LAme de lépervier (French Edition)

Musiques yoruba : les voix de la mémoire = Yoruba music : voices of memory.

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The thirty-four-year-old shooter has been spending progressively more time on my own, dwelling her existence via her digital camera lens. Redeeming Us Through Healing: Screenplay of a Woman's. Rose is a highschool youngster residing within the internal urban. She makes a call with the intention to impact the remainder of her lifestyles. The screenplay unfolds as Rose faces the effect of her selection all of the approach to maturity. Her existence fractures into many items yet unearths redemption whilst she provides these damaged items to Christ.

By Lisa Rosen you recognize these days in a family--weddings, funerals, births--when everybody comes jointly and all that heritage and rubbish fester and boil and occasionally explode? Consider four of the best-known stories from Perrault's Mother Goose—"Puss 'n Boots," "Tom T h u m b , " "Cinderella," and "The Ridiculous Wishes"—in comparison with some of the peasant tales that treat the same themes.

In "Puss 'n Boots," a poor miller dies, leaving the mill to his eldest son, an ass to the second, and only a cat to the third. The inheritance customs of French peasants, as well as noblemen, often prevented the fragmentation of the patrimony by favoring the eldest son. The youngest son of the miller, however, inherits a cat who has a genius for domestic intrigue. The older, Joseph, kept the farm. The younger, Baptiste, received only a handful of coins; and as he had five children and very little to feed them with, he fell into destitution.

Joseph tells him to strip off his rags, stand naked in the rain, and roll in the granary. He can keep as much grain as adheres to his body. Baptiste submits to this exercise in brotherly love, but he fails to pick up enough food to keep his family alive, so he takes to the road.

Eventually he meets a good fairy, La Ren- arde, who helps him solve a string of riddles, which lead to a pot of buried gold and the fulfillment of a peasant's dream: It provides a glimpse of the Malthusian world, even in Perrault's watered-down version: They were very poor, and their seven children were a great inconvenience, because none was old enough to support himself A very difficult year came, and the famine was so great that these poor folk resolved to get rid of their chil- dren.

Perrault wrote his tale in the mids, at the height of the worst demo- graphic crisis in the seventeenth century—a time when plague and famine decimated the population of northern France, when the poor ate offal thrown in the street by tanners, when corpses were found with grass in their mouths and mothers "exposed" the in- fants they could not feed so that they got sick and died. By aban- doning their children in the forest, Tom Thumb's parents were trying to cope with a problem that overwhelmed the peasantry many times in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries—the problem of survival during a period of demographic disaster.

The same motif exists in the peasant versions of the tale and in other tales, along with other forms of infanticide and child abuse. Sometimes they run away themselves, leaving the children to beg at home. And sometimes they sell the children to the devil. In the French version of "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" "La Pomme d'orange," tale type , a father is overwhelmed by "as many children as there are holes in a sieve,"30 a phrase that occurs in several tales and that should be taken as hyperbole about Malthusian pressure rather than as evidence about family size.

When a new baby arrives, the father sells it to the devil a sorcerer in some versions in exchange for receiving a full larder for twelve years.

At the end of that time, he gets the boy back, thanks to a ruse that the boy devises, for the little rogue has picked up a reper- tory of tricks, including the power to transform himself into ani- mals, during his apprenticeship. Before long, the cupboard is bare and the family is facing starvation again. The boy then changes himself into a hunting dog, so that his father can sell him once more to the devil, who reappears as a hunter.

After the father has collected the money, the dog runs away and returns home as a boy. They try the same trick again, with the boy transformed into a horse. This time the devil keeps hold of a magic collar, which prevents the horse from changing back into a boy. But a farm hand leads the horse to drink at a pond, thereby, giving it a chance to escape in the form of a frog.

The devil turns into a fish and is about to devour it, when the frog changes into a bird. The devil becomes a hawk and pursues the bird, which flies into the bedroom of a dying king and takes the form of an orange. Then the devil appears as a doctor and demands the orange in exchange for curing the king.

The orange spills onto the floor, transformed into grains of millet. The devil turns into a chicken and starts to gobble up the grains.

Handicapped Badass

But the last grain turns into a fox, which finally wins the transformation contest by devouring the hen. The tale did not merely provide amusement. It dramatized the struggle over scarce resources, which pitted the poor against the rich, the "little peo- ple" menu peuple, petites gens against "the big" les gros, les grands.

Some versions make the social comment explicit by casting the devil in the role of a "seigneur" and concluding at the end: It appears in a great many of the tales, often in connection with the theme of the wicked stepmother, which must have had special resonance around Old Regime hearths because Old Regime demography made step- mothers such important figures in village society.

Perrault did jus- tice to the theme in "Cinderella," but he neglected the related motif of malnutrition, which stands out in the peasant versions of the tale. In one common version "La Petite Annette," tale type , the wicked stepmother gives poor Annette only a crust of bread a day and makes her keep the sheep, while her fat and indo- lent stepsisters lounge around the house and dine on mutton, leav- ing their dishes for Annette to wash upon her return from the fields.

Annette is about to die of starvation, when the Virgin Mary appears and gives her a magic wand, which produces a magnificent feast whenever Annette touches it to a black sheep. Before long the girl is plumper than her stepsisters. But her new beauty—and fat- ness made for beauty under the Old Regime as in many primitive societies—arouses the stepmother's suspicions. By a ruse, the step- mother discovers the magic sheep, kills it, and serves its liver to Annette. Annette manages to bury the liver secretly and it grows into a tree, which is so high that no one can pick its fruit, except Annette; for it bends its branches down to her whenever she ap- proaches.

A passing prince who is as gluttonous as everyone else in the country wants the fruit so badly that he promises to marry the maiden who can pick some for him.

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Hoping to make a match for one of her daughters, the stepmother builds a huge ladder. But when she tries it out, she falls and breaks her neck. Annette then gathers the fruit, marries the prince, and lives happily ever after. Malnutrition and parental neglect go together in several tales, notably "La Sirene et l'epervier" tale type and "Brigitte, la maman qui m'a pas fait, mais m'a nourri" tale type The quest for food can be found in nearly all of them, even in Perrault, where it appears in burlesque form in "The Ridiculous Wishes.

While he ruminates, his appetite over- comes him; and he wishes for a sausage. Then, confronted with a disfigured spouse, he wishes her back to her normal state; and they return to their former miserable existence. Wishing usually takes the form of food in peasant tales, and it is never ridiculous. The discharged, down-and-out soldier, La Ramee, a stock character like the abused stepdaughter, is reduced to beggary in "Le Diable et le marechal ferrant" tale type He shares his last pennies with other beggars, one of whom turns out to be Saint Peter in disguise, and as a reward he is granted any wish he wants.

Instead of taking paradise, he asks for "a square meal"—or, in other versions, "white bread and a chicken," "a bun, a sausage, and as much wine as he can drink," "tobacco and the food he saw in the inn," or "to always have a crust of bread. He never shows any imagination in his ordering. He merely takes the plat du jour, and it is always the same: H Usually the peasant raconteur does not describe the food in detail.

