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Hard Work Hardly Works

883 statements
157 feature instances
151 referencing feature instances

Hard Work Hardly Works	type	FeatureClass
Hard Work Hardly Works	label	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works	page	HardWorkHardlyWorks
Hard Work Hardly Works	comment	Part of what makes fiction so entertaining is reading about how the protagonist is special and different, how they are the true heir, the Chosen One who has The Gift, wielder of the Cosmic Keystone, or simply that badass. They may train to get their skills and powers, but part of their hero package is a certain je ne sais quoi that grants them a better ability or talent at their Serious Business of choice. While it's true that genetics and heredity give us all different advantages when learning knowledge or skills, for The Protagonist and/or The Hero it goes far beyond that. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_1'); })Their power, skill, and ability rise geometrically with the effort they put into their training, if not spontaneously developing with no training of any kind. Even Book Dumb and slacker tendencies can't stop them from proving that My Kung-Fu Is Stronger Than Yours. These abilities are simply In the Blood due to their Superpowerful Genetics or because the Powers That Be have touched them with ultimate talent. This will endlessly frustrate The Rival, who puts himself through Training from Hell only to be chided about taking things "too seriously". An alternative, sometimes usually used as a Hand Wave, is that the protagonist did work hard for his abilities—offscreen. The Born Winner is in fact a survivor of The Spartan Way, a Disposable Superhero Maker which killed the other nine hundred ninety-nine thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine subjects, the genocide of his fellow Physical Gods, etc. He just doesn't like to talk about it or doesn't know. Other times the training is done offscreen to avoid segments of Padding. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_2'); })Despite the unfair-seeming nature of this trope, instances do exist wherein the lower gain can be justified: such as when The Rival does work harder than the competition, but due to their own stubbornness, they refuse to note any flaws within their work or allow themselves proper rest. The end result is a program that is certainly harder, but nowhere near as effective as one done "properly". Compare/contrast Misery Builds Character (you might be able to achieve something without working for it, but it won't be as satisfying) or Sweet and Sour Grapes (where you have to work hard to achieve something, but only after you've predestined your success by doing something spectacular without any work). A cynical Family-Unfriendly Aesop. It results in Can't Catch Up and Instant Expert, and the hard-working character becoming The Resenter who keeps saying "I Coulda Been a Contender!". This is the opposite of Charles Atlas Superpower and Weak, but Skilled. Contrast Hard Work Fallacy (the misconception that only hard work matters) and Talented, but Trained (ability plus hard work). See also Technician vs. Performer and Incompletely Trained. It's often accompanied by a Training Montage. Advertisement:propertag.cmd.push(function() { proper_display('tvtropes_mobile_ad_3'); })Examples:
Hard Work Hardly Works	fetched	2020-06-28T20:42:29Z
Hard Work Hardly Works	parsed	2020-06-28T20:42:29Z
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_100d4e39	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_100d4e39	comment	In Aladdin: The Series, one of Mozenrath's main beefs with Aladdin was how easily Al had gotten his genie. Mozenrath had studied extensively for decades, even given up his own right hand for power, and here comes this guy with an all-powerful genie at his side, and the kid doesn't even seem to realize that it's unusual!
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_11d0af1	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_11d0af1	comment	His Dark Materials: Lyra learns how to use the alethiometer in less than a month. It's supposed to take decades. On the other hand, she's not the only one. Justified, somewhat, in that it's explained that Lyra was granted the use of the alethiometer for a short time only, and that when she's completed her role, the ability leaves her. However, she can regain the ability through years of study just like anyone else. More to the point, the information she gains out of the alethiometer is angels talking to her. Another character in another world has been working on a computer program that does the same thing, essentially, and after a certain point the angels get impatient and simply spell it out for her.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_13b6da8c	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_13b6da8c	comment	Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog makes fun of superheroes who don't need to work for their powers during the scene in the laundromat when Smug Super Captain Hammer is confronting Dr. Horrible in his street persona.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_155c7e93	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_155c7e93	comment	Maplestory has Kaiser's and Angelic Buster's friend Velderoth get hit with this. With the former two gaining obscene powers from sheer luck of the draw he's left in the dust with nothing to show for it. Sadly, this leads to his Face–Heel Turn.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_17024c6d	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_17024c6d	comment	The Pretender: Surgery? Profiling? Sniping? Naval tactics? Golf? If Jarod doesn't know how to it, he can learn overnight. The Justification? He's a One In A Million Mutant stolen from his parents at age six and taught to do nothing other than this for thirty years. Subverted in one episode where he has to learn to play pool to deal with that episode's Big Bad. Jennifer Garner's character tells him something along the lines of "You can put away your books. They can teach you how to play pool, but they can't make you a pool player."
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_174e641b	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_174e641b	comment	Played with then subverted in Any Given Sunday. At first, it seems like the third-string quarterback, Willie Beaman, is a natural player able to call his own plays, much to everyone's surprise. Later in the film, you find out he was a hardworking top prospect, who suffered a setback in his career, because of a bribery scandal in college.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_19f510d4	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_19f510d4	comment	Subverted in the (borderline Canon Discontinuity) Silent Sinner in Blue manga, where Yorihime, pretty much a Reimu who did actual training, starts curbstomping the main characters. Even before that, though, Lunarians are considered something fierce. Houraisan Kaguya is the kind of person you'd expect to give no effort at all and, though her spellcards are considered to be not so difficult by decent players, she has more cards than any other boss in any of the games.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1ad81282	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1ad81282	comment	Averted with a vengeance in High School DXD, where even the author has gone on record stating this is a series where hard work does pay off. This is exemplified at the end of volume 2/anime season 1, when Issei's 11th-Hour Superpower expires before he can land more than one good hit on his foe. He goes on to win the fight thanks to everything he learned during his earlier Training from Hell, with a dash of Crazy-Prepared. Even his biggest Mid-Season Upgrade, being resurrected in a body grown from two deities, is less of a raw power boost than finally being able to go all-out without tearing himself apart.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1b386512	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1b386512	comment	The titular character of Ranma ½ possesses a Charles Atlas Superpower that, sometimes, allows him this particular luxury. Although he has to train long and hard to attain blinding speed (the Kachuu Tenshin Amaguriken and Parlay du Fois Gras training methods,) or learn a particularly devastating technique (the Hiryuu Shouten Ha and Mouko Takabisha,) "long and hard" for him means "a few days of experimentation," regardless of the decades it might have taken the techniques' original creators. Particularly noticeable in the case of the Umisenken, which he learned from watching it once, and practiced and mastered literally overnight, then used it to defeat the opponent who had trained in the opposite style Yamasenken his entire life. It does help that the "Musabetsu Kakutō Saotome Ryū" (The Saotome School Of Combat Pragmatism) is actually absurdly simple - accent on absurd. Its sole method of training is Training from Hell - By Experience. As in, survive stupid suicidal acts repeatedly. For example, Genma taught him how to fall from buildings without killing himself by throwing him off cliffs. He survived over a decade of this. Starting at age two. Result: The martial arts equivalent of The Pretender. If there's something he doesn't know how to do with his body already, he can come up with a suicidal training aid and fill the gap in a day or so.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1cc09117	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1cc09117	comment	Bleach: Ichigo has gone through Training from Hell lots of times, but that hasn't stopped him from conquering a curriculum lasting approximately hundreds of years in the matter of weeks, days or hours. Which is why he had to lose that power in order to keep the story going, because if enemies are EVEN stronger than that state, then the rest of the cast would be even more superfluous than they already were. It's stated by Aizen that Shinigami have a specific limit to how powerful they can get which is determined long before they even start trying to get stronger, and it's implied that this applies to Hollows as well. This trope was even discussed by Grimmjow's minions who, after eating thousands of Hollows to try to advance to the highest Hollow stage, noted that their growth had just completely stopped at some point. This was part of Aizen's motivation to create the Hougyoku, which can alter both Shinigami and Hollows to erase those predetermined limits, either by turning them into Shinigami/Hollow hybrids or, in his own case, by transcending both types of power.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1d417633	comment	Monsters University: Due to hard studying at an early age, Mike has more technical knowledge than any other student but lacks the size and appearance to be scary. The film averted this when Mike and Sully had to work themselves up from mailmen to a full-fledge team at Monster Inc. after being expelled. Its also Zig-Zagged with Mike, as while he studies hard and still isn't able to be scary, he acquires an encyclopedic knowledge of just what it means to be scary, and all the diverse ways, which helps him improve others. Also, by the end of Monsters, Inc. the switch from screams to laughter means that Mike finds success in a similar field.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_1db4222a	comment	Super Danganronpa 2, on the other hand, features Nagito Komaeda, who appears to wholeheartedly believe that the only way to have any sort of talent is to be born with it. He cheerfully claims that anyone with a Super High School Level skill is automatically just plain better than anyone who might try building up their abilities through hard work and practice.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_2212773a	comment	This is part of Lindsey McDonald's motivation in Angel season 5. He started in the mailroom of Wolfram & Hart and worked his butt off to become a good lawyer, while the Senior Partners just gave Angel the position of CEO overnight.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_223c2a48	comment	Also played with in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in regards to Zelda. She was initially fiercely jealous of Link for so easily being chosen by the Master Sword when she's worked for years to awaken her own powers to no avail. It's heavily implied in-game that her father forcing her to try and awaken said powers by constantly praying to Hylia and putting immense pressure on her is what stopped her from awakening them sooner. Not only does hard work hardly work, but it was also quite likely actually impeding her!
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_227431b6	comment	Played with in Runaways, where Tina and Robert Minoru, who've been presumably training in the dark arts for years, can barely use the Staff of One, but their daughter Nico manages to become proficient with it after just a few days, because the staff's power requires a creative mind, and Nico is far more creative than either of them. On the other hand, when she later encounters her ancestor, Witchbreaker, who has a much more powerful version of the staff and decades more experience, she is handily schooled.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_2275c659	comment	Played straight in House. House cheated on his exams at Johns Hopkins and spends much of his time watching cable tv or playing a video game rather than reading about new medicine, new treatments, etc. He tries to invoke Eureka Moments. Then again, he is "almost always eventually right" because he still knows his stuff.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_2372359	comment	Averted with Garion in The Belgariad. Anyone gifted with sorcery will still need years of training to truly master the art, and even near the end of the second series, he's still getting plenty of pointers from his elders. He is a lot more powerful than a sorcerer of his age should be, but that's largely thanks to the Orb and his acknowledged status as the Child of Light rather than any innate ability. It's also worth noting that in his final battle with Torak, sorcery has nothing to do with it- it is his willpower, and rejection of Torak, that grants him victory. Of course, not every sorcerer is privy to the full details of his unique status, so there is some confusion when he pulls of feats he probably shouldn't be able to. At the start of the next series he causes problems due to large power and little training a few times. He stops a battle of knights by creating a lightning storm and a few months later, an irate Belgarath calls him some fun names while informing him that the disciples (all old sorcerers) spent months fixing the world's weather. He also, with the help of the orb, blows up a gate in a city his army is attacking. As he is angry the orb gets enthusiastic and the gate with part of the wall disappear as the explosion is THAT big. Parts of the wall land kilometers out to sea as well.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_248a0d14	comment	In Lie to Me, Dr. Lightman has spent years of his life memorizing and learning the various reactions and facial tics he uses in the show to be a human lie detector. Ria Torres, a former airport security guard, intuitively recognizes all of these with no formal training. Also subverted. Lightman repeatedly notes that while Torres intuitively recognizes facial cues, she doesn't necessarily understand the context. So The Gift works, but practice is better. Also, The Gift isn't much of a gift. Torres picked up the ability to intuitively recognize facial cues because her father was a vicious prick and an alcoholic; she learned how to recognize micro-expressions because if she didn't know when he was in one of his moods and had to be avoided and/or placated, she got badly beaten. Talk about Power at a Price... of a screwed-up childhood.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_261c8d3f	comment	Frank Grimes from The Simpsons, rather darkly Played for Laughs. He's a man who has had to struggle through his life to land a mid-level position in the Springfield Nuclear Plant and immediately comes to resent Homer for having a job despite his incompetence as well as a large family, house and a bunch of awards from his various misadventures. When he attempts to humiliate Homer by entering him in a children's science project, the fact that he's still congratulated drives him insane and leads to his death. A dramatic example occurs in "Bart Gets an F", where Bart actually tries to study for a test, and still gets an F. Fortunately, his knowledge of an obscure historical fact impresses Mrs. Krabappel enough to give him a D-.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_28b53408	comment	FEAR is a particularly jarring case, as it's suggested this is your character's first time working with the team, and fresh out of training. You promptly take out an entire army of clones, while your teammates are either turned into ash or helpful chatterboxes by the end of the first level. It is eventually justified, as the Big Bad that fried your teammates only wants to give you a hug that would instantly kill you. On the other hand, he has been a spec ops soldier for quite some while and has gone through some pretty intense training (that is since he was born).
