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Improbable Sports Skills
- 127 statements
- 23 feature instances
- 14 referencing feature instances
| Improbable Sports Skills | type |
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In real life, most teams of a certain sport look fairly similar to each other. Top-class players may have different styles among them, but everyone's figured out what the "best" techniques broadly are. Victory mainly comes from being better at executing those techniques, having better strategies, or better teamwork. In fiction, however, sports can become physics-defyingly awesome. The characters will have special moves like jumping all the way across the basketball court or swinging the tennis racket at light-speed. Spectators may be astounded, but nobody will act like what's happening is actually impossible. It's simply a fact of life in that world that really good hockey players can Flash Step across the ice. Appears a lot in Shōnen anime and comics. Fighting Series also involve this a lot, since fighting is a sport if rules are enforced. Often the skills will depend on Heroic Spirit, so protagonists in these series can pull off David vs. Goliath victories. These skills frequently involve Calling Your Attacks and There Is No Kill Like Overkill (although it might not be overkill if the other team also has such skills). Compare Fictional Sport, whereas in this trope it's about playing a real sport with fictional techniques, and Blood Sport, whereas in this trope the game itself isn't deadly; it's the players who hold potentially deadly skills. Also compare Martial Arts and Crafts. See also I Know Madden Kombat, the inverse of this trope (using non-combat sport skills in combat situations), and Muggle Sports, Super Athletes, where the skills come from explicit superpowers. Examples |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_283b23c1 | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_283b23c1 | comment |
In the Magical Girl Lyrical Nanoha A's manga, Nanoha, Fate and co are playing dodgeball. Predictably, Fate uses her supersonic flight and Super-Reflexes to her advantage. But Nanoha's friend, the Passionate Sports Girl Suzuka Tsukimura, surpasses her by showing superior reflex; she manages to Catch and Return the ball that Fate throws at her, and making Fate unconscious in the process. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_2a5cb601 | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_2a5cb601 | comment |
The Mighty Ducks: Both shots of goal-snipers Fulton Reed and Russ Tyler are physically impossible to perform in real life. Tyler's knucklepuck cannot be launched as shown in the movies (the puck would tumble along the ice for a few feet before sliding to a stop) and violates aerodynamic laws as it travels every which way in mid-flight; Reed's slap shot is more straightforward but the tracking shots make the puck seem to travel all of three miles an hour, plenty of time for opposing players to skate out of the way and for the Hawks goaltender to let out a scream before being blown into the back of the net. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_468bebb0 | comment |
Discworld: Death is The Ace at pretty much every sport or game he tries his hand at. Because he's Death. However, when he takes a stab at being human in Reaper Man, he has to learn how to be bad at things, and so becomes impossibly bad at them, which takes a great deal more skill than being merely good. Soul Music: At her school, Death's daughter Susan demonstrates unerring and somewhat inhuman accuracy at any sport involving sticks, being able to swing a hockey or lacrosse stick with such strength and accuracy that the ball or puck goes exactly where she wants it to go. Apparently being able to swing a long stick with precision runs in the family. But to Susan's chagrin, the more she points this out to her peers, the more likely she is to be picked last for a team. And one more with Death — as described in the Deaths Domain Mapp, the grounds of his home include a golf course, but he had to include dimensional instabilities and Gravity Screw areas in order to make it even slightly challenging for himself. |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_62a7de21 | comment |
Played for laughs in Azumanga Daioh, during an impromptu soccer game between Yukari and her class. Sakaki is shown moving to intercept Yukari, as the latter charges upfield with the ball. Then Sakaki casually steals the ball from Yukari as she literally walks past her! | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_72262aee | comment |
Avatar: The Last Airbender: Played straight in "The Beach" episode, which has Azula, Zuko, Mai, and Ty Lee dominate an opposing team in a volleyball match by using gravity defying stunts and trick shots. Including one instance where Ty Lee lands atop the net and strikes a pose, after acing a shot, and another where Azula roundhouse kicks the ball in midair, at about 20 ft. above the court! The shot scorches the net and is the game winning point. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_7f53df55 | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_7f53df55 | comment |
Speedster Mercury of Filmation's Space Sentinels amuses himself by playing one-man baseball. He throws the pitch (a fastball, of course), then runs to the plate ahead of the ball to bat it toward the outfield. Mercury then circles the bases multiple times before once again arriving ahead of the ball to catch it. "You're out!" he declares, though not before the scoreboard has recorded 46 runs. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_88609c3d | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_88609c3d | comment |
Shaolin Soccer did this by putting Kung Fu in soccer. In short, a bunch of superhumans playing soccer, and making shots on goal so strong that they blow away all 11 players plus the goal post. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_8b2d4580 | comment |
The Prince of Tennis is full of this - we have players who can perform instant serves, lightning-fast reaction speed, shots that always hit your wrists, or even take away your five senses during a play. The protagonist? A Game-Breaker which can use his sixth sense to play tennis while copying everyone's special moves, and is unbeatable even when he suffers from memory loss. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_90a3a7f4 | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_90a3a7f4 | comment |
