Punched Across the Room

Shut up Darkseid!

Hand-to-hand variations of Blown Across the Room. In movies and videogames, punches and kicks send you flying, usually in the direction of something breakable. Never results in anything worse than Blood From the Mouth.

This might be because you're Made of Iron, and thus punches that are known to pierce cement or steel can't harm you, or it might simply be that martial arts activate the Rule of Cool.

Nearly every example involves superhuman, or above average strength. So, it's usually excusable.

Sometimes, the Monster of the Week is too busy throwing the hero around to Just Hit Him. May lead into a Meteor Move. When played for humor, often results in The Pratfall.

Subtrope of Knockback.

Examples of Punched Across the Room include:

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• Punchy, of Hawaiian Punch fame, used to punch people all the time, sometimes right through walls. For obvious reasons, he no longer does.
  • Old age?
    • No, crippling arthritis. Sad really...

Anime and Manga

• Dragon Half. Mink gets really angry when Clothing Damage happens to her (she wanted her love interest to be the first one to see her boobs), and winds up not only doing a Ring Out to her opponent, she also breaks through his magical Wave Motion Sword. With a single punch.
• Higurashi: Done in a dramatic scene by Satoshi to Shion, when she beats his sister Satoko. Also done by Satoko to Keiichi; the latter is particularly jarring because Keiichi is twice her size and seems to be pushed back at least five feet.
  • Done in another not-so-serious scene in Rei, where Satoko gets launched AT LEAST 10 feet by a Rena-paunch for trying to break up the Les Yay between Miyo and Rena.
• Tenchi punched his friend Kazuhiko, who was twice his size, across the classroom to smash into the lockers in the first Tenchi Muyo! OVA. If it hadn't been a parody, it would have been a heinous act, because: they weren't in a fight; Tenchi was a martial artist and knew that the obese Kazuhiko wouldn't defend himself; Kazuhiko's sole crime was to make a lewd joke; and he wore glasses. And, of course, Tenchi was supposed to be the good guy.
• Many Shonen anime series do this, such as Dragonball Z and Naruto. One scene from the latter happens during the big Naruto vs. Sasuke fight. Naruto, having previously collapsed, is covered in the Kyuubi's chakra. He stands up and delivers a solid punch right in the middle of Sasuke's face, sending him tumbling several meters through the air.
  • Naruto also parodies this in an early chapter with the "One Thousand Years of Death" technique in which Naruto is kancho'd across a clearing.
• In One Piece, Luffy does this a lot. Perhaps the best ones, however, are his one-hit KO of Bellamy the Hyena and punching the Celestial Dragon Saint Charlos, both times leaving a marred knuckle imprint.
• At one point in Dragon Ball GT, Super Saiyan Kid Goku literally punched Super Android 17 across the world.
• In Death Note, when L and Light are handcuffed together, they have a fistfight that leads to a few moments like this. Of course, since they are handcuffed together, they send themselves flying as well. The only furniture harmed is a couch.
• The Familiars and more melee-oriented Belkan magic users of Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha can do this, sometimes accompanied by a magic boost or a Power Fist to give their punches and kicks that extra oomph.
  • In StrikerS, Subaru (a Belka-type mage) proves herself PARTICULARLY apt at this. During her Crowning Moment of Awesome, where she activates her hidden potential, she knocks several high-class Combat Cyborgs across the room. And through walls.
  • StrikerS also has Signum doing this to Teana, as a Get a Hold of Yourself, Man!.