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_2b82b95f	comment	Sam on iCarly gets away with multiple school projects by winging it, whilst Freddie and Carly fail after spending an inordinate amount of time and effort on theirs. Example, the Green Aesop science experiments in iGo Nuclear where Sam passes by demonstrating the "green qualities" of an orange. Namely that it's edible, and the peel is biodegradable. Although admittedly, the teacher was a Straw New-Age Retro Hippie.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_2bb4ae0f	comment	Averted in Heroes. Of all the main characters, only the main antagonist Sylar is shown rapidly mastering his abilities (his original power, Intuitive Aptitude, is a literal applied version of The Gift). All the actual Heroes have to spend several episodes (the space of a couple of months) figuring out How Do I Shot Web? or trying to avoid a Super-Power Meltdown. Played straight in that office worker Hiro Nakamura, after a single sword-fighting lesson from his father, becomes skilled enough with a katana to fight evenly against and ultimately defeat Takezo Kensai, a professional mercenary and swordsman. Of course, Hiro can slow down time. It could be an extra long lesson…
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_2d316ba2	comment	Averted in the second Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles cartoon, where Leonardo is unquestionably the best fighter of the four almost solely due to his training and discipline, while Michelangelo, who is acknowledged to have the potential to be even better, isn't because he doesn't have the discipline or the will to train.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_30a5ebfd	comment	Naruto: The series had the initial Aesop that hard work would trump natural talent any time. As the series progressed however, that... wasn't always perfectly represented. Rock Lee seems like the poster child for this trope. He has little natural talent whatsoever and trains and trains and trains to prove he can be a powerful ninja without ninjustu or genjustsu. He has a good showing at first, easily defeating the two leads, but then proceeds to lose almost every other fight he gets into. However, those losses tend to come from extremely powerful enemies and Lee has impressive showings for those fights. His fight with Gaara, for example, had Gaara's teammates spend the entire match panicking at how badly Lee was manhandling him. Also, it is indisputable that Lee has come a long way from where he was in the academy, where even his beloved and supportive Guy sensei admitted he was pathetic. So, hard work may not have made him the best around, but without it he'd be useless. It should be noted that Lee is hardly talentless. Sure, his talent with the more traditional ninja arts is non-existent. However, it is also said by Kakashi there is no way hard work alone can get you to open five gates at age 13. Lee's case is really a person whose talent is not discovered by lesser teachers and he later runs into a teacher that recognizes his real talent and applied the appropriate training method for that talent. Naruto (and possibly his earlier reincarnations) is more or less the same thing. Basically, hard work is important, but to get to the very top or close to it, you need BOTH talent and hard work. Sasuke was born with The Gift, specifically one that lets him instantly copy any technique and, with sufficient training and aptitude, execute it flawlessly, in addition to already exceptional skills. Now, quite a few times he is said to train seriously, notably in his Fire Release jutsus and Chuunin exam training, but much of it happens offscreen, and he has gotten several powerups in a row thanks to Superpowerful Genetics mixed with The Power of Hate. He does receive his Mangekyo after a grueling battle with Itachi, and it requires battles with several powerful opponents for him to master it. However, this trope becomes more notable after he receives Itachi's eyes from Tobi, whereupon he starts receiving incredible power-ups without any work put in. Much like Naruto, he tends to ping-pong as the plot demands. As best as we know, the two characters on the opposite ends of the scale are Indra and Ashura, the sons of the Sage of the Six Paths who both achieved similar levels of power, Indra through Superpowerful Genetics, and Ashura through Training from Hell & The Power of Friendship. The titular character ping-pongs between both ends. On the one hand, he starts the series as a talentless loser whose only saving grace is insane amounts of stamina. On the other hand, we learn that his parents were both highly-skilled ninja and the Kyuubi implanted in him makes incredibly strong, and is the reason for his incredible stamina in the first place. However, learning to control the Kyuubi's chakra was a long, dangerous process and the Sage of Six Paths has pointed out that incredible parents don't always pass down their talent. However, in earlier chapters Tsunade said that Naruto's ninjutsu style is like his mother's (we never really saw Kushina fight) and its been noted a few times that he also inherited her strong chakra genes to make it even possible for him to control the Kyuubi chakra.note Though he didn't inherit his mother's powerful "chakra chains" ability; instead his distant cousin Karin spontaneously manifests that ability. Naruto will frequently undergo Training from Hell which would seem like an aversion, but he often gains extraordinary power from it that no one else could or would get and in some cases he uses his aforementioned incredible stamina to take shortcuts that wouldn't be available to use for other people. Finally, he's The Chosen One who is destined to succeed through hard work, as paradoxical as that sounds. At the end, he and Sasuke only succeed due to a literal Deus ex Machina in the form of the Sage Of Six Paths inexplicably showing up and giving both of them a power up due to them being the reincarnations of his sons. It's also worth mentioning Shikamaru. For most of the series, he is the definition of Brilliant, but Lazy. During the Chunin Exams, he is the only participant to pass and be promoted to Chunin even though he was by far the laziest participant and passed entirely due to impressing the proctors with his raw natural ability. In spite of his slacker tendencies, he ends up being the one of the youngest jonin of his generation. He also becomes co-general of his own division during the war. It could be said that he only grows strong after he starts working hard. But considering the effort he puts in compared to everyone else, it's obvious that his success is mostly due to his genius intellect. And then we have Might Guy to provide the ultimate subversion: as a child, he was so talentless he failed the academy entrance exam the first time around and couldn't use ninjutsu and genjutsu, but by the time we met him his training had enabled him to use ninjutsu and made him one of Konoha's top shinobi. And when he uses the Eight Gates, he becomes capable of warping space with a kick. Hard Work is partly what made Guy strong enough to knock around Uchiha Madara, the guy who Curbstomped all five living Kage at the same time like a ragdoll. Other factors were Madara holding back against Guy. Along with Minato, Gaara, Kakashi, and Lee helped nerf him. Still, it's enough for Madara to declare him the greatest Taijutsu master he has ever faced, and give him more respect than the entire Shinobi Alliance. In fact, Guy is one of only two people Madara ever considered a worthy opponent. Also zig-zagged with Naruto's son, Boruto, who is talented at chakra control. However, his laziness causes him to fall behind other Genin of his generation and causes him to resort to cheating with preloaded jutsus. In the final battle, the one jutsu he worked hard on, the Vanishing Rasengan, managed to save the heroes from the villain (who is also lazy). Of course, Naruto's massive chakra was still necessary to finish the villain off.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_36e5d7da	comment	Veritas subverts this big time. In the Reunion program, Gangryong faces other students far more powerful than he is. Their power comes through medical ki treatments, while his is earned through good old fashion hard work. Gangryong's training also gives him the added edge of an exceptionally strong grasp of fighting basics. His opponents can throw a fireball that can destroy a building, but many of them don't know how to defend against a cross hook, maintain a perfect stance, or outmaneuver an opponent who fights dirty. As a result, Gangryong is able to win enough matches to move up through Reunion ranks. The one technique that signals Gangryong becoming an actual threat is mastering a half step to the side.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_370f4bc0	comment	Every Zoids protagonist of note tends to drop into the cockpit without much previous combat experience, and manage to kick the backsides of more than a few expert enemies who've fought for years. Bit Cloud might be a deconstruction, as he spent most of his adult life as a junk merchant specializing in Zoid parts and studying tactics, and isn't treated very seriously by opponents early on because he had little fame behind him. Bit also states at the start of the series he had wanted to be a pilot so it's possible he had trained beforehand. He's certainly good at coming up with a plan. Van and Bit are both justified by having the Organoid helping out from the inside. Van in particular starts out relying almost entirely on Zeke, and receives proper training later on. Bit might be smarter than he looks.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_39d92b2f	comment	Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha is an extreme version. The title character literally did not train at all, instead skipping right to fighting monsters for an hour or two after school each day. Within a week she's stronger than someone else around her age who had been training his entire life, and by the end of the first season (at most a couple months) she's become A (elite) rank. When there are more seasons, much Rank Inflation ensues though there's at least a considerable Time Skip between the second and third seasons. The second season and its supplementary manga explains all this by... turning Nanoha into a complete aversion of this. Her exponential increase in strength? It's revealed that thanks to Raising Heart, she's able to train every single waking moment of her life, displaying astonishing multi-tasking skills by running virtual reality training programs directly into her mind while she eats, goes to school, and does her other activities. This is in addition to her waking up early and going to bed late to practice her magic in the real world, and Raising Heart going on Pressure Mode to act like a magical training weight that forces Nanoha's magical growth by draining her mana when she's not active. The third season then subverts it; apparently all that built up stress and exhaustion caught up to her years later, nearly killing her on a routine mission. Additionally, said manga shows that while Chrono (said "someone else her age") isn't as powerful, his combat experience actually allows him to be able to defeat both Nanoha and Fate. Teana is a complete aversion. Unlike the other Forwards, she doesn't have the advantage of winning the Superpower Lottery or being a Super Soldier, but she manages to become the only one of them to reach S Rank (half a rank below Nanoha) through hard work alone. This is Jill Stola's personal philosophy in ViVid Strike!, and is one of the things that Nove disagrees with her on. The irony being that Jill earned her skill while Nove is a genetically enhanced combat cyborg. Then again, Nove is close friends with - and was originally defeated by - Teana, so she knows first hand that this trope doesn't always apply.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3aeb1c75	comment	As in the Dragon Ball examples above, Dragon Ball Z Abridged takes the various plot points involving this (Vegeta gaining the ability to sense energy just by visiting Earth, Saiyans getting stronger with every defeat, everyone stealing Krillin's Destructo-Disk) and runs with it. The Tien example came to the fore in episode 48, when Semi-Perfect Cell taunts him over his inability to keep pace despite working his butt off.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3b34143f	comment	Harry Potter is Playing with a Trope. Harry is a naturally gifted Seeker. He doesn't seem to be that far above average while playing any other position. The general line is that this is because his dad was a great seeker. When it comes to school work, he leans on Hermione. This is also extended to Hufflepuff whose defining trait is hard work. The number of major/notable characters from that house that are crucial to the plot can be counted on one hand . Hermoine is the best student in her house because she spends all her time reading. Ron doesn't excel at school subjects or sports because he's playing Wizard Chess, which he excels at and he eventually becomes an excellent Quidditch Keeper and his grades are mostly passable to good, he's just Overshadowed by Awesome. Neville seems to be playing this straight until Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Give Neville a reason to work, and he will give you results. When Bellatrix Lestrange escaped from Azkaban Neville was given sufficient reason to become a fighter; his subsequent focus and training caused him to improve himself almost as fast as Hermione and Harry considered this sudden change to be quite alarming. This was also the book in which it was revealed he'd been using a wand that hadn't chosen him meaning he'd had the distinct disadvantage of dealing with a wand that was fighting him this whole time.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3defe34c	comment	Discussed by the God-Emperor Incubus — this is the pitch he sells when offering his Deal with the Devil. Why spend the effort developing your own potential when you can take a piece of his spirit into your mind, let him unlock it for you, and "Bam! Instant badass"? Terms, conditions, and eventual spiritual ruination apply.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3e4d48d5	comment	Averted in Food Wars!, where every single exceptionally skilled chef is constantly shown to be making improvements to their cooking styles and that even if they are "gifted", the moment when they stop trying to improve is when their skills begin to stagnate. Soma even points out in the beginning of the series that even if the other students have been studying fine cuisine since middle school, he's been cooking in the kitchen for twelve years and definitely outperforms a significant portion of the student body as a result. Despite being among the best students in the whole school, Soma is always finding ways to improve his recipes and continues to aim to overcome the handful of students that are better than him. This is shown to be the underlying relationship between Soma and his father Joichirou. While Joichirou was considered to be the most talented member of the Polar Star Dorm, he considers his son to be the better image of a chef that would surpass himself. The reason is that while his son was nowhere near as talented as he was in his youth, it is his greater sense of hard work and perseverance that made him a better chef. Double Subverted with regards to Nene. She failed because she worked hard, but at the wrong things. As the heir to an ancient and proud culinary tradition, she focused on learning to cook her forbears' recipes to perfection, but never regarded how her customers would regard those dishes, or how they could be improved or adapted to different circumstances. Jouichirou's own tenure at Tootsuki can be considered a Deconstruction. The people around him chalked up Jouichirou's successes to his "innate genius" and pushed him to greater and greater heights while failing to see the immense amounts of hard work that went into everything he accomplished. In the end, Jouichirou worked himself into a near-complete breakdown trying to live up to people's expectations, and eventually had to leave Tootsuki to maintain some semblance of sanity.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3e5de40b	comment	Averted in Scrubs, which indicates on several occasions that hard work is the most important part of being a good doctor. For example, Dr. Cox tells J.D. that Elliot has overtaken him as a doctor because he spends too much time goofing off with Turk. In season 8, new intern Ed is another subversion in that while he was initially smart enough to get by with little work, eventually it became impossible for him to keep up and he was fired.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3eb3a36f	comment	Played with and ultimately averted in Assassination Classroom. Class 3E's hard work does pay off at the very end with every student making the top fifty spots in the school, but the weakest student in the class (Terasaka) stays the weakest academically and Karma, who is naturally gifted, stays at the top. It's in comparison to the rest of the school that they gained, not so much in comparison to each other. Karma managed to place thirteenth in the entire school for the first term's finals without even studying...but this is treated as failure since everyone knew he could have done better if he tried, having been fourth place on the midterms. It's only when he studies that he can claim the top spot in the school. The four class slackers decide to place top of a subject in the midterms...in the elective of home ec; which is then subverted as it's revealed they would have had to have studied past testing trends to score so well on such a subjective course and thus worked just as hard as their classmates. The other top scorers are all noted as having natural talent in their preferred subjects on top of their studying. Class A has an advantage due to being more naturally gifted in the style of study promoted by the school and having special cram sessions. During the second finals, A Class trains too hard and end up burning out by the latter half of the tests since they can't sustain their energy anymore. Played straighter in regards to assassination techniques. No matter how hard he tries, Karma is simply not the natural assassin Nagisa is; for all his raw strength and brains Karma cannot master the elements of surprise and the speed Nagisa has at his disposal. Nagisa not acknowledging his natural talent actually acts as a minor Berserk Button for Karma in the class civil war.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3efc191f	comment	Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide: During an argument with Shinji, Asuka throws in his face that he never had to work hard for being an Eva pilot, whereas that she trained hard for one entire decade to become the best, and everything that she got was getting her mind raped.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3f4a104b	comment	In Dilbert, Alice is a consistently hard-working employee while Wally does virtually no work at all. The Pointy-Haired Boss treats them equally and sometimes even tell Alice that she ought to be more like Wally. Justified in that the boss is a moron. It is sometimes shown that Wally is a brilliant worker when he wants to be, but this is practically never, because he's realized something that Alice hasn't: effort doesn't pay off in a company that steals all your achievements without granting you slightest recognition, and the management doesn't recognise the difference between a lazy slob and a devout employee. Wally is based on a real-life individual that Scott Adams knew. Wally was a brilliant worker who gamed the system so that he got the best outcome from minimal effort. Specifically, he figured out that the buyout for layoffs was better than the retirement package, so he made a dedicated effort to be useless without actually getting fired. According to Adams, he succeeded.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_3f5ac463	comment	This trope explicitly comes into play in the movie Resurrection 'F': after Frieza is wished back to life by his minions, he says that he thought being a prodigy was all he needed, only to receive a rude awakening thanks to Goku and Future Trunks. Thus he resolves to train for the first time in his life so he can return to Earth and take his revenge on the Saiyans. His training succeeds, as he becomes powerful enough to challenge post-series Goku. The real kicker? It only takes him four months to come close to Goku's level, who had been training for years. However, this trope isn't played completely straight. Frieza increased his raw strength, but didn't learn to control or maintain his power. Once he reached his super form, he could only keep it for a short time before his energy rapidly drained. Goku calls Frieza out on this, saying that instead of completing his training, he rushed to Earth as soon as he achieved his new transformation. It's re-averted when Frieza meditates while in Hell to learn to control his ki, and by the time of the Universe Survival Saga, he's able to keep up without exhausting himself.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_40852654	comment	Medaka from Medaka Box is about the epitome of this trope. Her abilities just literally come to her be it semi-naturally or through her ability Power Copying, which not only allows her to acquire other peoples' powers just fighting or coming into contact with them (and later just by hearing some details about the ability) but allows her to master their ability even if the original holder hasn't done so themselves and create derivatives of them to suit her own needs albeit ones that didn't take the original purpose of the ability into account. This later comes to a head as she is considered an opponent that even an introduced God-Mode Sue can't beat. Before the series' Genre Shift it wasn't really touched upon, but since becoming a battle manga, she's become somewhat of a Deconstruction of overpowered main characters. She does however state in the beginning that those with talent (like herself) do work to get where they are, but the work put in varies like any other person. It's also played with in regards to the Supporting Protagonist Zenkichi. Despite being the Team Normal of the cast, he's able to keep up with other Superpowered characters through hard work and determination. Yet in a later arc, other characters explicitly stated to be normal easily upstage him in a Treasure Hunt.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_42cc8840	comment	In High School Musical, newcomers Troy and Gabriella get the lead roles in the school musical over veteran actors Sharpay and Ryan.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_44fe781e	comment	Neon Genesis Evangelion. Asuka is sent over the edge when Shinji's sync ratio got higher than hers even when she trained as a pilot for years. Then we found out why: it's revealed that Asuka figuratively "walling off" her heart from everyone (to avoid being hurt again) also caused her to shut out Eva-02 in all her attempts to synchronize with its resident soul, which just so happens to be that of her dead mother, thus she was essentially piloting an Eva all wrong. The fact that she managed the highest sync ratio for any period of time is impressive, and Asuka is still a better pilot than Shinji in terms of self-discipline and practical skill anyway. The main problem being that the series is Neon Genesis Evangelion, where everything will always go wrong (unless you're in a Lighter and Softer spin-off).