Lacking any notion of gastronomy, he simply loads up his hero's plate; and if he wants to supply an extravagant touch, he adds, "There were even napkins. In a society of de facto vegetarians, the luxury of luxuries was to sink one's teeth into a side of mutton, pork, or beef. The wedding feast in "Royaume des Valdars" tale type includes roast pigs who run around with forks sticking out of their flanks so that the guests can help themselves to ready-carved mouthfuls.

The French version of a common ghost story, "La Goulue" tale type , concerns a peas- ant girl who insists on eating meat every day. Unable to satisfy this extraordinary craving, her parents serve her a leg they have cut off a newly buried corpse. O n the next day, the corpse appears before the girl in the kitchen. It orders her to wash its right leg, then its left leg. W h e n she sees that the left leg is missing, it screams, "You ate it. But whether they filled up on meat or porridge, the full belly came first among the wishes of the French peasant heroes.

It was all the peasant Cinderella aspired to, even though she got a prince. Immediately a fully decked table appeared before her. She could eat what she wanted, and she ate a bellyful. They also imagined other dreams coming true, including the standard run of castles and princesses. But their wishes usually re- mained fixed on common objects in the everyday world. One hero gets "a cow and some chickens"; another, an armoire full of linens. A third settles for light work, regular meals, and a pipe full of tobacco. And when gold rains into the fireplace of a fourth, he uses it to buy "food, clothes, a horse, land.

Despite the occasional touches of fantasy, then, the tales remain rooted in the real world. They almost always take place within two basic frameworks, which correspond to the dual setting of peasant life under the Old Regime: The opposition between the village and the road runs through the tales, just as it ran through the lives of peasants everywhere in eighteenth-century France. The folktales constantly show parents laboring in the fields while the children gather wood, guard sheep, fetch water, spin wool, or beg.

Far from condemning the exploitation of child labor, they sound indignant when it does not occur. In "Les Trois Fileuses" tale type , a father resolves to get rid of his daughter, because "she ate but did not work. Three magic spinning women, one more deformed than the other, accomplish the tasks for her and in return ask only to be invited to the wedding. When they appear, the king inquires about the cause of their deformities. Overwork, they reply; and they warn him that his bride will look every bit as hideous if he permits her to continue spinning. So the girl escapes from slavery, the father gets rid of a glutton, and the poor turn the tables on the rich in some versions the local seigneur takes the place of the king.

The French versions of "Rumpelstilzchen" tale type and some related versions of tale type follow the same scenario. A mother beats her daughter for not working. When a passing king or the local seigneur asks what the matter is, the mother devises a ruse to get rid of an unproductive member of the family. She pro- tests that the girl works too much, so obsessively, in fact, that she would spin the very straw in their mattresses.

Sensing a good thing, the king carries off the girl and orders her to perform super- human tasks: Although the tasks always get done in the end, thanks to supernatural intervention, they express a basic fact of peasant life in hyperbolic form. Everyone faced endless, limitless labor, from early childhood until the day of death. Marriage offered no escape; rather, it imposed an additional bur- den because it subjected women to work within the "putting-out" system cottage industry as well as work for the family and for the farm. The tales invariably place peasant wives at the spinning wheel after a day of tending livestock, hauling wood, or mowing hay.

Some stories provide hyperbolic pictures of their work, show- ing them yoked to ploughs or hauling water up a well with their hair or cleaning ovens with their bare breasts. The animals did not always turn into princes, although that was a com- mon form of escapism. According to the Irish and North European versions of the tale, the couples set off on a series of adventures, which are neces- sary to metamorphose the animals back into men. The French ver- sions simply recount what the young couples serve when the mother comes calling—mutton procured by the wolf, turkey fetched by the fox, cabbage filched by the hare, and filth from the pig.

Having found good providers, each after his own fashion, the daughters must accept their lot in life; and everyone gets on with the basic business of foraging for a living.

Sons have more room to maneuver in the tales. They explore the second dimension of peasant experience, life on the road. The boys set out in search of their fortune, and often find it, thanks to the help of old crones, who beg for a crust of bread and turn out to be beneficent fairies in disguise. Despite the supernatural interven- tion, the heroes walk off into a real world, usually in order to escape poverty at home and to find employment in greener pas- tures. They do not always get princesses. In "Le Langage des betes" tale type , a poor lad who has found work as a shep- herd comes to the aid of a magic snake.

In return, he finds some buried gold: She was the prettiest girl in the village, and he had loved her for a long time. Seeing that the shepherd was rich, the father gave him the girl. Eight days later they were married; and as the farmer and his wife were old, they made their son-in-law sole master of the farm. Other boys take to the road because there is no land, no work, no food at home.

The hero of "Jean de l'Ours" tale type 30IB serves five years with a blacksmith, then sets off with an iron staff, which he takes as payment for his labor. Once en route he picks up strange fellow travelers Twist-Oak and Slice- Mountain , braves haunted houses, fells giants, slays monsters, and marries a Spanish princess.

Standard adventures, but they fall with- in the framework of a typical tour de France. They confronted danger everywhere on their travels, for France had no effective police force, and bandits and wolves still roamed through the wild lands separating villages in vast stretches of the Massif Central, the Jura, Vosges, Landes, and bocage. Men had to make their way through this treacherous territory by foot, sleeping at night under haystacks and bushes when they could not beg hos- pitality in farms or pay for a bed in an inn—where they still stood a good chance of having their purses stolen or their throats cut.

W h e n the French versions of T o m Thumb and Hansel and Gretel knock at the doors of mysterious houses deep in the forest, the wolves baying at their backs add a touch of realism, not fantasy. True, the doors are opened by ogres and witches. But in many tales "Le Garcon de chez la bucheronne," tale type , for example , the houses contain gangs of bandits like those of Mandrin and Cartouche, who really did make traveling hazardous in the eight- eenth century.

There was protection from traveling in groups, but you could never trust your fellow travelers. They might save you from disaster, as in "Moitie Poulet" tale type and "Le Navire sans pareil" tale type ; or they might turn on you when they caught the scent of booty, as in "Jean de l'Ours" tale type B.

Petit Louis' father was right when he advised the boy never to travel with a hunchback, a lame man, or a Cacous a pariah-like ropemaker tale type Anything out of the ordinary repre- sented a threat. But no formula was adequate to the task of decod- ing danger on the road. For most of the population flooding France's roads, fortune seeking was a euphemism for beggary. Beggars swarm through the tales, real beggars, not merely fairies in disguise. W h e n poverty overwhelms a widow and her son in "Le Bracelet" tale type , they abandon their hut at the edge of the village and take to the road, carrying all their goods in a single sack.