• The Sengoku Basara anime features Takeda Shingen doing this a lot to his Battle Butler Yukimura, usually while shouting his name out loudly.
• A fight in Gash Bell involved Kiyomaro and Gash fighting against a man with a mother who had died, Shinichi, and his demon, a snotty self-proclaimed elite named Eshros. At one point in the fight, Kiyomaro gets so sick of Eshros manipulating Shinichi's love of his mother that he punches him across the room (or in this case, the schoolyard where they were fighting). He then says he just wants to beat the crap out of this guy.
• In Kurokami, Kuro is able to do this against Keita's teacher after synchronizing her powers with Keita.
• Black Star does this to Maka after a Hit Me Dammit/My Fist Forgives You moment after an argument in Soul Eater
• In Durarara!!, Shizuo throws a punch that's not only strong enough to throw a man down the street, but also rip him out of his clothes.
• In the finale of Joey's duel against Valon in Yu-Gi-Oh!, their armored fists collide, but Valon is the one knocked back.
• Tengen Toppa Gurren Lagann takes this trope, like it does with so many others, Serial Escalation when the newly-formed Arc Gurren-Lagann punches its enemy so hard that it falls out of the universe. Put simply, it hit emptiness so hard, emptiness broke.
• A few times in Lovely Complex when mad at Otani, Risa punches him so hard he flies back several feet.
• In Rebuild of Evangelion, Unit 01 makes a Crowning Moment of Awesome out of this. Doesn't sound too impressive until you realize it's a made-of-sheer-willpower replacement left arm, that transforms into a projectile AT-Field and shoots an Angel halfway across the Geofront.
  • That's only because Unit-01 and Zeruel were fighting in the center of the Geofront. Shinji could probably have punched Zeruel even further, if the Eldritch Abomination hadn't hit the side...
• Happens surprisingly rarely in Dorohedoro, considering the amount of super-strong characters. Probably because they tend to punch through people and get their arms stuck.
• Naru gets one of these in Love Hina, from a very upset Kanako.
• When Afro goes into a tavern and orders a lemonade, a huge hulking brute approaches him from behind to take the No. 2 Headband for himself. When he smashes Afro's drink in an attempt to intimidate him, Afro signals for another drink on the man's tab. Enraged, he attacks Afro, only for the warrior to backhand him so forcefully that he flies across the bar and through the front wall. Oh, and he dies, too.
• In Hajime no Ippo it's Punched Across The Ring.
• During the battle between Genesic GaoGaiGar and Palparepa, it is first Genesic GaoGaiGar that gets punched around. Then the table turns, and Palparepa gets punched through 2 skyscrapers and a bridge, in just one punch, during a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, and a quite awesome one at that.
• In Fate/stay night: Unlimited Blade Works movie, Kuzuki Souichirou does this twice. First to Shirou and, moments later, to Rin.
• Ranma ½: Ranma gets punched across the room in the first movie.
• This happens to Inuyasha all the time, although usually the "breakable" thing he slams into is a cliff.
  • Played straight once when he transforms into a human: in a hand-to-hand fight with an evil sage, he winds up getting punched into an urn full of human-faced fruit, which then shatters.
• In the Yu Yu Hakusho movie Poltergeist Report, this happens to resident Badass Hiei - he gets slammed into a skyscraper, then falls into a river, although he's perfectly fine a few moments later when he rescues the others from their impending boss fight.
  • In canon there's Younger Toguro, who does this to just about anyone he punches, assuming the punch doesn't just tear right through them.
• In the K-On! manga, Mugi accidentally does this to Akira after the latter offers to let the former slap her as an apology for making her cry.