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_4522fd1	comment	Chaka from the Whateley Universe is a Ki prodigy, able to pull off crazy stunts with a few seconds of planning. She can do things her teacher studied for years to learn, and nothing is a problem for her. There's a scene in Aquerna's story where she feels depressed and useless because her powers suck compared to nearly anyone's, and she can't do anything remotely resembling what Chaka does. The subsequent conversation with their sensei implies that he suffers from similar feelings because he worked for years to do what he does, while Chaka gets it naturally.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_45599333	comment	Twenty-Fifth Bam from Tower of God has a talent and affinity that borders onto Power Copying. He can emulate Shinsu techniques others had to train for years (often decades) to perfect just by experiencing and witnessing them. It doesn't help him catch much of a break though, rather the opposite.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_47f0eac3	comment	Zig-zagged in Metalocalypse: Toki is the world's second-best guitarist by virtue of natural talent alone, and it is outright stated that he doesn't practice. However, Toki is nowhere near as good as Skwisgaar, who is the world's best guitarist (as well as Dethklok's primary songwriter), but Skwisgaar maintains a near-insane practice regimen specifically to ensure that he will always be better than Toki.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_489150a8	comment	In The Licanius Trilogy, Davian has been trying his entire life to wield Essence. He's studied every book and practiced every technique, but he just isn't able to tap his Reserve and wield it. That's because Augurs use Essence by wielding it from the environment, not their Reserves, but he has no clue about this until someone tells him. From that point on, he's a natural.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_49a84be6	comment	In Final Fantasy III is perhaps one of the most egregious examples. All the characters are orphans, and only one has any battle experience. They all can learn any job very easily, especially if you use the job level glitch in the DS version. From a story standpoint though, they defeat the ultimate evil in what we are led to believe is a few days. Of course, the actual amount of time it takes to beat him is subject to how long you stay at ye olde Trauma Inn.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_4a198c8f	comment	Averted hard in All Rounder Meguru: while talent is an important element, not only it takes many hours of rigorous training to assimilate techniques, it's made clear that the biggest difference between a normal amateur and both professional MMA fighters and amateurs planning to go pro is physical strength that can be obtained only through hard training-and that goes for any martial art Meguru has a talent for analyzing his opponents' techniques, strengths and weaknesses and get the right timing to put them at disadvantage and easily learning techniques used on him, but before he could use his talent he had to go through a very long, repetitive and hard training to learn the basics and through many painful spars with Maki to learn the clinch. He also needs more work than average to keep his physical strength, and that is why, in spite of being a lightweight (up to 65 kg) coming from karate, his usual trainer is Nabe, a middleweight (up to 77 kg) wrestler who works him to the bone. Momoko is a genius judoka who quickly learns ju-jitsu, but would always skip reinforcement training. Because of that, every time she takes part in a tournament she always loses in the semifinals or finals due being too tired. Mitsuya is well known for his talent, even having been a candidate for the Olympic games and was expected to win the All Japan Amateur Shooto Tournament-but due his exceptional talent he failed to take things seriously, and that cost him both his chance for the Olympic games and the qualification for the national tournament, in the latter case losing (barely) to Meguru in the finals of the Kansai tournament. He has learned from his defeat, and at the Kanto Open Tournament he mops the floor with Yudai (noted to be almost Meguru's better in grappling and his overall equal).
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_4fd9904a	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_4fd9904a	comment	Neville seems to be playing this straight until Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Give Neville a reason to work, and he will give you results. When Bellatrix Lestrange escaped from Azkaban Neville was given sufficient reason to become a fighter; his subsequent focus and training caused him to improve himself almost as fast as Hermione and Harry considered this sudden change to be quite alarming. This was also the book in which it was revealed he'd been using a wand that hadn't chosen him meaning he'd had the distinct disadvantage of dealing with a wand that was fighting him this whole time.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_526d4c5c	comment	Knights of the Old Republic. All it takes is a visit to Dantooine and a literal Training Montage (a week, maybe a month?) and you can go from a simple republic trooper to full-scale Jedi. The montage includes a scene of one of your teachers stating that to learn so fast is unheard of and that you have learned in weeks what takes years for others. The reason for that? This is not the first time you are going through the training.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_53b30902	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_53b30902	comment	Inverted in Valkyria Chronicles — hard work always works, but natural-born talent (if it puts you in a class above your peers) is completely and irredeemably evil. In theory. In practice, the series demonstrates the professional soldiers who have trained for years are MUCH weaker than a bunch of amateurs who have just joined the army, the point where even one of their newbies can beat several enemy soldiers at a time. The sequel makes this worse, where veterans are easily outgunned and outclassed by the supposed academy's failure class, none of whom can keep up with the fresh-faced 16-18-year-olds, aside from a few boss characters, marked out by their own special talents. And the leader maybe a careless idiot who doesn't understand and doesn't even try to understand tactics, rushes into situations and laughs in the face of a danger in a way that would get his unit violently wiped out in a real war, but dam if he doesn't completely overwhelm the enemy, even they outnumber him 6 to 1 or more!
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_54e7b84f	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_54e7b84f	comment	Very averted in No Chance for Fate. Ranma has to work hard to gain abilities and even then, he'd just have learned them but still needs experience to become better. The Senshi do get their magic for free but have no experience using it. They also are still essentially normal teenagers and need combat training to learn everything they need to survive in battle.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_55d81244	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_55d81244	comment	This is Jill Stola's personal philosophy in ViVid Strike!, and is one of the things that Nove disagrees with her on. The irony being that Jill earned her skill while Nove is a genetically enhanced combat cyborg. Then again, Nove is close friends with - and was originally defeated by - Teana, so she knows first hand that this trope doesn't always apply.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5908ee91	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5908ee91	comment	In The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim, the Greybeards of High Hrothgar live lives of seclusion, spending their lives to learn the Thu'um. The Dragonborn just has to kill a dragon to learn a shout instantly. Interestingly, they acknowledge this and claim that instructing you is an honor beyond honor. Also it should be noted that they are much, much better at it than you are.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_59151283	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_59151283	comment	A recurring theme in the Metal Gear franchise is proving this trope wrong. The series is full of super soldiers with innate powers, artificial augmentations, virtual quick-training technologies, and gene therapy all being used to make superior soldiers, but it's always the soldiers who have worked hard to train and gain experience who come out on top. The Genome Army are just "video game players" according to Solid Snake as he takes them down by the dozen, the elite Cobra Unit with all their abilities lose to Naked Snake because he was trained by The Boss, the effectively robotic B&B Corps go down to the experienced Old Snake and his bag of obsolete guns and the cyborg Raiden takes the most savage beating of his life from the guy with a robotic arm and a lot of training with a sword. At the end of the day, the series makes it very clear all these special abilities and augments only serve to enhance what has been built by rock-solid training and experience.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_59215319	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_59215319	comment	Persona 2 zigzags this, as it does work largely like "any RPG" as mentioned above - you go from normal high school student (or magazine editor, or cop, or whatever) to monster-slaying, god-enslaving, world-saving badass in what might generously be two weeks. However, some of your biggest foes are other people who have been granted immense power... and used it as a crutch to lord over others. So all your hard work lets you kick them in the face. Seemingly played straight again at the end of Innocent Sin, where you beat up Nyarlathotep, except shortly thereafter Nyarlathotep reveals he was just playing down to your level and isn't remotely inconvenienced, then goes on to end the world while you just stand by exhausted from the fight. No, you didn't just Punch Out Cthu- er, Nyarlathotep like you thought you did, and it takes another god's intervention to turn back time. Played more straight in the end of Eternal Punishment, though the hard work has been put in twice over by some people, this time. Though all this is probably Justified because the collective unconscious is reshaping the world, meaning heroes can rise up out of nothing because enough people believe they can.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5921531a	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5921531a	comment	In Persona 3, Persona 4, and Persona 5, this is averted when it comes to increasing your character's non-combat statistics. Before exams, you'll need to have studied quite regularly to get the most out of it, and one of the characters in Persona 3 even tells you that studying a bit each day rather than just cramming will go further.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5afbc0cb	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5afbc0cb	comment	Undertale: Papyrus and Sans are royal guards for King Asgore. Papyrus takes his job seriously and practices constantly, both at work and at his cooking skills, but never seems to get any better at either of them. Sans bums around, flat-out refuses to do his job, and takes laziness to what other tropers describe as an art form; not only does he cook delicious hot dogs, he is by far the strongest single entity on the planet, serving as the True Final Boss of the Kill 'Em All ending. While not thematically related, he's also stronger than Flowey, the Big Bad, who has spent a century or two trying to manipulate an Eternal Recurrence to his favor; the Fallen Child, the Greater-Scope Villain, who has been training in the afterlife about as long as Flowey; and the player character, who is required to go Level Grinding no fewer than nineteen levels to even be allowed to battle Sans. Only a Fusion Dance of the Fallen Child and the player character is enough to finally bring Sans down. The battle part is justified in that Sans cheats with the mechanics of the game. By the game's stats, he only has one attack point and one defense point, implying that his lack of work really does result in him being weaker... on paper. In-game, he gets around the latter by simply side-stepping attacks, which no other enemy does, and he gets around the former with a combination of bypassing Mercy Invincibility and overly long attacks that require fast reflexes to dodge.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5b1037f3	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5b1037f3	comment	Averting this is a key part of A Certain Magical Index. Anyone can become a powerful esper if they work hard and focus on the ability improvement curriculum. Mikoto Misaka, one of the heroines, started out as a level 1 and rose to level 5 (the highest level) through patience and determination, and is often held up in the series as an example of what you can do if you work at it. Except that's all a lie. Using the supercomputer Tree Diagram, the city's leadership knows who will respond best to the ability improvement. They focused their efforts on those children, while ignoring the majority of the city as not worth the investment of time and resources.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5ce51054	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5ce51054	comment	Subverted in Frazz. At the end of the summer when Caulfield learned to swim, Frazz praised him as a natural. He confesses to having snuck back into the pool after his lesson and practiced more.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5e16d550	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_5e16d550	comment	Black Clover: Subverted. Despite being born without any magic, Asta has trained diligently for years, giving him an incredibly muscular body and great strength. However, in the first chapter it's established that, despite his musculature, he still can't compare to skilled mages. Then, he manifests his grimoire, which gives him an anti-magic sword that he can wield because of his lack of magic and strength from years of training. This is discussed regarding the kingdom's aristocracy. It's stated that the biggest factor to learn spells is natural talent. Nobility rarely train as a result and look down on it as something people who are not born into power do. However, it's also stated that dedicated training, battle experience, and intense determination in a crisis are important factors in manifesting power. This explains how the Black Bulls, who are mostly commoners who have been through many tough battles and trained hard, effectively face off against other, mostly noble Magic Knights in the Royal Knights Exam. And it's because Noelle has natural talent and worked hard as a Black Bull that she learns her spell Valkyrie Armor to save her siblings.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6117815f	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6117815f	comment	The One I Love Is: In chapter 9 Asuka complains that she worked hard for one decade to become the best pilot, and she was being beaten by a barely-trained rookie.
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The One I Love Is (Fanfic)	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6117815f
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_65608478	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_65608478	comment	Choujin Sensen: According to FEE, this is how Tomobiki justifies his action in not enrolling in college, finding a full-time job, or confessing to the girl he likes.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_696b75c2	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_696b75c2	comment	In A Brother's Price, Jerin is able to marry the princesses because his grandfather was special, but his lockpicking skills and ability to read thieves' cant are all due to hard work. This is a family tradition, coming from his grandmothers who were spies, but Jerin and his sisters are shown practicing it. On the other hand, Jerin's Sex God abilities do seem somewhat implausible given that he's a virgin at the start of the novel and only had the theoretical knowledge passed to him by his grandfather. On the other hand, such things are subjective and the competition isn't any better, either, as chastity is highly valued in husbands in this setting.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6a54faf8	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6a54faf8	comment	This is why Liz Ricarro from IGPX: Immortal Grand Prix gets angry with Takeshi. She trains herself so much whereas he rarely does anything and yet, they're just as good at being mech pilots. It can easily seen where Liz first beats him handily in kung fu, what she has been practicing for years, in the first episode. That is until Takeshi practices kendo, where he easily beats her in the second season. Then partly defied in the same season when Takeshi talks to the Insufferable Genius Max about everyone working together.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6ac55ec7	comment	In Dungeons & Dragons: Kobold creation myths claim that their racial deity Kurtulmak laboriously honed his skill and power while in service to the Dragons, earned his freedom, and built a lair of unsurpassed design from which the kobolds were poised to enter the world as a major race — until the deity Garl Glittergold collapsed it on top of him and led his gnomes to dominance in their place. Neither Kurtulmak nor Garl is entirely trustworthy sources of information, however. Leaked Experience means that a party of Player Characters get equal Experience Points from combat encounters, regardless of how useful each character was. DM permitting, it's possible to become a powerful wizard or sage just by watching your friends beat stuff up. This trope competes with Time Dissonance to explain why a human can gain as much power in seventy or eighty years as an elf can in four or five hundred. Apparently, elves are just slower learners. Wizards and Clerics have to study for years to gain their first Character Level and learn the rudiments of magic, which leaves them a bit cross when a budding Sorcerer intuitively taps dormant power in their blood or a deity awakens some schmuck as a Favored Soul.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6c4aecd1	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6c4aecd1	comment	There's a joke in The Sharkasm Crew that if you don't train in Super Smash Bros. Melee, you'll get better at it. Subverted in that Kason, Sauxuas and Vyzor, the top three members, play Melee the most.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6c9193a1	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6c9193a1	comment	Dr. Orpheus of The Venture Bros. is, despite his Butt-Monkey status in his personal life, one of the closest things to a Deus ex Machina in the show. However it's shown this power came at a price; his incredible dedication to his mystical profession and training lead to his wife divorcing him and has been a cause of major strife in his life. So when one fourth season episode has him shown up by the Outrider, the guy his wife has now hooked up with — he's far more powerful, and hasn't made nearly as many sacrifices to get his skill— he has a crisis. This trope is then subverted by revealing the Outrider cheated, he's "cyborged" a mystic artifact into his brain... which ends up going horribly wrong. However, the episode also points out the other side of the coin - though the Outrider took shortcuts rather than constantly training, it freed him up to actually spend time with his wife and stepdaughter, something that Orpheus was never able to balance out with his mystical duties. Ultimately, Orpheus has to admit that the Outrider is much happier and better-adjusted than he is.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6ee4478f	comment	Once More with Feeling: One reason Asuka is so frustrated with Shinji is that his synch rate is higher even though he's been training for much less time than she has. Of course, Shinji has a couple of advantages (being a time traveler and knowing some things he shouldn't) over her.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6f4f76ce	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_6f4f76ce	comment	Dragon Knight 3: Knights of Xentar inverts this: Desmond (or Takeru in the original Japanese version) starts off being quite an advanced and powerful knight at the beginning of the game. A bit into the story, though, a daemon tricks our guy, and he ends up becoming weak and forgetting everything he learned. Starting from Level 1 again, now the hard work (and not just hard work with the ladies, of which there are a lot in the story) hacking up monsters...