Their way leads through a menacing forest to a gang of robbers and the poor house before rescue finally comes from a magic bracelet. Desperate for food, they can think of no way to survive except by operating as a team of beg- gars, the blind man and his keeper. In "Norouas" tale type , a single crop of flax means the difference between survival and desti- tution for a peasant family living on a tiny plot of land.

The crop is good, but the bad wind Norouas blows the flax away while it is drying in the field. The peasant sets out with a club to beat Nor- ouas to death. But he runs out of provisions and soon is begging for crusts and a corner in the stable, like any vagabond. Finally he finds Norouas on top of a mountain.

Give me back my flax! Taking pity on him, the wind gives him a magic tablecloth, which produces a meal whenever it is unfolded. The peasant "eats his fill" and spends the next night in an inn, only to be robbed by the hostess. After two more rounds with Norouas, he receives a magic staff, which thrashes the host- ess, forcing her to surrender the cloth. The peasant lives happily— that is, with a full larder—ever,after, but his tale illustrates the desperation of those tottering on the line between poverty in the village and destitution on the road.

The picture fits, and the fit was a matter of consequence. By showing how life was lived, terre a terre, in the village and on the road, the tales helped orient the peasants. They mapped the ways of the world and demonstrated the folly of expecting anything more than cruelty from a cruel social order.

To show that a substratum of social realism underlay the fanta- sies and escapist entertainment of folktales is not to take the argu- ment very far, however. We need to make at least a brief attempt at comparative analysis. Consider, first, the Mother Goose that is most familiar to Eng- lish speakers. Admittedly, the disparate collection of lullabies, counting rhymes, and bawdy songs that became attached to the name of Mother Goose in eighteenth-century England bears little resemblance to the stock of tales that Perrault drew on for his Contes de ma mire I'oye in seventeenth-century France.

But the Eng- lish Mother Goose is as revealing in its way as the French; and fortunately a good deal of it can be dated, because the verses pro- claim their character as period pieces. Most of the rhymes, however, appear to be relatively modern post , despite persistent attempts to link them with names and events in the remoter past. They have more gaiety and whimsy than the French and German tales, perhaps because so many of them belong to the period after the seventeenth century when England freed itself from the grip of Malthusianism.

But there is a note of demographic agony in some of the older verses. Thus the English counterpart to the mother of Le Petit Poucet: There was an old woman who lived in a shoe; She had so many children she didn't know what to do. Like peasants everywhere, she fed them on broth, though she could not provide any bread; and she vented her despair by whip- ping them. The diet of other children in Mother Goose was not much better: Nor was their clothing: When I was a little girl, About seven years old, J hadn't got a petticoat, To keep me from the cold.

And they sometimes disappeared down the road, as in the Tudor- Stuart rhyme: There was an old woman had three sons Jerry and James and John. Jerry was hung and James was drowned, John was lost and never was found, So there was an end of her three sons, Jerry and Jama and John. Life was hard in the old Mother Goose. Many characters sank into destitution: See-saw, Margery Daw, Sold her bed and lay upon straw. Others, it is true, enjoyed a life of indolence, as in the case of the Georgian barmaid, Elsie Marley alias Nancy Dawson: She won't get up to feed the swine, But lies in bed till eight or nine.

Curly Locks luxuriated in a diet of strawberries, sugar, and cream; but she seems to have been a late eighteenth-century girl. Old Mother Hubbard, an Elizabethan character, had to cope with a bare cupboard, while her contemporary, Little Tommy Tucker, was forced to sing for his supper. Simple Simon, who probably belongs to the seventeenth century, did not have a penny.

And he was a harmless village idiot, unlike the threatening poor of drifters and deviants, who appear in the older rhymes: Poverty drove many Mother Goose characters into beggary and theft: Christmas is a-comin; The geese are gettin fat. Please to put a penny In an old man's hat.

They preyed on defenseless children: Then came a proud beggar And said he would have her, And stole my little moppet [doll] away. And on their fellow paupers: There was a man and he had nought, And robbers came to rob him; He crept up to the chimney top, And then they thought they had him. The old rhymes contain plenty of nonsense and good-humored fantasy; but from time to time a note of despair can be heard through the merriment.

It summons up lives that were brutally brief, as in the case of Solomon Grundy, or that were overwhelmed with misery, as in the case of another anonymous old woman: There was an old woman And nothing she had, And so this old woman Was said to be mad. All is not jollity in Mother Goose. The older rhymes belong to an older world of poverty, despair, and death. In general, then, the rhymes of England have some affinity with the tales of France.

The two are not really comparable, however, because they belong to different genres. Although the French sang some tontines counting rhymes and lullabies to their children, they never developed anything like the English nursery rhymes; and the English never developed as rich a repertory of folktales as the French.

Nevertheless, the folktale flourished enough in Eng- land for one to venture a few comparative remarks and then to extend the comparisons to Italy and Germany, where they can be pursued more systematically. English folktales have much of the whimsy, humor, and fanciful details that appear in the nursery rhymes. They concern many of the same characters: The English tale dwells on his pranks and the Lilliputian quaintness of his dress: His stockings were of apple-rind, tied with one of his mother's eyelashes, and his shoes of mouse-skin, with the hair in- side.

The French tale tale type does not mention his clothing and does not provide him with help from fairies or any other supernatural be- ings. Instead, it places him in a harsh, peasant world and shows how he fends off bandits, wolves, and the village priest by using his wits, the only defense of the "little people" against the rapacity of the big. Despite a considerable population of ghosts and goblins, the world of the English tales seems far more genial.

Once upon a time—a very good time it was—when pigs were swine and dogs ate lime and monkeys chewed tobacco, when houses were thatched with pancakes, streets paved with plum puddings, and roasted pigs ran up and down the streets with knives and forks in their backs, crying "Come and eat me! Brave but lazy, good-natured but thick-headed, he blunders into a happy ending in a happy-go-lucky world. His initial poverty and the ominous chorus of fee-fi-fo-fums from above the beanstalk do not spoil the atmosphere. Having overcome adversity, Jack earns his reward and emerges in the end looking like Little Jack Horner: Petit Jean, Parle, or Le Petit Futeux, according to different versions of the same story tale type A pint-sized younger son, "extraordi- narily sharp witted.

Like most French giants, this "bonhomme" does not live in a never-never land somewhere over the beanstalk. He is a local landlord, who plays the fiddle, quarrels with his wife, and invites the neighbors in for feasts of roasted little boys. Petit Jean does not merely run away with the treasure; he bamboozles the giant, torments him in his sleep, oversalts his soup, and tricks his wife and daughter into bak- ing themselves to death in an oven. Finally, the king assigns Petit Jean the seemingly impossible task of capturing the giant himself.

The little hero sets off disguised as a monarch and driving a coach loaded with a huge iron cage. I'm looking for him, too. He is supposed to be terrifically powerful. I'm not sure that I can keep him locked up in this iron cage. Petit Jean locks it. And after the giant exhausts himself trying to break the bars, Petit Jean an- nounces his true identity and delivers his victim, helpless with rage, to the true king, who rewards him with a princess.

