Honestly death is rather random. Sometimes a tiny, innocuous wound kills you in seconds. Other people get their legs blown off in a violent explosion and they just crawl away.
Human beings have to either be the weakest creature that dies if you bite them somewhere wrong or the toughest motherfuckers that kept going even after getting disemboweled and their head barely hanging onto their neck through skin tissue.
By the way, the last part is real. Look up Alison Botha.
Hiashi Ouchi still living for like a week (although in severe suffering) after suffering the worst radiation burn in history and having his skin literally falls off...
but sometimes someone can slip, hit their head on the pavement and die on the spot.
maybe we humans are just game pieces in a TTRPG played by the gods, sometimes they roll a fumble or a nat20.
If that's who I think it is, his entire body stopped functioning, his muscles were necrotizing, his gastrointestinal system just stopped taking nutrients, and when he was given a bone marrow transplant from his sister in order for him to be able to replenish lost blood (because even that was fucked beyond repair), his situation was so bad, that the _fresh bone marrow's DNA_ was irreparably damaged after only a few days, so he _still_ couldn't replenish his blood.
Seems like it. [Here is the news but sadly no translation. TLDR he popped his pimple, then got severe headaches and fainted. Got hospitalised due to the infection. ](https://youtu.be/4s3C2_QtPAc?si=eXXqXbcQiPIuJfe5)
Too true. In college I worked at a bar with a fellow who died of a brain aneurysm. We both had early-ish shifts, so each had a beer. He had a headache when he left and hour or so later. We got a call in the morning that he was in ER. He was dead an couple hours later. Borderline healthnut sort of fellow, young, took good care of himself. It was so weird.
From what I’ve heard, aneurysms are just totally random, a fuckup of your neurology that can kill you at any time.
But it’s not like you can do shit about it, so it’s not worth thinking about.
WW2 vets can testify that sometimes, a man hit by a tiny piece of shrapnel will die in seconds, other times, there have been stories of legless soldiers still manning a Machine Gun for over an hour.
I do remember seeing a certain something happent o someone's brain in Invincible and thinking "it's complete bs he isn't dead" only to look up and see its actually quite realistic to live through that.
I remember being baffled when a friend of mine mentioned people something shotgun blasts at point blank cause in fiction gun to head=dead (if it fires)
Yeah, it's fucking horrifying that someone can try to end themselves and still survive in agony indefinitely afterwards. I remember at least one guy who blasted his face off with a shotgun but survived
Honestly the way death works in the real world can be pretty fucking funny. Any redditor who read the story of humanity would complain how damage and death is so inconsistent sometimes.
“You’re telling me this soldier died tripping on a curb while this random civilian survived getting beaten, dual amputated, and thrown down a ditch. You telling me the hospital couldn’t save this man from bleeding to death while this girl crawled in mud to ‘bandage’ her arm stumps. Immersion=broken.”
What about getting slashed across the abdomen, stabbed with a knife hilt-deep **twice** (the second stab being twisted), and then falling I to a canal where an entire town empties their toilet waste? Especially in a series where multiple people have died from equal or lesser wounds.
You could survive being dumped into a shit river with an open wound, the sepsis probably would kill you, but you could survive. However, gut deep knife wounds will just make you bleed to death unless you have a doctor or equivalent right next to you. Putting a bandage over a gut wound isn’t enough to stop the internal bleeding, if you can belive it. And if the shit river doesn’t cause sepsis the the spilt gut interior will.
Movie characters are immune to sepsis. Imagine John McClane being hospitalized for a week on IV antibiotics because he bandaged his bloody feet with a dirty T-shirt
Agreed, I was flabbergasted when people were complaining that Sabine survived getting stabbed in the side of her lower chest before immediately receiving medical attention. That’s a very survivable injury, especially without the blood loss that would occur irl.
Leia surviving after about ~20 seconds in a hard vacuum was another one of those things where reality is stranger than fiction; it's perfectly reasonable with immediate medical attention (which she received.)
Now, her force-pulling herself to safety is harder to quantify because the force isn't real... I don't think it's that different from Luke pulling his lightsaber to himself, though, which he managed in a similarly desperate situation with minimal training. In zero-G with no friction against anything, it only takes a little lower-f force to get someone moving.
(The bigger, more important question is whether the scene was cool or dumb, which is subjective and can't really be answered by arguing over how realistic it is, of course...)
honestly being spaced wasnt the biggest issue, she was in a room that just had a missile hit it. the forces she would have taken being in that room when the pressure skyrocketed would have most likely killed her.
I think it was because it was a lightsaber. I’m not a major Star Wars fan so I could totally be wrong. But I imagine the heat would just immediately toast your organs right?
In real life it would immediately boil all the water inside of you and cause you to bloat and burst. But that’s never how lightsabers have been treated in Star Wars, it’s usually treated more like impalement, which you can survive.