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7041cf12	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7041cf12	comment	Shirogane from Kaguya-sama: Love Is War averts or subverts this, depending on how one looks at it. In his own estimation, he has zero natural talent, and the only reason he holds the #1 spot in academia is because of the constant effort put into studying. It's been shown that he's from below average to downright atrocious when it comes to some mundane activities, including ones that any other individual wouldn't have had trouble performing reasonably well at without prior training (aside from, weirdly enough, juggling). It also takes tremendous amount of work, along with a skilled instructor to bring his skills in those areas to about normal level. On the other hand, he is quick-witted and can come up with plans on the spot, holds multiple national certifications in different fields, manages to keep in balance his domestic routine, three part-time jobs and rather demanding studying sessions at the same time, eventually gets accepted into extremely selective Stanford University (at an accelerated rate at that), and most importantly, always succeeds exponentially in self-improvement (becoming average at something may not sound extraordinary, but when you start below figurative "zero", it's a whole other story). All of that suggests he might be very special human being.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_70959613	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_70959613	comment	Parodied by Kung Fu Hustle, where the hero has inherited greatness in his chi, which spontaneously emerges upon emerging from a cocoon. Though this was after some Percussive Maintenance acupuncture courtesy of the Big Bad, "unblocking" his chi flow.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_72262aee	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_72262aee	comment	Avatar: The Last Airbender: Katara feels this way when Aang masters Waterbending seemingly without trying when she's been self-training for years. This is lampshaded partly in the numerous references to past Avatars—Roku notes to a hesitant teacher that the Avatar has already mastered the elements a thousand times, which means learning them might be more like remembering something you forgot a long time ago. In addition, Katara was self-teaching, but Aang immediately benefited from everything she learned. When they both get some supervised training from a true Master, she learns much faster because he doesn't take it very seriously: Katara makes enough progress in days for said master (a Straw Misogynist who only changed his tune after a near-defeat and some Epiphany Therapy) to declare her a Master in turn. Lesson: being a Determined Prodigy is superior to being Brilliant, but Lazy. Zuko also laments to himself about things come so easily for Aang, just like for his sister, while he has to constantly struggle for anything he wants and loses so many times. In the end, however, this becomes Zuko's strength against Azula, as his determined nature allows him to bounce back from failure better than Azula does when Mai and Ty Lee do a Heel–Face Turn against her. It also gives him an advantage that was demonstrated as early as the third episode; he doesn't have the flashy or most powerful moves that more naturally skilled firebenders possess, but his superior mastery of the fundamentals can make up the difference. Per Word of God, this is the point of bending in general. They wanted a magic system that you actually have to work at, rather than just being handed power. There are geniuses like Azula and Toph, but they still had to train. Even the Avatar, the local messiah, has to master each element individually every time they reincarnate. In fact, the Avatar State is basically just accessing the experience of hundreds of Avatars at once, stacking thousands of years of training to cheat the system and do things that no one with a mortal lifespan could ever manage. In the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, this is played straight and subverted in different situations. Tenzin studies spirit lore for decades and it gets him exactly nowhere in regards to actual spirits, yet his eleven-year-old daughter has a natural connection to the spirit world and sufficient Airbending skill that she's nearly as good as her father. On the other hand, while Zaheer can sledgehammer almost any bender in a one-on-one fight despite having only been one for a few months, it turns out this is because even before Harmonic Convergence he was a talented martial artist and simply adapted his style to include airbending; he had also been reading the philosophy behind it for years beforehand by complete coincidence, and gets a lot of mileage from using extremely obscure abilities he learned of in this study. When he does come up against someone who has been studying the same bending style for decades, it's only the intervention of his allies that prevents Tenzin from destroying Zaheer.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_73383fee	comment	Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc's Kiyotaka Ishimaru wants to prove this isn't true at all. While he attends the elite Hope's Peak Academy, he notably reacts poorly to being called a 'genius', as he connects that term with the concept of being born with talent as opposed to working hard for it.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_746814ae	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_746814ae	comment	Played straight and then averted in an old episode of Arthur, dealing with a school-wide Spelling Bee. In the initial round, Arthur gets through by sheer luck in that the only word he studied was "Aardvark", whereas a few other classmates studied furiously. Deciding to win through skill the next time, Arthur studies rigorously and does succeed in the end.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_74f7210c	comment	The Legend of Zelda: In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, local mentor Orca teaches Link the Hurricane Spin, a technique gained by gathering ten Knight's Crests (a feat in and of itself) - and lots of practice. Before performing the technique, he'll mention that it took him years to become so accomplished and that age caught up to him before he could fully realize his dream. He's moved to tears upon witnessing Link execute it flawlessly in a matter of seconds. This trope is also played with in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess where the Hero's Shade teaches the new Link several techniques called the "Hidden Skills." Although he will patiently review them until Link (i.e. the player) gets them right, he makes it clear that Link's status as The Hero means this trope should be in full effect and only shows approval after Link masters them appropriately. It should be noted that Link has Leaked Experience from all his past lives. The first Links had to train long and hard, but the later ones retain it in a manner similar to muscle memory. It should also be noted Link wasn't exactly goofing off to get those ten Knight's Crests. Also played with in The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild in regards to Zelda. She was initially fiercely jealous of Link for so easily being chosen by the Master Sword when she's worked for years to awaken her own powers to no avail. It's heavily implied in-game that her father forcing her to try and awaken said powers by constantly praying to Hylia and putting immense pressure on her is what stopped her from awakening them sooner. Not only does hard work hardly work, but it was also quite likely actually impeding her!
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_762df2bc	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_762df2bc	comment	This happens quite a bit with Po from the Kung Fu Panda movies, largely because he is the Dragon Warrior, The Chosen One. In the first movie, the Furious Five and Tai Lung had to train for years, if not decades, to become as powerful and as skilled as they are. All Po requires is the proper motivation and a Training Montage that couldn't take more than a week or two. It helps that his particular Training Montage was tailored specifically to his psychology. He is a talented learner, and has incredible stamina and willpower as shown when the Five cream him one after the other and he asks for more! Natural immunity to Tai Lung's instant-KO special move doesn't hurt either. Additionally, both the dumpling battle with Shifu and the final battle with Tai Lung show that Po did not defeat Tai Lung simply through matching him in techniques (it would be impossible in such a time frame) but by engaging him in a battle of wits and skill, such as using the environment and unorthodox methods as well as a distracting measure (the Dragon Scroll). He was helped by Tai Lung losing his usual perceptiveness and tactical thinking due to his initial arrogance and ongoing Villainous Breakdown. By the time Tai Lung focused more on killing Po than getting the Dragon Scroll for himself, he's taken a fair amount of embarrassment and damage from Po, and is mentally crushed by the Dragon Scroll's revelation, allowing Po to put his newfound skills and immunity to nerve strikes to good use and own him. In a sense it's inverted with Po and the Furious Five and Tai Lung. Tai Lung and the Furious Five (as revealed in Secrets of the Furious Five) all had natural strength and ability even before they started training with Shifu and Oogway (with the possible exception of Crane). Po's talent wasn't very obvious at first but was eventually discovered through the hard work he did perform. In the sequel Shifu expresses exasperation that Po has managed to learn inner peace at such a young age when he himself didn't manage it until the end of the first movie, by which point he was already an old man. Po consoles him by remarking that he had a great teacher. This makes sense when you compare personalities. Shifu's strict and no-nonsense attitude made it difficult for him as well as his reluctance to face his trauma. Po on the other hand, upon learning said trauma, forces himself to face it much sooner for the sake of helping his friends and getting past it. While Shifu may have known the road, he had more self-imposed mental blocks than Po. By the end of the third film, Po has become a Master of Chi, even though Shifu studied for decades and only had a very limited form of chi manipulation, and is given Oogway's mystic green staff. Oogway reveals that he chose Po as the Dragon Warrior because of his descent from the ancient pandas, who could naturally use chi so well. This is lampshaded mercilessly at the end:
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7700a651	comment	Sword Art Online is a complete aversion, which is notable because it takes place in an MMO, which would naturally fall into this. The only way to increase your skills is to work, hard. If they weren't trapped inside the game 24/7, no one would have time to get past level ten. Even though everyone desperately wants to escape from the game, they grudgingly admit that it is fair. A very in-depth review of the series pointed out that this is largely because the series was written in 2000, before World of Warcraft, when MMOs were still grindfests where you could expect to do nothing but kill monsters to advance for most levels. And then it's played straight in both the Fairy Dance (where he is explicitly cheating by carrying over his SAO stats) and Phantom Bullet arcs ( where Kirito basically curb-stomps his human enemies), only to be averted again during Alicization.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_77184a72	comment	In one episode of Victorious, Tori needed to take her Tech Theater Exam. She's tutored by Robbie, who had not only passed it, but had the highest score. Through out the series, Robbie has been shown to be the more tech minded of the group, while Tori needed to be shown the ropes when she had to do theater tech. Yet, despite spending only one night studying, Tori easily aces the test and beats Robbie's score.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_797793b1	comment	Ren of Shaman King suffers from this. His entire life has basically been one long Training from Hell, and yet no matter how hard he pushes himself, Yoh always kicks his butt with what seems to be little to no effort, the whole while spouting off his own philosophy of not pushing himself too hard to do something he can't do (which would have been the thing required to defeat Ren in that particular battle) until for no apparent reason he is suddenly granted the ability to do that critical thing (or more commonly, the strategy that every experienced Shaman watching thought was total suicide turns out to work). It's worth remembering that prior to the story's beginning Yoh was given Training from Hell by his grandfather and later his fiance, but said training didn't give him any hidden power for him to conceal or help him get over his slacker tendencies. Hell, he's practically the messiah of slackers!
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7988cb68	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7988cb68	comment	Averted in Mass Effect, in which pretty much every character (including Shepard) has been a soldier or at least getting in a lot of fights for the best part of their life, making your Badass Crew perfectly believable. The only exception is Grunt, who due to his origins comes right out of the cloning tank a fully-grown super-soldier ready for combat. This troubles him to the point of having a crisis of faith about his status as the 'ultimate' krogan, leading him to seek a personal connection with his race.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7d3f1bd3	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7d3f1bd3	comment	Likewise, Kisaragi in GA Geijutsuka Art Design Class is also hardworking and doesn't seem to be very skilled, unlike the more Cloud Cuckoo Lander-ish Nodamiki. Unlike Hidamari Sketch, though, whether she's that bad compared to Nodamiki has not been demonstrated.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7de8951a	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7de8951a	comment	From the concluding notes of the original edition of Traveller: "The typical methods used in life by 20th century Terrans (thrift, dedication, hard-work) do not work in Traveller; instead, travellers must boldly plan and execute daring schemes for the acquisition of wealth and power."
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7e9d1a6c	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_7e9d1a6c	comment	Frozen (2013) has an exaggerated and deconstructed version with born cryomancer Elsa. Not only do her abilities grow to phenomenal levels without any training or work, it does so while she is actively trying to suppress it. Her lack of control over her powers leads to it doing things she'd rather it not do, such as freezing the kingdom and killing people. It's not until after she starts actually trying to hone her abilities that she gains sufficient control over it to avoid such problems.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_81433aa0	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_81433aa0	comment	In the bonus modes of New Danganronpa V3, the two actually meet and argue about this. Ishimaru declares he wants to make a world where hard work matters and people don't rely only on those with talent. Komaeda simply doesn't comprehend what he's talking about and focuses only on the hope that Ishimaru can bring to people.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_8343d183	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_8343d183	comment	Subverted by Hell Teacher Nube: both Nube and Izuna are exceptionally gifted with immense supernatural abilities, but Nube endured arduous training for years and years to reach his level of skill, a fact that he always uses to berate Izuna when she tries to find a shortcut.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_86814cd0	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_86814cd0	comment	Inverted in Final Fantasy IV. Golbez comes right out of nowhere and is easily able to get everything he desires right from the start. No matter what you seem to do, he is always one step ahead of you, and nearly every time you encounter him, it's a Hopeless Boss Fight. When you do manage to actually defeat him in a fight, he's able to escape with the MacGuffin as though nothing had happened. And if it weren't for FuSoYa, you wouldn't have been able to do anything to stop him. This also applies to the Man Behind the Man, as he is able to easily defeat Golbez and FuSoYa in a fight, and if not for the Plot Coupon Golbez gives you and your allies assisting from afar with a Combined Energy Attack, you can't even touch him.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_86814e94	comment	Final Fantasy XI both subverts and averts this. Storylines sometimes laud the fact you defeat powerful foes compared to other hardened warriors... though they never mention the other five people you had to group with to do it. Then you go to Besieged or a Campaign battle and see the generals do 1000+ damage every 15 or so seconds and take hits like you never, ever, will. In fact, the only reason you're normally involved in the story is that you keep putting your nose where it doesn't belong, You Meddling Kids! To be fair, those guards in RPGs never had to worry about fighting against monsters or people that can easily destroy the world so they didn't have to train as hard. Now the heroes on the other hand...