In the case of tale type , which concerns the rescue of princesses from an enchant- ed underworld, the English hero is another Jack, the French anoth- er Jean. Jack frees his princesses by following the instructions of a dwarf. He descends into a pit, runs after a magic ball, and slays a succession of giants in copper, gold, and silver palaces. The French Jean has to contend with more treacherous surroundings. His fel- low travelers abandon him to the devil in a haunted house and then cut the rope when he tries to haul himself out of the pit after delivering the princesses.

The Italian hero, a palace baker who is run out of town for flirting with the king's daughter, follows the same path through the same dangers, but he does so in a spirit of buffoonery as well as bravura. The devil comes down the chimney of the haunted house in a magic ball and tries to trip him by bouncing between his feet. Unperturbed, the baker stands on a chair, then on a table, and finally on a chair mounted on the table while plucking a chicken as the diabolical ball pounds helplessly around him. Unable to overcome this circus act, the devil steps out of the ball and offers to help prepare the meal.

The baker asks him to hold the firewood and then deftly chops off his head. He uses a similar trick in the underground pit to behead a sorcerer, who meanwhile has abducted the princess. Thus piling trick on trick, he finally wins his true love. The plot, identical to those in the Eng- lish and French versions, seems to lead through the Commedia delP Arte rather than into any kind of fairy land.

And the Italian "Bluebeard" shows how completely a tale can change in tone while remaining the same in structure.

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In Italy, Bluebeard is a devil, who lures a succession of peasant girls into hell by hiring them to do his laundry and then tempting them with the usual device of the key to the forbidden door. The door leads to hell; so when they try it, flames leap out, singeing a flower that he places in their hair.

After the devil returns from his travels, the singed flower shows him that the girls have broken the taboo; and he tosses them into the flames, one after the other— until he comes to Lucia. She agrees to work for him after her older sisters have disappeared. And she, too, opens the forbidden door, but just enough to glimpse her sisters in the flames.

Because she has had the foresight to leave her flower in a safe place, the devil cannot condemn her for disobedience. O n the contrary, she ac- quires power over him—enough, at least, to be granted one wish. She asks him to carry some laundry bags back to her mama so that she can have help in coping with the gigantic backlog of filthy washing that he has accumulated. The devil accepts the task and boasts that he is strong enough to make the entire trip without laying the bags down for a rest. Lucia replies that she will hold him to his word, for she has the power to see great distances.

Then she frees her sisters from the hellfire and sneaks them into the laundry bags. Soon the devil is lugging them back to safety. Every time he begins to stop for a rest they call out, "I see you! So all the girls reach safety, using the devil himself to do the job and making a fool of him while they are at it. The villain is a mysterious wizard, who carries the girls off to a castle in the midst of a gloomy forest. The forbidden room is a chamber of horrors, and the narrative dwells on the murdering itself: Then he threw her into the basin with the rest.

She brings her sisters back to life by reassembling their mutilated corpses. Then she hides them in a basket, covers it with gold, and orders the wizard to carry it to her parents, while she prepares for the wedding that is to unite her with the wizard. She dresses a skull in bridal ornaments and flowers and sets it in a window. Then she disguises herself as a giant bird by rolling in honey and feathers. Coming upon her on her way back, the wizard asks her about the wedding preparations. She answers in verse that his bride has cleaned the house and is waiting for him at the window.

The wizard hurries on; and when he and his accomplices have gathered for the ceremony, the girl's kinsmen sneak up, lock the doors, and burn the house to the ground with everyone in it. As already mentioned, the French versions tale types and , including Perrault's, contain some gruesome details but nothing approaching the horror of the Grimms. Some of them emphasize the escape ruse, and most depend for their dramatic effect on the delaying tactics of the heroine, who slowly dons her wedding dress, while the villain a devil, a giant, a "Monsieur" with a blue or green beard sharpens his knife and her brothers rush to the rescue.

The English versions seem almost jolly in com- parison. It meanders through episodes involving riddles and elves but no hacked-up corpses, and it ends with some good, clean giant killing by boiling water. There is no way of knowing what effects the different versions of "Bluebeard" actually pro- duced on listeners in different parts of Europe two centuries ago.

And even if that could be known, it would be absurd to draw conclusions about national character by comparing variations of a single tale. But systematic comparisons of several tales should help one to isolate the qualities that gave the French oral tradition its peculiar character. The comparing works best where the tales are most comparable, in the French and German versions. If done thoroughly, it could extend to many volumes filled with statistics and structural diagrams. But one should be able to do enough within the bounds of a single essay to advance a few general propositions.

Consider "Godfather Death" tale type The French and German versions have exactly the same structure: In both versions the father refuses to accept God as godfather because he observes that God favors the rich and powerful, whereas Death treats everyone equally. This impiety is rejected in the Grimms' transcription of the German tale: The doctor makes a fortune, because Death provides him with an infallible prognostic technique.

When he sees Death standing at the foot of a sick per- son's bed, he knows the person will die. When Death appears at the head of the bed, the patient will recover and can be given any kind of fake medicine. In one instance, the doctor successfully pre- dicts the death of a lord and in return receives two farms from the delighted heirs. In another, he sees Death at the foot of a princess's bed and pivots her body around so that Death is duped. The prin- cess survives, he marries her, and they live to a ripe and happy old age. When the German doctor tries the same stratagem, Death seizes him by the throat and hauls him off to a cave full of candles, each of which stands for a life.

Seeing that his own candle has almost expired, the doctor begs to have it lengthened. The French doctor eventually comes to the same end, but he postpones it quite successfully. In one version, he asks to say a Pater before the extinc- tion of the candle, and by leaving the prayer unfinished tricks Death into allowing him a still longer life.

Death finally gets him by pretending to be a cadaver at the side of the road—a common sight in early modern Europe and one that evoked a common re- sponse: True, the story demonstrates that no one can cheat death, at least not in the long run. The climax sees her tie a buzzsaw to her stump to chop up the sharks that are attacking him. By this point his legs are broke, his ankles have shattered, and he has been shot in the shoulder. Bob Paulson from Fight Club is originally introduced as a pathetic guy who had to be surgically castrated forcing him to take hormonal supplements that give him "bitch tits" due to testicular cancer.

By the time he gets killed , he has more than earned his place in Project Mayhem, as evidenced by the other members' chant: His name is Robert Paulson! Epic novel Aztec included an Aztec warrior who kills four other men in gladiatorial combat, despite the fact that his feet were cut off. Mixtli is also handicapped, but he always wins through cunning rather than awesomeness. Sniper Nessa Borough of Dan Abnett 's Gaunt's Ghosts series is one of the best snipers in the Tanith regiment, despite being completely deaf.

A couple of other characters also retain their badassery after being handicapped, such as "Shoggy" Domor, who is blinded, and Sergeant Varl, who lost an arm - through it got replaced with a bionic augmetic limb that can punch people's heads off. Another Warhammer 40, book, Redemption Corps , seems to love this trope: Major Zane Mortensen suffered burns to every part of his body crippling his nervous system so he can't feel anything who leads a squad of implied sues.

