Real quick nitpick: after storming the castle and returning to her masters home she doesn’t have a few days to recover, but probably a few months since the seasons change significantly between when she arrives and when she leaves.
Nice catch, that is absolutely possible. I made the assumption because Abijah Fowler and Heiji Shindo talk about their trip which is only a few days long, but you are right that the weather changes quite a bit, so that might indicate a longer passage of time than I thought.
@@PerseusGrim i also wanted to mention Mizu doesn't faint before her fight with Tigen due to the cut. that's part of it but as you explore its literally not that deep. Mizu also fell from a cliff and has a concussion since the fall knocked her out cold and its the water on her face that jolts her awake. i think Mizu is framed as this, not invincible, but wholly unstoppable force, she bleeds, she can die, but she will not stop till the 4 white men, her would be fathers are wiped from the face of the earth. i think the story does a pretty good job of demonstrating that, although i think increased mobility issues after being stabbed through the foot horizontally would be nice to show she IS injured and there are consequences for that, i think Mizu just doesn't care if she dies on her quest. Hense why she agrees to fight tigen while on the brink of death.
@@Dr_Procrastinatorthe interesting makes less sense but something else is the fact that she's probably got some naughty high pain tolerance because she's fighting a lot of people and getting injured all the time that was shortly after she does that run and then stuff she immediately gets into a fight so she's pumping through adrenaline which makes her ignore it and then it continues even further and she continues on this constant fighting Streak and then she's getting pumped up with drugs and then she's getting hit with adrenaline and then she's getting hit with both so she just absolutely pumped up with s*** that is just making her ignore everything and just perform at maximum capabilities like people who are on adrenaline can lift f****** cars so her pumped up with adrenaline and some drugs makes climbing up the side of a tower carrying tengen is 100% possible
@@PerseusGrimI see it as their actual trip only took a few days but he was probably still in the tower for a few months because he need enough time for all of his weapons to get sent in in all of their installments which would have taken several months because the number that he brought he brought like probably a couple thousand so that definitely took a few months even if a few shipment showed up already by the point that he had a fight with Mizu he was still waiting on more so the actual trip itself might have only taken a few days but the entire setup for the rest of it probably took a couple of months
Yup! And we get that montage of Heiji Shindo and Abijah Fowler fucking their way through a long, leisurely trip, so it certainly took weeks--if not months. Plus, the show begins in winter, but Akemi's wedding is in the "Spring", because it's "auspicious."
One fun example of a bad injury in a story that springs to my mind is from Assassin's Creed: Rogue, where the main character is shot in the back, falls off a cliff, and is then saved and taken to an older couple's house to be nursed back to health. We cut forward to see him some time later, and he's in the process of recovering - he's not on the verge of death, but he's still clutching his side and limping heavily, clearly in pain with every movement. So, it starts out pretty reasonable, he got hurt badly and is taking time to recover. Then some gangsters attack the people who have been caring for him, and he's suddenly fit enough to beat them unconscious - but okay, it was a desperate situation, maybe the adrenaline helped him push through the pain for a little bit, fair enough... and then he gets some new clothes and is immediately able to start doing parkour as if he wasn't limping and holding his side minutes earlier lmao
Haha, that sounds very on brand for the topic. It seems like most of the time, characters just need a little nudge to overcome their injuries and then they act as if they were never even hurt to begin with.
@@starbirds007 He didn't though, that was a psychosomatic issue, not an actual injury-related issue. It's DUMB, but it does have the appropriate context to make it work.
Arthur Morgan’s tuberculosis slowly kills him and even changes his appearance and strength throughout the entire game. This is in my opinion one of the best ways to show an injury’s impact on the character, endings, and gameplay.
Arthur’s TB is ultimately what allows Micah to one up him. Arthur is shown to be a pretty beefy work horse through the story and capable of taking on men much bigger than him while Micah gets his ass handed to him by just about everybody. When Arthur fights micah in the final scene he still whoops Micah’s ass for a good long portion but due to him being so worn down from TB he loses his strength and can’t finish the fight, allowing Micah to beat him to the brink of death.
I never thought too much about characters jumping through glass windows until a glass door shattered in my hands one day (it was tempered glass and not super dangerous, just some small cuts). Now every time I see a character diving almost headfirst through a window, I can't help but wince a little bit.
love the part in teh venture brothers where rusty jumps through a window as a stunt and then is immediately sent to the hospital for the rest of the episode
I think Mizu's (or BES's in general) deal is that she's, at least metaphorically, an Onryo, and the enemies she faces are mythological creatures of a similar caliber. Think of it as you would John Wick, for example. The point isn't shock value, or I don't think so. It's to show the fact that she's so driven that not even deathly injuries can stop her. As you yourself said it, she's a force of nature. That being said, I think this is a great video! Between this and the previous one, I'm already looking forward to what you put out next.
Good points! I definitely agree about the metaphorical side of things, and as I said in the video, I did really like the show, but sometimes I feel like it earns a bit of an eye-roll. But yeah, it's definitely a bit of a "woman too angry to die" situation. Also, I'm glad to hear that you've enjoyed both my videos so far!
first of all, i haven't watched BES, i just knew about the show now and i'm planning to watch it, so i'd just like to talk about this within the scenes that are shown by perseus grim. but correct me if i get anything wrong anyway. i think it would be more compelling if we actually do see the effects of those injuries, but despite them, she still pressed forward. If a character's arm was cutoff and knowing their chance of survival has been drastically reduced, yet they still choose to keep fighting is perseverance. but, if they lost their arm, then regained them the next episode or suddenly the bad guys are incapable of taking down a one armed guy that they could take down with both arms or the injury didn't even faze them, then it's not perseverance, that's just called plot armor. if the character doesn't even consider it as something important, then the viewer would think that way as well. the "too angry to die" premise kind of only works if we see them dying / struggling as direct result of those injuries, but if they don't struggle from them, then did those injuries really happened? the injuries could literally be swapped with anything since the outcomes wouldn't change. it seems BES didn't really focus on the characterization part, as the fight scenes shown are still tied down by realism. what i mean is that because they didn't go 100%, it kind of just became a stale mix of it; it's not as beautifully stylized like samurai jack, not as grounded and impactful as hara kiri, and not as flashy / entertaining as kill la kill.
@@enraikow6109 I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think that'd actually benefit the narrative that much. In fact, it could only slow it. It's hard to explain without spoiling it, (and I do think you should go watch the show even having seen this video). And for that last part: BES can ABSOLUTELY be as beautiful as Samurai Jack and as entertaining as Kill la Kill (Nothing can ever be as flashy as KLK tho). Haven't seen Hara Kiri tho.
I agree that some suspension of disbelief about how an injury *would* affect a character is acceptable; but when it's taken too far, I find it a distracting factor that takes away from the story.
I fully agree. It's hard to expect every writer to have knowledge equivalent of someone with a medical degree, but as long as you don't stray too far from common sense when writing injuries it should be alright.
@@qc6265 Yes, it does! And as for the voices, those threw me off too, but there are a variety of dubs to choose from, so you could always try another version.
for blue eye, I agree that she seems to not care about her injuries(maybe due to adrenaline?) , but the time skip was not just 4 days. it was stated, or atleast alluded to being months. as we can see how the snow melted away when she has recovered, when it was in the middle of winter when she came back.
About the star wars bit: Obi chose to die. Him disappearing was most probably meant to be taken as a trick of the force. Vader's shoulder is armored. When there were more sith and jedi, Vader was usually sent to kill them, so he wears armor to protect(even slightly) against light sabers. You could also make an argument that Luke wasn't properly using the saber so it didn't go through fully(i.e he pulled the saber back prematurely instead of following through with the strike.) Luke's hand was completely unprotected. No explanation needed.
Yep. Many flaws in all the star wars movies. This ain't one of them, if anything these scenes (when shown in their actual entirety) are a good example of how to explain things audiovsiaully without words. Obi-Wan has a whole narrative cue that he is about to do something (he sees the rest of his team coming to board the falcon, he knows they did what they came to do and that they'll scape now). Then the sound track quickly shifts into a force theme with obi-wan smirking then doing something odd (closing his eyes in concentration and taking a completely defenseless position), clearly signally he is about to do some force shenanigans. Then he immediately follows that by vanishing, leaving a visibly confused vader behind (it is visible from hsi body language). The scene perfectly narrates that what was happening was Obi-Wan's doing and the extraordinary enable through the force, all without saying a word of exposition about it. Vader's shoulder armor has the same sparks and smoke visual effects we see on other things light sabers can't cut well or at all in the movie, such as the walls just a few seconds earlier in that scene/clip. Anyone paying attention can recognize "oh, his shoulder sparks and smokes just like all the other things the light saber just kinda bruises the surface". And it is the same Vader who in an earlier scene in the movie stopped a few blaster shots ("laser" blades, "laser" shots) with the armor in his hand, which also did a similar sparks and smoke effect. Clear communication and consistent communication that the light based technologies don't go through everything equally, and Vader armor is one of such though to go through things, and all without one word of spoon fed exposition, you just have to watch the movie.
Man this feels cathartic to watch. I honestly can’t agree more. So often I watch or read something and it’ll establish that injuries aren’t taken seriously, but then the mc will be taken out by something they’ve shrugged off 100 times because the plot demands, or the other way around. It just feels like I can see the authors pen moving in the frame to get what it wants and whenever I bring this up people are always really dismissive of it, but dammit injuries can do so much for a story. My favourite example is from The Road, a 2006 book and 2009 movie by Cormac McCarthy. Slight spoilers ahead: the road is about a father and son travelling a post apocalyptic USA (and not the fun kind) as the father becomes more and more bitter and paranoid as the story goes on. Towards the end of the movie, a gang try and kill the pair and the father gets hit in the shin with an arrow. Most series would have the mc pull it out and limp for a bit and move on like he’s wolverine, but instead the road uses the wound to increase the desperation and bitterness felt from that point on. The father CANT heal the wound because they have no supplies, and the injury brings them both to the brink and the story instead of just saying “ look how cool the protagonist is they can shrug off arrows” or something equally shallow it uses it to brilliant effect.
Glad to give some catharsis to a like-minded soul! I haven't read the book or seen the movie that you mention, but it sounds like that is a pretty good example of how to make an injury impactful. Besides, post-apocalyptic settings feel like the perfect fit for a small wound to become a big deal, specifically because of the scarcity of medical supplies.
People that shrug off those kinds of complaints watch shows to not think about anything. Brain dead entertainment for them. If you're going to have unrealistic things, at least keep it consistent enough so that it makes sense! People that aren't bothered by illogic like characters being unhindered by being chopped in half that suddenly need a vacation from a split lip and bruise to the abdomen don't use their brains in the first place. Entertainment is just a way for them to waste time not thinking about stuff, when even sleeping would be more productive for them. I'd be infuriated by seeing a main character take on an army and then suddenly beat up by some lone punk and then their sidekick who's not even close to being as competent suddenly becomes immortal to avenge their friend. Pointless injuries that don't impact my characters as much as they should is a glaring issue that I've noticed myself, and even when starting writing I'd have these characters recovering for at least a month from some stuff. But my whole point has always been to see characters *_push through_* their limitations, not just have none. My only issue is that I would give my characters more injuries than they could reasonably handle, even for the logic and magic my stories have.
@astraamarante6233 because it never really affects the writing process and I'd say pointless injuries most of the time enhances a story. Look at Arthur Morgan, a man literally at the brink of death from TB and pushed to his limits. Realistically, he shouldn't be even able hold a gun let alone fight a crazed gunman like Miach in a fight. Yet, he still does because at the end of the day realism is not as important as you really think. Most characters, even in grounded universes, still perform feats that would be considered superhuman. The truth is most people don't really care unless if the injury is blatant enough to everyone to notice. The whole point of entertainment is to really just well entertain, dead brained or not. After a hard day at work, people want to come home and relax for the most part. This doesn't excuse BS damage or plot armor, but it's a perspective you kinda have to go with when writing or watching anything. Most of the time, your writer isn't going to be a medical and relies on mainly general knowledge. It also depends on what you're watching as well. If you're watching an hyper fast action movie, I wouldn't really be surprised characters survive impossible injuries since that's the whole click with those types of entertainment.
Spoilers for Malazan Book of the Fallen! I love how one of the characters gets hurt and his wound doesn't heal completely. The medic, who has access to magical healing then repeatedly urges the guy to have the wound fixed, but he constantly declines, because there are others who need healing and he doesn't have time to be out of the action. Two books later, the already strained bone snaps and he dies in a fight making it a very powerful moment.
Haven't gotten around to reading Malazan yet, but that sounds like some good storytelling. Sacrificing your own access to magical healing does make a lot of sense if it is a limited resource and others are in more urgent need of it.
This must be something that’s been bugging me subconsciously too. The main cast in my comic has two characters with enhanced healing factors, two doctors, and the rest at least know basic first aid. I’ve been very explicit with how characters’ injuries effect their fighting ability, and they take sterilizing and securing injuries asap seriously. I think working in a field where I use *extremely* sharp knives, chisels, and other assorted blades every day has made me very aware of how little it takes to put someone out of commission (I once chopped the end of my finger with a chisel and couldn’t use that entire hand properly for months while it healed :D). Anyway, wonderful video! I’ll make sure to stick around for whatever else you analyze, as you’ve been bringing up some very fascinating points that I hadn’t consciously considered before!
It's surprising how little it takes to knock people out of commission, even with small injuries. Even without a blade or other tool, just using enough physical exertion can make you sore for days. Let alone actual injuries, those can easily take months to return to normal even if small.
I'm glad I could help drag those thoughts from your subconsciousness so they could be fully articulated, and thank you for the kind words! I hope you didn't lose too much of your finger in that accident and I hope you've stayed more careful around those sharp blades since then, but yeah, it doesn't take much at all for an injury to prevent you from going about your day-to-day like usual. When I started bouldering, I noticed how losing just a tiny amount of skin on a finger would completely distract me and prevent me from grabbing the holds like I was supposed to, so even just a small scrape can be painful or annoying enough to inhibit normal actions.
@@PerseusGrim Oh, yes, I’m much more careful now. Work gloves are a beautiful thing that shouldn’t be underestimated haha. I’ll continue giving you kind words as you bring up fascinating points in the future, and I wish you luck in the getting the algorithm gods back on your side. I hope these comments boost engagement so other people can have their own “aha!”, moments.
