The Hulk trains for the new Olympic sport, "human being throw".
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
, though in real life such strikes have been known to cripple, concuss or even kill the victim.
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
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Anime & 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 no Naku Koro ni: 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. Tenchi also doesn't realize yet that he has superhuman strength (since all of his sparring is with his equally superhuman grandfather, he's got no frame of reference), though this incident really should've clued him in.
- Many Shōnen anime series do this, such as Dragon Ball 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.
- 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. Both deserved it.
- 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.
- 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 Zatch 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 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.
- When Natsume of Natsume's Book of Friends gets really worked up he can punch a youkai clear across a room, even if it's several times larger than him. This is solely due to his strong Soul Power, though, so it's useless against humans.
- In the preliminaries of the Demon World Unification Tournament in YuYu Hakusho, Yusuke punches all his opponents into the sky and out of the arena. While the objective was to remove the opponents' rings, either by making them say the number or killing them and removing the ring, all of Yusuke's opponents are disqualified by ring-out and he wins. Younger Toguro punches his own brother high into the sky, far away from Hanging Neck Island to prevent him from interfering with his fight. Younger Toguro can also punch the ground to rip up huge sections of it; in the English dub this is attributing to him releasing demon energy out through his punch for extra damage, but the Japanese original has him attribute to the air pressure created by the force of his attacks.
- In the 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.
- Mekakucity Actors: This happens to Kido when Kuroha emerges as she tries to get the others to run.
- In Sailor Moon, a brainwashed Makoto was once at the receiving end of this, courtesy of Minako's kick. It nearly killed her.
- In A Certain Magical Index:
- Touma Kamijou often launches people through the air when he punches them, especially if he gets a running or jumping start. The punchee sometimes makes a crater on landing.
- Accelerator once knocked Awaki into a building in the distance by punching her.
- 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 literally knocking people 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.
- 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".
- Drinking the magic potion in Astérix makes you able and eager to do this, the hapless Roman victims generally being punched straight out of their sandals.
- Rogue of the X-Men was struck by Binary (the former Ms. Marvel, whose life had been ruined by Rogue before she became a reformed bad guy) so hard that she ended up nearly hitting the Moon.
- Similarly in Garth Ennis' The Pro. The guy's jaw was never found.
- The reader can see it though. It's on a ledge a storey or so above the ground.
- World War Hulk vs the Sentry. The punches the two throw at each other destroy half of Manhattan at least.
- Superman once punched Lobo so hard that he broke the atmosphere. Justified, because he's Superman.
- Likewise, Captain Atom once punched Superman so hard that Superman landed "somewhere in Connecticut" (the punch had been delivered in Manhattan).
- The villain Paragon knocked Superman into orbit once. Justified because Paragon adapts the super-powers of everyone around him... including Superman.
- In the first Superman/Spider-Man team-up, the two heroes are fighting and Spidey gets in the first couple of blows, which are unusually effective due to some interference from the villains. Superman, who doesn't know why Spidey hit him in the first place, responds as he would for an equally strong opponent, only to realise, just before his fist is about to land, that the punch will kill the wall-crawler. He pulls it, but the wind-blast caused by his moving fist is enough to blow Spidey several hundred yards away, including right through a skyscraper (in and out via windows, and the inside is an open-plan office, fortunately).
- All-Star Superman was once punched so hard he slammed into the moon with enough force to break it in half.
- Superman once stopped just short of hitting Black Adam with a punch that he claimed could have smashed the moon (he stopped because Adam deliberately turned around and Superman didn't want to hit an enemy when his back was turned.
- Captain Marvel (Shazam version) had a punch that was called the Megaton Punch. He only used it as a last resort on enemies that he thought could survive it.
- Superman has even been on the receiving end of a such attack by Etrigan. The demon uppercutted him so hard, he went from the surface of the ground and smashed into the moon.
- The Flash (Wally) once punched someone so hard that he/she was sent flying to somewhere in Africa, and they were in Mount Rushmore. He did it with the Infinite Mass Punch◊ in which he travels at the speed of light.
