Hi out there. Haze, if you read this ignore this thread and don't read further !! -------------------------------------------------- Not having any kind of experience with knife fights, where are places one could stick it and not be immediately life-threatening, but impeding ability for motion? I have considered the muscles of upper thigh, or right below the collarbone but I am not sure if a sufficiently determined victim would not be able to ignore it and come on anyway. Thanks for all takers in advance! Edit: It just got resolved. If you still want to discuss I would be interested but I don't need it anymore for my scene.
Research tendon locations and connections. No matter how strong or motivated a character is, if you sever enough radial connection, that arm is not moving.
I'm definitely no expert, and this is only anecdotal, but several years ago, I was trying to be a cool kid and was fooling around with a kitchen knife...I bet you can guess how that ended. I got a cut deep enough to leave a pretty substantial scar on a fatty part of my leg, right above and to the side of my knee. I lost enough blood to almost make me pass out, but that area had enough padding that I didn't sever any kind of important things. It definitely impeded my movement, though!
What solution have you come up with? I would have said hands. Lots of nerves, tendons, small bones, and fine motor control (or... large? motor control) can easily be shot with a small wound. Also, hand wounds are frickin' painful.
Well.. I concluded that it would have been out of character for my antagonist to only have one knife. And, being that the character to-be-injured didn't need to survive for long, I used two knifes. One in the upper thigh, one at gut-level. Poor guy! Quite a horrible death really..
Just so you know, that could kill you. You have massive arteries in both those areas. Namely the femoral in the thigh and the subclavian under the collarbone, or as medical terminology would have it, the clavicle. Seeing as the subclavian connects to the heart a few inches down... yeah. Have fun surviving. As for the femoral, if you get that sliced you're dead in less than five minutes. And if it's a small knife, there's an even lower chance that it will be severed completely, meaning the muscles surrounding the artery wouldn't contract and stop the blood from squirting out of your leg like a fire hose. Also the gut is one of the least fatal places to be stabbed as the intestines are quite touch and slimy and will be pushed out of the way before they're ruptured. And, even if they are ruptured, you'll probably die of gangrene before anything else. Unless of course the leg wound killed him, in which case he'd be gone in ~3 minutes so it wouldn't be that bad. Especially since you pass out from shock at around the ~20 second mark.