Comic Books

• X-Men had Juggernaut get punched across the U.S. as a bit of foreshadowing for its "Onslaught" arc.
• Scott Pilgrim once hit a guy so hard he saw the curvature of the Earth, never mind getting punched across the room.
  • Lynette punches Knives across a room so hard that her highlights fly out of her hair.
• Daredevil does this a lot. But since he's street level weight class, he's limited to knocking people LITERALLY across rooms. Still impressive in its own right.
• Many punches thrown in Sin City end with this or High-Pressure Blood. Sometimes it's both.
• As the page image shows, Superman, Superboy, Supergirl and other Kryptonians do this fairly frequently, except they are strong enough - and a lot of their enemies are tough enough - for "punched across the room" to become "punched across the city".
• Most superheroes and supervillains do this, as it looks really cool.

Fan Works

• In the Mass Effect/F.E.A.R. crossover Harbinger, Shepard's Slo-mo abilities let him punch someone so fast and with such force that he can send them flying dozens of meters away. However, punching that hard can shatter his own arm, so Shepard's armor has to be modified to generate a dual-layer mass effect field to absorb the impact.

Film

• Every Hong Kong kung fu movie ever made will feature at least one of these.
• In the 2001 television movie Earth vs. the Spider, Quentin does this to a burglar he finds in his apartment block after injecting himself with spider DNA. Played (surprisingly) realistically in that the impact involved breaks the neck of the punchee.
• Parodied in the opening of Wasabi, and subverted when the main character learns that one of the people he punched would be in traction for 2 months because he got launched down a flight of stairs.
• Any fights done in The Matrix fought by, with, or against people who know the Matrix for what it is. In particular Neo, although being The One, he's explicitly allowed to break the rules.
• Jackie Chan explicitly uses a lot of this in his movies.
• The Incredible Hulk, in the 2008 movie, kicks Emil Blonsky across a field and into a tree. Slight subversion, though, in that the impact shatters almost all of his bones, and he only survives due to the healing factor given by the supersoldier serum he took earlier.
  • After becoming the Abomination, Blonsky delivers one of his own during his battle with the Hulk, sending him flying through a building.
  • In the vein of Marvel movies, any character with super strength has done this. The Iron Man movie subverts this by adding the sounds of breaking bones when a punch connects, pointing out that hitting someone that hard would be fatal.
• Will Smith tends to suffer this a lot in his movies: it occurred in both I Robot and Men in Black 2. Technically it also occurred in Hancock, but that doesn't really count.
• A lethal version occurs in Freddy vs. Jason when a protagonist taunting and distracting Freddy turns around to see Jason standing right behind her. Cue her getting punched right into a tree with a big crunch.
  • Similarly, a geeky character pulling a Heroic Sacrifice earlier in the film got Punched Across the Room right onto something sharp.
  • And Freddy and Jason do this to each other a few times.
• In the film version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, Judge Doom hits Eddie with an anvil-fist...knocking him across an entire factory warehouse. Justified because he's a toon.
• In Fatal Instinct, Lola Cain does this to Ned Ravine after he calls her a "sure thing".
• In The Crush, Nick grabs the crowbar out of Adrienne's hand and gently taps her off the carousel and across the room in such a way that you wonder if it was meant to be serious or not.
• Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom: Indiana's He's Back moment where he punches a slaver so hard he slides along the floor a good distance.
• Pretty much every Terminator ever made will do this to someone/something at least once. Quite ridiculous, as the punches are actually projected quicker than the rest of their moves, which are also weaker.
• Superstar Rajinikanth takes this Up to Eleven: [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ckKWWAj61MA
• Played for laughs in The Avengers, when Hulk offhandedly punches Thor across the room at the end of the climactic battle.

Literature

• Frequently happens in Animorphs when Marco is in gorilla morph.
• Happens several times during the course of the four books of Last Legionary. It is treated somewhat realistically: although the protagonist has unbreakable bones, this kind of stuff is still painful.

Live-Action TV

• This is usually what happens when any mook tries to fight B.A. Baracus in The A-Team. Often occurs after said mook finds himself on the wrong side of a Punch-Punch-Punch Uh-Oh exchange. A Giant Mook might hold his own or even manage to win the first time they fight. But B.A. tends to remember these guys, and he pretty much always pays them back by the end of the episode.
• Buffy the Vampire Slayer was on both the giving and receiving side of being Punched Across the Room. Her fights with Glory come to mind,along with one time with her boyfriend, by accident.
  • Similarly, Faith vs. The Beast, and Angel vs. Hamilton
• Angel vs. anyone, really. Angel was full of fights where people got Punched Across the Room.
• Cameron does this quite often, though its justified by the fact that she's a super-strong killer cyborg
• This commonly happened during battles on Hercules: The Legendary Journeys. Once a pair of combatants seated next to each other (facing the same way) punched each other in the chest and both flew backwards.
• Piper from Charmed is told by her gynecologist that she will have a hard time conceiving a child because of lots of abdominal injuries (she was Punched Across the Room or Blown Across the Room in nearly every episode).
• Castiel does this with Dean in Supernatural, but in an alley. Justifiable, because he's an angel in a human vessel...
• Find an episode of Smallville that doesn't use this trope. In the Season 9 finale, Clark demonstrates that he's strong enough to do this even when he's Brought Down to Normal.
• Punched/Struck by a Goa'uld? Yep. You're going flying. Justified because they give their hosts Super Strength.