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_86f886e1	comment	Averted and then played straight in the case of Kirino in Oreimo. She has been able to be a highly successful student athlete by practicing really hard, despite the lack of talent. However, after she starts being trained as a professional athlete, it all falls apart as she clearly couldn't catch up to those who also have real talent.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_8b4f76b	comment	Invoked, but ultimately averted in Kaleido Star. When she first joined the Kaleido Stage, the smug, arrogant May Wong believed she could charm her idols Leon and Layla and become a star without even trying. Cue Break the Haughty when Leon deliberately drops her during an act as a test of strength, badly injuring her in the process, and when Layla tells her that while her performances are technically good, they're completely soulless and not actually focused on entertaining the audience, thus meaning she'll have to start from scratch.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_8f25225c	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_8f25225c	comment	Danganronpa: Danganronpa: Trigger Happy Havoc's Kiyotaka Ishimaru wants to prove this isn't true at all. While he attends the elite Hope's Peak Academy, he notably reacts poorly to being called a 'genius', as he connects that term with the concept of being born with talent as opposed to working hard for it. Super Danganronpa 2, on the other hand, features Nagito Komaeda, who appears to wholeheartedly believe that the only way to have any sort of talent is to be born with it. He cheerfully claims that anyone with a Super High School Level skill is automatically just plain better than anyone who might try building up their abilities through hard work and practice. In the bonus modes of New Danganronpa V3, the two actually meet and argue about this. Ishimaru declares he wants to make a world where hard work matters and people don't rely only on those with talent. Komaeda simply doesn't comprehend what he's talking about and focuses only on the hope that Ishimaru can bring to people.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_90f42a9b	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_90f42a9b	comment	The Wheel of Time: Egwene and Nynevae are described as being some of the most powerful channelers Moraine has ever seen. When they get to Tar Valon in the second book, Egwene is entered at the level of Novice, but Nynevae gets to skip Novice and proceed directly to Accepted, the middle rank. They leave the Aes Sedai for an extended portion of the second book, and when they return in the third, Egwene is raised to the level of Accepted. Mat Cauthon inherits past memories of incredible martial and tactical ability. With barely any combat training, he defeats two excellent swordsmen at the same time, despite the fact that he's practically an invalid at the time. He goes on to become an extremely successful general. Not hardly any training, he was trained in the use of the quarterstaff by his father, who was the best in their hometown. It also helped that the swordsmen were underestimating him...and that the Warder instructor noted "a farmer with a quarterstaff" was the only man to defeat the greatest swordsman in history, suggesting the clash of styles worked in Mat's favor. He had to work hard to get good at the quarterstaff, but as for the army management...in his first large-scale battle (where he has any command) he takes a group of essentially new recruits and carves his way through an ambush laid by overwhelming numbers of the best warriors in the world. Justified in that many, many people had to work hard, and even die, to get Mat those skills, he just wasn't one of them. Zigzagged with Rand. After struggling to learn the basics of channeling, Rand taps into the Ghost Memory of his prior incarnation, Lews Therin, who was The Ace in his time period, allowing Rand to spontaneously pull off complicated weaves with no practice. The catch is that Lews Therin starts to manifest as a voice in Rand’s head, and Lews is dangerously bonkers. So while Rand doesn’t have to put much work into being good at channeling, he has to put a lot of work into integrating Lews Therin into his own consciousness without driving himself mad.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_920bdb7c	comment	Kill Six Billion Demons: Discussed by the God-Emperor Incubus — this is the pitch he sells when offering his Deal with the Devil. Why spend the effort developing your own potential when you can take a piece of his spirit into your mind, let him unlock it for you, and "Bam! Instant badass"? Terms, conditions, and eventual spiritual ruination apply. Part of the reason Incubus' pitch works so well is because the multiverse normally averts this trope pretty hard. Enlightenment Superpowers and Supernatural Martial Arts are the order of the day, so everyone has to earn their power some way or another. Allison is one of the very rare exceptions, as she got the most powerful artifact in all Creation shoved into her skull for doing nothing whatsoever. After a Time Skip, she's finally begun to avert this by training with White Chain, but she still tends to fall back on her Key when things get dicey, making her Unskilled, but Strong.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_921cb27d	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_921cb27d	comment	Deconstructed, in a manner of speaking, in My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series: Rainbow Dash could clear the skies in a manner of seconds, faster than any other pony, and not have to put in the hard work they have to to do their job. But she's paid by the hour, so actually using her speed means a smaller paycheck, which is why she's so lazy at work. So in this case, Hard Work Hardly Works, But It Pays More.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_94a41eac	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_94a41eac	comment	Radiata Stories subverts this. Every Hopeless Boss Fight is against people older, or at least more experienced than the protagonist. And there are many hopeless boss fights, even in the late game (in one path). Gerald personally lampshades it.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_95376ce9	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_95376ce9	comment	Averted hard in Zatch Bell! with Zeon. He has the same lightning spells as The Hero Zatch only Zeon has also undergone Training from Hell. The end result is he kicks the crap out of Zatch so badly it takes Zatch's partner Kiyo having the Answer Talker superpower to even stand a chance. Zeon wins anyway through another aversion of the trope, his own partner Dufort has the same Answer Talker, only where Kiyo awoke it an hour ago he's been practicing it for years and naturally outclasses Kiyo by a large margin. When Zatch is about to undergo his own Training from Hell, he's told to not even bother trying to imitate Zeon's Flash Step abilities; it took Zeon years to get those down and Zatch just doesn't have the time.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_95e58696	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_95e58696	comment	Negi of Mahou Sensei Negima! manages to pick up martial arts pretty much over a weekend. He also manages to master incredibly advanced magical techniques in very little time. It's partially justified in that he uses a Year Inside, Hour Outside mechanism to cram whole extra months of Training from Hell in. Even so, in the space of a month or so, he puts together a Black Magic technique, the complexity of which surprises the person who created the Black Magic to begin with. Said person is an immortal vampire who previously spent years on it. Jack Rakan might be an aversion. Unlike Negi, who was very powerful but didn't seem to put any effort into gaining that power, Jack Rakan spent almost whole his life fighting, he almost died many times but as time passed he became more and more powerful all thanks to decades of hard work. Even Negi refers to Rakan as "The Ultimate Hard-worker". In a possible subversion, Rakan is generally still acknowledged to be a lot stronger. The general opinion of the matter is that Negi's greatest strength lies in how proficient he is in making new techniques. At one point it's mentioned that people would just love to stick him behind a desk somewhere and make new spells. And for a completely played dead straight example, Nagi at the age of fifteen fought evenly with Rakan (forty years of combat experience) and presumably won their fight by a tiny margin. And Nagi is a lot less intelligent than Negi is and probably didn't do nearly the same type of training. The aversion is underlined by Fate Averruncus when Negi manages to defeat him after learning Dark Magic- Fate is surprised by that Negi could ever beat him in a fight, and is unable to improve himself because he never needed to train in his whole life. He only survives his fight against Rakan by using an artifact that breaks the game even more than Rakan himself, because it MAKES the game.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_960062b7	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_960062b7	comment	In My Hero Academia, this gets played straight before being subverted. Protagonist Izuku Midoriya hoped to become a hero like his idol, All Might, even though he's Quirkless. But the day he meets All Might, the hero flat out tells Izuku that being a superhero is impossible without a Quirk because it's simply too dangerous of a job. But after being chosen as the successor of One For All and entering U.A., he works his butt off more than anyone else to catch up to his classmates who have had their powers their entire lives. His efforts pay off, becoming one of the best fighters in his class, giving him excellent grades, as well as a newfound respect from his peers that he never had when he was Quirkless.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_985ad25d	comment	This is also demonstrated by Future Trunks, who's the last living fighter in his timeline and thus doesn't have the leisure to slack off like the others. When he returns in Dragon Ball Super, he's dealt with Majin Buu (Well, Babidi and Dabura- he didn't let them come close to reviving Buu) and has spent a year fighting off an Evil Twin of Goku; as a result, he's achieved Super Saiyan 2 and is (at least according to the manga adaptation) equal to Super Saiyan 3 Goku in terms of power. And that's before he achieves a form that's seemingly just a step shy of Super Saiyan Blue.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_986e857e	comment	Charm Caster in Ben 10 spent years learning magic. Gwen meanwhile is naturally talented and can do it without any training. Justified since she is part Anodite, aliens who are literally made of magic.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_9876f376	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_9876f376	comment	Averted in Canvas 2. Takeuchi can match the genius Elis if she really tries.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_99c003af	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_99c003af	comment	Subverted in The Boondocks episode "Ballin'", where Riley constantly watches basketball videos and mimicks the players until he can break through any defense with ease... but it's all for naught because he can't actually shoot the ball to save his life, a fact that didn't come up until his first game because he refused to go to practice.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_99ca8dc9	comment	In Muhyo and Roji, during Muhyo's days at the academy, Enchu works hard to become an Executor while Yoichi and Muhyo slack off. However, Muhyo soon realizes his talent, and despite Enchu pulling all-nighters when he and Muhyo are considered for Executor, Muhyo is chosen. It's later revealed that there was more to the decision than aptitude; Page said the committee was concerned by Enchu's preoccupation with his ill mother (her death greatly contributed to his Start of Darkness, and was part of Teeki's plan), and chose Muhyo because he, in refusing the position, was thinking of others.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_9bb5aad4	comment	Yu-Gi-Oh! GX, Judai, despite sleeping through all the few classes he bothers to attend, effortlessly beats anybody who challenges him (except for Ryo that one time). Deconstructed in season 3 when an Isaac Newton-like teacher tried to take revenge on him for inspiring pupils to ignore studying and try to emulate his success and a villain convinced him that everything coming so easily for him meant he wasn't a true hero. It was almost like a summary of how nobody likes The Ace because nowadays, True Art Is Angsty. The one time he did prepare and use a coherent strategy, in the second duel with Ryo, it didn't work. Ryo commented that it was a disappointment and told him to go back to dueling the way he did before. (He took this advice to heart and managed to end it in a draw.) The best example in the series however comes from Daichi Misawa, the Ra Yellow who was originally set up in Season 1 as The Rival to Judai. While exceptionally smart, he is shown spending hours upon hours studying and formulating strategies in order to beat his foes, being so Crazy-Prepared as to make 8 different decks over the course of the series (6 elemental decks, a seventh specifically to beat Judai, and an 8th "perfect" deck he used for the rest of the series.) With the exception of Manjoume in Season 1, however, he rarely ever won duels on-screen, and the few times he did win were against nameless Red Shirts, and no one else cared. Be it Judai revealing an all new card perfect for the scenario, or the current Big Bad manipulating his will, Misawa's hard work all came to naught against the Magic Poker Equation, and ended with him running away from the school buck naked.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_9d7c8202	comment	In Servant × Service, for all his youth Creature of Habit Jouji has been challenging Brilliant, but Lazy Yutaka. For all these years Jouji won for not a single time.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_9e202b7b	comment	Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple plays around with his trope in many ways but the most prominent is the aversion with Kenichi himself. He's The Protagonist but he doesn't have The Gift. Hard work always trumps untrained talent and between two hard workers, the one who works harder has the advantage. The entire story is a message in that you need to work hard to keep up in the world of martial arts. Kenichi is repeatedly said to be completely average and talentless, and his only strength is training hard. Although the people he beats up on a regular basis also probably train hard as well and probably have been doing so for more than a few months, they still don't train as hard as Kenichi. He trains under numerous different masters, working 7 days a week and often dying from the training, only to be brought back with medicine and first-aid. So while Kenichi might not have trained as long as his opponents, he has trained hundreds of times harder. That's why he defeat Karate club bullies and Ragnarok thugs. Yomi is a different matter. His opponents there are all expert martial artists, raised by masters every bit as strong as his own, with techniques just as brutal, which means he loses some of his "hard work" advantage. When Takeda begins his own Training from Hell under the underground boxing master, his abilities surge massively in a very short amount of time, putting him very nearly in Kenichi/Yomi tier within a much shorter time than Kenichi himself needed. He even began to unravel and utilize Kenichi's recently-learned perfect defense within a single sparring match. So apparently when a person who is already exceptionally talented (as Kenichi's masters have all noticed) starts that sort of training, the results are dramatic and much faster. So it's subverted in that for the prodigies, hard work really works. It's zigzagged with Berserker, a boy who has never had any training, but is so naturally talented that he has never lost a single fight. Then Tanimoto manages to defeat him, and afterward states that this entire trope is a lie: Natsu, who like Takeda is very naturally talented even manages to quickly boost his skill level by consistently fighting opponents who are just a little bit better than he is. Part of his resumed Training from Hell by his own master who is the brother of one of Kenichi's masters. Everyone in Yomi works hard but here are prodigies among Yomi's ranks and Kenichi's masters point out that being a prodigy doesn't mean anything without training yourself to back it up and that they can't simply rely on their innate talents.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_a22918b	comment	Holyland, which reads more or less like the author's love letter to martial arts and street fighting, presents most fighters' skill as a mixture of training, fighting experience and inborn 'talent', and makes it clear that ultimately it's those with talent who rise to the top if they get the other two; training and experience can only compensate so much. Protagonist Yuu Kamishiro is noted to have talent and combines it with working himself to the bone and hard-earned experience to win over people who have martial arts backgrounds, despite lacking formal training and experience until his mid-teens (which would be a death sentence to most people's ability to compete). Some people, like Masaki, are noted to have all three, and serve as mentors or major street bumps during the story.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_a2dee471	comment	In The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, local mentor Orca teaches Link the Hurricane Spin, a technique gained by gathering ten Knight's Crests (a feat in and of itself) - and lots of practice. Before performing the technique, he'll mention that it took him years to become so accomplished and that age caught up to him before he could fully realize his dream. He's moved to tears upon witnessing Link execute it flawlessly in a matter of seconds. This trope is also played with in The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess where the Hero's Shade teaches the new Link several techniques called the "Hidden Skills." Although he will patiently review them until Link (i.e. the player) gets them right, he makes it clear that Link's status as The Hero means this trope should be in full effect and only shows approval after Link masters them appropriately.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_a332484d	comment	Kidou Tenshi Angelic Layer outright states that experience doesn't matter in the Angelic games, and that the deus' love for their Angels is far more important than the Angels' parameters and strengths. At the start of the Manga, The Protagonist Misaki knows nothing about Angels, but quickly becomes the champion of the Kanto regional tournament while suffering almost no losses, defeating many much more experienced Dei in the process. It's made worse that Misaki is almost seen in a Training Montage (aside from the dance session near the start of the manga), making it seem like she is putting 0 effort to win.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_a6a7f785	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_a6a7f785	comment	Played straight on the 3rd episode of Hell Girl during Season 3. An Idol Singer is loved and worshiped for her beauty and natural singing talent. However, during her youth, the Idol Singer used to bully another inspiring singer who was working very hard. The flashback also showed that the Idol Singer didn't even practice and got by on her looks, taking Fanservice pictures. The bullied girl tries to blackmail her by exposing the fan service photos; she demands the Idol Singer give her a break in the music business. But the Idol Singer tells her that she never could sing well. A scene earlier proves this when she sung and sounded off key. The once bullied girl cries about how she worked very hard all her life. But the Idol Singer responds by saying: "Hard work is the last resort of those without talent." This makes the bullied girl call Hell Girl. And even though the Idol Singer paid her 3 million yen and wrote an apology song for the bullying, the bullied girl still sends her to hell, while the Idol Singer was singing the apology song live on stage during a concert. The revenge is empty however, as the Idol Singer went on to become a music legend, while the bullied girl is forever broken, being in her shadow.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_a90d239a	comment	In Psychonauts, Raz can pick up psychic abilities almost instantly and far outperforms children who have been coming to Whispering Rock for years. His mind is also so shielded that not even Oleander can read his thoughts, despite the fact that Raz has never had psychic training. His dad's training probably had something to do with that. Also remember that Raz is much more focused than the other children, and actually is training throughout the game while the other kids just worry themselves about trivial things. There's also the merit badges, which seem to have an active role in allowing him to use the attendant powers; sort of like training wheels, they enable him (and, theoretically, any other camper who's actually putting in the work to earn them) to use the power until he has enough of a handle on it to use it unassisted.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_abb11fc7	comment	Terry and Andy Bogard of the Fatal Fury and The King of Fighters series are both solid and versatile fighters. However while Andy spent years abroad honing his skill and training under the Shiranui style of ninjitsu, Terry trolled the streets of Southtown and just mastered fighting the old fashioned way. Come time for them to compare skills, Terry's "do what works" background ended up giving him the superior fighting talents. Sometimes this gets under Andy's skin but it's not enough to ruin their relationship. Truth in Television, as real life Mixed Martial Arts fighters learned how being a specialist in a single fighting style may not prepare you to handle other styles. Andy might win every time against a ninjutsu fighter from who he knows what to expect and how to react, but Terry's practical training means he taught himself to face any fighting style.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ac259af8	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ac259af8	comment	In Saki, a variation comes into play with Kaori, a complete beginner at mahjong whom her friend, the Tsuruga team president, recruited to the team so that they would have enough people to go to the tournament. Kaori manages to come out on top in her match with her uncanny Beginner's Luck, which disrupts the playstyle of Mako, her opponent from the protagonists' team, who plays with Photographic Memory of her time in her grandfather's mahjong parlor and cannot counter Kaori's playstyle due to never having seen an amateur at play before. When the Tsuruga girls prepare to go to the individuals, Kaori is forbidden from practicing, under the reasoning that if she lost her beginner's luck, she could not possibly improve enough in that short time to compensate. Kaori ultimately ends up getting eliminated before long, though. In a more individual case on the flip side of this trope, Maho, who can imitate anyone's "special ability" for a single turn each day, nevertheless has many bad habits, such as revealing that she has no yaku, or trying to pick up a tile when doing so would get her penalized, despite having practiced for a year, and she's referred to as an "eternal beginner."
