, being unable to fight back.
  • Zamasu's Complete Immortality in Dragon Ball Super manifests as a Healing factor that instantly regenerates any injury, lucky for him he doesn't seem to feel the pain.
  • Al from Fullmetal Alchemist by virtue of being Animated Armor. Sadly he can't (physically) feel anything else, either.
  • In Gangsta., Twilights often show this as their early death approaches, but Nicolas can temporarily give himself this by intentionally overdosing on his medication.
  • Cyborg characters in the Ghost in the Shell universe have the option of voluntarily shutting off their body's pain receptors. This is used on multiple occasions, such as Hideo Kuze's attempted assassination of Prime Minister Kayabuki in Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex 2nd GIG.
  • GTO: The Early Years: Joey used to be ill and addicted to morphine, but after a near-death experience he's immune to pain, even stabbing himself with an ice pick and slashing his own neck to prove it. This has turned him into an Ax-Crazy Death Seeker desperate to find someone who can give him a death he can feel.
  • Gunslinger Girl: The cyborg girls of the Agency feel pain, but it's programmed to go away quickly if they're injured, enabling them to keep fighting despite injuries such as punctured eyes or being shot by anti-materiel rifles. This can lead to Moral Myopia with the girls outraged over any minor scratch their handler receives while ignoring their far worse wounds.
  • Katou from Holyland due to being drugged up.
  • Inuyasha:
    • Miroku drinks a poison that will make him insensitive to pain every time he sucks miasma into his Wind Tunnel so that he's able to protect the ones he loves and keep fighting, even though it'll only kill him faster. He's well aware of the downsides, but does it anyway.
    • During her brief period as Naraku's Unwitting Pawn, Sango had a Shikon Jewel shard embedded in her body that rendered her unable to feel pain, with the idea that she would fight Inuyasha to the death if she didn't know how badly she was hurt. Indeed, Inuyasha has to explicitly point out to her that she was bleeding all over the place during their fight. When Naraku later retrieves the shard from her body, Sango is promptly incapacitated from the pain and ends up falling into a coma for over a week.
  • In Karas, the hero, born to a rather messed up mafia family and more apparently his brother is his father, and for half the series, he's in a coma, acting through a projection into an animated suit of transforming samurai armor, and after dying, he's reborn through the will of the City, says he feels no pain, allowing him to be the enforcer to said mafia family, taking 9mm shots and still remaining at full functionality. He also comforts a girl attempting to treat his wound he got from a demon during the local Apocalypse by saying he feels no pain so he's all right. Apparently, no sensation of pain means the wound is ... just not there. There is a justification to this, but it's not pretty: through the production of incest, it gave him a condition to which if he were to even lose his arm, he would not feel it.
  • In Karate Shoukoushi Kohinata Minoru, the underground fighting ring champion Kevin Norton occasionally uses PCP before entering the ring, rendering him insensitive to pain. In the end, the drugs themselves take a harder toll on his body than the blows he ignored in combat.
  • In Kemono Jihen, Kabane is a half-ghoul hybrid. As a result, he's physically incapable of feeling pain, not reacting at all when tearing off his own arm or when his eyes are attacked by flesh-eating insects.
  • This is what allows Ax-Crazy Psycho Knife Nut Farfarello from Knight Hunters to go out kicking ass with near-total impunity. It's also indirectly implied to be why he's missing an eye and covered in a lot of nasty-looking scars.
  • Moritsugu Reiji from Linebarrels of Iron was born with the inability to feel pain. This factors into his backstory, and is part of why he can continue to be The Stoic.
  • The Zero series of Artificial Humans in Loveless were designed without pain receptors, and their creator thought this would make them unstoppable. However, in the story, Soubi ends up exploiting this when fighting the male Zero pair by lowering the temperature around them to dangerous levels; as a result of having no warning system, both Zeroes' bodies begin to shut down, and they can't defend themselves. Later a female pair of Zeroes are brought in, and it's eventually revealed that one of them is apparently losing her powers and is starting to feel pain, which she hides from the other girl.
  • Yukari from Murciélago does not feel pain, which allows her to shrug off blows that would put a normal person out of commission. This is also best seen when she loses a leg and arm and only reacts to the amputations with surprise.
  • Naruto has Sasori. He can't feel pain because he swapped the majority of his body out for puppet parts (with the exception of his heart). He explains this to Sakura when she slaps him.
  • Mook Lieutenant Dewey in Nurse Angel Ririka SOS gets an upgrade that, unbeknownst to him, inhibits his ability to feel pain so he can fight Ririka until he dies. He shrugs off what should be serious injuries until his body begins to give out and he suddenly starts feeling the pain. It's an agonizing, awful pain. Being a kind-hearted girl, Ririka uses the last of her Green Vaccine to cure his injuries despite him being an enemy.
  • Deconstructed in One Piece. Moria's zombies don't actually feel pain despite reacting like they do; the response to pain stimuli is ingrained behavior in the animating shadow. Once reminded that their bodies can't feel pain, zombies will ignore even the most damaging attack. While fighting a giant zombie, Chopper, the team's doctor, tells it that the fact that it can't feel pain is its greatest weakness, as it has no way of knowing how much damage its body parts are accumulating until they're so injured that they simply stop responding altogether. The Straw Hats eventually beat it by first crippling its right arm and then shattering its spine, leaving the thing laying on the ground wondering why it can't move.
  • In Princess Tutu, Mytho is unable to feel pain because he lost his heart and thus, his ability to feel emotions. Since his only personality trait left is to rush to the aid of anything that's helpless and in danger, he constantly places his own life in danger, and is completely unaware why everyone seems so freaked out by it when he does so.
  • Puella Magi Madoka Magica: By weakening the link to their body, a Magical Girl can lower the amount of pain they feel, at the cost of slowing their reactions. And they always feel less pain than a regular human.
    Sayaka: I can't feel the pain anymore! [cue insane laughter]
  • Several of the 'Invisible Nines' in Pumpkin Scissors 'benefit' from this. The 901st Anti-Tank Troopers are mostly insensitive to pain at all times, and go completely numb when activating their 'Blue Lanterns' — this allows them to march through a shower of tank-shells and machinegun fire, not stopping until their bodies have been literally torn apart. Meanwhile, the flamethrower-wielding 908th 'Heat Troopers' wear suits filled with anesthetic fluid, which prevents them from noticing that the constant, oppressive heat given off by their weapon is literally melting off their skin. At the end of the war, most of them took off their suits to celebrate, only to literally fall apart as a result...
  • One of Ray's friends in Ray the Animation can't feel pain. There's a flashback to when she broke a finger and just kept smiling. Ray assumes she's dealing with a fraud when the girl cries about how much something hurts, but the friend explains that she's gotten very good at pretending to feel pain, because she remembers how creeped out people got at her nonreactions to injury.
  • Kahlua in Rosario + Vampire, thanks to a "charm". While this made her nearly unstoppable in battle, as she was nearly impossible to knock out, her superior realized that this prevents her from knowing when her body is too damaged to go on. Thus, he pulls her back because as one of the world's greatest assassins she's far too useful to let her die pointlessly.
  • A similar battle occurs against a puppeteer enemy in Rurouni Kenshin, in which Kenshin blocks a pivotal joint with a rock; he points out to his opponent that a person feeling pain would have noticed the obstruction right away.
  • Faust from Shaman King constantly keeps himself doped up on morphine, which allows him to perform surgery on himself during or after a battle. Well, that and the fact that he's not quite right in the head.
  • Used to disturbing effect in Tokyo Ghoul.
    • Juuzou Suzuya mentions that he doesn't experience pain, allowing him to completely ignore things like being disemboweled and getting his leg cut off. It turns out to be the result of his beloved Mama training him to no longer feel pain, through a childhood of extensive torture. Oh, yeah, did we mention he was castrated during his childhood? No wonder this guy is so screwed up.
    • The Aogiri Executive Noro, who doesn't respond to being peppered with ammunition, stabbed through the stomach, kicked in half, and breaking his own neck to look at something behind him. Even other Ghouls think he's creepy.
    • In the sequel, Seidou Takizawa claims that he doesn't feel pain anymore because he's used to it.
  • Checkmate from Ultimate Muscle went through intensive training as a child to not feel pain. As with most of these cases, he loses because he can't tell what his body's limit is. This is all completely forgotten about once he turns good.
  • Inverted in UQ Holder!. Karin has a form of immortality that instantly retcons away any damage that she receives, but she still feels pain from where the injuries would have been.
  • Zero from Yami no Aegis, due to being shot in the head.
  • In Yu-Gi-Oh! 5Ds, most of the forces of Yliaster are really robots, so they don't feel anything when their bodies get torn apart. At one point, Aporia takes advantage of this when he faces Jack Atlas, Lua, and Luca at once. The duel makes their cards real, so they actually get hurt whenever they take damage, but he is unaffected.
  • YuYu Hakusho:
    • Hiei and Kurama were battling a giant construct designed not to feel pain. They're quick to demonstrate why not realizing how much damage your body is taking really isn't as good an idea as it seems.
    • Doctor altered his body chemistry to both feel no pain and to never lose consciousness. He explains this to Yusuke after he barely reacts to a limb being shot off.