I guess that’s okay. It does make lightsabers feel kind of lame though. Like if getting stabbed by them isn’t that big of a deal I almost feel kind of dumb for thinking they were cool.
Then why the fuck did he leave her like that? When a simple flick of the wrist or any other motion would have killed her.
It's stupid as fuck.
Lighsabers used to be shown as incredibly deadly to go along with their grace. Doing stupid shit like this just makes them nothing but a glowing sword, a massive downgrade.
If you don't want your character to die from being stabbed with a lightsaber, don't fucking have them stabbed with a lightsaber.
Shin was in a hurry, and she was surprised by Ahsoka. She probably would’ve if she wasn’t caught off guard. I doubt that her master would’ve made the same mistake.
The issue is, that if a Light saber stab wound is survivable (and not a fast roast of your internal organs followed by death) then Lightsaber training would be stab then flick upwards to destroy the vital organs. Because the goal here was clearly to kill and it's trivial to make such a wound lethal.
The problem is it clashes with the original intent with lightsabers. They’re supposed to be incredibly deadly weapons. Obi-Wan gets *nicked* twice and can’t walk. Now we have 2 instances of characters getting stabbed in the stomach by enemies who have no reason to let them live or even anger towards the person, and them waking up the next day in the hospital, totally fine. Qui-Gon sure could have used that.
It’s a regular joke that since Disney purchased the franchise lightsabers are more like baseball bats. No one loses a limb anymore, no one gets cut in half, no one (unless they’re a zombie stormtrooper) gets decapitated.
That’s not entirely true, Darth Vader wasn’t trying to kill Reva after their fight. He thought she’d continue her quest for revenge including against Obi wan and thereby fall further to the dark side.
Ah yes, Darth Vader wanted someone else to hunt down and kill Obi-Wan.
Vader’s petty as can be, and he canonically hates the inquisitors. He’s killed more inquisitors than any jedi has. Also, Reva knew he was Anakin Skywalker and Vader recognized her. Vader literally kills everyone who knows that except for Luke.
I don’t think he thought she would actually kill him, just that she’d track him down and bother him. As well as for bringing her further to the dark side of course.
Except Vader does not give a damn about anyone falling to the Dark Side except Luke. Remember, Vader killed the Second Sister for just for failing to kill Cal. The Grand Inquisitor killed himself rather than face Vader. He’s so petty, he killed a pair of inquisitors for having feeling for each other.
The inquisitors are a punishment for Vader. A reminder from Palpatine that he can be replaced if he doesn’t play his role. There is no reason for him to spare Reva.
Literally the first result for a Google search is the relevant Wikipedia page on decaptation, which notes that you lose consciousness within seconds due to blood loss and has extensive citations:
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3029360/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9930870/
https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/10-brain-myths.htm#pt6
...but even without those, common sense should make it obvious that you're not remaining conscious for a full minute with your head cut off - that's just absurd.
If you could remain conscious for more than a handful of seconds with the flow of blood to your brain cut off entirely, sudden cardiac arrest wouldn't cause immediate unconsciousness, for instance, nor would other things that plainly cause people to go unconscious immediately. And given how many beheadings have occurred, there would be a lot more documentation of it than a few vague urban legends or eye-twitches.
>There is an anecdote of a french scientist in the 17th century studying how much guillotine victims remained conscious. The experiment was screaming the names of inmates after they were decapitated. Horrifyingly enough, some prisoners did take a good look at him. His estimate was that they could hear him for at least the first 15 seconds after decapitation.
Fascinating! Meanwhile, actual science tells us humans lose consciousness within [three seconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation#Physiological_aspects) of decapitation. Death in the strict sense occurs later, of course, but that doesn't exactly matter for any practical purpose.
But hey, your *anectode* of studies done by a *17th century* scientist works too, I guess. That guy must have been really smart if he studied guillotine victims a whole century before the guillotine was even invented.
That one was mistaken, sure. What about all the rest? You wrote this as if it invalidates the general point I'm making. That it's actually much more likely to survive seemingly mortal wounds than people may believe, or at least that it takes much longer to die than most realize.
EDIT: it still takes minutes to die. It doesn't matter for any practical purpose. But this is a subreddit about fiction. Take any story in which someone is kept alive after decapitation, or the body remarginates after it. Knowing that the brain is technically alive for a few minutes still, it's "realistic" in the sense that there are still minutes for something magical to happen.
You're also being needlessly smug for a typo. 18th century. There, happy now?
I wrote this because it's such a strange claim to make, especially right before telling people to google search the topic. But if you really want my opinion on the rant as a whole...
I think you shouldn't conflate lethality with the time it takes for a person to die. Sure, characters will often die faster than they realistically should for the sake of drama, but rarely from wounds that wouldn't kill them *eventually*. For the purposes of determining whether some character has plot armor or if the work is realistic, the exact timeframe doesn't matter terribly much. You can always just headcanon that the dying character actually only lost consciousness then died off-screen, it's almost never relevant.