Don't you _love_ it when characters cut their palms diagonally with a knife every time a ritual demands some blood? After all, it's just a 5cm/2in gash in the middle of the hand. Pfft. As if _that_ would ever interfere with day to day activities or fighting, right? 🙄
My main character has an entire arm fused with metal, so he pretty much not only has an entire arm out of commission 99% of the time(he can use the magic system to actually use it again under some curcumstances) but it has very real weight to it. He uses it as both a blessing and a curse since he uses it as a counterbalance, but since he can't move it much so it's also a glaring weakness and affects everything in his day to day life
I think a great example of an injury done right is Hiccup’s leg in How To Train Your Dragon. He loses it in the first movie, struggles with his new and limiting prosthetic, and in the later movies he upgrades and masters his prosthetic leg.
The use of DOOM's music is great to emphasise the video game feeling of it all. Once you are past a checkpoint (a scene ends), your short-term mistakes don't matter, almost as if creators count on our attention spans being a minute long. Hell, even "get stabbed to use your opponent's weapon as leverage" seems to become more of a cliche by the day (from John Wick to Dune to Road House). Great job.
I'm happy to find any excuse to include some gems from the DOOM ost, so when it came time to add music, it felt like the perfect fit. As you said, that episode feels almost like a video game. And the point you make about writers relying on shorter attention spans reminds me of the claim made by Tomasz Bagiński that the logic of the writing in a show doesn't matter anymore because the audience has been damaged by things like RUclips and Tiktok. Can't say I agree with his take, because it seems more like an excuse for lazy writing, but I guess a lot of people don't seem to mind so maybe he has a point.
what also massively bothered me is that all the "important" characters are basically walking tanks in what sort of injuries they get, but the enemies that wear thick armor get split in half like butter. why even bother with it at all then if it seems to be doing nothing. like what is that bs. she throws her sword and penetrates multiple mm of steel plating with it. like WHAT?
Something, something, magical meteorite sword. But seriously, I could probably make an additional video just about the Hollywood trend of turning plate armor into paper, because writers seem to think armor doesn't do jack. I guess the only armor that really matters in media is plot armor, and random grunts don't get any of that.
@@PerseusGrim - Plate armor is paper but steroids give you bullet resistant muscles! Also, roided out colossi don't feel pain and don't seem to care about getting stabbed or shot¹, which is what allows the protag to kill them, otherwise, they'd all be Jack Reacher, and you _do not_ want to fight Jack Reacher! ( ... when he's Alan Ritchson.) ¹Apart from the usual suspects, Kevin Nash in _Punisher (2004)_ comes to mind.
Oh the answer is simple because Is the bad guys never get a hit on the good guys you would instant be going “ these bad guys are incompetent why even bother with the bad guys” when goons are important for two factors 1. Tissue that an evil group or empire isn’t literally just “ The name bad guys” and looks and seems like it could be an operation 2. To allow the writers to show off characters being cool without destroying credibility of the main bad guys or the main good guys by having them face each other too often. it would be way lamer if the bad guy lost a bunch of times to show off how cool the good guys are instead of nameless goons
Honestly the best depiction of injury / disease was in rdr2 When arthur get diagnosed eith tuberculosis showing how he knew his death was close and he couldnt be there to protect the gang or dutch and wanted to die eith good terms with everyone in a dry place. Setting up real good ending and the switch to john and his family with the last mission
Definitely. While watching this vid I kept thinking about that one mission where Arthur is caught by Odriscoll and shot point-blank in the shoulder with a shotgun. He had to cauterize the wound, stumble his way out with barely any strength left and escape barely conscious by horse and then had to recover for several months before he was healthy again
Injuries can be an effective tool for worldbuilding, especially if characters are not human. In Blame! most of the characters are either cyborgs or androids. And when any of them suffer non-fatal injuries (a severed limb is a fairly common occurrence) , details are revealed to us about how the characters' bodies work and whether they have access to futuristic regeneration and repair capabilities, while interactions with equipment and machinery that allows augmentation or healing add depth and thoughtfulness to the world.
8:49 Mizu and Taigen didn’t actually recover in a few days this was actually a time skip where over a few months have passed however I don’t think the time skip was shown clearly enough and they still probably wouldn’t have been fully recovered after the time skip
You want a great example of how to do injuries properly? The Dark Tower Series. In book 1 we meet Roland, an absolutely crazy capable gunslinger and our protagonist. He's shown to be deft with his revolvers and uses them impeccably well to survive several violent encounters throughout the story, as well as using his wits, knowledge, and just his cold and cynical iron will to overcome several obstacles in his path. Then in Book 2 he very nearly dies in an almost buffoonish way after encountering some wild animals while he's just waking up and snip snip, loses most of the fingers on his dominant hand. Oops. Not only does he spend the remainder of this book having to deal with the immediate injurious effects - the wound is infected and potentially poisoned and he has to go to some rather great lengths to simply not die - it completely changes the nature of him as a character. Because his martial art was tied directly to the deftness of his hands, his ability to aim a revolver precisely and quickly reload the gun faster than any could believe (to the point that they called it his "reloading trick") and losing most of the fingers on his dominant hand absolutely ruins him in this regard. But over the course of the same story he also gains several allies in his quest and over book 2 and continuing throughout the rest of the story, he begins to train them. They become his students in everything he knows. His injury changes him from the sole action protagonist into more of a mentor of a group of action protagonists instead. And he's not exactly a slouch in a gunfight either since he does still have his other hand, and after a few years of training, becomes proficient enough with using his non-dominant hand in a gunfight even though he knows he'll never be at his peak again. It's honestly a great example of an injury A) happening a lot like they often do in real life - almost incidentally or accidentally and having a profound impact, and B) changing the whole direction of a character's role in a story in a way that C) "rebalances" a potentially overpowered character that makes other characters more important as the spotlight moves onto them.
I think "pointless" injuries are a great tool for setting a tone and establishing the characters place in the world. SOMEWHAT SPOILERS FOR "BERSERSK" ANIME & MANGA WAS For example we can take Guts vs 100 soldiers scene from Berserk: he is a freaking badass and comes on top and his injuries from that fight don't even add much to the story. But this shows that no matter what ungodly powerful warrior you are, you are still vulnerable. And further in the story when he faces a real threat it payoffs
It can absolutely work if it's written well! I'm not all that familiar with Berserk, but I came across the scene you mentioned while I was doing research for my video. I guess it's almost necessary to let a character get at least a little hurt if they're fighting off a small army all on their lonesome.
I’ll be honest I think berserk is a bad example here, Berserk is very much like blue eye samurai here in that it feels like it’s a split 50/50 chance if an irl debilitating injury is gonna be that or if it’s just gonna be shrugged off
It helps a lot that in the 100 men fight you can see his injuries steadily slowing him down - but we also get to see how his ferocity and the sheer amount of death he's causing is shaking the morale of the group. We get the satisfaction of seeing him GRIT through the injuries and come out on top thanks to his willpower, while also feeling like the injuries are consequential (in the short term, of course).
@@ASmartNameForMe bro got stitched up and had to not be in the front lines for a bit after that 100 man fight. Also we see him debilitate in health after consecutive fights on the later arcs, (the Fairy dust probably helped on some of the healing to fighting condition, but Guts mostly fights on a deficit)
Berserk is the biggest culprit using pointless sadism to tell a story. Look at what the author repeatedly done to ALL the female characters in the story. Rape, rape, rape. Since berserk became successful inspiring most dark fantasy genre, most people would NOT stop using rape as a pointless sadistic traumas to create their female characters. It almost feels like a fetishized idea of overcoming your traumas, which is something a lot of dark fantasy suffer from. Romanticizing toughest by throwing their characters in some of the worst, and most horrid events. Tokyo Ghoul is another series that does that crap. Look at its ending.
One time where an injury felt like it impacted a story was Lee’s bite in the walking dead video game. You even choose if you cut his arm off which effects the story and gameplay a bit, which I find very cool.
I love how injury is treated in The Revenant. The protagonist gets as close to death as possible and struggles through a healing process that he will never fully recover from
This is one of my least favorite battle shonen tropes. Aside from providing the characters some iconic scars, you can be relatively sure that any harm they take (and they do take a lot of punishment in battle shonens) will be repaired in the next chapter. Just recently, the protagonist of one of Shonen Jump's biggest-running series had both of his arms severed before regaining them in less that three panels. Kimetsu no Yaiba really surprised me since it was one of the few times when the main cast was injured and it was revealed that they would genuinely be handicapped for the rest of their life.
I sure hope they have a good explanation for how the guy could regrow his arms, because that sounds very extreme, even considering the genre. Either way, it's always a pleasant surprise when writers take injuries seriously and aren't afraid to let them have some real long-term impact on the story and the characters.
@@PerseusGrim I mean considering how much superhuman people in shoenen anime, and how much magic is thrown around, saying people can heal much easier than RL makes perfect sense. Kind of how modern medicine greatly reduced the chance of dying from injures.
Who did if it was itadori from jjk it makes sense since he has reverse cursed technique and blood manipulation. If it was denji from chainsaw man then like yeah denji has gone trough worse and healed it due to his hybrid biology. I genuinly cant think of shonen character rn that doesnt have an insane healing factor. Or a world with very good healing capabilities
@@herdoman5169 There's also Undead Unlock, with Andy negating death. Honestly one of my favorite examples of doing the trope of super fast healing factor.
I mean, I don't think kimetsu no yaiba is the best example about this, or at least I don't think it's always consistent about injuries. I still remember that tanjiro vs gyutaro fight and how the show describes how messed up and destroyed his entire body is and he can still move and defeat the enemy. And although you can see the suffering and they dedicate months of rest to heal, once they are healed they can go without a problem for another life or death fight.
Amazing video. I love the conclusion where you admit the things that work within Blue Eyed Samurai, and your humor throughout is great. The calculations you did on the blade depth and injuries was really cool. The clip of the dramatic football/soccer injury you put in at 13:38 took me so aback I laughed aloud. Really well done and great analysis. I'm glad this sort of "injury suspension of disbelief" is being pointed out, and it's allowing me to look back at my own stories and see how they work.
It's not as strong of a professional writing comparison but I have something very interesting to share on the topic of injuries. I run a tabletop roleplay campaign with some of my friends and I use a mostly homemade system for all the rules and such, set in a low-fantasy dark age. One thing that I decided for a long-term, character driven campaign was that death could be a little boring, so if anyone is defeated in a battle with an enemy they don't lose all their health and die then need to make a new character. Instead they always have a chance of death based on context but they're more likely to survive with a permanent injury. And must carry on that character with the burden of their injuries, also including mental damage as well (too many spells gone awry make you coo-coo). One of my players, the charismatic captain of the company of mercenaries everyone is a part of began her career leading from the front of the formation, gung-ho and ready to take on any challenge. Until she received a nasty spear wound that permanently collapsed one of her lungs. Leaving her short of breath and weak nearly all the time. What I so enjoy about that turn of events though is how organically we rolled with the punches and told a story with it, since her injury the captain is basically dependant on riding her horse when marching, and when it is time to fight she found new ways to be of use, she studied tactics, organised sergeants, leaned on her charisma instead of her sword to lead smart, not hard. And the company turned out all the better for it. I also observe an odd phenomena: Where we have a bunch of NPC's in the company that I always make time to develop and characterise, which means it's almost harder to have to tell them they're too injured to be part of the team, give them a severance package and drop them off in the nearest town than it is to just watch them die on the spot to some beast in a shower of glorious viscera. This system has also really brought into the spotlight another player who chose to be the company's physician, any time you get saved from death or permanent injury you have the doctor to thank. And because the system in my game is more involved than "I cast +5 HP", usually involving intense surgery and preparation. People have a particular camaraderie, appreciation and protectiveness over him. He's respected like a professional, instead of memed as a babysitter like clerics in DnD. I also have another player who got really lucky on a dice roll and got away from a wound with just a facial scar that people find dashing, +1 charisma. So even in a systemically-driven, emergent video game sense, having fail states that don't just set you back to a checkpoint can be very engaging.
@@royrieder2113 Hey, I'm glad someone actually likes the nonsense I come up with, I'd be happy to share. If you don't mind a fair bit of reading. We all have to play the game digitally, we use a site called roll20 and I use sheets from a system called "FATE" by Evil Hat. I wouldn't recommend you do the same though, FATE has been busted on roll20 for a time and I've just had to make do. That said, these rules can be adapted or be made to apply to any system of your choice I'm certain, so I'll explain it all more generally. Every character has an amount of points they can accrue as a result of failures, these points go into 'wounds', 'derangement', 'suspicion' and 'scandal', these are all fundamentally your health, but made to track other things such as mental trauma, criminal records, fame and infamy respectively. Different races in my game each have different max amounts, the towering "Krokozza" for example have a higher threshold for wounds but a lower one for derangement. Now whenever you reach the maximum amount for any of these you receive a 'consequence', for wounds it's a permanent injury, for derangement it can be any amount of persistent nightmares and so on. But of course to stay on top of these you have to prepare: For the game I'm running I drew up a big map of the setting and let my players loose on it, so it's a sandbox that I mostly ad-lib our adventures on. You have time in each day to do anything you want, I use just three units, morning, afternoon and evening, there is night as well of course but you got to sleep sometime. For the doctor, he mostly spends his time making medicine. However, this was never meant to be a hardcore survival or anything like that, I don't track ammunition for example because I've filtered what I consider to be chores out of the things that take a time slot, instead I focus on meaningful decisions. For injuries, you can receive any of: Bruising, bleeding, broken bones and or infection. The doctor needs to treat each with a specific cure but only has enough time to prepare for each. See what I'm getting at? So it is essentially a game where the players have lots of downtime to make medicine, improve their skills, train the company, go shopping or anything else. But encounters are quick, nasty and designed to test their preparedness. It is a low-fantasy setting though, and things are sort of made through a historical and grounded lens. A knight in full plate receives very few cuts and less bone breakage, but can still get super bruised up, so with a bit of common sense the doc can have an idea of what to prioritise. But when a forest hermit sics a horse-sized, acid spitting insect on the party there is less one can do to prepare for the supernatural, which is just how I like it, keeps magic 'magical'. I hope this was a good enough rundown, it isn't a fully realised system, but more of a loose set of house rules I put in to try and shake up the cliché's and expectations of your average DnD game.