    Comic Books 
  • In All-New Wolverine, Alchemax attempts to duplicate the super-soldier X-23 repeatedly and strips the resulting clones of their ability to feel pain before four of them escape. The youngest of them, X23_4GAB a.k.a. Gabby, turns out to be the only one who inherited Laura's Healing Factor and abuses it far more lightly than most who must bear even transitory pain (i.e., severing a middle finger as a gag gift for Deadpool).
  • Midnighter from The Authority has the ability to turn his pain receptors on and off. He's fought with a broken neck, amongst other things.
  • The one-time The Avengers villain Monsieur Khruul employs a group of henchmen who have been injected with a special drug that prevents them from feeling pain. Swordsman finds this out the hard way.
  • Butterball in Avengers: The Initiative has Nigh-Invulnerability and complete immunity to pain but is obese and weak. Unfortunately, he also can't feel anything else, and his invulnerability means he can't lose weight or improve his muscle tone. He reveals this when a teammate offers to have sex with him, as normally her fire abilities would burn her partner. He explains that while he wouldn't be hurt, he also wouldn't be able to get any enjoyment out of the act.
  • Deconstructed with one-shot Batman villain the Gork. In addition to giving him enhanced strength and durability and adding shields grafted under his flesh in certain areas, the experiments that made him superhuman also removed his ability to feel pain. However, because he couldn't feel pain, he didn't know he was overexerting himself until it was too late. So his inability to experience pain ended up killing him.
  • The Crow: Those revived by crow guardians cannot feel any pain unless it is self-inflicted.
  • In Cruelty, one character is punched in the face and bloodied. He is kneed in the groin. He feels none of it and proceeds to hand out an ass-kicking. He is drugged to the gills.
  • One issue of Global Frequency has a special operative of the titular organization called in to deal with an assassin who stole his biofeedback techniques (pain-negation) techniques. What ensues is a brutal, bloody brawl that fails to incapacitate either combatant until the operative rips off the assassin's arm and shoves it down his throat.
  • Kick-Ass: As a result of nerve damage sustained during his first failed attempt at being a superhero, this could be considered the closest thing Kick-Ass has to a superpower. Even then he can feel some pain — in the movie, he specifically states that even with all the nerve damage, having mafia goons torture him still really hurts.
  • Lobster Random has this as a result of his claws. It also gives him no empathy whatsoever with his torture victims.
  • In Marshal Law, superheroes created by the US government have a spinal implant that blocks pain signals.
  • Traditionally, zombies and many other undead don't feel pain — their nervous systems aren't running. Alternatively, they feel, but not pain. This is used in Marvel Zombies for the creepifying factor — a bone tears its way out of Bruce Banner's stomach, and he reports in horror that it doesn't hurt... but he can still feel it.
  • In Next Men, Bethany is Nigh-Invulnerable, but the side-effect of this is that she can't feel any physical sensation, including pain.
  • Pack: Chastity can't feel pain because of a head injury she endured when she was shot by a Dirty Cop.
  • Rising Stars: One of the Specials is entirely invulnerable and doesn't feel pain. On the flip side, he also can't feel anything, but his sense of taste still works (so he's obese), and being invulnerable doesn't mean he can stop himself from getting tossed aside in a football game.
  • In Venom, the Xenophage explains that its species does not have pain receptors.
  • Played realistically in an issue of X-Men. Professor X feels no pain in his lower legs because he's paraplegic. He was crawling through a tunnel and caught a snag; when he ripped himself free, he didn't realize until later that he had ripped the skin on his leg and was worried that he'd bleed to death before reaching the X-Men.

    Fan Works 
  • All For Luz:
  • Becoming a True Invader: The Fefians have evolved an inability to feel pain alongside their natural Healing Factor in order to cope with the constant deadly situations of their planet. Kor is one of the unfortunate few who lack this attribute, which is part of why she's so pessimistic and hates her own kind.
  • The Bridge:
    • Enjin seems to not feel pain. He doesn't give any reaction to being struck and stoically resets his own dislocated shoulder. It's not foolproof, as when Aria Blaze blasts him from the inside out, it makes him scream and thrash around.
    • Kaizer Ghidorah can go into a berserker rage where he completely ignores his own injuries to steamroll his opponent.
  • Satsuki in chapter 5 of the story Come Find Me, Again, during her depression fueled Sanity Slippage, as her mother seemed to have noted based on the fact that she had seen the former dance barefooted on broken glass without apparently feeling the effect. However, this case might be due to her being so mentally out of it by that time.
  • Izuku in Death Need Not Apply has a pain tolerance so high that he might as well not feel pain. During the U.A. entrance exam, Izuku is functionally Quirkless and still gets enough points to enter the hero course by beating the robots to death with his bare hands then ripping off pieces to use as improvised weapons. In chapter six, Izuku is stabbed with so much broken glass that he clinks with every movement and shows no reaction at all. The only time so far Izuku's shown to actually feel pain is when he grunts slightly after getting hit in the face by Mina's acid.
  • In Gensokyo 20XX, we have a subversion with Reimu, who can feel pain, although she may as well not feel it, seeing as she doesn't respond to it, at least mentally. Justified, as she was conditioned that way, so she wouldn't really know to respond to it, as the instinct was removed from her unless said injuries/painful situations were called to her attention. In that vein, she doesn't seem to respond to discomfort as well. This was changed in 20XXV, when she was kicked in the face and responded, causing her to fly into a rage and stab the perpetrator.
  • Harry Potter and the Natural 20: At one point, the story notes that pain, by D&D rules, has no functional meaning outside of storytelling and fluff. It doesn't cause any penalties, debuffs or negative effects in any way (even the spell Symbol of Pain is dangerous solely because of the penalties it causes, rather than the pain), so pain only matters to the extent that you want to roleplay that the pain bothers you. The protagonist, Milo, is such a dedicated munchkin that he almost never roleplays anything disadvantageous unless it leads to some advantage further down the line. This makes him functionally immune to the Crucio Curse. Technically, he feels pain; he just doesn't care.
  • Hysterical: Izuku's Quirk, Hysterical, causes him to have a constant adrenaline rush that allows him to use hysterical strength and completely shuts off his pain receptors. Besides getting constantly injured from his own strength, Izuku simply can't fake being in pain. When he shatters his leg and pretends to be a normal U.A. student, Bakugo describe Izuku's pained expression as looking like he ate several lemons then sniffed dog turds.
  • In Live a Hero (MHA), Izuku has long since been desensitized to most forms of pain. Even a gash extending down his entire arm barely makes him flinch. This is because he watched his sister get brutally murdered right in front of him. He heard her scream as her bones were crushed and she was left dying with her eyes wide open. Compared to that, everything else, even after his body torn apart from the inside by having a Quirk forced on him, is nothing by comparison.
  • Played with in Maim de Maim and Satsuki Matoi. Everything that Evelyn tried to do to kill her with, even going as far as throwing the former into a furnace, had zero effect, actually, she shrugs it off and continues talking. However, earlier, during a bonding moment with Junketsu, she did react to being burned with an iron. Then again, she does have a powerful Healing Factor.
  • Rainbow Dash's Resurrective Immortality curse in The Many Deaths of Rainbow Dash includes her being unable to feel pain — which is a good thing, considering that most of her titular "many deaths" are ridiculously brutal. In fact, she is numb over all her body and can't feel much of anything. Several times, she takes a bit of time to realize that she's just been grievously injured.
  • The Mountain and the Wolf:
    • The Mountain starts the battle with the Wolf on painkillers, which lets him ignore a painful wound. Doesn't save him though.
    • The Nurglite mercenaries the Wolf brings to the Battle of Winterfell shrug off horrifying damage without even appearing to register it.
    • The Technically-Living Zombie Mountain is even tougher, now able to stand getting stabbed all the way through without slowing down. Still not enough to save him.
  • The Night Unfurls:
    • Kyril is not insensitive to pain, but the fact that he can shrug off debilitating injuries, as well as possessing Blood Vials that heal him completely speaks volumes regarding his pain threshold. It is then subverted in Chapter 14, where he gets struck by the tendrils of a mutated war chief. Chuckling to himself that it has been far too long since he felt pain like this, it marks the original story's Serial Escalation.
    • Shamuhaza's half-insect, half-human Elite Mooks don't seem to feel any pain. Luckily, they can still be killed.
  • In the Pony POV Series, Diamond Tiara's mother Golden Tiara/Screwball experienced a very severe injury as a child and had it fixed without anesthetic. As a result, she no longer feels pain or has an insanely high pain tolerance to the point dislocating her own bones is a common combat tactic for her. She's also a black belt in martial arts.
  • Webwork: Eight years in the Emptiness, most of which was spent undergoing a slow, Body Horror-inducing Painful Transformation, means that Jade's pain threshold has gone through the roof. She's now able to shrug off direct hits from chi blasts, and even the traditional Oni weakness to onions has no effect on her.

    Films — Animation 
  • Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget: One of the first signs that something is off about the chickens in Fun-Land Farms is that they don't react to potential injury. Molly first discovers this when she barrels into a hen trying to climb up a slide and the hen doesn't show any pain or annoyance. Once she's sensitized to this, she notices all sorts of other similar behavior, such as one chicken who's head-down in a golf hole, being lightly whacked with a putter, and not yelling or trying hard to escape. It's a result of the mind-control collars.
  • In Corpse Bride, the titular character Emily, who is dead and can no longer feel physical pain, unflinchingly takes a sword to her belly to prevent Victor from being killed by Lord Barkis.
  • In Kung Fu Panda 2, Tigress reveals that as the result of punching ironwood trees for twenty years, she now "feels nothing". She proves it when Po punches her palm and he's the only one that gets hurt.
  • Sword of the Stranger: The Ming warriors have this thanks to a special anesthetic drug, allowing them to shrug off all but the most deliberating or instantly-fatal wounds and keep fighting. The exception is Luo Lang, who's too much of a Blood Knight to use it, as he feels it would take the fun out of his fights, but he doesn't need it since he's the Master Swordsman of the bunch. Its effectiveness can't be denied, as combined with their natural skills, the Ming are able to dominate most fights where they're outnumbered, and one who ends up captured by the Japanese is able to ignore all the torture they put him through. However, they tend to miss important cues in the heat of combat, like when Feng Wu gets stabbed through the throat with his own sword and he's only able to stumble around in shock trying to find his weapon before he expires. Plus, when the drug wears off, all the pain comes rushing back, as what happened to the previously mentioned tortured Ming who immediately started screaming and writhing before giving up what he knew before getting put out of his misery. The Japanese general Shogen Itadori manages to get his hands on the drug before the final battle and uses it to go on something of a power high, though it doesn't save him from being fatally shot while he's distracted, and Luo Lang offers Nanashi some of it before their final fight to help with his injuries but Nanashi refuses to Lang's surprise and approval, as he states pain is what makes him feel alive.
  • Roger in Who Framed Roger Rabbit. "No pain!" [dish to own head] "No pain!" [another one] "No pain!" [yep] He probably could (and would) have continued on indefinitely if Valiant hadn't stopped him. Interestingly, this only works if Roger's prepared to take the hit — he can still be incapacitated through pain if he's not ready for it. (Chalk it up either to his being a toon or to his stuntman training.)