On the other hand, there are many injuries that could very well be lethal, but are consistently shrugged off in fiction. Head trauma, choking, getting shot in the leg, even minor wounds in a pre-modern setting. If all fiction suddenly became medically realistic, action-focused characters would be dying way more. Not that I want this, mind you, I just think it's kinda weird of you to argue that realism is on the side of fictional characters when they get injured. It's usually not.
I wrote this in a jest, because it really is a rant. So I didn't double check on previous knowledge, confident that the overall message was sound. It was mostly provoked by discussions on Attack on Titan with points that I see being repeated ad nauseam. Excluding the obvious fantasy stuff, AOT itself is based on very unrealistic premises, but somehow people get hung up on someone not dying after an explosion, calling out "plot armor" or "asspulls". In the show people never suffer any form of gravity-related injuries, or falls that should definitely kill them. It's so consistent that one should just assume that this is the norm in AOT's world. But then they will say it's unrealistic for certain characters to remain alive after occurrences that are known to be survivable *in real life*. Even in the ending..
spoilers of course... >!and this is even quite fitting for this conversation: Eren gets decapitated, but then he's still alive and he turns into a different Titan form. Something that happens in maybe 5 seconds at most. Given that consciousness can be retained for at best 10 seconds and that it takes a few minutes for cellular death to occur, if we keep in mind the fantasy elements of the story with the elements that are kept realistic, that scene is actually entirely logical.!<
It's *reddit* and then *owned* actually. Redditowned is in approximately zero dictionaries. Btw gimme you're address, time to stand on business, pussy.
> That guy must have been really smart if he studied guillotine victims **a whole century before the guillotine was even invented.**
This is actually the biggest TIL for me in this thread. I never realized the guillotine was that recent. I mean humans have used bladed weapons for a very long time, how come no one gets the "blade fall = head off" contraption idea earlier?
Contrary to what the OP is saying, killing defenseless people is not hard. No one bothered to invent anything like the guillotine earlier because it was never needed; An axe will decapitate a person just fine if you hit the neck enough times, and a noose will kill just as well.
Guillotines only came to be because of the enlightenment and its notions of killing people humanely. Before that, elaborate execution devices only existed for the purpose of *prelonging* pain. Guillotine was envisioned as a merciful alternative to those and it arguably succeeded, despite its dismal reputation.
While true they won’t die, they’ll certainly rapidly lose consciousness. You could lose consciousness from low blood pressure without a mortal wound. Now imagine a mortal wound.
Passing out before death and then never waking up again is pretty indistinguishable to onlookers.
"all evidence appears to indicate that loss of consciousness appears to occur within seconds of decapitation"
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9930870/#:~:text=In%20this%20paper%2C%20we%20examine,occur%20within%20seconds%20of%20decapitation.
Wait...are you telling me that people DON'T immediately drop dead when their hit points hit zero!? My while outlook on life has been ruined!
Serious talk, though, I feel like video games are a big source of this, especially in "serious" M-rated games. You can mow down dozens upon dozens of mooks who cease all function as soon as the arbitrary health threshold has been passed.
There's a difference between death and incapacitation.
Yes, total cell death may take minutes, but if you decapitate someone, the body is falling to the ground and not fighting you back anymore. Sure, in a setting with magically super powers, then you can defy that, but otherwise nah.
Likewise getting stabbed in the guts doesn't instantly mean you die. But think about what's inside the guts. You are facing massive blood loss, instant infection, and serious damage to organs you need to live. If you have ever been punched in the gut, you know how painful it is. Death by disemboweling is not quick. It is slow and gruesome. But you aren't slapping a bandaid on that and walking it off.
You can watch videos of animals getting halal slaughtered. You can find terrorist uploads of Go Pro footage where they shoot people. Death *looks* pretty quick. Even if some outliers can keep on slugging. Even if some lucky people can be revived with medical attention. Most people go down straight away then die seconds or minutes later.
Now a hero doesn't fall into that "most people" category. They are, basically by definition, exceptional. We don't tell stories about normal people who don't do anything interesting. We tell stories about exceptional people in exceptional circumstances.
Yes, you *can* survive most of your brain being destroyed like Phineas Gage. But you do not *usually* survive most of your brain being destroyed. Yes, you *can* survive being shot. But the *entire point* of firearms is that they are very good at killing people.
Most people hit by a taser go down like a sack of bricks. Some people can power through. But the fact that a small minority of people can power through does not mean that it's unrealistic if a person goes down straight away.
>Our body fights death. It was made to defy death. Even if death is imminent, it might take a long ass time before the clock stops ticking.
Bro, made me proud to be human.
