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Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond
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Take a character who, in their home region/universe, is fairly normal, if not underpowered. They'd be a Mook or Red Shirt, or someone fairly low key. Or maybe back home they're weak because they have to measure up to god-level opponents or Eldritch Abominations. Whatever the reason, they're not considered strong. However, due to the nature of the world they are dropped into, they are unbelievably powerful. This trope is about when Power Creep, Power Seep does not come into play. To be a Normal Fish in a Tiny Pond, you must be much more powerful than the locals, without gaining anything you didn't have before. At a certain point, the stuff in your pockets makes you a god to those who lack it; as civilizations technologically advance, members of that civilization have access to increasing amounts of energy. For example, your average medieval peasant could never hope to own something as destructive as an AK-47 automatic rifle or a few drums of fuel oil mixed with ammonium nitrate. Compare Like a Duck Takes to Water where the individuals transplanted have some unique gifts or knowledge, and Not Rare Over There when it comes to resources. This one is just a normal guy or person in their universe, but is special in another. Fish out of Water goes hand-in-hand with this trope. This is a staple of comic book alien supers, whose “powers� consist primarily of “being a member of their species� on a planet where the dominant species isn’t as powerful, whereas on their homeworld they would be considered merely a Badass Normal. Invoked for Summon Everyman Hero. See also Those Were Only Their Scouts. Contrast Big Fish in a Bigger Ocean and Outside-Context Problem. Compare and contrast Mighty Whitey. Large Runt is a Sister Trope purely about physical size, not general ability. |
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Lorcan in Brimstone Angels is introduced as the enigmatic, manipulative, powerful devil who convinces heroine Farideh into entering a pact with him to acquire magical power. All around, he comes off as an extremely impressive, charismatic, frightening guy. Then we see what his home life in Hell is like, and it turns out he's the youngest and weakest of his family and pretty much a complete nobody as far as the cutthroat devil hierarchy cares- to inexperienced mortals he may be a big deal, but at home, he's near the bottom of the food chain and is painfully aware of that fact. | |
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The T-800 series Terminator from the Terminator franchise is a mass-produced infiltration robot that, while dangerous, the human resistance fighters of the post-apocalyptic future have grown adept at detecting and destroying. But in the decades before Judgment Day, where there's no such thing as a "phased plasma rifle in the 40-watt range," just a single Terminator is a Nigh-Invulnerable Implacable Man that in the first movie marches effortlessly through an entire police station and murders 17 armed officers without even slowing down. | |
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The bird in A Bug's Life is a comparatively small songbird that humans wouldn't consider a predator or even a carnivore when next to the rest of the raptor species. To literal bugs, it's a T. rex with wings, and when confronted with it, Big Bad Hopper is snatched up in seconds and Eaten Alive by the chicks. Even better, a bird enthusiast would tell you that the bird's yellow and red plumage is actually indicative of a juvenile. It's basically a housesitting teenager. | |
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This seems to be the case for "Da Samurai" from the fourth season of Samurai Jack. While The Reveal at the end of the episode is that he's actually a scrawny guy with a beer gut wearing a muscle suit to look stronger than he is, he is still strong enough to take out a pair of robots with relative ease. His problem is that he's completely full of himself; since he's the strongest person in the area he lives in, he let his ego soar to the point he believed he's the strongest in the world. His first inkling that this isn't the case is when he challenges Jack, who is so much stronger that, even simply using a bamboo stick in their duel, he still completely outclasses Da Samurai in, effectively, just two moves. | |
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Ãœber: In the alternate-history WWII, this trope is in play with the various classes of superhumans. Normal humans are completely outclassed by the lowest class of superhuman, a tank-man; a single enhanced human is impervious to bullets and can tear a person apart bare-handed. However, the tank-men are themselves outclassed by the higher levels of Ãœbers: at the Second Battle of Kursk, ninety tank-men attack a single Battleship-class Ãœber. Eighty-one of them are disabled, and the Battleship loses an arm. As the war goes on, it is increasingly fought only between the most powerful Ãœbers. | |
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Sluggy Freelance: In "Kesandru's Well", the main characters all get transported into a hellish alternative dimension called the Never. While they don't exactly have fun there, they discover that being material in a place where spirits are as good as material makes them stronger than the inhabitants because they're sort of double real or something. Torg thinks for a moment that he's developed superpowers (and dons a cape) when easily fighting the god-hounds. Unfortunately, there are also some inhabitants that are powerful way beyond the advantage given by materiality. One story features Blinky and Clyde transported to fantasy stereotype alternative dimension. They are a pair of bumbling idiots in their own world, two faceless expendable footsoldiers for Hereti-Corp. But in this world...well, they're still a pair of bumbling idiots, but they're a pair of bumbling idiots with a fully-armed War Mech in a world where Dakka does not exist. |
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Inside Job (2021): Brett is The Generic Guy among his super genius, alien and mutated peers in Cognito. That still means he is fairly smart and often the most mentally adjusted in the group. Also, Played for Laughs in Buzzkill, where when fighting the rogues on the moon Brett is a heavyworlder in comparison and sends them flying easily. | |
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DEATH BATTLE!: "Hercule Satan vs. Dan Hibiki": This is the reason Hercule wins. They're both a joke compared to everyone around them in their home franchises, but "everyone around them" is a vastly different spectrum for Hercule than it is for Dan. Dan is a bad martial artist; Hercule is a good martial artist in a world with guys who can casually blow up planets. "Steven Universe vs. Star Butterfly": While Steven is the single strongest being in his home series, Star proves that much more powerful than him that he couldn't win. At full power, he struggles to adjust to a peaceful world where there's nothing left for him to fight and ultimately becomes his own show's Final Boss. This puts Steven at a disadvantage against Star, who has always had something to fight until the final credits of her own show. "Omni-Man vs. Homelander" manages to show exactly how outclassed Homelander really is against Omni-Man as a result of this trope. Homelander is from a setting that is somewhat like the real world; aside from the occasional Supe, Homelander only had to fight against powerless humans armed with just guns and explosives, and as such he didn't have any real reason to train or better himself. Omni-Man however, comes from a more classical superhero setting that has slightly-higher tech available and is filled with plenty of Mad Scientists, Alien Invaders, Kaiju, and Ancient Horrors in it for the superheroes of his setting to fight against; along with the fact that Omni-Man himself is a Viltrumite: A member of a galaxy-spanning empire that is well over a thousand years old, and saw plenty of fights that had really tested his mettle: enough that Omni-Man saw no other choice but to hone his skills to stay on top and survive. "Rick Sanchez vs. The Doctor" notes that Rick rarely has to actually compete with someone his intellectual equal or superior, due to the Council of Ricks' Central Finite Curve preventing Rick from going to a universe where he's not the smartest person, and tends to fare poorly when he does. This puts Rick at a disadvantage against the Doctor, who is not only smarter but has several millennia of experience over him and the tools needed to counter his tech. "Galactus vs. Unicron": This trope is one of the decisive factors in Galactus' victory. In the Marvel multiverse, Galactus has serious competition and has fought several Reality Warpers capable of as much destruction as he is. Unicron, on the other hand, is the biggest threat in his home multiverse and has very little in the way of competition. Furthermore, Galactus has technically never been defeated; his "losses" are mostly the heroes tricking him or pushing him back to where he willingly leaves them alone. Unicron, on the other hand, has been defeated on numerous occasions due to both trickery and the Transformers using The Power of Friendship, which Wiz states is Unicron's anathema. Adding to this is the fact the Transformers multiverse itself simply can't compare to the sheer scale of the Marvel multiverse, which contains an infinite number of infinite multiverses. |
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Homerooms & Hall Passes: In his native realm of BrÃandalör, Albiorix is a textbook Squishy Wizard: he is much weaker than the rest of his party and is considered a poor fighter. But BrÃandalör is a relatively harsh environment; when Albiorix is transported to a setting similar to the 21st-century U.S., he turns out to be surprisingly fit compared to the more pampered inhabitants of that realm. | |
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Taylor Anderson's Destroyermen starts with the USS Walker, a World War I-era destroyer, running away from the powerful Japanese fleet at the height of World War II. Even the US Navy considers destroyers of her class little more than Cannon Fodder. Then a freak squall takes the Walker to an alternate Earth where evolution took a different path and end up fighting ships straight out of Wooden Ships and Iron Men. Suddenly, the Walker is not only the most powerful ship in the world but also able to run circles around any other ship (until the Japanese battlecruiser Amagi shows up). | |
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Spider-Man 2099: This is how Lyla describes herself. In 2099, she is commonplace, but in 2015 she is beyond cutting edge and can hack absolutely anything. | |
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Hard Drive has a satirical article about the tragic fate of a fighting game enthusiast who can't hack it against other competitive players, and never gets beyond preliminaries in the fighting game tournaments—but he's still far better than any of his normal friends, to the point that he can't enjoy playing against them casually, either. | |
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In Cixin Liu's hard sci-fi The Three-Body Problem, the alien Trisolarans have an immense technological advantage over 1970s Earth, but their invasion fleet will take 450 years to arrive — and considering humanity's rapid rate of scientific progress, Trisolaris fears that Earth will have far surpassed them by then. So to enforce Earth's status as a tiny pond, they send sophons to disrupt all research into subatomic physics, preventing humanity from ever attaining Trisolaris's level of technology. And, true to this trope, later books reveal that Trisolaris is a tiny blip in a big galaxy, and deathly terrified of being noticed by the galaxy's real heavyweights, who routinely annihilate civilizations like theirs offhandedly. | |
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In Magia Record: Puella Magi Madoka Magica Side Story, Mami Tomoe stands out for being a veteran magical girl with quite a level of experience and power in fighting witches, to the point that she's even a bit of a topic of discussion when she first comes to Kamihama. And while she's certainly impressive to the magical girls because she manages to fight the strong witches of Kamihama without having had the Coordinator strengthen her magic (because Mami is just that strong already), she does still somewhat pale in the bigger picture. Kamihama's large collection of magical girls means that there are some that have been fighting witches as long, and even longer, than Mami has and several of them are on-par with her, or even stronger, albeit they usually have had their magic strengthened. Mami is still an impressive combatant and considered an asset to any group she lends her strength to, she's just not as big of a deal as she was when compared to the original series. | |
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One episode of Buck Rogers in the 25th Century features an assassin with super strength due to his homeworld having different environmental conditions compared to most human-adapted worlds. He was, in fact, a cripple by his own people's standards, and decided to make a better life for himself off-world rather than get a job as a librarian. | |
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The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The people you invite to the newly established Tarrey Town mostly weren't very notable in their original homes but are indispensable in their small yet booming new town. This is most explicit with Greyson, who states that he wanted to leave his old job at the Goron Mines for Tarrey Town because he felt more appreciated for his mining skills in the latter than the former. | |
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In the Star Trek: Enterprise episode "In A Mirror, Darkly" the USS Defiant, which had originally disappeared in the Original Series episode "The Tholian Web", is in its own time and universe just one of several Constitution-class ships, much like the Original Series Enterprise. In the 22nd-century Mirror Universe, though, it's a unique superweapon capable of curb-stomping an entire Empire into submission, and a prize worth killing for. | |
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The Simpsons: Lisa Simpson is a smart kid, certainly, but she's only brilliant by comparison with Springfield's stupid children and horrible school system. When she gets the opportunity to study at Waverly Hills, an elementary school with actual standards and quality, Lisa is traumatized to learn that she's really only a B student, as opposed to the straight A's she got at Springfield Elementary. In another episode, she gets to skip to the third grade early but finds it difficult. Further demoralizing her was Bart getting demoted back to the third grade alongside her as a punishment and proceeding to effortlessly score top marks in everything since he could memorize the answers the teachers were too lazy to change. Lisa eventually decides she prefers being the smartest student in a class that's too easy over being an average student in a class that's at her level. Invoked and Played for Laughs in "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Guest Star": Bart Simpson is expelled from school. While seeking for another one, Marge proposes the Oakwood Academy. Bart protests that it's a school for blind people, and his mother replies that he would start advantaged. |
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Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The inhumans are also this. They're a major threat to the (mostly human) S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, but even the strongest — i.e. Hive and Lash — don't have near the power of, say, Thor or The Hulk. This becomes fairly obvious when Ghost Rider is introduced and curb stomps both Quake and Hellfire. Kasius in Season 5 has elements of this. To the remnants of humanity, he's their untouchable Evil Overlord. To the galaxy at large, he's The Un-Favourite Black Sheep of his family who's been shipped off to oversee operations on an Insignificant Little Blue Planet. |
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Characters in Spider-Man: No Way Home are actually inverted examples of this trope since the villains and alternate Spider-Men from the Spider-Man Trilogy and The Amazing Spider-Man Series continuities come from more grounded worlds: Although Spider-Man has a wide variety of powers, by Avengers standards, he is overshadowed by guys like Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Doctor Strange. By street level standards he is a powerful Lightning Bruiser. As he gets older and more experienced, he grows out of it, and even manages to hold his own quite well in a Let's You and Him Fight with Doctor Strange in No Way Home. When Doctor Octopus (from Spider-Man 2) is carried over into the MCU, he suffers a downplayed intellectual version of this. While still highly brilliant by the standards of the MCU, Otto in his home series was arguably the most outright accomplished scientist in the world, developing AI, creating advanced robotics in the form of his tentacles, and being on the cusp of perfecting clean nuclear energy. However, he still came from a more mundane and grounded world and he in particular got pulled from two decades in the past. As such, the new world he finds himself in is rife with technology capable of matching and surpassing his own- his arms are easily overtaken by the Iron Spider Suit's nanites, and the Arc Reactor is essentially a safer, completed alternative to his own nuclear fusion machine. Like Doctor Octopus all the villains are affected by this to some extent; while still formidable threats, they were some of the only superhumans in their own world, whereas the MCU has plenty of superhumans, gods, and sorcerers running about. Electro and Sandman, however, still seem to be very formidable even to the standards of the MCU. In the formers' case it helps that he Took a Level in Badass twice over the course of the movie. The alternate Spider-Men are also affected to a lesser degree, since in their worlds they are the only confimed superheroes and deal with more grounded threats. This means they are completely unprepared for the existence of magic, the multiverse and more fantastical adventures their MCU self has experiened. |
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Certain powerful enemies in Dark Souls and Demon's Souls like the Red Eye Knights from the latter and Silver Knights in the former are just the regular Mooks of their day. Well they were, until the Apocalypse How took out most of the stronger beings, leaving the various Knights as strong contenders wherever they are. Lord Gwyn's war with the dragons has left most of their descendants a pale shadow of their previous strength. While the wyvern in the undead burg and the Gaping dragon are powerful enemies in the early game, Seath the Scaleless eclipses them in strength many times over and the one scaled dragon you can find is so untouchably powerful that attacking it for its tail weapon doesn't cause it to register damage and merely regenerates the lost tail cause that little inconvenience is all you can do to it. This is used to justify the use of Degraded Boss later in the game. In the first half most bosses aren't the strongest being created by the area but the vanguard of a later one. Taurus and Capra Demons litter Lost Izalith, two Gargoyles are just milling about Lordran, and multiple Moonlight Butterfly specimens are in Seath's crystal cavern. It isn't until the Gaping Dragon that you fight a unique enemy. |
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The Orville: Xelayan Lieutenant Alara Kitan is a Cute Bruiser who can tear airlock doors off their hinges and crush blocks of steel with her bare hands, thanks to coming from a high-gravity planet. She's actually not very outstanding among her people, who tend to go into academics and the arts; her parents consider her a bit of a disappointment who never realized her real potential. Nevertheless, the rest of the crew are very much impressed with her abilities, and when she leaves the crew, Mercer requests another Xelayan as replacement (Lieutenant Talla Keyali, who is similarly gifted). | |
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Vampirella: In Vampirella's Warren years she was an inhabitant of the planet Drakulon and never said to be particularly powerful for one of them. That still made her superpowered compared to humans. | |