    Films — Live-Action 
  • The little boy in Bereavement has CIPA. The villain believes, at various times, that this means he has no conscience, has a completely clear conscience, or has no soul.
  • In Black Mask, members of the rogue Super-Soldier unit have enhanced strength, speed, agility, and no longer properly feel pain. Sometimes this adequately explains situations where they continue fighting as if nothing has happened despite suffering grievous injuries, sometimes it's pure Rule of Cool and Artistic License – Biology.
  • Crimes of the Future (2022): For no known reason, almost all of humanity has stopped feeling pain or suffering infections, causing recreational surgery to become "the new sex."
  • In Cube Zero, the Cube soldiers are impervious to pain as part of their programming. After Haskell is "reactivated", he is impaled on a spike by the escaping heroes and shrugs the injury off. When the Cube then undergoes a clean sweep (every occupant inside being vaporized at once) he looks with bemusement at his scorching hand until he's gone.
  • Bane's mask in The Dark Knight Rises is nominally meant to supply him with anesthetic gas that reduces the pain from a serious injury he suffered in the past. The fact that Bane inhales the anesthetic implies a general effect rather than being specialized to one area (as it would be in an injection), rendering him immune to all other pain — such as when Batman is beating him senseless. The only time he reacts in pain to a hit is after his mask gets damaged in the final fight, seconds before Catwoman blows him away with the Batpod's guns.
  • Darkman has this as one of his three powers. After gaining third-degree burns over most of his body, experimental surgery is performed to ease his pain. Afterwards, he can feel nothing all over his body. Starved for sensory input, his brain makes his adrenal gland go wild, giving him unusual strength. His final power is scientific, as he can create synthetic skin to appear as anyone he likes by grafting on a new face. Why Darkman doesn't get horrible infections and die from his constant injuries is anyone's guess.
  • In Deadpool (2016), Ajax's pain receptors were burned off by his mutation, allowing him to keep fighting despite grievous injuries up to and including a sword through the chest. However, unlike the Merc with the Mouth (who feels pain but doesn't care) he lacks any sort of Healing Factor, so he pays for it later.
  • As the Friday the 13th series progressed, Jason Voorhees seemed to gradually lose the ability to feel pain, with only extremely severe attacks (like the ones inflicted on him during the fight in Freddy vs. Jason; see him stumble in one scene) fazing him.
  • Much like Jason in Friday the 13th as described above, Michael Myers from Halloween usually reacts very little to injuries. A couple shining examples come from the two most recent films, Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. In Kills, even after Michael is beaten down with baseball bats and knives, as well as being shot several times by the mob, he gets back up to kill most of the mob as if nothing happened, just when they assume he's dead. In Ends, while his numerous injuries have caught up with him, making him noticeably weaker than before, he still makes no real response when Laurie slits his throat wide open, besides ripping one of his pinned hands free to try and strangle her as he's bleeding out, before Alyson intervenes.
  • In Kingdom of Heaven, the King of Jerusalem has leprosy, which he says was discovered when, as a child, he cut his arm but felt no pain from the injury. This fact is later used to reveal that his nephew has it too.
  • In The Last Witch Hunter, Kaulder at one point breaks all the bones in his hand without even flinching. It may be part of his Healing Factor, or it might be that the years of taking punishment made him used to it.
  • Saruman's Uruk-hai in The Lord of the Rings are said to not know pain. How much of that is true is debatable, but their chieftain who duels with Aragorn is not reacting to penetrating stab wounds and limb loss, except for the reduced mobility. Later on, an uruk berzerker howls in pain when he gets Gimli's axe in the groin, suggesting that it may not be as complete an immunity as first thought.
  • In Lucy, the protagonist gains control over her ability to feel pain, allowing her to pull a bullet from her shoulder and have a drug packet removed from her abdomen without anesthesia.
  • The two main villains of The Malay Chronicles: Bloodlines, Kamawas and Taji, wears amulets powered by Hollywood Voodoo which makes them immune to any kind of pain.
  • The Black Knight from Monty Python and the Holy Grail. John Cleese said in commentary the scene would be cruel and sadistic if not for this trope and the fact that the knight doesn't care what happens to him.
  • Adam Sandler's character in Mr. Deeds has a blackened foot from a past frostbite which he is unable to feel anything, including pain.
  • Night of the Living Dorks: Philip, Wurst, and Konrad discover that, as zombies, they can't feel pain. They decide to use it to their advantage at gaining popularity at their school.
  • The cursed pirates in Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl "feel nothing", allowing them to not even flinch when stabbed full in the guts or be more worried about losing their head when it's cut off than distracted by the pain.
  • Star Trek: The Next Generation's Data is incapable of pain — until he gets living skin grafted on in Star Trek: First Contact, allowing him the experience for the first time. He doesn't much care for it. Being an android, he's immune to any of the downsides of a lack of pain since internal diagnostic systems will leave him aware of any damage that he takes.
  • Terminators are robots encased in flesh, and don't register pain at all from damage to either the flesh or their actual bodies, although in Terminator 2: Judgment Day when the T-800 is asked if his (many) bullet wounds hurt, he states flatly, "I sense injury. The data could be called pain.", suggesting that what they receive is more like an error or damage report than a true pain-like sensation.
  • The protagonist of The Twelve Gold Medallions demonstrates his ability to use his chi in suppressing pain, by dipping his bare hands in a wok full of boiling oil to retrieve a piece of fried dough cake and eating it in front of his enemies.
  • Renard from The World Is Not Enough cannot feel pain due to a bullet in his brain that is slowly working its way through. And this somehow turned into immunity to third-degree burns. Because he couldn't feel the hot rock he was holding, it apparently didn't damage his hand at all, unless he just doesn't care — Renard is depicted as something of a Death Seeker who knows full well his days are numbered.
  • Three Finger, One Eye and Saw Tooth, the main hillbillies in the Wrong Turn series, are stated to have a severe case of congenital analgesia (meaning they feel little or no pain) in Wrong Turn 4: Bloody Beginnings. This led to a period of presumably exploratory Self-Harm in their youths; Three Finger bit off and ate his missing two digits, One Eye gouged out and ate one of his eyes with a fork, and Saw Tooth began grinding his teeth against walls.
  • Inverted in X-Men when Rogue asks Wolverine if his claws hurt when he extends or retracts them. He grimacingly says, "Every time."
  • Played for Laughs in You Don't Mess with the Zohan when Zohan and the Phantom try to outdo each other while saying "No, no, no. I feel no pain!" The Phantom sticks a piranha on his cheek while laughing. Zohan grabs the piranha and sticks it down his shorts while looking bored.

    Literature 
  • Miles Hundredlives in The Alloy of Law. In his case, it's because of how insanely effective his Healing Factor is — he's been injured so many times, and his injuries always heal nearly instantly, to the point that he barely remembers what pain feels like.
  • One of the later Callahan's Crosstime Saloon books includes a character of Ashkenazi Jewish ancestry with familial dysautonomia (a.k.a. Riley-Day syndrome), which leaves him unable to feel pain and impaired at feeling temperature, with vertigo and other problems as a "bonus".
  • The Chronicles of Thomas Covenant: This is the primary effect of the titular character's leprosy. Modern medicine means that it won't kill him directly, but the damage it's already done to his nerves means that he has to live in a perpetual state of paranoia, constantly checking himself for injury. This is why he is so adamant that the Land cannot be real: If he allows himself to accept the healing the Land offers, he'll lose that protective paranoia, which will kill him when he returns to his original life.
  • An aspect of metalcrafting in Codex Alera. This usually presents itself in increased endurance and pain tolerance. But the first book mentions a courier who had enough metalcrafting to ignore pain from an infection in his foot but lacked the sense not to and ended up losing the foot.
  • Citizens of The Culture are wired so that while their other senses are normal (and in the case of sexual arousal, heightened), they don't feel pain to a great extent. Thus, in several novels, there are scenes where protagonists suffer really horrible injuries but describe them in a fairly detached way.
  • When Arnie is turned into a monstrous snake in Dr. Franklin's Island, he becomes very strong and, to Semi's reckoning, insensitive to pain.
  • Durarara!!: Shizuo didn't realize he'd been shot until he slipped in his own blood. Pens and knives are even less effective. Luckily, he also has ridiculous durability, though it's a good thing he slipped on the blood since that superhuman durability wouldn't save him if he lost too much of the stuff.
  • Several different characters in Joe Abercrombie's The First Law trilogy displays this power. Ferro Malljin feels little to no pain due to being part-demon. Logan Ninefingers can't feel pain when he's overtaken by The Bloody-Nines, but DAMN can he ever feel it afterwards... Also, all of The Eaters lose the ability to feel pain — or anything else, for that matter. Which, along with their Healing Factor, makes them really hard to torture.
  • Asagami Fujino in the third The Garden of Sinners chapter is insensitive to pain both physically and emotionally, though she keeps this a secret from everyone else so they don't think she's abnormal. She has even been repeatedly raped by a gang because of her passivity and her unwillingness to tell anyone about her 'pain'. She starts getting her sensation back in fits after one of the gang hits her with a baseball bat. The pain makes her feel more alive... and murderous. They die messily. It turns out that the lack of pain is the result of her father medicating her as a child to seal her psychic powers before they got out of hand, which has now backfired. One disadvantage to not being able to feel pain is that she doesn't even realize she has appendicitis, and would have eventually died from it if Shiki had not intervened.
  • A variation occurs in Halo: Ghosts of Onyx: the Spartan-III soldiers of Gamma Company have been given a cocktail of chemicals that prevents their body from going into shock when gravely injured, to give them an extra edge in combat; at one point when a soldier is hit it doesn't immediately register, and he only collapses once he loses enough blood for his heart to stop working, since he lost most of his chest. This comes at the cost of them needing to take anti-psychotic medication to suppress the negative effects it had on their brains.
  • Yuki Nagato from Haruhi Suzumiya shows no sign of pain even through being impaled by several swords through presumably vital areas. She also catches laser beams potent enough to sear through part of her hands without flinching. Whether this is truly because she does not feel pain, or if it's because she's that stoic, is unknown.
  • In volume 2 of The Heroic Legend of Arslan, Dariun is forced to fight a duel with a giant who supposedly couldn't feel pain on behalf of one of the prince's allies. In the end, it was shown to be partly true: the giant certainly didn't react to a massive diagonal slash down his chest, but Dariun's thrown sword plus a timely lightning bolt causes him to scream in pain and give up the fight.
  • A variation in Hurog with Oreg, who has two "bodies" — the keep that he is bound Genius Loci of and a human body which he can manifest at will. Protagonist Ward questions him about this and he admits that damage to the keep doesn't cause pain, though he does notice it... but damage to the manifested body does, mostly because it amused the man who created the binding spell.
  • I Become Shadow: The Shadows are given a treatment that stops them from feeling pain.
  • One of the many afflictions of Mario Incandenza in David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest is a relative insensitivity to pain — at one point, he burns himself on a stove, and it's the ETA cook, with whom he is talking, who notices.
  • Brisingr, the third book in the Inheritance Cycle, as well as the final book, Inheritance, had soldiers who could feel no pain due to magic. Unless a blow hit/affected something exceptionally major (their lungs/heart/head), they'd just keep coming and often destroyed morale and/or army cohesion, though they're otherwise affected by stuff, i.e., severing nerves in an arm would lose functionality for said arm, which they'd notice rather than the pain/lack thereof. The spell has been cast by the Big Bad Galbatorix, who has essentially weaponized this.
    Roran: It is true that not being able to feel pain gives them no small advantage, but they also die in greater numbers because they do not protect themselves the way a man who did feel pain might.
  • In Janitors Of The Post Apocalypse, feral and cured humans feel, at most, a dull ache and a throbbing sensation. This, plus their absurd toughness and durability, makes them great indentured shock troops for the Krakau.
  • Ronald Niedermann from the Millennium Series has a congenital inability to feel pain, and is also beastly strong, which makes him a really tough opponent to take down in a fight.
  • In The Nekropolis Archives, protagonist Matthew Richter is a zombie and thus incapable of feeling any pain.
  • Orion in the Ben Bova series by the same name is a Super-Soldier with the ability to voluntarily shut off his pain receptors. He's well aware that his Healing Factor is the only reason that this is a useful trait for him since he's prone to accumulating numerous minor injuries that could otherwise become cumulatively incapacitating whenever he uses is.
  • By the third book of the Parrish Plessis trilogy, the protagonist's Corruption has advanced to the point where she's able to ignore even serious wounds.
  • Pump Six and Other Stories: As part of their trans-human nature, characters from "The People of Sand and Slag" don't exactly feel any pain, even if their limbs are cut off (they do that for fun) or their organs are smashed into pulp during jumping out of a chopper without a parachute. Surprisingly Realistic Outcome occurs as this makes them extremely clumsy since they can't even fathom what pain or harm is. The story revolves around three security guards finding and adopting a stray, unmodified dog. "You have to treat it carefully", one of them points out at one point — "See how it doesn't immediately heal if I hurt it like this."
  • The Saga of Ragnar Lodbrok: When Aella's messenger relates Ragnar's death to the Ragnarssons, Sigurd Ragnarsson is paring his fingernails with a knife. He listens to the messenger so attentively (and presumably, is so worked up internally) he does not notice he is cutting into his own flesh "until the knife stood in the bone, and he did not flinch at that."
  • Scanners Live in Vain: In this story, deep space is flooded with a kind of radiation that causes debilitating pain in living creatures. In order to get around this, passengers are placed in cryogenic suspension for the trip. Ships are primarily crewed by "habermans", convicted criminals whose sensory nerves have been severed to render them immune to the pain... at the cost of causing them to lose all senses other than sight. Since it's not a good idea to leave murderers and rapists in sole charge of helpless passengers, the haberman crews are supervised by the titular Scanners, an elite body who volunteer to undergo the haberman process. While Scanners do have access to "cranching" technology, which temporarily restores the disabled senses, it is still a major sacrifice. Much of the story consists of the POV character meditating on what the Scanners have lost by the change.
  • The Unsullied (elite eunuch slave soldiers) in A Song of Ice and Fire are dosed with an elixir called the "Wine of Courage" that deadens the sensation of pain from a young age. Gregor Clegane is a variation in that he's almost always doped up on Milk of the Poppy to take the edge off his crippling migraines, so any pain on top of that tends to be both deadened and irrelevant in the face of the splitting headache he usually has.
  • In Space Marine Battles, sister Sethano takes a Made of Explodium round to the gut and doesn't even notice in midst of killing her enemies.
  • In The Stainless Steel Rat for President, diGriz is arrested in a Trojan Prisoner gambit, and knowing the reception he'll get has himself dosed on drugs beforehand, so the Secret Police get extremely frustrated beating up our hero with no apparent effect. Things are different when the drugs wear off of course, and diGriz's family make a point of inflicting some Laser-Guided Karma on the policeman concerned.
  • In the Alternate History of The Tales of Alvin Maker, Napoleon has become Emperor of a United Europe but suffers from crippling gout. His protégé Calvin is unable to cure it, but is able to turn off his ability to feel pain to prevent it from hampering him. While preparing for a hot bath, Napoleon wonders whether some of the pleasure of it will be diminished if he can't feel the slight pain of the hot water. He muses that if this makes sex less pleasurable, he'll have Calvin killed.
  • Rimuru Tempest in That Time I Got Reincarnated as a Slime has the [Pain Nullification] skill as part of his original starting set after his reincarnation, which ensures he doesn't feel pain no matter what attack hits him even if it blows away part of his body. The negatives of this are covered by the fact he lacks any valuable organs to damage being a slime and he has the [Self-Regeneration] skill unique to his new species, meaning usually nothing short of something destroying every last part of himself (which he would definitely notice happening) would be able to kill him. In fact, the only attacks he can feel pain from are ones that deal direct damage to his soul.
  • In the Warrior Cats book The Place of No Stars, it's noticed that a spirit being mind-controlled by Ashfur does not feel pain. Any downsides aren't clear since Squirrelflight's trying not to hurt him anyway, it just makes the battle seem all the more impossible for her to win.
  • The Zombie Survival Guide makes it very clear that the only way to stop a zombie with guns is by shooting their legs and knees, or destroying the brain, or causing some other injury which makes them physically incapable of advancing.