Tabletop Games

• Due to the cinematic nature of the game, any powerful attack in Exalted stands a chance of knocking an enemy back a few feet. Magical effects can extend this to dozens of feet, or miles.
  • Note that due to the supernatural durability of most characters and the ease of the roll required to prevent this, it rarely happens.
• Any sufficiently powerful impact will send the target flying in GURPS.
  • The Supers book suggests that it's genre appropriate to give the "double knockback" enhancement to any and all attacks.
• Champions refers to this as knockback, and has advantages and disadvantages that can increase or decrease it. And rules for calculating additional damage from it, or avoiding part or all of said damage.
• In Mutants and Masterminds, a target who fails a Toughness save by 5 or more may suffer knockback.
• In Inquisitor, characters have a "Knockback" value equal to 1/10th their Strength. If you get hit by something that does at least that much damage, you go flying or (just as often) get knocked down. Big weapons like hammers effectively halve the effort it takes to do a knockback. There exists the Blown Across the Room variant, as well.
• A feat available to Large or larger creatures in the previous version of Dungeons & Dragons. Unsurprisingly, you could optimise your character for this, comboing your hitting damage with their hitting the wall damage multiple times per turn.
• Magic: The Gathering: In Test of Metal, Nicol Bolas casually backhands Tezzeret when he wakes up, knocking him across the room and smashing him against the jagged cave wall.