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ac719b97	comment	When Daniel Jackson got the gate to work in the Stargate movie, he was told that he "solved in fourteen days what they couldn't solve in two years". The military's trouble and Jackson's initial 2 weeks of utter lack of progress was because both assumed the symbols on the Stargate were letters of a language that translated into something. Jackson only solved it through a Eureka Moment, realizing the symbols were actually constellations, and the set of symbols represented a way of plotting coordinates in 3D space. There's some debate over whether the military ought to have stumbled on the relatively simple answer even without understanding how it worked, but that's all that we'll say about it here.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_b0e228be	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_b0e228be	comment	Averted in Generator Rex in Rex's battle VS the Consortium w/Meta Nanite powers. They may have power over things like gravity, time, electricity, fire, ice, and have similar abilities to Rex, but Rex has had his powers for longer and promptly owns them. At least until they join into a Humongous Mecha.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_b1072514	comment	Lampshaded in Forrest Gump. Forrest never works to become a fast runner or a good table tennis player.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_b5a6027f	comment	This is discussed in Oh God Not Again! when Draco points out that the Hufflepuff house never comes out ahead specifically because working hard is such an ingrained, defining trait of theirs. “What are they going to do? Do exactly what they're supposed to do MORE?"
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_b8abf9b6	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_b8abf9b6	comment	The Triptych Continuum version of Trixie Lulamoon gets screwed over hard by this trope. In the Continuum, a pony's magical strength is fixed from birth, and no amount of exercise, practice, or effort will ever improve it. Trixie's talent provides her with an unending supply of ideas for new spells, but she knows that she will never be able to cast most of those spells.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_bd184166	comment	In The Neverending Story Hynreck is a professional hero who spent his whole life being the best at everything he does, but he can't hold a candle against Bastian, who outmatches him with ease by virtue of holding AURYN.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_bdbcdadf	comment	In Neither a Bird nor a Plane, it's Deku!, Katsuki Bakugou worked his ass off to overcome his debilitating childhood injuries, tearing his way through the U.A. Entrance Exam through his natural talent and effort. Unfortunately for him, his Childhood Friend, Izuku, happens to be Kryptonian. Because of this, he's constantly overshadowed by Izuku's constantly growing powers despite the latter's disproportionately smaller (but no less dedicated) amount of effort in training.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_bdcd318c	comment	Mizuki in Son of the Sannin seems to believe this trope, citing it as one of his main reasons to defect from Konoha and sell himself to Orochimaru. In a rather ironic twist, the one who defies the trope to hell and back is Lee himself, who fights one-on-one against Mizuki (the latter even using a Cursed Seal for a power boost), and still manages to win by pure physical endurance and willpower.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_be8abb52	comment	Averted in Frost/Nixon, where David Frost and his team have to put in a good year's work, at all hours of the night, to trap Nixon into a confession.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_c0d295c4	comment	In Team Fortress 2, it takes a lot of practice to become a good Spy, possibly the most practice of any class. Spy's best counter? The Pyro, a class that can be used fairly effectively with almost no practice. In fact, all of the classes except the Spy and perhaps the Scout can be used at least somewhat effectively with a small amount of practice. This can be mostly attributed to the fact that the spy isn't effective at straight-up fighting like all the other classes, just about all of his tactics revolve around being behind enemy lines, being unnoticed, destroying structures, and backstabs. All things that usually amount to pass/fail - hence a bad spy dies either failing to get anything done or before they can even try, while any other class playing poorly can at least get some shots in at the enemy team.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_c4282b71	comment	My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic: Played with in "The Super Speedy Cider Squeezy 6000." The Apple family competes with salesponies Flim and Flam to see who can make the most cider - the Apples with their personal and hoof-made method, or Flim and Flam with their fancy machine. Flim and Flam win by a large margin despite the rest of the Mane Six joining in and helping the Apples, but soon thereafter are run out of town because they turned off their quality control to gain a larger advantage, so the cider they try to sell is terrible. It should be noted that Twilight zig-zags this trope; she spends her entire life studying magic to the exclusion of all else (except friendship) to become as powerful as she is, but Celestia took her on as a student because she already knew the significance of Twilight's Cutie Mark and set her on the path to fulfilling it. So basically Twilight worked pretty hard studying magic, but this was largely immaterial because she was only picked because she was the Chosen One who won the Superpower Lottery. Also played with then subverted in "Hurricane Fluttershy". After finally deciding to help Rainbow Dash and the other Pegasus create a powerful tornado to make clouds, the viewers are shown a Training Montage where Fluttershy is training to fly at a certain speed to help create the tornado. However, when she's tested, Flutershy still ranks well below the needed amount of speed. Later, when it all on the line, Fluttershy proved the training really paid off, as she is able to fly faster than anyone and complete the tornado. Turns out Fluttershy was holding back because she remembered the torment other Pegasus did to her when she was younger and was afraid to fail. In "The Cutie Map", Twilight copies Starlight Glimmer's shield spell after seeing it once. Starlight complains that it took her years to learn it. This is later inverted in "The Cutie Remark", where Starlight Glimmer matches Twilight Sparkle, a pony who has saved Equestria multiple times and spent her entire life learning magic, in combat, and also manages to create a powerful, unprecedented time spell. Unicorns as a whole exemplify this trope. Characters like Starlight Glimmer can have borderline god-tier powers even if they never practice or train in magic merely because they were Born Lucky or let their emotions get the better of them, while characters like Trixie and Sunburst can spent their entire lives training in magic but be lackluster at it simply because they weren't born with innate power and there's nothing they can do about it.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_c62995ba	comment	Discussed in regards to Harry in Child of the Storm. While, unlike Hermione, he doesn't have a particularly good grasp of theory, and, indeed, doesn't have the mind she does (though he is far from an idiot), he has a level of raw power that was greater than hers even before it was revealed that his father was really Thor incarnated as James and an intuitive grasp for spellwork, particularly in favoured subjects, that means he grasps spells almost as quickly, or as quickly as (in some cases, even faster than) she does. It's not this, as such, but also his Quidditch skills and giving off the impression at being pretty good at whatever he turns his hand to, and, finally correcting her answer in Defence Against the Dark Arts, that upsets her.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_c861aa06	comment	Somakinetics in Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution. Somakinetics have super strength and speed, even if they don't work out or train. Also, even the most well-trained human can never master certain special combat techniques that require somakinesis.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_c8da904d	comment	In Future GPX Cyber Formula, Naoki Shinjyo works hard to win races and two F3 championships to get to Cyber Formula racing. Yet he gets constantly beaten by Hayato, a 14-year-old rookie with no experience in motor racing and it leads him to blame others for his failures in racing. It takes Miki to straighten him up and realize that his obsession of training hard and being the best clouds his ability as a racer. By then, Shinjyo regains his love for racing.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_cae652c	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_cae652c	comment	Subverted in Hunter × Hunter. While natural talent grant you significant edge over untalented individuals, one still must train extremely hard to get results. Chief of the Hunter Association Netero stated that human potential is limitless and we know that nen can prevent aging. So, theoretically, a talentless person will require much more time to catch up, but eventually will catch up. And gloriously subverted with Netero himself, who managed to fight with Meryem on semi-equal ground due to insanely over the top training (even by Shonen standards).
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_cb7e4986	comment	One-Punch Man plays with this. Exaggerated to parodic levels with Saitama's Super Strength and Super Toughness coming from, according to himself, from doing one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, one hundred squats, and a ten kilometre run every day for three years, which is all anyone needs to do in order to be able to punch holes in buildings and win every fight with a single punch. Everyone treats this as exactly as stupid as it sounds. There are implications that Saitama's incredible strength may be some supernatural ability that was somehow unlocked by obsessively training to be a hero. Although the true nature of his power remains a mystery. For anyone not named Saitama, this gets ping-ponged everywhere. Some of the most powerful S-Class Heroes achieved their rank through honing their swordsmanship (Atomic Samurai), martial arts (Bang), physical training (Superalloy Darkshine and Flashy Flash), while others used methods like technology (Metal Knight, Genos, Child Emperor) to close the gap. The strongest shown S-Class Hero (Tatsumaki) was born with her incredibly powerful esper abilities, but it's not entirely clear how much of it is purely innate and how much was honed through training (though she's still leagues stronger than Fubuki and Psykos, both of whom were explicitly born with weaker abilities and trained much harder than her to maximize them, but still can't match her for sheer power). Monsters that were once humans could have transformed from becoming so obsessed in a particular field they transformed, or they short-cutted with monster cells. Garō plays with this harder than anyone. He has trained and much of his power comes from his sheer mastery of martial arts and incorporating new techniques from others while fighting them. On the other hand, the reason he's gained so much power so quickly is that he seems to possess an innate Came Back Strong Adaptive Ability that makes him stronger the more damage he takes fighting strong opponents. This actually gets lampshaded and defied when Flashy Flash (who proudly claims he achieved his abilities by training harder than anyone else in his village) fights two strong ninja from the village that used monsterization as a shortcut to greater power over training further. While incredibly fast and powerful while transformed, they still hadn't fully mastered their new abilities and are ultimately cut down by Flash, who notes that if they had trained themselves to that level of power, they would have stood a chance of defeating him.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ce1f9679	comment	The Pet Girl of Sakurasou has a lot of this, because of the composition of the main trio: Sorata, who is neither very focused nor skilled; Nanami, who is very hardworking but probably not outstanding, and Mashiro, an Idiot Savant: Sorata tells Nanami in Episode 15 that he hopes she succeeds at her audition because he's been watching her study hard ever since they were first year high school students, and hopes that it pays off at some point. Especially since both of them failed at their resepctive auditions the first time around. Played straight in the end of episode 20 and the whole episode 21: it starts with Nanami failing her audition; goes on with Sorata's game failing the last review due to another rhythm game which was more simple, traditional and more appealing to the market; afterwards, all of the main cast fail at getting enough signatures to prevent the destruction of Sakura Hall; finally, to add insult to injury, the game company that rejected Sorata ended up sending a work offer to Shiina as character designer thanks to the pictures she gave to Sorata.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ce50887e	comment	Yamcha from the Dragon Ball series has an extreme case of this, particularly in Dragon Ball Z. Even in the original series, he was often used for The Worf Effect despite training a lot, particularly for Martial Arts tournaments. For the third tournament at the end of Dragon Ball, he even does Training from Hell in alone the wild for three years, invented a new move from scratch, and still loses in his first match. In Z, Yamcha never wins a single fight, ultimately realizes he'll never be useful in protecting the Earth, and gives up after almost dying a third time in the Android Saga. By the time Dragon Ball GT, he had still never achieved any of his goals in life (getting married and/or winning a World Martial Arts Tournament). Vegeta, he trains and trains and trains, but Goku is most of time stronger than him, and the only saving grace for him is that thanks to his AND Goku's constant training, they're both the strongest characters in the entire series. Yes, Goku trains (though it's usually unclear just how much, or whether it's because he just gets better training), too, but at nowhere near the level of Vegeta. The funny thing is that Vegeta was supposed to be the super-talented prodigy. Whis suggests in Resurrection 'F' that Vegeta actually trains too hard and doesn't let himself relax, which hurts him and doesn't allow him to build his strength up to Goku's level (on the other hand, Goku's relaxation means he lets his guard down when Vegeta wouldn't). Averted with Goku and Gohan. Gohan has far greater inherent potential, but does not find fighting and martial arts fun, so he prefers having a normal life to constant practice. Goku, on the other hand, spends most of his life (and whatever parts of his afterlife we saw) undergoing ever more extreme Training from Hell and eventually outpaces Gohan. Gohan in his mystic form ends up becoming the most powerful unfused character in the entire series due to his potential, only outpaced by Goku and Vegeta, who kept up their training while Gohan finally knuckled down and concentrated on studying. There's also the fact that Goku trained under several masters of martial arts throughout his life, learning various techniques and training methods that compensated for his low (for a Saiyan) inherent power, while Vegeta, for most of his life, was too arrogant to even think of asking someone to train him. When Vegeta finally swallows his pride in Super and asks Whis to train him, he rapidly catches up to Goku. But then Goku asks Whis to train him, and, well... It's played completely straight when you compare Saiyans with non-Saiyan characters: Tenshinhan and Chiaotzu eventually more or less pretty much spent all their time training after a certain point, and remained hopelessly behind the Saiyan characters nonetheless. Neither of them could even put a scratch on Nappa! Even though Tenshinhan was able to harm Semi-Perfect Cell, managed to survive Super Buu's Human Extinction Attack and later showed up against Buu... the pink git practically only needed to cough to send Tien flying (though that's more thanks to the Sorting Algorithm of Evil). There's also the fact that Saiyans get a literal, quantifiable power boost from almost dying. At one point on Namek, Vegeta's strategy is "have Krillin shoot a hole through my chest, and then get Dende to heal me". It's the only time anyone invokes it, implying that it's less efficient than training (and it does nothing to raise any sort of skill, just power level), but the fact is that their biology is built for Hard Work Hardly Works. Yamcha, Krillin, and Tien may gain skill by fighting to the death, but they'll never get the same gains that Goku and Vegeta get in that same situation. Really, anyone who isn't Goku (and to a lesser extent, Gohan) falls victim to this trope. Piccolo, despite having no family or friends to distract from his constant training (the only person he spends any time with is Gohan, and essentially all the time they spend together is training), and at one point being STRONGER than the Saiyans during the Android Saga, is nowhere near as strong any time afterwards. By the time of Resurrection 'F', Vegeta has managed to restore himself to relevance, but the non-Saiyans are still little better than mooks no matter how hard they train. This is lampshaded by Master Roshi with the quote at the top of the page, as back in the original series we had no idea what a Saiyan was. Master Roshi gets to lampshade it a second time during the Android Saga when he admits he was once called the 'Strongest in the World' but now he'd 'give anything just to be able to help out again'. He does a pretty good job in the Universe Survival Saga, where he manages to get three eliminations on his own before succumbing to exhaustion. Vegeta may not quite be able to keep up with Goku at Super Saiyan 3 (they were more or less equal at Super Saiyan 2), but he comes a damn sight closer than anyone else in the universe. There's a reason Frieza was scared of how powerful the Saiyans might become. Then there is the case of Goten and Trunks, who are the youngest of Super Saiyans. Gohan, Vegeta, Chi-Chi and Goku each had their own expressions of shock when they found this out. The three older Saiyans had to go through sweat and blood to accomplish their transformations, and the two brats