this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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hmmm
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For things that are "hmmm".
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Every time I see a precarious stairs situation, I think of a Spider-Man novel I read as a kid wherein he descended a great number of floors very quickly by straightening his body and diving between the railings.
I've always been terrified of heights. Even disregarding the logistical questions I never liked thinking about that.
There was a cheesy 2000s action movie where the hero jumped down the stairway center hole to escape an ambush and used a bad guy's body as a cushion to survive the landing. I wanna say either Punisher or Shoot-Em-Up?
I remember thinking how much easier it would have been to simply dive out a window. Same distance, but without all the railings to avoid on the way down.
That was a lot of movies. I think the first Bourne had it.
I feel like all the parkour films (banlieue 13, Yamakasi) had a lot of staircase scenes
Hardcore Henry certainly does.
Your username is awesome.
And yeah, one of the non-height things that bothered me was how Spider-Man would recover from the fall. He didn't have a corpse cushion.
I think I read that book twenty-two years ago, so I might be forgetting some things, but I don't think the author described his landing. The only two options I could figure out were him grabbing a railing above ground level, in which case he'd surely flip around and slam various parts of himself against stair bits; or he could land at ground level (or wherever the bottom of the stairs was). In the latter case, being a superhero, I'm sure he'd negate the fall damage ... But given how narrow the space was described as being, it seems like he'd still be unable to avoid slamming into stair bits.
All that said, in the same book, the villain was described as being of an indeterminate size due to standing completely still. That made even less sense to me, but at least didn't trigger my fear of heights.
That has to be the most hilarious riff off of Heisenberg I've seen