- Marvel Comics baddie Onslaught punched Juggernaut across North America at one point.
- The Hulk when fighting the X-woman M: "Go be invulnerable in Jersey."
- Also in the Punisher story "Confederacy of Dunces" set in New York. The Hulk punches Wolverine, but thankfully for him, he lands in a lake...before he's promptly arrested by the Boston PD.
- Hulk's cousin She-Hulk once puched Titania into Utah... from New York City.
- A punch from The Sentry threw She-Hulk from Manhattan to New Jersey.
- Which then led to a Crowning Moment of Funny, in which She-Hulk catches a cab back to New York and pays back the favor to Sentry.
- In a battle with a mind-controlled Power Girl, Wonder Woman gets punched into Canada. It mostly just annoys her, though.
- In the 1980s parody comic DESTROY!!, the Red Basher goes berserk and demolishes Manhattan. When Captain Maximum tries to stop him, he ticks off the Red Basher so much that he winds up his famous "Big Bang" punch — which sends Captain Maximum all the way to the moon.
- In Powers, Walker once punched a guy so hard he flew into the moon and bounced off it at more than escape velocity.
- Punchy, of Hawaiian Punch fame, used to punch people all the time, sometimes right through walls.
- In the Mass Effect/FEAR 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.
- RWBY Reckoning showed this when a Boarbatusk broke loose in Professor Port's class, and tried to kill Darrel. He ends the conflict by socking it with an Aura-powered punch that blows the Grimm through four walls.
- 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.
- Darquesse and Lord Vile from Skulduggery Pleasant are rather partial to throwing each other into anything that doesn't move out of their way fast enough.
- 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.
- The incuels in Tough Magic often have the fighters being punched or kicked several yards backwards, although it's more common with spells; and with much greater effect.
- 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.
- Same thing goes for getting whaled on by a Wraith. Or an Asuran. Or your own doppelgänger. Or pretty much anything you meet off-world, actually. Pegasus Galaxy can be a pretty rough place, I hear.
- Invoked by Niles on Frasier, who riles up a guy threatening to charge Frasier with assault until he gives Niles a light poke in the chest. Cue a wild, over-the-top and attention-grabbing pratfall that takes several coffee tables out with it... and when Frasier goes to help him up, he whispers, "Countersuit!"
- One episode of Merlin's last series had this. In the episode where Arthur accidentally brings back Uther from the dead, Merlin blasts Uther's ghost across the room and through the door
- During their fight in Grimm, Adelind and Juliette frequently do that to each other. While all Wesen tend to be stronger than humans, in this case, Mind over Matter could also be a factor.
- "Coward of the County" by Kenny Rogers – implied during the climatic fight scene involving the main hero, Tommy, and the villainous Gatlin brothers ... that his pent-up rage and anger over their having raped Becky leads to Tommy beating the boys severely, and with blows so powerful they are knocked back farther and with greater force than ordinary punches and kicks could do.
- A staple trope of many large wrestlers, especially monster heels. For them, ordinary punches and kicks are more powerful than such moves by "normal-sized wrestlers," with the finishing moves or more powerful set-up punches/kicks frequently knocking the opponent from one side of the ring to the other with a single blow ... and sometimes clear outside the ring! Of course, said impact of moves are always greater on jobbers, as top-shelf wrestlers are always more able to absorb the blow and thus it doesn't have as great of effect.
- 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.
- Perhaps ironically, in this game knockback from being hit by a "proper" martial arts attack is by default less than what might result from a plain old random punch or kick by the exact same opponent. (Of course, both the GM and the players have ways of getting around that — the former by changing the ground rules for the campaign, the latter by giving their characters appropriate tricks and powers.)
- In Mutants & 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.
- 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 your foe flying 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.
- This also happens to the final boss.
