User blog:DragonBladeJutsu/DragonBladeJutsu's blog: Making a believable character! Part one: Gettin' Physical

DragonBladeJutsu's blog: Making a believable character Part one: Getting physical

Injuries
Injuries are some of the worst things a writer has to include in there writing. First of all they are time consuming. Besides inflicting the injury there is recovery, recuperation, and other medical things not to mention mental trauma, and depending on the severity of the injury these take up time that often the writer and character don't have. Sometimes authors will think it's better not to have injuries inflicted at all.

However that's where the problem lies. To have a character dodge every hit is freaking annoying. They have to get hit at some point, I mean come on. If someone threw a thousand knives at you would you be able to dodge them all? Plus there's the whole endless stamina and fast healing thing. Naruto has this problem. He heals from his injuries quickly due to his nine-tailed fox chakra and it is repeated that his stamina is seemingly endless. Kishimoto, the sly little b*****d, implemented this to prevent having to have Naruto spend to much time in the hospital mostly because it would get boring for him and the audience. However if you haven't noticed he makes up for this with Naruto's faults which are many. Because Naruto has so much chakra he can't do basic techniques without overloading the move and causing it to blow-up or fail or both. So he gets a pass there, but having a demon fox in you shouldn't cause you to heal at the rate Naruto does.

Intensity
You need to have your character's get injured somewhere. Fatigue is the easiest way to do this. Long term battles will cause fatigue and may affect the character's movements. (Kishimoto get's an A here) Another way to inflict injury that has a short recuperation/recovery time is cuts and scrapes. With medical ninjutsu those can be fixed in a jiffy but still remind the audience that your character can get hurt. Small burns, bruises, and shallow knife wounds also fall into the small injury category. Medium sized injuries are things like fractured bones, 2nd degree burns and deep cuts. Large scale injuries are torn muscles, 3rd degree burns, massive cuts, sprains, concussions, and broken/shattered bones. So which injuries should be inflicted and where? Short term battles (0 to 10 minutes) typically are placed with small or minor injury category, medium term (20 to 30 minutes) fall in the medium injury range, and finally long term (30 minutes and up) fall into the large scale or severe categories. If you have questions about anything injury related ask me in the comments below. Inflict any injury upon your character but use common sense!

Severe injuries
These injuries aren't necessarily the easiest to work with so bear with me. What classifies as an 'other injury' are injuries that are more complex or advanced and sometimes aren't visible to the human eye. Trauma and depression fall into this category.

Organs
If someone gets hit hard enough it can affect them internally. A punch at a certain degree can stop the heart! If you get stabbed in the gut your intestines can get hit. A lot can go wrong internally so always pay attention to that!

Concussions
If your character gets slammed into a brick wall or something don't ignore it. Your character could be concussed. Concussions aren't funny. They are any amount of trauma caused to the brain and can be very serious. A concussed individual shouldn't be fighting.

Amputation
Amputation is not a fun subject. If it is an arm, poof! No ninjustu for you! Amputation means the limb is gone, forever. (Unless you can somehow get it back…)

Long term effects
Most severe injuries have long term effects. For things like broken/shattered bones there will be some more recovery time than say a slap to the face. If a character gets stabbed there will be blood. If a character gets hit there will be a bruise. The same goes for most severe injuries. Again, any questions regarding this topic feel free to ask!

A quick announcement…
Thank you guys so much for reading my blogs! It truly means a lot to me. I am always open to new ideas! If you have any questions regarding medical injuries I will be happy to answer them in the comments below. Thanks again for reading!

DragonBladeJutsu (talk)