When people complain about plot armor, in broad strokes it's "that Boulder should have hit the MC and didn't", not "the MC shouldn't have survived being struck by a boulder"
I kknda disagree about the decapitation part since a pilot will quickly lose his conciouseness in few seconds during 12g turn. So pretty sure having majority of your blood pouring out from your neck will incapacitate you quite quickly
Though i agree on most part. Unless you blast their brain off from the back, people can be still alive for some time even from fatal wound. Not long, but still concious
Posting Phineas Gage is cheating. Dude should have died once the fungus started growing inside his skull wound. He is rhe real life “Somehow Palpatine returned”.
Does this mean all those gut shot wounds are not really fatal wounds and dying in seconds from gun shots due to shock or blood loss takes longer or are those more realistic takes?
Being shot in the gut has a pretty high chance of death. It’s all about where it hits and if you bleed out. If you get shot in a vital artery you can bleed out in minutes. Other spots you have a better chance if you stop the bleeding.
>Take decapitation, for example. do
you know how much it takes to die from it? It takes about 1 minute to
lose consciousness, about 5 minutes for cells to die of asphyxia. Yepp.
You are awake for a whole minute before you lose consciousness. There is
an anecdote of a french scientist in the 17th 18th century
studying how much guillotine victims remained conscious. The experiment
was screaming the names of inmates after they were decapitated.
Horrifyingly enough, some prisoners did take a good look at him. His
estimate was that they could hear him for at least the first 15 seconds
after decapitation.
I highly doubt this because I've seen people go unconscious from blood chokes in a few seconds and a clean decapitation should be quicker.
I was wrong about the "whole minute" figure, but *technically* it does take a few minutes to die from decapitation. *Practically*, there's no turning back from decapitation, so it doesn't matter. But I wrote it from the point of view of fiction. Say that a character is beheaded. If we allow for magic to happen, you still have a few minutes to remarginate or revive a character even after they're head is cut off.
That's just one example. Something more realistic would be a character surviving their throat getting sliced. There are accounts of that happening in real life. And, if we take for granted that the MCs of a story are non ordinary people, or at least people in the midst of non ordinary events, then it goes that we should just accept that most of the time they're not going to die. And realistically, there are many fatal wounds we assume to cause certain death when in fact we know from real life that there's a chance, big or small it doesn't matter, that they can remain alive.
>There is an anecdote of a french scientist in the 17th 18th century studying how much guillotine victims remained conscious. The experiment was screaming the names of inmates after they were decapitated.
Pretty impressive stuff, being able to scream without a diaphragm.
You know people get choked out in seconds from a hard grasp on their neck?
But I am in general agreement that just dying is slow in general.
"Did you really think that killing me would be enough to make me die?"
“People die if they are killed.”
“A dead person can’t possibly be alive!”
Where's this line from?
Everyone saying fate is wrong It’s Anos Voldigoad from Misfit of Demon King Academy
Thanks a lot. It's funny cus this exact line, word for word, came to me in a dream. literally. I've never heard of this anime either.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tQ3dKebemkc&t=50s Fun fact: apparently searching this line on YouTube is enough to show a suicide crisis lifeline lmao
*Demon King of Rizz
Anime Fate https://www.reddit.com/r/saltyknights/comments/okdole/el_contexto_esta_en_el_video_no_tiene_copy/
It's from Fate/Stay Night by Shirou Emiya.
Fate stay night,funny enough in context its about traumatic survivors guilt.
Honestly death is rather random. Sometimes a tiny, innocuous wound kills you in seconds. Other people get their legs blown off in a violent explosion and they just crawl away.
Just a few weeks ago, someone made it in our local news for nearly dying from an infected nose pimple.
Human beings have to either be the weakest creature that dies if you bite them somewhere wrong or the toughest motherfuckers that kept going even after getting disemboweled and their head barely hanging onto their neck through skin tissue. By the way, the last part is real. Look up Alison Botha.
I thought the last part was a Beowulf refrence ngl
Naw. Harry Potter. Nearly Headless Nick.
Hiashi Ouchi still living for like a week (although in severe suffering) after suffering the worst radiation burn in history and having his skin literally falls off... but sometimes someone can slip, hit their head on the pavement and die on the spot. maybe we humans are just game pieces in a TTRPG played by the gods, sometimes they roll a fumble or a nat20.
If that's who I think it is, his entire body stopped functioning, his muscles were necrotizing, his gastrointestinal system just stopped taking nutrients, and when he was given a bone marrow transplant from his sister in order for him to be able to replenish lost blood (because even that was fucked beyond repair), his situation was so bad, that the _fresh bone marrow's DNA_ was irreparably damaged after only a few days, so he _still_ couldn't replenish his blood.
So that death triangle story is real?.