Inquisitor Herrenvolk is a weak old man who has to be carried everywhere The Lord Commissar is so crippled that he has to live in an oxygen tent Cadet-Commissar Krieg has his most badass moments shortly after having his right arm surgically re-attached, making it useless.

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Lois McMaster Bujold has written at least two In the Vorkosigan Saga , Miles Vorkosigan, whose brittle bones and stunted growth enhance his badassitude. His mother implies that if he had grown up normally and been treated like anyone else, he would have been an intelligent and valued military officer; due to his disabilities and his society's extreme phobia of mutations, he has to work harder to overcome their expectations and ends up overshooting them by miles.

Like all Barrayaran military officers, Miles trained extensively in hand-to-hand. He notes once that three-quarters of the moves are barred to him in a real fight due to his brittle bones, but the one-quarter remaining are still more than sufficient for him to grab a large and healthy man by the throat and toss him around a bit during A Civil Campaign. Dag from The Sharing Knife was a competent monster-hunter. Then he lost his left hand among other things , got a prosthesis, went back to monster-hunting while not caring much if he survived, with successes leading to a close-to-legendary reputation, at least among monster-hunters.

Then he breaks his right arm, which leads to a spurt of his magic abilities that's unheard of for someone his age. In Doris Egan's Gate of Ivory , Eln Cormallon, who was born without sorcerous abilities in a family whose business is sorcery, then was left unable to walk as a youngster. He compensated by studying sorcery more deeply and learning more about the theory of it than any of its practitioners have done, to the point of being supremely dangerous when involved in a sorcerer's duel. In Mary Gentle 's The Golden Witchbreed , Ruric amari is a one-armed warrior in a society where warriors fight with two swords, one in either hand.

She is the T'An Commander of the army of the Southland. Stephen King 's The Dark Tower: Her legs were hit by a train as a child, but she still went on to join Roland's ka-tet and be awesome. Roland is a lesser example, remaining a badass gunslinger after getting three fingers on his dominant hand chewed off, and later on having to deal with arthritis. In Sarah Monette's Doctrine of Labyrinths series, Mildmay the Fox has near crippling self-esteem issues and one of his legs is crippled at the end of the first book, leaving him in near constant pain when he walks and unable to get around without a cane.

He still manages to be the biggest badass in the book and accomplishes a few feats that most able-bodied people would probably have died attempting. Epitomises this trope by having no legs yet still being a very Scary Black Man when occasionally necessary. This only serves to increase his awesomeness in the sequels, as he now has to pull off all his impossible stunts and insane schemes without the use of his legs. In the Animorphs book "The Ultimate", Jake The Leader , who's been toughening up the last years to fight Yeerks gets flipped by James a paralyzed kid in a wheelchair. James follows up with: This did not stop him from being a one-man Air Force and master of Recon.

He was also the main one to attack Visser Three in the majority of their battles. That doesn't stop him from being able to outride, outfight and outthink anyone or anything that threatens him or his people. As one character notes, when your society is based around horses, not being able to walk stops being such a problem. Beldin is a hunchback, and suffers from dwarfism of an unspecified type.

Neither condition prevents him from kicking the asses of people three feet taller than him without breaking a sweat he treated Durnik like a basketball on their first meeting and that's before he brings his immense magical ability and prodigious intellect to bear. Maedhros from The Silmarillion was a strong elf warrior who was captured by Morgoth and hung by his right hand halfway up a cliff. He was only rescued by having his right hand cut off —and when he'd recovered from his imprisonment, he went on to be a more badass warrior with his left hand than he was with his right, despite being right-handed.

Beren Erchamion 's right hand was bitten off by a giant wolf This doesn't stop them from being the most feared warriors in Middle-Earth and having far better night vision than mortals. In Sword of Truth there is a blind sorceress named Adie. When twenty soldiers came to arrest her, they never had time to flinch.

Somewhat subverted, though, when she runs into the Pristinely Ungifted ; since she uses her magic to make up for her lack of sight, she can't even detect them unless they make some noise. When some bullies come and start hitting them, Red beats them senseless with his fake arm. He teaches Inigo how to deal with adversity in a fight, such as having to fight blind or at a different elevation. Harry Potter 's Mad-Eye Moody. Over the course of his career as an Auror, he loses an eye and a leg and a chunk of his nose but gains a reputation as the most fearsome member of the agency.

He uses a wooden leg and a magically-enhanced prosthetic eye that can see in all directions and through solid objects. You'd think that magical technology capable of coming out with something like that eye could do better than a peg leg. Hollow Places has Austin. Despite missing an arm, being blind in one eye, and having a body covered in scars, he manages to save several lives and take down a serial killer. He had a bit of help by way of a partner and an anomaly which allows him to go wherever he wants, but what he accomplishes is still impressive given his handicaps. His right arm got chopped off, but he still managed to master wielding a BFS with his remaining left arm and develop very powerful Ki Attacks.

BIONICLE 's Vezon, although never actually fighting, manages to remain a main character, not dead, unbelievably unscathed after being captured by the worst torture master in the MU with the building collapsing , and unmutated by Pit Mutagen. So what makes him better than Badass Normal? He doesn't have powers, and considering how almost every breathing thing in the MU has some power or other, that's pretty crippling.

He also doesn't have much of a mind, so the mental handicap comes into play. This powerless nature doesn't apply to him anymore, since ever since he got fused to the Mask of Dimensional Gates, he became a living portal into other worlds , and was reduced to a mere, yet very powerful and handy plot device. Sir Apropos of Nothing has been lame of leg since he was born and requires a staff to hobble about. And this has not at all stopped him from kicking a great deal of ass.

Especially impressive considering that he doesn't want to kick ass. Captain Sand dan Glokta was badass once. He was a handsome, dashing war hero, a decorated warrior who distinguished himself in battle And was captured by the Gurkish, and spent the next two years somewhat less pleasantly than he was accustomed to. This left him crippled, disfigured, incontinent, and in constant pain.

At this point, most people would have been happy to live out their days in comfort, resting and being brought meals in bed. Glokta decided to screw that, promptly became an Inquisitor , and spends the series making readers cheer as he unwinds conspiracies, conquers stairs , and reveals that he hasn't entirely lost the ability to fence. Caul Shivers really comes into his own as a badass after losing his eye to Cold-Blooded Torture.

Several cases in A Song of Ice and Fire: Qhorin Half-Hand, a ranger of the Night's Watch, lost a large chunk of his right hand fighting wildlings and is still one of the best fighters in the Night's Watch, said to be even better fighting left-handed than he was before. Bran Stark gets pushed out of a tower window, shattering his legs and spine; while he will never walk again, his long convalescence gave him a lot of time to hone his ability to mind jack animals while dreaming.