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In The Legion of Super-Heroes!, when Superboy visits the 30th century, he expresses amazement at his tiny town Smallville becoming a big city after ten centuries. Cosmic Boy says it is still just a town, and he should wait to see the actual big cities. | |
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Beavis and Butt-Head has Smart Beavis and Smart Butt-Head, two alternate universe counterparts to the duo who first made their appearance in Beavis and Butt-Head Do the Universe. In B&B's world, they're intelligent on a cosmic scale compared to most people and come from an advanced civilization that far surpasses the normal Earth. But by the standards of their own world, they're still pretty incompetent and not too smart, as evidenced by how they can't properly pilot their ship and get easily fooled by scammers into buying "beachfront property" on the moon. By the time of "Abduction", it's fully shown that the two are so incompetent in their own world that their Supreme Leaders want to put them to death for their stupidity, and even when they're trying to get their sentence commuted by experimenting on Tom Anderson, they still end up bungling things up, with Smart Butt-Head shooting Smart Beavis on accident, both of them needing the less advanced Anderson to fix their machine, both of them accidentally wiping their own memories instead of Anderson's, and Smart Beavis getting trapped in the anal probing device, which allows Anderson to simply walk away. | |
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Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (2012): Donatello gets hit with this during the space arc in the fourth season. While on Earth, Donnie's a Gadgeteer Genius and Omnidisciplinary Scientist, he soon finds himself overshadowed by Professor Honeycutt, discovering that Earth is about 3000 years behind the standard transdimensional concepts of physics and he's effectively a "galactic idiot" in comparison. | |
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The Dukes of Hazzard: Compared to most gangsters and corrupt officials or businessmen, Jefferson Davis "Boss" Hogg is a piker. This is true even in the show's universe, and more than once the Dukes have had to bail him out when he gets involved in a scheme with some outside criminals and ends up in over his head. By the standards of Hazzard County, however, he's still a talented enough schemer to have reached the point where he's effectively owner, employer, landlord, mayor, judge, and otherwise sole authority over the entire population. (Not bad for someone we're told was born "on the dirt floor of a sharecropper's shack"). It doesn't hurt that Hazzard County is considered not much to look at even by rural Georgian standards, which means most bigger and meaner crooks would have little to gain by muscling in on Hogg's turf. | |
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In Venom (2018), the titular symbiote tells Eddie that he was a loser compared to other members of his race, but he is a badass killing machine on Earth. One of the reasons he chooses to remain on Earth and stop Riot from attracting more symbiotes is because he feels unique here rather than on his home world. | |
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At the end of Mad Men, Pete and Trudy Campbell realize that, rather than continually and unhappily striving to become somebodies in New York, their lives and marriage would be much happier if they took Pete's chance to relocate to Kansas City and become successes in a smaller arena. | |
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Played with in Darkwing Duck in the episode "Planet of the Capes." Darkwing Duck is taken to a world where he must use the standard-issue Earthling super-power of... not having super-powers. The entire planet is populated by superheroes, and their society will fall apart without a powerless "normal guy" they can save. | |
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RWBY: With intensive training, people can use Aura, Semblances and Dust to produce powerful, magic-like effects. However, certain characters have the ability to circumvent these rules and wield true magic. Despite that, this is but a fraction of their powers' origin. The Four Maidens wield true magic, making them much more powerful compared to modern humans. And before the time of the Four Maidens: all of Humanity could wield true magic until stripped of it by the gods and subsequently wiped out. Tasked with redeeming Humanity, Ozma was reincarnated and retained his magic, and was easily mistaken for a god by modern humans. He sacrificed much of his power to create the Four Maidens, de-powering himself in the process. Each Maiden is therefore only wielding a fraction of his original might. The Big Bad, Salem, is another survivor of original humanity, and she still has access to all her magic powers. Her Complete Immortality aside, she's suggested to have been only of average ability among old Humanity, but in the current world she's essentially a Physical God. The Jabberwalker is the most feared denizen of the Ever After due to being the only thing able to permanently kill Afterans. However, it doesn't pose much of a threat to trained Huntsmen like RWBY, being far more inclined to run away from danger when it feels outmatched. It's only after it's been killed by Neo, who turns it into an illusory army does it begin to pose a true threat due to no longer being held back by its skittish nature. Additionally, Jaune manages to hold it off for years in the Ever After (and being hailed as a hero called the Rusted Knight, a fairy tale back at home), due to being a trained and qualified Huntsman from Remnant, but he is consistently considered one of the weakest combatants out of the heroes due to mostly being a support fighter. |
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The eponymous ogre of Shrek is pretty standard for his kind. He still manages to fight off a dozen armed guards and take on a dragon, and he regularly sends thugs running. The fourth film shows he isn't a particularly strong, large or well-trained ogre — in fact he's actually smaller than most. He is, however, a great deal more intelligent than any ogre in the movie except Fiona, who are almost all depicted as Dumb Muscle. The second movie has shown Shrek having more up his sleeves than just his race. After turning into a human, he still shows to be intelligent, resourceful and determined, and the transformation only manages to bring him down to badass. | |
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unOrdinary: When researching Waldo Isen and Remi note that while in any other district his rampage wouldn't last a week, in a low-tier area like Brandish, he's essentially undefeatable. | |
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Felix Cortez from Clear and Present Danger is a borderline example. A Cuban intelligence agent now employed by Colombia's Medellin Cartel, he's surrounded, to his chagrin, by drug lords who aren't exactly stupid, but are still far below what he as a KGB-trained officer is capable of. This helps him to play the drug lords against each other with an eye to eventually taking over the entire Cartel himself, which he very nearly succeeds at (and would have if not for the intervention of Jack Ryan and John Clark). Downplayed in that his American enemies admit that he's a very good spy, a capable enemy not only for untrained drug dealers but even for fellow intelligence professionals. | |
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Essentially the premise of Idiocracy: The soldier who was frozen was chosen specifically for being perfectly average in every way, but humanity "evolved" to be stupider, so when he wakes up, he's the smartest man alive, and the person who was frozen with him is the smartest woman alive. And at the end the smartest pimp alive wakes up. | |
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"Hercule Satan vs. Dan Hibiki": This is the reason Hercule wins. They're both a joke compared to everyone around them in their home franchises, but "everyone around them" is a vastly different spectrum for Hercule than it is for Dan. Dan is a bad martial artist; Hercule is a good martial artist in a world with guys who can casually blow up planets. | |
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Harry Potter: Hagrid's full giant half-brother Grawp is much larger than Hagrid and is pretty much the biggest thing in the Forbidden Forest. In the giants' homeland he's a runt among the other giants. In the final book, Harry finally sees a full-sized giant and realizes that there's big and there's big. Hagrid himself is much bigger than any human, impervious to most spells, and has borderline super strength... but he's even smaller than Grawp, let alone a true giant. This is presumably why young students are forbidden from doing magic outside of school, as even a young and untrained wizard would still be incredibly dangerous to a ordinary person, especially when they don't yet know how to fully control their spells. |
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Vector from Alita: Battle Angel is the supervisor of the Factory and the Motorball tournament, effectively making him the ruler of Iron City... but he’s just a low-level crime boss at best, a glorified Puppet King at worst. He’s only a big deal because Iron City is a post-apocalyptic Scavenger World where anybody with significant resources is a major player by default, and he only has those resources to begin with because of Nova’s backing. Vector actually lampshades this and reveals it’s partly why he’s never tried to get to Zalem; up there, where society actually approaches a semblance of what it was like before the Fall, he’d be at the bottom of the food chain. In Iron City, he can be a king, or at least pretend to be one. Just to drive it home, once Alita cuts through all his Mooks, she finds that Vector himself is just a normal guy who she cuts down with one hit; Nova manages to be a far bigger threat without even physically being in the city. | |
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Nemesis the Warlock: Nemesis is well-respected among his race, but is not portrayed as being extraordinarily powerful. In fact, his crazy uncle Baal is said to have much greater power than him and he can be put on a spell even by young and inexperienced female Warlock (as they are by default more powerful than males) and the only thing that makes him special is being in the possession of the Sword Sinister, through it's unexplained why. Compared to humans and other races he is however seen almost as a godlike being and Galaxy's only hope against the Termight Empire. | |
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In the Rick and Morty episode "Close Rick-Counters Of The Rick Kind", we're introduced to the Council Of Ricks, an organization consisting exclusively of alternate reality versions of Rick and their respective Morties. We're also introduced to "Doofus Rick" (actual title: Rick J19Z7), a version of Rick that's constantly mocked and bullied by the rest of the Ricks for being relatively dumber than them (and because, allegedly, he comes from a reality where people literally eat their own shit), and it's implied he's THE dumbest Rick in the whole Council. However, this being Rick we're talking about, he is still a genius scientist with intelligence far above that of the human average. This is best shown when he shows Jerry, a character whose intelligence is average at the very best, how to make instant, oven-less brownies. However, it turns out the Ricks are kinda wrong, as shown in the comics. J19Z7 Rick does not come from a "doofus" universe, but some sort of opposite universe, hence why "Doofus Rick" is the only nice and non self-loathing Rick. Compare this with J19Z7 Jerry. This being the mirror verse, this Jerry is a ruthless, ambitious, intelligent and powerful man who is the richest of the world, practically controlling it, and upon discovering the multiverse, proceeds to beat Ricky and Morty multiple times and takes over the Council of Ricks with the intent of multiversal conquest. As a Rick puts it, in that verse, Rick was the prey and the predator is Jerry. The season 5 finale "Rickmurai Jack" reveals that all Ricks are ultimately this. In an infinite multiverse of infinite variations, isn't it strange that every single one of those universes has a Rick who is the smartest person in that universe? The Citadel has artificially walled off a small segment of the multiverse known as the Central Finite Curve. The only thing these universes have in common is that Rick is the smartest guy in each of them, meaning that nothing (save another Rick) can challenge the Citadel's power and authority. For all we know, there are just as infinite universes where Jerry discovered multiversal travel, but the Citadel members don't want to face the fact that they are not all that special in the grand scheme of things, or face the reality that there are external universes where Rick can be as smart as expected, but still lose out to someone else. Ironically, the entire purpose of the Central Finite Curve is soundly defeated by the emergence of Evil Morty, who outsmarts virtually every Rick in the curve, the only exceptions being "our" Rick and Rick Prime. |
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The Dresden Files: Harry has power that to humans seems amazing, but as wizards go he's fairly young and not considered particularly powerful by the white council, with Harry himself admitting he'd be outright no match for Morgan, to say nothing of the senior council members. On top of this there's fairies and other supernatural creatures whose innate power is beyond (presumably) any wizards. To elaborate, there's Mother Summer and Mother Winter, the latter of which has magic powerful enough to craft a spell the entire white council combined couldn't create, even when she was at her weakest, and with no effort. There's Mab and Titania whose true forms nearly broke Harry's mind (and he himself called his power a speck of dust compared to theirs), there's Odin and the Erlking who are on par with Mab and Titania, there's the Eldest Gruff who has killed at least 3 senior council members, and that's just the Fairy Courts. There's also the forest people, one of which compares human wizards to "children waving around handguns", Ferrovax, a Dragon whose will alone crushed Harry into the ground with no effort, and the archangel Uriel who apparently has the power to destroy galaxies! Overall Harry spends most of his time in over his head power wise, and has to rely on his clever plans to succeed more than his magic. |
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In Supernatural, the angel Castiel is powerful enough that he's often sent on a mission during Monster of the Week episodes so as not to be available to solve all the Winchesters' problems with his scale busting angelic powers. He's far more powerful than the brothers are, and can easily kill humans, demons, and monsters alike, but he's actually evenly-matched if not low powered when compared to his fellow angels, particularly the archangels, who have killed him on more than one occasion by exploding his vessel with a snap of their fingers. | |
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There's a variant in the Whateley Universe— Whateley Academy is a school full of Exemplars, impossibly beautiful people who look hotter than supermodels and actors put together. However, compared to the Exemplars, the normal students are hideous, and many develop severe problems with their self-image and self-esteem as a result. However, once they leave the campus, whether it's for holidays or when they graduate, they're often quite surprised to find that other people think they're legitimately attractive. | |
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Elden Ring: Virtually every boss in the first area of Limgrave. While impressive enemies at that point in the game, later on seeing them as common enemies shows how far from the thick of the conflict they are. Pointedly the Leonine Misbegotten that you get the last legendary armament from actually uses it against you while the first didn't, likely because it couldn't handle the weapon's massive strength requirements. The Fire Giant is one of the last bosses faced, with power so great that Alexander considers it to be nearly the same as a god's. Do note that Alexander helped face General Radahn, a colossal demi-god that a small army of some of the greatest warriors around had to take down. Yet looking around at the rest of the bodies you can see that most of the Giants were the same size, and there is a massive corpse embedded into the mountain that would make the Fire Giant look as small as you in comparison. This becomes something of a problem with Ironfist Alexander. Despite being a decent warrior jar in his own right, seeing the power of Radahn gives him a dose of reality where his abilities stand. After he takes step after step to become stronger to become a stronger vessel. At the end of it all he decides the final step is for him to take your remains inside himself and faces you in combat. Despite all his training the battle is little more difficult than every battle in Faram Azula. He dies content despite knowing that all his actions did not make him much stronger and likely hurt himself without any improvement gained. |
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The Guns of the South: Though the AK-47 is still a respectable rifle in its own right, especially given the age of its design, there are definitely deadlier weapons of war available by 2013. But it's cheap to produce and easy to maintain, and when supplied to a Civil War era army, is enough to overwhelm all opposition of the time period. | |
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Final Fantasy VII: Cloud is leagues stronger then the regular mooks and easily impresses the local members of Avalanche with his strength and talk of being a First-Class SOLDIER. Yet further in the game, it is not hard to notice that he isn't terribly impressive when put up against even the Third Class SOLDIER mooks. In story, he needs help just to fight one of the Turks and is caught with ease by a couple of them. It turns out that he didn't make SOLDIER at all and his strength largely comes from being one of Hojo's science experiments with Sephiroth's cells to replicate his Reunion theory. Later in the game, he averts this and is considered one of the strongest people on the planet and the only hope to defeat Sephiroth. Final Fantasy VII Remake averts this. As part of the Adaptational Badass upgrades to the story, the party defeats more impressive enemies and bosses than those which appeared in the same parts in the original game. In the same vein, the boss of chapter 4 in Remake is Roche, a 3rd class SOLDIER implied to be stationed well bellow his actual abilities; and Reno, who is fought earlier and in the boss battle corresponding to the one in the original game has Rude for backup, still nearly gets beaten. Don Corneo talks a big game as the top man in Wall Market, but in the grand scheme of things is just a guy that Shinra tolerates to keep the people down in the slums appeased. When he proves to be more trouble then he is worth, he is quickly forced to flee with the few stooges who are still loyal to him. And when he is finally found in Wutai, the Turks easily take him down even after the New Meat Elena gets herself captured. |
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Final Fantasy XIV has Blanstyr in the Armorer storyline, who's such a perfectionist in the smithing world that he drives out most potential recruits and is constantly at odds with guildmaster H'naanza over it. It isn't until the player character comes along that he realizes he actually has a ways to go to call himself the best armorer in Eorzea. The other expansions serve to show that while he might be the best armorer in Limsa Lominsa, he's considered small fry to the rest of the armorer world. | |
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World of Warcraft gives us N'zoth the Old God. On the relative scale of power it's stated outright that N'zoth is the weakest of the old gods compared to the others, but he's still an insanity-causing extradimensional monster, one who makes up for his lack of strength by being smart. At the end of Battle for Azeroth his manipulations result in him being set free entirely, meaning that "weakest" becomes just a matter of pedantics, as being unsealed and at his full power means he's far more lethal and dangerous than C'thun (half-dead and still recovering when players finish him) and Yogg-Saron (still bound in his prison, if only just, and fought with the aid of four demigods who were made specifically to seal and - if necessary - destroy him). It's considered nothing less than a miracle that the players emerge victorious, and beating him required a Kill Sat that was originally intended to sterilize a planet directly on top of him to destroy his physical form. | |