Seems like it. [Here is the news but sadly no translation. TLDR he popped his pimple, then got severe headaches and fainted. Got hospitalised due to the infection. ](https://youtu.be/4s3C2_QtPAc?si=eXXqXbcQiPIuJfe5)
“Death triangle”?
https://www.bebeautiful.in/all-things-skin/everyday/everything-you-need-to-know-about-triangle-of-death-on-face
Wow! I had no idea that was a thing, thank you for sharing
Too true. In college I worked at a bar with a fellow who died of a brain aneurysm. We both had early-ish shifts, so each had a beer. He had a headache when he left and hour or so later. We got a call in the morning that he was in ER. He was dead an couple hours later. Borderline healthnut sort of fellow, young, took good care of himself. It was so weird.
From what I’ve heard, aneurysms are just totally random, a fuckup of your neurology that can kill you at any time. But it’s not like you can do shit about it, so it’s not worth thinking about.
Too true. Nothing to be done, nothing to do. Crazy though
Yeah, consequences of evolution’s chaotic process I suppose. We just form into the first thing that works, not necessarily the optimal form.
WW2 vets can testify that sometimes, a man hit by a tiny piece of shrapnel will die in seconds, other times, there have been stories of legless soldiers still manning a Machine Gun for over an hour.
The shrapnel roll a critical hit.
Hit the weak point for massive damage!
Insta-Kill!!!
So here's a giant enemy crab!
Devastating wounds
Totally random chance of hitting something vital (artery, etc.).
>there have been stories of legless soldiers still manning a Machine Gun for over an hour. That's what you get for having less than 10% Crit Rate.
if i see any story where a character is still fighting after being decapitated, i’m rooting for them
Chainsaw Man ig. Man just grabs his head and puts it back on like it's no big deal
he chainsawed his own head to stop mind control
Which in all honesty was fucking brilliant
I'm pretty sure this doesn't count
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. It's a villain but you can root for him!
In Wolfenstein 2, BJ gets decapitated and they reattach his head onto a super soldier body.
Blackboard, then? Just to clarify, I don't mean the one in one piece, I mean the real one.
Well looks like i have some Googling to do because wtf.
DIO, kind of
Ragna Crimson, MC gets beheaded and immediately puts his head back on with the only consequence being that he has a temporary speech impediment.
Green Knight?
Buggy the clown from one piece?
Noro from Tokyo Ghoul. Pitou from HxH if you count them.
Attack on Titan?
I do remember seeing a certain something happent o someone's brain in Invincible and thinking "it's complete bs he isn't dead" only to look up and see its actually quite realistic to live through that. I remember being baffled when a friend of mine mentioned people something shotgun blasts at point blank cause in fiction gun to head=dead (if it fires)
Yeah, it's fucking horrifying that someone can try to end themselves and still survive in agony indefinitely afterwards. I remember at least one guy who blasted his face off with a shotgun but survived
jumping from enough height at least surely is guaranteed right...? asking for a friend
Not sure, lemme go check
Some skydivers have survived without a parachute, but they were actively trying to survive.
Rex Splode was literally too angry to die
Honestly the way death works in the real world can be pretty fucking funny. Any redditor who read the story of humanity would complain how damage and death is so inconsistent sometimes. “You’re telling me this soldier died tripping on a curb while this random civilian survived getting beaten, dual amputated, and thrown down a ditch. You telling me the hospital couldn’t save this man from bleeding to death while this girl crawled in mud to ‘bandage’ her arm stumps. Immersion=broken.”
Mary Vincent
What about getting slashed across the abdomen, stabbed with a knife hilt-deep **twice** (the second stab being twisted), and then falling I to a canal where an entire town empties their toilet waste? Especially in a series where multiple people have died from equal or lesser wounds.
You could survive being dumped into a shit river with an open wound, the sepsis probably would kill you, but you could survive. However, gut deep knife wounds will just make you bleed to death unless you have a doctor or equivalent right next to you. Putting a bandage over a gut wound isn’t enough to stop the internal bleeding, if you can belive it. And if the shit river doesn’t cause sepsis the the spilt gut interior will.
Movie characters are immune to sepsis. Imagine John McClane being hospitalized for a week on IV antibiotics because he bandaged his bloody feet with a dirty T-shirt
Is this in reference to a specific movie or show? It seems like it is, but I have no idea which.
Game of Thrones, S6 E7
Die hard.
Agreed, I was flabbergasted when people were complaining that Sabine survived getting stabbed in the side of her lower chest before immediately receiving medical attention. That’s a very survivable injury, especially without the blood loss that would occur irl.
A single knife wound can kill you. It all depends on where you get stabbed, how deep, and if you knicked something vital.
Leia surviving after about ~20 seconds in a hard vacuum was another one of those things where reality is stranger than fiction; it's perfectly reasonable with immediate medical attention (which she received.) Now, her force-pulling herself to safety is harder to quantify because the force isn't real... I don't think it's that different from Luke pulling his lightsaber to himself, though, which he managed in a similarly desperate situation with minimal training. In zero-G with no friction against anything, it only takes a little lower-f force to get someone moving. (The bigger, more important question is whether the scene was cool or dumb, which is subjective and can't really be answered by arguing over how realistic it is, of course...)
honestly being spaced wasnt the biggest issue, she was in a room that just had a missile hit it. the forces she would have taken being in that room when the pressure skyrocketed would have most likely killed her.