    Live-Action TV 
  • Played for Laughs on A.N.T. Farm when Olive states she is so scared to sleep away from home that she was awake and coherent during surgery on her appendix. While they don't make mention to her pain tolerance, intense pain is the main reason for being put to sleep prior to surgery. So one can only imagine how painful that had to be.
  • Arrow:
    • Season 2's Story Arc is built around Mirakuru, a Super Serum developed as part of a World War II Japanese military program. People who use it become Super Soldiers, which gives them super strength and a massively impressive Healing Factor, which together means that they just shrug off whatever they're hit with, not even seeming to notice it.
    • In the Season 3 episode "Corto Maltese", Thea Queen is undergoing Training from Hell from her supervillain father Malcolm Merlyn. At the start of the episode, he pours scalding hot tea over her hand and she begs him to stop. At the end of the episode her brother Oliver is surprised when someone accidently spills a cup of hot coffee on Thea's hand and she doesn't even flinch.
    • A Season 5 Villain of the Week named Derek Sampson is exposed to a chemical bath that seems to act as a poor man's Mirakuru, enhancing his strength and making him completely impervious to pain. However, unlike with the Mirakuru, his Healing Factor is slow, and as such he's taken down with a dose of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome — just because he can't feel his tendons being cut, doesn't mean he's not immobilized when it happens.
  • In the Best Friends Whenever episode "A Time to Double Date", a guy named Drake keeps asking Cyd to punch him in every part of his body and doesn't feel anything.note 
  • The Courier from The Blacklist has congenital analgesia, and as a result often stores evidence inside his own body for safekeeping and is immune to physical torture. His brother explains that because of this their abusive dad was frustrated that his physical punishments never had any effect and resorted to more extreme measures, such as making his son fight a dog in a ring while the neighbors watched, and even without the lack of pain since such a thing could and did warp his personality pretty badly. After he's captured one of the FBI agents is forced to impersonate him at a meeting with a client and is asked to prove his identity by demonstrating this, which he does by cutting his arm open and pretending not to feel anything. The client is suitably impressed since she already knows he's not really The Courier for unrelated reasons and only asked to see if he'd actually do it. At the end of the episode we also see a case of Surprisingly Realistic Outcome when it comes to this, since rather than shrugging it off after getting shot multiple times The Courier collapses from the massive damage to his body and dies.
  • Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
    • This happens to Riley Finn as an eventual side-effect of Professor Walsh's experiments, though the strain it put on his body led to a Hollywood Heart Attack.
    • The Mayor's Nigh-Invulnerability apparently included this, given his non-reaction to injuries such as getting stabbed or having his head sliced open.
  • In The Cape the Lich boasts that he can't feel pain. As one might realistically expect, this doesn't help all that much, and he gets knocked unconscious.
  • The present-day killer in the Criminal Minds episode "Painless" suffers from Pain Asymbolia after surviving being at ground zero of a bomb blast, which means he can still register the sensations of pain, but pain no longer bothers him. This phenomena is discussed within the show and is far from being a superpower: it's mentioned that people who feel no pain suffer a big increase in injuries because they miscalculate what they can do, the killer's attempt at Self-Surgery after cutting himself on some glass is a butcher job, and he drops dead after being shot twice, with the first shot alone knocking him off his feet.
  • Game of Thrones: The Unsullied, as Kraznys mo Nakloz is pleased to demonstrate in "Valar Dohaeris" by cutting off one's nipple. The books elaborate that this is brought about by a potion they consume at every meal.
  • At the start of the fifth season of Gossip Girl Chuck Bass is unable to feel anything at all, be it physical or emotional. He doesn't fully realize this until he crashes with his motorcycle and feels nothing only to later find half his abdomen is bruised. He goes as far as paying people to beat him up in the hopes that he'll feel something but nothing works. The reason why he can't feel any pain is said to be a form of PTSD after going through way too much crap in season four, culminating in letting the love of his life go so she can marry a prince and have her fairytale fantasy come true. This all lasts until the third episode where Blair tells him that she's pregnant and he's not the father. He ends the episode crying on his bed, comforted by his dog, feeling both the emotional pain of losing Blair and the physical pain of all the injuries he's sustained over the past three episodes.
  • A child had this on Grey's Anatomy. She thought it was a superpower and allowed herself to get beaten up to prove it.
  • Haven:
    • Nathan Wuornos. Initially he calls it idiopathic neuropathy, but it's a Trouble: a supernatural curse, within the context of this show, that prevents him from feeling anything. He can still feel Audrey Parker, who has Anti-Magic powers, which he once uses to identify a shapeshifting impostor. It's not discussed, but it seems to be coupled with a sort of minor healing factor. Even after getting his hands severely burned by a red-hot gun, he requires little more than a bandage and it heals with no scars. This is likely why he suffers from few of the side afflictions you would expect from someone with no pain. Some examples of this in action include:
      • In the episode dealing with a "Groundhog Day" Loop, Nathan is hit by a car. The injury is fatal and he collapses not long afterwards, but he is able to get up after the initial impact and claim to be fine.
      • Nathan shares some childhood instances where he didn't realize he was injured. One time he crashed his sled into a tree, and not realizing he was injured got up to keep going. It wasn't until another girl started screaming that he realized he had bones sticking out of him and was covered in blood. He also mentions a time Duke and other kids slapped tacks into his back (under the guise of congratulatory pats on the back) placing bets on how many they could fit in (16) and once again, he didn't notice until someone screamed at the blood.
      • However, as Troubles show up on a regular cycle, Nathan felt pain and other sensations normally in early childhood and also for an inter-Troubles period of late adolescence/youth... just not during the period of the show.
      • The show also highlights how this impacts his everyday life, too. Once he and Audrey get comfortable with each other, he asks her to check the temperature of his coffee so he doesn't burn his mouth. And in "Close to Home", a shot of his kitchen reveals it to be covered in notes reminding him his stove burners go from warm to hot, and that the knives in his knife block are sharp. He also has handle mitts on all of the pots on the stove, despite it not actually being on.
      • In the final episode, when all Troubles are neutralized, he permanently regains his ability to feel.
    • A bad guy who stole Nathan's ability is defeated because his arrogance over not being able to feel pain makes him subscribe to The Law of Diminishing Defensive Effort, and he's downed by bullets.
    • Nathan's biological father Max Hansen had this too. Max's former cellmate explained that he used it to be nearly unstoppable in prison brawls.
  • Heroes:
    • Subverted with Claire; given her penchant for mangling her body for the flimsiest reasons (*cough* garbage disposal *cough*), you'd think she doesn't feel pain. However, in her own words, she feels pain: she's just learned to endure it and get over it quickly. This is also believed to be a trait of Wolverine.
    • Played straight in the 3rd season, where Claire seems to lose the ability to feel pain after Sylar pokes around in her brain. She's quite upset by this, as she felt that the ability to feel pain made her human. It seems like it's going to result in her finding purpose in other people's pain. It's a good thing she can withstand pain, and good thing she can heal, since just bumping into someone will rotate her head 180 degrees.
  • One of House's patients had CIPA — congenital insensitivity to pain with anhidrosis. The episode makes a point of portraying the condition relatively realistically — in a scene which is as interesting as it is hilarious, she and House (who is in constant chronic pain in his right leg) get into a whine-off over which of them has the worse deal, with the patient making clear the real downsides of her condition: she has to wake up every morning and check manually to see if she scratched her corneas while sleeping, she can't run anywhere without examining her toes for swelling, she needs to set an alarm to remember that she has to use the bathroom, etc. She also ends up suffering a multitude of problems at once, not realizing anything until something goes wrong (i.e. she turns out to have a severe fever and doesn't realize it until she suddenly passes out), with her inability to feel her own symptoms making it harder for the doctors to narrow down what's wrong with her. Eventually, they do find the culprit in the form of a 25-foot tapeworm in her large intestine, which House extracts after slicing open her stomach without anesthesia (although the lack of anesthesia obviously doesn't bother her at all).
  • This plays a role in revealing Simpson's culpability in murdering Clemons in Jessica Jones (2015). Simpson burned the body and the crime scene to hide details of the murder, but during the process he received some burn injuries which he couldn't feel thanks to the combination Super Serum/Psycho Serum he was taking. Because he didn't feel the burn he didn't think to cover it up to hide his involvement, and between that, some suspicious behavior, and knowing some things he shouldn't, Jessica quickly realizes that he was responsible.
  • Deconstructed in Kamen Rider Amazons. Due to being turned from a corpse into an Amazon, Amazon Sigma felt no pain. However, this also meant he had no way of knowing how badly he was injured.
  • Used in an episode of The Middleman: The villain is the only man who can lie when faced with Pain's River, because the zombifying pike that injected venom directly into his spine left him impervious to pain.
  • The NCIS episode "Broken Bird" features an old acquaintance of Ducky's who feels no pain. This led to him becoming a Torture Technician, and he put one poor fellow through so much agony that Ducky decided to Mercy Kill him.
  • Played for laughs in NewsRadio. Jimmy tells Dave to be more thick-skinned, and demonstrates how thick his skin is by holding his hand over an open flame.
    Jimmy: Wanna know how I can do this?
    Dave: Wild guess, thick skin?
    Jimmy: Metaphysically, yes; technically, you do it fifteen, sixteen times, it kills all the nerve endings in your hand.
  • In an episode of Perception (2012), the victim was shot and kept on walking into the courtroom where she died. Dr. Peirce realized that she can't feel pain.
  • Subverted in a Scrubs episode, Elliot has broken up with Sean and, upon meeting up with him a couple weeks later, asks him how he's doing: "Well, I've been crying a lot, then I was numb for a while... and this morning I stuck a fork a half-inch into my thigh to see if I could still feel the pain." "And?" "Oh, yeah, I could."
  • In the South African series Shadow, the title character is a Vigilante Man who can't feel pain after being struck by lightning as a boy. He does experience sensation, but it all feels the same to him.
  • Star Trek:
    • Not exactly no pain, but Vulcans can suppress pain with mental discipline much the same way they suppress emotion. As Tuvok points out after being tortured, this only works to a certain extent, beyond which "we must simply endure the experience."
    • Played straight with Star Trek: The Next Generation's Data, who is an android, with a single brief exception in the movies (see entry under "Films").
    • Also played straight for Star Trek: Voyager's Doctor, who is a hologram. This actually causes some difficulties because, being a doctor, this means he's treating patients with no concept of what it feels like to be in their position, leading him to sometimes be condescending and dismissive, at least until Kes teaches him a small lesson in empathy. Averted in "Future's End", when the episode's antagonist, Henry Starling, tortures the Doctor by adding a subroutine that allows Starling to induce painful sensations at the press of a button.
      Starling: Pain. It's an interesting sensation, isn't it.
      Doctor: I — I never realized—
      Starling: How unpleasant it could be?
  • In the Supernatural episode "I Think I'm Gonna Like It Here", Castiel's loss of this angelic trait is his first clue to his humanity when he scrapes his palm after falling.
  • The Twilight Zone (1959):
    • In "The Lateness of the Hour", a young woman realizes that she is just another robot that her "parents" built. She has a Freak Out and starts slamming her hand against a wall, screaming about how she can't feel any pain.
    • In "Uncle Simon", the niece of a cantankerous inventor finds herself forced to deal with a robot of this type for the sake of an inheritance.
  • According to one villain from The Wild Wild West, those under his hypnosis are insensible to pain. He demonstrates by sticking a needle into Artemus Gordon's shoulder. Down to the bone. Artie, as it later turns out, isn't actually hypnotized; somehow he manages to remain still and expressionless so as not to give this away.
  • Mike from The Young Ones, attempting to nail plates to the table, somehow managed to drive the nails through both his thighs without noticing he was doing so. The pain didn't seem to hit him until Vyvyan cut away his chair's legs, leaving his body's weight supported only by the nails in his legs.