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The Mandalorian: Imperial AT-ST walkers are light scout tanks, designed to support a larger and more impressive mechanized force. To any competent military, they are simply not a real threat. To a peaceful farming village that can barely scrounge up a couple of blasters, even an old and run-down AT-ST is an invincible juggernaut that they are only able to defeat with a great deal of luck and preparation. TIE fighters are probably the smallest and most fragile Space Fighters in the 'verse, but against a group on the ground with no anti-aircraft weaponry, just one is terrifying. |
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Thunderbolts: Baron Zemo, who has no superpowers, ended up being on both sides of this during the comic's run. Early on, as Citizen V, he was shown being a great fighter, despite having always been more of The Chessmaster and lacking in combat prowess; Kurt Busiek answered inquiring readers that being good enough to last a few minutes against Captain America ought to mean you can wipe the floor with most other people. However, later down the line, it became a running theme Zemo would lose any actual fight he got into, even when fighting with his chosen weapon, the sword. Zemo might be decent in a fight by most standards but he's not the Worlds Greatest Warrior, and anyone who's actually got genuine talent with swords is going to easily school him, nevermind anyone with actual superpowers. Zemo's weapon is his intellect and charisma, above everything, so while he can dispatch mooks, even B-listers like Andreas Strucker will best him. Moonstone has also faced this over time. Though among the Thunderbolts themselves she's one of their most powerful members, being a Flying Brick with energy beams and density control, but she's far from the only or even the most powerful Flying Brick super there is; once, she straight up fled from Monica Rambeau, while other times, her antagonism towards Carol Danvers has generally been treated as a Smug Snake picking a fight with a woman who is really holding back. During the Busiek-Nicieza era, the team as a whole were presented as a Ragtag Bunch of Misfits, first intentionally as part of Zemo's plan to cast them as more sympathetic idealists, but then for real when the ruse was exposed and the whole world was gunning for them. Even at their best, they were far from on-par with the Avengers or Fantastic Four, and at their worst, they were almost bullied into giving up their Heel–Face Turn and joining Crimson Cowl's Masters Of Evil. Then they got trapped on Counter Earth, and ended up basically becoming both the biggest superhero team on the planet but also its de-facto rulers, as the world was in shambles. They were so good at this that Zemo even contemplated letting the actual earth perish and was content to just remain on Counter-Earth as its heroes/dictators, but then his own long-awaited Heel–Face Turn kicked in. The Warren Ellis run of the comic had Bullseye be treated as The Dreaded for a while—until he went up against American Eagle. As Eagle points out, Bullseye may be a very dangerous foe by the standards of a Badass Normal thanks to his Improbable Aiming Skills, but he's nothing compared to people who have actual offensive superpowers. Eagle isn't an especially dangerous superhero—in fact, prior to that story, he was deep in the C-List Fodder ranks—but just having any form of Super-Strength and enhanced reflexes leaves him so far above Bullseye that the latter can't even touch him in a fight, and being Immune to Bullets means that it wouldn't matter anyway. |
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In the Superman/Batman story "Torment", The Scarecrow betrays Desaad and sprays him with fear toxin, but it has no effect. Desaad angrily points out that just because he's a wimp compared to most superheroes and supervillains doesn't change the fact that he's a god. He proceeds to beat the crap out of Scarecrow and strap him to a table for torment. | |
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Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay features this as part of its generally Low Fantasy setting. Your characters go on relatively low-scale adventures and start out as nobodies; and due to the way combat works, even after a good amount of progress, they will never be that much more powerful than a common soldier. Thus, what would normally be an Elite Mook in the war game (which is meant to model battles involving hundreds or thousands of troops)note The appendices labeled "Scale and Measurement" in the 5e and 6e core rulebooks states that 1 inch = 10 yards, 1 model = 10-20 men, and 1 turn = 1 hour. is often a dangerous boss fight to your party. | |
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At the end of Waiting... when Mitch finally snaps and delivers his fierce minutes-long "The Reason You Suck" Speech to each and every employee at the restaurant, he reserves special criticism for Monty's attempts at acting to suave and cool... by pointing out there is a vast difference between someone who is actually cool, and the "cool" guy who works at a Burger Fool. | |
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An early 1980s made-for-TV movie, The Final Countdown, involves the USS Nimitz, a post-Vietnam supercarrier, being transported to December 6, 1941. While far from a Red Shirt in its own time, neither is it some particularly spectacular Super Prototype, especially without the battlegroup that normally defends it. Nevertheless, its combat power is depicted as being such a huge spoiler that the crew considers it no particular challenge to destroy the entire Japanese attack fleet targeting Pearl Harbor, and the only debate concerns the ethics of changing history. | |
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In Homestuck, Karkat was the weakest of the protagonists by far, neither reaching the God Tiers like the human players nor possessing the super strength or psychic powers of his fellow trolls. However, in The Homestuck Epilogues and Homestuck: Beyond Canon, the fact that he managed to win a session of Sburb as well as being one of the few trolls on Earth-C to actually grow up on Alternia makes him one of the planet's most seasoned fighters, with his Candy self acting as the Big Good in the war against Crockercorp. | |
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In the Star Trek (2009) reboot, Nero's ship, the Narada, is simply a mining vessel in his own time. 100+ years in the past, however, and it's The Juggernaut, capable of laying waste to anything the Federation or the Klingons can throw at it. | |
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In the Dinosaur Planet episode "Pod's Travels" a normal-sized raptor washed out to sea ends up on an island of dwarf dinosaurs where he is the same size as the dwarf allosaurus, the island's alpha predator. Due to his experience and speed giving him an edge over the allosaurus, he becomes the new alpha predator. | |
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3rd Rock from the Sun: Dick Solomon is quite average intellectually by the standards of his own family, but by Earth's standards his physics and mathematics knowledge is genius level. All of the Solomons appear to speak several languages fluently. | |
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Tolkien's Legendarium: The biggest powerhouses - Sauron, Sauruman, Gandalf, Smaug, and the Balrog - all fit this trope. As Maiar (lesser angels) and a Dragon, they are relics of the First Age, which fielded armies of Balrogs and Dragons and where Sauron was merely a servant of the Valar (Archangel) Melkor (who was renamed "Morgoth" when his evil nature was fully revealed). While they would have been significant, powerful players in the First Age, in the Third Age, the Balrog alone was able to drive out an entire kingdom of Dwarfs on its own. And would have easily defeated the rest of the Fellowship, a hand-picked group of the greatest heroes Middle Earth could muster, and Sauron managed to maintain his position as the Big Bad despite being severely weakened due to the loss of the One Ring and destruction of his physical body. Shelob the Giant Spider, who acts like Sauron's uncontrollable pet, is just one of the countless offspring of Ungoliant, an Animalistic Abomination that looks like a Giant Spider who mated with many spider creatures of Ered Gorgoroth (including her own offspring). Compared to her Animalistic Abomination mother, Shelob is "only" a half-demon/demigod, as her father is just an "ordinary" Giant Spider. But after many of Ungoliant's other spawn and descendants either died or disappeared over the ages, while Ungoliant herself disappeared elsewhere and never to be seen again, Shelob becomes a more serious threat in the Third Age. Shelob herself produces many progeny that are smaller and weaker than her, though just as nasty as their mother and grandmother. The hobbits show this upon returning to the Shire. Even with a year of training and travel, and their service in the War of the Ring, they are nothing particularly special from a pure soldierly perspective (though they are still held in high regard for their actions in the war). However, when they return to the Shire, they are likely some of the most dangerous warriors for miles around: they have full combat gear and equipment of the sort normally seen in the hands of nobility, along with the knowledge and grit that comes from very real battlefield and adventuring experience. By contrast, the other hobbits have seen no combat to speak of and carry only improvised weapons and hunting bows, and the Chief's Men trying to oppress them are little more than a street gang armed with clubs and knives. Merry and Pippin are even literal examples of this: having drunken ent-draughts, they have grown to be over four and a half feet tall, which leaves them on par with a ten-year-old by human standards, but is a record-breaking height for hobbits. In the ensuing battle, they end up being remembered as the greatest heroes in the Shire's history. |
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Elf: Buddy (Will Ferrell) was an orphan baby who crawled into Santa's bag of toys and accidentally got taken back to the North Pole, and taking pity on him, they decided to keep him and raise him as an elf. As an adult, he's the least productive worker in Santa's workshop - because elves are magic, they can work faster than it is physically possible for any human to ever be. Buddy is ashamed that he is only capable of making 85 Etch-a-Sketches by hand in a single day, when the normal quota for a (real) elf is one thousand a day. Nonetheless, all of the training Buddy got from the elves made him the best human toymaker on the planet: when he travels back to Manhattan, everyone is stunned by his near-superhuman skill level (able to decorate an entire department store into a winter wonderland in a matter of hours with nothing but scissors, tape, and construction paper). | |
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Jessica Jones (2015): Jessica and Luke Cage are good examples. Compared to normal people they're complete powerhouses, being able to lift cars and in Luke's case shrug off bullets. But since they share a universe with the likes of The Avengers, they're relatively low on the superhuman totem pole. For reference, their powers are basically the same as The Hulk, but they're leagues below the Jade Giant in terms of power. Considering the rest of the Avengers include Powered Armor users and a Physical God, it's safe to say their powers aren't a big draw. Even Super-Soldier Captain America and Badass Normal Black Widow and Hawkeye have fighting skills that make them much more effective than Unskilled, but Strong Jess and Luke (although Luke is shown to be a capable fighter in his own series but living in a World of Cardboard causes him to focus too much on not killing to combine his strength and skill effectively). Kilgrave also counts; his powers in this series are borderline Story-Breaker Power, but like his comic counterpart he's not exactly an Avengers level threat. Particularly since many Avengers can No-Sell his virus based powers (The Vision isn't human, Thor is immune to earthly viruses, The Incredible Hulk has a healing factor, Iron Man's suit can filter the virus out, Hawkeye is immune to mind control after the first movie, and Captain America can [at least in the comics] resist him through sheer willpower) and he's something of a one trick pony who doesn't have any additional fighting skills or powers to fall back on. |
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The Men in Black series. Our race is considered to be extraordinarily weak compared to some alien races, and extraordinarily strong compared to others. In Men in Black, an entire galaxy of intelligent beings is so small that on our world it is a pendant on a cat's collar. At the end of the movie, however, a pan-out sequence reveals that our own galaxy fits into a mere marble that is used for games by aliens with a similar difference in size. In Men in Black II, an entire species of aliens fits into a train station locker. They revere the main characters as gods; they see a light-up watch in the locker as a holy light, and they consider a business card that was put in there to be a religious text. As in the first film, this situation is turned around, as it is revealed at the end of the movie that an entrance to our world leads to another processing station... for aliens as big as skyscrapers. The second film also contains this exchange: |
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Undertale: As they are beings literally composed of magic, monsters are extremely vulnerable to Killing Intent from other monsters and especially humans. Because of this, even a small human child with enough EXP and LOVE (i.e. the willingness to inflict violence) can slaughter hordes of monsters. Because of this, most weapons in the game are either usually harmless items (Toy Knife) or household items that are dangerous yet would be relatively ineffective (Burnt Pan, Worn Dagger). At the end of the Genocide Run, you find the "Real Knife", which being an actual weapon, serves as the Infinity +1 Sword due to it amplifying the protagonist's homicidal intent. |
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In the early parts of Neverwinter Nights 2 you keep hearing about two legendary men from your home town who both outgrew the place and moved on to bigger things when your character was a child. You run into both later on, and while both achieved some measure of success it's more "middle management" level than the greatness everyone expected. | |
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New Gods: Mister Miracle is generally depicted as a Gadgeteer Genius and Technical Pacifist Guile Hero. He’s nowhere near as strong as more martially-oriented New Gods like his wife Barda, Kalibak or Orion, all of whom can take Superman and Wonder Woman in a straight fight. Nor does he (usually) have the flashy energy powers some New Gods have, physically he’s just an average New God. Which means he could rip the average human apart like damp cardboard if he wanted to. | |
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When Doctor Octopus (from Spider-Man 2) is carried over into the MCU, he suffers a downplayed intellectual version of this. While still highly brilliant by the standards of the MCU, Otto in his home series was arguably the most outright accomplished scientist in the world, developing AI, creating advanced robotics in the form of his tentacles, and being on the cusp of perfecting clean nuclear energy. However, he still came from a more mundane and grounded world and he in particular got pulled from two decades in the past. As such, the new world he finds himself in is rife with technology capable of matching and surpassing his own- his arms are easily overtaken by the Iron Spider Suit's nanites, and the Arc Reactor is essentially a safer, completed alternative to his own nuclear fusion machine. | |
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In Resident Evil, the Tyrant is the Spencer Mansion's darkest secret in its deepest depths and is so inhumanly strong and durable nothing the characters have can kill it, requiring Brad to drop off the 11th-Hour Superpower rocket launcher to defeat it. When these things, even their finished T-103 model forms, go up against a properly armed army unit they get slaughtered as evidenced by the numerous Tyrant corpses littering the Dead Factory in Resident Evil 3: Nemesis. Later entries in the series like 4, 5, Village, etc. reveal that even stronger monsters existed at the time of the original game, and even before it as revealed by Resident Evil 0; we just lucked out that those things weren't what was trying to kill us at the time. | |
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Venom: As Venom, Eddie Brock never fared that well when he branched out and fought other heroes (Darkhawk, Daredevil, Iron Man, Quasar, etc.) besides Spider-Man, who he was a nightmare for due to being more powerful, knowing his secret identity, and being immune to his Spider Sense. The Amazing Spider-Man (1963) #317 includes a scene where Eddie visits an oblivious Aunt May as a means of intimidating Pete into no longer asking for help from any of his superfriends like the Fantastic Four, making it clear that if Pete won't keep their feud just between the two of them, then he won't either. Averted during his stints as Toxin and Anti-Venom, where he can kick a lot of ass. Mac Gargan and Flash Thompson also never ran into this problem, presumably because they already were an experienced supervillain and soldier, respectively. In his second stint as Venom, he has so far not really run into this problem, presumably owing to the Symbiote being more powerful and Brock being more experienced. Lampshaded in Venom Annual #1, where a group of villains at the Bar with No Name tell each other Venom stories. Black Cat speaks of how she once got the jump on him and kicked him into an exploding car, the bartender speaks of how Venom once fought Wolverine, who mocked him for picking only on Spider-Man and got the better of him in that particular bout, and lastly a third patron speaks of how Venom once went toe-to-toe with Juggernaut - while claiming the entire time that Venom was out of his depth and got curb-stomped, although the actual flashback shows Venom fending him off. Mac Gargan — who once was Venom himself, mind you — starts outright mocking Venom and asking why anything he just heard should give him the scares. Then it turns out the third patron was Venom in disguise and he sends the bar's entire patronage running for their lives. Mac Gargan is not amongst the lucky ones, with the ending of the issue implying that Venom ate him, though later it would be revealed that he survived. |
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American Dad!: Steve is a nerd who's constantly bullied by every Jerk Jock at his school, alongside his friends, but within their group, he's generally shown as the leader and the one person who has anything resembling social skills and charisma. When a plan to cheer up Snot after Hayley firmly rejects him leads to him seemingly losing his virginity (actually faked by Roger under one of his personas, "Jenny Fromdablock"), he's elevated to the new leader of the group, and Steve quickly sabotages him. Roger accuses Steve of this trope, claiming that he did it just because he likes being the "king of the nerds". | |
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The Lost Fleet: In his own time, Commander John Geary is an average cruiser commander in a fairly peaceful 'verse. Then the convoy he's escorting ends up being ambushed by the Syndics. He ends up pulling a Delaying Action to allow the convoy to escape, and puts himself into cryosleep, after the cruiser has been pounded into scrap. A century later, he's discovered and awakened by The Alliance, who has been engaged in a nonstop war with the Syndics since that day. With the horrendous attrition rate among the fleet officers, all the knowledge of fleet tactics has been lost, and concepts like honor have degraded into an unrecognizable state. Modern ship commanders rush into battle individually, relying on their "fighting spirit" to win the day. Admirals have little authority and mostly play politics to get their way, while scheming to topple the Alliance government. Now, Geary (promoted to Captain after his "death") turns out to be the best tactician alive by virtue of no one else knowing how to properly fight with a fleet and also remembering what honorable behavior should be. | |