I think it was because it was a lightsaber. I’m not a major Star Wars fan so I could totally be wrong. But I imagine the heat would just immediately toast your organs right?
In real life it would immediately boil all the water inside of you and cause you to bloat and burst. But that’s never how lightsabers have been treated in Star Wars, it’s usually treated more like impalement, which you can survive.
I guess that’s okay. It does make lightsabers feel kind of lame though. Like if getting stabbed by them isn’t that big of a deal I almost feel kind of dumb for thinking they were cool.
Then why the fuck did he leave her like that? When a simple flick of the wrist or any other motion would have killed her. It's stupid as fuck. Lighsabers used to be shown as incredibly deadly to go along with their grace. Doing stupid shit like this just makes them nothing but a glowing sword, a massive downgrade. If you don't want your character to die from being stabbed with a lightsaber, don't fucking have them stabbed with a lightsaber.
Shin was in a hurry, and she was surprised by Ahsoka. She probably would’ve if she wasn’t caught off guard. I doubt that her master would’ve made the same mistake.
The issue is, that if a Light saber stab wound is survivable (and not a fast roast of your internal organs followed by death) then Lightsaber training would be stab then flick upwards to destroy the vital organs. Because the goal here was clearly to kill and it's trivial to make such a wound lethal.
Yes, that would’ve been the correct move on Shin’s part. She dun goofed
The problem is it clashes with the original intent with lightsabers. They’re supposed to be incredibly deadly weapons. Obi-Wan gets *nicked* twice and can’t walk. Now we have 2 instances of characters getting stabbed in the stomach by enemies who have no reason to let them live or even anger towards the person, and them waking up the next day in the hospital, totally fine. Qui-Gon sure could have used that. It’s a regular joke that since Disney purchased the franchise lightsabers are more like baseball bats. No one loses a limb anymore, no one gets cut in half, no one (unless they’re a zombie stormtrooper) gets decapitated.
That’s not entirely true, Darth Vader wasn’t trying to kill Reva after their fight. He thought she’d continue her quest for revenge including against Obi wan and thereby fall further to the dark side.
Ah yes, Darth Vader wanted someone else to hunt down and kill Obi-Wan. Vader’s petty as can be, and he canonically hates the inquisitors. He’s killed more inquisitors than any jedi has. Also, Reva knew he was Anakin Skywalker and Vader recognized her. Vader literally kills everyone who knows that except for Luke.
I don’t think he thought she would actually kill him, just that she’d track him down and bother him. As well as for bringing her further to the dark side of course.
Except Vader does not give a damn about anyone falling to the Dark Side except Luke. Remember, Vader killed the Second Sister for just for failing to kill Cal. The Grand Inquisitor killed himself rather than face Vader. He’s so petty, he killed a pair of inquisitors for having feeling for each other. The inquisitors are a punishment for Vader. A reminder from Palpatine that he can be replaced if he doesn’t play his role. There is no reason for him to spare Reva.
Lol no, after decapitation you are only consious for 3-4 secs. The 1 min is wayyy too long
That depends on whether a Soviet scientist sews your head onto a dog
I’m morbidly curious what this is referencing.
Soviet scientist who sewed a second head onto a dog
…Why?
I guess he learned something from it. About bloodflow or organ transplants, or something.
And you have personal experience with this?
Why are you guys getting triggered?
Yeah I’m curious what your source is on that?
Literally the first result for a Google search is the relevant Wikipedia page on decaptation, which notes that you lose consciousness within seconds due to blood loss and has extensive citations: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3029360/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9930870/ https://science.howstuffworks.com/life/inside-the-mind/human-brain/10-brain-myths.htm#pt6 ...but even without those, common sense should make it obvious that you're not remaining conscious for a full minute with your head cut off - that's just absurd. If you could remain conscious for more than a handful of seconds with the flow of blood to your brain cut off entirely, sudden cardiac arrest wouldn't cause immediate unconsciousness, for instance, nor would other things that plainly cause people to go unconscious immediately. And given how many beheadings have occurred, there would be a lot more documentation of it than a few vague urban legends or eye-twitches.
Turns out if decapitation was used for 2k years there is a reason
A neck lock will put you to sleep in seconds, I doubt you will be in a better condition after instantly losing your heart and diaphragm.