    Manhua 
  • Ravages of Time: This is Liaoyuan Huo's disability, but of course because he's the main character this turns him into an Implacable Man and not a limbless mess.

    Music 
  • Implied in the refrain of Supertramp's "Goodbye Stranger":
    Feel no sorrow, feel no shame,
    Come tomorrow, feel no pain

    Podcasts 
  • Cecil, the announcer of the Welcome to Night Vale radio show, offhandedly announced that he was born without pain-sensing nerves. Then again, so was 53% of the town's residents.

    Pro Wrestling 
  • Kane had this as part of his power set when he first introduced. The novel Journey into Darkness, an attempt to put together all of the bizarre crap they've thrown into his backstory, tried to set up the reason behind this as being because he has a condition called HSAN, which stands for Hereditary Sensory and Autonomous Neuropathy. Essentially, he was supposed to be completely incapable of feeling pain. However, even the book mentions that while his case is severe, it does seem to have some limits. Like everything else with Kane, this has been either forgotten or outright ignored as the years have gone by.
  • Subverted by Mankind. Early on, the commentators would say of him "I don't think he even feels pain! Or maybe he likes it!" In his Worked Shoot interview with Jim Ross, he demolished this perception in absolutely brutal fashion.
  • The Undertaker originally embodied this trope in the WWF. No matter what was thrown at him, he would just keep coming. These days, it varies.
  • "I fear no man! I feel no pain! It's time, it's time! It's Vader time!"

    Roleplay 
  • Haruo in the Bay 12 Katawa Shoujo Role Play has this as a birth defect.
  • In Dawn of a New Age: Oldport Blues, Devin was born with nerve damage that renders him immune to pain. Since people always mock or pity him when they find out about his condition, he wishes he could live a normal life without it. On the flip side, he can control his newly acidic blood with his acid manipulation power, so not feeling pain when he cuts himself to gain access to his blood is a plus.