Averted painfully with Jaime Lannister: He's suicidal for some time afterward, though he does pick up a bundle of Guile Hero tendencies later on. He becomes obsessed with recovering his skill - apparently not realising that fighting left-handed is a new skill he needs to learn from scratch - and terrified of someone finding out that he can't fight any more. Tyrion Lannister, who doesn't let being born a dwarf stop him from personally leading charges in ill fitting armor and chopping down men twice his size.

In one case he forces his reluctant men to attack because they would look like total wimps if they were out manned by someone they usually mock. Also from the Night's Watch is the blacksmith, Donal Noye, who only has one arm. This doesn't stop him from putting up a Last Stand against the king of the giants, and takes the giant with him.

From the prequel series is Brynden Rivers , the sinister "Lord Bloodraven", who lost an eye fighting his half-brother Aegor Rivers. Didn't stop him becoming perhaps the best spymaster Westeros ever knew, becoming Lord Commander of the Night's Watch, and being a greenseer who is still alive 48 years after he apparently died. Gateman from Andrew Vachss 's Burke books uses a wheelchair, but is enough of a crack shot that other cons respect him. Even with that severe handicap, he's still more than a match for the Attolian Guard in one-on-one sparring matches He complains about it all the time , but given this is Gen we're talking about, it's anyone's guess how much is genuine Wangst.

But never forget that he's a very old HERO. Jack Bauer has chronic often torture-induced heart problems throughout 24 , and continues to kick ass in spite of having been clinically dead twice as a result. Agent Sousa of Agent Carter. A leg injury in WWII crippled him, forcing him to walk with a crutch.

However he is still a dangerously smart SSR agent, and can still hold his own in a fight. Wesley Windham-Price in Angel used a wheelchair temporarily at one point.

It's a good thing he was handy with a shotgun. In a vision of an alternate reality, Wesley was badass despite the loss of an arm. Llud the Silver-Handed from Arthur of the Britons. A one-handed warlord and Arthur's adoptive father, the "Silver-Handed" epithet comes from his non-functional silver prosthesis. Alfred Bester in Babylon 5. It's easy to miss because his badassery is more of the Manipulative Bastard variety, and it's never mentioned in dialogue, but his left hand is immobile. It only becomes really obvious in a late episode where he has to use his teeth to help remove his right glove.

Tigh had his eye plucked out between the second and third seasons, and if anything becomes more badass as a result. Samuel Anders took a bullet to the brain, survived and was then hooked up directly to the Galactica 's central computer , essentially becoming Galactica itself for the final few episodes of the show. Felix Gaeta lost his leg and shortly thereafter started a full-scale, devastating mutiny against his CO.

Barbara Gordon, formerly Batgirl , was shot by the Joker prior to the start of the series, leaving her a paraplegic. Normally she stays at the hideout as Oracle, but she's still quite capable of defending herself with gadgetry and collapsible batons. Richard Harrow from Boardwalk Empire , who suffered a horrific facial injury in World War I that cost him an eye and damaged his nerves so that eating and drinking is very difficult.

But he's still a very skilled sniper. The protagonist's Reign of Badass began with his diagnosis of terminal cancer. One of the Cousins doesn't ease up on his Roaring Rampage of Revenge at all after his legs are amputated. He stabs a guard to death with his prosthetic hand and then proceeds to go an a Roaring Rampage of Revenge. Robert Morehouse of Copper lost his leg after a battle in the Civil War. Aside from being a Guile Hero who can play Tammany Hall like a fiddle, at the end of the series he leads a manhunt to find John Wilkes Booth, and despite his missing leg and s prosthetic he manages to be quite good at it.

However, it takes its toll on him, and the chafing from the prosthetic causes him immense and crippling pain. Auggie Anderson of Covert Affairs. Went blind on a special ops mission, learned Braille in two years, is head of tech ops at the CIA, and kicked the collective asses of two members of the Russian mob on a moving train , while shirtless. He probably still has nanobots in his body from his days at the NSA. CSI has Doc Robbins. He has two prosthetic legs and walks with the aid of a crutch, but if he catches you in his morgue and you don't have a right to be there, he will attack you, usually with his crutch and anything else that comes to hand.

And if the odds are fair, he'll probably win. In an episode of Dark Angel , Logan struggles with an assailant and hauls them both to the ground. Logan then declares, "The thing about wheelchairs: The First Doctor had to walk with a cane, and was just as badass as any of his future regenerations. Davros, an Omnicidal Maniac who only has one mechanical eye and the use of one hand. Despite this, he and his Daleks are two of the most feared monsters in the show. Think Stephen Hawking aged several hundred years. Later on, he gets the one working hand shot off They could still kick Zarbi ovipositor.

Orcini in "Revelation of the Daleks". In "Oxygen" , the Doctor gets blinded after having to give Bill his helmet during a spacewalk. He still saves the day with minimal help. Kerry Weaver in ER. She walks with the aid of a crutch for the majority of the series, but is in no way impeded in helping her fellow doctors in emergency situations.

In one episode, she assists in the arrest of a schizophrenic patient who had killed Med student Lucy Knight and seriously injured Dr. John Carter, by tripping him with her crutch. A few episodes after this, she uses the crutch to beat her way through a crowd of brawling High School footballers to help Malucci, who had been knocked unconscious in the chaos. Later, in season 8, she leaps into a crashed ambulance, surrounded by fallen power lines, in a storm, to deliver an injured pregnant woman's baby. Also, she's everybody's boss for a significant chunk of the series.

A recurring element in the series is the pair of quirky henchmen and of all of them, season 1's Mr. Wrench is probably the most dangerous. He's a deaf hitman played by the also deaf Russel Harvard who nearly kills the Big Bad of the first season and much later tears through the villains from season 3 including that season's quirky henchman pair. The jury-rigged hybrid product of a cruel Mars Needs Women project that used two species which were almost completely incompatible, he's in constant pain and almost constantly on the point of dying from heatstroke, depending on a Clingy Costume cooling system that includes a heat sink running through his skull into his cranial cavity.

But as long as his endothermic heat-absorbing rods get changed regularly he's a Genius Bruiser who can both beat the crap out of people and outplot anyone in the universe. In Firefly , the Alliance's brutal and unethical mental enhancement and training exercises leave River Tam with a case of borderline psychosis.

It's unclear if she's a stone cold badass because of this or in spite of it. Freak Out , the short-lived British disabled lifestyle show, was presented by the short-armed martial artist Mat Fraser and featured amputee stunt men, one who worked on Predator2 for the scenes where the Predator lost an arm.

Another episode followed disabled hunters, but subverted the trope since, as Mat put it, it wasn't about independence as much as interdependence. Properly paired, two disabled hunters could hunt as well as any able bodied hunter. Tyrion's stature certainly counts as a handicap in a world were it's mandatory for men to be big, strong and dangerous fighters. If his ability to talk, bargain or weasel himself out of dangerous situations doesn't make him badass enough, his final discovery of a useful fighting style for anyone under five feet certainly makes him so. That and talking a bunch of disheartened city guards into making a foray out of a city under siege.