@@royrieder2113 Hey, I posted a reply earlier but it seems it didn't go through. Did it? Maybe it's an invisible character limit so I'll try again: Everyone has a threshold of points in certain things. Wounds, derangement, suspicion and scandal. It's basically your health system but it can also track mental health, criminal record, fame and infamy. In order to counter these points you need to prepare. For wounds the doctor needs to make medicine appropriate to the type of injury that I just decide based on context, you need a specific cure to cuts, bruises, bone breakage and infection chance. You only have three time slots to brew up a certain amount of each. I generally work with small numbers because I prefer to emphasise meaningful decisions rather than make a full 24-hour itinerary to track things I would consider chores. Making ammunition I would consider a chore, making a decision to make one cure over another that saves someone in the next fight is a meaningful decision. When you can't stay on top of you wounds etc. And you cross the threshold, you receive a consequence, a permanent injury or nightmares, a bounty, merchants trust you less. So yeah, that's the most brief way I can describe the whole thing, you can apply these little rules to any system I should think, change the numbers as you so choose and all.
The moment you find a video essay on something you obsess over, my favorites are berserk and vagabond, injuries feel like they matter, there's these breathers inbetween fights where we see our cast recovering and these are great moments that allow you to just spend time with the characters and breath with them, and when the action picks up, you see these characters be pushed sooo far, up against unbelievable odds, now berserk is still very extreme, there's alot of shit he shouldn't survive if he was in real life, but the world clearly sets that humans in this world aren't like us, i mean just look at the huge knights strapped with several tons of steel, swinging around even more, the peaks for human strength and speed are so much higher, so it feels consistent for guts to be how he is, and his tactics, once again while extreme, feel reasonable, he has to be resourceful, ruthless, smart, lucky, everything, the choreography keeps you believing he's just a man in this world, in our world yeah, he'd be super human, but in his world, he's human, right down to the bone Regardless the injuries are treated seriously in these series, it makes you care for the characters, they aren't shonens, your character isn't safe, they suffer losses, they lose parts of themselves, make sacrifices, the authors have this ability to make the the characters bodies feel physical, not something that keeps going cuz the plot says so, something ive gone to great extent to wanna replicate in my works
The Star Wars example kind of bugged me. Maybe I misunderstanding what you are saying, but their is a fairly clear logic that comes across, Ben disappeared when stabbed, because he is an enlightened space wizard who understands things better than Vader and Luke, this seemed to be clearly intended to be weird thing which was not normal. Second Lightsaber blows stuck different things each time, in Vader case he got armor, and we see him barehanded block a blaster bolt, no shock a lightsaber merely hurt him. In Luke case getting a hand cut off is different than being cut in half.
That's not compelling enough tho. Injuries are supposed to atleast slow you down and if written well are supposed to add up to something. Blue eye samurai, as good of a show it is, is poorly written in a lot of places.
Yeah I think pretty much everyone got that but the fact that she just walks off a FATAL wound in ep 5 just takes you out of the story. I found the entire series pretty damn disappointing
The movie with the most brutal injuries that have the least impact that I have ever seen was Scream 6. The movie starts out taking itself quite seriously and the consequences of injuries were for the most part fine and didn't break the immersion, but the final act was so bloody and brutal, yet it never had any consequences for the characters, that it basically switched genre from whodunnit-slasher to supernatural comedy. I don't think I've ever before seen an unintentional grnre swap. To this day I still can't tell if it's by accident or design.
As interesting as the first video. As an indie writer, both of your videos helped me put words on some things I felt instinctively but couldn't explain clearly while writing my book. Great video!
i wonder how your take would be on Raiden from MGSRR when the katana wound he suffers actually makes him stronger story and gameplay wise. He actually gets mortal injuries at the beginning and ending and they mean different things, there is also a funny injury gag about his chin.
Not many channels are able to keep my adhd self fascinated/focused for more than 10-12 minutes in a video, this one has from the get-go had me watch both published videos back to back. Fantastic work & analysis! This channel is going to go far. I would not be surprised at all to see it grow to 100k+ viewers within a few months with this kind of work.
Wonderful essay! I appreciated your balance of memes with citations, and visual demonstrations with jokes. And thanks for qualifying that at the end of the day, TLOU is trying to be intensely grounded, while BES uses the viscerality of its action for more short-term gratification. (The creators cited action movies as their main inspiration, so it's likely they're sticking to those 'rules' and use them to further Mizu's intensity, rather than provide hurdles on their own, since the injuries themselves are less psychologically-charged than what causes Mizu to brush them off.)
Thank you! I've been a bit worried that the people who were interested in my first video would only be want stuff related specifically to the fantasy genre or the medieval era, so hearing that someone finds both topics interesting is reassuring! After all, I don't have a huge sample size of (my own) videos to analyze, so I'm forced to test the waters to see what people are really interested in.
At least for me, both your medival stasis video and this one cover topics where, when I am reading the title, I think "yeah, why is that the case?". To me, both videos are about somewhat obscure questions/aspects of storytelling, that really get my brain going, and I think that's why they chatch me. Good luck on the testing and may the youtube-algorithm be with you!
I'm so glad someone is talking about this. I'm sure plenty of people can enjoy this show despite it's flaws but for me personally, I could not care less about any fight scene, since near-mortal injuries are irrelevant. They made it clear there's no stakes, Mizu's opponents may aswell be trying to hit her with a pool noodle.
The explosions though. My biggest injury pet peeve: When an explosion happens, the hero is lifted off their feet and thrown across the room, and then gets up and walks away. If you're thrown off your feet by the concussive force of an explosion, your bones are broken and your organs are pulped. That's fatal every time.
11:12 Little correction : Vader didn't killed Obi-Wan, per'se. Obi-Wan turned into Force Spirit, moment before being hit. It was like quitting a multiplayer game. + Vader is mostly machine, so its rather obvious conclusion that he got the Grievous' idea, and made himself body made out of plasma resistant materials.
Vader didn't participate whatsoever in the initial design of his suit, in fact his suit was designed by palpatine to be as uncomfortable and unhelpful as possible, Vader then started tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking to try and make it somewhat useful. Having said that we do know that most of it is made out of armor weave, which is supposed to have some chance in hell of surviving a blaster bolt, and at least one of his gloves is completely immune to blasters and lightsabers
I have to quickly say that Joel moving around and actually being able to fight people after *just* waking up from a *severe* stab wound was not just incredibly unrealistic, but downright superhuman. I think it was Doctor Mike that analyzed that scene.
I think a sister issue is the "disabled person gets super powers that completely negates their disability" trope. Disabled people (like myself) crave representation, but when we get it the character is either the villain or their not actually disabled because of blank power. Or if the disability is subtle and not specifically said, no one thinks of them as disabled
Even smaller disabilities like someone who wears an eye patch falls into this. They somehow retain perfect depth perception and their field of vision being completely fine. One example of this trope being Baiken from Guilty Gear, she's a samurai that has one arm and one eye, and even tho design wise it's absolute peak, the fact that her very visible disabilities have zero purpose other than to look badass is something I never liked all too much.
That was one reason why I didn't enjoy Shazam as much as I would have otherwise. Of course, it's a silly movie and I wouldn't say it's a cinematic masterpiece anyways, but I don't think they handled Freddy Freeman in a way that felt respectful, especially considering the comic book source of his disability.
@gibleyman I mean, Guilty Gear is a fighting game, I'm not really sure how they'd be able to represent either disability without fundamentally breaking the game. It would be really cool though!
This goes the same for mental stuff as well. Like, I have autism and ADHD and I'm absolutely sick of it being either turned into "incompetent character" or "super genius who doesn't understand social cues and is likely a robot/alien".
I could not enjoy the last John Wick movie at all as I was unable to disable my brain and accept all the body shattering injuries he sustained without being K.O'd
Oof, I've only seen the first three so far, but this doesn't bode well for whenever I get around to watching the fourth one. Suspension of disbelief is a powerful thing, but even so it has its limits.
John Wick is a series I desperately wish had never had a sequel. The first film is so interesting and full of mystery that the following three films simply destroy. I’m a firm believer that, regardless of the excellent cinematography and locations, ONLY the first film should be acknowledged.
I'm surprised you didn't mention Mizu and Taigen surviving (apparently without long-term consequence) their jump from the top floor of the castle. That was 100+ feet onto sea ice nearly a foot thick. That's death, not a KO.
Injuries that don't affect the characters is one of my biggest pet peeves. It breaks immersion and I keep trying to explain to myself how the character is overcoming the injury. I just zone out. Blue Eyed Samurai is an awesome show but not recognizing the injuries bothers me.
This video has reminded me of the Manga Vagabond where I think injuries are done rather well, for instance a character is cut in the calf during a fight and they're left nearly unable to walk and stuck using a walking stick for years after the fight
I know I should really finish the video before commenting but man, the way you're describing the issue episode 6 of Blue Eye Samurai ironically makes me remember why I love the show and that episode in particular so much. I honestly think the injuries and how they get brushed off makes the whole episode all the more amazing and powerful. It's impossible to ignore the gravity of the wounds in the episode, so I think the creators were very aware of what they were doing. It was so highly unrealistic, but in my opinion in the best possible way. Made the episode something I've rarely if ever seen before from a story and the vengeful determination was captured so well due to how much it ignored reality
You have a good eye for video topics. I clicked on this video on the home page without recognizing it was you. Despite being subscribed to you after your last video. Will look forward to you next work
That's great to hear! It's hard to know what kind of topics people are interested in when you're just starting out, so getting some positive feedback on that is a bit of a relief.
Dresden files is a great example of injuries being dealt with well. Our protagonist receives a very severe burn to one of his hands and this burn is a lasting injury that he actually has to go to physical therapy for and takes several books to fully heal and only heals with the aid of some magics as well.
What bugs me is when the writers acknowledge injury but never let the character internalize it or have it effect their choices. The injury doesn't cause them to be super careful, it doesn't make them delirious, it doesn't have them retreat, and it doesn't affect how they treat their teammates in their state of heightened adrenaline and cortisol. When I got myself flung off a horse, I landed on my chest and my legs went over my head. It didn't hurt, it was only like a 5 foot drop and my tits broke my fall yet, it changed the choices i made when I got back on. The headache from not landing right, the anxiety that it would happen again, the stiffness in my back, etc, etc, all made me a worse rider and increased the chances of me getting hurt again. All this and the accident didn't even hurt.
I did think that when watching blue eyed samurai recently... everytime I looked over to my 2nd screen during fight scenes, she got injured, but nothing ever lasted. Which probably explains why I just stopped caring at some point and just fully zoned out of all of the action.
As a writer I really needed a video like this, one of the main turning points for a character of mine is an injury and that's always how it's been, no way around it, but it's been hard to make it fit with everything else that's developed around it
Injuries in stories always have been a pet peeve of mine. I can eye-roll in almost every show, movie, or book with how improperly handled they often are. It often strikes me that people think that adrenaline makes you invulnerable, when it only pushes the pain back. If you get a deep cut on your arm, good luck moving it when the muscle is barely sticking together. Concussions are also absolutely debilitating. You get a ateong concussion, and your brain just isn't brainig anymore, sorry. I write as a hobby, and my favorite thing in action scenes is making it poignant how much injuries impact abilities. A charcter may have quick ways to heal now, but past injuries bother them, and new ones are critical until the helaing can get done. You don't think cuts are that bad until your fingers ache in cold weather or before rainfall. There is appropriate suspension of disbelief for those things, of course, yet I can't help but be exasperated when the writers treat broken bones like a fashion choice for a character, instead of a possible instant defeat. Fights are quick and brutal, and if they aren't, you can see how the fighters get worn down, so please show it.
Yeah I don't doubt that it was intentional. It definitely messes with the suspension of disbelief, especially if you're not used to that kind of injuries being thrown around so frivolously, but I found that it was best to just roll my eyes and enjoy the rest of the show anyway.
11:12 Well, there are in-universe reasons for each of these. Obi-Wan Kenobi gave himself up to the force, in order to become a force ghost. (Yoda does the same thing in Return of the Jedi). Vader has a lightsaber-resistant suit. He can survive a glancing blow from one. On the other hand, Luke's wrist was just exposed skin. A lightsaber has no trouble cutting through flesh.
I'm reminded of an episode in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where a character who got shot and as a result has lost his leg comes back from the hospital where he got a new leg (it's sci-fi an all). The whole episode is about him having to deal with the experience of having lost his leg. At one point he watches a Western on a old-school TV (something they usually don't do in that future) and is very confused when he sees the protagonist getting shot but continuing like nothing has happened. It was a good scene.
I think the Raid series is a great example of what you're getting at here where damage and stamina are always considered. The way the homeless assassin is dealt with is probably the best example of it. A coup is happening within a crime family, and the assassin is one of the gangs biggest threats, so instead of attacking him head on, they lure him into a trap. In that trap he fights around 15 henchmen, and even though he beats them all, he's heavily wounded and thoroughly exhausted.. and *then* he has to face the main villians, who easily dispatch him. It was such a smart way to remove a character they've established with this kind of "invincible" reputation without it feeling cheap. It's like, "yeah, he's a badass that could 1v1 or 1v2 or even 1v3 anyone in this movie... but he cant 1v20 then 1v3 them."
I really like how Breaking Bad did it. Hank's injuries during his fight against the Salamanca twins take a whole season to fully heal and we see him going through the treatment for that, as well as his depression for being put in his most vulnerable state yet
The Star Wars example did have logic to it. Kenobi clearly disappeared due to a force thing. Like how he said "cut me down and I'll be more powerful than you can imagine", and he later showed up as a ghost, not unable to be kept away from Luke and able to keep mentoring him. Darth Vader basically took blaster bolts to the hand, and assuming Han wasn't just aiming at his hand, redirecting the bolts. It isn't too hard to think this super powerful sith lord who's already shown impossible feats with energy weapons could deal with that. Over all agree with your point in the video though. Just, so long as the characters being superhuman isn't a rule in the setting, and they stick to that rule (even selectively as long as it's actually due to some nuance in the rules and not just the writer's convenience).
11:56 - There are explanations for all 2 to 3 of those. Obi Wan vanishes because he becomes a force ghost. Luke’s strike hits Vader’s ARMOR, and Vader’s strike cuts through Luke’s unarmored wrist.