- Tsukika Izayoi of Mugen Souls series has a habit of unintentionally doing this to people, especially the person she cares about the most,Shirogane. She is well aware of this, and being a Yamato Nadeshiko in all but marriage, her incredible strength actually is a source of depression for her.
- Oddly, this is included in her gameplay too. She has the highest strength and is the only character that gains a passive to the Blast Off effect, which is a mechanic to launch an enemy across the battlefield.
- 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.
- As of Resident Evil 5, Chris Redfield packs enough of a wallop to send ordinary Majini flying several feet back with a straight punch. His heavier haymaker punch can only be used against the Gatling-toting Majini, but it's strong enough to knock them off-balance, and they're built like a freakin' tank.
- 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. Now, though these flights are rarer and less ridiculously long, the unfortunate victim now skids and bounces across the floor when thrown, and longer flights tend to turn the victim into a mangled, unrecognizable mess due to each bounce breaking a bone or three.
- Jecht punches Tidus like this in Dissidia: Final Fantasy. Right after literally shrugging off a sword-slice to the chest.
- 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 is especially good at this due to his combat style being centered around it; almost every HP attack he has is guaranteed wall-rush. The purest example is in Firion's punch follow-up, which (especially in the sequel) has a ludicrous base damage and will send the opponent flying at the nearest wall at very high speed.
- 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.
- Also invoked in Saints Row IV when the player gets superpowers, allowing them to send enemies and random passersby alike flying across Steelport with a good punch in the nads.
- Deadpool gets this in his own game when mistakenly motorboats the chest of a very unimpressed Cable.
- One zombie in Over Blood 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, god 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.
- In Freedom Force you can punch any thing a cross the map.
- BlazBlue: 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.
- And don't even get us started on Planet Crusher.
- Chrono Phantasma pumps eleven kinds of drugs into the matter with the "Galaxian Impact" Overdrive - every Drive attack is at maximum power (level 3) for the duration.
- 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.
- ME3 also features Thane hitting Kai Leng with a Biotic Pimp-Smack that sends him flying.
- The Heavy Melee of Krogans in Multiplayer will send opponents flying if their shields were down. Especially in Rage mode.
- The Batarian heavy melee takes things a step further with a literal, charged Megaton Punch. With this, humanoid enemies can easily be sent flying, often sans their heads. An unlockable gear item makes this attack available to everyone.
- Dark Messiah uses this as a key gameplay mechanic. Your ability to kick enemies off of ledges into spiky objects or off of cliffs can make for a much simpler and easier way to fight your enemies than using weapons or magic. If you're paying close attention, you may notice that your kicks are context-sensitive; kick a person when there's nothing to knock him into/off of, and he'll just stumble back a bit. Kick a person when they're in close proximity to a deathtrap, and they'll fly back up to ten feet into whatever trap that happens to be behind them.
- The Knockback enchantment in Minecraft gives your sword attack an extra kick by pushing your enemy backwards a lot farther than normal. At level 3, you can effectively push enemies beyond a 20 block distance from you, making it every effective to keep Creepers away from you so they don't explode or if you want to push enemies off a cliff.
- Team Fortress 2's Heavy landing a Critical Hit with his fists can send opponents (or rather their corpses) across a room. The Gunslinger (a prosthetic robot hand) landing its three hit combo can get even more ridiculous, sending the unfortunate person's ragdoll shooting off into whatever direction the Engineer was aiming at the time, even if it's ten feet up in the air.
- In every installment in the Marvel vs. Capcom series (excluding CotA and MvC3), specific attacks would hit the characters so hard that they'd be sent flying across the stage, all while the camera panned along with them. Their off-screen opponent would run after them and show up on-screen shortly after to continue the fight. After an air combo, characters can also be spiked towards the ground with a Type A Meteor Move (the camera would Tilt downward along with them.) It really made battles look more intense. On a side note, a literal example of this trope is the Juggernaut, who can send his opponents flying with his Juggernaut Punch.
