The image of invulnerability in the Babad Tanah Jawi
One thing I noticed in my reading of the (Indonesian translation of) W.L. Olthof's compilation of Babad Tanah Jawi material is the way it represents important martial figures as being invulnerable to common weapons. Interestingly, this representation is not confined to Javanese figures--VOC (Dutch East India Company) military officers also get some form of supernatural defensive prowess ascribed to them. I'll do a rather loose translations of an excerpt about the Untung Surapati incident to illustrate this.

"Surapati advanced and was met by a Dutch captain named Brikman. The captain stabbed Surapati repeatedly but to no effect. Surapati retaliated in kind but he had no success in injuring the captain either. The captain then leapt upon Surapati and bit him in the neck. Surapati retreated, disgusted at the feel of the captain's saliva. Then he remembered that he still had his patrem [(enchanted dagger)] and he drew it before he came back to confront the captain. He stabs the captain in the neck and the captain dies immediately. Upon seeing Captain Brikman fall, Captain Tak was filled with wrath. He commanded his soldiers to fire upon Surapati and assault him with swords but they could not hurt Surapati. Raden Nerang Kusuma arrived with reinforcements for Surapati and the fighting commenced afresh. Both Javanese and Dutchmen died in heaps. Captain Tack was surrounded, stabbed at with spears, but he did not suffer a single scratch. Surapati even broke four daggers upon him to no avail."

("Tak" here is Captain Tack, the leader of the VOC expedition against Surapati's rebels and a hero of the previous war against the rebel Trunajaya. Unfortunately I haven't managed to find out who "Brikman" is--the Javanese pronounciation of his name and the fact that the VOC army was a multinational force give me little clue about whether his original name was Brickman, Broukman, Brueggemann, or whatever. Let's hope I'll have some better luck at it within the next few days.)

Of course it's perfectly possible to ascribe the Dutchmen's invulnerability to superior armor--some Dutch officers might still have worn armor even in such a late period (1685)--but I'm more convinced by the idea that it's simply the usual result of Javanese literary tropes designed to emphasize the unique character of leader figures. The whole thing brings echoes of the invulnerability of high-level PCs (player characters) in fantasy roleplaying games; at the same time, it strongly underscores the idea I've mentioned before that fiction writers might be able to get more inspiration by researching through primary sources rather than reading secondary historical works!