just got theirs when they were playing in the woods. This seems to have become a trend for human-Saiyan hybrids, as the end of Dragon Ball GT shows one of Goku's descendants (his great-great grandkid) casually using the Super Saiyan transformation in a tournament sparring match along with one of Vegeta's descendants. The Super Saiyan transformation comes in response to a need, not a desire. In all known cases, the form has been initially triggered by either desperation or indignation. However, Saiyans are somewhat detached (with the exception of Goku) which is why it is difficult. For hybrids such as Gohan, they possess the emotional connection of humans allowing them to reach it easier. Kid Trunks, Goten and Goku Jr., being young children, have the easiest time being forced into desperation or indignation. Goku Jr, Goku's great-great grandson becomes a Super Saiyan defending a bear against a pig-demon thing, a clearer example compared to Trunks and Goten. The best way to describe this trope in Dragon Ball is that while hard work pales before natural talent, said talent must be maintained with hard work. Saiyan hybrids like Gohan, Goten and Trunks have more potential than their full-blooded Saiyan fathers, but said fathers are also constantly training to improve themselves while Gohan is more focused on studying and Goten and Trunks on being kids. Dragon Ball's infamous So Last Season is also a factor; while anime filler shows that by the end of the Namek saga, the Z fighters (yes, including Yamcha) are powerful enough to defeat the Ginyu Force (thanks to King Kai training them), who in their introduction were powerful enough to easily defeat Vegeta, the threats from the next saga put even Freeza to shame, so they're stuck being useless. This is also demonstrated by Future Trunks, who's the last living fighter in his timeline and thus doesn't have the leisure to slack off like the others. When he returns in Dragon Ball Super, he's dealt with Majin Buu (Well, Babidi and Dabura- he didn't let them come close to reviving Buu) and has spent a year fighting off an Evil Twin of Goku; as a result, he's achieved Super Saiyan 2 and is (at least according to the manga adaptation) equal to Super Saiyan 3 Goku in terms of power. And that's before he achieves a form that's seemingly just a step shy of Super Saiyan Blue. Defied with Hit, who notes that as he has no transformations or inherent boosts to make himself more powerful, he has to get better the old-fashioned way. And it works; he manages to defeat Goku in their sparring match (if partially because Goku used a Dangerous Forbidden Technique that was about to run out and disable him), and by the next time Goku sees him, he's improved by leaps and bounds and is able to (temporarily) kill Goku. Completely and utterly averted with Jiren: hard work and training made him more powerful than Gods. This trope explicitly comes into play in the movie Resurrection 'F': after Frieza is wished back to life by his minions, he says that he thought being a prodigy was all he needed, only to receive a rude awakening thanks to Goku and Future Trunks. Thus he resolves to train for the first time in his life so he can return to Earth and take his revenge on the Saiyans. His training succeeds, as he becomes powerful enough to challenge post-series Goku. The real kicker? It only takes him four months to come close to Goku's level, who had been training for years. However, this trope isn't played completely straight. Frieza increased his raw strength, but didn't learn to control or maintain his power. Once he reached his super form, he could only keep it for a short time before his energy rapidly drained. Goku calls Frieza out on this, saying that instead of completing his training, he rushed to Earth as soon as he achieved his new transformation. It's re-averted when Frieza meditates while in Hell to learn to control his ki, and by the time of the Universe Survival Saga, he's able to keep up without exhausting himself.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ce67d43a	comment	Agria in Tales of Xillia believes in this trope, and she even berates Leia for the latter's insistent belief in getting stronger via hard work. This is because she was once Lady Nadia of House Travis, who lost her family, affluence, and sanity to a fire (and she ironically uses that element in combat).
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_cfd860dd	comment	Nasuverse: Played with, as Archer trained and fought and worked his entire life and eventually became who he is today. Tohsaka, in contrast, is a played straight counterexample of what geniuses can do compared to a normal person, does work hard but doesn't need to and not nearly as hard as Shirou. This is true of Nasuverse mages in general, at least in the case of the Magic Association. The main way of becoming a good magus is to inherit a magic crest from your ancestor to the point that, in general, a magus family will only train one successor (hence why Sakura was given away to the Matou family). Good training can help, but to get anywhere in the Association, you have to be the heir of a prestigious family. This is a major part of Waver Velvet's character arc. When he was a young man, he would often claim that, despite not coming from a notable mage family, he could still be the equal of the great masters if he worked hard enough. Many years and many adventures later, he remains mediocre at best, and he admits that the people telling him he would never be as amazingly powerful and talented as them were right. Nevertheless, while he cannot become a master magus, he finds that he can still contribute in his own way: he's an excellent teacher, a skilled detective, and while his actual magic is poor, his knowledge of magic is not.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_d31cdea	comment	Cato from The Hunger Games. He and the other Careers spend their entire lives training for the Games, only to be beaten by a relative novice from an outlying district.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_d89dc118	comment	Teppu is about how main character Natsuo has finally found a sport Mixed Martial Arts) where this trope doesn't hold for her, meaning she'll actually have to work to excel at it. This is exactly why she's interested in it. The manga otherwise has much the same attitude towards this trope as Holyland above: A good MMA fighter needs to have talent, training and experience. Natsuo has the talent, which is why she has the potential to be great at it. Her erstwhile rival Yuzuko has an expert coach and lots of training experience and hard work behind her, while Yuzuko's best friend Ringo adds a natural talent for the sport on top of it.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_d8a25df3	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_d8a25df3	comment	Touch: Averted in Tatsuya's case. Although he is an amazing natural athlete, even better than Kazuya, years without exercising or practicing mean that when he eventually joins the baseball team he has to train hard to even come close to his brother's standard, let alone surpass him. Played straight, however, with Minami, who goes from not being particularly interested in gymnastics to winning a championship very quickly.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_d9ce2c22	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_d9ce2c22	comment	If one reads the Epistle of James and tries to harmonize it with Paul's epistles, they would see that believers are not saved by works, but rather they are saved unto doing good works.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_db96ded4	comment	In the sequel series, The Legend of Korra, this is played straight and subverted in different situations. Tenzin studies spirit lore for decades and it gets him exactly nowhere in regards to actual spirits, yet his eleven-year-old daughter has a natural connection to the spirit world and sufficient Airbending skill that she's nearly as good as her father. On the other hand, while Zaheer can sledgehammer almost any bender in a one-on-one fight despite having only been one for a few months, it turns out this is because even before Harmonic Convergence he was a talented martial artist and simply adapted his style to include airbending; he had also been reading the philosophy behind it for years beforehand by complete coincidence, and gets a lot of mileage from using extremely obscure abilities he learned of in this study. When he does come up against someone who has been studying the same bending style for decades, it's only the intervention of his allies that prevents Tenzin from destroying Zaheer.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_dc03f758	comment	A Mage's Power averts this trope. Whenever Eric goes up against older and/or more experienced warriors, he is outgunned every time. The only way to victory in those cases is with guile. Eric trains for hours every day before and after school for a couple of weeks and he gets humiliated by a veteran mercenary, whose experience ranks in a couple decades. Anyone of the Black Cloak rogues could kill him on their own, so he pretends to be one of them and uses a quick spell combo to disable them when his ruse is discovered. When he fights mages from the Royal Academy, note Students of magical theory and other non-combat areas of study who have never been in a serious fight before he curbstomps all of them but one. When he fights Kallen Selios note A veteran field agent for the ICDMM, which hunts monsters so they can study mana mutation , he is curbstomped himself. In his climactic confrontation with Dengel, his only path to victory is exploiting the elder mage's ego and deceiving him. A direct confrontation would lead to a quick and permanent death.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e05a2543	comment	Averted in the boxing anime Hajime no Ippo, as hard work usually does pay off. The Main character Ippo does have immense punching power by nature, his friend/rival Miyata is called a genius for his talent, and his Jerkass Big Brother Mentor Takamura is easily the best boxer in the whole series... but all of them still train very hard to get better and so do most other boxers. Kamogawa once said to Takamura "Not everyone who works hard is rewarded. However, all those who succeed have worked hard!"
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e261956	comment	Ping Pong: Sakuma puts in ten times the effort of all the other major characters combined to excel at table tennis, but his astigmatism and lack of natural talent prevents him from ever surpassing them. His crappy attitude doesn't help matters, and gives Smile reason to utterly crush him when they face off.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e293455a	comment	This was actually used as motivation for Amy the witch in Buffy the Vampire Slayer. At one point she was really powerful and not unfriendly to the main cast, what with them saving her from being trapped in her mom's body. Fast forward five seasons: Willow is now the resident Deus ex Machina, and Amy is royally pissed that Willow (who wasn't even aware magic existed until the age of sixteen) has more magic in her pinky than it took Amy, an already accomplished mage, years of training to get. In her words, most born magic users nowadays have to "work twice as hard to be half as good" was Willow, who picked up witchcraft during high school. She's also rather upset that Willow attempted to destroy the world and didn't get more than a slap on the wrist and some friendly counseling. The whole "stuck as a rat" issue probably didn't help her attitude either. However, in almost all of the Amy episodes up to this point Willow is not shown to really be stronger. Amy seems to be incredibly powerful when she can turn people into rats, and at the same time Willow complains about being able to barely levitate a pencil. Willow is complimented on her magical abilities in Season Five just for having the ability to summon a little lightning and magically throw knives. Willow seems to get her magical upgrade in Season Six from Rack. While it may be argued that she was stronger at that point, she had three more years of training while Amy was still a rat yet Amy's complaint in Season Seven was that Willow was "always" stronger. Anya invokes this trope in Season Seven when she tells Buffy that she is not "better" than the rest of them, just "luckier".
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e2fa7287	comment	Touhou features this in its heroine, Reimu. She is specifically noted to be extremely lazy and relies upon her bloodline's innate superpowers and her magically sharp intuition to defeat the various Gods, demons, and monsters with powers on par with Eldritch Horrors of Gensokyo on a regular basis. In contrast, her main rival is Marisa, who relies upon a variation of Charles Atlas Superpower to learn her magic, having no talent for anything but a single-minded devotion to becoming a "Magical Girl". How hard a worker Marisa is may depend on how you interpret "steals a lot of stuff", though. You didn't think she developed the Master Spark herself, did you? It's stated in Perfect Cherry Blossom's manual that Reimu does not believe that effort will be rewarded (so much so that her shrine's paper fortune does not carry the fortune "Least Luck," which can be interpreted as "You will get exactly as your effort"). Subverted in the (borderline Canon Discontinuity) Silent Sinner in Blue manga, where Yorihime, pretty much a Reimu who did actual training, starts curbstomping the main characters. Even before that, though, Lunarians are considered something fierce. Houraisan Kaguya is the kind of person you'd expect to give no effort at all and, though her spellcards are considered to be not so difficult by decent players, she has more cards than any other boss in any of the games. Reversed with Meiling. The character who is said to train the most (and be in a position to be challenged more often than others) can never claim canon combat success over anyone. It doesn't help that her few victories with plot were All Just a Dream.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e372755d	comment	In The Karate Kid (1984), the Cobra Kai undertake intense physical conditioning and training for years... only for Daniel to train for two months with Mr. Miyagi and defeat their best guy in a tournament. Justified with the implication that Kreese spends far more time punishing his students and teaching them to be completely ruthless than helping them develop their skills, i.e, it doesn't matter how long you train for if you train under a bad teacher. Daniel also didn't start from scratch, as he is mentioned to have taken basic classes before the film starts, and trains all day, everyday one-on-one with an instructor, instead of as part of a class. There's also a bit of Tactical Rock–Paper–Scissors at work; the Boring, but Practical style focusing on fundamentals that Miyagi teaches is noticably faster than the flashy and crowd-pleasing Cobra Kai style. In the first sequel Daniel gets a sobering wake-up call when he gets in a fight with a more experienced practitioner of the same style and gets his ass effortlessly handed to him.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e3f0daf4	comment	Discussed in A Growing Affection. Lee gives Sakura a scenario for the Chunin Exams with Ninja A (Crippling Overspecialization Bare-Fisted Monk) and Ninja B (Jack-of-All-Stats). As Lee explains, Ninja B could go through the entire tournament and beat many in the third round but can lose to Ninja A and Ninja A will become a Chunin.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e4854399	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e4854399	comment	Averted/Subverted in Mx0. Kuzumi is thought to be an incredibly gifted wizard with a gold card. In reality he has no magic, and his innate skill is so low that he failed the entrance exam. Everything he does he does through careful lying and a lot of hard work. The series ends (aggravatingly abruptly, due to cancellation) with him temporarily transferring to another school with a special tutor who is going to push him up to gold card level through raw hard work.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e5ea79ee	comment	In The Authority, Jeroen is the latest World Shaman, able to tap into the collected experience of hundreds of predecessors, automatically making him one of the most powerful beings on the planet, despite the fact that he's a lazy, immature drug addict whose money all comes from his rich wife. He is utterly hated by his teammate Engineer, who grew up in a poor, unexceptional family and had to work her ass off to be deemed worthy of becoming the new Engineer.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_e863cc41	comment	In Mega Man Battle Network Chaud is shown to spend most of his time training. However, Lan (who is clueless, lacks foresight, and is later flanderized into being Book Dumb) always winds up beating him senseless (at least 3 and 6 make him a difficult Bonus Boss) and admits he isn't strong enough to help Lan when he decides the fate of the world in the final battle (barring the Big Damn Heroes moments he is always in), all because 1) Lan is the Player Character, and 2) His navi is Megaman.EXE, the title character. The games DO go out of their way to attribute a great part of Lan's success to The Power of Friendship, which "Lord Chaud" clearly lacks. That, and apparently training ten hours a day makes Protoman very predictable. There's also the fact that Chaud's entire training process doesn't even make sense. Supposedly, he spends ten hours a day secretly training... leading to the following questions. 1) How do you keep something you do 10 hours a day a secret? 2) Since Net Battling is usually measured in minutes, if not seconds, how could you spend ten hours on it? 3) The games note that Chaud doesn't actually operate Protoman, so presumably he's just watching the entire time. How is this supposed to help him? 4) Protoman is a program. He can't really "train", as he doesn't have anything to develop. 5) The only thing Protoman could conceivably fight for ten hours are viruses. Moving away from the fact that repeatedly battling extremely predictable enemies isn't really going to help in an actual Net Battle, how does this make him different from Megaman, who also spends a lot of time virus busting? By the time Battle Network 5 and 6 rolls in, this trope starts losing force. So much that in the last game of the series, Megaman himself needs the combined Power of Friendship and the Deadly Upgrade of a digital monstrosity to keep up with what Protoman can deal with by his own vanilla self!