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Skyward: M-Bot was a more or less normal design for pre-war humanity, but compared to the centuries-old Defiant tech and the reverse-engineered Krell ships, he is almost godlike in his capabilities. | |
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I Am Alive brings this into play with the rare and difficult to obtain... bullet. Just your Weapon for Intimidation is enough to make you a major threat to any NPCs you encounter. | |
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Fire Emblem Fates has gameplay-only examples with Silas and Kaze. On the Conquest route, Silas, while a perfectly serviceable unit, will ultimately be overshadowed by other cavalry units (including the Purposely Overpowered Xander) or more specialized units. However, on the Birthright route, he is one of the few mounted characters available, and unlike Subaki, Hinoka, Reina, or Scarlet, he is not a flying unit, meaning he is not vulnerable to arrows. Additionally, if made into a Great Knight, he becomes one of the few tanky units and a rare axe-user. Meanwhile, on the Birthright route, Kaze, while fast, suffers from middling strength and being overshadowed by Saizo and Kagero, who, while slower than him, are still fast enough to double all but the fastest of enemies on the lower-power route, and are stronger than him. It doesn't help that Kaze can die if you did not obtain his A support with Corrin. However, on the Conquest route, he becomes essentially the only offense-oriented hidden weapon user, and his high speed allows him to safely double attack enemies such as Swordmasters, in addition to being able to use the debuffing abilities of hidden weapons alongside Poison Strike to weaken the stronger enemies on the route. |
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The TV side of the MCU contains multiple examples: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D.: The inhumans are also this. They're a major threat to the (mostly human) S.H.I.E.L.D. agents, but even the strongest — i.e. Hive and Lash — don't have near the power of, say, Thor or The Hulk. This becomes fairly obvious when Ghost Rider is introduced and curb stomps both Quake and Hellfire. Kasius in Season 5 has elements of this. To the remnants of humanity, he's their untouchable Evil Overlord. To the galaxy at large, he's The Un-Favourite Black Sheep of his family who's been shipped off to oversee operations on an Insignificant Little Blue Planet. Jessica Jones (2015): Jessica and Luke Cage are good examples. Compared to normal people they're complete powerhouses, being able to lift cars and in Luke's case shrug off bullets. But since they share a universe with the likes of The Avengers, they're relatively low on the superhuman totem pole. For reference, their powers are basically the same as The Hulk, but they're leagues below the Jade Giant in terms of power. Considering the rest of the Avengers include Powered Armor users and a Physical God, it's safe to say their powers aren't a big draw. Even Super-Soldier Captain America and Badass Normal Black Widow and Hawkeye have fighting skills that make them much more effective than Unskilled, but Strong Jess and Luke (although Luke is shown to be a capable fighter in his own series but living in a World of Cardboard causes him to focus too much on not killing to combine his strength and skill effectively). Kilgrave also counts; his powers in this series are borderline Story-Breaker Power, but like his comic counterpart he's not exactly an Avengers level threat. Particularly since many Avengers can No-Sell his virus based powers (The Vision isn't human, Thor is immune to earthly viruses, The Incredible Hulk has a healing factor, Iron Man's suit can filter the virus out, Hawkeye is immune to mind control after the first movie, and Captain America can [at least in the comics] resist him through sheer willpower) and he's something of a one trick pony who doesn't have any additional fighting skills or powers to fall back on. |
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The Stormlight Archive: After two books of terrorizing the nations of Roshar and being an unstoppable force of nature, Szeth is ultimately revealed to be this by the end of the second book. While he is a Master Swordsman, his true threat came from possessing a Shardblade and being the first Surgebinder seen in centuries. By the end of the first book, however, Surgebinders are coming back, meaning Szeth no longer holds a monopoly on that power. And while his Shardblade is dangerous, it's by no means unique. Furthermore, the second book reveals that, like most Shardblades, Szeth's Blade isn't a true Shardblade, and as such lacks the Morph Weapon qualities and instantaneous summoning of a true Blade. Finally, the end of the second book reveals that Szeth isn't a natural Surgebinder, his abilities instead coming from possessing an Honorblade. Due to this, his ability to take in Stormlight and channel it is much weaker than that of a true Surgebinder. Ultimately, despite being a credible threat throughout the first two books, Szeth holds a mere shadow of the power of a true Knight Radiant. This is best shown in the climax of book 2, where he fights a real Radiant, Kaladin, and is outmatched at every turn, unable to keep up and ultimately killed. This is rectified at the very end of book 2, where Szeth is revived by the Herald Nalan, who intends to turn him into a true Knight Radiant. | |
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In Bob and George, the title characters are originally from a Superhero-esque webcomic universe, however, once they enter to the Mega Man Universe, they are considered Sue Tier (Bob even lampshades this on one occasion). Also, since time and interuniversal travel are common topics here, we've only seen one "native" (from the Mega Man Universe) big bad invasion (two if you count the whole "X going rogue" incident) and on top of that, he was the local version of a previous big bad who attacked first. | |
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Someone with rudimentary explosives training can awe the citizens of Megaton in Fallout 3 by defusing a bomb. | |
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The thirteenth Skulduggery Pleasant begins with a Satanist cult, led by a man called "The Master", preparing to sacrifice a young girl to Satan. The Master has the ability to summon fire with a snap of his finger, and move objects without touching them, which greatly impresses his followers - until the girl they're sacrificing reveals that The Master is just an ordinary low-level sorceror, and there's a whole hidden civilization of people with similar powers. | |
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Dunsparce, introduced in Gen II was for many years known as one of the worst Pokémon of all time, with a mediocre pure-Normal typing, abysmal stats, and a barely passable move pool. However, in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Dunsparce got an evolution, Dudunsparce. Dunsparce was quickly banned from Little Cup, since while it was one of the worst fully evolved Pokémon of all time, it's actually terrifying when its only competition right now is a bunch of unevolved weaklings. | |
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Big Mouth: Jessi is portrayed as one of the top students at Bridgeton Middle School (the actual top spot goes to Missy), but when her family moves to New York City, she goes to a private school that turns out to be light-years ahead of Bridgeton, to the point that Jessi can't even answer any of the questions. This is one of several factors that ends up plunging her into depression. | |
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Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance: Ena's dragon Transformation astounds the troops around her and attempting to fight her in melee is a bad idea. Despite her great physical strength, among dragons she is actually completely ordinary, even stating that the berserk dragons in the penultimate chapter are far stronger than her. | |
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Vampire: The Masquerade: This trope usually applies with sixth and seventh generation vampires; by vampire standards they are only middle class and are not really special in the grand scheme of things, but since lower generation vampires tend to be incredibly rare even to the point of being considered legends, sixth and seventh generation vampires are usually the strongest and most influential vampires that most people can come across. | |
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Both the main protagonists and antagonists of Stargate SG-1 fit this trope in their own way: The Goa'uld, the main villains for most of the show, are largely Wasteland Warlords living in the ruins of more sophisticated civilizations: even in the present day, most of the alien factions we encounter are far more advanced than they are and entirely capable of cleaning their clocks in battle. However, these factions are either in other galaxies and unaware of the Goa'uld (the Replicators, the Wraith, the Ori), isolationists with no interest in anything beyond their own planet (the Tollan, the Nox), or otherwise occupied (the Asgard, who do sometimes hold the Goa'uld in check but, unknown to them, are too busy fighting a war in their own galaxy to fight another one in the Milky Way). As a result, the vast majority of the Milky Way is wide open for the Goa'uld, who rule it for 10,000 years largely by default because no one else has chosen to challenge them for it. The Earth, having been completely cut off from the broader galaxy until the Stargate was put back into service in the 1990s, is similarly viewed as a primitive backwater by people whose societies have been starfaring for centuries. However, it's also a modern society with an industrialized economy, a massive population, and a very sophisticated scientific and engineering community, which means that it's quickly able to get up to speed once exposed to the broader galaxy, and ends up being more than a match for the feudal and stagnant Goa'uld societies. |
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The Woman King: One of the pillars of Oyo dominance in West Africa is their cavalry. In Eurasia, cavalry has been a vital part of warfare for centuries, but in sub-Saharan Africa most people simply do not have the breeding base nor horsemanship expertise to field them. The Oyo trade slaves for European muskets and horses, and their cavalry wouldn't be particularly impressive compared to the cavalry in Europe at the time, but the fact they have cavalry gives them a large martial advantage over all their neighbours. | |
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Dick and Marge from Mom and Dad Save the World are completely unremarkable suburbanites. However, on a planet full of idiots, their common sense becomes a game-breaking weapon. | |
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Storm Hawks member Junko is a Wallop, a species known for being big and strong. However, Junko himself is actually weaker than your average Wallop, being a nerd to his peers. All told, he's still stronger than most humans, being able to take down Snipe when sufficiently incensed. | |
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The Legend of Zelda: The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: Two of the bosses, Big Green Chuchu and Big Octorok, are apparent Giant Mooks. However, despite their names, they're actually not any stronger than normal — it's Link that's shrunk down, and at that size these perfectly normal Goombas are boss-level threats. The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild: The people you invite to the newly established Tarrey Town mostly weren't very notable in their original homes but are indispensable in their small yet booming new town. This is most explicit with Greyson, who states that he wanted to leave his old job at the Goron Mines for Tarrey Town because he felt more appreciated for his mining skills in the latter than the former. |
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Doom: Doom: The Barons of Hell. In later episodes, rockets, the Plasma Gun and the BFG can trivialize them. However, in the final level of the first episode (Phobos Anomaly), you will have no plasma cells and five rockets at best, so two Barons become fearsome bosses. Doom II: The Wolfenstein SS are this. They were fearsome in Wolfenstein 3D, where you had just bullets, but when you get shotgun shells and rocket launchers they become pushovers. |
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Frank Fontaine in BioShock was just some lowly racketeer/conman back in the United States, but emerges as the terrifying Diabolical Mastermind of Rapture, in no small part to the lack of competition and exploiting the citizens' gullibility/desperation, allowing him to scam his way into becoming one of the most powerful figures in the underwater city. At the end of the day, he is nothing more than an opportunistic crook that lucked out due to being in a city of suckers with no other options. | |
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Steven Universe: On Earth, The Crystal Gems are nigh-immortal alien warriors with advanced technology and magical artifacts, all of which is completely standard for their society... at least, it was standard thousands of years ago. All their technology is now wildly obsolete by the standards of modern Gems. The Crystal Gems are also on the weak side of average when it comes to physical power (as the only remaining members consist of a glorified servant, a defective, runt-sized warrior, and a fusion whose component parts are an average Mook and Seer), compared to proper warriors from the Homeworld. Garnet in particular, despite being more powerful and well-adjusted than the others, is only this precisely because she's a fusion. Compared to other two-gem fusions, such as Opal or especially Malachite, Garnet comes out as rather unimpressive and is probably one of the weakest fusions in the show. As for being more emotionally well-adjusted, that's also purely because she's the fusion of a romantic relationship; her component parts spend most of the series so co-dependent that it takes until the sequel series for them to spend more than five minutes apart without becoming emotional wrecks. The source of Rose Quartz's extensive list of powers is eventually revealed to be because she's actually Pink Diamond, the weakest member of the most powerful class of Gems. White Diamond specifically calls her (or rather, Steven) out on this as part of her Hannibal Lecture, deconstructing Rose/Steven's usual Be Yourself moral: |
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Ms. Marvel: Spider-Man villain Shocker attempts to invoke this in Ms. Marvel (2014) when he moves to New Jersey, reasoning that while he is not high on the totem pole in New York, which is filled with superheroes and villains, in Jersey there is so little of either he will easily become king of the hill. However, when he fights Ms. Marvel, he fares little better than a normal Villain of the Week, and Kamala struggles more with her powers going on the fritz at the time. | |
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Sovereign in Mass Effect, as revealed in the third game, was basically a single unremarkable military android to the civilization that created him. To the civilizations of Citadel Space, on the other hand, he's a mysterious and nigh-unstoppable space-faring techno-organic Eldritch Abomination who can subjugate planets casually, bulldoze entire fleets of high-tech warships (sometimes literally), and is Nigh-Invulnerable on top of causing insanity with his mere presence. Oh, and by the standards of Citadel Space's science, he's also a physics-defying Perpetual Motion Machine. This is further proven in the third game; when an entire armada of "Sovereigns" (tens of thousands of them) descend on the galaxy, all of galactic civilization falls in less than three months, necessitating a Deus ex Machina super weapon for the protagonists to have a chance. | |
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In Spider-Man: Far From Home, Mysterio is ultimately a con man looking to capitalize on a world without the Avengers or Tony Stark, and the main reason he's a threat at all is because he's going up against a naive teenager and the big time superheroes are either dead or too preoccupied. | |
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In the Bayonetta series, Affinities are the lowest rank of angelic soldiers, and the titular protagonist tears them apart by the dozens. However, when they show up in Bayonetta Origins: Cereza and the Lost Demon, King Puca uses them as Elite Mooks, and they're on par with some of the higher ranking fairies. | |
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In Mega Man (Ruby-Spears), there was an episode where Mega Man X chases Vile and Spark Mandrill back in time. Though being relatively equal in strength to each other, just as Mega Man is to his own adversaries, all three are from the future and thus vastly more powerful than anyone in the present; Mega Man's shots simply bounce off their armor, and X makes giant explosions with each shot. | |
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Warhammer Fantasy Battle: Monstrous Arcanum: Warpfire dragons are terrifying, monstrous behemoths that are deeply feared and carefully avoided by most other beings. Some scholars, however, theorize that they ones known are actually the juveniles and runts of their species, primarily because few to no specimens have been encountered that seem to match the full-grown, "emperor" stages of the dragon life cycle. Warpfire dragons are thus believed to be native to the Southern Chaos Wastes, a nightmare land ruled by daemons, twisted monsters, and presumably the actually fully-grown warpfire dragons, which forces the weaker members of the species to migrate north to lands home to weaker beings. | |
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Cloud is leagues stronger then the regular mooks and easily impresses the local members of Avalanche with his strength and talk of being a First-Class SOLDIER. Yet further in the game, it is not hard to notice that he isn't terribly impressive when put up against even the Third Class SOLDIER mooks. In story, he needs help just to fight one of the Turks and is caught with ease by a couple of them. It turns out that he didn't make SOLDIER at all and his strength largely comes from being one of Hojo's science experiments with Sephiroth's cells to replicate his Reunion theory. Later in the game, he averts this and is considered one of the strongest people on the planet and the only hope to defeat Sephiroth. Final Fantasy VII Remake averts this. As part of the Adaptational Badass upgrades to the story, the party defeats more impressive enemies and bosses than those which appeared in the same parts in the original game. In the same vein, the boss of chapter 4 in Remake is Roche, a 3rd class SOLDIER implied to be stationed well bellow his actual abilities; and Reno, who is fought earlier and in the boss battle corresponding to the one in the original game has Rude for backup, still nearly gets beaten. | |
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"The Slavers" arc from The Punisher MAX is a good example — having just dumped his latest victims' automatic weapons into a lake, he's nearly defenseless when a bunch of Bosnian Serb (war) criminals show up. Where gang bangers and mobsters start shooting at random with their handguns Gangsta Style, these guys just slip back into the habits that kept them alive and victorious in the Balkans, forcing Frank to flee. | |
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However, it turns out the Ricks are kinda wrong, as shown in the comics. J19Z7 Rick does not come from a "doofus" universe, but some sort of opposite universe, hence why "Doofus Rick" is the only nice and non self-loathing Rick. Compare this with J19Z7 Jerry. This being the mirror verse, this Jerry is a ruthless, ambitious, intelligent and powerful man who is the richest of the world, practically controlling it, and upon discovering the multiverse, proceeds to beat Ricky and Morty multiple times and takes over the Council of Ricks with the intent of multiversal conquest. As a Rick puts it, in that verse, Rick was the prey and the predator is Jerry. | |
