The shields in Dune. The personal kind were vulnerable to slow moving knives and the large kind were vulnerable to, IIRC, a sand storm.
Vampires are a common example of this. Most of them have an inherent vulnerability to things like sunlight or garlic or wooden stakes.
I don’t think the Witch-King’s deal was a general invulnerability at all so much as it was Glorfindel’s foretelling of how he would die. That is, if Aragorn and Faramir had double-teamed him, and Faramir had been armed with a barrow-blade for hobbling use, the result would have been the same. Glorfindel merely apprehended what was GOING to happen.
I agree.
“Waste port?” Ouch. I guess that would be right up their Achilles’ hole.
*The Black Rider flung back his hood, and behold! He had a kingly crown; and yet upon no head visible was it set. From a mouth unseen there came a deadly laughter.
“Old fool!” he said. “Old fool! This is my hour!–”*
“Psst! Fetchez le vache!”
“Quoi?”
“Fetchez le vache!”
*"–Do you not know Death when you see it?" He lifted high his sword and flames ran down the blade.
Gandalf did not move. And in that very moment, away behind in some courtyard of the city, a siege engine fired and a terrified cow mooed in mid-flight.
“Die now and-- JESUS CHRIST!” *THUD
–from the notebooks of J.R.R. Tolkien’s estranged half-brother Barry Tolkien
King Kong was just about invulnerable… but 'twas Beauty killed the Beast!
Does the Wicked Witch of the West and water count, or is that like kryptonite?
In defense of kryptonite, let me say that it’s sort of integral to the character, being rocks from his home planet from which he was orphaned and all.
What are they?
I’m assuming ents?
Yes; treants are the D&D version of Ents; as I recall at one point whomever held they copyright for Tolkien’s books ( his family IIRC ) got a litte sue-happy. Thus treants and balor instead of Ents and Balrogs.
Now me, I’d think “Free advertising !”
not exactly an achilles heel, but calling Marty McFly “chicken” always got him into trouble.
Not a book, but Data has an off switch at the nape of his neck. (And for some reason it never seems to occur to him to ask LaForge to disable it, which should not be a great challenge.)
Whoops, missed the “literary not cinematic” thing.
Well, there are Star Trek novels where it’s mentioned, so it’s literary too. As far as it being disabled, in on novel ( Imzadi I think ) there’s an amusing bit where Riker and others are trying to stop a version of Data from the future barehanded; he pokes the off switch - and nothing happens. Future Data says calmly, “That switch proved inconvenient, so I had it disconnected.”, and flings him across the room.
Who’s the guy that gets his power from his hair?
Talos, the Bronze Man of Crete that was encountered by Jason and the Argonauts, literally had a vulnerable heel. In one version of the story he scraped it with a rock he was picking up to throw at the Argo, and it cut the vein that ran from his head to his heel. The ichor ran out, and he died *.
they depicted something like this in the Harryhausen movie Jason and the Argonauts, only in that it was Jason who loosened the screw holding the vein closed (you gotta have a pro-active hero in the movies), but the movie script (by classically-educated scripter Beverly Cross) took its cue from the existing myth as told by (IIRC) Apollonius of Rhodes.
*It has been convincingly argued, by Arthur Bernard Cook and others, that this represents imagery derived from cire perdu bronze casting.
George Clooney?
In the Russian legend of Kastchei (various spellings) the Deathless, his heart (or in some versions, his soul) was magically external to his body so he couldn’t be killed unless you found where he had hidden it. I’ve seen variations on this legend, including the evil sultan in the movie Captain Sindbad
The Hydra.
Xo many cebezas.