One of my favorite tropes in media, especially very long-form media like novels, is when the protagonist is constantly just barely scrapping by with the skin of their teeth. Where the story keeps raising the stakes, where things only get more dangerous the more competent the hero is, such that they are always on the verge of death or (often times) worse.
Then the story takes a step back, often by having the protagonist talk to a character that hasn't been directly involved a lot, someone with an intact sense of scale who goes, "Holy shit you are literally insane. A normal person would be dead a thousand times over by now."
The protagonist gets no respite from this, but I, the reader sitting in bed with my sugary drink and plushie shark, always have a little giggle about just how fucking cool the hero is, and how they will never acknowledge this.