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Star Wars Jedi: Fallen Order: Cal Kestis can be a formidable warrior on his own, but as a Jedi he has a lot to learn. This is demonstrated by the fact that Inquisitors are considered very serious threats, a fallen Jedi Master would have killed him were it not for outside help and a Sith Lord is considered unstoppable. Star Wars Jedi: Survivor shows that Cal is starting to subvert this and be a master in his own right. The previous Climax Boss, the Ninth Sister, is the Starter Villain of the prologue and the Climax Boss of this game Rayvis was a notorious Jedi killer. Dagan proves too much for Cal alone, but he was one of the best during the High Republic, showing that while Cal might not be at the level of Obi-Wan, Darth Vader and Yoda, he would still be a great Jedi. | |
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The world of My Little Pony: Equestria Girls has no magic, leaving them defenseless against the likes of Sunset Shimmer or the Dazzlings, who are somewhere above average compared to the usual threats the heroes have to face in Equestria (at least until they go One-Winged Angel). When the alternate versions of the Mane Six gain Equestrian magic, they become strong enough to match them, and it makes them immune to the sirens' Hate Plague. Midnight Sparkle, on the other hand, is a subversion; her powers are a sufficient threat to endanger both worlds and are on par with the likes of Discord and Tirek in destructive potential. | |
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We Happy Few takes place in a town where almost everyone constantly takes a drug called "Joy", which makes you a hallucinating 'happy drunk' in normal effect, or drives you to paranoid schizophrenia if your body reacts badly. Anyone who voluntarily stops taking their Joy (called "Downers") therefore becomes a One-Man Army manipulative Stealth Expert by comparison, simply with their natural capacities of lying, rational thought and motor skills. One character even jokingly asks if Arthur is a Downer after witnessing him fix a machine that had baffled an entire Joy-fueled engineering team. It's not that they're particularly clever or tough, but when faced with forgetful and delusional citizens or rambling and flighty madmen, pretty much anyone could fight and sneak their way through the dystopian town. Even minor character Prudence Holmes, whose corpse is found literally minutes away from the end of Arthur's campaign, having expired in the Motilene Mines. | |
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Three Panel Soul points out this trope (and its use in the Super Hero genre) in the comic "On Remote Tasting," going one step farther and suggesting that humanity sense of smell could be considered a superpower in a society of aliens that lacked it. | |
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The Galaxy Trio: In "Cavemen of Primevia", a gang of criminals from Vapor Man's home planet conquer a planet and boast that their powers make them seem godlike to the natives. Vapor Man scornfully notes that they are about average in power for a member of his race and defeats them with ease. | |
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"Galactus vs. Unicron": This trope is one of the decisive factors in Galactus' victory. In the Marvel multiverse, Galactus has serious competition and has fought several Reality Warpers capable of as much destruction as he is. Unicron, on the other hand, is the biggest threat in his home multiverse and has very little in the way of competition. Furthermore, Galactus has technically never been defeated; his "losses" are mostly the heroes tricking him or pushing him back to where he willingly leaves them alone. Unicron, on the other hand, has been defeated on numerous occasions due to both trickery and the Transformers using The Power of Friendship, which Wiz states is Unicron's anathema. Adding to this is the fact the Transformers multiverse itself simply can't compare to the sheer scale of the Marvel multiverse, which contains an infinite number of infinite multiverses. | |
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Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine has Chaos Space Marines (Devastator, Tactical, what have you) serving as high-level mooks with lots of health and heavy weapons. While not weak at all in the Fluff, they're a standard Troops choice for a number of factions in the tabletop wargame to the point Marine Equivalent is a unit of measure for how effective a unit is (in terms of how many Marine Equivalents it can shred before going down). Of course, your own character is also a marine... | |
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"Omni-Man vs. Homelander" manages to show exactly how outclassed Homelander really is against Omni-Man as a result of this trope. Homelander is from a setting that is somewhat like the real world; aside from the occasional Supe, Homelander only had to fight against powerless humans armed with just guns and explosives, and as such he didn't have any real reason to train or better himself. Omni-Man however, comes from a more classical superhero setting that has slightly-higher tech available and is filled with plenty of Mad Scientists, Alien Invaders, Kaiju, and Ancient Horrors in it for the superheroes of his setting to fight against; along with the fact that Omni-Man himself is a Viltrumite: A member of a galaxy-spanning empire that is well over a thousand years old, and saw plenty of fights that had really tested his mettle: enough that Omni-Man saw no other choice but to hone his skills to stay on top and survive. | |
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In Percy Jackson and the Olympians, demigods in general are stronger or more skilled than regular humans, such as children of Athena being incredibly smart or children of Apollo being great healers and/or archers. However with few exceptions, most children of a particular god are no stronger or weaker than their siblings and almost all of them are weak when compared to children of Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, who can hold their own against even some Olympian gods. In the Sequel Series, The Heroes of Olympus, Percy is easily defeated by (fellow Poseidon son) Chrysaor during a sword battle despite Percy up until that point being considered one of the best swordsmen in the past hundred years. |
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Gym Leaders' signature Pokémon, especially for early game bosses, tend to be major roadblocks that you have never seen before. Later, you will find the same specimens at much higher levels. For a classic example, Brock's Onix is the toughest mon you will have faced up to that point. After you get to the Rock Tunnel, though, Onix are common, and they're all higher level than Brock's. Later games and other media suggest that Willfully Weak is likely in play. HeartGold and SoulSilver, for example, allow players to rematch all of the Johto and Kanto Gym Leaders, who use stronger teams with levels comparable to the Elite Four. Likewise, Pokémon Sword and Shield has the Gym Leaders ranked in order of performance with the better Leaders showing up later in the Gym Challenge with higher-level Pokemon, but for the final competition and the Galarian Star Tournament, their levels are all elevated into at least the 50's. Pokémon Origins, while not canon to the games, shows Brock selecting his usual Red/Blue team when he learns Red has no Badges, implying the Gym Leaders are playing down to their competition for the sake of fairness. Likewise, when Red challenges Giovanni but acknowledges him only as the leader of Team Rocket and not the Viridian City Gym Leader, Giovanni decides to use only his strongest two Pokémon and proceeds to steamroll most of Red's team in the process. |
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Superman: The Man of Steel himself looks at first sight like a prime example. He's a completely normal Kryptonian, but the completely normal ability of Kryptonians to absorb solar energy makes him on Earth, well, Superman. Then averted in the (many) instances when he loses his powers or fights against other Kryptonians or overwhelmingly god-like beings, showing him to be a resourceful, intelligent and absolutely relentless highly trained warrior and leader ready to face the apocalypse and save the world no matter what. By Kryptonian standards, Clark is a more emotive Batman. Back in the Golden Age the ultimate source of his powers was that he had the body of a man meant to live on a high-gravity world like Krypton while actually living on the relatively low-gravity world of Earth. The same principle was used in Stan Lee's version of Superman. Supergirl comes across as a Physical God as well as a super-genius to Earth people, but back in Argo City, she was a normal, ordinary Kryptonian girl. The only thing remarkable about her were her parents (or, depending on the version, only her father). One story in the Silver Age had Jimmy Olsen go to another world, where the low gravity meant he had the equivalent of Superman-level abilities. Mr. Mxyzptlk, the imp who occasionally pops over from the Fifth Dimension to bug Superman, was said in his first appearance to be a nobody in his home dimension, where his powers are nothing out of the ordinary. In the Superman/Batman story "Torment", The Scarecrow betrays Desaad and sprays him with fear toxin, but it has no effect. Desaad angrily points out that just because he's a wimp compared to most superheroes and supervillains doesn't change the fact that he's a god. He proceeds to beat the crap out of Scarecrow and strap him to a table for torment. Superboy-Prime is an interesting example. Pre-Crisis on Infinite Earths, he was just one among the many versions of Superman across the multiverse (all of them with Silver Age-level power - through, Prime had no weakness to Kryptonite and magic). But, when he emerged into the DC Post-Crisis universe in Infinite Crisis, he effectively became the strongest Superman of them all, since he retained his pre-Crisis power level - whereas the newer versions of Superman could withstand supernovas, Superboy Prime could withstand Big Bangs. In a single story back in the Golden Age, Superman encountered an earthman named Regor who was accidentally blasted into space when he was a baby and landed on the planet Uuz, which had a significantly lower gravity than Earth. On Uuz, Regor had Flying Brick powers similar to Superman. He could also see through walls because buildings on Uuz were all made of glass, which Uuzians can't see through. |
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Xenoblade Chronicles X has the Ganglion. They were one of the two factions that destroyed Earth and continue to aggressively hound human refugees on Mira. Fighting them off is a struggle and they're easily winning a war of attrition for most of the game. It's later revealed that the Ganglion are actually a criminal syndicate — and not even a major one, they're the space equivalent of thugs the real players use as hired muscle. That's just what happens when a Higher-Tech Species decide to pick on a race still figuring out spaceflight. | |
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Monster Hunter: World: the two crossover monsters, the Behemoth from Final Fantasy and the Leshen from The Witcher, both qualify. In their home universes, they're considered powerful, but not overly so; upper-mid-tier foes, perhaps. In Monster Hunter, they're treated as top-level threats that require multiple elite hunters to deal with, largely because the hunters have no magical abilities and have no experience fighting beings that can command magic. The Behemoth is a downplayed case; although the use of magic is foreign to what the hunters are familiar with, what it does with the magic isn't exceptionally new. Existing monsters have generated tornadoes, lightning, and eruptions, so the authorities are comfortable giving it the "Elder Dragon" classification and setting their hunters after it. The Leshen is a far straighter example; it's stated that the Monster Hunter world has a far greater amount of Life Energy, meaning the Leshen, as a nature spirit, is much more powerful there than it is in its home universe. Whatever brought the Leshen over also brought over Geralt of Riva, and the authorities decide to leave it to him. The Rathalos also provides a matching Inverted Trope for its partner appearance in Final Fantasy XIV. While it's definitely dangerous and the complete lack of magical presence makes it hard to predict by local standards (communicated by the bossfight lacking attack tells), for a party of experience adventurers the threat it presents is downright mundane. |
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Red vs. Blue: Agent Washington is a complete badass compared to the regular Blood Gulch crew. However, among the Freelancers, he was only the sixth best, and the leadership board therefore considered him the "weakest" member of their group. This is primarily because each of the top five had exceptional specialist abilities they were known for, while Washington didn't. Instead, he was a solid all-rounder and generalist, able to play back-up to anyone, but unlikely to ever lead. In fact, his first taste of leadership comes when he joins the Blues as their leader, and has to learn as he goes how to do it. Freelancers and similar elite fighters may be a One-Man Army against regular soldiers, especially the regular soldiers seen throughout the series who are heavily implied to be mostly rear echelon troops, but Word of God states that they would be utterly curb-stomped by an actual SPARTAN. |
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In Animorphs, though the heroes are technically super-powered with alien technology, in morph they're only as powerful as whatever they're transformed into. When the heroes go to Leera and morph into hammerhead sharks (the Yeerks had previously planned to infest hammerheads and use them as shock troops on Leera), they turn out to be this. The Leeran Controllers shoot them with "deadly" spears... that are mere pinpricks to dolphins and sharks. Turns out Leera never evolved the concept of predation, so their life forms are much more fragile than Earth's. When Elfangor decided to live the rest of his life as a human, he found it hard to pretend not to know the subject matter of his college lectures better than the professors. He had to pretend to struggle with concepts he'd learned and memorized since childhood (standard Andalite education). Both he and his younger brother have this problem, and they are implied to be bright, but not overly so by Andalite standards. |
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BattleTech: The Taurian Concordat, and to a lesser extent the Magistracy of Canopus. They're major powers compared to the other Periphery systems, but neither can hold a candle to the five Great Houses of the Inner Sphere. The Taurians in particular spend a goodly chunk of the setting's extensive history in a state of Space Cold War with the Federated Suns that only lasts as long as it does because while conquering the Concordat is eminently possible for the Feddies, they'd have to invest too much resources, making them vulnerable to their Great House enemies, while being all but guaranteed to get nothing useful out of it in return. This is masterfully illustrated in the 2018 computer game in which the Taurians getting involved in the main campaign's Succession Crisis in the Periphery realm of Auriga is treated as a massive Oh, Crap! moment despite their marginal status in the main tabletop game. Wolf's Dragoons. Intended as a vanguard intelligence gathering unit by the Clans, the Dragoons were a fake mercenary company made out of washed-out warrior caste failures, freebirths and volunteers who were given 200-years-out-of-date military training and machinery that would serve as a plausible cover story as some backwater yokels who accidentally stumbled upon an SLDF weapons cache. To the war-torn Inner Sphere, which had long since devolved into After the End neo-feudalism and backstabbing, the Dragoons were five regiments' worth of highly professional and drilled mercenaries with their own logistics corps, using pristine battlemechs models that had in many cases been extinct for over a century. Taken out of a Clan context the Dragoons were the equals of the Praetorian Guard of any of the Successor States and instantly found themselves under intense scrutiny by anyone with two brain cells to rub together. Clan Goliath Scorpion. In the beginning they start out as one of the weaker Clans that can barely hold their own against another in an all out war. When they leave Clan Space they went out and easily conquered the Periphery nation of Nueva Castile with relative ease, as their technology is quite primitive even by Periphery standards. After several decades they then set their sights on the Hanseatic League which rivals the Clan Homeworlds in size of territory, but possess technology only comparable to the Inner Sphere Pre-Clan Invasion. Within two years the Scorpions were successful in conquering the League establishing themselves as one of the most powerful groups in the Deep Periphery. This is the logic behind the "Banshee kings" and "Charger kings" in the Periphery. The stock Banshee and Charger Battlemechs are considered Joke Characters, assault 'Mechs with far too much weight in their engines and pathetic armament (especially the Charger, whose weak, short-ranged firepower makes it nearly useless in a firefight). However, in the Periphery, there are very few things that can stand up to 'Mechs at all, and the Banshee and Charger are still assault 'Mechs with all the weight, durability, and raw physical power that implies. When all you can muster are tanks, jeeps, helicopters, and the occasional light or medium 'Mech, the threat of a Banshee or Charger picking up one of your friends and beating you to death with them is very real. |
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Several of The Forsaken from The Wheel of Time series have shades of this. In their native Age of Legends they were fairly common channelers in terms of power and talents, but in the Third Age, after millenias of decline, they are easily more powerful and knowledgeable than anyone. Subverted in the end, as main characters realize that old techniques can be rediscovered and Forsaken is actually nowhere near evil demigod they were believed to be. | |
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MS Saga: A New Dawn: The Dark Alliance in the early game wrecks the world through use of their mobile suit army. However, looking at what they are fielding shows that they are not able to use particularly powerful suits and are only as dangerous as they are because nobody has armies or suits. An entire invading army is taken out by the original Gundam while the true Big Bad, the Neo-Zarth, fields multiple Gundams that all eclipse that one in strength several times over. | |
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Little Cup, a format where all Pokémon are level 5 and only unevolved Pokémon are legalnote originally from the Pokémon Stadium games, but currently held only in fan-made competitive settings due to the absence of Stadium games beyond Generation IV frequently has problems with this when new evolutions mean that once otherwise unremarkable mons can sweep the tier. In fact many Pokémon are quick-banned, like Scyther or Duraludon, because they already were as strong as fully evolved Pokémon. Dunsparce, introduced in Gen II was for many years known as one of the worst Pokémon of all time, with a mediocre pure-Normal typing, abysmal stats, and a barely passable move pool. However, in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Dunsparce got an evolution, Dudunsparce. Dunsparce was quickly banned from Little Cup, since while it was one of the worst fully evolved Pokémon of all time, it's actually terrifying when its only competition right now is a bunch of unevolved weaklings. Girafarig, also introduced in the same Gen II, quickly became a terror in the tier. Before Farigiraf was introduced, its only real notable advantage was its Normal typing allowed for Ghost type immunity. In Little Cup, its varied move pool, strong all around stats for an unevolved Pokémon, and Normal typing leaving less counters let it score many wins. Many agree the only reason it wasn't banned so fast was because Dunsparce was taking the flack first. |
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At the end of the second season of The Dragon Prince, a red dragon attacks a city in human territory. Several soldiers armed with balists can hardly cause her any harm. Even Claudia's dark magic only weakened her. The third season shows that this dragon is a joke against Sol Regem and Azimondias. She was almost unstoppable in the human kingdoms, but in Xadia she is way below the other dragons. | |