Videogames

• In the various incarnations of the Melty Blood games, certain attacks from certain characters (like Akiha's Forward+C kick) can blow an opponent clear across the screen. In the same vein, Circuit Sparks will usually break the opposition's attacking string and blow them clear away, making them hit the opposite end of the screen at the cost of 200% (two bars) of your Magic Circuit meter.
• In the Super Smash Bros. series, as the objective of the fight IS to send flying your foe off the stage. In fact, if an opponent's damage meter is high enough (generally about 300%, or in Sudden Death mode), even bouncing them off the ground will knock them off the screen so fast that you can barely see it, much less follow it.
  • And as an added bonus, this can also be used for the "Corpse Missile" attack, allowing one to not only fire their opponent, but the guy s/he slams into.
  • Actually mentioned as a bonus in Melee; in which case, it's called a "Dead-Weight KO".
• Magical Battle Arena gives us one of the least expected users of this trope in the titular character of Cardcaptor Sakura, who uses The Fight in one of her moves to unleash a Spam Attack that ends with a powerful kick that sends her opponent flying across the battlefield.
• City of Heroes has several powersets capable of this (even enhancements to increase this "Knockback" mechanic), but one specific punch capable of propelling an enemy thirty feet away is Power Thrust from the Energy Manipulation set for Blasters
  • This has led to some amusing experiments with maxed-out 'Knockback' being used to launch hapless low-level thugs like they've been shot out of a cannon, landing them somewhere between two and four miles away.
  • But they got nothing on Force Bolt from the Force Field powerset, which has a truly ridiculous knockback force.
• The Tank in Left 4 Dead hits the survivors so hard they go flying. This is can end badly if you happen to be standing on a building or a cliff, to say the least. Meanwhile, this video shows that doing a jumping melee against a pouncing Hunter will send it flying back.
  • In fact, one of the Steam Achievements (or Xbox achievements, whichever system you're on) is to hit a Hunter with a melee attack just before it lands on you. It literally stops the Hunter dead in its tracks, and if it's a player in Versus, they usually have no idea what just happened and are easily killed. The achievement is appropriately called Dead Stop.
• Certain robots in Drill Dozer.
• With enough buildup, Eddie can do this to most toons and, to a lesser extent, humans in the NES version of Who Framed Roger Rabbit?.
• In Prototype Alex Mercer can do this to any human or human-sized infected. However, it is usually fatal to people. Alex himself can survive getting punched halfway across Manhattan, but that's justified as he's Nigh Invulnerable.
  • The last strike of a full Hammerfist combo usually results in human-class enemies flying yards.
  • Evolved infected civilians cannot be dismembered in normal combat. This results in them being sent flying away after receiving quick follow-up strikes from even the Claw power.
  • Two of the more fun (and more sadistic) abilities in the game are based on this. The first is an uppercut which launches the unfortunate target about twenty feet straight into the air. The second is a snapkick that sends them flying blocks away. It is so much fun to simply drop into a crowd of random civilians and start punting them left and right.
  • The Snapkick Launcher also works on vanilla hunters and supersoldiers. The Flipkick Launcher is amusing to use on throw-able vehicle targets if only because of the questionable physics involved.
• Simlarly, in The Incredible Hulk: Ultimate Destruction, Hulk can send normal soldiers flying into the stratosphere with one hit, and punch Hulk-sized enemies far away.
• In God Hand, this is just one of the things Gene can do with the power of the title Power Fist.
• In older versions of Dwarf Fortress, it was not at all uncommon to see a soldier dwarf hit an enemy (or another dwarf) so hard that it would leave a bloody trail several tiles long before impacting a wall and exploding.
• Jecht punches Tidus like this in Dissidia Final Fantasy. Right after literally shrugging off a sword-slice to the chest. There's a reason he's a Memetic Badass.
  • It's also a gameplay mechanic: If you hit your opponent hard enough, you can send them flying into the wall, ground, or ceiling of the stage, causing extra damage. Cloud seems to be especially good at this.
• If you use the Lighter Gravity and Milk Bones cheat in Saints Row 2, and perform pretty much any move on someone, be it with a chair, sledge hammer, or the sole of your foot, you will send your victim flying, floating, and falling into the ocean on the other side of the island.
  • Also hilarious when used in the Insurance Fraud missions, with the Lighter Gravity cheat on, and your pratfall energy completely maxed out, you enter a super-knockback effect whenever you're hit by anything. If you run in front of a truck on the freeway, you can fly like a ragdoll superman across the island and slam into a building, only to float somewhere else at 90Ks/h, bonus points if it's back into another truck on the freeway.
• One zombie in Overblood does this to Raz, leaving Milly to fight it. It's hilarious.
• There's a few bosses in the Castlevania series that have attacks which do this. One in OrderOfEcclesia even does an attack chain of seven of them.
• Barta in Skies of Arcadia can knock the heroes flying, but somehow they always end up where they last were.
• In God of War III, any of Hercules' punches do this to Kratos. Justified given that the puncher is Hercules, demigod and resident World's Strongest Man, and the punchee is a demigod as well.
• Just about any weapon can knock people around in Vampire: The Masquerade Bloodlines, but punches are one of the worst offenders, especially since the humble unarmed strike is better than most weapons for about half the game. This can be particularly annoying to users of combat Disciplines, as prone opponents generally can't be struck in melee and the time they take to stand back up consumes precious seconds from the Discipline timer. Spend too much time knocking someone around, and you'll have to burn more blood to finish them off.
• Freedom Force you can punch any thing a cross the map.
• Makoto's "Impact" Drive is all about this trope. Level 1 blows don't do much, but level 3 hits knock opponents from one side of the screen to the other, blast them into the air, or spike them into the ground, and that's just the standard fare. You can block them, but you will forfeit a Guard Primer on a level 3 hit, so it's really not recommended. Not even if you're Iron Tager.
  • Break Shot is a variant, as rather than blow the poor victim around, it's aimed for her Comet Cannon projectile. The Level 3 version still rapes your Guard Primers!
  • And don't even get us started on Planet Crusher.
• In Guild Wars 2, Warriors or Guardians who equip a hammer will get a skill that does this (called "launching" in the game). It's about as satisfying as it sounds.
• Adepts in Mass Effect 3 get a biotic palm strike for their heavy melee which sends enemies flying. Vanguards have a similar heavy melee, but theirs is more akin to a Megaton Punch.