    Tabletop Games 
  • Zombies in All Flesh Must Be Eaten who have the Senses trait "Like the Dead" don't feel pain. "Like the Living" or better gives them that quality back — even though they don't suffer real damage from heavy blows, it feels like it, and thus they lose their next action if they take significant injury from a single attack. The sourcebook Atlas of the Living Dead adds the Feel No Pain quality, which removes that drawback from the higher Senses traits, allowing for zombies with incredible perception and a complete lack of concern about injury.
  • In BattleTech, the Clan's Elemental Powered Armor pilots are hopped up on so many painkillers that they will shrug off mortal wounds and keep attacking until they physically can't move or bleed out. However, outside of their armor they are simply exceptionally strong humans and will yield when wounded.
  • Blackbirds RPG:
    • The Undead have the "Flesh of the Undead" rule, causing them to ignore injuries such as broken limbs and concussions due to their lack of ability to feel pain.
    • Those afflicted with the Plague of Beauty begin to feel less and less pain as their condition progresses, preventing them from realizing that the disease is slowly dissolving their internal organs. Unfortunately, this abruptly ceases to be the case right before the disease agonizingly kills them.
    • The Golden Messiah's influence, known as the Fervor, causes his followers to slowly transform into gold, with the practical benefit that golden body parts cannot feel pain. Just like with the Plague of Beauty, this stops working right before their agonizing death as molten gold overtakes their remaining organs and central nervous system, transforming them into an inert gold statue.
  • Chronicles of Darkness:
    • Promethean: The Created: Prometheans have this as one of their special tricks — whereas other supernaturals (and mortals) start taking wound penalties at a certain level, and have to roll to resist passing/bleeding out when their health meter fills with bashing/lethal damage, Prometheans will continue onward even if they're losing limbs, not falling down until they're dead. And even that doesn't stop them.
    • In both the Old and New World of Darkness, Werewolves and Vampires ignore wound penalties during frenzy.
    • Mage: The Ascension included the merit "Insensible to Pain", which allows the character to ignore wound penalties.
    • Princess: The Hopeful: The Practical Magic of the Court of Storms allows Storms' followers, Princess and Sworn alike, to invert wound penalties into bonuses (i.e., pain actually makes them stronger) and not have to roll to resist falling unconscious from injuries.
  • Several types of entities in Deadlands Feel No Pain, including some Player Characters that are Blessed with Suck. Like the Bruce Banner example in the Comic Books section above, these beings can usually still feel when something's wrong, but the sensation isn't described as unduly distracting. Excessive injury can still cause penalties to dice rolls, though, because it's hard to walk without your favorite patella, and it's hard to maintain balance without your spinal column.
  • Tortogs in the DragonMech setting only really feel pain when something punches through their shell. It's what makes them great smugglers — when night is virtually guaranteed to bring anything from a stinging micrometeorite hail to a full-on orbital strike, you don't need speed to get around — you need durability, and tortogs are good at durability.
  • Dungeons & Dragons:
    • Immunity to pain isn't a much sought-after ability since it has little effect in the game. Only a few spells, feats or special abilities are described as using pain to cause Status Effects. Creatures immune to critical hits (constructs, elementals, oozes, plants and undead) are also considered immune to pain.
    • A couple of drugs from the Book of Vile Darkness, Sannish and Luhix, can grant immunity to pain for a few hours. Sannish last longer, is cheap, has little side effects and isn't too addictive. Luhix (made from plants from the Abysses), on the other hand, is insanely expensive and its vicious addictive level makes it closer to a slow poison than an actual drug — without magic to counter the lasting effects, a single dose is likely to kill even a high-level character in a few days. However, Luhix is stronger as it can protect from pain-induced damage, while Sannish only protects from penalties.
    • The Paladin spell favor of the martyr grants immunity to pain attacks and non-lethal damage, as well as a long list of status ailments, and even allows to stay functional at negative hit points.
    • The Bard spell empyreal ecstasy induce a pleasurable fuguelike state that renders the subjects immune to pain penalties (but not damage) and mind-affecting spells, although it also makes it difficult to concentrate. The higher-level Cleric spell sublime revelry gives the same advantages without the negative effects.
    • The Cleric spell undead mask gives the subject many traits of The Undead, including their immunity to pain.
    • The Exemplars of Evil sourcebook offers the "Feign Death" alternate class feature for monks, rogues or rangers. It puts the subject into a catatonic state similar to death, where he or she no longer feel anything, including pain. The sole little drawback is that one can no longer move at the same time.
    • Dragon #313 introduces several "half-undead" templates, among which are the Ghedens, living beings mixed with the essence of mindless undead such as zombies and skeletons by some necromantic intervention. As a result, they have the "Dead Nerves" ability, which makes them incapable of feeling pain, and thus immune to nonlethal damage, stunning or death from massive damage.
    • Trolls in the Mystara setting feel no pain in addition to traditional D&D-trollish Healing Factor. The combination has led them to develop a fondness for games in which participants toss their own or others' severed arms, legs and heads around.
  • Some Malfeas Charms in Exalted make it so that while you do feel pain, it doesn't actually affect you. At Essence 5+, with By Agony Empowered active, you can have multiple open aggravated wounds, and yet you keep fighting at full capacity until your Incapacitated health level gets marked off with aggravated damage. With the right Overdrive charms and Driven Beyond Death, you can arrange to then stand up again, go One-Winged Angel, and wreak havoc, still without being debilitated by your wounds.
  • In GURPS this requires both the disadvantage of "Numb" and the advantage of "High Pain Threshold". Cruelly, "Numb" makes it so you can feel only pain.
  • Kingdom Death
    • One of the Disorders a Survivor can get is Immortal. As long as the Survivor is Insane, they suffer no physical damage. Instead their insanity gets slowly whittled away until they're no longer insane and start to take actual physical damage.
    • In the end-stretch of the base campaign, Survivors can unlock Metabolic Surrender, which allows them to ignore all previously sustained damage or negative attributes... at the cost of dieing at the end of the round.
  • The Juicer and Crazy character classes in Rifts both feature this trait — the former due to being in a constant state of computer-controlled drug dosage, the latter due to Nanomachines in their brain editing pain signals out.
  • The Pain Editor in Shadowrun is bioware (artificial organ implant) which is Exactly What It Says on the Tin. Cyberpunk 2020 has a similar gadget, only this time is a chip if memory serves. One of the arguments for the superiority of cyberware over the less invasive bioware is that cyberware's simsense (what allows you to feel through the artificial limb) can be turned on and off at will; someone stabbing you unexpectedly in a cybernetic limb will hurt as much as getting stabbed in a normal arm, but you can turn that off immediately and perform such feats as grabbing the smoking barrel of a gun without feeling pain or suffering damage.
  • Warhammer 40,000:
    • "Feel No Pain" is a universal special rule, which allows models to roll a dice and potentially disregard a wound even after they fail their normal armor save, provided the wound wasn't dealt by a weapon that would have invoked the Chunky Salsa Rule. In some cases it's understood that this rule reflects the unit's superhuman physiology, in others it simulates the effect of having a medic in the squad providing some battlefield healing. For some specific examples from the rules and the fluff:
    • Among the followers of Chaos, Khorne's Berserkers are so lost to their bloodlust that they're able to ignore most injuries, Plague Marines of Nurgle as so bloated with corruption that they won't react to any wound that doesn't immediately kill them, while followers of Slaanesh do notice pain, and enjoy it.
    • Among loyalist Space Marine chapters, Salamanders get a chapter trait that gives them an FNP roll against wounds caused by flame weapons, reflecting their background as a cult of blacksmiths on a highly volcanic world. The Blood Angels' Death Company, meanwhile, are not only insane with bloodlust, they're also hallucinating the events leading up to their Primarch's death.
    • Orks have such an extremely robust (and partially fungus-based) physiology that they can survive decapitation long enough for a Dok to set them up for a "body transplant." On the subject of Ork physicians, it's an open question whether a Painboy gives his mob an FNP roll because he's on-hand to provide medical care, or whether they're so afraid of said medical care that they're willing to disregard a little thing like a bolter round blowing a chunk out of them.
    • The Cult of the Wrath Unbound can enter a euphoric killing trance known as the Khaélas Maenaid. Most Drukhari Wyches are savage and Ax-Crazy in combat as a matter of course, but this states drives their killing instinct Up to Eleven and causes them to attack friend and foe alike in a frenzy of unstoppable violence, undaunted by injury or fatigue.
    • The tabletop RPG system has Feels no Pain as a minor mutation, offering a larger number of Wounds while mentioning no external signs of mutation, making it one of the more beneficial mutations.

    Theatre 
  • In Jasper in Deadland, it's implied that the citizens of Deadland can't feel pain, as Gretchen can rip her own heart out without the slightest hint of discomfort.

    Video Games 
  • Batman: Arkham Knight: Professor Pyg, the villain of the side-mission "The Perfect Crime", kidnaps victims and surgically alters them into genderless lobotomized "Dollotrons". The Dollotrons are unique from the other enemies in that they lost the ability to feel pain as a result of Pyg's surgeries, allowing them to get up and shrug off Batman's attacks, necessitating that the latter knock them out directly. In game terms, Batman has to land a Combo Special Move, beatdown, or environmental attack; just beating them up means they'll get up again.
  • In BioShock 2, one of the audio diaries indicates that the researchers at Rapture gave the Little Sisters medication to eliminate their pain response, in order to get around the issue that they rapidly healed yet still felt the pain of their injuries. Unfortunately, this resulted in the Little Sisters chewing off their own tongues in ignorance of what they were doing.
  • Blood Will Tell: One of the forty-eight body parts Hyakkimaru gets from killing one of the Majins is his pain receptor nervous system. In practice, this just makes the controller vibrate.
  • Krieg in Borderlands 2, if specced into Hellborn, has a skill called Numbed Nerves. It gives him up to 50% resistance to all damage...as long as he is on fire.
  • Hayden, the protagonist of darkSector, has congenital insensitivity to pain. This is the reason he can use the superpowers given to him by the mutagen he has been infected with during the story, as it is revealed later than normal humans go insane from the constant pain it gives them.
  • Dawn of War:
    • Orks have Mad Doks and their Fightin' Juice, which causes affected ork squads to not die while the effect lasts. Knockback still affects them, so it's possible (and very much in the spirit of orkyness) to have the dok use the juice on himself/his squad, plant a Big, Bulky Bomb in the middle of a crowded melee and take flight unscathed.
    • The Space Marines' Word of the Emperor has a similar effect but applied to squads around the Librarian who uses it. An occasional bug causes the game to forget about the "while it lasts" part, meaning the effect never ends. The God-Emperor's Angels of Death indeed...
  • Dwarf Fortress:
    • Many supernatural creatures, including vampires, werebeasts in their transformed state, night creatures, forgotten beasts, angels, demons, and Bronze Colossi are immune to the effects of pain, which makes them far more dangerous. Most mundane creatures in the game can be killed by inflicting harm, which causes them to pass out from pain, leaving them vulnerable to a Coup de Grâce. Typically, a creature that doesn't feel pain must be killed by blood loss or dismemberment. This means blunt weapons are much less useful against such creatures.
    • One forgotten post states a Forgotten Beast causes a player's military to lose their skin, their eyes, and permanently paralyze their peripheral nervous system. Thanks to the player's medical skills, the Military becomes a force of skinless, eyeless, Legendary military that, thanks to the nerve paralysis, felt no pain.
  • Clones in Dystopia have all of their nerves rerouted through a device called a Combat Control Unit which filters out about 90 to 95 percent of pain signals. They don't feel pain so much as they do the sensation of getting shot or cut.
  • America in the Fallout: New Vegas mod The Frontier is a teenage girl with congenital analgesia, which means that she doesn't feel pain. While useful in the dangerous Frontier of post-nucelar war Oregon, it got her branded as a mutant and kicked out of the Midwestern Brotherhood of Steel after an incident where her left hand was crushed and she didn't even notice.
  • Yomiel in Ghost Trick, who proves it to Cabanela at one point by slamming his fist down on a boiling hot stove and holding it there. This is due to the fact that the Temsik fragment lodged in Yomiel's body is constantly rejuvenating his body to the state it was in (i.e. perfectly healthy) the moment before he died. And thanks to the ending, it's a possibility that Sissel might now have this trait too.
  • God of War (PS4): The Stranger that Kratos fights at his home claims to be incapable of feeling anything from Kratos' attacks, coupled with having an exceptional Healing Factor that immediately regenerates his injuries during the battle, including getting hit hard enough to crash through solid rock and keep going. Atreus deduces his identity as the Norse god Baldur, son of Odin and Freya, from this. When Freya heard a prophecy that Baldur would die "a needless death", she reacted by casting a spell that removed his ability to feel. However, in addition to pain, it also prevents him being able to feel things like touch, taste, smell, and pleasure. By the time the story begins, Baldur has been living like this for at least 100 years according to himself. Similar to his mythical counterpart, getting stabbed with mistletoe (in-universe, the broken-off tip of a mistletoe arrow that he accidentally strikes when attacking Atreus) removes his invulnerability and returns his ability to feel (though it's not what ultimately kills him unlike the myth). The resulting influx of sensory ability, after having been starved of it for an entire century quickly drives Baldur into fits of psychotic glee as he sustains injury after injury in the ensuing battle with Kratos.
  • Haunting Ground has Daniella who is incapable of experiencing pain.
  • In Heroes of Might and Magic VI (Well, technically, Might And Magic Heroes VI, for unexplained reasons), the 'Cyclops' (which is the Champion-level creature of the Barbarian faction) has the special ability Insensitive To Pain, apparently due to being heavily warped by demonic energy. In gameplay terms, it means that whatever damage is inflicted on a Cyclops, won't affect it until its next turn — a potent ability, since it enables the Cyclops to always counterattack with his full strength, even if the attack should've killed him. And better yet, it can trick people into wasting more attacks on a unit that is technically already dead — he just hasn't realized it yet. Oh, and if you're clever, there's a number of spells you can use to take further advantage of it in various insidious ways... so in that universe, at least, being unable to feel pain is a definite advantage.
  • Knights of the Old Republic II: The Sith Lords has an inversion of sorts with Darth Sion. Not only is he in constant agony holding his broken body together with the Dark Side of the force, but he exploits his self-torture to more easily tap into the Dark Side and is virtually indestructible in conventional battle. In your first encounter with him, you can only retreat as any wounds you inflict only help him.
  • League of Legends:
    • The mage Swain first came to attention of the Noxian government when he limped into a medical ward with his leg broken and the bone visibly protruding. The doctor who treated him noted that he showed no distress, and had no reaction to the bone being snapped back into place.
    • The champion Sion also has an ability called Feel No Pain, which has a chance to reduce the damage taken from attacks. He even says as much as a voice line.
  • In Metal Gear Rising: Revengeance, cyborgs have pain inhibitors installed into their brains so that pain would not affect them during combat and debilitate them. Losing limbs or eyes to them is nothing more than annoyance, demonstrated when Sam chops off Raiden's left arm and cuts his left eye. They have support teams monitoring their bodies for damage instead. Later on, Raiden urges Doktor to turn off the inhibitors so that he could draw on the sensation of pain to unleash his Jack the Ripper persona.
  • Rogue Legacy has Congenital Insensitivity to Pain as a trait your heroes can have. It's one of the worst in the game, though - instead of giving you any benefits, it removes your HP gauge from the HUD. Unless you're very good at math (as the damage numbers still pop up when you're hit), you'll never know how badly injured you are until it's too late.
  • The Sandbag from the Super Smash Bros. series is a sapient punching bag who can't feel pain, as explained in his unlockable trophies in Melee, Brawl and 4, and in fact enjoys watching combatants give it their all. Naturally, the player is encouraged to beat him up for items or launch him hundreds of kilometres in Home-Run Contest. In Ultimate, he even blushes when at a high damage percentage, as a likely reference to his trophy descriptions.
  • Tales Series:
    • The infamous Coffee Mindfuck in Tales of Symphonia involves Lloyd tricking Collette into thinking that the hot coffee he'd handed her was ice-cold in order to make her admit that she'd lost her sense of touch, and by extension, her sense of pain as she's transformed into an angel. She gets better, though.
    • Tales of Arise: The protagonist, Alphen, can't feel pain due to the metal mask he (unwillingly) wears. It becomes a blessing in disguise for him: not only can he endure more punishment, it also nullifies Shionne's Curse of Thorns and allows him to wield the Blazing Sword, which is way too hot for anyone else to use. It's noted that his pain immunity doesn't mean that he's invulnerable, but luckily, Shionne can heal him with magic. When the mask eventually comes off, he starts feeling pain, but continues using the Blazing Sword anyway through sheer Heroic Resolve.
  • Wolfchild: The Sega Genesis manual specifically states that the titular Wolfchild is immune to all levels of pain.
  • Yakuza: Like a Dragon; one sidequest has Ichiban encounter a man who is such a hardcore masochist that he cannot feel any pain, and it's made him depressed as now he can't get any stimulation from his favorite hobby. The party wails on him for almost a minute and causes no damage whatsoever. It ultimately takes the other focal character of the sidequest, a timid cashier that moonlights as a Dominatrix, to finally get him out of his funk. Completing said sidequest unlocks "Mr. Masochist" as a summon who buffs the defense of the party via granting them his ability to not feel pain via grossing them out.