All those years of cheerleading and martial arts classes was how Kim Possible was able to pull off all those death defying moves and fights. Then in the Postscript Season, Ron stole, er, secret borrowed Kim's super suit from So The Drama to become a star football player, until he is forced to give it back, at which point he is able to maintain his star role because of all the time he spent running from bad guys. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_99c003af | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_99c003af | comment |
The Boondocks: "The Red Ball" episode culminates in a showdown between Huey and Ming, that has him airbend the ball, then roundhouse kick it at her, in the exact same fashion as the above example. Ming returns fire by kicking the ball hard enough to set it ablaze, and breaks her shin! You can see it here. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_9ea4ee87 | type |
Improbable Sports Skills | |
| Improbable Sports Skills / int_9ea4ee87 | comment |
Baseball film The Scout has an utterly ridiculous scene in which Steve Nebraska 1) pitches a perfect game (possible if extremely difficult- there's only been 23 in MLB's 218,000+ game history,) 2) by striking out every batter, 27 in total (ridiculous, as no pitcher has ever struck out more than 20 batters in a game and more than 15 strikeouts is pretty uncommon) 3) on the minimum 81 pitches (about a billion times more unlikely than the 27 strikeouts). | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_a5c4171 | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_a5c4171 | comment |
Blue Lock: High-school footballers display skills even professionals would gawk at. The players' weapons range from only somewhat improbable (e.g. Chigiri's speed and Bachira's dribbling) to nearly impossible (e.g. Nagi's super-traps and Reo's ability to copy any move with 99% accuracy. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_a6543322 | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_a6543322 | comment |
Touhou Project has a fan-game called Touhou Soccer, i.e soccer in Touhou style. Everyone uses overpowered skills, which usually don't involve kicking the ball, to play soccer - from dribble, tackle, passes, shoots, saving, while you can even use danmaku to stop opponents going further by invoking a foul. And by overpowered, see it yourself. Probably the most exaggerated example ever seen. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_a9c57bd | type |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_a9c57bd | comment |
In The Greatest American Hero, Ralph goes undercover as a pitcher in a baseball team. He uses the supersuit to throw pitches at well over 100 mph. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_c2463c55 | comment |
In Final Fantasy X, The Jecht Shot is this in-universe for the sport Blitzball (some mixture of rugby and soccer and played underwater). It involves bouncing the ball off the goal post (or a defender's face) and swimming up to kick the rebound into the goal with a lot of spinning thrown in. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_c326acd9 | comment |
Inazuma Eleven has junior high school kids playing soccer and throwing bona fide Elemental Powers and other supernatural stuff around like no tomorrow. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_c5e0e278 | comment |
Sporting events in Battle Athletes tend to involve Improbable Sports Skills, Improbable Sports, or sometimes both at the same time. Examples include high school girls who can outrun Usain Bolt, ride bicycles on roller coaster tracks, and drag cement rollers cross-country through minefields. | |
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NBA Jam, the NBA Street series, and to a lesser extent the NFL Street series, give real-life athletes apparent superpowers. Nobody can jump over the rim while pulling off highlight-reel dunks as consistently as the players do. | |
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The Ultimate Game of basketball is this in Space Jam, wherein Elmer Fudd can dunk, lardbucket Stan Podolak can sink a shot while buried under five Monstars, and Michael Jordan can reach the rim from the half-court line. Of course, since the game is being played in the cartoon universe, the Laws of Physics and the Rules of Basketball are reduced to suggestions. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_dcb07085 | comment |
Soul Music: At her school, Death's daughter Susan demonstrates unerring and somewhat inhuman accuracy at any sport involving sticks, being able to swing a hockey or lacrosse stick with such strength and accuracy that the ball or puck goes exactly where she wants it to go. Apparently being able to swing a long stick with precision runs in the family. But to Susan's chagrin, the more she points this out to her peers, the more likely she is to be picked last for a team. | |
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DSBT InsaniT: The volleyball scene in 'Beach Brawl' contains a lot of artistic liscense on physics. This is even pointed out by the characters. The soccer match in 'Store Story' has some crazy physics too. | |
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| Improbable Sports Skills / int_ea77c5ab | comment |
Captain Tsubasa is famous for this. We have soccer player protagonists who shoots football that follows any arbitrary curve, shots that blow the goalkeeper away and hurt anyone who block them, soccer player that jump on posts and crossbar and many other examples. | |
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In Eyeshield 21, American football becomes one - a Magnificent Bastard who always outsmart other teams, runners who are rumored to have lightspeed (or to be accurate, 50 yards in 4.2 seconds) with improbable counter-attacks to stop players from blocking them, pass receivers who run backwards even faster than most people can run forwards, and catch long-range passes without looking at the ball. | |
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