I'm so glad someone talked about this. The blasé-ness of the injuries in the later half of Blue Eye Samurai kept me from loving the show. I was already suspending my disbelief for the minor and glancing injuries Mizu and co. had sustained, because the show's set in 17th century Japan, and any one of those wounds would realistically lead to an inevitable infection and death. But I was fine with that, because it's cool, and it adds stakes. I was also fine with Mizu fighting and winning against an army of dudes after getting her intestines purée'd, because I'm willing to believe she's full of enough adrenaline, rage, and spite to somehow pull that off. But Mizu somehow running through the whole castle gauntlet, which involved her almost drowning in freezing water, getting impaled through the foot, fighting a gang of men, fighting a room of monkeys, getting caught in an explosion, falling through the floor, fighting the Mountain, getting caught in a second closer explosion, fighting Fowler, _and_ jumping from the top of the castle into freezing water, and being able to walk after that is where I draw the line. No amount of adrenaline, rage, or spite would give anyone the ability to _stand_ after going through everything before fighting the Mountain, let alone climb a castle while carrying a man on your back after just surviving the Mountain and _another_ explosion. I really dislike the 'jumping from the castle into the water' bit, because there is no way in hell that someone could convince me that she or Taigen could have survived that. They'd have died on impact
Earned my like and sub. Nice essay. :) For my part, I always find this topic relevant in discussion Health in DnD or other TTRPG. People have this idea that being hit by an attack and losing HP means being injured. This becomes a break in immersion if a simple one hour break can remove said injury as you regain HP. My answer to this situation is that HP does not equal Health but Hit Points. How much a character can take before going down, like Drake's Health in Uncharted. When Drake's HP reaches 0, he is actually shot for the first time and dies. His lucks runs out. Therefore, HP can be visualised in many ways. Being nimble enough to dodge but draining your internal stamina. Tough enough to simply take the hit like Mizu but still able to move forward. Simple luck that the blade hits your armor but the sheer force makes you stumble for a second. The second part of this is how recovery works. How easily could wounds be mended and by which way? How is the narrative aspect of recovery handled in comparison to mechanics? Some might simply sleep of an axe wound to the shoulder and ignore that part. Others simply imply use of medicine and bandages, the sdme way equipment maintanence is implied. If magic healers are in involved, things becomes way easier to handwave. And some DnD tables or even other systems have grittier rules where being injured always gives a character penalties until recovered. Meticulous system to track injuries are implemented because we associate being hit with an action hero being hit. But we want to keep our immersion intact, thus do not simply recover wounds easily Wounds and recovery in media are certainly interesting.
Personally, when I play D&D, I like to think of hp mainly as a mix of endurance and minor scrapes. Of course, if you take a massive hit that eats up half your hit points, that might be a real injury (albeit not lethal), but most parties also have some form of magical healing at their disposal anyway, so that can always be ruled as something that deals with the worst of the wounds the characters sustain. There's also the older editions of the game, of course, where long rests would take weeks to complete, so naturally you'd have more leeway to properly hurt the characters without completely ruining immersion. And regarding your video game take, I definitely think that most of the gameplay is "non-canon" in regards such as damage. At the end of the day, it's just a mechanic to create a challenge and not really something which is a part of the narrative.
@@PerseusGrim Part of the issue with that, is their are some cases where it hard to explain injures of working that way, for example healing fixes it quickly, objects have hitpoints, sneak attacks only do extra damage If you have skill, you take hit point loss from environmental hazards and so on. However hit points only tend to get high in number when one is past level six, at which point one doing so much superhuman stuff it makes sense in a way. Why can your character survive being stabbed dozen times, prehaps the same reason you character just clubbed a hill giant to death while a annoying wizard keeps on summing bears on your head,
HP has usually been described as luck and minor scrapes, in my experience, but if we're gonna be real about it the reason why characters have HP that is depleted per attack in a TTRPG such as DnD is because that's the core game mechanic to facilitate player characters getting into multiple fights in a row and the feeling of being larger than life. At its core HP is first and foremost a gameplay mechanic; any narrative rationale is applied post-hoc. That is why TTRPGs that want to evoke the feeling of wounds being serious with narrative consequences will design their combat system-or lack thereof-with this specific intent and will most likely forgo using HP in the first place. It's easy to get caught up in how realistic combat is in a TTRPG or whether or not it breaks immersion and forget that you're playing a game that needs to function as a game. This, incidentally, is why homebrew injury systems slapped onto DnD for the sake of realism end up sucking because they are completely at odds with how the rest of the game functions and what actions it encourages. You are better off playing a system where that concept is baked into the game from the ground up. I know this is getting a bit off the topic of non-interactive fiction, but I wanted to stress this point since I have seen it come up time and again in discussions of DnD and HP as a mechanic in TTRPG game design-and, admittedly I have a bit of a bug up my ass about it.
@@starmantheta2028 I feel like that does not work that well in practice. At low levels the amount of injuries to take someone out is easily survivable, their is a the classic commoners getting murdered by angry house cats, humans have also survived stuff like being shot many times, getting a metal rod through the brain, terminal velocity falls. Also some stuff is just less deadly than you expect, for example, I remember hearing machete attacks are less deadly than you might think because it actually hard to get a good deep cut on a moving squishy live target. Basically at low levels the notion at the person is keeping going past their injures on grit and adrenaline is plausible. Meanwhile at high levels, you can often get into scenarios where their is no plausible way to dodge the attack, stuff like being submerged in lava, getting entangled than hit by a troll club repeatedly. At the same time at those high levels, one is doing superhuman stuff often enough that it kind of makes sense in a mythological hero kind of way. Also this leaves a major question how AC factors into things, it is kind of weird how dodging and blocking with armor got shoved in the same thing. I guess precise well executed blows help bypass/overcome both, but they react very differently to a unwieldy oversized weapon.
Curing tiktok brain, one person at a time! On a more serious note: I'm glad to hear that I could pique your interest enough to sit through the whole thing!
@@PerseusGrim It's more that a lot of RUclipsrs are artificially inflating otherwise interesting questions/videos that would realistically take about 10 minutes into these needlessly long 30+ minute videos, so I very rarely click on them these days. Your video had a lot of depth and nuance to cover, so the length is entirely appropriate. I just get really pissy when it's clear that a RUclipsr is just wasting my time!
@@Mage_Chartreux That's fair, I know exactly what you're talking about. I usually aim to make shorter videos (I wanted this one to be around 20 minutes originally), but then by the time I'm done covering everything I feel like I need to talk about, I end up with a behemoth of a video on my hands instead. Because of that I always try to cut out as much as possible that isn't absolutely vital, so I'm glad this method seems to pay off.
As much as i personally noticed, it was ridiculous that mizu came back from so many injuries at a pace that would make Wolverine blush, i absolutely love blue-eyed samurai. Just fucking love it. It does so many other things so well.
8:17 - I hate this so much. It doesn't matter if you're a zombie, Gregor Clegane, or an anime protag having flashbacks of your parents dying in an alley when you were a kid, if a tendon or muscle got severed, if a nerve cannot work due to damage or neurotoxins: You. Are. Not. Moving. That. Bodypart!
The Long Sun novels have a storytelling method that isn’t for everyone, but they use injury to create tension very effectively. The protagonist (a healthy man in his 20s) gets scared in a confrontation halfway through the first book and jumps off a second story balcony to flee. He breaks his ankle in the process, and despite the use of medical futuretech the injury is a recurring problem at least every 2-3 chapters for the remainder of the four book series. It’s not the most consequential in its own right, but when urban warfare breaks out in the later novels it makes the reader acutely afraid of how easily characters could die from their injuries.
I know this video is kind of old but there’s kind of also another reason for this It is kind of meant to show the enemies aren’t completely and utterly “incompetent” Sure you can have an action movie where the main character never gets shot by an enemy and always shoot the enemy. But then people are going to complain and go “ every single enemy in this movie is completely incompetent why would we fear them in the slightest” If the enemy shoots and hits the main character and the main character just moves and shrugs it off like it’s nothing at least the impression we get is “ OK the enemies are not incompetent, but The main character is just built different” Basically they need the enemies to be “ perceive” as a threats even if The writers “and even the audience” knows the basic lackeys aren’t going to do much. And the only way we can do that is to have them “hit” The main character even if they shrunk off the injury.
One other brilliant example of demonstrating injuries fairly well is Rurouni Kenshin animated series(the on with 96 episodes). Although they sometimes flirted with the concept of how much a person can withstand pain or injuries. Specifically in the case of Shishio Makoto, perhaps they were about to show his will to live. He was undoubtedly epic in many ways.
Going back to the Star Wars point you made in the start of the video. I think that the first trilogy, the prequel films and the early star wars series such as clone wars and rebels set some pretty good ground rules for how a lightsaber should work and act. (Maybe with some faults, as you pointed out in the original trilogy as well as in clone wars, looking at you Darth Maul) Lightsabers have come to be seen as glowing sticks of lava, able to melt metal and slice through limbs like butter, one stab has always been enough to kill a person. So when Disney now is treating them like staby glow sticks and not what the fans expect a lightsaber to be, that adds onto the pile of problems that the new star wars series and movies have.
I think another factor of Blue Eye Samurai that isn't always considered is how the story feels a bit reminiscent of a Japanese folk tale. This is her story of how she gets revenge for her mother and her life, she's overpowered and has an indomitable will to finish her quest no matter what. Her injuries are huge but I think her fighting like nothing else matters not only adds to her being seen as an Onryo but also clearly showcases her fury and will to continue. She is so determined that she completely disassociates her pain during those fights.
I found the treatment of specifucally mizu's injuries to be a part of the fantasy element? Like playing into the whole inhuman revenge death angel fuled by hatred and willpower thing
>”I Love Star Wars” > Doesn’t know the lore reason Ben disappearing and became a force ghost >Doesn’t know why vaders armor is so strong >Doesn’t know how it cut off Luke’s hand
5:36 "realistically you could say she only makes things worse" - Rule number one in first aid with impalings... dont pull it out, stabilize the object and wait for propper care... but yes I too hate when people make unrealistic wounds.. they could have sprained the leg and get the same effect... still would affect her for at least a few months afterwards.
How are you going to have her sprain her ankles in a spike trap. If someone only gets injured by simply springing their ankles in a spike trap and I’m sorry that is a horrible spike trap. It should either pierce or do nothing at all otherwise what’s the point in having it be spiked
Vagabond has a good example of injury with Musashi getting a potentially “career ending” injury after a long battle and being forced to rethink his path and choices going into the Farm Arc
While I generally agree with your stated thoughts, I do keep remembering how inconsistently I personally respond to injuries. Example: shingles only tickled for me, I've had organs attempt to burst and felt nothing...but if I stub my toe or lightly bump my thigh into a table and experience exquisite pain, bordering on agony. I've also been seriously injured but didn't notice until way later due to adrenaline. So maybe it's sloppy writing, but...maybe it's also partially due to human bodies being ridiculous?
While writing a reply to another comment, I came up with a great representation that makes sense for this topic: Characters should have to push through limits rather than have none. It's different when you see an injured character being put nearly out of commission who obviously struggles to get back up and keeps fighting through adrenaline. Showing them having difficulty when getting up and adding a bit more weight to their movement is enough to show that they are impacted and yet fighting through it, whereas, you lose immersion and investment when injuries that are supposed to put you on the edge of your seat don't affect the character at all.
Battlestar galactica does this really well imo, even in the very beginning a character named helo has a hole straight through his leg from a piece of shrapnel from a middle going through his ship and puncturing his leg and for a large portion of season 1 he’s always limping whenever we see him walk but oddly enough the show is equally as good about making injuries matter with the titular ship itself the Battlestar Galactica with it visibly accumulating visible damage after every battle. By the end of the series it looks like it’s barley holding together and it’s even a plot point that the ship is falling apart due to lack of repairs and aging
Real quick nitpick: after storming the castle and returning to her masters home she doesn’t have a few days to recover, but probably a few months since the seasons change significantly between when she arrives and when she leaves.
Nice catch, that is absolutely possible. I made the assumption because Abijah Fowler and Heiji Shindo talk about their trip which is only a few days long, but you are right that the weather changes quite a bit, so that might indicate a longer passage of time than I thought.
@@PerseusGrim i also wanted to mention Mizu doesn't faint before her fight with Tigen due to the cut. that's part of it but as you explore its literally not that deep. Mizu also fell from a cliff and has a concussion since the fall knocked her out cold and its the water on her face that jolts her awake.
i think Mizu is framed as this, not invincible, but wholly unstoppable force, she bleeds, she can die, but she will not stop till the 4 white men, her would be fathers are wiped from the face of the earth. i think the story does a pretty good job of demonstrating that, although i think increased mobility issues after being stabbed through the foot horizontally would be nice to show she IS injured and there are consequences for that, i think Mizu just doesn't care if she dies on her quest. Hense why she agrees to fight tigen while on the brink of death.
@@Dr_Procrastinatorthe interesting makes less sense but something else is the fact that she's probably got some naughty high pain tolerance because she's fighting a lot of people and getting injured all the time that was shortly after she does that run and then stuff she immediately gets into a fight so she's pumping through adrenaline which makes her ignore it and then it continues even further and she continues on this constant fighting Streak and then she's getting pumped up with drugs and then she's getting hit with adrenaline and then she's getting hit with both so she just absolutely pumped up with s*** that is just making her ignore everything and just perform at maximum capabilities like people who are on adrenaline can lift f****** cars so her pumped up with adrenaline and some drugs makes climbing up the side of a tower carrying tengen is 100% possible
@@PerseusGrimI see it as their actual trip only took a few days but he was probably still in the tower for a few months because he need enough time for all of his weapons to get sent in in all of their installments which would have taken several months because the number that he brought he brought like probably a couple thousand so that definitely took a few months even if a few shipment showed up already by the point that he had a fight with Mizu he was still waiting on more so the actual trip itself might have only taken a few days but the entire setup for the rest of it probably took a couple of months
Yup! And we get that montage of Heiji Shindo and Abijah Fowler fucking their way through a long, leisurely trip, so it certainly took weeks--if not months. Plus, the show begins in winter, but Akemi's wedding is in the "Spring", because it's "auspicious."
One fun example of a bad injury in a story that springs to my mind is from Assassin's Creed: Rogue, where the main character is shot in the back, falls off a cliff, and is then saved and taken to an older couple's house to be nursed back to health. We cut forward to see him some time later, and he's in the process of recovering - he's not on the verge of death, but he's still clutching his side and limping heavily, clearly in pain with every movement. So, it starts out pretty reasonable, he got hurt badly and is taking time to recover. Then some gangsters attack the people who have been caring for him, and he's suddenly fit enough to beat them unconscious - but okay, it was a desperate situation, maybe the adrenaline helped him push through the pain for a little bit, fair enough... and then he gets some new clothes and is immediately able to start doing parkour as if he wasn't limping and holding his side minutes earlier lmao
Haha, that sounds very on brand for the topic. It seems like most of the time, characters just need a little nudge to overcome their injuries and then they act as if they were never even hurt to begin with.