    Visual Novels 
  • Noiz from DRAMAtical Murder has a condition which prevents him from feeling pain. Embarrassed by their son's abnormality, Noiz's parents choose to isolate him from others as a child.
  • Kohaku from Tsukihime is a purely psychological (though apparently no less effective) version of this trope. One scene has her cutting her finger, then claiming that if she just tells herself she's just a doll, she won't feel the pain. She really does believe she's just a doll, who has to act human to fit in. And the "doll" thing was a defense mechanism created to deal with much worse things than mere cuts.

    Web Animation 
  • Subverted in HFIL: while the soul bodies the various characters have are, for all intents and purposes, indestructible, they can still feel all sorts of pain, whether it's from Goz and Mez clubbing them in the head, Freeza crushing Cell's neck with his tail, or the Ginyus trying to rip Raditz' limbs off. The latter actually learned about their Nigh-Invulnerability this way.
  • Love of the S*n: Charger Block and Crown don't feel a thing when landing after falling for 51 minutes because they're in the afterlife.
  • RWBY: The villain Hazel Rainart's semblance, Numbing Agent, has this effect. Of course, as someone else points out, it doesn't stop him from actually taking damage, just feeling it, but given that he's a 8-foot-tall mountain of muscle with a strong aura and a Bare-Fisted Monk fighting style, it tends to mean he can just barrel through anything that doesn't immediately kill him to paste his opponent. He also uses it to shove Dust crystals straight into his arm- the pain would be incapacitating for any normal person, but for Hazel it just enhances his punches.
  • Voodont: The Voodoo Doll that is the focus of the short does not feel any pain from the situations she is put through. All the pain she would have felt is transferred over to Ellie.

    Webcomics 
  • Sia from Crepuscule, due to being a mutant, has a diminished sensory system, leading to this. He can feel some degree of pain if the injury's really bad, but for most the part, nothing. It's mentioned to be part of what makes him a great swordsman, as he won't stop even when wounded, but it's also left him feeling rather bored with everything in life, as this also applies to his sense of touch in general.
  • Heavily tainted Drow in Drowtales merge with a demon and have a reduced sense of pain as a result, and in cases of extreme tainting it makes the Drow more or less unstoppable, which proved to be a huge problem with a group of tainted Drow decided to attack the main city. Naal, a girl who is so badly tainted that she shouldn't even be alive, comments that "I broke one of my fingers this morning, and I didn't feel anything." Later, an Imperial Guard gets gravely wounded on the head, but doesn't feel anything. Everyone including the guy is freaked out about it. One of the forum admins later clarified that this only applies to people who have either been tainted accidentally or with an intentionally faulty process and that "merged"/safe tainted, who go through a special ritual devised by Snadhya'rune creator of said faulty seeds have a completely normal pain response, which might seem odd until you remember the massive disadvantages that come from this trope.
  • Vlad from El Goonish Shive has a variant of this based on relative pain due to an incident when he tried to transform and it nearly killed him. He could still feel pain, but nothing else compares to the feeling of his own body trying to rip itself apart. Once he is transformed into a human woman, he gains it back.
    Vlad: (in response to a barrage of attacks) Are you done already, pretty face? The first, and only, time I tried to become human, I passed out, and nearly died. Since that day... all other pain... is numb.
  • Technically, Maytage of Flipside does feel pain, but she's trained herself to "accept" it, rather than the natural gut instinct to "deny" the pain being inflicted. To wit, she can endure slicing off her own left pinky (nearly one of her breasts) and having a mutated cannibal girl eat the rest of her left arm past the elbow with little to no flinching.
  • Forward's Zoa is a robot with no sense of pain. It primarily makes money as a sexbot, and its lack of pain awareness and easily reparable body mean it makes a fair chunk of that catering to torture fetishists or people with anger management problems who have no moral outlet for their desires with human partners. Human protagonist Lee is horrified, but Zoa reassures them it really doesn't suffer from it, and considers it far preferable to childcare, its original intended use. Artist Tailsteak likened it to shooting enemies in a video game and asked readers to consider if they were more shocked by the idea because Zoa looks like a woman rather than a man, a non-gendered humanoid, or a non-humanoid.
  • Grey from Inhuman cannot feel pain, which might be why he's covered in scars.
  • Kakon from Kuro Shouri can't feel pain anymore after being experimented on. It doesn't give him any real edge in battle, and on occasion he gets hurt without even realizing it.
  • Richard the Omnicidal Maniac warlock from Looking for Group. Examples include Annoying Arrows, annoying swords... annoying dragons... giants... Justified. He is undead, after all. Except not really.
  • Unity in Skin Horse due to being a military-issue construct zombie. At least, in theory. When Remy is sewing her arm back on, she says she doesn't have pain receptors, because "pain would just interfere with my undead rampage of killosity". Then Remy notices the arm he's sewing on has a hangnail, and her reaction is "OWIE OWIE OWIE BLOW ON IT!"
  • Slightly Damned:
    • Demons are a downplayed example as things that would be agonizing to humans (for example being stabbed in the side with a scythe) will only faze them momentarily then they'll be right back fighting. However when they go berserk, they become short-lived mindless killing machines that in addition to getting a massive boost to physical and magical power become unresponsive to pain. We see this in action during berserk Sakido's rampage through the forces of hell she doesn't even react to a fire demon's breath.
    • When Buwaro drinks a magic potion that makes him change into an even larger berserk form, one of the signs that his star pendant is keeping him somewhat sane is that the blast of lightning from a wind demon does cause him obvious pain.
  • In S.S.D.D., the "Gigglers" are created without the ability to feel pain, since they're disposable clone soldiers. One of the major characters is a "turned" clone who gained the ability to feel pain through nanomachine implants, though he seems to enjoy it a bit too much
  • String Theory (2009): Phineas is a sociopathic Serial Killer who's incapable of feeling pain due to congenital analgesia (a real medical condition), and who's Covered in Scars from attempts to feel it anyway. When he's given a drug that causes him genuine pain for the first time in his life, he finds it almost a religious experience.
  • In Undead Friend, reversed Undead feel no pain, even when losing limbs.
  • Keisuke from Undying Happiness not only has an uncanny Healing Factor, but is virtually immune to pain. This unfortunately makes him a bit reckless and frequently leads to Amusing Injuries.
  • The golem girls from Wapsi Square don't seem to be able to feel pain. For example, a welder to the finger elicits the response "That tickles." However, they are also pretty much indestructible, so there really isn't much of a reason for them to need to feel pain.

    Web Original 
  • Serina: The nops are a species of herbivorous marine bird that have been domesticated by a species of sapient, carnivorous marine bird known as the daydreamers as livestock for several million years. Eons of living a heavily regulated life as cattle has dulled not only their intelligence, but also their ability to feel pain. They'll continue to graze even if they're being Eaten Alive until they're too injured to keep functioning, although the daydreamers will still kill them before eating.

