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Blunt Force Damage
Background
Blunt Force Damage, also known as blunt trauma or non-penetrating trauma, describes a physical trauma due to a forceful impact without penetration of the body's surface. Blunt trauma occurs due to direct physical trauma or impactful force to a body part. Such incidents often occur with road traffic collisions, assaults, sports-related injuries, and are notably common among the elderly who experience falls. This type of damage in fiction is typically seen as destructive, with characters utilizing this ability being depicted as physically strong characters capable of performing large quantities of damage. This is in stark contrast to penetration damage which is widely seen as more contained and lethal. Though it may not seem as threatening to an individual in comparison, blunt force damage can lead to a wide range of injuries including contusions, concussions, abrasions, lacerations, internal or external hemorrhages, and bone fractures. This would ultimately vary on the weapons and tools in question, with some being far more useful at inflicting major injuries. Blunt force damage also varies heavily from character-to-character (usually based on their fighting style and sheer destructive potential), with most situations involving physical trauma to a person, whereas some more complex cases involve that on the metaphysical scale.
Types
Blunt trauma is fairly straightforward in concept, and therefore does not require many sub-tiers to differentiate them. Most damage caused by non-piercing weapons are highly dependent on the location the attack is initiated and the shape and material of said tool. For this reason, it is good to establish the details of the tool or user in question to give a more clear explanation.
- Physical Blunt Damage: Physical Blunt Damage is defined as a non-piercing form of physical trauma, often inflicted by rounded objects such as hammers or baseball bats. Blunt damage consist of a vast amount of injuries both externally and internally, including contusions (bruises) in less serious cases, or rupture of internal organs from briefly increased intraluminal pressure in the more serious, depending on the force applied and tool used.
- Examples: Jacket (Hotline Miami) (Jacket is most commonly seen using a wooden baseball bat in combat), Ramona Flowers (Scott Pilgrim) (uses a combination of a sledge hammer and a titanium baseball bat), Peppino Spaghetti (Pizza Tower) (uses the shoulder bash technique to ram through obstacles and enemies), Dio Brando (JoJo's Bizarre Adventure) (can use The World to unleash a fury of punches all at once), and Kong (Monsterverse) (uses his large size to throw targets around and launch building-sized objects at targets)
- Metaphysical Blunt Damage: Metaphysical Blunt Damage is a form of blunt trauma that is not of the physical plane. These types of attacks are often targeted towards the soul or mind, thereby bypassing durability entirely. It should be noted that these kinds of attacks should specifically be stated to be on a different level of existence in nature and/or completely ignore all physicality. Furthermore, attacks of this caliber aren't likely to cause standard injuries that one would expect with physical blunt trauma.
- Examples: Sans and Papyrus (Undertale) (both sans and papyrus use bones to attack the SOUL), Luigi (Super Mario Bros.) (can use his Poltergust g-00 to grab and slam ghosts to the ground), Aubrey (Omori) (Aubrey uses a stuffed animal which can directly damage an opponents heart), and Haruko Haruhara (FLCL) (uses her guitar to strike people with enough force to open spatial rifts in their bodies)
Limatations
- A common defense against blunt trauma is the use of padded surfaces and armor, which can help absorb and reduce the overall impact of an attack to the body. For this reason, blunt attacks may struggle against heavily padded targets and thus preventing proper injury to a target.
- Materials such as rubber are highly adapt when facing blunt trauma, due to the source material being capable of easily spreading out and absorbing the impact to become entirely nullified. This is why fictional creatures, such as slimes in RPGs, are typically resistant to blunt attacks.
Note
- Due to the common nature of blunt trauma, please make note of this ability only when made notable or irregular per the standard applications of the ability. Otherwise refrain from cluttering pages with information that ultimately is common knowledge amongst readers such as using hand-to-hand combat.
- For an in-depth comparison between blunt and penetrating damage, please read our Blunt Damage vs Penetration Damage page here. Information regarding the differences between the two can be found here.