@@PerseusGrim Kinda reminds me of Watson from BBC Sherlock Holmes. He forgets his walking cane and suddenly realizes he just doesn't need it.
@@starbirds007 He didn't though, that was a psychosomatic issue, not an actual injury-related issue. It's DUMB, but it does have the appropriate context to make it work.
Oooh, you're one of those they have to do essays on because you don't understand video games are video games.
@@nachgeben Que?
Now I understand the true message of Blue Eye Samurai: being a mixed kid makes you immortal
Yeap😅
The truth was right before us this whole time!
I'm mixed and can confirm this is true
@@SomasAcademy Feels good to know that I have immortal people watching my content!
I'm mixed as well, and my mortality has yet to be proven
Arthur Morgan’s tuberculosis slowly kills him and even changes his appearance and strength throughout the entire game. This is in my opinion one of the best ways to show an injury’s impact on the character, endings, and gameplay.
Red dead mentioned 🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥
Arthur’s TB is ultimately what allows Micah to one up him. Arthur is shown to be a pretty beefy work horse through the story and capable of taking on men much bigger than him while Micah gets his ass handed to him by just about everybody. When Arthur fights micah in the final scene he still whoops Micah’s ass for a good long portion but due to him being so worn down from TB he loses his strength and can’t finish the fight, allowing Micah to beat him to the brink of death.
I never thought too much about characters jumping through glass windows until a glass door shattered in my hands one day (it was tempered glass and not super dangerous, just some small cuts). Now every time I see a character diving almost headfirst through a window, I can't help but wince a little bit.
It certainly doesn't seem very bad in movies or shows, but I can imagine that the reality of it wouldn't be very pleasant. Either way, great example!
It's not pleasant but you can ignore how uncomfortable it is @@PerseusGrim
love the part in teh venture brothers where rusty jumps through a window as a stunt and then is immediately sent to the hospital for the rest of the episode
I got put through a window one time and I am glad that I was wearing a jacket because it gave me some extra padding but it still sucked a lot
Yeah them large shards are no joke. Particularly regular glass. Its like jumping through large knife.
I think Mizu's (or BES's in general) deal is that she's, at least metaphorically, an Onryo, and the enemies she faces are mythological creatures of a similar caliber. Think of it as you would John Wick, for example. The point isn't shock value, or I don't think so. It's to show the fact that she's so driven that not even deathly injuries can stop her. As you yourself said it, she's a force of nature.
That being said, I think this is a great video! Between this and the previous one, I'm already looking forward to what you put out next.
Good points! I definitely agree about the metaphorical side of things, and as I said in the video, I did really like the show, but sometimes I feel like it earns a bit of an eye-roll. But yeah, it's definitely a bit of a "woman too angry to die" situation. Also, I'm glad to hear that you've enjoyed both my videos so far!
Yeah, here I think it wasn't bad writing but rather a choice between more characterization or realism, and BES chose characterization
first of all, i haven't watched BES, i just knew about the show now and i'm planning to watch it, so i'd just like to talk about this within the scenes that are shown by perseus grim. but correct me if i get anything wrong anyway.
i think it would be more compelling if we actually do see the effects of those injuries, but despite them, she still pressed forward.
If a character's arm was cutoff and knowing their chance of survival has been drastically reduced, yet they still choose to keep fighting is perseverance. but, if they lost their arm, then regained them the next episode or suddenly the bad guys are incapable of taking down a one armed guy that they could take down with both arms or the injury didn't even faze them, then it's not perseverance, that's just called plot armor.
if the character doesn't even consider it as something important, then the viewer would think that way as well. the "too angry to die" premise kind of only works if we see them dying / struggling as direct result of those injuries, but if they don't struggle from them, then did those injuries really happened? the injuries could literally be swapped with anything since the outcomes wouldn't change.
it seems BES didn't really focus on the characterization part, as the fight scenes shown are still tied down by realism. what i mean is that because they didn't go 100%, it kind of just became a stale mix of it; it's not as beautifully stylized like samurai jack, not as grounded and impactful as hara kiri, and not as flashy / entertaining as kill la kill.
@@enraikow6109 I understand where you're coming from, but I don't think that'd actually benefit the narrative that much. In fact, it could only slow it. It's hard to explain without spoiling it, (and I do think you should go watch the show even having seen this video).
And for that last part: BES can ABSOLUTELY be as beautiful as Samurai Jack and as entertaining as Kill la Kill (Nothing can ever be as flashy as KLK tho). Haven't seen Hara Kiri tho.
@@PerseusGrim Bride from Kill Bill be like:
I agree that some suspension of disbelief about how an injury *would* affect a character is acceptable; but when it's taken too far, I find it a distracting factor that takes away from the story.
I fully agree. It's hard to expect every writer to have knowledge equivalent of someone with a medical degree, but as long as you don't stray too far from common sense when writing injuries it should be alright.
Numerous new RUclipsr's will make one hit video and then poof into irrelevancy and obscurity. I'm here to make sure this doesn't happen!
Happy to have you along for the ride!
I like him. But, c'mon.... Get used to it, friend.
What the fuck are YOU going to do?
Im here to make sure it does
It be like that though it's only natural my guy
Blue eye samurai was great. It also simultaneously had my suspension of disbelief fighting for its life every episode.
That's pretty much exactly how I felt about it too.
You seriously liked it? I found the dialogues and dubbing terrible and couldn't watch to the third episode. Does it get better later on?
@@qc6265 Yes, it does!
And as for the voices, those threw me off too, but there are a variety of dubs to choose from, so you could always try another version.
@@qc6265 It's not dubbed. The original language is English, unless you're talking about another language's dub of the show.
@@benjaminwilson2945 you would be surprised to know every animation needs a dub even original ones
for blue eye, I agree that she seems to not care about her injuries(maybe due to adrenaline?) , but the time skip was not just 4 days. it was stated, or atleast alluded to being months. as we can see how the snow melted away when she has recovered, when it was in the middle of winter when she came back.
Yeah I was pretty sure that the montage fowler has on his way to edo shows it took a long time. So mizu would have had time to heal.
About the star wars bit:
Obi chose to die. Him disappearing was most probably meant to be taken as a trick of the force.
Vader's shoulder is armored. When there were more sith and jedi, Vader was usually sent to kill them, so he wears armor to protect(even slightly) against light sabers. You could also make an argument that Luke wasn't properly using the saber so it didn't go through fully(i.e he pulled the saber back prematurely instead of following through with the strike.)
Luke's hand was completely unprotected. No explanation needed.
Thanks for commenting exactly what I was just about to man, I appreciate it
Yep. Many flaws in all the star wars movies. This ain't one of them, if anything these scenes (when shown in their actual entirety) are a good example of how to explain things audiovsiaully without words.
Obi-Wan has a whole narrative cue that he is about to do something (he sees the rest of his team coming to board the falcon, he knows they did what they came to do and that they'll scape now). Then the sound track quickly shifts into a force theme with obi-wan smirking then doing something odd (closing his eyes in concentration and taking a completely defenseless position), clearly signally he is about to do some force shenanigans. Then he immediately follows that by vanishing, leaving a visibly confused vader behind (it is visible from hsi body language). The scene perfectly narrates that what was happening was Obi-Wan's doing and the extraordinary enable through the force, all without saying a word of exposition about it.
Vader's shoulder armor has the same sparks and smoke visual effects we see on other things light sabers can't cut well or at all in the movie, such as the walls just a few seconds earlier in that scene/clip. Anyone paying attention can recognize "oh, his shoulder sparks and smokes just like all the other things the light saber just kinda bruises the surface". And it is the same Vader who in an earlier scene in the movie stopped a few blaster shots ("laser" blades, "laser" shots) with the armor in his hand, which also did a similar sparks and smoke effect. Clear communication and consistent communication that the light based technologies don't go through everything equally, and Vader armor is one of such though to go through things, and all without one word of spoon fed exposition, you just have to watch the movie.
The armor was probably courteous
THANK YOU
i have a theory he didn't heart your comment cuz he gotta keep up with the agenda
(this is a joke btw)
Man this feels cathartic to watch. I honestly can’t agree more. So often I watch or read something and it’ll establish that injuries aren’t taken seriously, but then the mc will be taken out by something they’ve shrugged off 100 times because the plot demands, or the other way around. It just feels like I can see the authors pen moving in the frame to get what it wants and whenever I bring this up people are always really dismissive of it, but dammit injuries can do so much for a story.
My favourite example is from The Road, a 2006 book and 2009 movie by Cormac McCarthy. Slight spoilers ahead: the road is about a father and son travelling a post apocalyptic USA (and not the fun kind) as the father becomes more and more bitter and paranoid as the story goes on. Towards the end of the movie, a gang try and kill the pair and the father gets hit in the shin with an arrow. Most series would have the mc pull it out and limp for a bit and move on like he’s wolverine, but instead the road uses the wound to increase the desperation and bitterness felt from that point on. The father CANT heal the wound because they have no supplies, and the injury brings them both to the brink and the story instead of just saying “ look how cool the protagonist is they can shrug off arrows” or something equally shallow it uses it to brilliant effect.
Glad to give some catharsis to a like-minded soul! I haven't read the book or seen the movie that you mention, but it sounds like that is a pretty good example of how to make an injury impactful. Besides, post-apocalyptic settings feel like the perfect fit for a small wound to become a big deal, specifically because of the scarcity of medical supplies.
People that shrug off those kinds of complaints watch shows to not think about anything. Brain dead entertainment for them. If you're going to have unrealistic things, at least keep it consistent enough so that it makes sense! People that aren't bothered by illogic like characters being unhindered by being chopped in half that suddenly need a vacation from a split lip and bruise to the abdomen don't use their brains in the first place. Entertainment is just a way for them to waste time not thinking about stuff, when even sleeping would be more productive for them. I'd be infuriated by seeing a main character take on an army and then suddenly beat up by some lone punk and then their sidekick who's not even close to being as competent suddenly becomes immortal to avenge their friend.
Pointless injuries that don't impact my characters as much as they should is a glaring issue that I've noticed myself, and even when starting writing I'd have these characters recovering for at least a month from some stuff. But my whole point has always been to see characters *_push through_* their limitations, not just have none. My only issue is that I would give my characters more injuries than they could reasonably handle, even for the logic and magic my stories have.
@astraamarante6233 because it never really affects the writing process and I'd say pointless injuries most of the time enhances a story. Look at Arthur Morgan, a man literally at the brink of death from TB and pushed to his limits. Realistically, he shouldn't be even able hold a gun let alone fight a crazed gunman like Miach in a fight. Yet, he still does because at the end of the day realism is not as important as you really think.
Most characters, even in grounded universes, still perform feats that would be considered superhuman. The truth is most people don't really care unless if the injury is blatant enough to everyone to notice. The whole point of entertainment is to really just well entertain, dead brained or not. After a hard day at work, people want to come home and relax for the most part. This doesn't excuse BS damage or plot armor, but it's a perspective you kinda have to go with when writing or watching anything.
Most of the time, your writer isn't going to be a medical and relies on mainly general knowledge. It also depends on what you're watching as well. If you're watching an hyper fast action movie, I wouldn't really be surprised characters survive impossible injuries since that's the whole click with those types of entertainment.
Spoilers for Malazan Book of the Fallen!
I love how one of the characters gets hurt and his wound doesn't heal completely. The medic, who has access to magical healing then repeatedly urges the guy to have the wound fixed, but he constantly declines, because there are others who need healing and he doesn't have time to be out of the action. Two books later, the already strained bone snaps and he dies in a fight making it a very powerful moment.
Haven't gotten around to reading Malazan yet, but that sounds like some good storytelling. Sacrificing your own access to magical healing does make a lot of sense if it is a limited resource and others are in more urgent need of it.
This must be something that’s been bugging me subconsciously too. The main cast in my comic has two characters with enhanced healing factors, two doctors, and the rest at least know basic first aid. I’ve been very explicit with how characters’ injuries effect their fighting ability, and they take sterilizing and securing injuries asap seriously.
I think working in a field where I use *extremely* sharp knives, chisels, and other assorted blades every day has made me very aware of how little it takes to put someone out of commission (I once chopped the end of my finger with a chisel and couldn’t use that entire hand properly for months while it healed :D).
Anyway, wonderful video! I’ll make sure to stick around for whatever else you analyze, as you’ve been bringing up some very fascinating points that I hadn’t consciously considered before!
It's surprising how little it takes to knock people out of commission, even with small injuries. Even without a blade or other tool, just using enough physical exertion can make you sore for days. Let alone actual injuries, those can easily take months to return to normal even if small.
I'm glad I could help drag those thoughts from your subconsciousness so they could be fully articulated, and thank you for the kind words! I hope you didn't lose too much of your finger in that accident and I hope you've stayed more careful around those sharp blades since then, but yeah, it doesn't take much at all for an injury to prevent you from going about your day-to-day like usual. When I started bouldering, I noticed how losing just a tiny amount of skin on a finger would completely distract me and prevent me from grabbing the holds like I was supposed to, so even just a small scrape can be painful or annoying enough to inhibit normal actions.
@@PerseusGrim Oh, yes, I’m much more careful now. Work gloves are a beautiful thing that shouldn’t be underestimated haha.
I’ll continue giving you kind words as you bring up fascinating points in the future, and I wish you luck in the getting the algorithm gods back on your side. I hope these comments boost engagement so other people can have their own “aha!”, moments.
Don't you _love_ it when characters cut their palms diagonally with a knife every time a ritual demands some blood? After all, it's just a 5cm/2in gash in the middle of the hand. Pfft. As if _that_ would ever interfere with day to day activities or fighting, right? 🙄
My main character has an entire arm fused with metal, so he pretty much not only has an entire arm out of commission 99% of the time(he can use the magic system to actually use it again under some curcumstances) but it has very real weight to it. He uses it as both a blessing and a curse since he uses it as a counterbalance, but since he can't move it much so it's also a glaring weakness and affects everything in his day to day life
I think a great example of an injury done right is Hiccup’s leg in How To Train Your Dragon. He loses it in the first movie, struggles with his new and limiting prosthetic, and in the later movies he upgrades and masters his prosthetic leg.
The use of DOOM's music is great to emphasise the video game feeling of it all. Once you are past a checkpoint (a scene ends), your short-term mistakes don't matter, almost as if creators count on our attention spans being a minute long. Hell, even "get stabbed to use your opponent's weapon as leverage" seems to become more of a cliche by the day (from John Wick to Dune to Road House).
Great job.