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The Meg is really a simple Megalodon from another age that the oceans of today are not equipped to handle. Unfortunately, that makes it a massive megafauna that modern anti-shark measures have no chance against. Shown when a massive undertaking to take it down uses a massive shark cage, neuro toxins and a mid-sized yacht barely takes one down and it is shown to be a smaller one compared to the big one that initially attacked. | |
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Malcolm in the Middle: Reese was the most dominant bully in his and Malcolm's middle school during the first couple season. With an Evil Power Vacuum even forming between every wannabe-tough guy in school, when he briefly tried to give it up. But when he (and later Malcolm) gets to highschool, it's made clear what a nobody Reese is in the grand scheme of things when he's not the toughest kid in the yard, as he lacks the social skills to make regular friends and doesn't have Malcolm or Dewey's smarts to fall back on when he can no longer just push everyone around. | |
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In A Song of Ice and Fire: The backstory explains that the Targaryens, the legendary house of dragonriders from Old Valyria with magic in their veins, were a mere minor noble house in Valyria (they were one of the forty dragonlords, but far from the most powerful). They just happened to be the only ones lucky enough to escape the Doom of Valyria. Fortunately for Aegon and his siblings, the people of Westeros were totally unprepared to face the family dragons. This also applies to their ancestral seat of Dragonstone. Before the Doom, it was a backwater colony in a distant land, basically a Place Worse Than Death. Afterwards, however, it became an important fortress and refuge, and was used as a launching point for Aegon's Conquest. Daenerys Targaryen's capture of the Slaver Cities invokes this as well. While the Old Ghiscari Empire eventually yielded to Valyria's might, it took five wars to bring them to their knees, even with the help of many dragons, since they were commonplace at the time. In the present, however, dragons have not been seen for over a century. People became complacent, and they have no preparations whatsoever when an aspiring conqueror with three small dragons come roaring out of the gate to attack them. In less than a year, all three Slaver Cities yield to Daenerys. |
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Pokémon: In Pokémon Sun and Moon, the extra-dimensional Ultra Beasts are considered a serious threat to both people and normal Pokémon (Celesteela, for example, is capable of burning down entire forests), but in their home dimension, each type is quite common and they're one of the few Olympus Mons to explicitly avert Single Specimen Species. Some, such as Poipole, are even explicitly said to be starter Pokémon for beginning Trainers. Throughout the series, many single stage Pokémon have gained evolved forms in later titles. Most of these had fairly unremarkable stats and abilities standalone, but as pre-evolved forms came off as rather powerful Crutch Characters. Sneasel and Murkrow for example were fairly weak single stage Pokémon, but after Gen IV introduced Weavile and Honchkrow respectively, they became pre-evolutions with incredible speed and attack stats. Although the fact they can now use eviolite as well doesn't hurt. Gym Leaders' signature Pokémon, especially for early game bosses, tend to be major roadblocks that you have never seen before. Later, you will find the same specimens at much higher levels. For a classic example, Brock's Onix is the toughest mon you will have faced up to that point. After you get to the Rock Tunnel, though, Onix are common, and they're all higher level than Brock's. Later games and other media suggest that Willfully Weak is likely in play. HeartGold and SoulSilver, for example, allow players to rematch all of the Johto and Kanto Gym Leaders, who use stronger teams with levels comparable to the Elite Four. Likewise, Pokémon Sword and Shield has the Gym Leaders ranked in order of performance with the better Leaders showing up later in the Gym Challenge with higher-level Pokemon, but for the final competition and the Galarian Star Tournament, their levels are all elevated into at least the 50's. Pokémon Origins, while not canon to the games, shows Brock selecting his usual Red/Blue team when he learns Red has no Badges, implying the Gym Leaders are playing down to their competition for the sake of fairness. Likewise, when Red challenges Giovanni but acknowledges him only as the leader of Team Rocket and not the Viridian City Gym Leader, Giovanni decides to use only his strongest two Pokémon and proceeds to steamroll most of Red's team in the process. Pokémon Legends: Arceus has you playing as a child from the modern Pokémon world who is transported to the past and finds themselves in a time and place where partnerships between humans and Pokémon are still uncommon and the average person still fears Pokémon greatly (not without reason, as the Pokémon do seem to be more aggressive in this time, possibly due to unfamiliarity with humans). It quickly becomes clear that in this scenario, a person who can not only approach Pokémon without fear but can also defeat or capture them with a reasonable success rate is an invaluable asset. Little Cup, a format where all Pokémon are level 5 and only unevolved Pokémon are legalnote originally from the Pokémon Stadium games, but currently held only in fan-made competitive settings due to the absence of Stadium games beyond Generation IV frequently has problems with this when new evolutions mean that once otherwise unremarkable mons can sweep the tier. In fact many Pokémon are quick-banned, like Scyther or Duraludon, because they already were as strong as fully evolved Pokémon. Dunsparce, introduced in Gen II was for many years known as one of the worst Pokémon of all time, with a mediocre pure-Normal typing, abysmal stats, and a barely passable move pool. However, in Pokémon Scarlet and Violet Dunsparce got an evolution, Dudunsparce. Dunsparce was quickly banned from Little Cup, since while it was one of the worst fully evolved Pokémon of all time, it's actually terrifying when its only competition right now is a bunch of unevolved weaklings. Girafarig, also introduced in the same Gen II, quickly became a terror in the tier. Before Farigiraf was introduced, its only real notable advantage was its Normal typing allowed for Ghost type immunity. In Little Cup, its varied move pool, strong all around stats for an unevolved Pokémon, and Normal typing leaving less counters let it score many wins. Many agree the only reason it wasn't banned so fast was because Dunsparce was taking the flack first. |
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John Carter has this as a plot point: as Earth's gravity is stronger than that of Mars', John can make incredible leaps and bounds, giving him an advantage over his enemies. He's also physically stronger and tougher, due to his body and bone structure being adapted to, from a Martian standpoint, a heavy-gravity world. | |
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Martian Manhunter: J'onn J'onzz is a completely normal Martian... which means he's a shapeshifting psychic who's as strong as Superman. | |
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Futurama: The episode "The Duh Vinci Code" reveals that Leonardo Da Vinci was actually an alien. Amongst his own race he was considered to be a dunce, but amongst humans he was one of the most intelligent people ever to live. The episode "Why Must I Be A Crustacean In Love?" focuses on Philip J. Fry trying to mentor Zoidberg to woo his old flame Edna. Fry is a very long way from The Casanova, and nobody bar Zoidberg is expecting this to work. As it turns out, though, the Decapodians are a race with no real concept of romance (their mating ritual is based on who can do a silly-looking display the best), and so Fry's advice like "tell her she looks thin" and "pretend to listen when she talks about her day" is enough to make Edna go mad with love. "The Day the Earth Stood Stupid" has something similar with Fry, where he's revealed to be the only one immune to the Brainspawn's intellect-draining (it's a unique genetic abnormality caused by the fact that Fry became his own grandfather during a time travel adventure in the 1940's). Fry is quite dim, but compared to the drooling simpletons of the rest of humanity, he's the only one who can save the world. |
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In the Love and Capes webcomic, Amazonia is this. She's one of 12 sisters in a dimension where everybody has powers like hers, and she likes the fact that on Earth, she's something special. | |
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Touhou Project: Sanae Kochiya is descended from a goddess, and her power to create miracles led her to be recognized as a Deity of Human Origin in her own right in the outside world. Then she moved with her goddesses to Gensokyo, where deities are a dime a dozen, just about Everyone Is a Super, and most of the locals are much more powerful than her. Cirno boasts of being the strongest fairy, but unfortunately fairies are essentially Cannon Fodder in Gensokyo. That said, Cirno also has a habit of winning fights she has no right to, or using her ice powers in unexpected ways, to the point that one character has warned that Cirno is getting too powerful and becoming something other than a fairy. The Earth soldiers sent to the moon in the Apollo 11 incident were able to inflict severe losses on the technologically advanced Lunarians' army by virtue of having actual combat experience as well as the passive condition that any prolonged contact with them risked dispelling the latter's immortality. The latter point is later used again by the fairies in Legacy of Lunatic Kingdom, propelling them from being Red Shirts from the heroines' perspective to effectively stalling the entire lunar military. |
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Tech Jacket: Zack's strength level with his Geldarian armor is far above average due to humans being stronger than Geldarians at base. | |
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God of War: Kratos is infamous for killing gods and titans from the Greek pantheon on regular basis. When he is thrown into Norse mythology in the 2018 PS4 game, his primary rival is Baldur who pushes the Spartan warrior to his limit and puts up a fight almost as savage as Zeus, the Final Boss from the previous game. Keep in mind that he is a relatively lesser god known for being a tracker rather than being a warrior. Imagine how much more powerful the likes of Odin and Thor are like... It should be noted, however, that Baldur is Blessed with Suck in such a way that he has been rendered impervious to all forms of harm until the final boss fight where he has been rendered vulnerable by mistletoe, regardless of whether Kratos still has the god-killing power of previous games. Kratos fights and snaps his neck several times in the story to no avail. Magni and Modi on the other hand put up far less of a fight, though. It's also implied that it's more that Kratos is out of practice from centuries of quiet living and the events of the games help get him back into the swing of things. |
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In his episode of Courage the Cowardly Dog, Robot Randy is an outcast among his peers due to his relative weakness, lack of interest in conquering worlds and fixation on carving wooden reindeer. That said, when he arrives in Nowhere with intent to conquer, he is still a sapient Humongous Mecha with laser weaponry. | |
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Michael "Eddie the Eagle" Edwards became the British Olympic competitor for ski jumping in 1988 despite having no competitive training and only starting ski jumping two years prior. How? At the time, countries were guaranteed spots in each Olympic event, and he realized there were no competitive British ski jumpers. So he was the only fish in the British competitive ski jumping pond, making him possibly the ultimate example of this trope. He of course placed last in the actual Olympic competition, but managed to get some celebrity out of the whole thing. The IOC (Olympic organising body) then instituted a series of rule changes regarding Olympic qualifications. Nowadays countries are not guaranteed spots in the Olympic events, but must earn them through athletic success in other international competitions. Additionally, all athletes must be "adequately prepared for high level international competition" as evaluated by the IOC, which reserves the right to reject any entrant at will. So it is unlikely we will ever see another of Eddie's ilk. |
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In South Park: The Stick of Truth, since the game is a LARP, all weapons are repurposed household objects. The Sweet Katana is the only real weapon in the game and thus it serves as the game's Infinity +1 Sword. | |
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Kid Radd: Radd is a Four Hit Point Wonder from an 8-bit game, but when he visits a fighter-game universe, it's noted that he gets Mercy Invincibility when injured. And since the fighter-game characters rely on combo moves... Radd's exactly four hit points actually make him incredibly resilient. He can withstand four attacks before dying, but he registers all forms of physical harm, from a punch to the face to a world-destroying explosion, as equal. In his home game, this made him a Glass Cannon, but in other games he can absorb an opponent's most powerful attacks without significant injury. His girlfriend is an NPC (at least initially) meaning that she doesn't have a health bar to be taken away from, so she is effectively invulnerable to any attacks. She takes a job with the Moderators in which she evacuates sprites from video games, and her ability enables her to avoid coming to harm if they attack her by mistake, regardless of how dangerous their attacks are meant to be. Also, Radd has a Charged Attack that's only limited by the word size of the system he's in. In his original 8-bit game, he is able to do a max of 255 damage, a 16-bit video game allows him to do 65,535 damage, and in the 32-bit Internet he's able to cause The End of the (Digital) World as We Know It if he spends enough time charging; not only does charging longer increase the damage and area of effect of his attack, but at a certain level, it destroys code. Mercifully, 64-bit systems weren't yet widespread when the comic had its run... |
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Booster Gold: Booster Gold was originally less than a muggle, he was a total loser: an ex-football player from the 25th century disgraced by betting on his own games, who ends up as the security guard of a museum. He steals a time travel device, a Force Field, a Legion Flight Ring, and a Robot Buddy and transports himself to present day...and has surprisingly become a great hero despite himself. | |
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Transformers Film Series: The titular Tranformers are nearly indestructible and possess firepower significantly greater then any human military. Even the relatively low ranking members of either faction are almost unstoppable on Earth. Bumblebee uses this for drama, as Bumblebee is a scout and the antagonists are three relatively unimportant Decepticons. | |
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Loki from Thor Zig-Zags this trope. He actually is a formidable physical combatant even to the standards of other Asgardians, but since he is a member of the Royal Family he always finds himself overshadowed by Thor, which is a large part of the reason he has an Inferiority Superiority Complex and focuses on magic and deceit instead. Conversely, while a Squishy Wizard compared to Thor, Loki is more than capable of slapping mortal superheroes of Captain America's level around with ease. | |
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Spider-Man: For Marvel world standards, Spider-Man is not that special, being overshadowed by many superheroes like Thor, Hercules or The Incredible Hulk. But by street-level standards, Spider-Man is one of the most powerful heroes, being a Lightning Bruiser capable of lifting tanks and surprising Daredevil with his speed. | |
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According to Robot Chicken, E.T. is actually a "retard" when compared to his people (who intentionally dumped him on Earth to get rid of him); he has a stunted body, can't speak properly (the others use proper English) and "only has one glowing finger". | |
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In The Adventures of Superman, his abilities were the norm on Krypton, even though since it was the golden age, that's just superstrength and limited invulnerability— no heat/x-ray vision, and technically no flight (but they could "jump hella high"). One of the first scenes is Lara and Jor-El marveling that humans have to take hundreds of steps to get around. | |
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Barbie (2023): The Barbies and Kens have absolutely no concept of conflict outside barely planned Beach Offs. So when Beach Ken, who has no skills beyond being good looking at the beach, not even going into the water, comes back with ideas of patriarchy he takes over Barbieland and creates the Kendom. Overturning him amounts to little more than waking up the Barbies to thinking on their own and getting the Kens to bicker among themselves. | |
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Spartacus: Blood and Sand: In his first episode, Spartacus seemed to be an elite warrior when defending his village against raiders and then holding his own in the gladiator arena. Then he is cruelly lectured by his trainer and fellow gladiators that the only reason why he looked so strong was that his fellow villagers, the raiders, and his handpicked opponents were weak, and he is shown his place in the pecking order by Crixus beating the snot out of him. Spartacus slowly improves his strength and skill through grueling training and experience in the arena, until he is no longer this trope and is truly an elite warrior. When Ashur joins the Romans, he proves a point about the Romans underestimating the Rebels by admitting that he was mocked as the weakest of the gladiators, yet he is able to beat four Roman soldiers to near death. |
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Plants vs. Zombies 2: It's About Time: In Adventure mode, Dr. Zomboss' Zombots are challenging partly due to the fact specific plants are given semi-randomly via a conveyor belt. In Arena and Penny's Pursuit modes, they're far easier to disrupt as the player is allowed to bring their own plants and pre-plant a few of them before the battle ala Last Stand. | |
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In the original Alien, the titular xenomorph is a nigh-unstoppable murder monster... to the civilian crew of the Nostromo. It's actually just a basic drone, hatched from one of the many eggs the crew found in a derelict spacecraft. Aliens shows that not only are professional soldiers able to blow away such drones in a single burst of pulse rifle fire, but those basic aliens pale in comparison to the threat of their species' queens. | |
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Legion of Super-Heroes: In the 2004 reboot, at first glance Colossal Boy has the power to grow to gigantic sizes, but in reality he’s a member of a race of giants who live in an isolated city in Antarctica, and his actual power is the ability to shrink to a "mere" six feet tall. Back home they call him Micro Lad. In The Legion of Super-Heroes!, when Superboy visits the 30th century, he expresses amazement at his tiny town Smallville becoming a big city after ten centuries. Cosmic Boy says it is still just a town, and he should wait to see the actual big cities. |
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In The Magicians, Josh is undeniably the comic relief of the Physical Kids, an Inept Mage and a Ditzy Genius; though his spells are incredibly powerful, he has trouble getting them to work consistently and he barely managed to graduate from Brakebills. In The Magician King, Josh turns up as a very important figure among the hedge magicians living outside legitimate magical society, for though he's still on the bottom of the Brakebills food chain, his comprehensive education at Brakebills has made him more powerful and more knowledgeable than most of the underground community put together. | |