Although Bran can't walk, he's become quite a powerful warg and later on the second Three-Eyed-Raven. The Greatjon is still one of Robb's best soldiers despite losing two fingers. Jaime still manages to be a fairly competent fighter after having his right hand cut off, but he's understandably perturbed about losing most of his physical prowess, his only noticeable trait to the outside world he is the Kingslayer after all and skilled fighters like Bronn can easily knock him down, forcing Jaime to learn how to improvise. Though he does take out a Dornishman with the help of his golden hand, so there's that.

Oswald Cobblepot of Gotham. Having his legs broken early in the series has made him walk like, well, a Penguin. He is still, however, an incredibly ruthless and cold blooded killer. An episode of Hawaii Five-O called "Hookman" featured a deadly sniper with hooks for hands. Highlander 's Joe Dawson has no legs and can kick your ass all day long. His cane is made to stand up to swordstrokes. Gregory House has 1. It didn't dilute his MO of 'break into patient's houses' at all. Ironside , starring Raymond Burr as a chief of detectives in a wheelchair, was a piker.

The series received a short-lived remake , Ironside , with Blair Underwood as a Race Lifted version of the original character. In his second appearance in Jonathan Creek , Gideon Pryke is in a wheelchair and can only move one finger, due to being hit by a sniper. With a voice-activated computer and a few other tricks built into the chair, he continues to be a brilliant and badass no-nonsense detective. Little known fact about Michael Knight. In the pilot, Detective Michael Long is shot in the face by a traitorous bitch.

The only thing that saves him is a metal plate in his cranium from a war injury suffered ostensibly in Vietnam. The reconstructive surgery results in him becoming the Knight Rider. Mike Longstreet was blind and studied martial arts with Bruce Lee. Inverted and played with on Lost. The Bald of Awesome is revealed to have been paralyzed in the past, then revealed that his paralyzed self was weak and sad, then revealed that he was a sad little creature even before he was paralyzed. Then reveled that he was using the Idiot Ball all through the seasons even after he was healed.

In My Name Is Earl , the one-legged girl's boyfriend, despite missing both legs and an arm, brutally kicks Earl's ass. Once Upon a Time: Gold walks with a limp as a result of a self-inflicted injury during the Ogre Wars. Doesn't stop him from intimidating and manipulating everyone in town, as well as delivering beatings with his cane.

Finch walks with a limp due to a metal spine graft caused by an explosion which killed his best friend and while not being a badass fighting wise, he is a master hacker, Badass Bookworm and is willing to put himself in life-threatening situations to save his friends, in one case threatening an assassin with death by electrocution to get him to back down. Also, Reese uses a wheelchair or crutches for one episode after being shot by the CIA. It doesn't stop him from taking down the villain-of-the-week.

In Powers , both Triphammer and his successor, Martinez, are amputees. Bonus points for Martinez being a veteran. Jenna, blinded after an accident when she and the Liars were fourteen, still manages to scare them senseless on and off for seasons at a time, what with her manipulations, lies, and frame ups.

After the Time Skip at the end of the last season, she is now the life skills teacher at Rosewood High. And still a Badass. Anthony Ryan Auld from Project Runway 's 9th season qualifies in that despite being color blind he managed to become a fan favorite for his season and eventually win the second All Stars season. Especially since he's a fashion designer and color blindness would usually be thought of as a huge disadvantage. Lex Luthor in Season 8 of Smallville. Left crippled after the previous season's finale, he is quadriplegic, and forced to breathe via a respirator. He still has Clark , Oliver , and all their friends quaking in their boots at the mention of his name, even though he's the one on life support.

Appearing for only one episode, he uses his Chessmaster abilities to do more damage in that one than most villains do in a season. In addition to that one episode, Lex spent most of the season as The Man Behind the Man to Tess , further reinforcing his Chessmaster status. He's not crippled in the sense that he lacks full control of his body, but because due to injuries in the opening days of the Chig War, he has an electronic implant in his brain that acts as his Inner Ear.

If it is exposed to High-G maneuvers, it will explode, inducing a stroke. So when an alien fighter ace shows up in his nigh-invincible prototype fighter and starts tearing entire squadrons apart, McQueen has the implant removed, and learns to walk, run, do pushups and chin-ups, and fly a high-performance space fighter He fights the Chig ace one-on-one, and kicks his ass after a lengthy and pitched battle. Holly in The Sparticle Mystery is missing half of her left arm, still has a role as the group's Action Girl. Still doesn't stop him from busting caps in the Goa'uld. Cameron Mitchell shattered his leg in the battle against Anubis.

He still has pins holding his leg together. He is also a Colonel Badass. The Next Generation Captain Picard. It is revealed in "Tapestry" that a hot-headed younger Picard got into a bar fight and got stabbed in the chest, requiring an artificial heart to be put in. It worked reasonably well until he was shot during a riot.

It takes on greater significance because the audience learns the fight, as well as Picard losing his original heart, is what ultimately led to him becoming a galaxy-class badass. Commander Geordi LaForge, "a man with unique vision". The treatment that Dr. Bashir developed for her didn't solve the problem, but they did make her partially phaser-proof , and she went on to turn down the gravity at a crucial moment and whip the bad guy's ass. Bobby, after he gets injured and is unable to walk.

He retires from hunting , but fights when he has to. Castiel is this as of season 10, as he's lost his ability to fly due to his wings being broken, seemingly irreparably. A season 11 episode features a hearing-impaired hunter named Eileen. Doesn't stop her from kicking monster ass. Tate starring David McLean aka The Marlboro Man was a travelling gunfighter and bounty hunter who had lost the use of his left arm during the Civil War. During the intro to the second season of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles , Cameron suffers damage to her leg that limits her to a slow, unsteady limp.

Naturally, while she is limping, Cameron becomes an order of magnitude more terrifying as she hunts the Connors. Billy Baxter, blinded during the war in Bosnia and still faster round the Top Gear test track than two of the fully sighted celebs. He also holds the blind solo motorbike land speed record.

One of the team's challenges was to create a better off-road motorized wheelchair than the ones commercially available, and then do a navigation race against a team of former British Army soldiers that used the commercially available chairs to get to the top of a mountain. Through a variety of issues including the fact that the team's wheelchairs were Awesome, but Impractical , the soldiers won. Wilson Wilson in Utopia has just been blinded at the hands of a cold-blooded Torture Technician.

When the torturer returns from a fag break, Wilson has managed to free himself and shoots him with his own pistol whilst completely unable to see. He's later sporting an Eyepatch of Power. The Final Battle was originally written as wheelchair-bound. In his introduction scene, he was to knock Mike Donovan flat on his back. War of the Worlds: And he'll cheat to make sure of it. After Omar breaks his leg jumping from a window in The Wire , he proceeds to kick five kinds of ass all over Baltimore.