I'm happy to find any excuse to include some gems from the DOOM ost, so when it came time to add music, it felt like the perfect fit. As you said, that episode feels almost like a video game. And the point you make about writers relying on shorter attention spans reminds me of the claim made by Tomasz Bagiński that the logic of the writing in a show doesn't matter anymore because the audience has been damaged by things like RUclips and Tiktok. Can't say I agree with his take, because it seems more like an excuse for lazy writing, but I guess a lot of people don't seem to mind so maybe he has a point.
what also massively bothered me is that all the "important" characters are basically walking tanks in what sort of injuries they get, but the enemies that wear thick armor get split in half like butter. why even bother with it at all then if it seems to be doing nothing. like what is that bs. she throws her sword and penetrates multiple mm of steel plating with it. like WHAT?
Something, something, magical meteorite sword. But seriously, I could probably make an additional video just about the Hollywood trend of turning plate armor into paper, because writers seem to think armor doesn't do jack. I guess the only armor that really matters in media is plot armor, and random grunts don't get any of that.
@@PerseusGrim - Plate armor is paper but steroids give you bullet resistant muscles! Also, roided out colossi don't feel pain and don't seem to care about getting stabbed or shot¹, which is what allows the protag to kill them, otherwise, they'd all be Jack Reacher, and you _do not_ want to fight Jack Reacher! ( ... when he's Alan Ritchson.)
¹Apart from the usual suspects, Kevin Nash in _Punisher (2004)_ comes to mind.
@@PerseusGrimPlease make that video.
Oh the answer is simple because Is the bad guys never get a hit on the good guys you would instant be going “ these bad guys are incompetent why even bother with the bad guys”
when goons are important for two factors
1. Tissue that an evil group or empire isn’t literally just “ The name bad guys” and looks and seems like it could be an operation
2. To allow the writers to show off characters being cool without destroying credibility of the main bad guys or the main good guys by having them face each other too often.
it would be way lamer if the bad guy lost a bunch of times to show off how cool the good guys are instead of nameless goons
For me its just that adrenaline just immediately replaces the blood
Honestly the best depiction of injury / disease was in rdr2
When arthur get diagnosed eith tuberculosis showing how he knew his death was close and he couldnt be there to protect the gang or dutch and wanted to die eith good terms with everyone in a dry place. Setting up real good ending and the switch to john and his family with the last mission
Definitely. While watching this vid I kept thinking about that one mission where Arthur is caught by Odriscoll and shot point-blank in the shoulder with a shotgun. He had to cauterize the wound, stumble his way out with barely any strength left and escape barely conscious by horse and then had to recover for several months before he was healthy again
14:07 no0oo! goon used to have such a noble meaning
Times have changed, I'm afraid. I can't look at the word the same way anymore...
@@PerseusGrim Duhuhuh, good one, boss!
Injuries can be an effective tool for worldbuilding, especially if characters are not human. In Blame! most of the characters are either cyborgs or androids. And when any of them suffer non-fatal injuries (a severed limb is a fairly common occurrence) , details are revealed to us about how the characters' bodies work and whether they have access to futuristic regeneration and repair capabilities, while interactions with equipment and machinery that allows augmentation or healing add depth and thoughtfulness to the world.
8:49 Mizu and Taigen didn’t actually recover in a few days this was actually a time skip where over a few months have passed however I don’t think the time skip was shown clearly enough and they still probably wouldn’t have been fully recovered after the time skip
You want a great example of how to do injuries properly? The Dark Tower Series.
In book 1 we meet Roland, an absolutely crazy capable gunslinger and our protagonist. He's shown to be deft with his revolvers and uses them impeccably well to survive several violent encounters throughout the story, as well as using his wits, knowledge, and just his cold and cynical iron will to overcome several obstacles in his path. Then in Book 2 he very nearly dies in an almost buffoonish way after encountering some wild animals while he's just waking up and snip snip, loses most of the fingers on his dominant hand. Oops.
Not only does he spend the remainder of this book having to deal with the immediate injurious effects - the wound is infected and potentially poisoned and he has to go to some rather great lengths to simply not die - it completely changes the nature of him as a character. Because his martial art was tied directly to the deftness of his hands, his ability to aim a revolver precisely and quickly reload the gun faster than any could believe (to the point that they called it his "reloading trick") and losing most of the fingers on his dominant hand absolutely ruins him in this regard.
But over the course of the same story he also gains several allies in his quest and over book 2 and continuing throughout the rest of the story, he begins to train them. They become his students in everything he knows. His injury changes him from the sole action protagonist into more of a mentor of a group of action protagonists instead. And he's not exactly a slouch in a gunfight either since he does still have his other hand, and after a few years of training, becomes proficient enough with using his non-dominant hand in a gunfight even though he knows he'll never be at his peak again.
It's honestly a great example of an injury A) happening a lot like they often do in real life - almost incidentally or accidentally and having a profound impact, and B) changing the whole direction of a character's role in a story in a way that C) "rebalances" a potentially overpowered character that makes other characters more important as the spotlight moves onto them.
I think "pointless" injuries are a great tool for setting a tone and establishing the characters place in the world.
SOMEWHAT SPOILERS FOR "BERSERSK" ANIME & MANGA
WAS
For example we can take Guts vs 100 soldiers scene from Berserk: he is a freaking badass and comes on top and his injuries from that fight don't even add much to the story. But this shows that no matter what ungodly powerful warrior you are, you are still vulnerable. And further in the story when he faces a real threat it payoffs
It can absolutely work if it's written well! I'm not all that familiar with Berserk, but I came across the scene you mentioned while I was doing research for my video. I guess it's almost necessary to let a character get at least a little hurt if they're fighting off a small army all on their lonesome.
I’ll be honest I think berserk is a bad example here, Berserk is very much like blue eye samurai here in that it feels like it’s a split 50/50 chance if an irl debilitating injury is gonna be that or if it’s just gonna be shrugged off
It helps a lot that in the 100 men fight you can see his injuries steadily slowing him down - but we also get to see how his ferocity and the sheer amount of death he's causing is shaking the morale of the group. We get the satisfaction of seeing him GRIT through the injuries and come out on top thanks to his willpower, while also feeling like the injuries are consequential (in the short term, of course).
@@ASmartNameForMe bro got stitched up and had to not be in the front lines for a bit after that 100 man fight. Also we see him debilitate in health after consecutive fights on the later arcs, (the Fairy dust probably helped on some of the healing to fighting condition, but Guts mostly fights on a deficit)
Berserk is the biggest culprit using pointless sadism to tell a story. Look at what the author repeatedly done to ALL the female characters in the story. Rape, rape, rape. Since berserk became successful inspiring most dark fantasy genre, most people would NOT stop using rape as a pointless sadistic traumas to create their female characters. It almost feels like a fetishized idea of overcoming your traumas, which is something a lot of dark fantasy suffer from. Romanticizing toughest by throwing their characters in some of the worst, and most horrid events. Tokyo Ghoul is another series that does that crap. Look at its ending.
One time where an injury felt like it impacted a story was Lee’s bite in the walking dead video game. You even choose if you cut his arm off which effects the story and gameplay a bit, which I find very cool.
I love how injury is treated in The Revenant. The protagonist gets as close to death as possible and struggles through a healing process that he will never fully recover from
The TLOU's injuries analysis was really interesting. Thanks for shining a new light on the game!
Glad to hear that you found it interesting! I'm always happy to provide my thoughts on stories I really enjoy, and TLOU is certainly one of them.
This is one of my least favorite battle shonen tropes. Aside from providing the characters some iconic scars, you can be relatively sure that any harm they take (and they do take a lot of punishment in battle shonens) will be repaired in the next chapter.
Just recently, the protagonist of one of Shonen Jump's biggest-running series had both of his arms severed before regaining them in less that three panels.
Kimetsu no Yaiba really surprised me since it was one of the few times when the main cast was injured and it was revealed that they would genuinely be handicapped for the rest of their life.
I sure hope they have a good explanation for how the guy could regrow his arms, because that sounds very extreme, even considering the genre. Either way, it's always a pleasant surprise when writers take injuries seriously and aren't afraid to let them have some real long-term impact on the story and the characters.
@@PerseusGrim I mean considering how much superhuman people in shoenen anime, and how much magic is thrown around, saying people can heal much easier than RL makes perfect sense.
Kind of how modern medicine greatly reduced the chance of dying from injures.
Who did if it was itadori from jjk it makes sense since he has reverse cursed technique and blood manipulation. If it was denji from chainsaw man then like yeah denji has gone trough worse and healed it due to his hybrid biology. I genuinly cant think of shonen character rn that doesnt have an insane healing factor. Or a world with very good healing capabilities
@@herdoman5169 There's also Undead Unlock, with Andy negating death. Honestly one of my favorite examples of doing the trope of super fast healing factor.
I mean, I don't think kimetsu no yaiba is the best example about this, or at least I don't think it's always consistent about injuries. I still remember that tanjiro vs gyutaro fight and how the show describes how messed up and destroyed his entire body is and he can still move and defeat the enemy. And although you can see the suffering and they dedicate months of rest to heal, once they are healed they can go without a problem for another life or death fight.
Amazing video. I love the conclusion where you admit the things that work within Blue Eyed Samurai, and your humor throughout is great. The calculations you did on the blade depth and injuries was really cool. The clip of the dramatic football/soccer injury you put in at 13:38 took me so aback I laughed aloud. Really well done and great analysis. I'm glad this sort of "injury suspension of disbelief" is being pointed out, and it's allowing me to look back at my own stories and see how they work.
It's not as strong of a professional writing comparison but I have something very interesting to share on the topic of injuries.
I run a tabletop roleplay campaign with some of my friends and I use a mostly homemade system for all the rules and such, set in a low-fantasy dark age.
One thing that I decided for a long-term, character driven campaign was that death could be a little boring, so if anyone is defeated in a battle with an enemy they don't lose all their health and die then need to make a new character. Instead they always have a chance of death based on context but they're more likely to survive with a permanent injury. And must carry on that character with the burden of their injuries, also including mental damage as well (too many spells gone awry make you coo-coo).
One of my players, the charismatic captain of the company of mercenaries everyone is a part of began her career leading from the front of the formation, gung-ho and ready to take on any challenge. Until she received a nasty spear wound that permanently collapsed one of her lungs. Leaving her short of breath and weak nearly all the time.
What I so enjoy about that turn of events though is how organically we rolled with the punches and told a story with it, since her injury the captain is basically dependant on riding her horse when marching, and when it is time to fight she found new ways to be of use, she studied tactics, organised sergeants, leaned on her charisma instead of her sword to lead smart, not hard. And the company turned out all the better for it.
I also observe an odd phenomena: Where we have a bunch of NPC's in the company that I always make time to develop and characterise, which means it's almost harder to have to tell them they're too injured to be part of the team, give them a severance package and drop them off in the nearest town than it is to just watch them die on the spot to some beast in a shower of glorious viscera.
This system has also really brought into the spotlight another player who chose to be the company's physician, any time you get saved from death or permanent injury you have the doctor to thank. And because the system in my game is more involved than "I cast +5 HP", usually involving intense surgery and preparation. People have a particular camaraderie, appreciation and protectiveness over him. He's respected like a professional, instead of memed as a babysitter like clerics in DnD.
I also have another player who got really lucky on a dice roll and got away from a wound with just a facial scar that people find dashing, +1 charisma.
So even in a systemically-driven, emergent video game sense, having fail states that don't just set you back to a checkpoint can be very engaging.
You just described exactly what I'm looking for in a TTRPG. Is there any way you could share the rules you use?
@@royrieder2113 Hey, I'm glad someone actually likes the nonsense I come up with, I'd be happy to share. If you don't mind a fair bit of reading.
We all have to play the game digitally, we use a site called roll20 and I use sheets from a system called "FATE" by Evil Hat.
I wouldn't recommend you do the same though, FATE has been busted on roll20 for a time and I've just had to make do.
That said, these rules can be adapted or be made to apply to any system of your choice I'm certain, so I'll explain it all more generally.
Every character has an amount of points they can accrue as a result of failures, these points go into 'wounds', 'derangement', 'suspicion' and 'scandal', these are all fundamentally your health, but made to track other things such as mental trauma, criminal records, fame and infamy respectively.
Different races in my game each have different max amounts, the towering "Krokozza" for example have a higher threshold for wounds but a lower one for derangement.
Now whenever you reach the maximum amount for any of these you receive a 'consequence', for wounds it's a permanent injury, for derangement it can be any amount of persistent nightmares and so on.
But of course to stay on top of these you have to prepare: For the game I'm running I drew up a big map of the setting and let my players loose on it, so it's a sandbox that I mostly ad-lib our adventures on.
You have time in each day to do anything you want, I use just three units, morning, afternoon and evening, there is night as well of course but you got to sleep sometime. For the doctor, he mostly spends his time making medicine.
However, this was never meant to be a hardcore survival or anything like that, I don't track ammunition for example because I've filtered what I consider to be chores out of the things that take a time slot, instead I focus on meaningful decisions.
For injuries, you can receive any of: Bruising, bleeding, broken bones and or infection. The doctor needs to treat each with a specific cure but only has enough time to prepare for each. See what I'm getting at?
So it is essentially a game where the players have lots of downtime to make medicine, improve their skills, train the company, go shopping or anything else. But encounters are quick, nasty and designed to test their preparedness.
It is a low-fantasy setting though, and things are sort of made through a historical and grounded lens. A knight in full plate receives very few cuts and less bone breakage, but can still get super bruised up, so with a bit of common sense the doc can have an idea of what to prioritise. But when a forest hermit sics a horse-sized, acid spitting insect on the party there is less one can do to prepare for the supernatural, which is just how I like it, keeps magic 'magical'.
I hope this was a good enough rundown, it isn't a fully realised system, but more of a loose set of house rules I put in to try and shake up the cliché's and expectations of your average DnD game.
Yeah that's a GENIUS system, definitely gonna keep it in mind for my own games.
@@royrieder2113 Hey, I posted a reply earlier but it seems it didn't go through. Did it?
Maybe it's an invisible character limit so I'll try again:
Everyone has a threshold of points in certain things. Wounds, derangement, suspicion and scandal. It's basically your health system but it can also track mental health, criminal record, fame and infamy.
In order to counter these points you need to prepare. For wounds the doctor needs to make medicine appropriate to the type of injury that I just decide based on context, you need a specific cure to cuts, bruises, bone breakage and infection chance. You only have three time slots to brew up a certain amount of each.