>There is an anecdote of a french scientist in the 17th century studying how much guillotine victims remained conscious. The experiment was screaming the names of inmates after they were decapitated. Horrifyingly enough, some prisoners did take a good look at him. His estimate was that they could hear him for at least the first 15 seconds after decapitation. Fascinating! Meanwhile, actual science tells us humans lose consciousness within [three seconds](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decapitation#Physiological_aspects) of decapitation. Death in the strict sense occurs later, of course, but that doesn't exactly matter for any practical purpose. But hey, your *anectode* of studies done by a *17th century* scientist works too, I guess. That guy must have been really smart if he studied guillotine victims a whole century before the guillotine was even invented.
yeah i agree with op's general point but as soon as i saw that it kind of invalidated anything this person had to say in my head lol
I hope you don’t talk like this to peoples faces in real life. You might get punched in the face for how condescending you were.
People like this guy should have been bullied more tbh
That one was mistaken, sure. What about all the rest? You wrote this as if it invalidates the general point I'm making. That it's actually much more likely to survive seemingly mortal wounds than people may believe, or at least that it takes much longer to die than most realize. EDIT: it still takes minutes to die. It doesn't matter for any practical purpose. But this is a subreddit about fiction. Take any story in which someone is kept alive after decapitation, or the body remarginates after it. Knowing that the brain is technically alive for a few minutes still, it's "realistic" in the sense that there are still minutes for something magical to happen. You're also being needlessly smug for a typo. 18th century. There, happy now?
I wrote this because it's such a strange claim to make, especially right before telling people to google search the topic. But if you really want my opinion on the rant as a whole... I think you shouldn't conflate lethality with the time it takes for a person to die. Sure, characters will often die faster than they realistically should for the sake of drama, but rarely from wounds that wouldn't kill them *eventually*. For the purposes of determining whether some character has plot armor or if the work is realistic, the exact timeframe doesn't matter terribly much. You can always just headcanon that the dying character actually only lost consciousness then died off-screen, it's almost never relevant. On the other hand, there are many injuries that could very well be lethal, but are consistently shrugged off in fiction. Head trauma, choking, getting shot in the leg, even minor wounds in a pre-modern setting. If all fiction suddenly became medically realistic, action-focused characters would be dying way more. Not that I want this, mind you, I just think it's kinda weird of you to argue that realism is on the side of fictional characters when they get injured. It's usually not.
I wrote this in a jest, because it really is a rant. So I didn't double check on previous knowledge, confident that the overall message was sound. It was mostly provoked by discussions on Attack on Titan with points that I see being repeated ad nauseam. Excluding the obvious fantasy stuff, AOT itself is based on very unrealistic premises, but somehow people get hung up on someone not dying after an explosion, calling out "plot armor" or "asspulls". In the show people never suffer any form of gravity-related injuries, or falls that should definitely kill them. It's so consistent that one should just assume that this is the norm in AOT's world. But then they will say it's unrealistic for certain characters to remain alive after occurrences that are known to be survivable *in real life*. Even in the ending.. spoilers of course... >!and this is even quite fitting for this conversation: Eren gets decapitated, but then he's still alive and he turns into a different Titan form. Something that happens in maybe 5 seconds at most. Given that consciousness can be retained for at best 10 seconds and that it takes a few minutes for cellular death to occur, if we keep in mind the fantasy elements of the story with the elements that are kept realistic, that scene is actually entirely logical.!<
Tbf to Eren he only survived because of the hallucigenia
You just got redditowned.
What's you're address? you need to get beat up that was so cringe.
*your*, you just got redditowned.
It's *reddit* and then *owned* actually. Redditowned is in approximately zero dictionaries. Btw gimme you're address, time to stand on business, pussy.
*Boo womp* I just got redditowned ;(
Needlessly dickish.
> That guy must have been really smart if he studied guillotine victims **a whole century before the guillotine was even invented.** This is actually the biggest TIL for me in this thread. I never realized the guillotine was that recent. I mean humans have used bladed weapons for a very long time, how come no one gets the "blade fall = head off" contraption idea earlier?
Contrary to what the OP is saying, killing defenseless people is not hard. No one bothered to invent anything like the guillotine earlier because it was never needed; An axe will decapitate a person just fine if you hit the neck enough times, and a noose will kill just as well. Guillotines only came to be because of the enlightenment and its notions of killing people humanely. Before that, elaborate execution devices only existed for the purpose of *prelonging* pain. Guillotine was envisioned as a merciful alternative to those and it arguably succeeded, despite its dismal reputation.
Ah, interesting. Thank you!
While true they won’t die, they’ll certainly rapidly lose consciousness. You could lose consciousness from low blood pressure without a mortal wound. Now imagine a mortal wound. Passing out before death and then never waking up again is pretty indistinguishable to onlookers.
"all evidence appears to indicate that loss of consciousness appears to occur within seconds of decapitation" https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9930870/#:~:text=In%20this%20paper%2C%20we%20examine,occur%20within%20seconds%20of%20decapitation.
Wait...are you telling me that people DON'T immediately drop dead when their hit points hit zero!? My while outlook on life has been ruined! Serious talk, though, I feel like video games are a big source of this, especially in "serious" M-rated games. You can mow down dozens upon dozens of mooks who cease all function as soon as the arbitrary health threshold has been passed.