- Starting with Tatsunoko vs. Capcom and later added to both versions of Marvel vs. Capcom 3, the former (being sent flying across stages) was replaced with characters bouncing off the Invisible Walls on the sides of the screen. This gave players more opportunities to set up combos. However, these games still retain the air combo spikes (along with the camera tilts).
- The same applies for the JoJo's Bizarre Adventure Fighting Games (which were also developed by Capcom), but only the "flying across the stage" type is featured in them.
- In the early Mortal Kombat games, this was Shao Kahn's NORMAL punch. He also had an uppercut that knocked you offscreen as well.
- Something: Used as the main gimmick in Punches on Cold Ice. Mario has to be punched by the titular enemies in order to cross the massive pits.
- Any of your MEC troopers in XCOM: Enemy Unknown with a Kinetic Strike module is pretty much guaranteed to do this every time they punch a target. The minimum travel distance is two tiles, and they'll ignore light cover as well (as in, you can punch your opponent through thinner walls and into the next room). It's possible to punch an enemy into a car so hard that the car explodes.
- All Street Fighter games. You get punched in the gut, you go flying. You get punched in the head, you go flying. You get punched in the groin, you go flying. You get punched in the toe, YOU GO FLYING!
- Fallout: New Vegas: This one happens often, depending on what hits, and who's hit. Super Mutants and Giant Radscorpions will often send you sliding a few feet back, and on the return, a good V.A.T.S. finisher strike will send the poor sap you hit's corpse sailing through the air. Two weapons in the game, the Displacer Glove and its variant Pushy, actually invoke this one, too, by being a glove hooked up to a sonic-boom speaker that will activate on hit, making for one amazing Power Fist that can launch people over barricades even if they aren't dead.
- Exaggerated in the Final Boss of MadWorld—in the last potental power struggle, the last hit sends the boss flying from the ring you're in all the way to the audience stands. A helicopter then picks up the boss from the stands, now dazed, and lets you kill him off for real.
- The Matrix: Path of Neo in an extened level Smith does this to Neo in a cutscene. It ends up sending him flying through a concrete wall.
- Megabyte Punch allows you to do this horizontally and vertically. Even the titular weapon allows you to do this.
- 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 Dragon Ball 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.
- In Justice League Unlimited, taking a punch from one of the more powerful characters easily sent the victim several miles or further (this is probably what is expected, considering some punches are capable of breaking the sound barrier).
- Best example is when Superman delivers a punch on Darkseid. This is after Superman gives his "World of Cardboard" Speech and reveals he's ready to cut loose on the one person in the universe he can hit at full power...
- To put this in perspective, with one punch, Darkseid was sent sailing through seven skyscrapers, and kept going! The only thing that stopped him was Superman giving him a Meteor Move midflight.
- Superman does this alot.
- The Justice League: 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 armored 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.
- 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 the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "Lesson Zero", a hypnotized and very much determined Big Macintosh can be seen kicking a huge dog pile of ponies on top of him well over the horizon.
- Also from MLP, Daring Don't had Daring Do knock a Mook across the room, with a hip-check of all things.
- Batman: The Animated Series episode "Love Is A Croc" has Batman punch Killer Croc about a hundred feet across a spacious room at a power plant Superman-style that sent Croc crashing against pipework. The enraged Croc attempts to retaliate by ripping out a piece of pipe, but it was a steaming, hot water pipe, which erputs a near-fatal burst of water that delivers Croc right back to Batman's feet.
- The Tom and Jerry short "Jerry's Cousin" has cousin Muscles inflate his fist and punch Tom across the room.
- Popeye did this to Bluto many, many times.
- 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. He also had a "Six Inch Punch" that could knock a person back about 15 feet. That's after being softened by the cushion his demonstration partner held between them, presumably to avoid getting his ribs broken.
- Bruce's blows could be so strong that stunt men were sometimes wary about working with him for fear that he would seriously injure them completely on accident. For instance, in the famous Enter The Dragon scene where Bruce kicks O'Hara off his feet and into a crowd of spectators, one of the stunt men was bowled over with such force that he broke his arm.