Super-Detailed Fight Narration

"...This mustn't register on an emotional level. First, distract target. Then block his blind jab. Counter with cross to left cheek. Discombobulate. Dazed, he'll attempt a wild haymaker. Employ elbow block, and body shot. Block feral left. Weaken right jaw. Now fracture. Break cracked ribs. Traumatize solar plexus. Dislocate jaw entirely. Heel kick to diaphragm. In summary, ears ringing, jaw fractured, three ribs cracked, four broken. Diaphragm hemorrhaging. Physical recovery: six weeks. Full psychological recovery: six months. Capacity to spit at back of head: neutralized."

—Robert Downey, Jr.. as Sherlock Holmes, before laying down the smack

A trope found mostly in literature, this is the description of a fight in excruciating medical detail - as the fight is going on. Often the case if narrated by a combatant capable of Awesomeness By Analysis.

Examples of Super-Detailed Fight Narration include:

Anime and Manga

• A common trope of stories aimed at the young male demographic, many super-powered kung-fu series make use of this extensively. Current prime offenders include such titles as Naruto and Bleach. Any given detail over the local form of magical kung-fu can take up entire chapters at a time. Coincidentally, this also helps to extend the life of the series with entire fight-explanation-chapters.

Comic Books

• Frank Miller often does this, especially with Batman in The Dark Knight Returns. He's far from the only Batman author to write this way either.
• The Punisher's various authors have employed this, to incredible anatomical precision.

Film

• The 2009 Sherlock Holmes remake has two scenes wherein Sherlock plans a beatdown out in advance before delivery. Assisted by Robert Downey Jr's real-life knowledge of Wing Chun.
  • In the sequel, A Game of Shadows, Holmes does this to an assassin, using metaphors for preparing omlettes to describe how he's beating the piss out of his opponent, i.e. "break the eggs". Sim interrupts the fight a quarter of the way through with a thrown knife. Later on, Holmes and Moriarty do this with an entire brawl in their minds, figuring out who is going to win by simply analyzing each other.
• See also John Cleese's Holmes film, which parodies this: At one point, Holmes does this after Watson kills the murder victim by being a bumbling imbecile, then explains that he was able to deduce the events because he was in the room the whole time.
• In True Lies, Harry gives a detailed account on how he's going to escape from, and kill his captors, after being given a truth serum.
• In Charlie's Angels, one of the Angels is captured by the Big Bad and tied to a chair. She manages to free her legs and then spends the next few seconds describing in detail how she's going to kick the Mooks' asses before "moonwalking out of there". The fight goes exactly as she described, except for the last part, because what she does can in no way be described as a moonwalk (doesn't matter if a Michael Jackson song is playing in the background).

Literature

• This is par for the course for Matt Stover. Caine, as a narrator, can spend pages on a 30-second fight.
  • See also Star Wars: Shatterpoint. The guy's trained in real-life martial arts, and when you add that to force powers and lightsabers, well...
• Nearly all the fight scenes in The Five Ancestors series. The books were written by a martial arts master after all.
• Lee Childs' hero Jack Reacher, as an ex-MP investigator with superhuman math skills, near-CSI investigative abilities and Hyper Awareness, gets outright ridiculous with these sometimes. In Killing Floor, Reacher apparently mentally solves the geometry problem of whether or not he can turn on his firing arc to get the optimal angle to shoot the Big Bad before the Big Bad can get the angle needed to shoot him (all in a fraction of a second, of course) and describes it to the reader.
• Found in works by Neal Stephenson. He doesn't do it that often, but that scene with the Vickers machine gun in Cryptonomicon...man.
• Frank Herbert's Dune
• Matthew Reilly gives pretty detailed descriptions. For example, what it looks like when a person gets shot with an anti-aircraft gun.

Live Action TV

• The History Channel's Dogfights.

Video Games

• A feature of Dwarf Fortress, where organ systems are modeled down to tissue layers, and all that gets taken into account and described in combat.