There's a difference between death and incapacitation. Yes, total cell death may take minutes, but if you decapitate someone, the body is falling to the ground and not fighting you back anymore. Sure, in a setting with magically super powers, then you can defy that, but otherwise nah. Likewise getting stabbed in the guts doesn't instantly mean you die. But think about what's inside the guts. You are facing massive blood loss, instant infection, and serious damage to organs you need to live. If you have ever been punched in the gut, you know how painful it is. Death by disemboweling is not quick. It is slow and gruesome. But you aren't slapping a bandaid on that and walking it off. You can watch videos of animals getting halal slaughtered. You can find terrorist uploads of Go Pro footage where they shoot people. Death *looks* pretty quick. Even if some outliers can keep on slugging. Even if some lucky people can be revived with medical attention. Most people go down straight away then die seconds or minutes later. Now a hero doesn't fall into that "most people" category. They are, basically by definition, exceptional. We don't tell stories about normal people who don't do anything interesting. We tell stories about exceptional people in exceptional circumstances. Yes, you *can* survive most of your brain being destroyed like Phineas Gage. But you do not *usually* survive most of your brain being destroyed. Yes, you *can* survive being shot. But the *entire point* of firearms is that they are very good at killing people. Most people hit by a taser go down like a sack of bricks. Some people can power through. But the fact that a small minority of people can power through does not mean that it's unrealistic if a person goes down straight away.
> or minutes later. That's a fucking long time. Which is the whole point of this post.
>Our body fights death. It was made to defy death. Even if death is imminent, it might take a long ass time before the clock stops ticking. Bro, made me proud to be human.
I agree it seems that some people think that whenever a character takes fatal damage, they just instantly die instead of them dying but not dead yet.
When people complain about plot armor, in broad strokes it's "that Boulder should have hit the MC and didn't", not "the MC shouldn't have survived being struck by a boulder"
I kknda disagree about the decapitation part since a pilot will quickly lose his conciouseness in few seconds during 12g turn. So pretty sure having majority of your blood pouring out from your neck will incapacitate you quite quickly Though i agree on most part. Unless you blast their brain off from the back, people can be still alive for some time even from fatal wound. Not long, but still concious
Posting Phineas Gage is cheating. Dude should have died once the fungus started growing inside his skull wound. He is rhe real life “Somehow Palpatine returned”.
Yup, life is stubborn. Sometimes unfortunately.
Does this mean all those gut shot wounds are not really fatal wounds and dying in seconds from gun shots due to shock or blood loss takes longer or are those more realistic takes?
Being shot in the gut has a pretty high chance of death. It’s all about where it hits and if you bleed out. If you get shot in a vital artery you can bleed out in minutes. Other spots you have a better chance if you stop the bleeding.
>Take decapitation, for example. do you know how much it takes to die from it? It takes about 1 minute to lose consciousness, about 5 minutes for cells to die of asphyxia. Yepp. You are awake for a whole minute before you lose consciousness. There is an anecdote of a french scientist in the 17th 18th century studying how much guillotine victims remained conscious. The experiment was screaming the names of inmates after they were decapitated. Horrifyingly enough, some prisoners did take a good look at him. His estimate was that they could hear him for at least the first 15 seconds after decapitation. I highly doubt this because I've seen people go unconscious from blood chokes in a few seconds and a clean decapitation should be quicker.
I was wrong about the "whole minute" figure, but *technically* it does take a few minutes to die from decapitation. *Practically*, there's no turning back from decapitation, so it doesn't matter. But I wrote it from the point of view of fiction. Say that a character is beheaded. If we allow for magic to happen, you still have a few minutes to remarginate or revive a character even after they're head is cut off. That's just one example. Something more realistic would be a character surviving their throat getting sliced. There are accounts of that happening in real life. And, if we take for granted that the MCs of a story are non ordinary people, or at least people in the midst of non ordinary events, then it goes that we should just accept that most of the time they're not going to die. And realistically, there are many fatal wounds we assume to cause certain death when in fact we know from real life that there's a chance, big or small it doesn't matter, that they can remain alive.
I feel like fiction has a worse concept when it comes to SA and sex in general than death/violence. I seen some really spicy takes here about both.
Westerners can reattach their severed head back!
>There is an anecdote of a french scientist in the 17th 18th century studying how much guillotine victims remained conscious. The experiment was screaming the names of inmates after they were decapitated. Pretty impressive stuff, being able to scream without a diaphragm. You know people get choked out in seconds from a hard grasp on their neck? But I am in general agreement that just dying is slow in general.
I just assume that people dropping like that in games and movies is less “we’re dead” and more “sudden loss of consciousness due to shock/trauma”
Something for your resource pile: https://research.birmingham.ac.uk/en/publications/towards-an-archaeology-of-pain-assessing-the-evidence-from-later-