When he confesses this to the rest of the cast, he tells about how his passion for the martial arts was reignited when he witnessed an exhibition by a martial artist confined to a wheelchair, who taught him to think of a perceived handicap as a challenge to work at overcoming. Alex Krycek from The X-Files. Gets his arm sawed off after escaping a Russian gulag, but it doesn't slow him down much. It does eventually get him killed, though, as he can't hold a gun with his prosthesis.

Yes, all of them are based on actual Society for Creative Anachronism fighters. The Who 's "Pinball Wizard"; "That deaf dumb and blind kid, sure plays a mean pinball. Odin has one eye — and sees everything. He traded away the other one, and the recipient can now see everything too. Tyr sacrificed his dominant right hand and remained the deadliest swordsman in Norse mythology.

In some versions Heimdall is this as well. He made the same trade as Odin, except he gave up an ear. He's the sole watchman of Asgard, with sight second only to Odin, and unmatched hearing in his remaining ear. And at Ragnarok he fights Loki to the death. Osiris from Egyptian Mythology is dead and his penis has been eaten by a crocodile.

This doesn't stop him from being one of the strongest gods, or from siring a son. Samson, blinded and shaven of his magic hair, brings down a temple on the heads of his enemies. In Welsh legends about King Arthur possibly the oldest stratum of the Arthurian legend Bedwyr, better known as Sir Bedivere, is one-handed, but wields a spear to great effect. Nuada, king of the tuatha de danaan in Celtic Mythology was a major badass before and after losing his arm which also meant losing his right as king, since no handicapped man may rule the tuatha.

He later got it replaced by an arm of lifelike silver by Dian Cecht. The Fomorians, some of which only had one arm, one leg, and one eye. Hephaestus, god of the forge from Classical Mythology , was crippled when Zeus or Hera Depending on the Writer hurled him off Olympus as a child again, the reason for this varies depending the writer. He is also a mechanical genius, and he's created super-gadgets and Humongous Mecha.

He also built two clockwork maidens out of gold and silver to help him walk, due to his handicap. The Aztec deity Tezcatlipoca got his left foot bitten off by an Eldritch Abomination of a crocodile while he and Quetzalcoatl were creating the world. It didn't slow him down in the slightest. Sedna, sea-goddess of the Inuit, was thrown from her father's boat and had her fingers chopped off when she tried to cling to it.

Her severed digits became the seals and whales upon which traditional Arctic natives have long depended for survival, and the loss didn't stop Sedna from becoming divine ruler of the sea and all that lives there.

In 2nd Samuel chapter 5 from The Bible , when David and his men set their sights on conquering Jerusalem, the Jebusites resist with a boast that "even the blind and the lame will turn you away. Plain from Dick Tracy was one of the most ruthless and frighteningly sane murderers Tracy ever fought, despite missing an arm. Merle loses both his arm and his left eye, but still manages to be fairly badass. Parodied in The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. Scientists have discovered cures for everything and doctors are out of a job - but everyone finds this universal perfect health rather boring.

Then they realise that "nothing turned, say, a slightly talented composer into a towering genius faster than the problem of approaching deafness ". So the medical profession is resurrected to provide artificial injuries, diseases and disabilities to boost people's performance - "you always overcompensate for your disabilities. From Dino Attack RPG , a number of characters continue to fight on the front lines despite their handicaps. Greybeard has a Hook Hand in place of his left hand, and became half-blind after his right eye was horribly scarred.

Taken a step further in the alternate ending December 21, , in which he was also missing his right leg. After becoming paralyzed from the waist down, Rex was forced to remain in a wheelchair for the remainder of the war. Hotwire lost his left leg and had to make do with a mere peg leg. While Shannon Grimton might not be on the battlefield like Rex or Hotwire, her Super Wheelchair comes with lasers, rocket launchers, and More Dakka so she could easily defend herself against Mutant Dinos.

The Forsaken splatbook "Tribes of the Moon" talks about the legend of a Blood Talon called Boneless Harald, who was born with deformed legs. After his first change, he bulked up his arms, got a huge sword, and rode into battle on a litter. Whenever the guys carrying it got killed, he wolfed out and dragged himself around by his arms, ripping chunks out with his teeth.

When you keep losing adventurers to the seductive song of a siren, who better to send against it than a deaf warrior? Gorgons keep petrifying your soldiers? Send blind Knights to fight them. He's got a humpback, a weak arm, and one leg's shorter than the other, but he is frankly amazing in battle, and he matches Young Clifford blow for blow when they duel.

In the entire fight sequence, his crippled feet never even touch the ground. Even people who don't care for the show are impressed by his moves. Malik from Assassin's Creed I loses an arm early on and yet later leads only four fellow assassins against a small army. With him fighting in the front.

The small army was composed of fellow assassins who were Brainwashed and Crazy at the time. So, Malik takes on a small army of men who have received the exact same training that he has, and he still kicks their asses. Although not actually in-game, the short cinematic 'Embers' has Ezio kicking as much ass as ever, even as an old, sick man. Asura from Asura's Wrath occasionally loses his arms after getting beat down enough or fights with such anger his arms will physically break off. Despite weakening greatly as far as offensive power is concerned, he doesn't slow down at all. Kenny Kawaguchi can, in a wheelchair, kick a football farther than most NFL players.

The Abramovici Twins from Batman: Despite both of them lacking an arm, they are the toughest enemies in the game, except for TITAN Henchmen Titan is a special drug that turns the user into a massive, hulking beast and bosses. Benedict the Buteonen Aviant has one wing that's crippled and requires an Aviary Exosuit to enable him to glide but he's still able to kick ass. Pendles the Roa lost an eye and his right tentacle had to be replaced with a prosthetic arm when it naturally molted off however, Pendles' still just as deadly an assassin despite these handicaps.

Cripple "Bendy" from Bendy and the Ink Machine has a twisted foot that causes him to limp. This doesn't stop him from being the fastest thing in the studio - likely due to his demonic nature and being an Eldritch Abomination. If that weren't enough to overcome his limp, he can also use ink to teleport, and thus pop up anywhere. In combat, he can rip off heads and One-Hit Kill Henry. He doesn't even need to notice lesser ink beings to kill them - the tendrils of ink that cover the rooms and hallways when he's around do that on touch.

However, he's noted for his exceptional hearing and will find and chase Henry. Basically, he's The Dreaded , and an encounter with him is Run or Die. A word of advice to any and all Bloodborne players: If you see an old man in a wheelchair, do not underestimate him. Best case scenario, he'll stuff you full of lead or set your sorry arse on fire. Gehrman, who on top of being chairbound is also missing a leg, will mutilate you with his Burial Blade and blast a hole through you with his Blunderbuss. Pandora is a Death World. Being a badass is a requirement for staying there for any amount of time, so any handicapped character you come across automatically qualifies for this trope.

One of the first examples you encounter is T. Baha, who is blind and missing a leg, yet he's able to sit around outside his house and enjoy the fresh air despite the Skags, Raks and Bandits around him.

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