    Web Videos 
  • The characters in The Cartoon Man become immune to all pain when cartoonified. At one point, Roy demonstrates by jamming a fork into his arm.
  • In Dragon Ball Z Abridged, Piccolo suggests that it was a mistake for Dr. Gero to not design his android body to be that way. Gero (now Android 20, via Brain in a Jar stored inside the android body's head) explains why Piccolo is wrong, that feeling pain is highly useful... not that it does him any good.
    Piccolo: You know, I never understood why you would even bother installing pain receptors. Kind of comes off as an intentional design flaw, if you ask me.
    Android 20: Don't you criticize my methods like you understand the neurosystem! Pain is imperative to recognize when you are in peril, to get the human mind con— [Piccolo rips off Android 20's hand] —TEEEEEEEXT!
    Piccolo: So, contextually speaking... how f**ked are you?
  • In JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Abridged, Jotaro barely even knows what pain is.
    Kakyoin: Doesn't that hurt?
    Jotaro: Doesn't what hurt?
    Kakyoin: Aren't you in pain?!
    Jotaro: What is "pain"?

    Western Animation 
  • In the final episode of Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Carl and Frylock develop this along with Complete Immortality after using magic shampoo.
  • Rusty from Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot was built without pain receptors, allowing him to take truly ludicrous amounts of punishment with a smile. One episode involves him getting turned into a cyborg and developing a sense of pain, drastically reducing his effectiveness as a superhero.
  • Captain Planet and the Planeteers: In "Mind Pollution", Skumm starts peddling a G-Rated Drug called Bliss, succeeding in getting Linka's cousin Boris hooked. People high on Bliss don't feel it even when they injure themselves. Boris falls on the curb during the opening segment and just starts laughing rather than holding the injury or any other expected response. The addicted mob keeps coming after the team despite Wheeler setting the grass on fire, and Boris throws himself through a window with no apparent reaction. Gi even suspects he doesn't know how badly injured he is.
  • DC Animated Universe:
  • Flintheart Glomgold from DuckTales (2017) is established as too stubborn to feel pain. As a result, he's an Iron Butt Monkey suffering all sorts of Amusing Injuries.
  • Ed, Edd n Eddy:
    • Ed can give Soundwave a run for his money. He endured being crushed by a house, smashing through a brick wall, being twisted around, etc... all the while laughing his ass off.
    • Completely inverted with Eddy's brother, something as small (in this show's standards) as a door ramming into his face knocked him out-cold, complete contrast towards everyone else being Made of Iron.
  • In the Heckle and Jeckle cartoon "Log Rollers," Heckle claims he didn't feel a thing when Powerful Pierre punches him smack in the face. Then he suddenly collapses and is out cold.
  • In The Mask, villain Pretorius considered this part of the key to The Mask's powers and tried to reproduce it in himself.
  • In one episode of Moral Orel, sexually frustrated Bloberta Puppington starts using power tools as sex toys. Rather than addressing the actual problem, Dr. Potterswheel prescribes painkillers. After he increases the dosage a few times, she's seen humming to herself as her hand catches fire in the course of cooking without utensils.
  • For an entire episode of the short-lived series O'Grady, nobody feels pain for a while on account of the ever-present "Weirdness" that plagues the town. Everybody enjoys the opportunity to do some "Groundhog Day" type stunts they normally would never have gotten away with, until, of course, The Weirdness wears off and their physical senses fully return. Ouch.
  • Mort of The Penguins of Madagascar is proven in the episode "Sting Operation" to be "protected by a halo of ignorance"; he literally doesn't have enough brainpower to register pain.
  • Elmyra of Tiny Toon Adventures was often shown shrugging off her pets' attempts at self-defense through this trope. One episode established (for that episode, at least) that she could actually feel pain, it just had to be insanely severe to penetrate her general obliviousness. And even then, it could take a while.
  • Transformers: Prime:
    • Soundwave seems to be this way if his fight with Wheeljack is any indication. Part of this might be the fact that he has no face or voice to show his reaction to being hit.
    • Deliberately stated as being an advantage Nemesis Prime had over the other Autobots, being almost purely automaton meant it didn't feel tired or the strikes of its opponent while the others had to recover from being knocked around.
  • Young Justice (2010): There's an episode in Season 3 where Geo Force turns a patch of ground into lava while fighting Sensei. Sensei proceeds to calmly walk barefoot across the lava without any reaction whatsoever. When Halo asks him if the act hurts, he dismissively replies by saying "pain is an illusion."

    Real Life 
  • There are two levels to pain immunity. One level is simply not feeling pain (possibly in addition to simply not feeling anything). Another level (called pain asymbolia or pain dissociation) is to actually feel the sensation of pain, but utterly lack the knowledge and instinct that pain is anything but a different kind of feeling. In the latter case, the aversion or unpleasantness associated with pain just isn't there. In both cases, there's a variety of things that can cause it, none of them pleasant:
  • Leprosy is such a debilitating disease because it destroys the nerve receptors, causing its victims to neglect injuries; in time, the wounds become infected to the point of needing amputation. But during the Crusades, armies actually exploited this phenomenon by offering men with leprosy a final chance to serve God and country. While "leprous crusaders" could still swing a sword, they couldn't feel injuries. This reputation as an Implacable Man, even discounting the fact that just bleeding on their foes could cause an outbreak of one of the most feared diseases of the old world, made them The Dreaded in any battle where they appeared. The fictional character of Thomas Covenant exploits this concept.
  • Peripheral neuropathy (numbness in the extremities) is a common feature of type 2 diabetes. Combined with reduced circulation, small wounds on the feet frequently lead to a downhill slide which begins with small injuries going unnoticed, turning into gangrene, leading to amputations, which prevents exercise because the patient isn't really very mobile anymore, but they still eat the same as they did before, they gain weight, the condition advances, they get another injury which goes unnoticed, gangrene sets in, repeat until dead. note  In some smaller communities in the US, particularly in the South and Southwest, a diagnosis of adult-onset diabetes is essentially terminal — because so few will change their diet or watch their blood sugar levels, they will very frequently enter this downhill slide, and be dead within five years.
  • There are rare genetic conditions that keep some people from feeling pain for their whole life. As a result, they tend not to live long, since they never learn to avoid injury, and can't determine its seriousness even when they've noticed that everything's not right with their body.
    • One such condition is CIPA, Congenital Insensitivity to Pain with Anhidrosis. Besides not feeling pain, they can't feel temperature and don't sweat. Overheating is a constant problem and leading cause of death in babies. People with this condition must constantly check for injuries, monitor their body temperature, check orifices for cuts or bleeding, etc. There are only about 20-30 people in the world with this condition at any one time, and it obviously shows up much, much more frequently in fiction. A good profile of CIPA can be found here.
      • People with CIPA sort of just "fall apart" in their 30s or 40s, as they do not subconsciously shift their weight when they are sitting still or sleeping. This results in great damage to their joints and most of the patients eventually die of arthritis complications.
    • A second condition called FAAH-OUT affects a gene that encodes fatty acid amide hydrolase (FAAH). The impaired gene causes Jo Cameron to not feel pain, and an accompanying absence of anxiety. However, she also tends to heal more quickly from light injuries and can withstand surgery without anesthesia. Only by noticing other signs of impaired function did she discover that she needed hip surgery. She believes she inherited the mutation from her father (who passed away before studies revealed her own condition), and her son inherited only part of the condition, reducing his experience of pain.
  • Robert Wadlow, the tallest man in medical history (almost nine feet!), could not feel pain in his feet, so he didn't know a leg brace caused a blister, which got infected, which killed him at only 22 years old.
  • Individuals under the influence of PCP are said to be completely detached from any pain stimuli, to the point that police often find them nearly impossible to take down short of crippling them. The standard protocol for taking down a rampaging person high on PCP is to make them unable to walk by damaging or restraining their limbs so they can't be used.
  • Powerful painkillers such as morphine often work by depressing the entire central nervous system, which can result in obliviousness to pain.
    • For a powerful localized painkiller, there are sodium channel blockers such as Novocaine. As the name implies, it works by blocking signals in your nervous system, so your brain literally does not register any feeling at all.
  • Certain drugs, including PCP (see above), synthetic adrenaline, and others are often used by militia and insurgents (e.g. insurgents in Mogadishu and Fallujah) to give them increased staying power in combat; though they can still bleed out, the painkillers will dull any pain and keep their hearts pumping even after they should be clinically dead.
  • Nomads in the Sahara Desert gain very tough soles on their feet from years of walking through the sands. As a result, some can actually put their feet in a low fire and not even feel it!
    • Veteran British tea drinkers, who pick the bags out of almost-boiling water with their bare hands and then squeeze out the strongest tea with their fingertips, have similarly resistant digits.
    • Long-time chefs, cooks and bakers get this too and can reach into hot ovens or flip things over in frying pans — with their fingers...
    • This even extends to long time microbiologists, having spent years working next to a Bunsen burner flame most can carry out the work without even feeling the heat and only notice it after a few seconds of coming into contact with the flame.
    • Bunsen himself is rumoured to have had the skin on his fingers so thick and callous from years upon years of working with noxious chemicals that he could put said appendages into the (less hot portion of the) flame of his burner, without feeling discomfort. He did this during lectures.
  • Bad lacerations or burns can result in nerve damage that makes it impossible to feel pain (or anything else) in the affected limb(s). This is actually the definition of a third-degree burn, when a burn goes so deep and does so much damage to the nerve tissue that it stops hurting; this frustrates paramedics since the patient has a tendency to refuse help. Depending on the extent of the damage and follow-up medical treatment, this may be temporary or permanent. As with the other real-life examples, this can be a major risk factor as a person unable to feel pain in their arm can, for instance, place their hand on a stove and not realize that the stove is actually on at the time until they happen to look down and notice their hand is smoking.
  • Pain asymbolia, a.k.a. Pain dissociation is a rare condition that, unlike CIPA, is not a genetic condition, but is generally acquired through external means, including injury to the brain, lobotomy, cingulotomy or morphine analgesia. People with this condition can actually feel pain, however it doesn't bother them. The associated unpleasantness that comes with, say, breaking your arm, does not faze them at all. They recognize the feeling and sensation of pain, they will know that they broke their arm, unlike someone suffering from CIPA, but it simply doesn't bother them as much or they are completely immune to the suffering that comes with it.
  • Naked mole-rats have a number of unusual physical traits, among them being a lack of pain sensitivity in their skin due to lacking neurotransmitters in their cutaneous sensory fibers. They can be made to feel pain by being injected with neurotransmitters, but this obviously does not occur in their natural habitats.

 
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Alternative Title(s): Feels No Pain

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Cutting The Princess' Arm

The only way to free the Princess of her binding is to cut off her arm, and she shows no reaction to the process and can seemingly function just fine without treating the wound in any way.

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Main / MajorInjuryUnderreaction

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