Visual Novels

• Kyou and Tomoyo of Clannad do this frequently in both the game and the anime, usually to Sunohara.
• Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai! has this happen frequently (replace room with street, field, riverbank etc as necessary).

Web Comics

• In Sluggy Freelance, Bun-Bun was actually kicked through a wall into another room. It didn't seem to faze him much.
• in El Goonish Shive a certain fire monster probably wished that Justin only kicked him across a room.

Web Original

• A comparatively moderate version occurs in the third act of Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog.
• Both heroes and villains alike in the web fiction serial Dimension Heroes find themselves being victims of this trope.
• Every single fight in Super Mario Bros Z sees each combatant being punched, kicked, thrown or otherwise sent flying hundreds of feet in any given direction. Usually the victim then crashes into a wall, which may or may not break. In the really extreme cases, they are sent flying through several walls or even hills. Everyone in the cast seems to be Nigh Invulnerable. Of course, this is a Dragonball Z semi-parody we're dealing with here.
• In the Avatar Adventures RP, a whole group of heroes get punched all the way from New Mexico to London in a single blow by the 65-year-old ex-superhero/war veteran Commie Buster. As you might have guessed, it's a pretty damn awesome RP.
• Every super-strong character in the Global Guardians PBEM Universe has done this to an opponent at least once. Usually it happens as regular as rain.
• In the Whateley Universe, Phase once had a fight where she was thrown across a large room, through a capture cage, and through the far wall. And it was just sparring in class.
• Near the end of Suburban Knights, Malachite punches Spoony so hard he flies across the entirety of the earth and back... twice.
• =FAAF ENGAGED=

Western Animation

• Popeye the Sailor, anyone?
• The Justice League Unlimited Grand Finale sees a VERY pissed-off Superman punching Darkseid across the whole of Metropolis, through several buildings and finally several feet into the ground.
  • The "Crisis on Two Earths" movie had a lot of collateral damage caused by this kind of thing. It's just as well the building where the League first fought the Crime Syndicate was pretty much condemned anyway, given the amount of it that was reduced to rubble by things like Superman throwing Superwoman through walls.
• Darkseid himself did this to Superman in the final episode of Superman: The Animated Series.
• A fortunately armoured Batman gets a milder version of the same treatment (in an obvious reference) in Batman the Brave And The Bold when Superman is under the effects of Red Kryptonite. In another episode, Batman challenges Darkseid into a fistfight without any special equipment. First, he gets punched through the air in the regular manner, and later Darkseid just hits the ground, letting the pressure wave blow Batman away.
• After Drakken pissed off Kim Possible too much in The Movie Kim punched him in the face so hard that he flew across the room. Considering that Kim is much stronger than Drakken and that it was the first time during the entire series that she did hit him, things did not look pretty. Auie.
  • Later in the same movie, after Kim and Ron managed to stop Drakken's army of robots, Kim confronted Shego and kicked her off the top of the building, surely sending her flying at least ten or twenty yards, and into a live electrical signal tower. And she apparently kicked her with so much force that the tower crumbled and collapsed on top of her. Of course, this is justified in that Kim is wearing a super suit during this portion of the movie.
• In ReBoot, Matrix punching Megabyte across the room - leaving a fist-sized dent in his chest - was the exact moment Megabyte realized just how much trouble he was in.
  • This is parodied in the episode that introduces Gigabyte. After spending much time luring him across the ocean. Gigabyte angers slash, and gets punched all the way back. Gigabyte then resumes destroying mainframe.
• eMMMbot punches SinisteRRR across the freaking town in the climax of We Are the Strange.
• A Megatron-possessed Bumblebee sends Ratchet flying across two different rooms with a single punch each time while trying to resurrect his body.
  • And before that, Lugnut and his Punch of Kill Everything.
• In My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, Big Macintosh can be seen kicking ponies over the horizon in the episode Lesson Zero. (Season 2, Episode 3)

Real Life

• Practically everyone Bruce Lee sparred with regularly said he did this to them.
  • The famous "One Inch Punch", while not exactly sending someone flying across the room, would knock them back several feet which is an impressive distance when you realize that Bruce Lee's fist quite literally only moved an inch.