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Warhammer 40,000-based media can invoke this easily, considering that the setting includes rules for everything from gang warfare to city-sized starships. An Imperial Guardsman's basic equipment is derided as a "flashlight and T-shirt" by the fanbase because of how it stands up to other armies' line infantry. After all, in a game of 40k a lasgun has no armor-penetrating power whatsoever and at best has a 50-50 chance of wounding even a weak enemy, and Frickin' Laser Beams are pretty lackluster compared to a Space Marine's bolter, which fires bursts of rocket-propelled, armor-piercing, explosive rounds. Likewise, a Guardsman's flak armor is functionally useless against the weapons carried by the majority of their opponents. But in games like Necromunda, whose gangers are scrabbling for any weapons and armor they can find, or Dark Heresy, where some characters are former civilians roped into Inquisitorial service, lasguns and flak armor are rare and top-tier equipment. Similarly, a "standard" Space Marine is a basic infantry unit in a normal game of 40k, and a given battle involving them will see Astartes dying by the dozen. In a game of Inquisitor, concerning exceptional humans and their retinues of specialists and oddballs squaring off against each other, a single Space Marine is Purposely Overpowered, able to shrug off most attacks, outperform everything else on the table, and annihilate anything he fights. Any technology used in the 41st Millennium is this compared to when most of it was developed, during the lost Dark Age of Technology. A Baneblade superheavy tank is a rolling bunker bristling with heavy weaponry that can annihilate whole squads of vehicles and infantry, and is rare enough that many Guardsmen will never see one during their lifetime of service. According to its blueprints, which predate the Imperium by millennia, the Baneblade is listed as a light battle tank. It's often commented that the Tau went from having little or no advanced technology to be a space-faring race with Humongous Mecha in "only" six-thousand years, reaching a point where they can hold their own in a battle with humanity or the Craftworlds, both of which have tens-of-thousands of years behind them. What people often forget is that most of the races in the Warhammer galaxy are technologically stagnant and have been for some time; the Imperium of Man literally considers the very idea of developing new technology, instead of maintaining their millennia-old "holy relics", to be a form of heresy punishable by death. While they aren't as extreme about it, neither the Aeldari nor the Necrons seem very interested in advancing their already hyper-advanced ancient tech. So of course the Tau's progress looks impressive in this setting: they're the only ones trying! |
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Hazbin Hotel: The Overlords are Sinners who control the Pride Ring of Hell through industries like the media and weapons dealing. While powerful in their own respective rights to varying degrees, they are vastly outclassed by the Royal Family, the Seven Deadly Sins, the Goetic Demons, and (before finding a way to actually kill them) the Exorcists. Special mention goes to Alastor, who is one of the strongest Overlords in the setting and often peacocks that fact to everyone around him, but ends up only being able to last a few minutes at most against the Exorcists' commander Adam before he's overwhelmed and wounded enough to pull a tactical retreat lest he be killed. | |
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Transformers: Animated: A running theme around the series is that the Decepticons are the only Cybertronians built for combat and thus far more powerful than the Ragtag Bunch of Misfits that the Autobots are. Single Decepticons can overpower the entire crew and Megatron's simple act of returning is enough to be a world threat that they have no easy way out of. Later on as the Autobots skills improve and getting their hands on stasis cuffs to handle them better the Decepticons become somewhat less of a threat. This element plays out strongly during the earlier episodes for the Autobots in Detroit. Because they're sentient robots with powerful weapons and human level intellect, they manage to be more than a match for a number of the criminal and technological elements of the city, and are quickly seen as the heroes of Detroit as a result. The opinions amongst the bots vary heavily on this, with Optimus initially finding this very unfulfilling, as he doesn't particularly feel like he's actually done anything to earn the title of hero for something he can do very easily, while the very weak Bumblebee relishes the praise from being finally able to be seen as worthwhile after a lifetime of failure and disappointment. This begins to lessen somewhat, as the criminal elements like Meltdown and Headmaster prove to be capable of giving even the stronger Autobots a run for their money. Among the team Optimus and Prowl seem to be the most skilled and level headed, likely due to being the only ones who actually excelled at their studies in their respective groups (Optimus was an academy bot on the fast track to becoming Magnus, while Prowl learned in the cyberninja dojo after being drafted for the war). While neither completed their studies due to extenuating circumstances, it still makes them the most capable in their team. |
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Gotham Central: This effect is used to great extent in the series, which typically has normal Gotham cops going against normal Gotham crooks. Even D-List Batman villains are a big deal whenever they appear, and when a true A-lister like Mr. Freeze or The Joker appear, they are story-arc villains that the police are as powerless to stop as if they were Cthulhu. | |
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In Men in Black II, an entire species of aliens fits into a train station locker. They revere the main characters as gods; they see a light-up watch in the locker as a holy light, and they consider a business card that was put in there to be a religious text. As in the first film, this situation is turned around, as it is revealed at the end of the movie that an entrance to our world leads to another processing station... for aliens as big as skyscrapers. The second film also contains this exchange: | |
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Similarly, a "standard" Space Marine is a basic infantry unit in a normal game of 40k, and a given battle involving them will see Astartes dying by the dozen. In a game of Inquisitor, concerning exceptional humans and their retinues of specialists and oddballs squaring off against each other, a single Space Marine is Purposely Overpowered, able to shrug off most attacks, outperform everything else on the table, and annihilate anything he fights. | |
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In a side story of Drowtales the Highland Raiders overhear several humans talking about "The Dark Knight" a drow who terrorizes local villages, kidnapping women and bringing dread with him. The Raiders immediately realize that it's a guy they refer to as "Val'Doomed" and speak of derisively since he ran off to the surface and started a harem of human women (something the drow consider akin to bestiality) and whom they beat up whenever they get the chance, since due to being on the surface he suffers from rapid aging due to mana deprivation and is pathetically easy to knock over. | |
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The Legend of Tarzan: As a result of being raised in the jungle by apes, Tarzan is much stronger and faster than ordinary humans and easily beats up dozens of soldiers even though they were armed with guns. However his strength and speed is nothing compared to an ape, and his ape brother, Akut, beats the shit out of him when they fight. | |
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The Punisher: Frank Castle has a huge bodycount for a non-powered hero. However, this is mostly because he deals with street-level criminals, non-powered ones and low-powered ones— they have just enough guns and muscles to intimidate civilians and run rackets, but are completely out of their depth against a trained soldier who hates them personally. This applies to both the superhumans he kills (e.g. one of the Vultures, who was strong but not Immune to Bullets... or knives) and the regular thugs (who are unarmored, usually only carrying handguns, and have no combat training or relevant experience). When higher level superheroes/villains get on his case, his plan almost always involves distracting/hobbling them so he can run away, having no chance against them (though he does try to kill the villainous ones). That said, The Punisher Kills the Marvel Universe exists... "The Slavers" arc from The Punisher MAX is a good example — having just dumped his latest victims' automatic weapons into a lake, he's nearly defenseless when a bunch of Bosnian Serb (war) criminals show up. Where gang bangers and mobsters start shooting at random with their handguns Gangsta Style, these guys just slip back into the habits that kept them alive and victorious in the Balkans, forcing Frank to flee. |
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A cross-game example from the Total War series: in Napoleon, the civilian Merchantmen is the weakest ship in the game, with a mere 12 guns compared to the 18 borne by the Sloop, the most basic dedicated combat vessel. A downgraded version of the Merchantmen (with only 10 guns) appears in Shogun 2 as the "Nanban Trade Ship," available only to Japanese clans that have Christianized and built top-tier port infrastructure... and since that game is set in the Sengoku Period, where naval warfare consists of wallowing bune loaded with archers or boarding parties, those simple foreign merchant ships dominate sea battles. And the Black Ship, a rare Western trading vessel with a full 20 guns that occasionally appears on the world map, is practically The Dreaded Dreadnought able to sink entire fleets by itself. | |
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Kratos is infamous for killing gods and titans from the Greek pantheon on regular basis. When he is thrown into Norse mythology in the 2018 PS4 game, his primary rival is Baldur who pushes the Spartan warrior to his limit and puts up a fight almost as savage as Zeus, the Final Boss from the previous game. Keep in mind that he is a relatively lesser god known for being a tracker rather than being a warrior. Imagine how much more powerful the likes of Odin and Thor are like... | |
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Aquaman: Part of the driving force behind Aquaman's ascent from maligned third-stringer to one of DC's heaviest hitters (literally!) was people realising that the Required Secondary Powers that enable him to swim at high speeds and throw a worthwhile punch under several hundred atmospheres of pressure would turn him into a standout example of this trope, granting the kind of Super-Strength and Super-Toughness that puts him in the same league as Kryptonians and Themiscyrans when he's on the surface. | |
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In Albion, there is the pistol from the prologue which is just an ordinary sidearm on the human spaceship it's found on that's only remarkable because of the circumstances it's found in, but on the titular primitive planet it's a Too Awesome to Use Disc-One Nuke that's deadlier than the Infinity +1 Sword. A downplayed example would be the stimdrinks also found in the prologue which are considered potent but still ultimately unremarkable painkillers in space, but are serviceable substitutes for expensive magical healing potions planetside. | |
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The Jenkinsverse: Due to Earth being a high-level Deathworld, an average human has a pretty good chance of being the single most dangerous thing on any planet, spaceship, or space station. The series kicks off when an unarmed human bartender with no combat training and suffering from muscle degeneration from months in low gravity easily slaughters the most dangerous aliens in the galaxy. This terrifies the rest of the aliens so much that they almost hit Earth with a kinetic bombardment right then and there. A nameless human who claims his only skill is winning Drinking Contests (and he was abducted after he lost one of those) becomes a One-Man Army in the Dominion-Alliance War while revolutionizing their strategic thinking, a random IT tech becomes a badass pirate queen, and one man broke out of his cell in order to help his captors with their experiments because he decided they weren't imaginative enough. Even the weakest diseases from Earth are stronger than the most horrifying bio-engineered plagues the rest of the galaxy has ever cooked up; any human in the broader galaxy has to have an immuno-suppressor implant just to keep from killing everyone on the planet. | |
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Emerald City: Well, both characters are slightly above-normal in intelligence, but they still fit. The Wizard was a shy lab tech named Frank Morgan in our world, who hadn't achieved anything in his life. After his clumsy attempts to impress his superiors result in the death of Dorothy's father, and when Frank, Karen, and Jane end up in Oz, he sees a golden opportunity for himself to impress the locals with his science and refuses to go back to Earth. However, fast-forward a few decades, and the city of Ev appears to have tech that's even more advanced than what the Wizard has. This is implied to be because Jane, the inventor who created all of Langwidere's masks and devices, was one of the lead scientists of the project Frank was working on. |
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Doctor Who: The Doctor is unique amongst their species in terms of their eccentric political opinions and the breadth of life experiences they obtained as a result of those, but they also struggled in school and their powers (regeneration, some Psychic Powers, two hearts, physical resilience, a "respiratory bypass system", "time sense" and slowed aging to name just a handful) are either standard-issue Gallifreyan or just part of the "Time Lord" ruling class. However, amongst humans and most other species, the Doctor comes off as an Impossible Genius and their powers range anywhere from unusual gifts to utterly godlike. This is, however, subverted the longer the series goes on. The third regeneration, through his confrontations with the Master, managed to outwit particularly clever and nasty Time Lords. Then he gradually ascends among the ranks of their society and proves to be an exceptional individual among Time Lords, facing (and defeating) universe-level threats and physical gods. The revival series ramps it even higher, showing the Doctor being considered a mythical figure around the universe, to the point that he can convince entire armies to stand out for fear of his reputation alone. And then the twelfth season reveals that the Doctor wasn't a simple Time Lord at all, but an exceptional and mysterious being that the entire Time Lord race descends from. The same goes for the Doctor's TARDIS, a Bigger on the Inside time machine that comes off as the "technology of the gods" to most of the universe. Back on Gallifrey, it was already an obsolete piece of junk gathering dust as a museum piece when the Doctor stole it. |
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In Men in Black, an entire galaxy of intelligent beings is so small that on our world it is a pendant on a cat's collar. At the end of the movie, however, a pan-out sequence reveals that our own galaxy fits into a mere marble that is used for games by aliens with a similar difference in size. | |
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In Flatland, this is how higher-dimensional beings appear to lower-dimensional ones. From the eyes of the 2-D main character, the 3-D sphere appears like a sorcerer, able to phase in and out, change shape, and see everyone's internal organs. The sphere is not particularly special in his own world, but his ability to intersect himself with Flatland quite easily makes him a god there. It's taken up (or perhaps down) to its logical extreme in the 0th dimension: It's infinitesimally small, so the Point is the only being that can fit in it. Such that the Point has no concept of other beings than itself, so they can't even communicate with it— anything it hears from other beings, the Point thinks it's hearing itself. | |
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The original premise of Star Wars Rebels was that it was following a single rebel cell on the backwater planet Lothal, to show a microcosm of how the rebellion against the Empire is playing out at the local level. Season 1 takes place about five years before A New Hope, so there is no formal "Rebel Alliance" yet. The group we follow is really just four or five people on one ship... one of whom was a former Jedi Padawan who managed to escape Order 66 by luck. Given that this is just a backwater planet, however, the local Imperial garrison doesn't really have that much to throw at them: it's considered significant when a light escort cruiser attacks them, and it's a season finale cliffhanger when an Imperial-class Star Destroyer shows up. This element of the show was gradually lost as each season advanced, though justified in that the war was escalating: by the final season they were having full scale fleet battles. | |
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Doom II: The Wolfenstein SS are this. They were fearsome in Wolfenstein 3D, where you had just bullets, but when you get shotgun shells and rocket launchers they become pushovers. | |
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Discussed in The Horse and His Boy, where Bree (a horse with human speech and intelligence) has an overinflated opinion of his own importance and intelligence after growing up surrounded by ordinary Calormene horses. Several characters remind him that when they finally return to Narnia, he'll be just like all the other Talking Animals who live there. | |
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Beast Wars has Megatron, the Big Bad himself. On Cybertron, he was just a renegade with delusions of grandeur, but on prehistoric Earth, he's the biggest threat to Optimus Primal and his Maximal crew, thanks to getting his hands on the Golden Disk. | |
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Yojimbo: Despite not being especially competent, Unosuke is by far the most dangerous opponent Sanjuro faces in the movie, simply by virtue of being a gunslinger at a time when repeating firearms were still new and rare in Japan. | |
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In The Jungle Book, the Wild Child Mowgli is no match for most jungle creatures. For instance, when Bagheera punishes him, swipes that "would have barely waked [panther] cubs" are agonizing to the Man Cub. And yet, when Mowgli moves to a human village, he finds the other children terribly fragile and slow; his upbringing has made him as hardy as the strongest men there. | |
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Although Spider-Man has a wide variety of powers, by Avengers standards, he is overshadowed by guys like Iron Man, Hulk, Thor, and Doctor Strange. By street level standards he is a powerful Lightning Bruiser. As he gets older and more experienced, he grows out of it, and even manages to hold his own quite well in a Let's You and Him Fight with Doctor Strange in No Way Home. | |
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The same principle was used in Stan Lee's version of Superman. | |
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Pokémon Legends: Arceus has you playing as a child from the modern Pokémon world who is transported to the past and finds themselves in a time and place where partnerships between humans and Pokémon are still uncommon and the average person still fears Pokémon greatly (not without reason, as the Pokémon do seem to be more aggressive in this time, possibly due to unfamiliarity with humans). It quickly becomes clear that in this scenario, a person who can not only approach Pokémon without fear but can also defeat or capture them with a reasonable success rate is an invaluable asset. | |
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Marvel 1985: This is essentially the premise for the series, in which Marvel supervillains begin appearing in our world—but no heroes. In a world without super-powers or super-science, even a guy like Stilt-Man can be a terror. | |