I generally work with small numbers because I prefer to emphasise meaningful decisions rather than make a full 24-hour itinerary to track things I would consider chores. Making ammunition I would consider a chore, making a decision to make one cure over another that saves someone in the next fight is a meaningful decision.
When you can't stay on top of you wounds etc. And you cross the threshold, you receive a consequence, a permanent injury or nightmares, a bounty, merchants trust you less.
So yeah, that's the most brief way I can describe the whole thing, you can apply these little rules to any system I should think, change the numbers as you so choose and all.
@camerondavids2481 That is an amazing system! If I ever get the chance to DM with my group, I'm definitely going to take some inspiration
The moment you find a video essay on something you obsess over, my favorites are berserk and vagabond, injuries feel like they matter, there's these breathers inbetween fights where we see our cast recovering and these are great moments that allow you to just spend time with the characters and breath with them, and when the action picks up, you see these characters be pushed sooo far, up against unbelievable odds, now berserk is still very extreme, there's alot of shit he shouldn't survive if he was in real life, but the world clearly sets that humans in this world aren't like us, i mean just look at the huge knights strapped with several tons of steel, swinging around even more, the peaks for human strength and speed are so much higher, so it feels consistent for guts to be how he is, and his tactics, once again while extreme, feel reasonable, he has to be resourceful, ruthless, smart, lucky, everything, the choreography keeps you believing he's just a man in this world, in our world yeah, he'd be super human, but in his world, he's human, right down to the bone
Regardless the injuries are treated seriously in these series, it makes you care for the characters, they aren't shonens, your character isn't safe, they suffer losses, they lose parts of themselves, make sacrifices, the authors have this ability to make the the characters bodies feel physical, not something that keeps going cuz the plot says so, something ive gone to great extent to wanna replicate in my works
The Star Wars example kind of bugged me. Maybe I misunderstanding what you are saying, but their is a fairly clear logic that comes across,
Ben disappeared when stabbed, because he is an enlightened space wizard who understands things better than Vader and Luke, this seemed to be clearly intended to be weird thing which was not normal.
Second Lightsaber blows stuck different things each time, in Vader case he got armor, and we see him barehanded block a blaster bolt, no shock a lightsaber merely hurt him. In Luke case getting a hand cut off is different than being cut in half.
Yea the examples given bugged me too like good point bad execution type thing
the idea is that her rage pushes her through the whole thing, thats why the injuries become an issue once she is done
Adrenaline push sort of thing
That's not compelling enough tho. Injuries are supposed to atleast slow you down and if written well are supposed to add up to something. Blue eye samurai, as good of a show it is, is poorly written in a lot of places.
@@Ingydar_ nah
Yeah I think pretty much everyone got that but the fact that she just walks off a FATAL wound in ep 5 just takes you out of the story. I found the entire series pretty damn disappointing
@@simondigruber2111 , One Piece treats the issues of battle damage better than Blue Eyed Samurai does.
The movie with the most brutal injuries that have the least impact that I have ever seen was Scream 6.
The movie starts out taking itself quite seriously and the consequences of injuries were for the most part fine and didn't break the immersion, but the final act was so bloody and brutal, yet it never had any consequences for the characters, that it basically switched genre from whodunnit-slasher to supernatural comedy. I don't think I've ever before seen an unintentional grnre swap. To this day I still can't tell if it's by accident or design.
Sounds like quite a roller coaster of a movie and very much sounds like it suits the topic of the video based on what you've told me.
Considering that it was a Scream movie, I think it was 100% intentional.
As interesting as the first video. As an indie writer, both of your videos helped me put words on some things I felt instinctively but couldn't explain clearly while writing my book. Great video!
Thank you, and I'm glad to have helped give you some perspective for your own writing journey! Best of luck with the book!
31:23 i love the phrase "it wasnt time who did it" it's so beatiful
i wonder how your take would be on Raiden from MGSRR when the katana wound he suffers actually makes him stronger story and gameplay wise. He actually gets mortal injuries at the beginning and ending and they mean different things, there is also a funny injury gag about his chin.
11:33 obi wan willingly becomes a force ghost and becomes one with the force. Vader has heavily plated armor while luke has basically a shirt on
Not many channels are able to keep my adhd self fascinated/focused for more than 10-12 minutes in a video, this one has from the get-go had me watch both published videos back to back.
Fantastic work & analysis! This channel is going to go far. I would not be surprised at all to see it grow to 100k+ viewers within a few months with this kind of work.
Wonderful essay! I appreciated your balance of memes with citations, and visual demonstrations with jokes. And thanks for qualifying that at the end of the day, TLOU is trying to be intensely grounded, while BES uses the viscerality of its action for more short-term gratification. (The creators cited action movies as their main inspiration, so it's likely they're sticking to those 'rules' and use them to further Mizu's intensity, rather than provide hurdles on their own, since the injuries themselves are less psychologically-charged than what causes Mizu to brush them off.)
Wow, you are picking really great topics for your first videos!
Thank you! I've been a bit worried that the people who were interested in my first video would only be want stuff related specifically to the fantasy genre or the medieval era, so hearing that someone finds both topics interesting is reassuring! After all, I don't have a huge sample size of (my own) videos to analyze, so I'm forced to test the waters to see what people are really interested in.
At least for me, both your medival stasis video and this one cover topics where, when I am reading the title, I think "yeah, why is that the case?".
To me, both videos are about somewhat obscure questions/aspects of storytelling, that really get my brain going, and I think that's why they chatch me.
Good luck on the testing and may the youtube-algorithm be with you!
I'm so glad someone is talking about this. I'm sure plenty of people can enjoy this show despite it's flaws but for me personally, I could not care less about any fight scene, since near-mortal injuries are irrelevant. They made it clear there's no stakes, Mizu's opponents may aswell be trying to hit her with a pool noodle.
As someone who doesn’t even care for Star Wars, I will say this:
Darth Vader is wearing some kind of armor while Obi Wan and Luke are not.
The explosions though. My biggest injury pet peeve: When an explosion happens, the hero is lifted off their feet and thrown across the room, and then gets up and walks away. If you're thrown off your feet by the concussive force of an explosion, your bones are broken and your organs are pulped. That's fatal every time.
11:12 Little correction :
Vader didn't killed Obi-Wan, per'se.
Obi-Wan turned into Force Spirit, moment before being hit.
It was like quitting a multiplayer game.
+
Vader is mostly machine, so its rather obvious conclusion that he got the Grievous' idea, and made himself body made out of plasma resistant materials.
Vader didn't participate whatsoever in the initial design of his suit, in fact his suit was designed by palpatine to be as uncomfortable and unhelpful as possible, Vader then started tweaking and tweaking and tweaking and tweaking to try and make it somewhat useful. Having said that we do know that most of it is made out of armor weave, which is supposed to have some chance in hell of surviving a blaster bolt, and at least one of his gloves is completely immune to blasters and lightsabers
Comparing Obi-Wan's death to quitting a multiplayer match killed me
I get it with adrenaline and all, but that gash is deadly without immediate medical attention
I have to quickly say that Joel moving around and actually being able to fight people after *just* waking up from a *severe* stab wound was not just incredibly unrealistic, but downright superhuman. I think it was Doctor Mike that analyzed that scene.
I think a sister issue is the "disabled person gets super powers that completely negates their disability" trope. Disabled people (like myself) crave representation, but when we get it the character is either the villain or their not actually disabled because of blank power. Or if the disability is subtle and not specifically said, no one thinks of them as disabled
Even smaller disabilities like someone who wears an eye patch falls into this. They somehow retain perfect depth perception and their field of vision being completely fine.
One example of this trope being Baiken from Guilty Gear, she's a samurai that has one arm and one eye, and even tho design wise it's absolute peak, the fact that her very visible disabilities have zero purpose other than to look badass is something I never liked all too much.
That was one reason why I didn't enjoy Shazam as much as I would have otherwise. Of course, it's a silly movie and I wouldn't say it's a cinematic masterpiece anyways, but I don't think they handled Freddy Freeman in a way that felt respectful, especially considering the comic book source of his disability.
@gibleyman I mean, Guilty Gear is a fighting game, I'm not really sure how they'd be able to represent either disability without fundamentally breaking the game. It would be really cool though!
This goes the same for mental stuff as well. Like, I have autism and ADHD and I'm absolutely sick of it being either turned into "incompetent character" or "super genius who doesn't understand social cues and is likely a robot/alien".
@@floppavevo5920 I'm speaking more about the story and such but yea that is a good counter point.
I could not enjoy the last John Wick movie at all as I was unable to disable my brain and accept all the body shattering injuries he sustained without being K.O'd
Oof, I've only seen the first three so far, but this doesn't bode well for whenever I get around to watching the fourth one. Suspension of disbelief is a powerful thing, but even so it has its limits.
I mean, the endings seems to have them matter.
John Wick is a series I desperately wish had never had a sequel. The first film is so interesting and full of mystery that the following three films simply destroy.
I’m a firm believer that, regardless of the excellent cinematography and locations, ONLY the first film should be acknowledged.
I've only ever seen the first John Wick, and it wasn't good enough to want to see any later ones anyway.
NO
I'm surprised you didn't mention Mizu and Taigen surviving (apparently without long-term consequence) their jump from the top floor of the castle. That was 100+ feet onto sea ice nearly a foot thick. That's death, not a KO.
Injuries that don't affect the characters is one of my biggest pet peeves. It breaks immersion and I keep trying to explain to myself how the character is overcoming the injury. I just zone out. Blue Eyed Samurai is an awesome show but not recognizing the injuries bothers me.
This video has reminded me of the Manga Vagabond where I think injuries are done rather well, for instance a character is cut in the calf during a fight and they're left nearly unable to walk and stuck using a walking stick for years after the fight
I know I should really finish the video before commenting but man, the way you're describing the issue episode 6 of Blue Eye Samurai ironically makes me remember why I love the show and that episode in particular so much. I honestly think the injuries and how they get brushed off makes the whole episode all the more amazing and powerful. It's impossible to ignore the gravity of the wounds in the episode, so I think the creators were very aware of what they were doing. It was so highly unrealistic, but in my opinion in the best possible way. Made the episode something I've rarely if ever seen before from a story and the vengeful determination was captured so well due to how much it ignored reality
You have a good eye for video topics. I clicked on this video on the home page without recognizing it was you. Despite being subscribed to you after your last video. Will look forward to you next work
That's great to hear! It's hard to know what kind of topics people are interested in when you're just starting out, so getting some positive feedback on that is a bit of a relief.
Crazy how adrenaline can make you ignore the fact your shoulder is literally chopped off and you're stabbed in the stomach twenty times.
Dresden files is a great example of injuries being dealt with well. Our protagonist receives a very severe burn to one of his hands and this burn is a lasting injury that he actually has to go to physical therapy for and takes several books to fully heal and only heals with the aid of some magics as well.
What bugs me is when the writers acknowledge injury but never let the character internalize it or have it effect their choices.
The injury doesn't cause them to be super careful, it doesn't make them delirious, it doesn't have them retreat, and it doesn't affect how they treat their teammates in their state of heightened adrenaline and cortisol. When I got myself flung off a horse, I landed on my chest and my legs went over my head. It didn't hurt, it was only like a 5 foot drop and my tits broke my fall yet, it changed the choices i made when I got back on. The headache from not landing right, the anxiety that it would happen again, the stiffness in my back, etc, etc, all made me a worse rider and increased the chances of me getting hurt again.
All this and the accident didn't even hurt.
2:50 it took me way to long to realize this shot wasnt animated
I did think that when watching blue eyed samurai recently... everytime I looked over to my 2nd screen during fight scenes, she got injured, but nothing ever lasted.
Which probably explains why I just stopped caring at some point and just fully zoned out of all of the action.
As a writer I really needed a video like this, one of the main turning points for a character of mine is an injury and that's always how it's been, no way around it, but it's been hard to make it fit with everything else that's developed around it
Injuries in stories always have been a pet peeve of mine. I can eye-roll in almost every show, movie, or book with how improperly handled they often are. It often strikes me that people think that adrenaline makes you invulnerable, when it only pushes the pain back.
If you get a deep cut on your arm, good luck moving it when the muscle is barely sticking together. Concussions are also absolutely debilitating. You get a ateong concussion, and your brain just isn't brainig anymore, sorry.
I write as a hobby, and my favorite thing in action scenes is making it poignant how much injuries impact abilities. A charcter may have quick ways to heal now, but past injuries bother them, and new ones are critical until the helaing can get done. You don't think cuts are that bad until your fingers ache in cold weather or before rainfall.
There is appropriate suspension of disbelief for those things, of course, yet I can't help but be exasperated when the writers treat broken bones like a fashion choice for a character, instead of a possible instant defeat. Fights are quick and brutal, and if they aren't, you can see how the fighters get worn down, so please show it.
Seems like it was a stylistic choice in Blue Eye Samurai. Though admittedly one I really didn't like and that took me out of the story quite a bit
Yeah I don't doubt that it was intentional. It definitely messes with the suspension of disbelief, especially if you're not used to that kind of injuries being thrown around so frivolously, but I found that it was best to just roll my eyes and enjoy the rest of the show anyway.
11:12 Well, there are in-universe reasons for each of these. Obi-Wan Kenobi gave himself up to the force, in order to become a force ghost. (Yoda does the same thing in Return of the Jedi). Vader has a lightsaber-resistant suit. He can survive a glancing blow from one. On the other hand, Luke's wrist was just exposed skin. A lightsaber has no trouble cutting through flesh.
I'm reminded of an episode in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine, where a character who got shot and as a result has lost his leg comes back from the hospital where he got a new leg (it's sci-fi an all). The whole episode is about him having to deal with the experience of having lost his leg. At one point he watches a Western on a old-school TV (something they usually don't do in that future) and is very confused when he sees the protagonist getting shot but continuing like nothing has happened. It was a good scene.
I think the Raid series is a great example of what you're getting at here where damage and stamina are always considered. The way the homeless assassin is dealt with is probably the best example of it. A coup is happening within a crime family, and the assassin is one of the gangs biggest threats, so instead of attacking him head on, they lure him into a trap. In that trap he fights around 15 henchmen, and even though he beats them all, he's heavily wounded and thoroughly exhausted.. and *then* he has to face the main villians, who easily dispatch him. It was such a smart way to remove a character they've established with this kind of "invincible" reputation without it feeling cheap. It's like, "yeah, he's a badass that could 1v1 or 1v2 or even 1v3 anyone in this movie... but he cant 1v20 then 1v3 them."