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ef26ede1	comment	In Hidamari Sketch, While Yuno is known to be hardworking, her skills will probably never be as good as those of her Ditzy Genius neighbour Miyako.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_ef661e97	comment	In Street Fighter, Zangief is a Russian professional wrestler who trained in Siberia, by wrestling polar bears. In contrast, Sakura is a Japanese schoolgirl who taught herself martial arts by emulating Ryu, possibly after seeing him on TV. However, in various medias, Sakura is able to go toe-to-toe with Zangief just fine. This is even lampshaded in the Sakura Ganbaru! manga adaptation, where, in the first few pages, Dan demonstrates his Gadoken and explains the basics of Ki Manipulation to Sakura. It takes her less than a minute to perform a complete (albeit still weak) version of the Hadoken, and in no time at all, she's using full-power versions of the technique. Seeing this, an outraged Dan pauses for a minute to comment on the absolutely terrifying potential she possesses. Dan himself is an example. Despite being the son of a master and training for years, he just plain sucks at martial arts, with any improvement or advantage he has being totally eclipsed by his sheer lack of talent.
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Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f2041376	comment	Prue in Charmed (1998) suddenly gains super awesome fighting abilities with her telekinesis, better than Phoebe's who had been studying martial arts for years. Sure Prue was a cheerleader in high school but she worked in a museum and an auction house in her adult years. Though this averted with regards to the sisters' powers as they are shown developing slowly over the course of the series. Though Prue's develop faster than her sisters' do. Perhaps understandable in that Prue, as the oldest sister, has the rawest power at her disposal. After Prue dies, Piper is the oldest sister and the most powerful of the three.
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Charmed (1998)	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f2041376
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f565604d	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f565604d	comment	In Eyeshield 21, Unsui and Agon, twin brothers, couldn't be further apart in ability. Unsui puts himself through Training from Hell (at one point shown doing one handed push-ups with their team's center sitting on his back) and is only "a great player". Agon doesn't practice at all, and is "a once-in-a-century prodigy." He's also the only one of the Shinryuuji Nagas who has any luck with the ladies (being that they go to an all-boys school). Sure, he's got The Gift, but he's also stone-cold evil. Ever since his team's loss to Deimon, he has been working out with increasing fervor and desperation; He doesn't want to become the trash he sees everyone else as. Subverted twice, though, when Hiruma deliberately (and successfully) sets Yukimitsu (who is 0 percent talent and 100 percent hard work) against him, and when Hiruma himself (a physically average player) outruns Agon because he improved his 40-yard dash by 0.1 seconds through the training Agon disdains. Leonard Apollo learned this the hard way during his time in the NFL, as well. And then there's the Yuuhi Guts. Even the manager keeps a training regiment so brutal it would bring most other schools' players to tears, but they only score one touchdown against Deimon in the fall tournament. It's worth nothing that the actual players (i.e. the ones that trained hard and ended up scoring the only touchdown) were only in the game for the last few minutes. The school had opted to use star players from other sports (Yuuhi being a renowned sports school where football was the only thing they didn't excel at), and they played terribly, having never practiced football itself and generally having no teamwork whatsoever. Had the actual football players been in the entire time, well, they probably still would've lost (Deimon was still the better team and trained every bit as hard as the Guts, after all), but it would've been a much closer game. A lot of the characters avert this too, though. And almost all of the "I'm just that good!" types wind up getting owned by Deimon, who are the results of canny planning, hell-training, and tenacity. Pretty much everyone on the Deimon team worked hard for their abilities in some way or another, and the closest it has to a "he's just that good" is the quarterback's planning skill. One of the only moments in the series that makes Agon seem like less of a Jerkass is due to this trope. Habashira Rui has to sub in for Shin when he's injured in the final game against America. Everyone, Habashira included, knows that he's not good enough to take on America. But he does it anyway, and Agon removes his wig and glasses, taking the game 100% seriously for perhaps the first time, purely out of respect for Habashira and to remind Unsui what he should be striving for. Shin averts this trope, however. Hiruma explicitly defines him as "the opposite of Agon, a monster who achieved his strength through hard work." Another subversion is Monta vs the "genius" catchers such as Ikkyu and Taka. The fact that he spent years chasing after and catching baseballs allows him to follow the ball more closely than anyone else, a skill that allows him to beat his much more naturally-talented rivals.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f565604d	featureApplicability	-0.3
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f565604d	featureConfidence	1.0
Eyeshield 21 (Manga)	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f565604d
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f6a1016f	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f6a1016f	comment	In The Matrix, you can become an expert in just about anything in seconds by having the skill uploaded into your brain. Although it's implied that the process is normally physically and/or mentally taxing on the individual, judging from Tank's incredulous comments about how long Neo has been downloading. In Path of Neo, we find out that it is actually a matter of time dilation. Seconds passing in the real world for hours passing in intense training.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f6a1016f	featureApplicability	1.0
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f6a1016f	featureConfidence	1.0
The Matrix (Franchise)	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f6a1016f
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f70c0e06	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f70c0e06	comment	Played straight in Fullmetal Alchemist. Edward gets to be a State Alchemist (a coveted position in Amestris) because of his natural talent moreso than how much work he puts into it. Dante, Big Bad of the Fullmetal Alchemist, delivers a well deserved sledgehammer to Equivalent Exchange and mentions this trope during her Breaking Speech:
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f70c0e06	featureApplicability	1.0
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f70c0e06	featureConfidence	1.0
Fullmetal Alchemist (Manga)	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f70c0e06
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f8956ef3	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f8956ef3	comment	Yu Yu Hakusho; Case in point, Kuwabara trains hard to unlock his spiritual powers, Yusuke gets hit by a car. Yusuke trains too, sure. But always manages to find shortcuts, leaving everyone else to get there the hard way. Come to that, throughout the series, Yusuke and Kuwabara mostly don't train during peaceful times. Kurama and Hiei do, and it lets them stay at roughly the same level. Hiei gets it the worst, because he doesn't seem to do anything else with his free time, while Kurama puts in enough work to stay at the top of his class in school and spends time with his human mother.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f8956ef3	featureApplicability	1.0
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f8956ef3	featureConfidence	1.0
Yu Yu Hakusho (Manga)	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f8956ef3
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f95eaabe	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f95eaabe	comment	The MLP Loops: Invoked for laughs. Ascending to alicorn requires a Beyond the Impossible feat directly related to a pony's special talent as well as a powerful artifact (the specific artifact can vary, just so long as it's powerful). Ascending again, however, is infinitely easier. At one point a bunch of loopers prank Celestia by pretending to ascend for ridiculously minor "feats" like eating a lot of muffins, wearing a crown, and choking on a paperclip. Celestia eventually gives up, declares that ascension no longer grants any special privileges, and mutters about how she was an alicorn before it was cool.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f95eaabe	featureApplicability	1.0
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f95eaabe	featureConfidence	1.0
The MLP Loops / Fan Fic	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f95eaabe
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f9cb2c07	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f9cb2c07	comment	The Second Try: In "Raise", Asuka remembers what she could never catch up with Shinji in spite of working hard to become the best. She also realizes that it doesn’t bother her or upset her anymore.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f9cb2c07	featureApplicability	1.0
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f9cb2c07	featureConfidence	1.0
The Second Try / Fan Fic	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_f9cb2c07
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa00b130	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa00b130	comment	Spongebob Squarepants has been trying to obtain his boating license for years. Then Patrick, The Ditz, gets it on his first try, and unintentionally rubs in Spongebob's face for the rest of the episode, though Patrick is hardly the world's greatest driver. Spongebob's inability to his get his liscence was from his nerves getting to him, as shown in an early episode. Patrick's clear-headedness allowed him to help Spongebob in nearly getting it (but it was cheating.) In this episode, Patrick ate Spongebob's informational index cards and retained the knowledge, allowing him to get the license.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa00b130	featureApplicability	1.0
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa00b130	featureConfidence	1.0
SpongeBob SquarePants	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa00b130
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa89a1ac	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa89a1ac	comment	Subverted in the second movie. Elsa's inborn magic powers let her get past obstacles pretty easily while other characters struggle to keep up physically, but then she gets distracted in Ahtohallan and goes into the most dangerous part after already getting what she needed, getting herself stuck. The more focused Anna ends up having to fix things, despite her lack of magic.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa89a1ac	featureApplicability	-0.3
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa89a1ac	featureConfidence	1.0
Frozen II	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fa89a1ac
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fcf65a1c	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fcf65a1c	comment	In Jeramey Kraatz's The Cloak Society, the only way into the Cloak Society is by descent from the founders; only they have the superpowers Umbra grants. Gage's father died in a lab accident because of his unceasing efforts to avert this — to demonstrate such inventing genius that they would accept him — and Gage is following in his footsteps. On the other hand, when it comes to actual skill, this trope is thoroughly averted. Both superheroes and supervillains are rigorously drilled both in their powers and in Boxing Lessons for Superman.
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fcf65a1c	featureApplicability	-1.0
Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fcf65a1c	featureConfidence	1.0
The Cloak Society	hasFeature	Hard Work Hardly Works / int_fcf65a1c

The following is a list of statements referring to the current page from other pages.

Bakuten Shoot Beyblade / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Beyblade Burst / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Dragon Ball Z: Resurrection ‘F’ / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Little Witch Academia (2017) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Neon Genesis Evangelion / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Pretty Rhythm Aurora Dream / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Shoujo Kageki Revue Starlight / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Time Bokan / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Wake Up, Girls! / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Yu-Gi-Oh! 5D's / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Chick Tracts (Comic Book) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Doctor Doom (Comic Book) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
ElfQuest (Comic Book) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
100 Bullets (Comic Book) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Red Skull (Comic Book) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck (Comic Book) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Eigengrau / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Embers / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
No Chance For Fate / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Rainbooms and Royalty / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Soul Chess / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The One I Love Is (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Second Try / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Dominoes (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Fantastic Foxes Of Zootopia (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Neon Genesis Evangelion: Genocide (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Off The Line / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Once More with Feeling (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Sanza Salazar Saga / Fan Fic / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Son of the Sannin (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Misfits (Walker) (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
To Aruverse Rewrite Project (Fanfic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
August Rush / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Captain America: The First Avenger / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Doctor Strange (2016) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Forrest Gump / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Overdrawn at the Memory Bank / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Power Rangers (2017) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Great White Hype / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Karate Kid (1984) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Dark Tower (Franchise) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Matrix (Franchise) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Touhou (Franchise) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Let's Race With RPGM (Lets Play) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
SuperLPHeroes (Lets Play) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Towersoared (Lets Play) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Chivalry of a Failed Knight / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
High School D×D / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
My Next Life as a Villainess: All Routes Lead to Doom! / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Oreimo / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Sword Art Online / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Pet Girl of Sakurasou / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Confessions of a D-List Supervillain / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Daniel Deronda / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Dragonlance / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
His Dark Materials / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
My Side of the Mountain / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Perfume / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Solo Leveling / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Sound! Euphonium / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Dark Tower / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The NeverEnding Story / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The White Tiger / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Warbreaker / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Condensing Vapor Queen	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
ConsoleRPGCliches97To120	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
HardworkHardlyWorks	sameAs	Hard Work Hardly Works
LoveStage	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
OliverCromwell	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
Ptitlecm2jt2w4	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
Upgrade Artifact	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
WeirdnessIsolationTropes	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
Aria (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Ace of the Diamond (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Air Gear (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Arachnid (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Assassination Classroom (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Baby Steps (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Baki the Grappler (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Big Windup! (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Black Clover (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Bobobo-bo Bo-bobo (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Chihayafuru (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Claymore (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Cross Game (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Dai no Daibouken (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Dragon Ball Super (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Eyeshield 21 (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Food Wars! (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Haikyuu!! (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
High School Exciting Story: Tough (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hunter × Hunter (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
K-On! (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Keijo!!!!!!!! (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Kuroko's Basketball (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha ViVid (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Muhyo and Roji (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Omamori Himari (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Ping Pong (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Tenjho Tenge (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Teppu (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Ancient Magus' Bride (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The World is Still Beautiful (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
We Never Learn (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Fearful Symmetry (Music) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
EverythingGaidenV2	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
ArchipelagoExodus	seeAlso	Hard Work Hardly Works
Canada's Worst Driver / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Glee / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Lie to Me / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Project Runway / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
RuPaul's Drag Race / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Skin Wars / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Survivor / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Taskmaster / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Psionics: The Next Stage in Human Evolution (Tabletop Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Amadeus (Theatre) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Art of Fighting (Video Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Dragon Ball Xenoverse (Video Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Final Fantasy XI (Video Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Garou: Mark of the Wolves (Video Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Mega Man Battle Network (Video Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Persona 3 (Video Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Legend of Heroes: Trails of Cold Steel (Video Game) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Danganronpa 2: Goodbye Despair (Visual Novel) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hakuouki (Visual Novel) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Maji de Watashi ni Koi Shinasai! (Visual Novel) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
RWBY Chibi (Web Animation) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Door Monster (Web Video) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Down the Rabbit Hole (Web Video) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Dr. Horrible's Sing-Along Blog (Web Video) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
My Little Pony: The Mentally Advanced Series (Web Video) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
STAR_ (Web Video) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Sharkasm Crew (Web Video) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Brawl in the Family (Webcomic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
One-Punch Man (Webcomic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Sweet Jade and Hella John (Webcomic) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Batman: The Brave and the Bold / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Donkey Kong Country / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Jem / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Kung Fu Panda / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Kung Fu Panda 2 / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Kung Fu Panda 3 / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
The Venture Bros. / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
CM Punk (Wrestling) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hell Girl / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
IGPX Immortal Grand Prix / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Red vs. Blue: The Chorus Trilogy (Machinima) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
hardworkhardlyworks	sameAs	Hard Work Hardly Works
Hikaru no Go (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works
Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple (Manga) / int_cc427069	type	Hard Work Hardly Works

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