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The Battlestar Galactica (1978) episode "The Lost Warrior" features a Cylon Centurion named Red-Eye. He's only a mere Mook, but on the planet Equellus, whose technology is akin to Earth's The Wild West, his armor makes him Nigh-Invulnerable. | |
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In Pokémon Sun and Moon, the extra-dimensional Ultra Beasts are considered a serious threat to both people and normal Pokémon (Celesteela, for example, is capable of burning down entire forests), but in their home dimension, each type is quite common and they're one of the few Olympus Mons to explicitly avert Single Specimen Species. Some, such as Poipole, are even explicitly said to be starter Pokémon for beginning Trainers. | |
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Demolition Man: Simon Phoenix, already a dangerous lunatic in the 1990s, becomes unstoppable in the future year of 2032, where society has become so passive that graffiti is considered scandalous. Likewise, Edgar Friendly is set up to be a violent resistance fighter and his Scraps as a major threat to Los Angeles, but he turns out to be a reasonable (if a little foul-mouthed and red-blooded) anarchist-kinda guy and the Scraps turn out to be moderately-armed hobos who use their guns to conduct harmless food robberies. | |
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M.U.G.E.N has many platformer characters (both players and bosses) with their original mechanics intact. They tend to have Mercy Invincibility, nullifying combos, and have unblockable attacks that conventional fighters cannot dodge as well as platformer player characters can. A good example of a boss would be the Stupid Little Drill Tank (Egg Mobile-D) — in its source game, it's a very easy Warm-Up Boss with an incredibly easy-to-avoid drill. In MUGEN, its constant movement, Hyper Armor and Unblockable Attack confuses most AI-controlled characters, who get hit for huge damage as they try to flinch the Drill Tank and/or guard against its drill instead of jumping over. | |
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On Ted Lasso, Jamie Tartt is quite obviously the most talented player in AFC Richmond's submediocre roster, and he both acts like and is treated like their star. However, he was sent there on loan from Manchester City, because they don't consider him good enough to start for their own squad, and when he returns to them after his loan expires, he spends most of his time on the bench. | |
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The unnamed protagonist of Beware of Chicken is transported into the body of cultivator Jin Rou as he is being beaten within an inch of his life by members of his own cultivator sect, of which he was a comparatively weak outer disciple. When he recovers from his injuries, he decides to get away from that life by moving away to the most remote village in the weakest and most boring province he can find, the Azure Hills, and becomes a farmer. Unbeknownst to him, however, the Cloudy Sword Sect that he left behind is one of the most powerful in the world, and even the lowliest of its outer disciples is more than a match for an elder of any of the Azure Hills sects; Jin's accidentally made himself the strongest person person in the province, even before it proves that absorbing oneself in farmwork makes surprisingly good moving meditation for further cultivation. | |
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In John Carter of Mars, the main character is a random American soldier note Well, a random American soldier who doesn't age, but has no superpowers beyond that... who ends up one of the strongest guys around on Mars because of that planet's lower gravity. | |
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In Dragon Ball Multiverse, this is suggested to be the case for the sole fighter of Universe 15; the unborn fighter I'k'l. He comes from Cell's original timeline... a time where all the Z-Warriors are dead, Trunks is dead, the Androids are deactivated, all the major antagonists have been killed, the Earth is now a smoldering ruin, and Cell himself time-traveled to the main timeline years ago. It's suggested that he's the strongest person in his universe not because he's insanely powerful, but because there simply isn't anyone left in his universe with any kind of significant power. | |
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Ben 10: Omniverse: Blukic and Driba are Galvans, which makes them technologically savvy enough to get by as Bungling Inventors on Earth, but by standards of their own planet they're complete idiots. | |
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At one point in Captain SNES: The Game Masta, Crono is transported to a Final Fantasy airship. Where FF's battles start with a Fight Woosh, CT's battles take place on the overworld, meaning he can attack them with total impunity. | |
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In the A Wizard in Rhyme novels by Christopher Stasheff, the hero Matthew Mantrell is, in his original reality, simply a man who has made an extensive study of English literature. After he is transported to a reality where poetry literally works magic, he becomes a Reality Warper. | |
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We Who Are About to Die: The Gladiator Games are mostly stuffed with down-on-their-luck, desperate schmucks just trying to survive, Leeroy Jenkins extraordinaires and utterly rusty veterans. As a result, some of the most formidable foes you can face in the game are actual, professional soldiers that would be utterly unremarkable in the army and are just trying this as a side-gig with their work uniform on. Simple conscripts might kick your ass six ways from Sunday by simple dint of having some actual training and actual equipment. | |
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Invincible (2021): The titular Invincible is among the most powerful beings on the planet, able to have a game of catch with his dad throwing the ball across the planet. Unfortunately by the standards of Viltrumites he is an untrained teenager and far below his father. Brutally showcased during Mark's fight against Omni-Man. Mark is hit hard enough to cause natural disasters and at one point forced into the way of an incoming train. He is as powerless to escape his father's grasp as the train is to not explode against his ultra-durable body. Season 2 shows that many Viltrumites don't advance their skills and strengths past what they naturally have after they purged themselves of half their population. Invincible is nearly able to win a fight with one and Omni-Man is nearly able to kill three even after Invincible's slipups result in him taking a few hits covering for him. Considering that nothing other than another Viltrumite is able to hold their own against them, they don't see the need to improve any further. |
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Stellaris: This happens whenever a space civilization invades a primitive planet. You might even be one of the weakest empires in the galaxy, bullied by everyone, but you need just a couple of gene-modded armies to occupy some primitives with muskeets or bows! | |
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The Legend of Zelda: The Minish Cap: Two of the bosses, Big Green Chuchu and Big Octorok, are apparent Giant Mooks. However, despite their names, they're actually not any stronger than normal — it's Link that's shrunk down, and at that size these perfectly normal Goombas are boss-level threats. | |
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Primal (2019): Spear is a powerful and experienced caveman whereas Fang is a small but capable Tyrannosaur. They live in a savage world of kill or be killed and, as powerful as they are, they're frequently shown to still be overpowered by stronger foes, usually winning due to quick thinking on Spear's part. Season 2 sees a massive change when they leave their home and arrive in the outside world, which is set during the age of Vikings. The two are shown to be far more dangerous and capable against their foes as, despite their own training and experience, the Vikings lack Spear's greater strength and Fang's greater size and endurance. | |
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Doom: The Barons of Hell. In later episodes, rockets, the Plasma Gun and the BFG can trivialize them. However, in the final level of the first episode (Phobos Anomaly), you will have no plasma cells and five rockets at best, so two Barons become fearsome bosses. | |
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The titular Predators from Predator are all regular members of their species that quite literally consider Hunting the Most Dangerous Game a way of life. Creepily shown in the first movie when a spaceship drops off the Predator in the rainforest. This guy is a big game hunter tourist at most and he still slaughters the most well trained and equipped soldiers around like it's nothing. | |
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BattleTech: By the standards of the larger setting, the Magistracy of Canopus and the Taurian Concordat are second-string powers. The Magistracy has maintained its independence mostly on the back of its skilled diplomats, and the only reason the Federated Suns haven't stomped the Concordat flat is that a full attack would divert resources away from its real enemies, most notably the Draconis Combine. By the standards of this game's Periphery-focused setting, the Magistracy and Concordat are major powerhouses, and their respective involvements in the Aurigan Reach conflict are major Oh, Crap! moments. Related, Samuel Ostergaard's Fortress-class DropShip Iberia is, by Inner Sphere standards, a significant but not particularly remarkable projection of military power. By the standards of the Aurigan Reach, its heavy armor, huge artillery armament and the combined arms battalion it carries make Iberia an "I win"-button in any conflict Ostergaard cares to intervene in. |
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Agent Washington is a complete badass compared to the regular Blood Gulch crew. However, among the Freelancers, he was only the sixth best, and the leadership board therefore considered him the "weakest" member of their group. This is primarily because each of the top five had exceptional specialist abilities they were known for, while Washington didn't. Instead, he was a solid all-rounder and generalist, able to play back-up to anyone, but unlikely to ever lead. In fact, his first taste of leadership comes when he joins the Blues as their leader, and has to learn as he goes how to do it. | |
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Family Guy: In "Dr. C and the Women", Meg (who is Hollywood Homely at the least but treated like an abomination at worst in their world) gets a job at the TSA where most of the people are very fat (with no necks or wrists) and she is regarded as the hottest girl working there. Brian Griffin is smarter and more cultured than the rest of the Griffin family (except Stewie) and Peter's circle of friends, who are all crass idiots. However, he is shown to be thoroughly mediocre and lacking in talent when it comes to actual intellectual undertakings; any time he encounters a genuinely smart person or attempts to pursue writing at a professional level, he is humiliated. |
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Family Guy | hasFeature |
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This trope is used as a plot point in Disgaea 5. Demon General Bloodis, aka Goldion, was believed to have died at the Rebel Army's hands before they do battle with Void Dark. However, the Attack of the Carnage Dimension postgame arc reveals that he was saved from death by several of these Carnage Demons, whom began training him once he was able. Originally, Goldion was the one whom took down Tyrant Overlord Killidia with ease in Killia's backstory. As Bloodis, he was able to fend off multiple Overlord-class demons with little issue. In the Carnage Dimension? Little more than a lowly grunt whom had to fight for his life every day in order to survive. Further driven home with the final battle against him, where he is easily hundreds of times stronger than he was in the campaign. Once he's been recruited, a skit opens up where he shares some of his experiences within the Carnage Dimension. | |
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Ash vs. Evil Dead: In "Books From Beyond," Eligos is explicitly mentioned to be the weakest demon that Lionel could find to summon in the Necronomicon, and he still proves to be too much for Ash to handle, using Teleport Spam and nearly killing him. | |
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Panopticon Quest: The stuff used by the Iteration X personnel from 1999 is incredibly potent compared to Earthside post-1999. When looking at what the former consider a hostile environment suit only rated for backblast, Serafina remarks that it's stuff that Progenitors would regard as full combat gear. Technocracy stuff in general compared to what Sleepers have. Partway through, Jamelia and co investigate several companies that used to be Technocratic assets but were left out in the cold, reduced to working with stuff behind the curve. Even 70s or 80s Technocracy hypertech is still comfortably beyond what 2010s Sleepers have access to. The SPD forces guarding LaCroix's hideout get shredded by Juliet and Rose, who are merely medium-high end combatants, but they themselves are more than potent enough to deal with werewolf raids or stomp Sleeper special forces. Anathema-class Aspects are stealth and infiltration rather than dedicated combat platforms, "only" the second smallest and weakest of the classes of Aspects. That still leaves them resistant to anti-tank weapons and magic, tank killers both at range and in melee, superhumanly intelligent... and that's before they start throwing around Enlightened Science procedures. A grand total of one appears onscreen in the story and is still a massive threat anytime it's in the picture. One shudders to imagine what kind of Person of Mass Destruction the top-class dedicated combat Aspects are like. |
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Cyberpunk 2077: The Basilisk armored hover-transport the Aldecaldos steal from Militech. By the standards of actual military hardware, the Basilisk is an obsolete light cargo hauler, with just enough cargo capacity to be useful, but woefully underarmored and undergunned, and only really good for sale to third-tier militaries who can't afford better. By the standards of Badlands nomads, the Basilisk (especially after being repaired and upgraded by Aldecaldos mechanics, a few of whom are Militech tank division veterans themselves) is an unstoppable Lightning Bruiser, which can tear through anything the Raffen Shiv can field like a fat kid through cake, sail effortlessly across any minefields corporations and governments set up to make life difficult for smugglers, and carry huge amounts of goods. | |
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Dragonlance: The Dragon Overlords of the War of Souls trilogy, dragons hundreds of feet in length, came from a world near where Takhisis moved Krynn to so she could be the dominant goddess. They came to Krynn because they were weaklings on their planet of dragons. Scary place. | |
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A technological version of this drives the plot of Artemis Fowl: The Eternity Code. Artemis has constructed a minicomputer from technology he stole from the People back in the first book, which is decades out of date by their standards, but at least fifty years ahead of human technology. He tries to blackmail the book's Big Bad with this, but gets Out-Gambitted and the computer is stolen — which is a major problem, as even this outdated fairy technology can completely ignore the People's defenses against exposure to humans. And Artemis just let it fall into the hands of possibly the single greediest human on the planet. | |
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It's the basic premise of the 1632 series. An unremarkable Appalachian town is sent back in time nearly 400 years. This goes about as smoothly as one would expect. | |
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Cloverfield: According to the directors, the monster rampaging through New York that an entire army can't even put a dent in is actually just a lost child. The film was also cut in a way that very little of its actions actually look intentionally malicious until the end when bombers actually hurt it a bit. The Cloverfield Paradox adds to this by showing another of its kind so large its head sticks out above the clouds while roaring in likely grief at the younger one's death. | |
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In Kong: Skull Island all the extraordinary and near invulnerable lifeforms may be daunting to all the humans on it, compared to the titans in the other Monsterverse movies they are unimpressive in comparison. A skullcrawler, the biggest, most dangerous creatures on the island save Kong, even larger then Ramarack shows up in Godzilla vs. Kong. It's killed in seconds at the hands of Mechagodzilla while it is still underpowered. | |
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The Sopranos: Tony Soprano's crime family, the DiMeos, rules the New Jersey criminal underworld with an iron fist and any other criminal organization that even attempts to challenge their hold or gets in the way of their business dealings gets swiftly annihilated. However, they are small potatoes at best compared to the Five Families across the river in New York. This specifically applies to the Lupertazzi crime family, who often use their overwhelming power as leverage in business negotiations. Their don even refers to them as a "glorified crew" and only tries to do business in good faith out of sheer pragmatism. | |
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Mega Man Legends has villainous examples: The first game has when the Bonne Family roll up to Kattelox Island to plunder their ruins for the Mother Lode. They have no problem subjugating the island with their humongous mechas and airships since the island has only conventional weapons like handguns and police cars. When a real threat like Mega Man shows up, however, they get stomped. This continues in the sequel as well, when they conquer the vaguely Arabian-themed island no problem until, again, Mega Man shows up and gives them what-for. The sequel introduced the Glyde Pirates, who again have no problem subjugating an uninhabited island (save for a lady and her two adoptive children) or an island with non-functional defense systems, but again once Mega Man shows up or those defense systems become operational again they get curb-stomped in pretty short order. |
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Many zombie games (such as Left 4 Dead or a few of the Resident Evil titles) invoke this as well. The player might be an average person but they're the only one still smart enough to use firearms, be stealthy, or use tactics other than "stumble forwards". | |
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In the Gravity Falls episode "Scary-oke," Soos is turned into a zombie, but it turns out that since he was already a Cloudcuckoolander he actually maintains his intelligence and merely changes loyalties. This presents a problem when he uses his handyman skills to dismantle the Pines twins' barricades, even boasting that compared to the other zombies he's a genius. | |
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Captain Atom: Captain Atom is generally considered a second-tier hero at best in the mainstream DC Universe, however, in Captain Atom: Armageddon, when he is transported to the WildStorm universe, he proves to be almost unstoppable, all but casually walking through The Authority, that world's mightiest "heroes". Of course, part of this is that Captain Atom holds back a lot. | |
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Grendel: Inverted with Hunter Rose, the Genius Bruiser Diabolical Mastermind who is the original Grendel. In his own universe, he's so powerful a Badass Normal that only a superstrong werewolf has a chance of beating him. However, in the crossover series with Batman and The Shadow, he provides a decent challenge to both of them but ends up getting his ass kicked both times, as they're used to fighting high-grade Badass Normal costumed villains. | |
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