I really like how Breaking Bad did it. Hank's injuries during his fight against the Salamanca twins take a whole season to fully heal and we see him going through the treatment for that, as well as his depression for being put in his most vulnerable state yet
The Star Wars example did have logic to it. Kenobi clearly disappeared due to a force thing. Like how he said "cut me down and I'll be more powerful than you can imagine", and he later showed up as a ghost, not unable to be kept away from Luke and able to keep mentoring him.
Darth Vader basically took blaster bolts to the hand, and assuming Han wasn't just aiming at his hand, redirecting the bolts. It isn't too hard to think this super powerful sith lord who's already shown impossible feats with energy weapons could deal with that.
Over all agree with your point in the video though. Just, so long as the characters being superhuman isn't a rule in the setting, and they stick to that rule (even selectively as long as it's actually due to some nuance in the rules and not just the writer's convenience).
11:56 - There are explanations for all 2 to 3 of those. Obi Wan vanishes because he becomes a force ghost. Luke’s strike hits Vader’s ARMOR, and Vader’s strike cuts through Luke’s unarmored wrist.
I haven't even seen the Last of Us, but hearing Joel call her babygirl brought me to tears. Great video
I'm so glad someone talked about this. The blasé-ness of the injuries in the later half of Blue Eye Samurai kept me from loving the show. I was already suspending my disbelief for the minor and glancing injuries Mizu and co. had sustained, because the show's set in 17th century Japan, and any one of those wounds would realistically lead to an inevitable infection and death. But I was fine with that, because it's cool, and it adds stakes.
I was also fine with Mizu fighting and winning against an army of dudes after getting her intestines purée'd, because I'm willing to believe she's full of enough adrenaline, rage, and spite to somehow pull that off.
But Mizu somehow running through the whole castle gauntlet, which involved her almost drowning in freezing water, getting impaled through the foot, fighting a gang of men, fighting a room of monkeys, getting caught in an explosion, falling through the floor, fighting the Mountain, getting caught in a second closer explosion, fighting Fowler, _and_ jumping from the top of the castle into freezing water, and being able to walk after that is where I draw the line. No amount of adrenaline, rage, or spite would give anyone the ability to _stand_ after going through everything before fighting the Mountain, let alone climb a castle while carrying a man on your back after just surviving the Mountain and _another_ explosion. I really dislike the 'jumping from the castle into the water' bit, because there is no way in hell that someone could convince me that she or Taigen could have survived that. They'd have died on impact
Sometimes the inconsistency or lack of realism doesn't matter when it's just a good and well-written story.
Earned my like and sub. Nice essay. :)
For my part, I always find this topic relevant in discussion Health in DnD or other TTRPG. People have this idea that being hit by an attack and losing HP means being injured. This becomes a break in immersion if a simple one hour break can remove said injury as you regain HP.
My answer to this situation is that HP does not equal Health but Hit Points. How much a character can take before going down, like Drake's Health in Uncharted. When Drake's HP reaches 0, he is actually shot for the first time and dies. His lucks runs out.
Therefore, HP can be visualised in many ways. Being nimble enough to dodge but draining your internal stamina. Tough enough to simply take the hit like Mizu but still able to move forward. Simple luck that the blade hits your armor but the sheer force makes you stumble for a second.
The second part of this is how recovery works. How easily could wounds be mended and by which way? How is the narrative aspect of recovery handled in comparison to mechanics? Some might simply sleep of an axe wound to the shoulder and ignore that part. Others simply imply use of medicine and bandages, the sdme way equipment maintanence is implied. If magic healers are in involved, things becomes way easier to handwave.
And some DnD tables or even other systems have grittier rules where being injured always gives a character penalties until recovered. Meticulous system to track injuries are implemented because we associate being hit with an action hero being hit. But we want to keep our immersion intact, thus do not simply recover wounds easily
Wounds and recovery in media are certainly interesting.
Personally, when I play D&D, I like to think of hp mainly as a mix of endurance and minor scrapes. Of course, if you take a massive hit that eats up half your hit points, that might be a real injury (albeit not lethal), but most parties also have some form of magical healing at their disposal anyway, so that can always be ruled as something that deals with the worst of the wounds the characters sustain. There's also the older editions of the game, of course, where long rests would take weeks to complete, so naturally you'd have more leeway to properly hurt the characters without completely ruining immersion. And regarding your video game take, I definitely think that most of the gameplay is "non-canon" in regards such as damage. At the end of the day, it's just a mechanic to create a challenge and not really something which is a part of the narrative.
@@PerseusGrim Part of the issue with that, is their are some cases where it hard to explain injures of working that way, for example healing fixes it quickly, objects have hitpoints, sneak attacks only do extra damage If you have skill, you take hit point loss from environmental hazards and so on.
However hit points only tend to get high in number when one is past level six, at which point one doing so much superhuman stuff it makes sense in a way. Why can your character survive being stabbed dozen times, prehaps the same reason you character just clubbed a hill giant to death while a annoying wizard keeps on summing bears on your head,
HP has usually been described as luck and minor scrapes, in my experience, but if we're gonna be real about it the reason why characters have HP that is depleted per attack in a TTRPG such as DnD is because that's the core game mechanic to facilitate player characters getting into multiple fights in a row and the feeling of being larger than life. At its core HP is first and foremost a gameplay mechanic; any narrative rationale is applied post-hoc. That is why TTRPGs that want to evoke the feeling of wounds being serious with narrative consequences will design their combat system-or lack thereof-with this specific intent and will most likely forgo using HP in the first place. It's easy to get caught up in how realistic combat is in a TTRPG or whether or not it breaks immersion and forget that you're playing a game that needs to function as a game. This, incidentally, is why homebrew injury systems slapped onto DnD for the sake of realism end up sucking because they are completely at odds with how the rest of the game functions and what actions it encourages. You are better off playing a system where that concept is baked into the game from the ground up.
I know this is getting a bit off the topic of non-interactive fiction, but I wanted to stress this point since I have seen it come up time and again in discussions of DnD and HP as a mechanic in TTRPG game design-and, admittedly I have a bit of a bug up my ass about it.
@@starmantheta2028 I feel like that does not work that well in practice. At low levels the amount of injuries to take someone out is easily survivable, their is a the classic commoners getting murdered by angry house cats, humans have also survived stuff like being shot many times, getting a metal rod through the brain, terminal velocity falls. Also some stuff is just less deadly than you expect, for example, I remember hearing machete attacks are less deadly than you might think because it actually hard to get a good deep cut on a moving squishy live target.
Basically at low levels the notion at the person is keeping going past their injures on grit and adrenaline is plausible.
Meanwhile at high levels, you can often get into scenarios where their is no plausible way to dodge the attack, stuff like being submerged in lava, getting entangled than hit by a troll club repeatedly. At the same time at those high levels, one is doing superhuman stuff often enough that it kind of makes sense in a mythological hero kind of way.
Also this leaves a major question how AC factors into things, it is kind of weird how dodging and blocking with armor got shoved in the same thing. I guess precise well executed blows help bypass/overcome both, but they react very differently to a unwieldy oversized weapon.
Great video I love watching writing tips to help on my own story also really made want to rewatch blue eye and replay last of us
Happy to hear that I could provide some writing advice. I'm finally putting that creative writing degree to use!
The first video longer than 15 minutes that I've been able to sit through in almost a week.
Pathetic
Curing tiktok brain, one person at a time! On a more serious note: I'm glad to hear that I could pique your interest enough to sit through the whole thing!
@@PerseusGrim
It's more that a lot of RUclipsrs are artificially inflating otherwise interesting questions/videos that would realistically take about 10 minutes into these needlessly long 30+ minute videos, so I very rarely click on them these days. Your video had a lot of depth and nuance to cover, so the length is entirely appropriate. I just get really pissy when it's clear that a RUclipsr is just wasting my time!
@@Mage_Chartreux That's fair, I know exactly what you're talking about. I usually aim to make shorter videos (I wanted this one to be around 20 minutes originally), but then by the time I'm done covering everything I feel like I need to talk about, I end up with a behemoth of a video on my hands instead. Because of that I always try to cut out as much as possible that isn't absolutely vital, so I'm glad this method seems to pay off.
blue eye samurai doesn't get enough critique. this video is needed!
As much as i personally noticed, it was ridiculous that mizu came back from so many injuries at a pace that would make Wolverine blush, i absolutely love blue-eyed samurai. Just fucking love it. It does so many other things so well.
man that scene always makes me cry when joel comforts elli
8:17 - I hate this so much. It doesn't matter if you're a zombie, Gregor Clegane, or an anime protag having flashbacks of your parents dying in an alley when you were a kid, if a tendon or muscle got severed, if a nerve cannot work due to damage or neurotoxins: You. Are. Not. Moving. That. Bodypart!
The Long Sun novels have a storytelling method that isn’t for everyone, but they use injury to create tension very effectively. The protagonist (a healthy man in his 20s) gets scared in a confrontation halfway through the first book and jumps off a second story balcony to flee. He breaks his ankle in the process, and despite the use of medical futuretech the injury is a recurring problem at least every 2-3 chapters for the remainder of the four book series. It’s not the most consequential in its own right, but when urban warfare breaks out in the later novels it makes the reader acutely afraid of how easily characters could die from their injuries.
I know this video is kind of old but there’s kind of also another reason for this
It is kind of meant to show the enemies aren’t completely and utterly “incompetent”
Sure you can have an action movie where the main character never gets shot by an enemy and always shoot the enemy. But then people are going to complain and go “ every single enemy in this movie is completely incompetent why would we fear them in the slightest”
If the enemy shoots and hits the main character and the main character just moves and shrugs it off like it’s nothing at least the impression we get is “ OK the enemies are not incompetent, but The main character is just built different”
Basically they need the enemies to be “ perceive” as a threats even if The writers “and even the audience” knows the basic lackeys aren’t going to do much. And the only way we can do that is to have them “hit” The main character even if they shrunk off the injury.
One other brilliant example of demonstrating injuries fairly well is Rurouni Kenshin animated series(the on with 96 episodes). Although they sometimes flirted with the concept of how much a person can withstand pain or injuries. Specifically in the case of Shishio Makoto, perhaps they were about to show his will to live. He was undoubtedly epic in many ways.
11:53 OBi let himself be struck and became a force ghost, vaders armor was struck without a lot of power, Vader had a full swing on Luke’s hand
Going back to the Star Wars point you made in the start of the video. I think that the first trilogy, the prequel films and the early star wars series such as clone wars and rebels set some pretty good ground rules for how a lightsaber should work and act. (Maybe with some faults, as you pointed out in the original trilogy as well as in clone wars, looking at you Darth Maul) Lightsabers have come to be seen as glowing sticks of lava, able to melt metal and slice through limbs like butter, one stab has always been enough to kill a person. So when Disney now is treating them like staby glow sticks and not what the fans expect a lightsaber to be, that adds onto the pile of problems that the new star wars series and movies have.
kora having the metal in her , lloyeds broken leg in ninjago , aangs shock pattern on his back ,all great examples of a make character injury
I just watched both your videos and if your first two are this good then im very excited to see what you make next!
Absolutely LOVE the use of Prey's music
I think another factor of Blue Eye Samurai that isn't always considered is how the story feels a bit reminiscent of a Japanese folk tale. This is her story of how she gets revenge for her mother and her life, she's overpowered and has an indomitable will to finish her quest no matter what. Her injuries are huge but I think her fighting like nothing else matters not only adds to her being seen as an Onryo but also clearly showcases her fury and will to continue. She is so determined that she completely disassociates her pain during those fights.
A good depiction of injuries is Fear and Hunger.
I found the treatment of specifucally mizu's injuries to be a part of the fantasy element? Like playing into the whole inhuman revenge death angel fuled by hatred and willpower thing
RUclips recommend me this video and after watching it i went to the channel ready to watch everyother one, only to find out you have only 2 videos 😭😭
Same lmao 😭😭
Your 1st vid popped up in my feed. Loved it and this one. More please.
21:43 the way I started crying because of that analogy 😂😂 too close to home
I think the whole point of Mizus wounds not affecting her is that she’s so full of vengeance and so willing to do whatever it takes to reach her goal.
>”I Love Star Wars”
> Doesn’t know the lore reason Ben disappearing and became a force ghost
>Doesn’t know why vaders armor is so strong
>Doesn’t know how it cut off Luke’s hand
5:36 "realistically you could say she only makes things worse" - Rule number one in first aid with impalings... dont pull it out, stabilize the object and wait for propper care... but yes I too hate when people make unrealistic wounds.. they could have sprained the leg and get the same effect... still would affect her for at least a few months afterwards.
How are you going to have her sprain her ankles in a spike trap.
If someone only gets injured by simply springing their ankles in a spike trap and I’m sorry that is a horrible spike trap. It should either pierce or do nothing at all otherwise what’s the point in having it be spiked
@@empireyouth5791 Pardon me, I should have made it clear that I would have written the injury in a way that it was not a spike trap that made it.
Vagabond has a good example of injury with Musashi getting a potentially “career ending” injury after a long battle and being forced to rethink his path and choices going into the Farm Arc
While I generally agree with your stated thoughts, I do keep remembering how inconsistently I personally respond to injuries. Example: shingles only tickled for me, I've had organs attempt to burst and felt nothing...but if I stub my toe or lightly bump my thigh into a table and experience exquisite pain, bordering on agony. I've also been seriously injured but didn't notice until way later due to adrenaline. So maybe it's sloppy writing, but...maybe it's also partially due to human bodies being ridiculous?
Awesome video! Keep up the good work!
Thank you!
Tripple Deluxe Vlad the Impaler Treatment
While writing a reply to another comment, I came up with a great representation that makes sense for this topic:
Characters should have to push through limits rather than have none.
It's different when you see an injured character being put nearly out of commission who obviously struggles to get back up and keeps fighting through adrenaline. Showing them having difficulty when getting up and adding a bit more weight to their movement is enough to show that they are impacted and yet fighting through it, whereas, you lose immersion and investment when injuries that are supposed to put you on the edge of your seat don't affect the character at all.
Battlestar galactica does this really well imo, even in the very beginning a character named helo has a hole straight through his leg from a piece of shrapnel from a middle going through his ship and puncturing his leg and for a large portion of season 1 he’s always limping whenever we see him walk but oddly enough the show is equally as good about making injuries matter with the titular ship itself the Battlestar Galactica with it visibly accumulating visible damage after every battle. By the end of the series it looks like it’s barley holding together and it’s even a plot point that the ship is falling apart due to lack of repairs and aging